Author: chipbruce

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Timeline tool

I knew that the iLabs timeline tool was useful for the Learning Technologies Timeline where I wanted both the format of a timeline and collaborative construction of it. Rajeev has taken that to a new level with his timelines for Dewey, Addams, and Chicago.

It wasn’t much to go from there to see the timeline tool as a way to present a roadmap for a project or to make an agenda for a meeting. And recently I realized that it’s also a way to make a syllabus for those who think the existing syllabus tool is too complex or offers too many options.

I didn’t see initially that it was also a blog if I simply sort by newest first. It’s also a lab notebook with spaces for regular notes, links to data, automatic dating, Dave and Rajeev helped me see that it’s a roster for a project or a class, especially helpful if it includes photos. Now, I’m seeing that it’s a bulletin board. Each instantiation of a timeline can be a separate forum, and individual postings are entries in that forum, which can then be sorted by dates or titles of the postings. Of course it doesn’t thread messages…

To what extent do each of the iLabs tools have this multiple use character?

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Mars comes the closest it’s been in a long time

On August 27 the earth and Mars will pass just 34.6 million miles apart. Mars will appear 58 times brighter than it did on January 1. As Francis Reddy points out, the last time this happened, Neanderthals flourished and humans had not yet made it to Australia.

If you paste “34,649,589” into Google, you’ll get to a bunch of sites on this, including Celestial Delights Online, which has a beautiful poster you can download and an animation showing how the image of Mars will change.

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Community Inquiry Lab Builder

The Community Inquiry Lab Builder provides a way to create a web site for a class, group, project, or community. It includes Inquiry Page tools, such as Inquiry Units, and a Document Center for group writing projects.

A Community Inquiry Laboratory (CIL) is a place where members of a community come together to develop shared capacity and work on common problems. Community emphasizes support for collaborative activity and for creating knowledge that is connected to people’s values, history, and lived experiences. Inquiry points to support for open-ended, democratic, participatory engagement. Laboratory indicates a space and resources to bring theory and action together in an experimental and critical manner. A CIL is most importantly a concept, not a technology in the narrow sense, but it may be supported through a website and other tools for communication.

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GSLIS canoe trip

Photos from a GSLIS canoe trip on the Middle Fork of the Vermilion River (Wabash River tributary). There was another GSLIS trip on the same river the previous June.

The Middle Fork is the only river in Illinois designated as a National Wild and Scenic River by US National Park Service. It flows through Kickapoo State Park near Danville.

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The world’s largest lesson

Today, April 9, there will be an attempt at the world’s largest lesson. The UN’s Literacy Decade has just begun and today they want people all over the world to teach a lesson about literacy, which focuses on facts such as that nearly a billion adults are illiterate, most non-literate people are women, and 100 million children don’t even go to school. They hope to have thousands of students thinking about these issues all on the same day. The idea of record setting seems a little silly, but the campaign for global literacy is very serious, addressing a problem that stands in the way of solving almost any problem one can name, whether that’s about healthcare, the environment, economic development, social welfare, or conflict resolution.

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Literacy in the information age: Inquiries into meaning making with new technologies

liabookEducators today want to go beyond how-to manuals and publications that merely celebrate the many exciting new technologies as they appear in schools. Students are immersed in an evolving world of new technology development in which they are not passive recipients of these technologies but active interpreters of them. How do you help learners interpret these technologies as we all become immersed in the new information age? Continue reading →

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Paseo Boricua

Paseo Boricua flagPaseo Boricua has become the center of the Chicago Puerto Rican community. It’s a place where Puerto Ricans can learn about their heritage through the culture center and where the Pedro Albizu Campos High School provides an alternative school setting to help young people succeed. Puerto Rican restaurants and night life have developed along with commerce. Inquiry Project members have bcome active in working with the Paseo Boricua community.

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Denounce the peacemakers

From No Iraq Attack: An Open Letter

“Naturally the common people don’t want war: Neither in Russia, nor in England, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But, after all, It is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the peacemakers for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country.”

Hermann Goering at the Nuremberg trials, 1946.

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Religion of Grass

I would be converted to a religion of grass.
Sleep the winter away and rise headlong each spring.
Sink deep roots.
Conserve water.
Respect and nourish your neighbors and never let trees gain the upper hand.
Such are the tenets and dogmas.
As for the practice — Grow lush in order to be devoured or caressed, stiffen in sweet elegance, invent startling seeds — these also make sense.
Bow beneath the arm of fire.
Connect underground.
Provide.
Provide.
Be lovely and do no harm.

by Louise Erdich

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Students using Biology Workbench

UI Scientists Head Back to School [article in the Champaign-Urbana News-Gazette]

“Students at Danville High School built their own molecules last year.

“Obviously, this is the kind of thing you can’t do with a textbook. Not surprisingly, it doesn’t yield typical textbook answers from the kids, which are more likely to be a recitation of facts from the book than a real understanding of how molecules work, says Shelley Barker, a Danville biology teacher and department chair.”