While preparing for a presentation I'll be giving in October I came upon this paragraph:
"Printing was considered vulgar and only for the poor. Many aristocratic bibliophiles refused to disgrace their collections with the presence of a non-manuscript text. It fell to the lower classes to recognize the importance of the printing press. And they did - by the end of the fifteenth century, more than one thousand printers had printed between eight and ten million copies of more than forty thousand book titles.

Full text here.

Let's do a little word substitution and see if it still holds true:
Social Media (or cell phones, or Web tools, etc) was considered inappropriate and only for the students. Many school districts refused to disgrace their classrooms with the presence of such a tool. It fell to the students to recognize the importance of the tools. And they did - by the end of 2009, more than 23 million users had accounts on Facebook, alone."

Interesting, no?

Oh, by the way, if you've got the Google/Wolfram alpha plugin for Firefox, do a search for "number of active facebook users 2009" See if you think the results may be a little off. :-)

When I read the blog post in the FlatClassroom ning this morning, I was at once excited and depressed. Excited to read about this year's student conference to be held in Mumbai, India that will likely see another 50 or more students from around the world in attendance. They will be experiencing education unlike anything they've ever dreamed of, in most cases, where they will learn about people and cultures and working together and SO MUCH more. Watch the video at the end of this post. (That is, unless blip.tv is blocked at your school, too.) Oh, how I wish I could go - and take a classroom of students with me.

And then I thought, I can't even share this blog post with many of our teachers in PA, because Ning is blocked. Blogs are blocked. Their conference wiki is blocked. On the one hand we've got some students traveling to India to learn from and with students from around the world, and on the other hand we've got teachers who can't even READ ABOUT IT!!

WHAT IS WRONG WITH THAT PICTURE?

CAN YOU HEAR ME SCREAMING??

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This won't be new to some of you, but I was talking with a couple teachers the other day about Office Live and I thought I'd create a little demo movie of how it works.

To get started on your own, start by creating an account at Officelive.com. Then, upload a file or two to your storage area. If you play around a bit you'll notice that you can assign multiple editors to documents (Can I say, "Like in Google Docs?"), and you can assign others as being Reviewers but not editors.

Now, in your version of Word (either 2007 for Windows or 2008 for Mac) choose "File>Open from Document Connetion." (Not sure if it says it differently in Windows version) In the resulting dialog box, click the icon in the top left corner to add your information to sign into your OfficeLive space.

Once you open a document from there and make changes and save, the changes are saved back to your workspace. You can also begin the process by going to your OfficeLive workspace and opening the file. If you're using IE 7 or above the document should open right in the browser for editing. There are many more features to the system, but this will get you started.

So, if you're in a district where Google Docs are blocked (don't get me started) then this is the solution for you. I don't see that you can embed documents, so if you see how that's done please leave a comment to tell us how it's done.

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I just received another email from a daughter of a family friend regarding her experiences in college. This is the second one I received. In both emails there were a total of just two capital letters. They were all in one large paragraph, too.

Should I... that is, should WE be concerned about that?