Hintonblogger

Well, I have been absent for a while from my blog, but it certainly was for a reason. The past few months have been a blur to some degree. In January I left the Arizona Department of Education and took a position with Remote-Learner.net. After spending a little over 6 weeks in that position, I realized that I had made a mistake. I should clarify that the mistake had nothing to do whatsoever with Remote-Learner. It was entirely my own mistake. They are a terrific company, both to provide services and to work for.

There is a great article I came across at Yahoo News, "Once shunned by academics, Wikipedia now a teaching tool". I have long been a fan of Wikipedia and it is often the first place I turn to begin the learning process about a particular topic. What has repeatedly surprised me, however, is the particular vehemence that many teachers seem to feel about its use in the classroom. This smacks of the "ivory tower" syndrome to which we, as teachers, can often fall victim.

I'm member of many different social networks (Classroom 2.0 on Ning, LinkedIN, Twitter, Facebook, and other communities like Drupal.org and Moodle.org among others). Social networks, like other mediums of media, are successful that more people view or participate in them. In large part they are judged successful by how capable they are of connecting you with people or things that you are interested in. Likewise, they tend to fail when they are unable to help you make those connections. One of the powerful new "technologies" is that ability of these social networks to suggest people, events, or other resources based on what it knows about you. I think this is a tremendously useful tool in helping us connect with things or people very easily. So why am I leaving Facebook - especially when I would maintain that it does or has helped me connect with people and things that I have an interest in (family, friends, people who share my interests, etc)?

The ultimate reason is that Facebook, in connecting me with my friends, family members, and other events and subjects I was interested in, also presented me with things that are horribly offensive to me. So offensive that those things completely outweigh the other things it was doing well. This lead me to the decision that my only choice was to choose not to participate. So I'll be closing my Facebook account (which I hear is not that easy to do actually). In the final judgement, Facebook failed me, it connected me to things that I didn't want exposure to often enough that it wasn't worth continuing my participation. My only question (which I'm going to Twitter and email to friends shortly) is how they put up with the exposure to pornographic images as they use Facebook - do they encounter them frequently? I would be doing unrelated things and then BAM! an add with a slew of pornographic images would appear on a sidebar. Once a event that was advertised in the Phoenix, AZ network had a very objectionable picture. I couldn't get it off my page until I changed networks, completely leaving the Phoenix, AZ network, even then the Phoenix, AZ network info (including the picture) didn't immediately disappear.

I'm not a novice to the Internet or social networks here. I realize that occasionally, no matter how skilled or wise an Internet user you are, that you may run into an image or two, in those cases you ignore it and just move away from the pages. I tried those things with Facebook, I even used Firefox's ability to block images from certain URLs and still ran into things that were objectionable. I wanted to use it, I really did. I think Facebook has value - but it simply wasn't worth it for the content I kept running into.

Allowing users to contribute content is a powerful new tool provided by the Internet today. Social networks success will depend on their how well they let users (and the social networks) select content that users want to see and avoid people and content that they don't. I have some ideas on how Facebook could get me back, which I think would hold true for many others as well. That post will have to wait until after work however...

Until then, for now, goodbye Facebook......

Well I just got the exciting news that Moodle 1.9 has been released. The release notes for 1.9 look awesome and I'm excited to get the final release installed over at HintonWEB Learning Center to start playing with it. Here are the features that I'm most excited about having:

Well this is my first post Gilbert Public Schools blog post. I left GPS last week after 6.5 years and took a new job as an Education Program Specialist in the Arizona Department of Education educational technology section. I am sad to leave the great people I worked with at GPS, but am looking forward to the new challenges and opportunities I will have.

Here is my first report I sent to eSchool News as a volunteer correspondent.  You can follow the different sessions (as well as my reports on the ones I was assigned - I have at least one every day) throughout the week at http://www.eschoolnews.com/cic/. 

MF235 – Drive for 2005 – 100% Participation Workshop Report