Nine Theses on Wikipedia: A Special Feature
I submit these nine theses to Wikipedia’s community and to the world. I do this, as Martin Luther said when he posted his famous 95 theses, “Out of love for the truth and the desire to elucidate it.”
My Blog
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Excelsior College announces “Bachelor’s Degree for Under $10,000” program
Excelsior College, formerly known as Regents College, is a fully accredited New York state private institution that grants degrees based on exam scores and portfolio evaluation. As such, it is a natural fit to students who want to study using free online resources and who cannot afford to attend college (or more precisely, who can’t afford…
7 comments on Excelsior College announces “Bachelor’s Degree for Under $10,000” program3 minutes -
The future, according to Kathy Sierra
Kathy Sierra blogged earlier today six years ago (!) that “The future is not in learning”; the future lies, instead, in “unlearning.” This sounds awfully like another example of the geek anti-intellectualism that I love to hate; we’ll see about that. Since that’s how the post comes across–beginning with the title–it has already gotten a lot of…
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Update about the boys, part 1 – January 2012
It’s been a long time since I gave an update about what I’m doing with the boys, who are now 5.5 years (H.) and 15 months (E.). I guess the biggest news about H. is that he’s now writing regularly and doing quite well with that, but we’ve made progress and made minor adjustments with…
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Why online conversation cannot be the focus of a new pedagogy
One of the most commonly touted features of a new, digitally-enhanced pedagogy, championed by many plugged-in education theorists, is that education in the digital age can and should be transformed into online conversation. This seems possible and relevant because of online tools like wikis and blogs. There has been a whole cottage industry of papers and…
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Would degrees by examination revitalize university education?
A 14-year-old essay by Prof. Paul Trout inspired some random but related thoughts on university education: • Dumbing down college education, by grade inflation and lowering standards, can’t continue forever. The nature of education itself demands limits. At some point, a college degree will inevitably become meaningless, as many have said, and employers will need…
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On educational anti-intellectualism: a reply to Steve Wheeler
Suppose a student arrived at the age of 18 not knowing anything significant about World War II or almost any other war, barely able to do arithmetic, ignorant of Sophocles, Shakespeare, Dickens, and most other great writers, and wholly unschooled in the hard sciences (apart from some experiments and projects which made a few random…
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An example of educational anti-intellectualism
I’ve got to stop blogging quite so much, but I couldn’t let this pass without comment. One would expect Steve Wheeler, Associate Professor of learning technology at Plymouth University in England, to be plugged into and more or less represent the latest academic trends in education technology. If so, I’m a bit scared. I came…
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A short manifesto for schools: time to focus on knowledge
Ever since I was an elementary school student myself, I have been chronically disappointed with the American education establishment. Don’t get me wrong–I get along fine with most of the educators I encounter, who are good people and full of all sorts of good ideas and real competence. But I also believe a sickness pervades…
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On changing student beliefs
I came across a very irritating post in the Coffee Theory blog by Greg Linster, and felt inspired to respond. This began as a comment on his blog, but after a while it became too long for that, so I figured I’d just put it on my own blog. Greg, you actually seem like a…
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Nominate Reading Bear for an Edublog award!
Hey, I can’t nominate ReadingBear.org myself in the Edublog Awards “Best free web tool” category, but it would be grand if you did! We need the publicity–we just launched! And don’t forget WatchKnowLearn.org in the “wiki” category!
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Support the Knowledge Standards Foundation:

- An open reply to Jimmy Wales. He's wrong: Grokipedia won't necessarily be biased; and, obviously, the Trump article is badly biased. First of a series of replies to Jimmy's remarks in this Reason exposé: https://reason.com/video/2026/02/23/can-you-trust-wikipedia/
- I invited my X peeps to ask me questions and then "like" the various questions, and I would upload the answers in video form. Here it is! Christian identity – 1:10 "Call no man teacher" – 9:25 Role of government – 15:45 Authority & resistance – 19:15 Wikipedia labor – 24:20 Net value of Wikipedia […]