23 July 2008
Hi everyone,
Hopefull summer is going well and that it is all you want it to be. How are things going for you in the way of technology and information literacy? Tell me . . .blog.
This summer I decided that I really wanted to get my arms around iTunes and my ipod. This has led me to the the podcasting phenomena which we touched on in class! Now in a class that focuses on podcasting-I love it! I am learning how to use Garageband (Mac) and some of you may know Audacity (pc). Either are very cool! If and when I get my first podcast complete I will share it with you at this site (if possible) Stay relaxed! Take care!
Wednesday, July 23, 2008
Tuesday, May 20, 2008
Another word on blogs . . .
Here is an interesting article on Hillary Clinton and what she is doing in the way of blogging as the 2008 Democratic primary race comes to an end. Read this article I pulled from the New York Times:
May 20, 2008
As Primaries End, Clinton Appeals Directly to Blogs
By KATHARINE Q. SEELYE
As Hillary Rodham Clinton decries the mainstream media for diminishing her chances of capturing the Democratic nomination, she is turning more to the Internet to make her increasingly urgent case.
She held her first blogger-only conference call on Friday, phoning in to about 40 bloggers from the campaign trail in Oregon.
And the campaign has stepped up its use of Twitter, a social-networking service that sends short, text-based posts, to make real-time calls to arms.
The push on the Internet comes amid signs that Mrs. Clinton is getting less attention these days, both in the blogosphere and the mainstream media. Techpresident.com reports that according to the blog search tool Technorati, Mrs. Clinton is being mentioned less than half as often as Senator Barack Obama in the blogosphere and that mentions of her have even slipped below those of Senator John McCain.
And the Project for Excellence in Journalism, which tracks the weekly coverage of the candidates in various media, reports that Mrs. Clinton was a significant factor in 53 percent of the coverage last week, compared with 68 percent for Mr. Obama.
The purpose of the conference call was to thank bloggers for their support, deliver her talking points and have those talking points conveyed to the blogosphere — and ultimately to the superdelegates who may control the outcome of the race.
“Your voices make a real difference, and your engagement in these incredibly significant ways helps to set the ground for what we are trying to say in the campaign,” she told them, adding that they can “influence the rest of the blogosphere and beyond.”
Her campaign has been reaching out to bloggers for a couple of years now and has exploited the Internet, particularly for fundraising and rapid-response messaging. Her Democratic opponent, Mr. Obama, has been credited with using it better, especially for organizing and social networking. But Mr. Obama himself has yet to join a blogger-only conference call.
(Oddly, perhaps, Mr. McCain — the likely Republican nominee who, at 71, jokes about being older than the Internet itself — holds blogger conference calls regularly, though his online fund-raising lags behind his Democratic rivals. )
While Mrs. Clinton started her campaign with the netroots and many in the blogosphere against her, partly for her vote to authorize the Iraq war, several bloggers have become more sympathetic over the course of the long campaign.
On the call, she apologized to them for the bile they confront for defending her.
“I deeply regret the vitriol and the mean-spiritedness and terrible insults and rhetoric that has been thrown around at you, for supporting me, at women in general, at many of those who support my campaign because of who they are and their stand based on principle,” she said.
“But this too shall pass,” she reassured them. “I don’t have time for their insults. I’m impervious to them. I figure it’s a perverse form of flattery that they would spend so much time and energy trying to tear me down when what we need to be doing is figuring out how we’re going to swear in a Democrat next January 20.”
Peter Daou, Mrs. Clinton’s Internet director, said the call had been planned for a while but had to be postponed a couple of times.
So it was coincidental that her first blogger call came during the first week in which Mrs. Clinton had been edged out of the media’s campaign narrative. Many in the M.S.M .have concluded that mathematically, she can’t win. And on that particular day, most political coverage was devoted to the back-and-forth between Mr. Obama and Mr. McCain.
But the call seemed to signal a more aggressive use of the Internet as time runs out on her quest for the nomination.
All campaigns have been using Twitter, for example, to notify their supporters of campaign events.
Mrs. Clinton is also using it now to gather signatures on a petition urging the Democratic National Committee to count the votes and delegates from Florida and Michigan.
She used Twitter again on Monday to ask her supporters to make calls to voters in Kentucky and Oregon. That message linked them to “the Hillary Clinton volunteer calling tool,” which allows them to call voters through the Internet, read a script, record the answer and submit the answer to the Clinton campaign so it can get out the vote on Tuesday.
The idea is to drive up her popular vote in hopes of bolstering her argument to superdelegates that, as she put it during the blogger call, she will “end the elections on June 3 ahead in the popular vote” (by counting Michigan and Florida, of course) and that she is more electable than Mr. Obama.
The M.S.M. have heard those arguments before and have essentially stopped transmitting them. But on the conference call, Mrs. Clinton gave full voice to them (though she was hoarse).
Heralding the message she would make on the campaign trail on Monday, she elaborated on her electoral argument _ that she can win in the fall because she has won states with a total of 300 electoral votes, while Mr. Obama has won states with only 217 electoral votes.
“I have a cushion on the electoral vote majority, and he has a significant deficit,” she said.
She said it was “especially important that we try to get people to start focusing on this,” adding, “I think that is the appropriate criteria on which to base a decision. I believe that I have a very powerful case there.”
(She was so thrilled to learn on Monday that Karl Rove, President Bush’s erstwhile strategist, had reached a similar conclusion that she trumpeted the news on the campaign trail, even though Mr. Rove is not a credible source for many Democratic primary voters.)
Electoral votes, of course, are irrelevant to the primary process and when her campaign first proposed this metric in March, the MSM dismissed it.
The delegate math is what counts, and it’s against her. Mr. Obama leads by about 150 delegates and is closer to the final number needed.
To help bloggers counter that notion, Mrs. Clinton tried out a new slogan on the conference call: “It is the map, not the math.”
The “map/math” phrase quickly found its way to various blogs, including Talkleft and Riverdaughter. Some, like Jerome Armstrong on MyDD examined the “map/math” argument in detail.
This in turn prompted a wider discussion in the blogosphere. Many rejected it, to put it mildly. Some, like Outsidethebeltway.com were dubious of her logic but still put the phrase in its headline and in the end concluded that it may be a “defensible” point -- if the only one she has left.
Mrs. Clinton started her campaign as the candidate of the establishment. It may be a measure of how far she has come -- or fallen, in the eyes of her critics -- that she is now using the megaphone of insurgents.
I thought folks might find this interesting!
May 20, 2008
As Primaries End, Clinton Appeals Directly to Blogs
By KATHARINE Q. SEELYE
As Hillary Rodham Clinton decries the mainstream media for diminishing her chances of capturing the Democratic nomination, she is turning more to the Internet to make her increasingly urgent case.
She held her first blogger-only conference call on Friday, phoning in to about 40 bloggers from the campaign trail in Oregon.
And the campaign has stepped up its use of Twitter, a social-networking service that sends short, text-based posts, to make real-time calls to arms.
The push on the Internet comes amid signs that Mrs. Clinton is getting less attention these days, both in the blogosphere and the mainstream media. Techpresident.com reports that according to the blog search tool Technorati, Mrs. Clinton is being mentioned less than half as often as Senator Barack Obama in the blogosphere and that mentions of her have even slipped below those of Senator John McCain.
And the Project for Excellence in Journalism, which tracks the weekly coverage of the candidates in various media, reports that Mrs. Clinton was a significant factor in 53 percent of the coverage last week, compared with 68 percent for Mr. Obama.
The purpose of the conference call was to thank bloggers for their support, deliver her talking points and have those talking points conveyed to the blogosphere — and ultimately to the superdelegates who may control the outcome of the race.
“Your voices make a real difference, and your engagement in these incredibly significant ways helps to set the ground for what we are trying to say in the campaign,” she told them, adding that they can “influence the rest of the blogosphere and beyond.”
Her campaign has been reaching out to bloggers for a couple of years now and has exploited the Internet, particularly for fundraising and rapid-response messaging. Her Democratic opponent, Mr. Obama, has been credited with using it better, especially for organizing and social networking. But Mr. Obama himself has yet to join a blogger-only conference call.
(Oddly, perhaps, Mr. McCain — the likely Republican nominee who, at 71, jokes about being older than the Internet itself — holds blogger conference calls regularly, though his online fund-raising lags behind his Democratic rivals. )
While Mrs. Clinton started her campaign with the netroots and many in the blogosphere against her, partly for her vote to authorize the Iraq war, several bloggers have become more sympathetic over the course of the long campaign.
On the call, she apologized to them for the bile they confront for defending her.
“I deeply regret the vitriol and the mean-spiritedness and terrible insults and rhetoric that has been thrown around at you, for supporting me, at women in general, at many of those who support my campaign because of who they are and their stand based on principle,” she said.
“But this too shall pass,” she reassured them. “I don’t have time for their insults. I’m impervious to them. I figure it’s a perverse form of flattery that they would spend so much time and energy trying to tear me down when what we need to be doing is figuring out how we’re going to swear in a Democrat next January 20.”
Peter Daou, Mrs. Clinton’s Internet director, said the call had been planned for a while but had to be postponed a couple of times.
So it was coincidental that her first blogger call came during the first week in which Mrs. Clinton had been edged out of the media’s campaign narrative. Many in the M.S.M .have concluded that mathematically, she can’t win. And on that particular day, most political coverage was devoted to the back-and-forth between Mr. Obama and Mr. McCain.
But the call seemed to signal a more aggressive use of the Internet as time runs out on her quest for the nomination.
All campaigns have been using Twitter, for example, to notify their supporters of campaign events.
Mrs. Clinton is also using it now to gather signatures on a petition urging the Democratic National Committee to count the votes and delegates from Florida and Michigan.
She used Twitter again on Monday to ask her supporters to make calls to voters in Kentucky and Oregon. That message linked them to “the Hillary Clinton volunteer calling tool,” which allows them to call voters through the Internet, read a script, record the answer and submit the answer to the Clinton campaign so it can get out the vote on Tuesday.
The idea is to drive up her popular vote in hopes of bolstering her argument to superdelegates that, as she put it during the blogger call, she will “end the elections on June 3 ahead in the popular vote” (by counting Michigan and Florida, of course) and that she is more electable than Mr. Obama.
The M.S.M. have heard those arguments before and have essentially stopped transmitting them. But on the conference call, Mrs. Clinton gave full voice to them (though she was hoarse).
Heralding the message she would make on the campaign trail on Monday, she elaborated on her electoral argument _ that she can win in the fall because she has won states with a total of 300 electoral votes, while Mr. Obama has won states with only 217 electoral votes.
“I have a cushion on the electoral vote majority, and he has a significant deficit,” she said.
She said it was “especially important that we try to get people to start focusing on this,” adding, “I think that is the appropriate criteria on which to base a decision. I believe that I have a very powerful case there.”
(She was so thrilled to learn on Monday that Karl Rove, President Bush’s erstwhile strategist, had reached a similar conclusion that she trumpeted the news on the campaign trail, even though Mr. Rove is not a credible source for many Democratic primary voters.)
Electoral votes, of course, are irrelevant to the primary process and when her campaign first proposed this metric in March, the MSM dismissed it.
The delegate math is what counts, and it’s against her. Mr. Obama leads by about 150 delegates and is closer to the final number needed.
To help bloggers counter that notion, Mrs. Clinton tried out a new slogan on the conference call: “It is the map, not the math.”
The “map/math” phrase quickly found its way to various blogs, including Talkleft and Riverdaughter. Some, like Jerome Armstrong on MyDD examined the “map/math” argument in detail.
This in turn prompted a wider discussion in the blogosphere. Many rejected it, to put it mildly. Some, like Outsidethebeltway.com were dubious of her logic but still put the phrase in its headline and in the end concluded that it may be a “defensible” point -- if the only one she has left.
Mrs. Clinton started her campaign as the candidate of the establishment. It may be a measure of how far she has come -- or fallen, in the eyes of her critics -- that she is now using the megaphone of insurgents.
I thought folks might find this interesting!
Sunday, May 18, 2008
The VERY last rambling . . .a personal message to all!
Dear Information Literacy Colleagues,
On October 3, 2007 the executive council of the American Federation of Teachers proudly endorsed Hillary Clinton for the Democratic nomination for president, citing her proven albilities to advance our nation's key priorities, and her bold plans for a stronger America. Now Hillary needs our help! Millions of people in Florida and Michigan went to the polls to make their voices heard in the Democratic Presidential primary. They deserve to have their votes counted! The DNC's Rules and Bylaws Committee is meeting on May 31 to make a decision about Florida and Michigan. If you are interested in sending a message to the DNC telling them to count the votes and seat Florida and Michigan's delegates email Hillary at :
info@hillaryclinton. com
Also be sure to check out: www.hillaryclinton. com If for no other reason than to see how far along presidential candidates have come in terms of taking their campaign to the world of cyberspace! Very cool!
Thanks!
THANK YOU!
Again many thanks to all the stakeholders involved with putting together such a great program this year! What a great cohort of people.! Though times, overextended and stressed with the myriad of teacher duties . . .I am glad I got "on board". I have been pushed into technology and have become more information literate than I could ever describe! I need to shout out a special THANK YOU to LMC Lady aka Linda. Linda has prompted, supported, and acknowledged teacher efforts in the way of incorporating technology for a good long time. Linda shared the information about this program with me last spring. She did not have to! I am so lucky, indeed blessed, to have her has a colleague and friend! Especially since I have been known to get on her last nerve! lol I also want to thank the other dear colleagues at CPSHS who along with me . . . really took the technology plunge! Kristin, Kathy, Kita . . . you are all wonderful teachers, colleageus, and friends! It has been a good ride . . . and we have only just begun. I KNOW there is a good deal more for me to explore, discover and wonder about! I get that. Hopefully I will share more next year about the improvements on my webpage and my results with the use of the research calculator, etc. Until then . . . a good summer to all and thanks!
RSS
I have really enjoyed the web feed format of RSS. Each Saturday I check my RSS feeds for MSNBC.com to see what is going to be the topic of Tim Russert's Meet the Press. Is their somee discussion or special guest I should be recording to share a snip of with students come Monday? How about National Public Radio (my favorite station)?NPR's Election 2008 discussions can be RSS collected and the weeks topics in podcasts are stored nicely so that I can easily listen to and/or review at my leisure (while eating, casually reading, etc.) All the good topics of discussion I miss during the day are SAVED. Do others enjoy the RSS feature? Just curious!
Del.icio.us (aka yet another thing . . .)
I missed one class this year. It happened to be the one that addressed (among other things) the social bookmark manager Del.icio.us I was surprised at how easy it is to register with del.icio.us I know that I will find it useful. I must say that I was very impressed with the step by step instructions for how to sign up and get started. I think this is going to be very handy however I do have a question? Is this any better than using Foxmarks Bookmark Sycnchronizer? While I have not tried foxmark yet I thought that would have been fun to explore as well. In the meantime-I will do what I can to keep up with all the great changes in on the way of on-line technology.
Wednesday, May 14, 2008
GOOGLE Earth
Without geography . . . you're nowhere . . .man . . .! So goes the main point of a recent technology mini-workshop I took that focused on Google Earth. I learned that that I am able to visit many places in the U.S (as well as around the world) by simply using an address and zip code. It was interesting to visit a location (I visited my high school) and use the latitude/longitude pointer to get around. . . all the while seeing the pointer coordinates change. People can learn about the elevation (the feet above or below sea level)as well as get a cool "bird's eye view" (how high you are above the ground). View the places all around the earth. I went to Vietnam and enjoyed zooming in on places I know in Ho Chi Minh City aka Saigon for example. However, I mostly enjoyed viewing and navigating the streets of good ole' Saint Paul. If a person clicks on "Street View" roads with available street views appear with a blue border. Those are the streets you can follow as if you are right in the front seat of a car. This is all very fun and I certainly want to spend some time this summer determining how I might be able to use this tool in my U.S. history classes this next fall. One bummer is that NOT every street in our Saintly city has been digitly photographed yet however, it seems that this GoogleEarth technology will only improve over time.
Anyway: do check out GoogleMaps (aka GoogleEarth) at this address: http://maps.google.com/support/
Anyway: do check out GoogleMaps (aka GoogleEarth) at this address: http://maps.google.com/support/
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