On another note, I’m using the social learning site Edmodo for the first time with one of my courses. I’ve never been a fan of Blackboard: it’s unattractive, buggy, and clunky. Plus, don’t we pay big bucks for Blackboard licenses? I’d rather put an end to that and join up using some free platforms, no?
It looks promising so far, we’ll see how it goes.
I’ve used Edmodo for some consulting gigs I’m involved in with public school teachers-I like it MUCH better than BB. Has some glitches here and there, but it’s function is more intuitive. Would like to know what you think about it once your class gets going….
Well, I’m probably not your typical ed prof, since I follow @tcf, and was an Apple student (and your town’s [Madison] michael apple was one of the early warning cries on all this sh!t). Some of us are writing and teaching our hearts out against this stuff. I have to say that my dept. is deeply ideologically divided. There are a bunch of sped faculty who have totally drunk the Koolaid. “Yay, Michelle Rhee” (actually heard one say that–but, uhm, her test improvement measures were fraudulant… doesn’t matter, this is ideology not science). At any rate, there are broad swathes of higher ed fighting this stuff, but the powers that be have been masterful at dividing our energies, defunding higher ed, forcing us to spend our time chasing the same audit-culture thinking/paper work that is spawned from NCLB.
I hear you. I struggle myself, a faculty member without tenure. Many of our colleges of education are taking their orders from state departments of education, perhaps the federal DOE as well. They are not listening to faculty who’ve gathered years of experience in education. I worry that with each academic conference I attend that folks are so obsessed with the research and journal article that they are ignoring a tremendous fight that needs their participation.