Category Archives: Web

Setting Up a Classroom Blog

I have been searching for a way for teachers to ease into using blogs for classroom activities. We do not have student email at this time and so I wanted to come up with a way for students and teachers to blog without it being complicated. This is what I have come up with for a beginning.

Setting up the blog:

Go to http://learnerblogs.org/

Register a blog for yourself.

  • There are some tutorials you can go through if you like.
  • You can come to the lab and I will help you set it up.
  • You will be the administrator and monitor all comments.

Create a rubric

Create a post that your students must respond to.

You can also require students to respond to one other student’s comment on the post Some suggestions for comment requirements:

  • Comment must relate to the post.
  • Comment must not contain any inappropriate material
  • Comments must not contain instant messaging language, must use proper grammar, correct spelling and punctuation.

Before you have your students post their comments spend some time discussing what you feel is appropriate and what you expect. You can show them some examples of some educational blogs (see me if you need some links to use) to illustrate how this can be done.

Create a spreadsheet of student names and elements from the rubric and anything else you want to base your grades on.

  • Open your spreadsheet and check off the elements as you read the student comments.

This is a starting point that that will allow you to use a classroom blog using student comments. If you want to include some posts by the students you as the administrator will have to post for them. They could write their post and save it to their folder on the server and I can retrieve it and send it to you so you can post it to the blog. I can point you to some class blogs for some examples of how other teachers have utilized blogging with their classes. I would appreciate any suggestions out there.

All of this information came from other sources. In particular I want to thank http://mhetherington.net/blogs/ and http://anne.teachesme.com/

Maps Are Fun

A friends’ blog had a link to a site to make a map of all the places you have travelled and it looked like fun so I did two – one for travels and one for all the places I’ve lived.

I’d especially like to go to the northwest and to D. C. someday.


I’ve also been to Ontario, Canada, Mexico, and Great Britain. Here’s where I’ve lived


create your own visited states map or check out these Google Hacks.

It would be fun to have students research where certain crops are raised or states with certain types of industry are found and have them blog on their findings and use this app to create a map to go with their research blog entry.

hmmm…the main column of my theme is too narrow to show the entire map.  I guess I’m going to have to get more intentional about creating my own theme.

My Tech Meeting Shares

Four Links To Share


World History For Us All
http://worldhistoryforusall.sdsu.edu/dev/default.htm“World History for Us All is a comprehensive model curriculum for teaching world history in middle and high schools.”This curriculum:

  • offers a treasury of teaching units, lesson plans, activities, and resources.
  • introduces educators to an integrative approach to world history, culture, and geography.
  • presents the human past as a single story rather than unconnected stories of many civilizations.
  • helps teachers meet state and national standards.
  • helps students relate the histories of particular regions to world history as a whole.
  • enables teachers to survey world history without excluding major peoples, regions, or time periods.
  • helps students understand the past by connecting specific subject matter to larger historical patterns.
  • draws on up-to-date research in comparative, cross-cultural, and global history.
  • may be readily adapted to a variety of world history programs.


World History for Us All is a national collaboration of K-12 teachers, college and university instructors, and educational technology specialists. It is a project of San Diego State University in cooperation with the National Center for History in the Schools at UCLA. World History for Us All is a continuing project. Elements under development will appear on the site in the coming months.”

ZohoWriter

http://www.zohowriter.com

  • “Create, format, & edit documents online with a powerful WYSIWIG editor
  • Access & share your documents from anywhere using just your browser
  • Lock your documents while in shared mode
  • Post to your blogs (Blogger/Typepad/LiveJournal) from within ZohoWriter
  • Export your docs in word, pdf & sxw formats
  • Periodic auto-saving of your documents to prevent data loss
  • Spell check, tag your documents for ease of use”

K12Station Educational Site of the Day
http://www.k12station.blogspot.com

A Blog featuring educational websites.

30Boxes
http://30boxes.com
An online calendar with features for color coded multiple calendars.

  • “organize your day and your web stuff
  • share the things that you want to share (like parts of your schedule on your blog or myspace)
  • follow your buddies’ myspace, flickr, webshots, livejournal, heck, any personal blog”


Online Web part 2

Someone else did all the work and did a great job! Jonas Back has a blog titled myuninstalledlife where he looks into the feasibility of uninstalling desktop software and doing everything on the web. This is something I’ve thought about a lot and he has some great articles and howto’s on his blog. You can check out different online word processors here and he also mentions some new applications that are still in beta but look promising. One is an online calendar called Scribe that is supposed to work offline without installing anything. I signed up for an invite so I hope to try it out soon. Another drawing program that looks good is Cumulate Draw also talked about on Mr. Back’s blog. He suggests this and Gliffy as replacements for Visio for flowcharts and network drawings. You can save your drawings in several formats to insert into other documents.

If you go to his main page he has everything broken down into categories of software to replace and you can navigate to the articles about the individual apps from there. Mr. Back also challenges the technology. He gives an example of a request:

“I want to have a fully blown Adobe Premiere alternative (video editor) on the web and nothing installed on my PC. It shouldn’t take more than 2 seconds to load.“

An online app that would take the place of Photoshop would be my dream! I look forward to his future articles and on seeing what the future web will be like.

Another link for tonight that isn’t an application but another online community. Recipe Thing is a site similar to online bookmarking only for recipes. You can register and tag your recipes, save them to your recipe box, share your favorites, and even have it find recipes according to what you have in your pantry. For the times when I actually get off the computer and cook, this is a fun and handy place to start cooking. Now if I can just find an online community that will clean my house….

Google strikes again – JotSpot

I promised a post on online word processors and that is coming but tonight I wanted to write about google. I read tonight that they have acquired JotSpot – a wiki site. Coming on the heels of YouTube and Google Docs (formerly writely) they have grown to a very impressive collection of web applications. They also have a pretty comprehensive spreadsheet application. Add to that Blogger, Gmail, Orkut, Google Talk, Picasa, Google Reader and a comprehensive list of specialized search engines and you have what constitutes a massive amount of data!

There is a convenience factor having just one password to login to all those services. If you don’t have an expensive office program you can do most of what you need online (add a database and a presentation program, some graphics apps and oops, throw in a browser and an operating system – wait, that’s microsoft LOL) and with all the open source software available you can complete the picture for little or no cost for software. I wonder where this will go in the future. And I wonder about all the data floating around out there. In high school I read the book “1984” and we used to talk a lot about “big brother” is watching you (that was the early seventies and we meant the government and whoever else we felt was part of the establishment). In some ways it seems to me that we have helped bring about the reality of what was a slightly paranoid reaction to a generational gap. We vote away our rights to obtain a temporary peace of mind and we do our banking, bill paying, purchasing, and journal keeping on the internet. Our kids share some of the most intimate details of their lives with complete strangers and corporations and college recruiters look at those details before making decisions about their offline futures.

I love having a front-row seat to all the changes and I hope that we pay close attention and make the technology work for us instead of the other way around. We are a society of busy people running from one end of the day to the other. I recently had some very bad experiences with the medical profession and most of what happened was due to people not paying attention. I think that sums up a lot of what is wrong with our world these days. We are in such a hurry that we are not paying attention and sooner or later those things that slip by have a way of catching up with us. My mother used to tell us “the chickens always come home to roost”. It’s funny how the older I get the more wisdom she seemed to possess. I think that the faster things change the more we need to pay attention to where we are and where we want to go.

Google isn’t good or bad – it’s just big and fast. It’s a tool and and a very powerful one. Power tools are wonderful and each one has a specific purpose. My experience with power tools is that you have to respect them. You should learn the proper way to use them and take safety precautions. You should use them for the purpose they were intended for, you don’t leave them on around unattended children and you don’t let them take over the garage.

Some Great Online Applications Part 1

Vicki Davis pointed me to these articles by Brian Benzinger. I have spent some time looking over some of the online apps mentioned on Solution Watch and thought I would add my two cents on some of them. Some were already familiar to me and some were new. The one I found most intriquing was Mayomi – an online mindmapping tool. I signed up for a free account and spent some time looking around. I think the idea is great but the site is all flash and kind of wonky to me. The interface while pretty is not the most intuititve nor is the search capability.
When I tried to create a simple mind map of the colors from primary to tertiary I couldn’t figure out how to get several forks added to one keyword. I think this site will need a little more work before it is easily usable.

Another site for making diagrams on-line is Gliffy and this one seems more user friendly and fun to use. You can copy, paste, and undo. Gliffy allows you to save, publish a read-only version of your drawing, or invite people to collaborate with you. You can choose shapes, colors, connectors and fonts. It seems fairly easy to use with most of the terms and tools familiar. You can export your completed diagram as an image file in several different formats so you can print it out, insert it into another document or presentation.
Competitious has an interesting application. You can create a graphic representation of the features of different items. It would be interesting for a government class to research platforms of different candidates, or an English class to make a graphic representation of characters in a book. Students can also save “clippings” from sites they research on the web.

These were all I had time for today but there is so much more out there. In part two I will look at some of the online word processors and note-taking programs.

What the heck is web 2.0?

I found a great definition for the “social” web on the NetSquared conference blog site. With all the buzz about web 2.0 which I have never really understood, this make sense to me.

“the social web is ‘the adaptation of internet tools for human interaction, communication and activism.”I’ve recently started reading “The World Is Flat” by Thomas Friedman. Every once in awhile a book comes along that seems to polarize people and the opinions I have read range from thinking it is brilliant to thinking it is total garbage so I had to see for myself.

I’ve just begun it and it is already interesting. In some ways the playing field is being leveled. The ease of communication and collaboration between people over any distance because of the internet makes it possible for many projects to be outsourced to many different places at once. A guy in India can work on one aspect while someone in Britain another and so on. This is pretty cool but the flip side means that people with angry and evil intentions can also use the same venue.

The playing field needs to be leveled in ways that can never happen on the internet though. The student with poor reading skills can’t get anything more out of the web than he can a book. The child with little parental guidance in real life will not have the skills to discern between helpful sites and sites that are anything but. We can’t improve our personal relationships through technology and no matter how good our intentions are, the virtual world reflects the real world and while there are wonderful positive things on the web there are some terrible things as well.

How does this new landscape translate for the student sitting in your classroom that isn’t getting enough to eat or lives in a home where violence and drugs are a normal thing. I guess I’ll have to finish the book but I have a feeling that those questions won’t be answered.

About K12 Online Conference

There is an interesting event happening online. It is an online conference.

“The “K12 Online Conference” is for teachers, administrators and educators around the world interested in the use of Web 2.0 tools in classrooms and professional practice! This year’s conference is scheduled to be held over two weeks, Oct. 23-27 and Oct. 30- Nov. 3 and will include a preconference keynote. The conference theme is “Unleashing the Potential.”

The starting point can be found here and the agenda can be found here. I’ve listened to most of the keynote and while I’m a little behind getting started it is very interesting so far. David Warlick uses the analogy of being on a train and everyone on the rail facing the same way. In a traditional conference the speaker is in front and everyone is facing the same way (on a rail!) and everyone is in the same place at the same time. Education has traditionally been the same way. This type of conference allows for “side trips” and the speakers and attendees hold ongoing conversations all happening from different places in different times.This is the read write web at it’s best. Everyone learning from each other and adding their unique viewpoints, reading, reflecting, and sharing their thoughts. I hope to squeeze as much out of this as time and computer access allows and blog about it here. Hope to “see” you there!

Open Office for Macs!

I am taking a little time to do some reading. The laundry is piling up and the dishes need to be washed but it will all be there tomorrow so here goes.

There was an article about Open Office soon running natively on Macs. I’m looking forward to it. I have always liked Open Office because it is something students can put on their home computers when they can’t afford the big expensive office suite and save their work so that it is compatible with said office suite. I should mention that teachers can put it on their home computers as well. There are no site licensing issues to worry about.

I have been able to use it on laptops running Linux and ported to OSX but now I won’t have to worry about porting it. It’s a shame more software isn’t this versatile.

I still have the other office suite running on computers at home and at work but I find myself using it less and less. It’s a habit I am working hard to break. If I am going to promote it I need to learn it well enough to teach it.

There is resistance to using it widespread and I don’t know if it is a matter of people being afraid of trying something new or an attitude of thinking that it must not be as good if it doesn’t cost anything, or a combination of both.

A quote from a DIGG comment “you would think schools would ask for programs to be made in other OS’s.” I would think software companies would want to make their programs in other operating systems. Oh wait – Open Office already does that – hmmm….

My Favorite Firefox Features

I have been using Firefox for several years and have always been an advocate for the browser. Lately I have used one feature more than any other. From the main menu click view, text size, increase. I do this several times til the text is easy for me to read without so much eye-strain. This may not be a big news flash for some of you but it has become a necessity for me!

Tabbed browsing has become second nature and I don’t know what I did before I had it. I always have at least four tabs open switching between them constantly. I keep one tab open to google so I can zip over and search for anything that catches my eye on the other websites I am currently browsing.

My bookmarks Toolbar is another essential feature. I have my everyday links listed there so I can just go to the menu and click a button and read the local paper, check my gmail account, or subcribe to a blog with bloglines.

Del.icio.us has a plugin for Firefox that places buttons on your browser that let you click a button to either tag a webpage or go to your del.icio.us page to browse your saved tags. I used to send links from home to work or vice versa. Now instead of clogging my email I can tag it and find it from anywhere I have internet access.

Firefox not only lets you have a searchbox for google right on your toolbar, but you can add search engines to it so you just click on the icon in the left side of the box and bring up a list of search engines. I have Ebay, Amazon, Food Network Recipes, Weather Channel, Wikipedia, and more. If I am reading an article by a favorite blogger and they reference a book that sounds interesting I can open up a new tab, click in the search engine box and change to Amazon and put the book title in to find the pricing, reviews, and if I like it, add it to my Amazon growing wishlist.

These are other Firefox tools I use but these are my everyday, can’t do without, A-list.

Interesting Times

I read a post by David Jakes that likened all the fuss about blogging being the way we will change education as one big taffy pull.

I get excited about new things whether it is software, gadgets, a new book by a favorite author, and yes – blogging. I don’t see it as the answer to all the things that are wrong with education.

I see it as an appropriate tool to enhance what is right with education. It is a fairly new tool and like anything new, we will experience growing pains and we will change it and mold it according to what works for us and it will eventually evolve or be discarded for the next new tool.

That’s what technology does. It changes. Change isn’t inherently good or bad. That’s why we have to constantly learn, test, evaluate, and adjust.

Our young people constantly dive into the pool without always checking the depth of the water. We can’t always stand on the side waving a warning they will find relevant if we refuse to go into the water ourselves.

Kathy Sierra has a post that talks about the space between the notes – where the music is. The important pause, the time to reflect.

“But real learning takes place between exposures to content! Long-term memory from learning happens after the training. The space between the lessons and practice is where the learning is made permanent. If we don’t leave that space, new content keeps rushing in to overwrite the previous content, before the learner’s brain has a chance to pause, reflect, and synthesize the proteins needed for long-term memory storage. “

I’m glad that there are people like Mr. Jakes who caution us to stop and look around as we try to navigate the ever-changing landscape of technology. I’m glad that there are people like Kathy Sierra who urge us to take time and space to reflect on where we have been and where we are going. I’m also grateful for the folks that urge us to wade in and get our feet wet.

We live in interesting times….

Bloggers Are Just Nice

I have been working on putting together material for teaching blogging to teachers and as usual find that people much more experienced that I am have already charted a lot of these waters. I have tried to be vary careful about obtaining their permission to use their work and without exception I have not only gotten permission to use and modify, but the responses have been enthusiastic, encouraging, and helpful. It just proved what I already knew – bloggers are just nice.

And So It Goes..

We may well be going back to the hospital Monday. Dale stayed home three weeks this time with one week of no antibiotics but he is having pain and fever again. I have packed just in case and had time last night to save a bunch of webpages to my jump drive. I will load them on my laptop so I can continue working even if I don’t have internet access. I have been getting my presentation on blogging together and this week I will work on suggestions for rubrics to facilitate assessment. I have completed handouts for reasons for reading blogs and reasons for writing and some basic instructions on using a feedreader to subscribe to blogs. I think the first step in getting teachers interested in using blogs is to show them some great examples and get them reading.

It’s funny to think about it now that I am so excited about blogging in education but the blogs that hooked me from the very start were not anything to do with public education. I began reading WaiterRant on a regular basis. There is some adult content there but I love his storytelling ability. The next was Creating Passionate Users and I never fail to get a boost of enthusiasm and excitement there. There are others on my blogroll that I read all the time and several are education oriented and I have learned so much from them and will continue to do so but in all the excitement of this tool for learning I will remember that like books, sometimes you just need to read for the pure enjoyment of it.

It’s been a very emotional week for me. The shock of walking in and seeing (or NOT seeing to be more accurate) my lab had been broken in to, and then the panic mode of realizing that Dale was showing signs of infection again, my son leaving for a two week trip – I’d like to borrow a cup of boredom from someone. If anyone out there has some to spare – please send it! If you are bored and want to make a trade we can talk…

Decorating My House

My house on the web that is. I haven’t had a lot of time to play but I finally dug around enough in the files to change the images a little. I hope Mr. Kubrick, the original creator of this theme approves. Changing the images was the easiest part as it turns out. What took the longest was finding the place I needed to change so that my name didn’t show up as a link on the header image. It seems that in making changes in the appearance the trickiest part as in real life was in the littlest details.

Staff torture (oops, I meant development)

Well it’s that dreaded time again – staff development. I get to help with it these days which for any griping I might do is infinitely more interesting that when I used to have to sit through it. As a teacher’s aide I rarely felt like in-services and staff development classes gave me any useful information and I think that is probably most people main complaint. I liked the technology classes though I usually left wishing for a little more in-depth or specific information.

In my opinion we approach staff development all wrong. We require a person who can’t install a printer or navigate through directories of files to take a class and do an assessment on Microsoft Access. Does that person feel like they have wasted their time? Of course they do! Have they walked out of a half-day class knowing how and why to create a database and having the skills to go to their computer and do so? Nope! If anything we have taken someone who is a little uncomfortable with the technology to begin with and made them feel inadequate. That is an experience we all want – right? Not!

On the other hand we ask someone who already knows the basics, can create and save a Word document and then navigate to where they saved it and send it to someone else as an attachment to pass an assessment where they create a folder on their desktop, rename and delete a file and or send a blind carbon copy email. That person needs to enhance the skills they already have and probably already has a list in their mind of things they need to learn more about to enhance the skills they already have.

Part of the problem we face in motivating teachers to do more than just fill a seat for the required time is their past experience with staff development. Mention the subject to teachers and they tend to roll their eyes and launch into a speech about how they have so many other things they need to be doing or explanation of why they can’t or shouldn’t have to complete an assessment. The word assessment makes me cringe. It’s a test no matter what you want to call it and teachers like to give them – not take them.

I am by no means an expert on any of this but I have a few ideas and since my job takes me up close and personal with teachers concerns regarding technology I have come up with a few ideas.

What if we asked teachers what they need? I think a very specific survey might be helpful. Instead of asking them to put their names on it – ask their department or discipline. That way you have a starting point for grouping your classes. An English teacher is going to have different uses for technology than a Coach or a Math teacher.

Ask what software they routinely use. Ask what hardware they routinely use – do they burn cds? Do they use a data projector? Ask what problems they have with what they use. Ask if they would use other software and hardware if they new more about it. Ask if they would be willing to mentor someone who had similar needs but less experience and be willing to give credit for that mentoring (more about that later). If you have someone who is willing to mentor another teacher in the same department then the teacher with less technical experience will benefit from mentoring in areas that are already being utilized in their discipline and the department will benefit from enhanced communication. The mentoring could happen one on one. The best way we can model how to teach our students is by teaching each other and if a student needs to be in class less challenging than an accelerated class we would make sure that student was placed in an environment where they could have success. We know from experience with our students that if we place them in an inappropriate environment they are not going to be successful and we will likely see some acting out. We adults know how to act out too, don’t we? I personally can be the queen of passive-aggressive if you put me in the right situation!

I think we should approach this like a video game where you have levels of achievement. Not too elementary but still fun. Classes where a teachers are offered several choices of short projects they will complete that are tailored to be something they can USE later. This means that the project would not only have to be relevant to them but should be basic and clear and not just teachable but “learnable”. The teacher attending this session needs to be able to walk out knowing without a doubt that they can go back to their classroom and repeat and refine what they have learned and make it theirs. There can be a few extra tidbits thrown in for those who want to go further so they are not sitting their wishing they were in their classroom working on grades or lesson plans. Ideas for the projects would be generated from the surveys that teachers had filled out previously.

If a teacher is willing to be a mentor then they could be included in the sessions and work one on one where needed or meet with their “pupil” in the classroom. Being a mentor would not only guarantee some prestige for being a splendidly, creative, masterful “edugeek” but should also carry with it a few perks that would motivate others to covet their geekly stature and want to become mentors as well. They could be first in line for new technology that becomes available. How about free jump drives? We need to make it fun, we need to make it cool. We need to make it important to them!

Head First

I am reading a new book. It’s called Headfirst HTML with CSS & XHTML by Elizabeth Freeman and Eric Freeman. It is part of a series created by Kathy Sierra and it is described as “brain-friendly” So far I love it and would have read much later if my attention hadn’t been distracted by the storm that came through last night. More about this later but in the meantime you can visit the website Creating Passionate Users to learn more. I will highly recommend these books. I am at a beginners level – I have learned enough to get by and skimmed a lot of information. I often end up having to research a problem because I skimmed over something I later needed. This book is presented in a way that causes you to stay focused and UNDERSTAND! I hope to move up a tiny bit past beginner.

And Then She Said

I have been learning XHTML and CSS . Learning the two of them at the same time has been a challenge. I was able to get a background image to not only show in the correct place, but to not repeat itself all over the page in IE and I was so proud that I had to show my teenage daughter. She took a look at my CSS file and then she said “oh yeah, you have to say no repeat” I stared at her in disbelief. She told me she had been working on her Xanga theme the other day and figured that out when she couldn’t get her page to look right. I have a little bit different view of Xanga and my daughter now.

After spending hours searching out blogs on the sxsw conference, I have some different views on learning too. I was fascinated by notes on the presentation by Kathy Sierra “How to Create Passionate Users” It impressed me most because it seemed universal. People learn when they are excited or passionate about something. The question then becomes how to get them excited. How do we maintain that level of passion to keep learning. I’ve now added the book “Headfirst Design Patterns” to my wishlist at Amazon. Some of the ideas that have caught my mind are showing a picture of what success looks like and then providing a series of steps to get there. I know that when I am trying to complete a task that involves something I am new and unsure about, it helps to have an attainable goal in sight and to know I have the tools I need to get there. The phrase “being in the flow” was mentioned as well. We all have that one thing we do that causes us to completely lose track of time and the rest of the world. According to these “patterns” gradual growth is better than a big payoff. We need to see that while we still have further to go we have gone from point a to b and each level thereafter and we need to have that sense of achieving progress at each level. “Give users an I rule experience” I have definitely become a “passionate user” What could happen if we applied these principles to staff development? To raising and educating our kids?

Interesting Times

Thanks to Tony for setting this up for me!

There is an ancient Chinese proverb that goes “May you live in interesting times”

I spend a lot of time reading on the Internet . I also spend time reading articles I have printed from the Internet . I used to run out and buy a book whenever I wanted to learn something new. Now I just google it (yes I’m a google addict) and start distilling the piles of information down to the details that I need. This changing from books to Internet has been a slow process for me and don’t get me wrong, I still need my books. I can’t sleep at night without reading first. But now when I want to know the weather forecast, the latest news, the definition of a word, the author of a quote and a myriad of other things, I turn to the computer first. Recently I discovered blogs and now I find that reading, an activity I always found relaxing, has become another source of stress. What if my favorite blogger posts something important and I miss it?

Now with the advent of so many web-based applications, we can read, write, keep our contacts, calendars, and links, listen to music, and create spreadsheets and presentations, all online. The design of web sites has become an art form. There are communities on-line which for my generation totally re-defines the word community just by their existence.

I like the idea of instant information access. Working in the public school system, I see the web-based applications as a wonderful equalizer for students and teachers to accomplish tasks without worrying about software compatibility. This article for example, is being written on ZOHO Writer and will be posted later to a blog. I have been watching to see which applications will survive on their own and which will be snatched up by larger companies, and how these applications will be used. With some creativity, the possibilities are remarkable for education, for small business, and for the individual. I think it will also be interesting to see how these changes affect our long-term use of the Internet. Will my grandchildren still carry schoolbooks in a backpack?

The new web accessibility standards make the Internet easier for folks with disabilities to accomplish their online tasks and with many smaller towns looking into citywide wi-fi and public libraries providing Internet access more people will be able to utilize information and applications. Will we keep up with these developments in the public school system by providing information and training to our students and teachers on the availability and use of all these new things?

The Internet used to be about looking up information and email. Now instead of just a reference or communication tool, we can interact constantly by writing our own blogs, creating documents online and making them public, participating in wiki’s, and subscribing to news services that allow us to vote for the stories we think are most relevant and in doing so causing them to migrate to the front page. We no longer are just bystanders, we are actually creating the Internet as we interact. Contemplating the implications of that are enough to make me believe that we do live in interesting times!