Stuff about using computers to help people teach and learn better.

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Why you shouldn't spend much time learning APA style

Posted Tue, 2009-10-13 11:09 by pfaffman

APA doesn't know either. You might think that a scientific field would appreciate parsimony and apply that notion to their stupid citation rules, but you'd be wrong.

Upgraded Drupal to 6.12

Posted Wed, 2009-07-01 12:53 by pfaffman

A friend sent me a message today to say that this site was down with some cryptic error message. In the course of solving that mystery, I found that I could delete something like 200MB of data from the database. Doing so took several minutes, but once I did I was able to successfully upgrade the old Drupal from 4.x to 5.x and then from 5.x to 6.12. I've spent a couple hours lately trying to do the upgrade and am happy that I've finally accomplished it.

Boring details follow.

Thorbama

Posted Sun, 2009-01-18 22:29 by pfaffman

Buy Trees

Posted Mon, 2008-11-10 11:54 by pfaffman
One dollar, one tree, one planet.

TETC 2007 Presentations

Posted Thu, 2007-11-29 14:11 by pfaffman
I have 3 presentations at this year's Tennessee Educational Technology Conference. Click the "read more" link to find out more about them.

Another $100 Laptop

Posted Tue, 2007-08-28 15:54 by pfaffman
The Washington Post has a story about Asustek Jumping on to the $100 Laptop bandwagon with their own Low-Price laptop. This one is $200 or up to $300 for more stuff. Like MIT's offering this one will run Linux. It's great that so many people are working to equip kids in 3rd world countries with laptops since all the kids in the U.S. already have ubiquitous access to computers.

Microsoft's $500 laptop

Posted Thu, 2007-06-28 16:51 by pfaffman

Microsoft goes low-cost in India, or so the headline reads. They're going to start selling PC's in India for $500! That's really impressive. Or is it?

Online a friendlier place than Real Life

Posted Thu, 2007-06-28 16:38 by pfaffman

So C|Net says that One in three teens bullied online. I guess this is supposed to sound pretty horrible. Better not let kids online. Oh, wait, the kids say that they're more likely to be bullied face-to-face. It seems like when people are online they act a lot like, well, people.

In which we learn that handwriting isn't what it used to be

Posted Mon, 2007-05-07 18:05 by pfaffman

In a shocking article in the Boston Globe we learn that handwriting is becoming more of an "art form" and that because NCLB and computers we are short-changing students from this important skill.

15 minutes of fame. For my dog.

Posted Thu, 2006-12-14 16:59 by pfaffman

Well, I don't normally post personal stuff here, but this is pretty funny. I sent these pictures of my dog Thor and his cat, Modi, to a friend of mine who works at a TV station. Yes. My dog has his own web site. Now he's a TV star.