King’s Corner
It’s not just academic.

This has been the weirdest term. I wind up saying that every term, but each time it is true. I had good classes this time, and accomplished a lot of stuff that we often don’t get to, and yet there was much I didn’t get to do with several classes. It’s also true, though, that I am so, so burned out. I’m teaching this summer, but I’ve already decided we’re going to do it “old school,” with a minimum of computer usage. Just do it the old-fashioned way. I think maintaining the tech support for the courses I’m teaching is just getting to be too much on top of the teaching.

Plenty of tech stuff to do, still, but it will be in support of what other people are doing. Perhaps this will be the positive version of the old saying concerning the cobbler’s children going barefoot. We’ll see.

In any case, congratulations to the graduates, and to a lesser degree to us all for making it through another one.

I have posted a fairly detailed update on Tennessee House Bill 1652, for those interested.

Yesterday I told you about a Tennessee legislative committee that could affect thousands of people across the state regarding whether their high school diplomas would be considered “valid.” (More here and here.)

Short version update: the needed amendment passed; the Dept. of Education’s ill-advised version did not come up.

Long version update: read Rob Shearer’s summary of what went on.

Politics has no place in this blog, which is focused on education. Nevertheless, I feel I would be shirking my duties if I didn’t at least mention this, since it could potentially affect hundreds of PSTCC as well as other college students. It has already affected a Walters State graduate.

I have blogged about it at Kingly News. If you fit either of these categories, please take a look immediately. Updates to the legislative action will also appear there.

Here is an excerpt from an email that illustrates the nature of the problem:

Cindy Benefield with the Department of Education told a graduate from a church related school, “Your diploma is not worth the paper it is written on.” He has to have a high school diploma to be able to work in his current profession.

Later the department did offer that he could take the GED and they would accept that. What that means is this: The DOE will accept making a 70 on a 6th grade level test, but they flatly reject a high school diploma given by a church related school. (They also rejected a Police Officer who after receiving his diploma, graduated from the Police academy with a 4.0 and are setting suspects free, because the arresting officer, a CRS graduate, had to be administratively demoted and cannot appear in court to be a witness in his cases.) [DK--this police officer graduated from Walters State Community College. Apparently, his college education is also invalidated by this DoE interpretation.]

It’s interesting the things we do when we don’t have time to do them.

I’m really grading stuff–really, I am. At this exact moment, though, my brain is fuzzed, everything I’m reading might as well be in Chinese, so I took a moment to download and install a “new” browser.

As with most things, it’s not really new. The developers of Flock have been at it for awhile. But it’s starting to get more notice, mainly because of its structure designed to manage the myriad social networking tools that seem to define Web 2.0.

Since it’s based on Firefox, it is both familiar and new. Those myriad tools take some figuring out, but only because of how many there are, not because of difficulty. In fact, everything seems pretty intuitive. For instance, I am using the built-in blog editor (in the browser, remember) to compose this blog post.

So far I have found only two drawbacks: some Firefox extensions work with Flock, but not all. I have some favorites, at least one of which may be a dealbreaker if it doesn’t work. I don’t know yet–quite literally, I installed this thing 10 minutes ago, and I’m already up and running with it, which bodes well.

The other things is very, very minor. When I edit my blog using its own WYSIWYG editor, the link button lets me set a target (in effect, it lets me specify whether the new link will load in a new window or replace the one it came from). The Flock editor does not. It’s really very minor because I’m an old HTML guy and know how to code that directly. It’s just slightly annoying to have to switch over to “Source” view to do so.

Just found another, that may be resolved when I post. There is a window to add tags, but not a way to apply WordPress categories. I suspect blogs are moving toward tags rather than categories anyway; we’ll see. [Update: It let me pick a category on posting! I'm impressed. They seem to have thought of everything, including letting me pick which blog it gets posted to. This editor, therefore, would allow you to use the same interface for multiple blogs, whether your own hosted or one on a service such as blogger.com. I'll have to see if it will pop up for me to edit an existing post.]

Tags: technology, browser, social networking, communication

You may know about this already from its original site, which was reportedly taken down because of bandwidth and hosting issues. It is available again, thanks to TechRepublic. The article is called “Computer bloopers and blunders from the technically clueless.”

If anyone has been reading these pages lately, you know it hasn’t been updated in a long, long time. I won’t go into a lot of detail, but it might be worth knowing the basic cause.

I am privileged to be the father of a child with an extremely rare chromosomal disorder. For the last 3 1/2 years, we have had a 24/7 care regimen that was wearing us down just the way water wears down a rock. At the end of fall semester, she was hospitalized for 52 days.

Ultimately, we were finally able to get nursing care for her at home. However, to mix metaphors horribly, we were worn down worse than an old pencil, and we are still recovering from long-term exhaustion. One of the casualties in all that has been this blog.

I’m not telling you that I will suddenly start posting at the old rate again. As I said, I’m still recovering. But I’m finding a little energy, that I think will enable me to start up again. This may be of particular interest to people who attended a workshop I helped facilitate at the Instructional Technology Conference at Middle Tennessee State University.

This blog has been relatively quiet this summer. For one thing, we’ve been on “summer break.” That doesn’t mean much, except that I wasn’t physically on campus as much. Other things had more of an effect.

• I had two (really, three or four) major PHP projects for which I was committed.
• I taught an online speech course.
• My youngest daughter wound up in the hospital again, her 18th hospitalization.

We’re not back in regular session yet, and Hannah isn’t home from the hospital yet. But I’ve turned in summer grades, and I have a connection from the hospital, so this is as good a time as any to crank it up.

I need to do something. I have bookmarked 33 pages that I had intended to tell you about, and that I haven’t had time to get to yet. I hope some of them still mean something by the time I get it all taken care of.