Joyce Valenza’s Neverending Search

A couple of days ago, the New York Times published an article on the Middlebury College’s banning of Wikipedia for student research. It’s a balanced piece that might be useful reading for both students and teachers. Author Noam Cohen quotes Jimmy Wales: Jimmy Wales, the co-founder of Wikipedia and chairman emeritus of its foundation, said [...]

Something is happening in the vernacular of presentations.  I remember the great vowel shift from my long-ago study of linguistics and I wonder if this shift is akin to that one.  Or, it could be merely a matter of style. And those of you who know me well, know that I am a slave to that stuff. Right now [...]

Charlie, an 11th grader, came in with a problem we’re likely to all face in the next several weeks. He saved his documents–due last period today–as Word 07 docs. And he couldn’t upload his file into our older versions of Word. (Of course, he should have saved as an older version or RTF. We’ll work [...]

I found myself crying in the flooring section of Home Depot this weekend. Dennis and I were walking around looking for materials for a renovation project when I was stopped by a big, strapping guy in his thirties with two boys, around seven and ten. “Joyce Valenza,” he said. “I’m Thomas O’Malley.” He turned to [...]

I attended our state technology conference (PETE&C) week. At one of the Sunday night receptions, I won a laptop cart–minus the laptops. Darn! Nevertheless, you can see Ken, Michael, and I got pretty attached to the cart at the party. More pics on Flickr. I enjoyed Apple’s Dave Marra’s workshop on podcasting with GarageBand. I [...]