Podcast. You and your school can participate in a "Sister School" program with a school in another country.  Establish a "Virtual Good Deeds Society," which can help kids overcome feelings of loneliness and isolation, and develop a spirit of kindness and cooperation, that encourages freedom of expression. The Good Deeds Societies recognize that bullying, fearfulness, self-harming, and despair often weigh kids down in our world today, and they have few strategies for bringing themselves up. Plus, it can also often be difficult to make friends, and to feel trust and true acceptance. In a virtual Good Deeds Society, students communicate with their sister schools. It's a great opportunity for students to share ideas, get to know each others' cultures, and to get involved in outreach. What is a Good Deeds Society? * A club that is centered around the doing of good deeds. * Good Deeds come in different flavors -- they are grouped in different categories, which include family, community, environment, pets, micro-finance/good stewardship, wildlife, learning and culture. * Students can write stories about things that challenge them, and use creative writing and journaling for self-expression. They may wish to read the book, Good Deeds Society, or Klub Dobrih Dejanj. * Students may compete in essay contests about good deeds. * Students think of their good deeds and then they do them. * They share the activities on their blogs and may communicate with other Good Deeds Societies in many different ways: MySpace, Facebook, Skype, Elluminate, Twitter, GoToMeeting, and webinars *Student-centered, but sponsored by the school, with a mentor or teacher-guide. ** The limits of our imagination are the limits of our world(s). *** Who are some of the winners of Good Deeds Society essay contests? Where are the schools? click here Fringe Journal: They Will Lift You Up

Podcast: http://www.beyondutopia.net/podcasts/amywinehouse.mp3 Amy Winehouse's exaggerated bouffant, Cleopatra eyes, and her own songs, "I'm No Good," and her remake of "He Hit Me and It Felt Like a Kiss," remind one of all echoes of earlier times. The perception is of women gutted by the male gaze, controlled by Svengali managers and boyfriends. Amy Winehouse's costuming and public persona evoke the tragedy of Anna Nicole Smith and even Dorothy Stratten, the Playboy centerfold murdered by her manager husband. However, the key difference is that instead of being physically dominated and controlled by an ever-present manager/boyfriend/husband, Amy's husband, Blake, languishes away in prison, where he is being held for obstruction of justice. While she claims he is always in her mind, he, by all accounts, is utterly powerless in his role. If he is in reality controlling her, it is only through the idea that she herself holds in her own mind about suffering and subjugation. In the meantime, each mark on Amy's body offers the communicating public an opportunity to participate in an ongoing and ever-morphing story. The story is about love, about loss, and about heartache. It is also about the way a cut, bruise, needle mark, or blemish can symbolize the chthonic; a subterranean repository of meaning that is not ever quite visible, except in manifestations that bubble to the surface in the form of cuts, bruises, scratches, tracks, and more. For more discussion, please read the full article here: http://elearnqueen.blogspot.com/2008/07/amy-winehouses-cuts-tracks-bruises-and.html Video: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-5406910453985093449&hl=en

Ruby on Rails podcast  A new book, just released by Packt Publishing, can help make elearning solutions more efficient by using the Ruby on Rails web development framework. The book, which is intended for users who have a basic familiarity with the framework, and who wish to develop their own applications or enterprise solutions, contains valuable guidance and insight. It is not intended for users who want to develop exotic uses, nor does it require users to be familiar with more complex web-based applications. It is most valuable for the ways in which it instructs users in the planning, development, and deployment processes. The book is entitled Ruby on Rails Enterprise Application Development: Plan, Program, Extend.   For the entire text, please read the entry at ELearning Queen.  

podcast: http://beyondutopia.net/podcasts/britney-deconstructs.mp3   Britney Spears, Lindsay Lohan, Courtney Love - the commodification of personal disaster is discussed from the point of view of a postmodern media confessional. This is a variant of the genre of the confession or confessional. Susan discusses how the tabloid / media spectator confessional differs from that of, say, St. Augustine, or Rousseau, or even Thomas DeQuincey's Confessions of an English Opium Eater. The tabloid confessional creates a false catharsis within the viewer that drives a hunger for another catharsis. It engenders addiction. We can apply the ideas of Baudrillard or Lyotard quite nicely to this; also Richard Rorty. Please see eLearningQueen:  http://elearnqueen.blogspot.com

Podcast:  http://www.beyondutopia.net/podcasts/britney-deconstructs.mp3  Each paparazzi shot of Britney is a treasure trove of "what's wrong with this picture" -- and, while it's fun to try to pick out all the things that are a stylist's nightmare -- it's also instructive. In a single Britney pic, one might find ill-fitting wig over shaved head, a shirt worn as a dress (revealing fleshy buttocks), a miniature Yorkshire terrier wearing a cast on its leg, a crying child, assorted "wardrobe malfunctions," and assorted food and grease stains on expensive fabrics. With Britney, we get to hone our skills at being social beings and identifying non-verbal communication and symbol interpretation. We recognize that people convey images with their appearance, and their acts. Britney shows how quickly people turn vicious when their expectations have been dashed, and how they attack people who do not fit the norm (whatever the "norm" is for the category the person seems to fit in). With Britney, we get to see the unraveled costume, which in unraveling, reveals itself to be a costume, rather than the wardrobe the real person would wear. Further, Britney's own (probably unintentional) deconstructions of a pop star image make the construction process transparent. It's Frankenstein's monster with the thick stitching hanging out for everyone to see that he is not the creation of a real god, nor is he, a real monster. Like Frankenstein's monster, who was given to eloquent soliloquies and exquisite pathos, Britney Spears shows her humanity as she rages against her Frankenstein (her mother?) and the loutish or greedy villagers who seek to devour and destroy (K-Fed? Perez Hilton and other bloggers?).  For full story, click here: http://elearnqueen.blogspot.com/2007/08/britney-spears-construct-constantly.html  E-Learning Queen: http://elearnqueen.blogspot.com

Podcast This podcast proposes solutons for small colleges and universities that find themselves in dire straits. Some of the colleges suffering from rising costs, declining enrollments, and declining contributions and endowments may have actually experienced a turnaround in the 1990s, but, due to circumstances, find themselves in trouble again. This article, by Susan Smith Nash, helps identify problems and proposes solutions.  http://www.beyondutopia.net/podcasts/turnarounds.mp3  Full text, with links  http://elearnqueen.blogspot.com/2007/08/small-college-turnarounds-can.html   Recommended sites on college administration and new visions in education: Stephen Downes: Articles published online. An amazing collection, very useful. http://www.downes.ca/page/7 Ray Schroeder's Educational Technology: http://people.uis.edu/rschr1/et/blogger.html Mark Wagner's Educational Technology and Life: http://edtechlife.com/ Scott Leslie's EdTechPost http://edtechpost.ca/wordpress/index.php Recommended site: http://www.elearners.com   Recommended book: Excellence in College Teaching and Learning: Classroom and Online Instruction

Podcast:  Smartphones in E-Learning My Podcast By now, everyone is familiar with the attributes of the iPhone, but what about the smartphones?  Let’s look at the Blackberry, the Blackjack, the T-Mobile Sidekick, Samsung, and others.  With the ability to download, store, and play mp3 files, video files, and images, the competition has heated up.  Smartphones are starting to have the functionality of handheld devices such as the Dell Axim.   New infrastructure and information architectures make downloading largerfiles and sending movies / images possible.  Here are a few innovations around the corner:   HSUPA:   High Speed Uplink Packet Access. 1.5 Mbps up to 5.76 Mbps   HSDPA:   High Speed Downlink Packet Access, with 3 Mbps up to 14.4 Mbps.   This is an improvement over the current method, WCDMA (Wideband Code Division Multiple Access) because it will be fully 5 times the speed of WCDMA.   Future possibilities include:   Delivery of Instructional Content to Massive Multi-User Groups   Uniform, low cost, highly effective test preparation   Virtual study groups   Multi-user webinars via Elluminate or other conferencing software   Synchronous professional development using polling and interactivity   Asynchronous training and development. Susan Smith Nash, Ph.D.     visit E-Learning Queen:  http://elearnqueen.blogspot.com