"Weblogs written by scientists are relatively rare, but some of them are proving popular. Out of 46.7 million blogs indexed by the Technorati blog search engine, five scientists' sites make it into the top 3,500. Declan Butler asks the winners about the reasons for their success."

Free Education: 200 Online Courses from Great Universities

This week, Stanford has started to roll out a new course, Einstein's General Theory of Relativity. Taught by Leonard Susskind, one of America's leading physics minds, this course is the fourth of a six-part sequence - Modern Physics: The Theoretical Minimum - that traces the development of modern physics, moving from Newton to Black Holes. As the title suggests, this course focuses squarely on the groundbreaking work of Albert Einstein. And, it's undoubtedly a plus that the course was presented in Stanford's Continuing Studies program, which means that it's tailored to smart non-specialists like you. You can watch the first lecture on iTunes here, or YouTube below. The remaining lectures will be rolled out on a weekly basis. If you would like to watch the longer sequence of courses, I have provided a complete list of links here. Enjoy.

The expression "you can't fatten your lambs by weighing them" may be an expression in southern illinois but it was also used by Jonathan Kozol in his keynote speech to the Children's Defense Fund in the early 90's. I know. I have the tape of the speech. Obama likes to take the words of others and use as his own. Comment by catherine - September 10, 2008 at 6:32 am

If you could lead through testing, the U.S. would lead the world in all education categories. When are people going to understand you don't fatten your lambs by weighing them? - Jonathan Kozol at Westfield State College's 157th Commencement

(Listen to an audio version of this essay). I recently heard the author Jonathan Kozol speak about the over-use of standardized tests in schools today. "We're very busy weighing our lambs. That's not the same as fattening them," he said. That made me think of Nelson.

Jonathan Kozol on "Shame of the Nation" Audio file of Kozol speaking abou "weighing the lamb"

Kozol came to Amherst to promote his latest book, "Shame of the Nation: The Restoration of Apartheid Schooling in America," which discusses "re-segregation" of public schools and the difficulties facing schools with a high minority population.

Google decided to close many services that were either redundant, not very successful or unrelated to Google's core business.

The TagCloud Top 100 List

HOW TO 2008: How To Do Almost Anything With Social Media

Google Reader + iPhone = Awesome

Wikipedia, meet RNA. Anyone submitting to a section of the journal RNA Biology will, in the future, be required to also submit a Wikipedia page that summarizes the work. The journal will then peer review the page before publishing it in Wikipedia.

"earth album is a simpler, slicker Flickr mash-up that allows you to explore some of the most stunning photos in the world courtesy of Google maps and Flickr."

FROM OVERVIEW: "They Say/I Say: The Moves that Matter in Persuasive Writing is recommended for use in Sages First Seminars. Gerald Graff and Cathy Birkenstein have created a book of templates useful for "Demystifying Academic Conversation" (Preface ix). While the book has received mixed reviews (mostly related to the contentious issue of whether or not templates are useful/proper tools for use in writing instruction; see "Responses to TSIS" below), we present the following information to help you decide for yourself. In addition, you will find sample exercises from the text (some of which have been tested in the classroom) under "Links." '

This article compares the Google index rating of canditates who allowed the posting of voter generated content on their site with those that didn't. In other words: Web 2.0 vs. Web 1 approach relative to the number of pages google had indexed from the site.

Students consistently told us that "really good" or "the best" writing is writing that is performative, that makes something happen in the world; for more information about this aspect of our findings, please see our article "Performing Writing, Performing Literacy" Throughout the five years, students reported being deeply engaged with writing out of class: for these students, extracurricular writing is very important, often more important than any of the writing they are doing for classes. Of the thousands of out-of-class texts students contributed, here is a representative sample:

"Visualising CoAuthors in Open Repository Online Papers, Part 3 In Visualising CoAuthors in Open Repository Online Papers, Part 2 I described an approach for pulling author information out of the OU ORO repository and displaying it in various ways, such as using a Graphviz plotted graph. I knew that ORO was scheduling an update, which has been pushed in the last few days, so the screen scraper I wrote to work with the old repository is now broken (of course...). The new ORO engine is capable of generating RSS search feeds though, so looking forwards, the whole system is far easier to play with it..."

Visualizations : Network Diagram of ORO dept authjors demo