Diigo In Education

Life is a broken-winged bird

The grass-plot before the jail, in Prison Lane, on a certain summer morning, not less than two centuries ago, was occupied by a pretty large number of the inhabitants of Boston; all with their eyes intently fastened on the iron-clamped oaken door. Amongst any other population, or at a later period in the history of New England, the grim rigidity that petrified the bearded physiognomies of these good people would have augured some awful business in hand. It could have betokened nothing short of the anticipated execution of some noted culprit, on whom the sentence of a legal tribunal had but confirmed the verdict of public sentiment. But, in that early severity of the Puritan character, an inference of this kind could not so indubitably be drawn. It might be that a sluggish bond-servant, or an undutiful child, whom his parents had given over to the civil authority, was to be corrected at the whipping-post. It might be, that an Antinomian, a Quaker, or other heterodox religionist, was to be scourged out of the town, or an idle or vagrant Indian, whom the white man's fire-water had made riotous about the streets, was to be driven with stripes into the shadow of the forest. It might be, too, that a witch, like old Mistress Hibbins, the bitter-tempered widow of the magistrate, was to die upon the gallows.

Since I also use Ning for blogs and forums, I don't use these much on Moodle, though I do use Moodle forums somewhat like an essay question on the test. I set it so a student can't read any other answers until after they post their own response--then they can read and comment on what others' wrote. I like that quite a lot. I just haven't been able to get Diigo to work through the password log on, so I don't have a really good way to comment on their responses.

says today's kids aren't just digital natives—they're "digital savages" and "digital cannibals." They master technology at an alarming rate, he says, and they find ways to adapt it to practices other than what was originally intended. And they cheat.