Glorified Hamster Wheels
The whole episode is worth watching on Hulu, or if that’s not available, the title is “Bart gets a Z.”
Remember, it’s the Simpsons; just a cartoon, just an amusing cartoon- no reality here. Browse along. Nothing to see here.
Related posts
Everything New is Bad
It’s fun to watch the reaction to change change that I am not involved in guiding, forcing or in any way ensuring occurs. I’d seen the over the top reaction to allowing video on flickr but hadn’t seen the humorous counter attack until Merlin Mann’s twitter post. In a useful way it is interesting to see how people are dealing with this change. Some have no problem and roll on while others completely freak out. It all depends, it seems, on their investment with the concept/community and their perception of the change as a threat to that. I guess that’s obvious but it does explain why change in teaching is so hard. People are completely irate by the addition of the option to have 90 second videos on a photo sharing site. Some of those people are even digital natives (previously believed to be immune to any issues dealing with change)! Now imagine instead you’re trying to change one of the core elements of a person’s life. How long will that take? What do you need to do to make that person make the effort, feel comfortable, enjoy it? Is that even possible?
Feeds Growing Slowly
So I’m slowly re-adding feeds to the newly blank aggregator (I always picture a very aggravated alligator when I see that word- too many Crocodile Hunter shows with my son). See what I’m reading below maybe you’ll find something interesting (maybe not) but I’m looking to expand so drop your top sites (educational or non) in the comments. I’m really looking for more on WordPress, design, change and data visualization. Real Life Collides Rationale: People I’ve actually met. bavatuesdays – Jim “WordPress” Groom (coworker) Pandaemonium – Kevin “Bossman” Creamer (coworker – counts as only .3 of a blog due to infrequent updating) EdTech Journeys – a wise man from NY who writes about staffdev and change Operative Fitness – My brother-in-law’s slightly nutty fitness blog (in a good way). I dabble with extreme-ish fitness and am back at it now that I’m out of K12. Humor/Non Serious/Inspiration Rationale: I like odd things and I feel humor plays a really important role in teaching (or should anyway). Boing Boing – lots of good ideas here Defective Yeti – I really like this guy and he writes really well Tcritic – a blog about interesting t-shirts XKCD – a webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math and language Education Rationale: Each of these blogs has something unique that keeps me coming back. Dy/Dan – […]
Why use WPMU in K12?
I’ve been slowly migrating all of our individual WP installs into WPMU over the last few days. It’s going to really make life a lot easier around here while adding some real advantages. You’ve seen Jim showing a million reasons to use WPMU in the college environment and while most (maybe all) can be transferred over to K12 there are some advantages to using WPMU in K12 that are worth looking at a little more directly. Flexibility – WordPress can handle just about any web need I have in a school setting. I can of course use it to blog but it can just as easily be the backbone for my school’s website and act more like a CMS. And imagine a school website that was both current and easy for multiple users to updated without expensive software. The ability to quickly and easily change themes is attractive to users but it is also a key component in creating engaging web experiences for students. BlackBoard and other CMS options tend to pretend to give you control over how your particular page or site looks but real customization is not an option at the user level and it makes a difference. Being able to control all the aspects of the Richard III page made things far more professional and interesting to […]
Comments on this post
As much as The Simpsons gets a lot of flak for not being as good as “back in the day” it can still speak truth so well.
I don’t care what they say, I love the Simpsons.
Lalalalalaalala!
It would be hard for me to imagine a better scene than that one.