Chris Betcher

If so, please take 30 seconds to fill in this very short survey. (It's three questions!) Dr Scott McLeod from the University of Minnessota is trying to get an idea of just how big the education blogosphere (there's that word again!) really is.  So, please help him out a bit and fill in his three questions.  Thanks!  :-) technorati tags: edublogging , survey

Found this article in a news link the other day. It seems that the growing list of terminology surrounding the "new web" (can I call it that?) is getting up some people's noses... "Blog", "netiquette", "cookie" and "wiki" have been voted among the most irritating words spawned by the Internet, according to the results of a poll published on Thursday. Topping the list of words most likely to make web users "wince, shudder or want to bang your head on the keyboard" was folksonomy, a term for a web classification system. "Blogosphere", the collective name for blogs or online journals, was second; "blog" itself was third; "netiquette", or internet etiquette, came fourth and "blook", a book based on a blog, was fifth. "Cookie", a file sent to a user's computer after they visit a website, came in ninth, while "wiki", a collaborative website edited by its readers...

The web is a really bizarre place sometimes. But this story proves that real life can always be more bizarre... In case you have been living under a rock lately, Apple is about to release a fairly major product called the iPhone . It's a mobile phone of course, but it also does email, voicemail, web browsing as well as being a pretty darn amazing video iPod as well. Although many other phones from companies like Nokia and Sony Ericsson offer similar features, the iPhone seems to have a much greater emphasis on design and usability, as only Apple seems to be able to do. Obviously the tech world thinks the iPhone will be a big deal because since the announcement of the device back at MacWorld last year, Apple's share price has gone through the roof, rising from about $70 per share to the $125 price it is sitting on at the moment. Whatever Apple is doing with the iPhone, it seems to be attracting the right kind of attention. There is a ridiculous amount of commentary on the i...

Since my Year 7 students will be doing a unit of work next semester on Superheros, I was doing a little surfing around the web to find some resources. (Or should that be " silver surfing "?) In the process I stumbled across this little quiz that asks you to select a bunch of your personality traits so it can tell you which famous superhero you are most like. Apparently, I would make a good Iron Man... Inventor. Businessman. Genius. Your results: You are Iron Man Iron Man 75% Spider-Man 75% The Flash 70% Supergirl 60% Robin 55% Hulk 55% Superman 55% Wonder Woman 50% Green Lantern 50% Catwoman 45% Batman 45% Inventor. Businessman. Genius. Click here to take the Superhero Personality Quiz Not being a huge comic book fan, I've never actually heard of Iron Man. However, according to Wikipedia he was a Marvel Comic books character based loosely on the rich and eccentric Howard Hughes. "Howard Hughes was one of the most colorful men of our time. He was an inventor, an...

After I posted the Eight Factors for Effective PD, I got an email from Bryn Jones reminding me that age does terrible things to one's memory. (Well ok, he didn't actually SAY that, but I can read between the lines) The point is that Bryn and I actually talked about 10 factors, not 8. On top of that, he has since come up with an extra one, so now there are 11 Factors for Effective PD. The missing ones are... Links to School from Home Leadership Flexible Learning Spaces Rather than expand upon them here, I have uploaded a PDF file that Bryn shared with me called "11things.pdf" and put it into my Box.net account. You can get a copy by clicking on the link in the Box.net widget on the left side of this page and downloading a copy. Thanks again to Bryn for sharing these insights!

You may have noticed that I changed the tagline at the top of my blog to the rather cryptic phrase "Rumour. Open your ears; ". You may be asking what that's all about... I was looking through that recent post about monkeys and typewriters and discovered that there actually have been experiments where they have done exactly that ... set a bunch of simulated chimpanzees loose on a simulated typewriters to see what happens. Interestingly, so far they have not managed to recreate the entire works of William Shakespeare. However, apparenty the 24 character string of "Rumour. Open your ears; " is so far the longest coherent phrase typed by a sim chimp randomly pressing keys on a typewriter. I don't know why I thought that was so funny, but I did. And it seemed a perfect tagline for a blog. technorati tags: chimps

James Farmer has been up to his upgrading tricks again, and Edublogs has been offline for a few hours today.  I don't mind, I just appreciate the facts that he takes the trouble to keep the Edublogs service at the cutting edge of Wordpress technology.  Anyway, it gave me a chance to do a bit of playing on my other blogs, tweaking a few things here and there. I also managed to get a new episode of the Virtual Staffroom podcast online.  It's been a long time between episodes, due mainly to a series of personal dramas but also because it took me a while to get broadband on again where I'm living now.  Anyway, the point is that a new episode is up -  "Open Minded"  - and another episode is in the works, Taking it Further".  Check them out, they are pretty good actually!  :-) I've also been having a good play with the Sidebar Widgets in Wordpress.  Very cool.  I'd been wondering how to add extra services to the sidebars like Clustr maps and other things wh...

A few years ago, I had the great fortune to be sitting in a boutique pub on the Fremantle docks having a beer with my mate Bryn Jones .  It was actually the first time I had gotten to meet Bryn in person, although we had exchanged many discussions via the Ozteachers mailing list for a number of years prior to that.  I happened to be visiting Perth to run some technology workshops and since Bryn was one of the few people I knew from WA I'd organised to catch up and meet him in person.  Bryn is a well respected WA educator and was lecturing at Notre Dame University in Freo at the time, quite literally teaching teachers to teach.  I met him at his place, we drove into Fremantle township and went for a wander down to this wonderful pub called Little Creatures , right on the edge of Fremantle Harbour, with incredible beers and one of the most interesting urinal troughs I've seen. Naturally, we talked a lot about education. At the time, Bryn was deeply immersed in research into why...

I had a little spare time tonight so I decided to do a job that I've been meaning to do for a while... cleaning up my bookmarks collection. (What's up with that? I can live in a house that's messy, my desk at work looks like a bomb has hit it, but my hard drive is really well organised... go figure!) I mentioned recently that I've been using Flock as my main browser these days... mainly because it has a bunch of wonderful built-in features that seem really sensible, but I can't help wondering why the bookmark organisation is set up like it is. One of the many nice things about Firefox, or even IE for that matter, is that you can arrange your collection of bookmarks/favourites into folders and subfolders. This is largely a very good thing, although I did notice I tended to get just a little over-organised at times and I had a large number of folders that had only one item in them, which is perhaps getting just a tad granular. But I did have a lot of top-level f...