homoLudens

Nothing new, but pithy in its summation:

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From Scorers of New SAT Get Ready for Essays:

The team uses a technique known as “holistic scoring,” a euphemism for reading an essay very quickly (a minute or so per paper) and making a snap judgment.

Kairos points to “A student in Indiana State University’s Center for Biological Computing [who] makes it quite clear in an extended and profane — but engaging — piece of writing why he or she really doesn’t like personal weblogs.” But, sigh, there’s no RSS feed.

Via Alan Levine: “Related to recent wonderings of Where Have All the Bloggers Gone?, it appears that author William Gibson is blogged out. In Last Postcard from Costa Del Blog, Gibson pens: ‘Time for me to get back to my day job, which means that it’s time for me to stop blogging. I’ve found blogging to be a low-impact activity, mildly narcotic and mostly quite convivial, but the thing I’ve most enjoyed about it is how it never fails to underline the fact that if I’m doing this I’m definitely not writing a novel??? Maybe it’s the next great slogan for blogging: “low-impact activity, mildly narcotic and mostly quite convivial”‘” [cogdogblog]

Me too! This present use of digital paper appears as a high speed flurry of post-its and ether airplanes. Scrible, stick, zoom, thunk. Yesterday I listened to this witty reflection on blogging by Andrei Codrescu. Today I read “Weeding,” librarian Thomas Washington’s lament for web-crowded books. “???. The goal is never to go under, never to fully immerse oneself in the contents of the page.” All week at Galileo I’ve been dustily stumbling on the same set of borrowers’ Date Due trails on the front pages of spine-weary classic novels. Sigh - time for a ‘blog weeding’ winter break.
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I tried to post this over at Charlie Lowe’s cyberdash in response to his post ‘Will Blogs Grow Class Management Wings?’
but the comment interface defeated me. Better to include it
here anyway, because the issue of Manila’s invisibility is actually
starting to annoy me, and it’s a great excuse to use the ‘Vent’
department again after such long neglect of its therapeutic benefits:

“Charlie: Great piece, as always. I completely agree about the
value of ‘design[ing] a unique site, one which can be used for a
combination of
knowledge management, web publishing and community interaction
purposes.’ And, needless to say, open source is the obvious choice - if
you have the tech support to implement it. I don’t, at least for the
moment. Drupal, esp. when given the deanSpace development that we all
hope for, may just fit the bill. (Happily, I have a few server admin types
glancing in Drupal’s direction).

My comment here, though, is about
Manila / Frontier
being left out of your blog tool listing. It’s not open source (neither are some
of the ones mentioned) but $299 per year for an educational license is
reasonable enough for even my
strapped California urban school to afford. Lord knows, it is quirky, but so is most open source blogging software. And if local
installation is impossible, there’s cheap
enough hosting available from Manila ISPs, including eBN. It’s been around
long enough to make many of the other blogging platforms look like
infants. And, most importantly, it IS a cms, not just a blogging tool.
Throw in Radio’s OPML outliner and the directory editing functionality, and voila - starts to make Blackboard
look like one of those aircraft carriers that can’t turn around in San
Francisco Bay. It’s not just a cool and flexible sloop - it’s a whole
damn boatyard! IMHO, it makes MT and Bloxsom and Live Journal and a
bunch of other tools look like rowboats. They float, you can tie them
together in a storm and even pull some supply dinghies, but I wouldn’t
want to take a whole bunch of non-sailors along for
the ride. I’m puzzled about Manila’s invisibility in edu blogging
circles.  It’s used all over the place, but no one names it. When Erin Clerico releases his
ISP Tools suite, maybe that will change. Meanwhile, Userland’s Manila
deserves mention along with all of its offspring.”

Exactly what I’ve been say for years about that weekend show too! (You have to dig a bit on the non-permalinked page.) - “And as Mr. Keillor reads or talks I wonder how and when he breathes as he talks in a soft breathy continual exhale, a wheezing out of words ???You can hear how his arched eyebrows and the deep sincere furrow in his brow tug the skin tight in the dip of the nose between his eyes. How has he escaped being caricatured on Saturday Night Live?”
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Over two years ago (see July 25 entry). I started talking to Peter Ford at schoolBlogs about ISP hosting issues, about the availability of digital paper. I argued even then that a .com should not be necessary, that the tax-supported infrastructure of the educational and library tech commons should be enough to get everyone happily hosted for blogging. And who says I’m not an optimist?

We’re both still nailing theses to doors. Some of the those doors are ivy-covered, as witness this rant [his descriptor] from Peter:

Imagine if Harvard opened up their weblogs to the rest of the educational bloggers in the USA. It could provide the enabling technology for the edublogging revolution in schools and colleges across the nation. Then again the rest of the educators could just press their noses up to the window of the weblogging elite and dream what they might accomplish with their own free weblog. I know you’ve been there Dave with the trials and tribulations of Manilasites etc but education is a different kettle of ifsh. Rant over - keep up the brilliant work -Peter Ford

“I’m really not like your usual futurist who has corporate clients who are expecting reports. If you drink too much good chardonnay on the yachts of CEOs and you don’t take the bus, you’re going to miss some things.” [via Sarah who still doesn't have permalinks]

Just think of what’s being missed in classrooms. And worse, what’s being missed in district central office and university and state department of education cubicles devoted to “supporting” teaching and learning.

Buses are uncomfortable. Capitalism finds perverse ’value’ in the isolation of singly occupied vehicles.