News, commentary, and resources about Learning Disabilities
LD Blog, which has been housed on my U.Va.-issue server since its inception, will soon move to it’s formal location at http://LDBlog.com. If you have a link or bookmark to it that has johnl.edschool in it, please update it.
I hope to take steps that will capture mistaken requests and reroute them to the correct location, but I am not expert enough to ensure that these steps will work. So a little human intervention is likely to be needed. Thanks.
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Along with my other blogs (and many others’ blogs, too), LD Blog is joining Sheryl’s promotion of National De-lurking Week on Paper Napkin. It’s coming in January 2006. Readers can get a head start on de-lurking by posting comments now!
Meanwhile, I’m looking for a place to put this image in the navigation elements at the right. Suggestions welcome; leave them [ahem] in the comments on this post.
Sphere: Related ContentPat Lloyd and I are abroad again, but this time it’s not to the East. It’s Portugal and surrounds.
We’re spending most of our time in Braga, which is in the northeast. Although it is a lovely city with a rich history for Portugal, Catholicism, and the ebb and flow of political tides in Europe, we actually have business in Braga. Thanks to a grant from the J. William Fulbright Foreign Scholarship Board, the Bureau of Education and Cultural Affairs of the US Department of State, and the Council for International Exchange of Scholars, I am teaching at the University du Minho and collaborating with faculty members on potential scholarly activities.
Thanks to the efforts of Luis de Miranda Correira and Ana Paula Martins, faculty members at Minho, I have had the chance to met a class of masters students on Friday the 21st; from 1400-2200, I described US approaches to identification of students with Learning Disabilities (with a substantial side-trip through basic assessment methods). The members of the group, most of whom are practicing teachers, were attentive and responsive. They are eager to know about both the practical side of identification as well as the controversies surrounding such topics as response to intervention.
Sphere: Related ContentI’ll be away for a bit, traveling to the East. I hope to keep up from where ever I am.
JohnL
This is from another of those Mac Widgets (tiny programs that permit easy switching from one function to another). This is DashBlog from June Tate and it predates WordPressDash by a few months, but development appears to be dormant at this time.
Sphere: Related ContentI work from Macs and LDBlog is served from one, too. I’m testing a new Widget that allows posting via a different interface. It’s “WordPressDash” from http://www.paniris.com/wordpressdash/.
Cameron Marlow of the MIT Media Lab is collecting data about Weblogs. If you maintain a blog or contribute to one, you can help the folks there develop a statistical picture of the people who contribute to blogs by completing an anonymous survey. I contributed to the power of the data set. The image is a link.
One might wonder why I’d elect to devote time to a blog about learning disabilities. Beyond the obvious reason (communicating my own views), there are several explanations, and I list some of them here.
Blogs provide an unfettered means of communication. There are no, publishers, editors, or others between me and anyone who elects to read the words I type. The downside of unfettered communication is that I’ll publish something ill-thought, poorly written, or just plain wrong; I’ll take that risk, in part because of the consequences of the feature of blogs discussed in the next item.
Blogs also permit readers to interact with me by submitting their comments. Thus, if I say something wrong, someone will come to my rescue. (This, of course, has risks, particularly the risk that someone will hijack the comments to promote something inappropriate, as spammners use e-mail; I’ll watch the comments and I reserve the right to remove inappropriate content from comments submitted by readers [or robots].)
Blogs are a rapidly expanding medium, as Lee Rainie wrote for the Pew Charitable Trusts. Rennie reported that data collected by the Pew Internet & American Life Project beginning in 2002 show that the number of blogs is increasing rapidly and the number of blog readers is increasing even more rapidly.
Blogs are rapidly being recongized for their impact on communication:
Some other’s answers to the question of why he or she writes a blog:
As a category of special education, learning disabilities is the subject of strong questioning. The field is battered by critics, both from within its own ranks and from outside the area. Because I’m concerned about this state of affairs, I plan to use this forum to explain my views of Learning Disabilities. I expect to devote most of my musings to the defense of LD, but I shan’t hesitate to offer my own criticism, as well.
Regardless of whether I defend or criticize LD, it must be understood that I am expressing my own views. What I post here does not represent the official position of my employer, any organizations with which I’m affiliated, or anyone else. In that sense, these musings are mine and mine alone. I share them here to promote open discussion and with the hope that discussion of the issues I raise will be beneficial to the area of LD in the long run.
Sphere: Related ContentMy name is John Lloyd. I am a professor in the Curry School of Education at the University of Virginia (USA). I serve as co-editor of the Division for Learning Disabilities Web site, TeachingLD.org, and as an officer of DLD (currently president-elect). I’ve written about learning disabilities and other matters and one can learn more than she ever wants to know about me by visiting my U.Va. personal Web space.
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Thanks for the conversation