Hey all,

Due to displeasure with Edublogs’ new embedded advertising practices, I’ve moved over to Wordpress.  My new site is http://waltersdesign.wordpress.com.

I’d appreciate a visit there.  I don’t plan to take this blog down on the off chance that Edublogs decides to rethink its money making strategy (perhaps less intrusive banner ads??).  I simply won’t be updating this blog for awhile.

Thanks,

Clint

Explorer vs. Wordpress???

Okay, so I’m a Linux guy.  I still live in reality, though, and I teach in a WinXP environment at school.  I tend to use Firefox on my own workstation because I’m more comfortable with it.  Today, though, I looked at my own blog in Internet Explorer for the first time in awhile.  Surprisingly, despite Wordpress’ tightly controlled style sheet, Explorer stuck my sidebars at the bottom of my page, and tweaked half of my fonts all funky (even in my widgets!).  I tried to figure out what the issue was, and after a small amount of Googling, I discovered that this is a typical problem.  Apparently, after the most recent Wordpress update, the majority of blogs look fine in Firefox, Safari, Opera, and even Chrome… but not Explorer.

“Wait”, you might say, “Isn’t this the fault of Wordpress?”  After all, they did the update.  True, but you have to wonder what kind of funky (wow, that’s twice in one post) proprietary coding Microsoft has going on in there that it’s the only browser that screws with our blogs.

The Moral:

The point is, if you’re looking at my blog on Internet Explorer, I know it looks bad.  I just want you to know, It’s not my fault.

I’ve found it.  That’s right. Amidst this tumult of uncertainty that is our current world, I’ve found the answer.  There is apparently one determining factor of our students’ success in the 21st century workforce.  Would you like to know what it is?

Despite increased globalization; the need to prepare students to access, evaluate, synthesize, and build upon information and media; and the drive to promote Creativity, Innovation, Critical Thinking, Problem Solving, Communication, and Collaboration, the curriculum of our district’s Computer Information Technology program hinges on Keyboarding. I’m not kidding. This is apparently very serious stuff. One teacher commented at a recent curriculum meeting that this is “becoming a management and discipline issue at the high school.” Wow. It seems that students, who have formed bad keyboarding habits despite intensive training at the Elementary level, are resorting to the technique that works best for them when teachers turn their backs.  Huh…  The nerve of some people’s children…

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The following is an excerpt from an academic paper I’ve been working on, hence the rather formal citations etc.

As a teacher of technology, I am very interested in the “new literacies” related to information management, often referred to as Information Literacy, Media Literacy, Digital Literacy, and Network Literacy. I recently read Judy Salpeter’s article, “Make Students Info Literate” in the May 22, 2008 issue of “Techlearning” magazine. In the article, Salpeter succinctly makes several points that I’ve been trying to make with colleagues for the last four years.

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…and there was much rejoicing.

After weeks of frustration, the first solution I had tried (typing “sudo apt-get install xserver-xorg-video-intel” in the terminal) finally panned out.  I turned out that after installing the intel driver I had to manually edit my xorg.conf file, replacing the defaut “vesa” driver with the word “intel”.  Below you can click on the thumbs to see my original 1024 x 768 layout and my new 1440 x 900 goodness.  Check out all of that desktop real estate I gained back!  Wide open spaces are wonderful, particularly when you’re running a seperate OS on a virtual box! 

Tune in next time for ”The Noble Experiment, Part IV: The Perfect Desktop”

I’m teaching Adobe Photoshop Elements to my eighth grade students for the first three cycles of Technology class this year, and I’ve been spending a lot of time examining the authentic career applications of such a product. Elements is essentially Photoshop without the Web Design and Graphic Design tools, which limits its practical application to photo enhancement and manipulation.

Incidentally, I do have some moral qualms about the primary application of Photoshop in the world of publishing for photo enhancement and manipulation. This situation is nicely summed up by the “Evolution” film, available at Dove’s “Campaign for Real Beauty” web site.

Obviously, this is a reality that I will be sharing with my students, but it begs the following questions:

• Do we, as educators, have a moral responsibility to equip students with the knowledge of the consequences of the technology we’re training them to use?
• How is it that we are encouraged to teach applications that ultimately harm a multitude of individuals, but are forbidden to use collaborative web based tools on the premise that we may encounter something offensive?
• By sanctioning such commercial products and their related careers and media whilst banning community based tools, known for breaking down such barriers as media vs. public, are we not perpetuating such harmful distortions for future generations?