benshead

Steve sent us a postcard from Mongolia. It only took two weeks. Not bad!

Also see:

• this picture
• and this one

Brandon has been blogging his purchase and first-booting of a Dell XPS 410n running OEM-installed Ubuntu. He writes,

After 10 years of using Linux, I was finally able to order a prebuilt computer from a major OEM without paying anyone for an operating system that I would delete shortly after unboxing. Instead of devoting half of Saturday afternoon to installing Linux, I had a working Linux system 19 minutes after opening the box.

See his pictures at Flickr.

My friend Lee bought a bike shop in Brunswick, ME last fall and needed a web site for it, so I made him a site. Check out Center Street Cycles if you’re curious. It is fairly plain jane right now, but will hopefully get a little more exciting as time goes on…

Some Interesting Results (full results are continued in the full entry):

1. 57% of 6th and 7th Graders have their own site at MySpace or Migente.
2. 42% have looked up other kids in our school on M or M.
3. 25% have never used M or M.
4. 33% use one or both of the sites everyday
5. 28% never do
6. 58% of parents and caregivers have rules about how their children use the sites.
7. 72% believe teachers “shouldn’t be able to” look their students up on M or M. (inspired by ETC2C #5)
8. 32% have friends online they have never met; 15% have 3 or more.
9. 25% chat privately with friends they have met on M or M. (for Tom)
10. 60% have heard of YouTube; 23% use it (there you go, Steve)
11. 60% have heard of Wikipedia; 23% use it.

Who was surveyed?:

15 Sixth Graders and 12 Seventh Graders were surveyed. This represents all students present in the two sections on the day that the survey was given. These two sections are one-third of their grades, respectively. Therefore, they are decently representative of our school’s population which is, in turn, statistically representative of Providence Public Schools. At least in theory.
Keep in mind:

1. I am no Statistician and this is not a scientific survey.
2. I emphasized that these results would be used confidentially when students filled this out. I did not accept surveys with names or identifying marks on them.
3. Except where noted explicitly, questions applied to MySpace and Migente. I realize that this makes it impossible to distinguish between the two in the results, however, I was more concerned with including the two and I was concerned that a longer survey would get less accurate results.
4. I have the results broken down by grade, but that is probably more interesting to me than it would be to others who don’t know my students. That comparison does show a somewhat predictable increase in experience with social networking sites in year difference between 6th- and 7th-graders, but I am not convinced that it is statistically significant enough to draw much of a conclusion from.

Humorous Anecdote:

• Two students, after handing in their surveys, overheard saying, “What was that site, YouTube? We’re going to have to check that out!” The other replied, “Yeah, write that down before we forget it.”

Conclusions:

1. Wikipedia and YouTube are equally popular among my students.
2. Students use social networking sites primarily to interact with peers and friends who they know in their offline lives (only about half of those who use social networking sites report friends who they have never met in person;less than half chat with strangers).
3. Almost 3/4s of students have unrealistic expectations about whether their teachers should be able to access their online lives.
4. While other sites have some popularity, MySpace and Migente are the big two among our students.

Full results are available after the break. Copies of the survey are here in .doc, .odt and .pdf.
(more…)

I finally surveyed two 6th and 7th grade classes on their use of MySpace, Migente and other social-networking sites. Copies of the survey are here in .doc, .odt and .pdf. After the break there is an html version that may be of limited usefulness.

I’ll post results in a follow-up post.
(more…)

I still read Dan Benjamin’s blog Hivelogic regularly even though he has sadly stopped writing in the second person. Today he announced Cork’d, which is, in his words:

…a free service for wine aficionados. You can use Cork’d to catalog, rate and review wines you’ve tasted. You can also keep track of wines you’d like to try and buy as well as subscribe to what your buddies have reviewed.

Written in Ruby on Rails and making extensive use of RSS, Cork’d seems to be just what I didn’t know I needed but instantly love. The social networking of this is, of course, what makes it cool, but it also makes it kind of scary. The only way to rate a wine is to also review and tag it (with ‘tasting tags,’ descriptions of the tasting experience). For this I-know-what-I-like-even-if-I-don’t-know-why wine-newb it’s a little scary to put in writing why you like or dislike a wine.

They have some kind of tie-in to wine.com’s catalog, which doesn’t seem to intrusive and gives you an easy way to order a wine, if you need to.
Check out my profile or create your own.