Paul Allison : Activity

Overlapping Curriculum Circles

Sat, 05 Jul 2008 14:23:44 GMT

http://www.gcast.com/user/paulallison/podcast/main

(11 min. 06 secs.) Some thoughts about planning for the fall while running on a road in Upstate New York.

21st Century Literacies

Sat, 05 Jul 2008 04:53:54 GMT

http://paulrallison.blogspot.com/2007/11/21st-century-literacies.html

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21stCenturyLiteracies,
originally uploaded by Paul Allison.

This document -- and the assumptions behind it -- have helped me to clarify my reasons for defining a new discipline alongside of rhetoric and composition, but different from these disciplines.

Testing OpenBox Services

Sat, 05 Jul 2008 04:53:54 GMT

http://paulrallison.blogspot.com/2007/11/testing-openbox-services.html

I'm getting ready to write another post about how we need a new discipline, different than rhetoric and composition.

Seals and a Fox

Sat, 05 Jul 2008 04:53:54 GMT

http://paulrallison.blogspot.com/2007/08/seals-and-fox.html

You can see them if you look closely -- wait -- see!

Courtney is so smart!

Sat, 05 Jul 2008 04:53:54 GMT

http://paulrallison.blogspot.com/2007/08/courtney-is-so-smart.html

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Cape Cod - Summer 2007,
originally uploaded by Paul Allison.

I really like the consensus that Courtney McGough has found in response to my babbling about databases. I'll have more response, I just wanted to say that this felt warm.

Are state library research databases really worth the effort?

Sat, 05 Jul 2008 04:53:54 GMT

http://paulrallison.blogspot.com/2007/08/are-state-library-research-data

This month, over at Teachers Teaching Teachers, Susan Ettenheim, Lee Baber and others are looking into how and why to use state library research databases, and they have given us a homework assignment:

Find you own states database collection (paid for by your taxes!).... Now, think of something you are wondering about. Is it your aunts newly diagnosed illness, is it a question about Iraq, is it the history of a neighborhood fixture, is it something about a book youve been reading this summer? Search in these state funded free resources and see what you find. If you can, wed love you to do the same search in some other places too, maybe Google, maybe findarticles.com, maybe Wikipedia...

Its time to walk the talk! TTT67 - August 15, 2007

Here's the results of dipping my toes into the New York Online Virtual Electronic Library (NOVELNY). These are just my first impressions, and they leave me wondering whether a more careful study has ever been done than the one here that we are doing for oursleves. Has anyone ever more carefully studied and described the differences one finds between searching in publically available sources, and these protected databases?

Last month I used the the keyword "relationships" to show how to set up subscription alerts for on-going searches in Google Blogs, Google News, EveryZing (audio), and FindArticles. By using the same word to do a NOVELNY databases search, perhaps I can compare resusts. On the search page, I choose "Full-text articles only," then I ask for a search in "All Resources," and I do a search for the the keyword, "relationships." This gives me almost 45,000 hits in 14 databases.

1	EBSCO Animals
65	Funk & Wagnall's New World Encyclopedia
949	General Science Collection
15	Health & Wellness Resource Center
326	Primary Search
225	TOPICSearch
15687	MasterFILE Select
170	Business & Company Resource Center
24142	Custom Newspaper Database
62	Informe Revistas en Espanol - Spanish
2058	New York State Newspapers
1194	National Newspaper Index
10	Twayne Authors Series
43	Gale Virtual Reference Library (All)

Joyca Valenza on PowerPoint Reform and Gail Desler & Sue Waters on Edublogs - TTT110 - 06.25.08

Wed, 02 Jul 2008 03:45:11 GMT

http://teachersteachingteachers.org/?p=174

Download Joyca Valenza on PowerPoint Reform and Gail Desler & Sue Waters on Edublogs - TTT110 - 06.25.08 Joyce Valenza talks about reforming PowerPoint in the first half hour of this podcast. She provided this resource as well: Reforming Powerpoint. (Also of interest, perhaps: DavidByrne.com - Envisioning Emotional Epistemological Information.)
In the second half of the [...]

Setting the table

Tue, 01 Jul 2008 03:28:35 GMT

http://paulrallison.blogspot.com/2007/09/setting-table.html

It feels far away, because I've got to get computers set up -- and connected to the Internet -- and I keep running into problems like Skype not working because of something the Department of Education put on the computers.... I can get it off, but doing that thirty times becomes a pain. Still, I feel clear about what I want the students to have available, and how to get them started, but I need to figure out how the students can do parts of this set up -- while still being accurate.

Link

Protest or Acting Irresponsibly?

Fri, 27 Jun 2008 02:51:18 GMT

http://paulrallison.blogspot.com/2007/11/protest-or-acting-irresponsibly

Link to audio

Today is one of several days out of the year when teachers are proctoring tests -- assessments that determine our school grade. This is so Orwellian that I don't know where to start to protest, so I just keep saying "No!" I don't do this loudly or even explicitly. My negative opinion about the testing-mandated-curriculum culture just seems to ooze out of me. Mainly I teach new things to students like blogging and podcasting and -- like now -- I'm setting up for a webcast tomorrow, instead of proctoring for a test. Unfortunately my attitude and teaching can't last long in a school, so I guess I need to be ready to keep looking again and again. Why can't I find a school that might be willing to re-think curriculum in such a way that computers are necessary to do the tasks we imagine for young people?

Profile, Posting, Responding

Fri, 27 Jun 2008 02:51:18 GMT

http://paulrallison.blogspot.com/2007/10/profile-posting-responding.html

I've been trying to describe my curriculum in simpler and simpler ways. Recently I've been saying that there are three strands:

* Blog Posts - responding to literature and journal-writing/research
* Profile building - description of self, community, and culture using multimedia
* Responding to others in the Personal Learning Space, a school based social network.

Of course there are a lot of other goals, and I'm concerned that my students are following me.