T the blogger -- Part II

Here's the latest from our man T:

To continue the saga....for yesterday's junior tilt it was a day of gale force winds and biblical rain....fitting given the two Catholic schools competing...you lads remember the Thanksgiving game in the 'Prior in 77? 78?......this time not quite snowing......and we didn't get stuck at Fay Thom's farm later in the night....
Regi opens up passing....which is promptly picked....we march about 30 yds for the first score and never looked back.....pound it up the middle, off tackle, around the end....whatever you like.
Three different backs...three touchdowns...a 27yd field goal....and by third quarter we're up 25-0.
Then the weather really got bad......some lightning and the rains really picked up.
Both teams and all the fans head into the school while they sort out what to do.
Regi wants to keep playing as I think the coach is determined to teach the lesson of finish what you start....and it gives them a chance to roll everyone into their last game.
The weather lets up and they return to the quagmire.....JJ comes in to direct the offence with a posse of other grade 9s and handles the ball well given the conditions.
We finish it off 25-0 and head to Queen's this Saturday to defend the City Championship againts the mouthy bastards....and that's the mothers.....from Frontenac.
So if you're passing through Kingston Saturday you can swing by Richardson Stadium at 11 for the juniors or 1 for the seniors where I'll guarantee you'll see quite a spectacle......
......ya I'll be the one with my shirt off and "GO CRUSADERS GO!" painted on my belly.
T

For the those of you who may be in K-Town this weekend, I will pay money for a picture of the aforementioned belly ;-)

T the blogger

My buddy T is blogging, he just doesn't realize it.
Here's a sample about his sons and their exploits on the gridiron:

Round one of the football semi-finals went yesterday.
Mike's senior squad travelled to the much hated Frontenac Falcon lair to face a heavily favoured Falcon team......they clubbed us 28-7 in the regular season.
Our boys took it like Chuck Wepner and dished it like Spot McGlauglin......came down to the last 40 seconds we're down 17-14 with the ball on their 45....2nd and 22 ......Pawliuk rolls left and fires a strike to Flude who gets drilled in the centre of the back and has the ball spring up into the air....[edited]! it's over....no wait....just before it hits the ground O'Donnell scoots in to snatch it and rumble down the left sideline to about the 10....he knows he can't get by the two defenders so he runs out of bounds to stop the clock.
Now it's first down on the 10 with about 20 seconds to go.....Pawliuk rolls right....Flude runs a hook just inside the goal line and Pawliuk hits him right in the bread basket.
Touchdown Holy Cross!
We win 20-14 and are off to the Senior final on Saturday afternoon at Queen's against the farm boys from Sydenham.
The Big Man might not be in the lineup as he had his left shoulder chicken winged early in the game. He played the whole game but I could tell he couldn't really lift it.....he's so tough you'd think he was from Tiger Island.
Sorry no pictures of the big catches as I was too rattled to hold the camera steady.
Johnny's juniors suit up this afternoon in the junior semi vs Regi and hopefully I'll be able to report a Championship double header for the lads

Great stuff.

Blogs in Schools 2.0

Check out Scholar Podcasts. Now this is some powerful stuff.

I arrived at the link thanks to D'Arcy Norman, a member of the Canadian edTech blogigentsia.

The thing is, I didn't find the link on D'Arcy's blog, but rather in a comment on Barbara Ganley's.

It's really exciting to see what's taking place on the web in terms of media and connections. I'll make a post to samlab with more about the latter.

NOTES:

• Dave and Jeff -- the "movers and shakers" at World Bridges -- need to get him hooked up for one of their 'casts


• I see on D'Arcy's blog (just now, when I went there to get the URL for this post) that he's going to try to make it to Thursday's EdTech brainstorming session, so there you go....

Blogs for schools

Many of the issues that are associated with blogs and younger students are addressed in a new offering from James Farmer. Long a proponent of blogging in education, James now offers blog hosting to both students and teachers. Visit edublogs.org to set up your blog.

Teachers wanting to introduce classes to blogging, but are worried about "inappropriate" materials and issues of privacy can use the supported medium James is providing to ensure a "safe area" in which stakeholders can access blogs in a supported and safe environment.

Blogging as active research -- part II

I continue to work on my ideas for a research study for this semester. I'm feeling a little better about the endeavour now that I've decided to focus on blogs. I'm also feeling better about the whole thing after finding the published work of Torill Mortenson and Jill Walker.

Their paper Blogging thoughts: personal publication as an online research tool (PDF), Chapter 11 of Researching ICTs in Context is full of provocative thoughts on the role of blogging for academics and the opportunities it provides for publishing and sharing academic research.

As I struggle with the design of my own research study for this semester, I found the authors' thoughts on "academic writing" to be enlightening -- especially their prescription for writing "in the humanities and social sciences" and that an "academic article" must contain:

a) References to theory, preferably updated, focused, wide enough to display a healthy variety to our reading but not so wide that we can be accused of being shallow.

b) References to empiric data, or the object of our research. This should have enough status that we can justify spending our valuable time on it, eith through being a classsic, being something entirely new, or being popular enough to have social significance.

c) An original and spirited discussion of how a) relates to b). (p. 261)

The authors also go on to tell us that the profile of the "modern researcher" has changed.
The modern researcher is not quite the old man in a dusty, smoky study behind a labyrinth of books, unable to relate to the rest of the world. Research is supposed to be related to contemporary topics, and preferably lead to results tha can give new insights to more than a narrow group of specialists. (p. 261)

I'm especially interested in some of the phenomenon that Mortenson and Walker see at work in their 2002 consideration of blogging and how the medium has grown and changed since. Indeed, because both continue to blog, we can track developments in their thinking and practices related to the "blogsphere" and the topics broached in the paper.