Today, Grant wrote a post writing up a recent trip he made to Harvard to visit Eric Mazur, father of Peer Instruction, who told Grant this:

Mazur also noted in our conversation that his years of experience on the Physics AP design committee made him less than enthusiastic about AP’s. He has data showing that student who got 5s on the Physics AP do worse than other Harvard Physics students who did not take the AP’s – a sobering thought.

I’m not surprised, and I’ve also heard similar stories about AP physics having no bearing in physics performance in other colleges. My guess is that the majority of those 5′s come from AP physics B, a inch-deep, light-speed marathon through all of introductory physics: mechanics, fluids, thermodynamics, waves, light and optics, electricity and magnetism, and modern physics. In fact, this course covers more material (at a much shallower depth) than your standard first year physics course in college. Also, while AP B has developed more of a conceptual focus, students still tend to see it as mostly a sea of equations. So it doesn’t surprise me that a lot of students coming out of it, even with 5′s struggle in Mazur’s physics class which really stresses a deep conceptual understanding. I could even imagine that students coming into Harvard with 5 on the AP physics might have a bit of overconfidence (they are Harvard students after all), and work less hard in the course or and so be less likely to seek out help when they start to struggle. Another interesting takeaway from this tidbit is that there are students at Harvard who didn’t take AP physics, and if Mazur is able to make statistically significant comparisons, there must be a lot of them. While this should be obvious, it’s a common misconception some students have that they need to take “every AP” their school offers in order to have a shot admission at a school like Harvard. Not true.

As Grant Wiggins suggests, the fact that earning a 5 on AP physics shows some negative correlation with performance in a college physics course among Harvard students should be very sobering indeed. It’s one more bit of information that tells me the value of taking an AP course that is so focused on content and earning a particular score on the AP test is meaningless, and possibly even harmful to your understanding and future progress in the subject.

Nuclear weapons : Cold War :: APs : college admissions

I wrote recently that students seemed locked in an AP arms race, and them ore I think about it it’s a very good analogy. Some very competitive high school students feel like they are locked in some life or death struggle with nameless competitors for precious few places at the “good” colleges (I plan to blog more on what a bogus notion it is that there are “good” colleges). And this plays out much like the drama of the Cold War. Just like the US during the height of the Cold War, we didn’t understand the struggle we were in, or the enemy we were competing with, yet we still felt the need to stockpile ever more powerful and useless nuclear weapons in the hopes of deterrence. Meanwhile, the Soviet Union was doing exactly the same thing, but this pursuit of military might was also hollowing out their economy and leading to an economic and political collapse. I suppose it’s over-stating things to compare AP’s to useless nuclear weapons and burned out students to the the Soviet Union’s economic collapse brought about by a singular focus on military might (I’m also aware that it’s abusing history as well). But the there may be a lesson from history for helping to lower the head of the college admissions frenzy—many times in the history of the Cold War, tensions were lowered by changing the rules of the game and open communication between the two superpowers. Could we do the same today, by changing the rules of the college admissions process and encouraging more open communication? We could encourage students to forsake the AP courses they aren’t interested in for things that do interest them, encourage gap years, and help students to develop a life of meaning, something that more often than not, requires cooperation and teamwork with ones’ peers rather than dogged competition. It seems to me that might be just the recipe for avoiding the Mutually Assured Destruction of the AP arms race.

Establishing meaningful rituals

I started by handing out the Renaissance Man article along with the selection of suggested learning experiences recommended by Jeremy Gleick. After that, we discussed the article, and I was surprised by how much students enjoyed the article, how likable they found Mr. Gleick, and how relatable they found his accomplishment, while still recognizing what a tremendous accomplishment it is to devote an hour each day to learning. I think I found this surprising because previously, some of my students have found some of the tales of students accomplishing extraordinary things (like this student who attended a UN conference on climate change) un-relatable and a bit of a turn off.

In our discussions, students could clearly see how interesting Jeremy Gleick was, and when I asked, “would you want to eat lunch with this guy?”, many responded with an enthusiastic yes. When I asked students if they could see themselves doing this, most said they could, if… and then we listed a ton of things keeping them from doing this. If they gave up another hour of sleep, if they didn’t have so much homework, if they didn’t have so many extracurricular involvements, etc.

My second class said what was interesting was that Jeremy had created a ritual of learning. Students could see some of their own rituals in their lives, be it a sport, debate or an instrument. We also talked about how difficult it is to maintain a ritual when you don’t enjoy it. I really like this meaningful ritual notion, and am going to try to incorporate it more into my language.

How students’ schedules play into rituals and a life of meaning

This was a perfect segue in a topic students are currently thinking about a lot—their schedules for next year. One of the most pressing questions for my students is whether or not they will enroll in AP Chemistry next year as sophomores. Students who take AP Chemistry take it as their first chemistry course, and the pace of the course is very fast.

In order to help students make this decision, I asked a couple of former students who had struggled with the decision to take the course last year to write up their experience and advice about making the decision in a couple paragraphs that I might share anonymously with students. The students wrote beautiful reflections that do a great job of characterizing the difference between AP and honors chemistry, and the questions one should consider when making the decision.

I tried to help the students see that the experience they’ve gotten in my course, and the experience they are likely to get if they choose to enroll in AP are simply different. One isn’t harder than the other, no more than sprinters are better athletes than distance runners. Our classes have different goals, but it can be a good thing to be stretched in different ways.

We then discussed why one should choose to take the AP Chemistry course, and I tried to present a few reasons—you’re interested in a possible career in the sciences, you feel like you might benefit from a very fast paced course that is going to push you to keep up with the pace of the course, and stretch you to learn more material than you thought possible. But I also said one thing that I think students should not be using as a factor to drive their decision—whether or not it looks good for college.

The AP arms race

Long ago, taking an AP course truly made students stand out. It was seen equivalent to doing college work in high school. Strong performance on an AP showed interest in the subject, and colleges would often see this as a sign that those students were especially well prepared to go on to major in that discipline. But that is before the AP arms race led every student thinking he or she must take as many APs as possible just to have a chance of admission at college. Colleges have seen more and more students skip introductory classes with AP credit and struggle in subsequent courses, making them far less likely to grant credit for AP. They also see students who have 5′s in a subject and then don’t go on to do anything in the subject in college. Overall, APs become a greatly diluted metric of accomplishment, which only amplifies the arms race. It used to be taking 5 APs in a college career was unheard of. Now, some students think they need 8 or more.

Of course, this is ludicrous, and it’s a distortion of the advice you hear at many college info sessions about wanting to see applicants take the most “demanding schedule possible.” What colleges want to see is that students will take advantage of the many opportunities each college offers, and a good indicator of this is how well a student takes advantage of the opportunities available to him/her in high school. But opportunities is one and the same to AP courses—it’s only our desire to come up with shallow and easy metrics that ever to admissions officers, teachers, or students making this false equivalence.

I doubt Jeremy Gleik took every AP course at his Los Angeles private school. I say this, because I think if he did, he would never have found the time develop his one hour of learning ritual. And though it should be obvious, I think almost any college admissions officer would find his love of learning, which probably oozed from his application and his discussion of his 1 hour of learning ritual. The didn’t need to waste their time counting how many AP classes he took.

The risk of doing very time consuming things just to look good for college

This is the danger that students risk when they do things just to look good for college—they very easily can find themselves in over their heads in courses and activities they have little interest in. This will inevitably reduce their motivation to do well in these classes and activities, and that could have a negative impact on the college process. Even more importantly, if students fill up your time with demanding classes and activities they don’t enjoy, they may not have the time to find that ritual they will enjoy—the one that will add meaning to their lives.

My goal in having this conversation isn’t to get students to not sign up for AP chem. As I said before, there are many great reasons to take the course. But I do want students to think carefully about why they are taking the courses they choose, and how those choices fit into the bigger picture of learning to live a happy and meaningful life.

After these discussions I always wonder if they have any effect. But today, I got this email:

Hey Mr. Burk!
I just wanted to tell you that I really enjoyed class today and the article we read. I’m really glad we talked about the stuff for next year, and I thought some of the stuff you said will be really helpful in decision making. Just letting you know.

I’ve spent the past few days trying to follow Kelly O’Shea’s great introduction to the Momentum Transfer Model (MTM) paradigm lab, but we had considerably more trouble than her class did. Ultimately, we got to the point where we were looking at a data table that looked something like this:

And we began to study this data looking for a pattern. Eventually, some students started to see that in some cases, the changes in velocity were exactly opposite one another, and these cases happened to be when the masses were equal. Later, they realized that in cases where the changes in velocity were not the same, the more massive cart had a smaller change in velocity than the less massive cart. And from there, students were able produce a nice graph showing that , that the carts seemed to be swapping something during collisions.

One student even said that it was like two people swapping money, and so this got me thinking, and I designed this with a little bit of free time today:

So now I have a momentum currency for my class, and for a few minutes, I thought this would be cool for some sort of demo/activity in class. I’d give everyone a set amount of money, and then we’d simulate collisions where they would “transfer” momentum currency to one another. Finally, we’d tally all the individual transfers and see that momentum is conserved.

But then I got to thinking about this a bit more, and I’m not so sure this is a wise way to go. There are lots of ways that my momentum currency may confuse things more than I want. First, momentum is a vector, without creating some sort of perpendicular currency, I’m not sure that they will get that having more momentum doesn’t mean you can move in any direction you want. Second, objects end up with negative momentum, meaning they’re traveling in the negative direction. However, I have no way to track negative momentum, and so it would seem that this currency idea might mistakenly make students start to treat it like a scalar quantity, rather than a vector. Finally, I use the money metaphor a lot when dealing with energy, so I’m not sure we need a currency for both momentum and energy, and think that could get confusing fast.

So now I’m tempted to keep my POMs for myself, and not doing anything with them. But I’m curious if you have any suggestions about the usefulness of this activity or how to improve it.

So now

The response I got from readers was tremendous. You helped me see completely new uses for this application, envision great new features, and gave me tremendous advice on getting started. Again, the blog-o-twitterverse comes through in a big way. So I’ve decided to try to make this a go. I’m going to make my “one hour of learning” devoted to trying to make Inquiryweb a reality.

I first should confess my lack of expertise as a programmer. 12 years ago, I took a class in software design, and at one time, I had decent enough chops to write a 5000 line program to seat students randomly in our dining hall for sit-down meals (I even figured out the STL for that one). Since then, I’ve become quite rusty, and now am mostly content to play around with Python and get bored with Codecademy (I’ll blog more about that later).

But lots of what I’ve read (and Riley Lark) say Django and Python are the new hotness in web app development, so I spent the past week working all four of the lessons in the Django tutorial—I can make a poll-wow. I also spent most of the weekend trying to configure mySQL and Django to play nicely on my machine, which wins the cake as the most un-mac-like experience I’ve ever had on a mac. Thanks to MacPorts, an awesome package installer for mac (can you say sudo port install python27-mysql) and and lots of help from Stack Exchange, I’ve gotten everything working.

I’ve also put together what I think should be a vision for version 0.1 of Inquiryweb. I’d like a super simple web front end that can allow the user to enter a question very simply with one click. Questions should be associated with authors. Three other classes I think I will need are observations, predictions and answers. The couple of CS classes I took long ago tell me that somehow these should all be subclasses of some inquiry class, but I haven’t gotten that far yet. In addition to being able to view a particular inquiry type (question, observation, etc), you should be able to view all the inquiries made by a particular author).

Basically, I’d love Inquiryweb to make it easy to enter these questions and predictions from Brian Franks inquiry class in almost real time, and then export them out in a list to paste into a blog.

I did manage to put together a very basic UML document laying out the 5 classes I’ve thought of. And that’s about as far as I’ve gotten in terms of design:

As for real coding, I’ve entered these five basic classes into the models.py document, and used it to setup the mySQL database, and that’s it. This isn’t going to be a quick process, for sure.

I also did manage to figure out github, and have now created a public repository for this project. I’m going to use the github site to track my progress on developing this app, so that my readers who aren’t interested in my efforts to become an edu-startup aren’t bored to tears.

Future plans include:

• Writing out much more of the design doc
• setting up my mac mini with a static ip (dyndns?) so that I can use actually deploy and test inquiryweb on it.
• Setting up google app engine to run inquiryweb, if I want to be really cool and try to scale this idea.
• Trying to modify the tutorials to see if I can create my own admin interface.

So here’s where I’d love more feedback and suggestions from the my super cool social media coding cheerleaders. Where have I gone off the rails? Are there resources I should be checking out? Pitfalls to avoid? Really, any help would be most appreciated.

It’s the story Jeremy Gleick, a sophomore at UCLA who spends one hour every day learning something new, and he just completed his 1000th hour—this is beyond his coursework fro classes. So far, he’s studied everything from Gamma Ray Bursts to juggling.

Here’s a great quote from Jeremy describing the value he finds in this:

This is learning for learning’s sake, but the dabbling adds up. “Maybe you don’t become an expert,” Mr. Gleick says, “but you can get really good at something.” The practical use comes later. A detail about Jupiter’s Great Red Spot worked its way into a fictional story he wrote; sign language might be useful once he completes his emergency medical technician certification.

Here’s the other thing I find interesting. Much of the material from iTunes U. iTunes U is a pretty great resource (I’ve loved listening to both Physics for Future Presidents and Berkeley’s History 7B), and it’s now been around for six or more years since this resource debuted, but I bet I could count on my hands the number of students who have heard of it. Even with the big announcement Apple made about iTunes U and iBooks last week, I still bet may students or faculty at most schools have had the time to explore these resources.

And as much as we praise the “digital natives” I find that more often than not, they live in the internet shallows. They read ESPN, but not Grantland, they watch YouTube with the best of them, but few engage and ponder TED talks, and they rarely dig beyond the first or second link on Google. Why is this? First, I don’t think we teach the skills of how to be a lifelong learner at all-how do you find a good book to read, a useful tutorial on fly fishing or an excellent explanation of the second law of thermodynamics? So much of school consists of a teacher delivering pre-digested morsels of knowledge to students that students often flounder when seeking out learning on their own. Often, the very structure of school makes learning painful enough that few students want to pursue it on their own. Finally, we overschedule students’ lives so much that even if they did want to find time for an “hour of learning”, they couldn’t find the time.

But what if we changed this? What if there were an “Introduction to Life Long Learning Now” (ILLLN, for short) course that every 9th grade student takes, where students get together to share the things they’re learning, the cool sources they find, and their only homework is to spend an hour each night learning something that appeals to them? This is a course I’d love to teach—imagine all the things my students could teach me.

Dear math publishers: please cancel your subscriptions to Getty, Corbis, Stockbyte. The world our students live in isn't glossy or well-lit.—
Dan Meyer (@ddmeyer) January 24, 2012

Shawn Cornally, responding:

@ddmeyer As a classroom teacher, this tweet has much larger implications than just silly stock photography. Real questions aren't glossy—
Shawn Cornally (@ThinkThankThunk) January 24, 2012

Let’s get students focused on the grungy, messy problems that filled with meaning and offer deep satisfaction but don’t come with studio lighting.

This quarter, the section really delivered with Neal Gabler’s Once Percent Education, a thought provoking idictment of the current educational system with its focus on pre-determined merit, college admissions, and endless striving for perfection and individual accomplishment.

Here are a few quotes from the article:

The emphasis on personal achievement has done more than turn the admissions process into a race to rack up résumé points; more important, to the extent that elite colleges set the pace, it is turning the educational culture into one that stresses individual perfection instead of one that stresses social improvement.

Some may see this obsession with perfection as the culmination of a long trend; tiger moms have been pushing their children to be intellectual decathletes for generations. But it may actually be a reversal of an even longer trend. At the turn of the last century, the influential philosopher John Dewey saw education as a democratizing force not just in its social consequences but in its very process. Dewey believed that education and life were inextricably bound, that they informed each other. Education wasn’t just something you did in a classroom to earn grades. It was something you lived.

There is a big difference between a culture that encourages engagement with the world and one that encourages developing one’s own superiority.

Finally, a culture that rewards big personal accomplishments over smaller social ones threatens to create a cohort of narcissists.

In the end, 1 percent education is as much a vision of life as it is a standard of academic achievement — a recrudescence of social Darwinism disguised as meritocracy. Where the gap at the country’s best schools was once about money — who could afford to attend? — now there is the pretense that it is mostly about intelligence and skill. Many 99 percenters are awed by the accomplishments of 1 percenters, especially as the gap between rich and poor in SAT scores and college completion widens.

And here is the most powerful ending:

The danger isn’t just that people who are born on third base wind up thinking they hit a triple; the danger is that everyone else thinks those folks hit triples. One percent education perpetuates a psychology of social imbalance that is the very antitheses of John Dewey’s dream.

As product of public school and very modest means, who has now spent his entire teaching career working at elite private schools, I think I will be pondering the implications of this article for some time to come.

Here are just a few thoughts I’ve been having:

I would love to make an article like this part of the college process for students. At its worst, the college process for strong high school students becomes a completely individualistic exercise, steeped with competition (“you’re my best friend, but you better not apply to the school I’m applying to and take my spot”), devoid of a wider sense of the history or meaning of the process, and couched in completely hyperbolic terms—”If I don’t get into school X, my life is over.”

Why can’t we use the college process to help students better understand themselves, reflect on the opportunities they’ve been given, and understand the wider culture and history of this experience? We could teach students that the entire focus of college admissions of character—the admissions essay and the focus on extracurriculuars was cooked up in the 1920′s as a scheme by the Ivy League to identify and exclude Jews from admission, because academically, Jewish applicants were outscoring their preferred WASP counterparts. Add in some readings from the somewhat recent Gratz vs. Bollinger decision on Affirmative Action in college admissions, and findings that diversity is most beneficial to the majority students.

While we’re at it, I’d love to have students read excerpts from Shop Class as Soulcraft, to see the incredible value and satisfaction to be found in work that you don’t need a college degree to do. Let’s also bring math into the mix and do a few lessons on exponential growth by studying inflation in college tuition costs.

Then I’d like my students to consider Jonathan Kozol’s The Shame of the Nation, and help students to see that schools today are almost as segregated as they ever have been. While we are free to study physics with the latest lab equipment, focused mostly on critical thinking and deep reasoning, other, equally promising students find themselves in run-down, overcrowded schools, taking classes in sewing and hair braiding rather than APs.

I like to think that if we brought these lessons into the college process, students would have a greater sense of what an incredible privilege it is to spend four years studying ideas on one’s own, and a greater sense of responsibility to do something with that education. I’d like to think that these lessons would also significantly diminish in all the trivia of the college process: USNEWS rankings, $400/hr SAT prep and trying to figure out which school has the best party atmosphere.

I’ve written a lot about the ideas of Cal Newport and working to help student realize they have the power to change the world even in high school. I strongly encourage you to read Cal’s beautiful treatise on what the college process could be: The Race to Somewhere: How to Make the College Admissions Process the Foundation for a Well-Lived Life. Properly framed, I think these lessons about the college process can help students escape the the treadmill of individual resume building and instead focus on helping students to develop a happy life, founded on a true love of learning and desire to use one’s talents to make the world a better place, starting now.

I’ve found the differences between public and private school students and teachers to be much less than one might think. There are extraordinary teachers to be found everywhere, and the same is true for students. To me, the principal advantage of private school for teachers and students are much smaller class sizes, the freedom for teachers to set the curriculum as they see fit and of course, the incredible resources private schools are able to allocate to its students. The difference in resources is staggering (I’ve taught at schools where the tuition is over $40,000/year, and the actual cost to educate a student is 10-15 thousand more). A former headmaster of mine worked relentlessly to help students see the incredible inequality in our society (he exposed me to Kozol), and he went a step further to ask students that given this inequality, what could possibly justify a school devoting so many resources to so few students? His response to the question was always simple and direct—this investment in students comes with the greatest responsibility—using these resources to change the world for the better and reduce inequality.

Note: A day after reading this, I thought of one course at my school that is doing just what I describe above—engaging students in cooperative endeavors to make their community a better place. Synergy 8, a trans-disciplinary, project based, problem finding and solving course focused on community issues”, taught by colleagues and friends Bo Adams and Jill Gough. This course is helping 8th grade students to take a break from chasing grades and instead focus on tackling real issues in their school, from the somewhat mundane lunch line efficiency, to more significant issues of how to address childhood obseity in the greater Atlanta area.

Physics is awesome.
The goal of physics education is to convince students just how awesome physics is.

Last week Sam McKagan showed us the Physics Education Research (PER) user’s guide, which is basically the encyclopedia of all things Physics Education Research. Wonder how Peer Instruction (PI) compares to Just in Time Teaching (JiTT), Sam’s is loaded with information on every conceivable PER-based teaching method, and even includes an outstanding FAQ on Physics Education Research.

But I think the real value of the Global Physics Department to improve day-to-day physics teaching is just beginning to emerge as we explore the idea of virtual coaching. Wheaton College Physics professor Heather Whitney, describes just how powerful virtual coaching can be in a recent blog post, Show me the physics, not just the math. I strongly encourage you to take a moment to read this very thoughtful post.

In this post, Heather explains how little feedback a typical college professor gets on teaching—likely one visit per semester. I’d say this isn’t all that different in high schools, either. Remembering that it is also the case that most physics teachers in high schools are the only physics teacher in their departments, it’s can often be the case that the person visiting your class can’t really offer content or pedagogical suggestions based focused on physics teaching. Of course, these visits are helpful for assessing classroom dynamics, which any well trained teacher can comment on. But in general, I find these observations aren’t a great tool for the sustained, focused improvements I want to make as a teacher. As Heather said, I find these visits and the feedback we tend to get as teachers more helpful for making sure that I’m avoiding “terrible classroom habits” rather than developing nuances of my craft as a teacher.

So what is one to do? I think the Global Physics Department offers a solution. Heather’s post describes the incredible benefit she gained from sharing just 5 minutes of one her classes with the 15 or so attendees (both college and high school physics teachers) at the Global Physics Department. I venture to say that very, very, few, if any physics teachers are ever lucky enough to get feedback from 15 other colleagues, each with a deep understanding of physics and physics pedagogy.

Based on the value participants found from sharing 5 minute clips, we’ve decided to expand our virtual coaching sessions and are now going to try monthly coaching sessions where two physics teachers volunteer and submit 30 minute recordings of their teaching fro review.

The cost of this amazing professional development? Zero dollars. You can attend the global physics department from the connivence of your own couch, and you don’t need to get a sub, or make any travel arrangements. Best of all, this is a purely elective exercise, and consequently the energy and camaraderie of the GPD are very strong. I attend the Global Physics Department not because I’m checking off some sort of professional development requirement, but because I find the sessions genuinely helpful, and geekily, enjoy hanging out with some very cool physics teachers who I consider friends, even if we many not yet have met in real life.

So I hope you will join us this Wednesday at 9:30 for our 2nd coaching session, featuring Heather Whitney again and Frank Noschese. Both of them have submitted 30 minute clips of their teaching, and we should have a very invigorating discussion about physics teaching. If you want to join us, simply leave a comment below, and I’ll forward you the link to the videos we’ll be watching.

• Diigolet bookmarklet: I’ve become a big fan of Diigo for collecting bookmarks, and now I basically bookmark and tag everything useful I find on the internet. This bookmarklet gives me a quick hotkey to create a diigo bookmark. It’s still a little slower than the my previous favorite app for bookmarking, delibar, but the extra social features of diigo more than make up for the couple of seconds it takes for the javascript bookmarkelt to mark the page. You can follow me (occam98) if you like—I tend to tag a wide range of stuff (all sorts of science, technology, and metacognition).
• Readability: I read a lot of stuff on the internet. Often, I find the text on a page or article to be so badly formatted that it’s difficult to read. Readability solves this and instantly extracts the text making a single column of gorgeous, easy-to-read text before my eyes. If the article is super long or I want to read it later, I use Instapaper (see below), but for smaller, I want to read this now without all the garbage moments, Readability is a champ.
• Instapaper: Instapaper is a killer app. How many times have you found a logn article or blog post (perhaps even on this blog) that you want to read later, but you don’t really want to create a bookmark and save it? Instapaper solves that problem by extracting the text and storing it for you to read at your leisure on the instapaper site along with the entire library of articles you’ve saved. Even better, Instapaper for the iPhone/iPad downloads all these articles to your phone/tablet for reading offline in a beautiful interface. This app alone makes me seek out super long pieces to read for enjoyment. Luckily, there’s Longreads.
• Squrl and Watchlater: Instapaper for videos—what could be better? Many times I find what seems to be a useful video that I just don’t have time to watch in the moment. Squrl and Watchlater are two sites that allow you to collect videos on major video sites (they really only play nicely with YouTube and Vimeo—not your run of the mill flash based video embedded on a news site) and then watch them later on a custom video page, or on their iOS apps.
• Huffduffer: Instapaer for audio files. Occasionally, I’ll stumble upon some sort of embedded recording of an interview or lecture I’d like to hear. Huffduffer allows you to take that audio and turn it into a custom podcast feed you can susbscribe and listen to on your iPod.
• Amazon wishlist: This is a great little button that lets you add anything you find on the web to your amazon wishlist. I find it super useful for keeping a wishlist of lab equipment I’d like to purchase at some point in the future.
• Page Zipper: This bookmarklet brings an end to all those next page clicks you need to press to read mutli-page articles. When you activate page zipper it loads all the next pages and concatenates them into a single easy-scrolling webpage.
• Print Friendly: I don’t use this that often, but it makes a printer-friendly version of any webpage—stripping away ads, navigation and all clutter from a page you want to print.
• Subscribe to Google Reader: One click to add a webpage to my Google Reader feed? Yes please. In Google Reader, go to “Settings” and then the “Goodies” tab. There you will find the “subscribe” bookmarklet — right-click and drag the link into your browser’s toolbar.
• Markup.io: Markup.io lets you take a webage and draw/write all over it, and then share that edited page with anyone you like. It’s an awesome tool to give feedback on web designs, etc, but I’ve found it equally useful for giving students feedback on blog posts when I need to mark up a specific section/image.
• Edit Page: Click on this bookmarklet and you can literally type on the webpage as if it were a fully editable document. Change headlines on the NYT, delete images, whatever. As far as I know, you can really save or share your edits (other than printing as a pdf). A language teacher friend of mine said this would be an excellent tool for making small edits to foreign langauge news-papers to allow the teacher to substitute in easier vocabulary for lower level students.
• X-ray Goggles: This is an excellent new bookmarklet developed by the Mozilla Foundation that lets you see how a website is put together. Click on it and highlight a particular element and it will tell you the type of element it is (<div>,<p>,<a>,<h2>,etc). There are more powerful tools out there to do this like Firebug, but X-Ray goggles is wonderful for its simplicity and great for people who are just getting started with peeking under the hood of websites.
• Quix: Quix is the swiss army knife of bookmarklets. Activating it pops up a command line window that lets you do all sorts of things with just a few key presses: google image search, amazon search, email a link, and way more.

That’s my list. I put all of these in a bookmarks folder on my bookmarks tool bar titled “actions”, which gives me pretty easy access to activate each command. If you’ve got a super cool bookmarklet or other web ninja trick to share, I’d love to hear about it.

@occam98 Your blog has earned a nomination for the Fascination Awards! codepad.org/OTCpDNhN—
Joe Roberts (@Online_PhD) January 17, 2012

And I followed the link to this text:

Hi there,

An article you wrote in 2010 titled How to get rid of AP…start by changing the conversation has earned your blog a nomination for a Fascination Award: 2011′s Most Fascinating Teaching blog.

The comments posted in response to your post prove that your content not only inspires your audience, but it also creates discussion around your posts, both of which are requirements for the nomination of a Fascination award.

As a nominee of this award, you will receive a $25 restaurant gift card and full permission to display the “Nominated” emblem on your website. To learn more about the contest, the rules, or the prizes, click here: 2011 Fascination Awards Rules & Prizes:http://www.online-phd-degree.net/2011s-most-fascinating-teaching-blog-the-fascination-awards/

To get started:
1. Accept your nomination and receive your $25 restaurant gift card by sending an email that includes your blog URL to by Friday January 20th (11:59 PM EST).
2. Claim your “Nominated” badge to display on your blog:

Voting begins January 21st at 12:01 AM (EST). The blog with the most votes by January 26th at 11:59 PM (EST) will win the grand prize, a $200 restaurant gift card.

Good luck and thank you for your participation!

Director of Public Relations
Online PhD Programs:

At first I thought “Sweet—free dinner! My blog is starting to pay for itself!” (at a rate of , which gives new meaning to the phrase “If I had a nickel…”

But just as I was about to send out my email to claim my award, I thought…wait, online PhD’s? Haven’t I seen this before…

Oh, yeah: just about a year ago: The Tricks Get tricker but they still prey on our pride.

Just to refresh your memory, here’s how the scam rolls:

1. Online education sites get paid for every referal they send to an online eudcation provider.
2. The victims, “students”, sign up for online degrees, taking out tremendous amounts of loans, and often, these education providers even manager to scam the government out of federal student aid dollars.
3. Finally, with high dropout rates and questionable accreditation of many of these degree programs, students are often left with little to show for their “eduction” other than a crushing debt load.
4. And of course my role to play in all this, if I so choose, is to add to the link referrals to the online education site by linking to my award nomination and encouraging people to vote for me. If they can get enough small time bloggers like me to link to their site, it will move the SEO needle, raising the profile of the online education site in Google search results, and bringing even more eyeballs and possible victims to the online education site.

Although I am “fascinated” with this new twist on the scam and Online Ph’d's willingness to give me a free dinner in exchange for complicity in helping to raise their profile and ultimately lead more people to a spiral of student debt with little to show for it, I must decline this “Fascination Award.” As a person who is still working to pay off my student loans that are now more than 12 years old, the cost of this free dinner is just too high.