Here’s a couple blog posts I found interesting this week…

Actively Opposing Creativity Fatigue
Six Degrees of Separation in Instant Messaging
Shopping for a Wiki Tool?
Audio Transcript from “The Evolving Federal Role in Education”

After a white knuckle sled ride on 81N yesterday afternoon, I did make it home from three days of the PETE&C geek-fest. My presentation on Second Life went well and I send out big cudos to my ‘virtual’ friends Kathy Schrock, Kevin Jarrett, Joe Sanchez and Leslie Jarmon for contributing to my talk on the implications of SL on developing learning communities and the future of distance education. Thanks to those folks we were able to provide a really good demonstration of how real-world connections can be made and fostered within SL. Generated a lot of discussion and excitement I think. Session notes can be found here.

I wasn’t able to get notes posted about Steve Dembo’s keynote yesterday. He gave a great talk and if I have time later, I’ll summarize my written notes on here. Until then, Kristin Hokanson over at The Connected Classroom recorded the presentation. Hope I’m not taking any liberties by reposting it here.

I should mention one thing that I took away from Monday’s Keynote by David Pogue. Two words - SKYPE PHONE! Chris and I played with Skype on our Verizon XV6700’s today. We are both running the WM6 ROM hack on these devices. We downloaded the CAB files and installed with no trouble. Minutes later we were connected to our wireless network chatting over the internet from our cell phones. (Note that the XV6700 are wifi enabled) I should also mention that we then used the BT Audio program to force feed the audio to our bluetooth earpieces. Extremely simple and works well. This will definately get me to use Skype more often.

Nothing like 12″ of snow to allow you a breather to get a ton of work done. I feel like I’ve accomplished more today than I have in weeks. Great discussions with colleagues, ticking off a bunch from the to-do list, and even a few moments to throw up a blog post. Yeah!

However, this time come at a price because I had a bunch of stuff scheduled that got postponed. So tomorrow and next week should be a wreck. I am planning on attending the Governor’s Institute in Penn State next Sun-Wed, however our TV weather guys are calling for a hell of a storm developing over the weekend. Yikes! I’m actually looking forward to this conference - for a variety of reasons, but mostly because I’ll have the opportunity to hear Mr. Digital Native himself, Marc Prensky, give a talk at some point. Hope it isn’t canceled.

Actually I wanted to drop this note in here because I was just thinking about a quote I heard a couple weeks ago and wanted to document it before I forgot it. I think I heard it on Criminal Minds (which I loved when Mandy Pitankin was on, but kinda sucks now). Here it goes as best as I can remember…

“Fairy tales do not tell children that dragons exist. Children already know that dragons exist. Fairy tales tell children that dragons can be killed.” G.K. Chesterton

Is it weird that I remember a quote from a TV show? Probably. I’m OK with that.

Was able to finally put the finishing touches on the initial build of the Montrose Area Chamber of Commerce website and presented it to that group earlier this week. Chris was able to figure out a couple of issues I was having with two plugins to the e107 structure, but everything seems to be working OK now. Actually I think it turned out pretty well and contains some features that should drive traffic through - including a classifieds system for public use. There’s also membership levels that would allow special features for MACC members and provide for distributed management. e107 content management system worked out pretty well - contains a very robust management interface with all the bells and whistles. Should meet our needs.

Here’s a horrible story about cyberbullying that I stumbled across today. As educators we deal with bullying and the rise of cyber-bullying frequently, but this is just a terrible story and got me looking at the issue in a different way.

This story is about a 13 year-old girl who killed herself subsequent to being bullied on a social networking site. While this alone is tragic, what shocks me even more about this story is the fact that it was ADULTS that did the bullying - the parents of a friend of the girl who committed suicide. The adults were apparently doing this as a ‘joke’ or as a way to ‘get back’ at the girl who had just severed the friendship with their daughter.

a fictitious 16-year-old boy named Josh Evans, who contacted Megan on MySpace.com.

Their communication lasted six weeks, according to the Journal article, and ended with a string of disturbing messages from Josh and postings that read Megan was “fat” and “a slut.”

The story reported Ron Meier, Megan’s father, saying the final posting on the MySpace account read “The world would be a better place without you.”

Late on the afternoon of Oct. 16, 2006, Ron and Tina Meier discovered Megan had hanged herself in her closet. Megan, who died the following day, was a few weeks shy of her 14th birthday.

The newpaper breaking this story refused to identify the adults who perpetuated this suicide. This has raised a great deal of controversy which I can understand. How could you not expose the persons responsible for this? Not only are the adults not identified, but it seems that they actually didn’t break any laws. Its amazing that you can drive a emotionally vulnerable young person to death and yet suffer no penalty. Sometimes there just isn’t any justice. Are we not responsible for our own actions and the effects of those actions? Especially when those actions result in the tragic death of a child.