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If you are a relative of a college student, be forewarned, your imminent death may be just around the corner. That’s right it is that time of year again, it is time for midterm exams and e-mails of dead relatives are prevalent. This is an amazing phenomenon that occurs repeatedly four times per year, twice during fall semester and twice during spring semester. Oddly always coinciding with either midterm or final exam due dates.

It always amazes me as to the timing of the grim reaper. What devious plot does he serve when he decides to take the lives of the relatives of college students? He never seems to strike during the first several weeks of a semester or in the weeks immediately following the midterm exams. It seems that college student’s relatives are only ill-fated during the tumultuous weeks of midterm and final exams. An uncanny coincidence I am sure, one which should be a warning to anyone who is related to a college student. If I were one of these relatives, I would ask for a copy of the student’s schedule of classes so I would know when I should be most vigilant and wary of the possibility of the grim reaper coming to my doorstep.

You can’t say I didn’t warn you; make sure your affairs are in order and your will is up to date, because if you are related to a college student who is facing a midterm or final exam deadline your days are numbered. Your obituary will be written with tears in their eyes and the tragic impact your death has had on even your least known collegiate relative will be shared with college professors everywhere.

The Advanced Distributed Learning (ADL) Initiative was founded by the DoD in 1997 and charged with developing and implementing technologies across the DoD and federal government. Part of the ADL charter is to collaborate with government, industry and academia to promote international specifications and standards for designing and delivering learning content; the shareable content object relational model (SCORM) is a design specification in which learning assets are collected into shareable content objects (SCOs) which can then be aggregated in a plethora of combinations in order to suit the purpose of a particular instructional implementation. The aggregations of of SCOs are structured into an organization and then delivered as a single content package. SCORM helps instructional designers to integrate their course content with various learning management systems (LMS) like Blackboard, WebCT, or Moodle, including the use of sequencing, recording assessment scores, and tracking student usage of the SCOs.

Here is a list of links to YouTube videos discussing e-Learning design principles created and posted by the Advanced Distributed Learning Initiative (ADL):

• Visual Design Principles for e-Learning, Part 1
• Visual Design Principles for e-Learning, Part 2
• Visual Design Principles for e-Learning, Part 3
• Visual Design Principles for e-Learning, Part 4
• Visual Design Principles for e-Learning, Part 5
• Visual Design Principles for e-Learning, Part 6
• Visual Design Principles for e-Learning, Part 7
• Visual Design Principles for e-Learning, Part 8

In order for you to give my thesis any credence, I feel you must first understand my love of diversity in our current culture. So, when I say I’m agnostic when it comes to religion, I only state that so that you can appreciate the context of my next statement; which is, that I was once taught by a Catholic nun that there is a theory in Quantum Physics stating that everything created by man will eventually become the opposite of its intended purpose. After reading Mr. Estrada’s argument in chapter 6 of the St. Martin’s Guide textbook, I feel compelled to submit a differing viewpoint with a slightly more pertinent message. I would like to expose the dangers of PCism, and how it could get even more out-of-hand than it already is. PCism is a reaction to a problem, not a solution to that problem.

After reading the essay and completing the word listing exercise I looked at my list and thought about which ones offend me the most? On my list where words like: hillbilly, cracker, white trash, redneck, rube, and hick; all words I heard growing up because I was born in the once rural town of Riverside, Ca. I’m a man of average height, but compared to many of the jock friends I grew up with in high school, I was called small. I’m also part Italian so whop, ginny, and spaghetti bender have been applied. I became a Beatles fan as a teenager and love rock music so I’ve heard hippie, rock ‘n’ roller, rebel, delinquent, and pistol used as attempts to belittle me. I like to drive fast so several traffic cops have called me a lead foot or a menace to society. I love computers so geek, nerd, brainiac have also been applied. My parents were small business owners so I’ve also heard rich boy, bosses son, and since I’m getting up there in my years then old school and senior citizen can now be added to the list. Much to my surprise, just recently, I heard racist and zagh used as attacks on my character. Some of these words, I’m sure, you’re familiar with. Some you may laugh at and wonder why they are even on the list. Well, if we are to buy into Mr. Estrada’s way of handling things, I need to be sure my list is complete, and that I haven’t forgotten any names I’ve been called that were meant to offend me or inflict injury to my character. My list must be thorough and complete so that everyone can be made aware of what offends me, and I want to ask of you, the reader, to please avoid using them in my presence.

Truth of the matter is, being called any of these names does not make me feel offended or invalidated. To me, when I hear words like these spoken, it just tells me that the person speaking them is ignorant, and has no idea of who I am, what I am, or what I stand for. The way I was raised by my parents and the several public schools I attended while growing up, I was taught that we should all live by the golden rule. Recently, I was amazed to learn that according to a poll reported on the TV news, of the people polled, only 28% knew what the Golden Rule is. One simple phrase, “do unto others as you would have them do unto you,” is what I have based my life’s relationships on. For me, in part, I’ve always taken it to mean that I should give every person an even break, and that I should always greet my fellow human with dignity, respect, warmth, and joy from my heart, unless that person demonstrates a reason that I should do otherwise.

The last name on my list, zagh, stands for Zarrwellien Alien Guy Homosapien, and is a theoretically fictitious derogatory word I created to help illustrate how, in a universe of infinite possibilities, the process of trying to regulate speech and vocabulary is not only completely contrary to the first amendment of the United States Constitution, but more importantly, is against common sense. Another theorem of Quantum Physics is that in order for a truth to be true it must be universally true – no anomalies. When our society spans more than just our planet, out into our galaxy and beyond, when inter-planetary breeding becomes common place, and there are so many different cultures and civilizations that the mathematically available combination of letters are nearing annihilation for having been deemed offensive to one group or another, where will that leave us then? How will we communicate when they outlaw all the words?

Those that argue the other side will say that they are only removing the truly offensive words from the global lexicon, offensive to whom? Instead of trying to remove the words they should be trying to remove the ignorance. Instead of controlling lives we should be empowering lives. We, as a collective consciousness, should spend more time on developing educational skills and less of it attempting to regulate human nature. They’ll also argue how ludicrous my theory is that we might someday run out of words, although they’ll never give you any idea of where the line can be drawn as to the number of words that might possibly become taboo.

Wouldn’t it be simpler if we could just agree to all follow one simple rule and apply that rule, as a litmus test, to each and every action we take? The only race I have ever considered myself a part of is the human race. Regardless of where we’ve come from in life, instead of assuming that any one group could or should have power over our lives, instead of grouping various entities, which can only have a disparaging affect, wouldn’t it be so much easier to just do unto others what we would have them do unto us?

One of my favorite television shows while growing up was Green Acres. The basic premise of Green Acres was that a successful New York City businessman Mr. Douglas, played by Eddie Albert, and his wife were leaving the big city for a more peaceful and serene life of blue skies, fresh air and farm living in a small rural town. It was that TV show that prompted me to set a similar goal for myself many years ago. My biggest dream since childhood has been to work hard and achieve enough success in my career so that one day I might own a horse ranch of my own in a nice peaceful rural community. At age 44 I thought I had reached that goal – then came the urbanites.

Swoosh, was the sound that I heard as I placed the serrated edges of my wine cooler’s screw-off top between my thumb and index finger and gave it a twist. A gurgling sound followed as I gently poured the lime green fluid from my bottle of Bartle’s and James’ Melon Splash into an ice filled glass. It was a familiar fizzle, causing my mouth to water in anticipation of the cool tangy sensation that was about to strike my palette. As I gleaned out over the backyard and then beyond, past the green pasture that followed, I saw a striking silhouette of the San Gabriel Mountains as the sun became poised to set in the western horizon. The day’s chores had taken their toll; my body ached in an almost pleasurable way with the satisfaction gained from putting in a long day of manual labor mowing pastures, repairing irrigation lines, and caring for the animals that inhabit the ranch.

Bluesy jazz-guitar reverberations from Peter Frampton’s latest album, Fingerprints, pierced the air in a quiet calming manner. I had intentionally kept the volume low so that I could soak up the auditory ambience of the glorious nature that surrounded me. I heard Turkey, our tall, statuesque, lace feathered rooster, calling his hens to retire for the evening with a boisterous cock-a-doodle-doo followed by the sounds of cackling hens waddling to their roosting spots. Laredo, our four-year-old Paso Fino gelding, gave a whinny as he kicked up his heels and made one last jaunt around the back pasture before retiring to his nightly quarters. Looking closely I could see the wild cotton tail’s heads begin to populate the pasture as part of their nightly grazing routine. These small furry creatures, for the most part, stay under cover in their burrows during the day both to avoid the heat as well as the detection of the vigilant red-tailed hawk that frequents the area hunting for prey and whose screeches can be heard daily.

Even though I had selected this moment for a period of rest and relaxation I couldn’t help but notice the flaking white paint on the wooden pasture fencing. This gives it a rustic charm but my brain told me otherwise. I knew if it is left exposed to the weather much longer instead of just re-painting the fencing I would eventually end up having to replace it, requiring much more of my time and money than a new coat of paint would – mentally, I added it to my list of future chores. As I leaned back in the patio chair in which I was seated I viewed a seemingly un-ending sky of blue, bordered by the orange glow of the sun slowly setting in the west. There was not a cloud to be found as the afternoon breeze had whisked them away. My wine cooler was almost gone as my eyelids grew heavy and I drifted off into a peaceful serene bliss. I slinked back deeper into my lounge chair and rolled to my side, pulling my legs to my body in a fetal position. My body succumbed to exhaustion as my brain finally slowed and let go of its agendas. There was a sweet smell of spring blossoms and lemon scented Eucalyptus trees in the air. I had worked long and hard throughout my life to enable myself to experience moments like this. I savor these times dearly. Soaking up the ambience with all my senses, I was now at rest, feeling content as I dozed off, but still absorbing the beauty of my surroundings – life doesn’t get any better than this.

Suddenly, I was rudely awakened by the sound of waaaaaaaaah, wah, wah, which blared from the air horn of a semi-truck as it bolted down the grade of the neighborhood street I live on. Rat-a-tat-tat-tat-tat-tat screeched from its diesel engine as the driver applied the Jake brake and slowed his tractor-trailer momentarily before taking on the curve in the road ahead. More horns blared and more engines roared from speeding automobiles as they tried to pass each other on our two-lane road. My peaceful serenity had been broken by the daily barrage of commuter traffic that cuts through our neighborhood in an effort to bypass the congestion of the freeway interchange. The housing boom of the past several years has surrounded us with a plague of urbanites that disrupt and raise havoc in our once rural, peaceful and serene town of Woodcrest. Five days a week they commute from their little cookie-cutter boxes south-east of us, through our neighborhood, to their jobs in cubicles located to the west of us. I grabbed my empty cooler, headed inside the house and turned on the television to help mask the curse of urbanization and numb my soul to its remorse only to be lambasted by commercial after commercial professing the ways of a more modern society.

I am extremely thankful that my childhood dream of living life like Mr. Douglas of Green Acres fame has actually become a reality. However, during moments like the one I’ve described here, I reflect back upon times when reaping the fruits of my labor had seemed a worthwhile goal and ponder whether or not my efforts have been negated by industrialization and modernization; wondering if the reality is that I’m only being taunted by the promise of serenity?

So here I go blogging again. This will be the third time I have been prompted by an educator to blog. I really don’t see the point of writing a blog nor do I read or subscribe to any. When I am searching topics on the Internet, I don’t recall having ever been directed to someone’s blog. The intention of this blog (not the entire entity, but just this post) is to research and examine the literature that is out there regarding blogs to see what, if any, value they have in education.

According to Wikipedia, blogs are supposed to be digital communities evolved from online diaries. Functionally speaking blogs allow the owner of the blog to post some information for others to read and comment on, and they can be subscribed to using RSS feeds so that all participants can be notified when there is an update. A 2008 video from Palm Breeze Cafe’s Kim Cavanaugh (view below) cites the Pew Research Center’s 2008 data on blogs saying that 70% of students under age 18 have a blog. My guess is this statistic is much lower in 2010 with the advent and popularity of Twitter. A quick search of the Internet using Google shows numerous Web sites singing the praises of “blogs in education,” but oddly most are dated around 2003 or 2004 and very few seem to be current. One current blogger I found at halfanhour.blogspot.com had a post dated Monday, April 13, 2009 which is very thorough, comprehensive and contained a considerable amount of valuable links. Like most of the Web sites I found touting blogs in education this one too starts with a discussion about what is a blog. In his archived post the writer, Stephen Downes, states that according to edublogs they have hosted over 400 thousand educational blogs since 2005.

Pros: Some of the student benefits listed by Mr. Downes are the ability of students to take ownership of their own learning and providing them with an authentic voice in order to give students the opportunity to articulate their needs and inform their own learning. He also cites Bortee, D.S. (2005) as having said that blogs have been shown to contribute identity-formation in students. However I found no empirical studies which back up any of these claims.

Cons: Among the drawbacks I found while searching the Internet for information about educational blogging is the issues of privacy. Privacy of our students is a large concern of educators and so the question arises as to how much personal information, if any, can be requested or required of a student posting to a blog in order to complete a school assignment. Another issue is student motivation which falls in two categories, 1) getting students motivated to write a blog in the first place, and 2) the technological novelty of blogging seems to wear off very quickly and therefore students can become bored with it just as quickly. On another front one complaint I saw made by several posters was a complaint about the slowness of edublog. Edublog is a site set up for educators to give them and their students free blogging. Ostensibly this was a ground breaking site when free blogging was not as prevalent as it is today, but apparently their number of subscribers now outnumber its technical capability to provide blogging services which meet their expectations of responsiveness.

At this point I would say the results are inconclusive and much more research is needed to confirm whether blogs are making a difference in education or not. Subscribe to this blog if you would like to read my further research. I can guarantee you there will be at least two more posts made by me (they are assignments I am required to complete).