Teachers and Technology

You know that information overload that you have been bemoaning ever since the Internet picked up steam?  Well, help is on the way.  The latest way to keep track of all that information you have collected (and will collect) is to “tag” it for future reference. 

Let’s say you see an article on the Internet about something and you want to capture it on the fly, without having to save it in a folder the name of which you may or may not remember when the time comes to look it up. 

(Have you ever been the victim of your own organizational schemes?  I have.  The easiest way for me to lose track of something is to take the trouble to file it. When I file something, it is gone, save some method of organization that drives what I write on the manila folder I place it in.  Is the information about the new playground design better placed in a folder named “Playground Design” or in a folder named “Parent Association,” the funding source for the playground and the group that I will soon be addressing on the topic?  Maybe copies in both folders?  If these folders are electronic, and I put a copy in each, I may be creating an additional problem of version control.  The layout of my desk actually provides my best system of organizing documents, even though it looks like a mess.  Regions on my desk are identified as “must deal with today,” “should go through this pile soon,” “read later,” “stuff for today’s faculty meeting” and so forth.  I never lose anything on my desk.  I only lose stuff when I file it.)

So, the idea that an informal approach to filing and organizing things may work better than a formal one has some merit.  Well, that’s the beauty of tags.  If you tag information that you may have a use for later, you stand a better chance of finding it.  Why?  Because the tags that you assign to the information need only make sense to you.  Nobody knows how you think about things better than you, and so your categories (“re jon’s condition” or ‘football project”) will necessarily be of more use to you than ones that the public might need to understand as well.

An interesting thing happened on the way to the anti-plagiarism provider the other day; the students put up a roadblock.  Right here in the nation’s capital, home of every form of litigious sentiment and legislated morality, righteous indignation and ethical seesawing, the students at McLean High School took their stand.  It isn’t right, they say, for the school district to appropriate their original work, their intellectual property, and submit it without their permission to a for-profit company to be entered into a database that is used to “catch” other purported plagiarists.  The story was recently reported by the Washington Post.

A Generation of “Brand Ambassadors” is Born

Last summer we took a look at MySpace from alternative perspectives, and suggested that everyone’s got their knickers in a bit more of a twist than the MySpace phenomenon calls for. 

Instead of starting from the premise that MySpace is a gargantuan, omnivorous breed of Internet Pied Piper leading our young into a forest of grunge bands and spooky adults who would like to meet them for a date, we asked if maybe, just maybe, MySpace isn’t really an omnivorous breed of Internet Pied Piper whose sole objective is to get our young to (gasp) buy something.

With the recent outing of “Smart,” the new Wendy’s mascot/spokesperson/jpeg, as a commercial “faux profile” on the MySpace site, the smart money is moving toward the latter view of the site as a commercial juggernaut.  And why not?  When I checked this morning, Smart had 79,341 friends.  He is a 28-year-old Capricorn from Columbus who not lives in the city and who tells us that “to be FRESH to be beefy is to be the best.”  He adjures his buddies to “EAT ME!”  (Note the transposition of tired, old-media ad copy to the medium of web 2.0.  Youthography, a Canadian marketing consulting firm, looks at this stuff and comments that companies working in this medium need to “raise the creativity bar.”)