The tag line for One Word is serious: Don’t think. Just write.

A visitor has one word and sixty seconds. No time for writer’s block. No time for nuanced analysis. Lots of time for serendipities emerging from a mind at play.

The bar moving across the screen tracks the seconds — green, yellow, red — until — ding! — a message says “finish your last sentence.”

Add a name and an e-mail address, and you can read what everyone else wrote about when you get to the next page. Follow the arrows to see yesterday’s word and responses, and click to keep going back.

You can write about today’s word as many times as you wish, but there won’t be a new word until tomorrow. It will be a simple word like scarf or deliberate or trail. And it can bring out the writer in young and old.

Special thanks again to Mary!

A wonderful exploration of technology in K-12 education today from B. J. Nesbitt:

A recent Yahoo article suggests that social networking heavyhitter Facebook has decided to confront the problem of gender in the third-person singular pronoun in English.

For centuries English permitted the use of “their” for the indefinite 3rd person singular. Not until the late 1700s and early 1800s did the practice come under attack, and while it has diminished substantially among educated writers, it’s still in use.

Throughout the 19th and most of the 20th centuries, the rule was to use “he” when a writer meant “he or she.” Feminists in the 70s, however, pointed out that the pronoun was not as inclusive as male writers wanted to believe. One female writer suggested that we just use “she” instead of “he” and have everyone understand that it included men. That made the point for the last of the confused males, but it left us with only two choices: the very awkward he/she or switching the noun to plural, making their grammatically correct. Neither works all the time.

Facebook needs the singular for sentences such as “Aidan just updated his blog.” As the company expands and deals with other languages, it needs (they need?) to have the grammar right.

Special thanks to Scott for this one!

Helen Keller was accused of plagiarism when she was 11 years old. She had written “The Frost King,” a short story, and it was published and celebrated as an example of what disabled people can do if they are educated. Unfortunately, it was very similar to “The Frost Fairies” by Margaret Canby, which her teacher had read to her a few years earlier. Keller had done it unintentionally, but she had, in fact, plagiarized.

There’s not much we can do about students who plagiarize on purpose. For those who, like Keller, are trying to do the right thing and sometimes just slip up, new help has arrived. Jeffrey Smith, a recent college graduate, offers Plagiarism Detect. He writes on his home page, “I was having BIG problems with plagiarism in my papers.” This site shares his solution, which he describes as a “a great opportunity to check essays, term papers, research papers and other written documents at no cost.”

Smith says his site works by comparing a submitted text to resources indexed by Google. A recent upgrade also checks PDF files, online books, and blogs.

The site’s primary purpose is “to help students prevent plagiarism in their academic papers,” Smith says, adding, “It can be a useful tool for those who want to be original in writing.” Smith does not charge for this service — it is free.

I tested it by submitting a couple of my own blog posts and a blurb from my newsletter. While it returned several false positives, these were easily identifiable. It also identified the correct sources.

I’m thinking of adding it to my classroom procedures and making it almost part of the writing process — “Submit your paper to Plagiarism Detect and deal appropriately with any issues it flags before you hand your paper in to me.”

The site accepts donations but does not charge a fee.

Today’s post is from Larry Sanger, co-founder of Wikipedia and Editor-in-Chief of Citizendium:

I’m writing to ask you to help get a free, non-profit, K-12 educational video contest, WatchKnow, off the ground. …

Imagine tens of thousands of excellent short videos explaining nearly every topic taught in U.S. public schools. WatchKnow will be a free (open content), non-profit beta project, to launch probably this fall, to see whether we can create that. We will set the topics and invite teachers–and everyone–to submit videos. Videos will be rated, and, at a certain point, we’ll select a winner for each topic. We’ll give the winner(s) within each topic small prize(s), such as $75 and $25, but the amounts have not be decided firmly yet. We might award substantially more for certain topics. You could think of it as an American Idol for teachers, but we are not affiliated with American Idol.

The project is being carried out as a new program of the Citizendium Foundation, with funding from a retired Memphis millionaire who wishes to benefit American education. I’m the project’s Executive Director, and we’re now in the process of looking for and hiring a technical contractor who will actually build the system (see Craigslist).

Read more here
For future updates, please add yourself to the project announcement list, watchknow-l.

Because it’s non-profit and open content, we of course don’t expect to make money from this project; it’s charitable. Thankfully, our start-up capital is more than adequate for purposes of the beta-test project.

But we will need the help of volunteers to make this work. Educators, ed tech specialists–especially educators who make, use, review, and otherwise care about educational uses of online video–are needed to participate in a Video Review Panel, which will choose topics and rate videos. On the current plan, panel ratings will compose half of the score for any individual video. We could also use your endorsement and support for the idea! See: WatchKnow Participation.

If you’ve complained about the paucity of high-quality educational content online, here’s a chance to do something about it.

David Warlick opened his presentation at NECC in a manner that will probably become standard in the 21st century: he told his audience how to tag their blog posts and Tweets so that the RSS feed would pick them up.

He spoke of how students in his (and my) generation were well prepared to work in straight rows performing repetitive tasks under close supervision. To be more precise, they finished school ready to go work in a mill for 30 years, raise families, retire with a pension, and enjoy their grandchildren. He paused and said quietly, “Things changed.”

Now our job is to prepare our children for a future we can’t describe. And our children must not just survive in that world, he pointed out, they need to prosper.

Here are his three bullet points. (I want to mention them so I can do justice to his presentation and then talk about the other things that also captured my attention.)

1. The future is unpredictable.
2. Students are networked.
3. The new information landscape is flat, less authority (teacher)-driven.

Warlick redefined the Digital Divide for me. I had always considered it to be the difference between the “haves” and the “have nots,” between those who could afford a computer (and access and occasional repairs), and those who could maybe get a used computer but had to give it up once the power supply or monitor went out. How shortsighted of me! The “haves” are networked; they know, as Warlick put it, “how to find the people who can help you learn how to do what you want to do.” Those who are networked are powerful. Those who aren’t, are alone.

Warlick believes it is in our national interest for everyone to have free Web access. He pointed to Macedonia and other countries that have already made that commitment.

I had to think about that one. In my rural community, the “haves” can choose: cable, DSL, or if you live out in the county, dial-up. The “have nots” will tell me they have a computer at home, but they will add that it has picked up a virus. Or the printer is out of ink. Or the disk drive is jammed. Always some polite fiction. The point is, they don’t get to choose. Their ability to do schoolwork is affected, but we can level that playing field to some extent. Their ability to network, though, is postponed.

I have to wonder if that means that their ability to prosper is also postponed. In the coming economy, it sure looks that way right now.

This is an example of why I come to NECC. People share ideas that disturb and challenge and stick around.

The blog is ended, but the pondering continues …

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Yesterday’s post discussed how people read online. Research demonstrates that we read Web pages in a kind of F-shape, seeking specific information as quickly as possible.

“The biggest determinant for content usability is how users read online,” Jakob Nielsen writes, “and because people read differently, you have to write differently.”

Nielsen offers some specific suggestions for effective Web writing style which I have summarized below:

• Put the most important part first. People will read only 20-30 percent of the text on a screen unless they are especially interested in the topic.
• Use keywords that a search engine will target. The Web is not the place for symbolism or subtlety.
• Keep it short and sweet. Your reader isn’t sitting in a cozy armchair with feet up; your reader is looking for answers to questions.

Nielsen doubts that the Web is the best choice for education:

I continue to believe in the linear, author-driven narrative for educational purposes. I just don’t believe the Web is optimal for delivering this experience. Instead, let’s praise old narrative forms like books and sitting around a flickering campfire — or its modern day counterpart, the PowerPoint projector — which have been around for 500 and 32,000 years, respectively.

He acknowledges his bias; he writes books and presents seminars for a living. Teachers can relate to that.

Students need to be aware of their own reading strategies since, obviously, advertisers and politicians are. They need to understand why a powerful Web page is written differently from, say, an essay. Most important, they need to be aware of where the forms overlap and how the audience and purpose drive the differences.

We’ve been teaching those concepts all along, and perhaps now students will be more receptive to them.

Wikipedia, the upstart Internet encyclopedia that most universities forbid students to use, has suddenly become a teaching tool for professors.

Recently, university teachers have swapped student term papers for assignments to write entries for the free online encyclopedia.

Wikipedia is an “open-source” web site, which means that entries can be started or edited by anyone in the world with an Internet connection.

Writing for Wikipedia “seems like a much larger stage, more of a challenge,” than a term paper, said professor Jon Beasley-Murray, who teaches Latin American literature at the University of British Columbia in this western Canadian city.

“The vast majority of Wikipedia entries aren’t very good,” said Beasley-Murray, but said the site aims to be academically sound.

To reach its goal of academic standards, said Wikipedia’s web site, it set up an assessment scale on its English-language site. The best encyclopedia entries are ranked as “Featured Articles,” and run each day on the home page at www.wikipedia.com.

To be ranked as a “Featured Article,” Wikipedia said an entry must “provide thorough, well-written coverage of their topic, supported by many references to peer-reviewed publications.”

Of more than 10 million articles in 253 languages, only about 2,000 have reached “Featured Article” status, it said.

As an experiment, last January Beasley-Murray promised his students a rare A+ grade if they got their projects for his literature course, called “Murder, Madness and Mayhem,” accepted as a Wikipedia Featured Article.”

Read the entire article.