Bingos

Last night, I had to work at a bingo. Our Ukrainian dance group works numerous bingos throughout the year to raise money for costumes and to go on trips and such. This was a "red eye," which means that it started at 9:30 and ended at about quarter to four in the morning. Why on Earth would someone want to stay up until the wee hours of the morning to play bingo? Especially when Canada is playing a semi-final game - I find it so ridiculous. It was shortly after four when we got out of there, and so to get a good start on the next day we went to Denny's for a nourishing meal. Most other patrons at that hour on a Friday night were quite interesting - their activities were certainly not as benign as bingo. After my delicious bacon, eggs, and hashbrowns, I finally rolled into bed around 6:30 this morning. Stupid bingo.

My Spring Break

For my break, my girlfriend and I went to Victoria for a few days. It was great - I'd never been to BC before, and seeing some greenery in February really cheered me up a bit. We visited the Royal BC Museum, a wax museum, and Butchart gardens, and also just walked around and took in all the sights the harbor and gardens downtown Victoria had to offer. I also read a couple books (Catcher in the Rye, which I've read before, and Taras Bulba, which didn't appeal to me as much as I thought it would).

Research Report - Long Distance Learning

The topic I would like to address is distance education. There are several ideas which I hope to discuss:

1. Benefits versus detriments: While distance education is undoubtedly presenting new educational opportunities for students in remote locations, is an important social aspect of education missing when students learn away from their peers?
2. Do students in distance ed. programs gain enough practical, hands-on experience from their courses? Are the skills they have gained enough preparation for career preparation?
3. How can distance ed. programs be made more two-dimensional and transactional, rather than one-dimensional and transmissive?

These are questions I will address to begin my search; undoubtedly, other questions will arise as the search progresses.

Wikipedia Post

I work part-time in a lab, where I grow fungus. I added the second paragraph for the entry under L. maculans, describing how fungi change a toxic compound produced by plants into a less harmful substance. This is bad, as plants produce these compounds to protect themselves, and when fungi metabolize them into less harmful substances the plant becomes susceptible to disease.

Bloom's Taxonomy Assignment

1. Knowledge: Blogs can be used to deliver content remotely, provide news about a class or a school, and facilitate discussions about any sort of topic.

2. Comprehension: Teachers should integrate blogs into their teaching because a) they are open enough that any student in a class with an internet connection can access it, but private enough that teachers can limit access from the greater public; b) they allow easy access for students to quickly post their thoughts and discuss ideas with their peers any time of the day; and c) blogs are a familiar, customizable area that students are more likely to engage with, versus traditional teaching methods.

3. Application: I could use blogs a) to facilitate a discussion board around a particular subject, such as "Chemistry in Agriculture," and post relevant materials to it; b) as a way for students to work collaboratively in groups and share their research data for a group project; c) as a supplement to regular classes, with extra material plus notes for students who could not attend class for whatever reason

4. Analysis: I would argue that blogs would be most useful when facilitating discussion type things, or when the communication needs to be open for a whole class to comment on. However, blogs seem to be fairly linear affairs, and often conversations can get bogged down in a sea of comments, obscuring the initial points being made. Blogs do not have the structure that static web sites are capable of. In short, I think that each has their uses, and they are best used in combination to achieve different goals.

5. Synthesis: Blogging will change my role from being the deliverer of information to a facilitator of discussions, as students are now able to bring in their own ideas and information to post. However, I will also need to be more vigilant with privacy issues and abuse of the system, as people tend to put many comments up that can be hurtful, intentionally or otherwise. Thus I will need to educate about web safety and privacy as well.

6. Evaluation: Disadvantages of blogs include a) privacy issues relating to people outside of the intended class accessing information about students; b) students leaving comments designed to hurt other individuals, if a blog is not directly supervised by a teacher; and c) maintaining a blog could be a potentially onerous task, and could significantly increase a teacher's workload, especially in the initial stages of setting a blog up.

Got my Google account

I guess I circumnavigated the system somehow, and now have a Google account. Interesting.