Education

In a perfect world, educational centers at whatever level would be about learning. But they are not. They are about marks, about passing, about memorization, about scholarships, about degrees, about money, about jobs, but somehow learning has taken a back seat.

I hear that there are a couple of universities out there offering undeclared majors. I actually like that idea. Students could study what they are interested in. This, I think,  would promote interdisciplinary courses at the undergraduate and graduate level as students would be exposed to a variety of ideas. It would allow for these same interdisciplinary courses to be developed and driven by users. It would also allow for some generalists to graduate. I kind of like the idea that our future corporate leaders & political leaders might know something about gerontology, the environment and 19th century literature for example.

Has anyone heard about any long term results from these programs? Although I’m not sure that they have been around for too long- I would be interested to know what/who they are turning out.

Braches

Braches

Originally uploaded by Liiiiisa.

Blogging a photo from Flickr

Tagging

I started with searching del.icio.us for hairstyles. I came up with a couple of sites that I was interested in and put them on my favorites. I love the idea that I can access these from anywhere and that I can search them. It always took time and memory to remember what file I had put sites into in Explorer Favorites. I think that this is great.

I searched Yahoo and Google using the same search term. Google had too much – it took too long to search through all of the links provided to find a worthwhile site. On del.icio.us, other people have vetted the sites so when you looked at the ones that had a lot of links, they were quite good. Yahoo also was overwhelming but there were several good sites on the first page of results.

 On Flickr, I enjoyed the Explore Interestingness link. This posts the most interesting photos of the last 7 days.

A couple of the photos that I really liked are found below:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/61191065@N00/429134659/

http://www.flickr.com/photos/maritobonito/422101434/

http://www.flickr.com/photos/jamesrye/428422456/

http://www.flickr.com/photos/steenheilesen/426448601/

I was not able to add buttons to the staff computer browser toolbar because of “Administrator access” only. Using the buttons, I would be interested to know if you have to log in, because it would be handy – but not if my kids were adding their favorites to my account.

Wiki’s

I found the myfavoritebooks wiki somewhat difficult to use. Actually, I have found many of these new technologies to be unclear in their instructions and so more frustrating than they need to be. There are certain assumptions of knowledge that I think I have missed along the way.

Anyway, back to the wikis. I was unable to set up a seperate page for some time. I ended up cutting and pasting – this worked for me. I can see the use of a Wiki for something like a favorite book site. However,I have some problems with using a wiki for a reference site such as digitalreferenceshelf. First : with more users accessing it and adding to it, the authority of the site becomes less valid and watered down, ie Wikopedia. Yes many people access it, but I know in high schools it is considered just a website – not an encyclopedia, and as such not a great reference.

Second : many unrelated pages can be added and then the ease of finding valid websites or links becomes more difficult especially if you have to wade through numerous unrelated sites.

Finally, this could be a great place for an organization to post information changes about itself allowing supervisors writer capabilities so as information changes they can be immediately updated, to post manuals that can be regularly updated, or to develop agendas for staff meetings.