PostSecret

When looking at blogs, there is a blog I sometimes refer to for some of my more mature photo students. It is well known by a couple of my art colleagues and I use it. PostSecret is blog created by Frank Warren, started this 5 years ago in which he asks people to share a secret to the world. Everybody has a secret, ranging from small things like singing in the shower when no one is around to dark ones that can wreak havoc on a person's life. This whole idea of posting a secret that no one knows i think is an interesting way of using a blog setting and could be an interesting approach to use this blog as a conversation starter. What I love about it is how the people who post use photography, image and text together to show their secret. All the images are a gallery of postcard-sized images posted anonymously to unveil a secret.

Check it out:
http://postsecret.blogspot.com/

School of One

As I was flipping through Time Magazine this week, I came across the 50 greatest inventions of the year. One of them was school related and the name of it was School of One. School of One is a pilot program some schools are trying. It is a groundbreaking way of school instruction in which each day, students in the school are given a unique lesson plan, a "daily playlist" taylored to their learning style and rate of progress that includes a mix of virtual tutoring, in-class instruction, and educational video grames. Its learning for the xbox generation.

I'm thinking this might be interesting to add to the group project based on the main question of the paper which is what is the future of learning. What do we think about this kind of setup in schools? What about the social aspects of learning? Those are some things I think we need to look at when seeing if this program would be effective.

Here is an article about it in the NY times:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/22/education/22school.html?_r=1