Stephen's Untold Stories

The NFL must be taking lessons from a lot of school districts with this level of paranoia.

Last week, Chad Ochocinco revealed his plan to circumvent NFL rules and tweet during games. This afternoon, the NFL informed teams of its social media policy, and it appears Ochocinco’s plot to hand signal a fan in the stands and have him or her update his account for him is now squashed, along with lots of other player and media activities.

As it pertains to Ochocinco, the rule that would seemingly keep him from tweeting reads: “No updates are permitted to be posted by the individual himself or anyone representing him during this prohibited time on his personal Twitter (Twitter), Facebook (Facebook) or any other social media account.”

The prohibited time is not only during the contest, but also 90 minutes before and after the game. It applies to not only players, but coaches, team personnel, and officials. Beyond that, the media is also being put on warning about in-game social media activity:

“Longstanding policies prohibiting play-by-play descriptions of NFL games in progress apply fully to Twitter and other social media platforms. Internet sites may not post detailed information that approximates play-by-play during a game. While a game is in progress, any forms of accounts of the game must be sufficiently time-delayed and limited in amount (e.g., score updates with detail given only in quarterly game updates) so that the accredited organization’s game coverage cannot be used as a substitute for, or otherwise approximate, authorized play-by-play accounts.”

Read the rest here.

No major surprises here, although I didn’t know about Baidu.

1. Google
2. Yahoo!
3. Facebook
4. YouTube
5. Windows Live (live.com)
6. Wikipedia
7. Blogger.com
8. MSN
9. Baidu.com – Chinese search engine
10. Yahoo! Japan
11. Myspace
12. Google India
13. Google Germany
14. Twitter
15. QQ.com – Chinese Instant Messaging Site
16. RapidShare
17. Microsoft.com
18. Google France
19. WordPress.com
20. Google UK

Here is a link to the top 500.

Hilarious newscast where they re-create a bear sighting with a cardboard cutout of a bear.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nOKHlWAp4No

Apparently so!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A7y7NafWXeM

Awesome arrangement of a great song.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yjbpwlqp5Qw

October 7, 1921. “School in Session. Sunset School, Marey, West Virginia.

Click the image for a larger version.

That boy on the far left looks like he’s up to no good.

Click here for the original.

Thanks to Scott McLeod for this one!

dear parent

teacher

administrator

board member

don’t teach your kids to read

for the Web

to scan

RSS

aggregate

synthesize

don’t teach your kids to write

online
pen and paper aren’t going anywhere

since when do kids need an audience?
no need to hyperlink

make videos

audio

Flash

no connecting, now
no social networking

or online chat

or comments

or PLNs

blogs and twitter?

how self-absorbed

what a bunch of crap
and definitely, absolutely, resolutely, no cell phones
block it all

lock it down

keep it out
it’s evil, you know

there’s bad stuff out there

gotta keep your children safe

don’t you know collaboration is just another word for cheating?

don’t you know how much junk is out there?

haven’t you ever heard of sexting?

of cyberbullying?
a computer 24-7? no thanks

I don’t want them

creating

sharing

thinking

learning

you know they’re just going to look at porn

and hook up with predators

we can’t trust them

don’t do any of it, please

really

’cause I’m doing all of it with my kids
can’t wait to see who has a leg up in a decade or two

can you?

Nice work by our state school superintendent.

A very original and entertaining way of explaining how Wikis work.

An Ohio State fan made a nice video welcoming the Naval Academy’s football team for a game this fall.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n3Z52GKONPc

You parents out there should take a serious look at this.

The KidZui browser was designed to offer kids the same expansive experience adults have on the web. KidZui brought together a team of over 200 teachers and/or parents to scour the web in search of the best content for kids. The founders engaged their kids, nieces and nephews to assess the initial product; they were later joined by over 5,000 other curious young beta-testers and their parents.

Rather than filter the Internet, KidZui’s founders built an entirely new one – customized for kids. Instead of reducing, KidZui expands. There are already over a million websites, pictures and videos in KidZui, all thoroughly reviewed by caring teachers and parents just like you. And the process continues 24/7 with new kid-friendly content added daily.

http://www.kidzui.com

Very interesting video. Well worth 8 minutes of your time.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9hIQjrMHTv4

A very timely article for me as I am taking a course of designing and facilitating online learning this semester.

A recent 93-page report on online education, conducted by SRI International for the Department of Education (pdf) has a starchy academic title, but a most intriguing conclusion: “On average, students in online learning conditions performed better than those receiving face-to-face instruction.”

The report examined the comparative research on online versus traditional classroom teaching from 1996 to 2008. Some of it was in K-12 settings, but most of the comparative studies were done in colleges and adult continuing-education programs of various kinds, from medical training to the military.

Over the 12-year span, the report found 99 studies in which there were quantitative comparisons of online and classroom performance for the same courses. The analysis for the Department of Education found that, on average, students doing some or all of the course online would rank in the 59th percentile in tested performance, compared with the average classroom student scoring in the 50th percentile. That is a modest but statistically meaningful difference.

“The study’s major significance lies in demonstrating that online learning today is not just better than nothing — it actually tends to be better than conventional instruction,” said Barbara Means, the study’s lead author and an educational psychologist at SRI International.

This hardly means that we’ll be saying good-bye to classrooms. But the report does suggest that online education could be set to expand sharply over the next few years, as evidence mounts of its value.

Read the rest here.

A very interesting story involving the State School Superintendent in Georgia and a million dollars she won and pledged to schools for children with special needs. I hope they get it.

The drama in U.S. Bankruptcy Court began in an unusual place: On a television game show called “Are you Smarter than a 5th Grader?” with a chance to win $1 million.

State schools Superintendent Kathy Cox proved last August that she was indeed smarter and claimed the $1 million prize. Then, before a national broadcast audience, she pledged the money to scores of blind and deaf children who attend three state-run schools.

But three months later Cox and her husband, John Cox, filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy protection, leaving in its wake a slew of creditors embroiled in a tug-of-war with the state, which insists the cash should go to the schools. And, proponents for the students plan a protest Wednesday to demand the money.

“The state Board of Education contends Ms. Cox would not have been invited to the program other than in a position of playing for a charitable interest,” said Russell Willard, a spokesman for the Georgia Attorney General’s office, which is representing the Department of Education. “The monies won on that program should go to the charitable interests designated by Ms. Cox.”

Cox promised if she won, she would give the $1 million to Georgia Academy for the Blind in Macon; the Georgia School for the Deaf in Cave Spring; and the Atlanta Area School for the Deaf in Clarkston.

Those three institutions are state-run and, unlike most public schools, don’t rely on local funding.

But Gary W. Brown, the Chapter 7 trustee assigned to the case, doesn’t see it that way. On July 31, he filed suit against Kathy Cox and Fox Broadcasting Corp., which airs the game show, to claim the money for the creditors.

Read the rest here.

No, I’m not on the list.

• http://bestcollegerankings.org/2009/top-50-online-education-blogs/

Let’s just hope the enemy doesn’t get the password!

Join the Army, where you can edit all that you can edit.

In July, in a sharp break from tradition, the Army began encouraging its personnel — from the privates to the generals — to go online and collaboratively rewrite seven of the field manuals that give instructions on all aspects of Army life.

The program uses the same software behind the online encyclopedia Wikipedia and could potentially lead to hundreds of Army guides being “wikified.” The goal, say the officers behind the effort, is to tap more experience and advice from battle-tested soldiers rather than relying on the specialists within the Army’s array of colleges and research centers who have traditionally written the manuals.

“For a couple hundred years, the Army has been writing doctrine in a particular way, and for a couple months, we have been doing it online in this wiki,” said Col. Charles J. Burnett, the director of the Army’s Battle Command Knowledge System. “The only ones who could write doctrine were the select few. Now, imagine the challenge in accepting that anybody can go on the wiki and make a change — that is a big challenge, culturally.”

In recent years, collaborative projects like the Firefox Internet browser or Wikipedia pages have flourished with the growth of the Internet, showing the power of thousands of contributors pulling together.

Read the rest here.

A good sign! I hope to be doing these myself in a few years.

Sue N. Averill, associate provost for faculty affairs at Kent State University, has one overwhelming memory of her first few weeks on the job last year: a mountain of white-plastic bins looming over her head.

In early December, containers typically used to transport mail began piling up in the provost’s office. Each was filled with paper-stuffed binders from faculty members building their cases for promotion and tenure. The bins took up two whole walls in a conference room, where they were kept under lock and key.

Not only did the binders use colossal amounts of paper, Ms. Averill realized, but the cumbersome system slowed the evaluation process to a crawl. “I thought, ‘There’s got to be a better way,’” she says.

That “better way” will begin this fall, when Kent State faculty members have the option of submitting their dossiers electronically; digital dossiers will very likely become the only way to go in a year.

The push to go digital, currently under way at institutions such as Kent State, Virginia Tech, and a few others, is being driven in part by a desire to save paper (St. John’s University reported that it had saved 225,000 pieces a year when its process went online, in 2008) and in part to make it easier to include forms of scholarship that aren’t paper-based. The push is not as widespread as one might think. Though individual departments at some institutions have moved to digital dossiers, universitywide efforts have been hampered because breaking away from tradition is tough, and the technology involved doesn’t always meet expectations.

Professors at the university now have a choice. They can scan paper documents and upload them as files to be arranged in a digital system custom-tailored for dossier creation. Or they can punch holes in hundreds of sheets of paper to be sorted and then stuffed in a three-ring binder. Officials hope faculty members pick the former.

A big attraction of digital dossiers, some professors note, is that it’s easier to include elements of scholarship and research that couldn’t be captured as well in a binder. “You can post video and audio of your teaching. You can take pictures of art and include it,” says David W. Dalton, an associate professor of instructional technology at Kent State. “You can hyperlink to things. You can really tell your story in new ways.”

Gordon J. Murray, an assistant professor of electronic media, remembers putting DVD’s and CD’s in plastic sleeves to go in his binder, along with printed screen shots of Web sites he’d worked on. Mr. Murray has just started testing Kent State’s e-portfolio system, and plans to use it to assemble his application for reappointment, due in early September. “I’m grateful that the university is forward-thinking enough to to at least attempt to do this,” he says.

Electronic tenure applications are also touted as more accessible to reviewers. With paper binders, people typically “check out” the documents they need to look over. That means only one person can look at a binder at a time and generally does so only during business officers. Files can also become disorganized from repeated handling, or sections can go missing. Digital dossiers mean “faculty reviewers can look at them and they can all do it simultaneously and from anywhere,” Mr. Dalton says.

Read the rest here.

Google celebrates this annual event. Anybody going to do a lot of watching?

Several districts in Georgia are either doing it or are looking into it. The reason? Saving money, of course!

What’s 11 extra minutes a day in class equal? Five more days of summer, according to a recommendation that would cut Fulton County’s school calendar to 175 days.

Georgia’s standard school year is 180 days.

The proposal — the first from a major metro Atlanta system — comes as the economy keeps its viselike grip on schools and the state slashes its public funding.

It goes to Fulton’s school board next week, although a final decision will not come for another two months as officials seek public comment. The board will meet at 4:30 p.m. Tuesday at Dunwoody Springs Elementary School, 8100 Roberts Drive in Sandy Springs.

Among the first to embrace the change were two small systems outside the metro area, which over the summer turned to longer daily hours and shorter years.

The 4,000 students in middle Georgia’s Peach County now attend school four days a week, which system officials estimate saves more than $407,000 in operations and transportation costs.

In rural North Georgia, Murray County officials went to a 160-day school year that starts after Labor Day. In turn, elementary school students get another hour in class and middle and high school students another 30 minutes — for a savings of $124,000 this school year.

In Fulton, teachers would still work 190 days. Early release days for students would be eliminated, becoming full teacher training days. If approved, the calendar would start with the 2010-11 school year.

Read the rest here.