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National School Boards Association measures social networking at nine hours per week, much of it spent on homework help

I continue to believe in the linear, author-driven narrative for educational purposes. I just don't believe the Web is optimal for delivering this experience. Instead, let's praise old narrative forms like books and sitting around a flickering campfire

Educators must keep a portion of the undergraduate experience disconnected, unplugged, and logged off.

In my experience, what makes diigo better? it saves the content of the page you bookmark, not only the link. Magnolia used to do that before they lost all their user’s data You can highlight! Important, as sometimes you don’t remember what was interesting in a page Posts are Private by default There’s a bunch of community features behind it. Example: pop psych you can post to other sites, including delicious (they are an example of openness)

On top of all this, there’s another feature that may well become revolutionary: adding sticky notes to pages, in a way that other people can see it. When using the Diigo toolbar, you can see what other people have highlighted, and also comments (sticky notes) they added. That means that you are no longer limited to leaving comments on blogs, you can do so in any type of page (even static pages). Diigo enables you to drop your comment exactly where it is relevant, not at the end of a long list.

All in all, I’ve never seen an entrance in a monopolized market (social bookmarking) with this strength and resolution. Diigo is very impressive, and my bookmarking tool of choice.

Programming -OK, on the programming thing, here are my thoughts.In our curriculum our objective is not as much a specific LANGUAGE. One year I may use HTML with Javascript, this past year I used LSL — what I want kids to know that when they encounter programming and coding that there are certain conventions. Some are case sensitive, some are not. How do you find out how to add to what you know about programming? Do you know where to go to find prewritten code? Can you hack it to make it work to do what you want it to do?We spend about a week – two weeks but I require they know how to handcode hyperlinks and images – they are just too important.But to take 12 weeks or 6 weeks to learn a whole language – yes maybe some value – but to me the value is HOW is the language constructed or built. What are the conventions and how do I educate myself if I am interested in pursuing. What comes out of this time is kids who say either “I never want to do that” or “this is really cool, I love coding.”They are doing very simplistic work (although the LSL object languages were pretty advanced) but since we don’t have a full course nor time in our curriculum, I do see this as an essential part of what I teach.I’m not teaching it for the language sake but for the sake of understanding the whole body of how languages work – we talk about the different languages and what they are used for as part of Intro to Computer science and have an immersive experience.To me, this is somewhat a comprimise between leaving it out entirely or forcing everyone to take 12 weeks of it. I just don’t know where 12 weeks would go in the curriculum.