A book is a place - Books - Entertainment - theage.com.au: "The emergence of the web turned this vision of the book of the future as a solid, albeit multimedia object completely upside down and inside out. Multimedia is engaging, especially in a format that encourages reflection. But locating discourse inside a dynamic network promises even more profound possibilities.

Reading and writing have always been social activities, but the fact tends to be obscured by the way we engage with the medium of print. We grew up with images of the solitary reader curled up in a chair or under a tree and the writer alone in a garret.

The most important thing my colleagues and I have learned over the past few years from a series of experiments with 'networked books' is that as discourse moves off the page onto the network, the social aspects are revealed with sometimes startling clarity. These exchanges move from background to foreground, a transition that has dramatic implications."

Here's a snippet of the conversation over at Conversations of a Community College Dean:

Regional or National Accreditation?

In a comment a few days ago in response to my misgivings about a national online database of classes, someone raised the question of why we still have a regional, as opposed to national, accreditation system.

The short answer is, I have absolutely no idea. My best guess is inertia; regional accreditors emerged long ago, and gradually accrued a certain legitimacy. Now, certain regional accreditors are simply accepted as 'legitimate' – North Central, Middle States, NEASC, SACS, etc. The national accreditors that currently exist are generally held in much lower esteem throughout most of higher ed, to the extent that they get any respect at all.

 Read more, including my comment, here.

Labels: accreditation, colleges of education, credits, Dean Dad, transfer, universities

Friedman - Teacher, Can We Leave Now?

This NYT article explains the importance of our continuing role in the War on Terror - the spread of ideas. From a less than conservative columnist, no less. 

I confess, I find it hard to come to Afghanistan and not ask: Why are we here? Who cares about the Taliban? Al Qaeda is gone. And if its leaders come back, well, that’s why God created cruise missiles.

But every time I start writing that column, something stills my hand. This week it was something very powerful. I watched Greg Mortenson, the famed author of “Three Cups of Tea,” open one of his schools for girls in this remote Afghan village in the Hindu Kush mountains. I must say, after witnessing the delight in the faces of those little Afghan girls crowded three to a desk waiting to learn, I found it very hard to write, “Let’s just get out of here.”

Indeed, Mortenson’s efforts remind us what the essence of the “war on terrorism” is about. It’s about the war of ideas within Islam — a war between religious zealots who glorify martyrdom and want to keep Islam untouched by modernity and isolated from other faiths, with its women disempowered, and those who want to embrace modernity, open Islam to new ideas and empower Muslim women as much as men. America’s invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan were, in part, an effort to create the space for the Muslim progressives to fight and win so that the real engine of change, something that takes nine months and 21 years to produce — a new generation — can be educated and raised differently.

Labels: Afghanistan, democracy, Friedman, New York Times, schools, students, Thomas Friedman

Obama's Secret Meeting With Historians

The president held a dinner at the White House for leading presidential scholars

By Kenneth T. Walsh

Posted July 10, 2009

President Obama has found another way to break out of the White House "bubble"—holding private discussions with eminent historians who have studied the successes and failures of his predecessors. His goal is to better understand what has worked and what has failed in the past as he makes policy today.

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Obama held a dinner at the White House residence with nine such scholars on June 30, and it turned out to be what one participant described as a "history book club, with the president as the inquisitor." Among those attending were Michael Beschloss, H. W. Brands, Douglas Brinkley, Robert Dallek, and Doris Kearns Goodwin. Obama asked the guests to discuss the presidencies that they were most familiar with and to give him insights into what remains relevant to the problems of today.
At one point, the discussion turned to whether Obama was trying to do too much too fast and whether he might overload the political circuits of Congress.

Read more here. 

Labels: historians, history, Obama

Courtesy of http://www.wordle.net/. Images of Wordles are licensed .

Labels: learning, Web 2.0, Wordle

'YouTube-ing' All the Way to the Bank - ABC News

Shared via AddThis

Make sure to watch the final part .  . .



thanks, Julie!

Labels: 4th of July, muppets

Something interesting posted on Twitter (where I'm spending more time than here at Blogger given the much higher rate of interaction).

This is a test post from , a fancy photo sharing thing.