I’m planning to make a few to embed in my Moodle site for my kids to use. I wanted to try it out here first.

The meme is to list 5 changes you’d want to see in education. Here are mine.

1. Teachers need to not yell. I believe that yelling indicates you’ve lost control. When a teacher has a good relationship with students that transcends the power struggle, yelling can be placed to the side. I can recall Dan Meyer talking about standing to the side of the student when conversing, as opposed to the top-down, finger-wagging style so often seen.

2. I wish more teachers knew how to wade through the misinformation. There are too many folks preaching too many messages, and I don’t think many teachers are equipped with a knowledge of theory through which to analyze the messages coming at them through all of these channels. There is a lot of incorrect stuff being said, under the guise of being in the 21st century.

3. I wish education had a stronger focus on foreign language. Being bilingual has opened so many doors for me throughout life, yet my class is often relegated to the lowest rung of the ladder.  I wish elementary schools taught classes in both languages. I wish math class happened in English and English class happend in Spanish. I say that slightly tongue-in-cheek but you get the drift. I think school should be taught in more than one language, suffice it to say.

4. I wish education put more emphasis on the whole student. I love hearing friends talk about teaching their kids to care. I support that and wish we did it more often.

5. I wish education was less influenced by high-stakes testing. This is obvious, but the focus on major test scores has done much to harm education. Others have written way more about this than I have.

Ok so there it is, my two cents.
Chris

I thought I’d play along.

The book is called 365 Daily Devotions for  Righteous Man.

Page 56 is also Day 56, and the fifth sentence is, “And, few things in life provide more contentment than the knowledge that we are obeying God’s commandments.”

I didn’t plan this, but it happened to be the nearest book. If you want to play along, here are the rules:

Rules:
* Get the book nearest to you. Right now.
* Go to page 56.
* Find the 5th sentence.
* Write this sentence – either here or on your blog.
* Copy these instructions as commentary of your sentence.
* Don’t look for your favorite book or your coolest but really the nearest.

And like Doug, I want to say Thanks to Stephen Abrams of Stephen’s Lighthouse for this rather interesting (and easy) meme.

First, I happened to see a tweet by Bud Hunt asking if edublogosphere.com was broken.

It turns out it was! When I first built the site, I really just made a fancy login for the now defunct ircatwork.com CGI IRC installation. It seems as though the ircatwork.com folks have been taken over by Mibbit. While that’s not necessarily a bad thing, it defeats my login script.

So, I went in search of a new solution. I can’t install CGI IRC myself because my host (affiliate link) won’t allow it. I can’t say as though I blame them, as IRC takes a bunch of server load, especially on shared hosting like I am.

From the main page for CGI IRC, I found a link to blitzed.org. I dug around a bit and found their #help channel. I dove in and found some very helpful folks. In no time flat, I created a new #edublogosphere, registered it to myself, and scored ChanOps privileges. As I began to ask around, I actually ended up in a conversation with dg, the author of CGI IRC! That was a treat for me, as I respect anyone who can write software, which I certainly cannot do.

Not only did all that work out, but they’ve said that I can request an exception for the limits imposed on the web-based interface for any time we need it (i.e. NECC, etc). Thanks, blitzed!

So I rang bluehost and changed the CNAME implementation so irc.edublogosphere.com now points to irc.blitzed.org.

Then, I used their script generator to generate a nice login script that works like a charm. Try it out, will you?

Here is a shot of the new home page.

Here’s what it looks like now…

Useful, eh? Here’s how I did it..

I first heard about GeekTool some time ago from Lifehacker. I remember having tried to get it to work once before but failing. My issues, I was sure, so I attacked it again. Also credit Lifehacker for the script to embed Skype contacts you’ll see below..

Once Geektool was installed, I copied and pasted the shell command as per Lifehacker’s suggestions and it popped right up. I configured the script a bit for my liking and it was good to go!

I had also thought about a plain text todo list which I’ve heard from a few folks is a good idea. I had issues making it work with TextEdit, though, since it always tried to save as an .rtf file. Through a few twitter direct messages, I learned that you can force a plain text file by adding .txt to the file name.

It still didn’t work.

Turns out I had to set the encoding as shown below…this only worked for me once I created a file in Windows notepad.exe and copied it over. I couldn’t make this work solely on the Mac side.

Ok then, once I did this, I set the Geektool up to see the file. To monitor your machine’s console log, it defaults to seeing it like this…

I did this and it worked nicely when looking at my plain text todo list. The only trouble is when I changed the text file it didn’t change on the screen. That’s no good. I had to log off and log back on for GeekTool to recognize the change. That’s not cool.

I went searching and stumbled across this thread which lead me to this post. Eureka!

Once I right clicked, went to Open With, and used Firefox, I got the local URL for my todo list! I pasted that along with a curl command, set the refresh to 30 seconds and voila!

The command looks like this –> curl file:///Users/username/Desktop/todo.txt and it automatically refreshes at the interval selected.

So now I had my solution and a darned useful second monitor! I’ve still got plenty of screen real estate left to delegate to other stuff if needed, and will do that on an as-needed basis.

Here’s what my second monitor looks like now, click for a larger version with skitch’ed details.

As you can see, I’m leaving Colloquy open on the edublogosphere IRC channel (irc.edublogosphere.com and channel #edublogosphere) just in case anyone stops by.

Any other GeekTool’ers out there that can suggest a cool uptime command or anything else I can be doing with GeekTool to be even geekier? Did you set this up yourself? Shout out in the comments!

irc.edublogosphere.com

I set up a CNAME through Bluehost. The change has been reflected on the edublogosphere.com login page.

It will still work if you set it up using an IRC client, nothing changes there, you can use either. The new one just looks cleaner and can be easier to remember.

That’s all, back to vacation!

Chris

So, consider this the official announcement of an edublogosphere IRC chat room!

You can connect in one of many ways, through an IRC client like Colloquy or others, use the following details:

irc.cyberarmy.net
irc.edublogosphere.com
#edublogosphere

Or you can log in straight through the web at www.edublogosphere.com using CGI:IRC interface.

There is a limit of 50 people logged in through the web interface, but it is virtually limitless through IRC clients.

I think this will make for a fantastic backchannel for NECC or other conferences and is very flexibile. This is not designed to be a twitter replacement or Skype-replacement or centralized anything, just another resource.

The nice thing about this is anyone can participate without having to be a part of a pre-established network. Folks can jump in with a low barrier to initial participation.

Alec hopped in the chat with me and then a lot of people followed his tweet…

Cool, huh? Jump in and see what you think!

Update: I set up a CNAME so that folks can use irc.edublogosphere.com instead of irc.cyberarmy.net. I figure it’s easier to remember and easier to tell folks.

I’m looking at IRC, since it’s such a darned established network already, and has years of goodness behind it. I’ve got one heck of a sexy web-based IRC client that I’ve been working through, and the developer (who lives in Kyev, Ukraine!!) has been great to talk with.

I don’t have the skillz to be a channel op, so I’m looking for a channel to use. Do any of you know of a channel that wouldn’t mind this type of traffic but at the same time would protect our sensibilities? I’d need one that’s safe for work, and so forth.

The cool thing is you’ll be able to interact from a traditional IRC client (colloquy, mIRC, etc) or through the web. It looks promising, open, and happy.

Now I just need a channel, any help there?

- Chris

What I’d like to do is create a web-based IRC spot, whereas folks can drop by and chat all they like and not have to register for anything. No registration, no password, no privacy concerns, just chat. Just backchannel.

I am thinking IRC because it is an already-established network and I would merely provide a gateway. This way we can prevent all the trouble of IRC clients and frustration. Imagine if at the blogger’s cafe folks could just hit up edublogosphere.com and start chatting.

I like it because there’s no need to be someone’s contact, no need to download Skype, no need to hook up to twitter. It’s just easy, accessible, and requires no effort.

It doesn’t even require a download. Now, for those who want, they could use an IRC client just as easily, and perhaps more easily. See, flexibility.

So that’s my thinking thus far, now comes the implementation. I found ONE that I like, that’s clean enough for my taste. We’ll see if I can manage to get it installed. This is where I am stretching my knowledge, so I’ll have to learn this one on the way through it.

I’ll keep you posted!