AssortedStuff

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Meanwhile, Somewhere Else

May 8th, 2008

Since it takes a while for international news to break through the wall of celebrity gossip and political trivia here in the US, I just learned today that a long dormant volcano in Chile began a major eruption last Friday.200805081404.jpg

While that’s interesting enough, it was this slide show of pictures of the event from a news service in that country that really grabbed my attention.

Who knew there was so much lightning associated with an erupting volcano (I’m sure someone other than me did!)? It really does look like something out of a science fiction movie.

Makes the piddly little 1.8 earthquake that got people around here chattering yesterday look pretty insignificant.

Tags:   · · Filed under: science and technologyNo Comments

Testing Trumps Teaching Everytime

May 8th, 2008

Our district subscribes to Discovery Education Streaming, an excellent collection of video and other resources for instruction at just about any level and for almost any topic.

We’ve made it available to teachers for a couple of years now and most of them love the materials and use the service constantly.

However, our IT department this week sent out a message asking that our middle and high schools not use the site from now until June 13th.

Because for the next month those students will be taking the state standardized tests (the SOL’s in our local vernacular) online and, when you have limited bandwidth, it must be reserved for high priority activities.

And nothing gets a higher priority in American education than testing.

Tags:   · · · Filed under: the olsd2 Comments

All Science is Either Physics or Stamp Collecting

May 8th, 2008

Last month I ranted about a teacher raising the possibility of the world being swallowed by a black hole created by the Large Hadron Collider at CERN in Europe.

However, with my last physics class more than a few years back, I didn’t have a good grasp of what the project is supposed to do much less why someone might be afraid of it on a cosmic level.

After watching the TED talk by Brian Cox, a “rock star physicist”, I have a somewhat better understanding of the science behind the Collider.

Actually, I had to watch it three times to reach that point. :-)

But I find the concepts fascinating. And the scale of the theories being investigated at CERN certainly add some humbling context to the everyday routine of life.

BTW, you’ll have to watch the video to understand where the title of this post came from.

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A Step Back From Web 2.0

May 8th, 2008

A German publisher is planning on selling a dead-tree edition of Wikipedia.

Next fall, you’ll be able to buy a collection of articles from the German edition of the online encyclopedia called The One-Volume Wikipedia Encyclopedia. It will cost about 20 euros.

Since all the material in Wikipedia was produced by volunteers under a Creative Commons license, the company is not required to pay for the content (they will, however, donate 1 euro per copy to the Wikimedia foundation).

So, are the writers who contributed to the wiki being ripped off?

Possibly. They certainly aren’t being paid for the material they added to articles being sold.

But beyond that, the idea of a printed version of Wikipedia seems somewhat bizarre. The whole concept of the project is to maintain a living document that constantly changes based on the best available information.

Locking it down into print form seems so much like…, like…, like the Encyclopedia Britannica.

On the other hand, maybe the librarians and other educators who view Wikipedia as the great evil of knowledge will be more accepting of it in this pre-web 2.0 format.

Tags:   · · · Filed under: the read/write webNo Comments

Cheap Tech Support (aka Let Someone Else Do It)

May 6th, 2008

From a “special report” in the current eSchoolNews, I learned something interesting about the overly-large school district for which I work.

When it comes to supporting computers in an organization, “industry best practices suggest a computer-to support-staff ratio of no more than 100 to one”.

We, on the other hand, are doing it with “just 130 support specialists”.

According to the spokesguy from our IT department quoted in the article “We’re going on the cheap, and we actually do a pretty good job.”.

Of course, he’s completely ignoring the hundreds and hundreds of people in the system who DON’T work for IT but still provide tech support, even though for most, it’s nowhere close to their job description.

Going on the cheap, indeed!

It’s pretty easy to make that happen when you have someone else doing a big chunk of the work for you!

Ok, I’m going to bed now so I can get up bright and early to search for another place to work. :-)

[BTW, I'd link to this article but eSchoolNews has this "special report" (AKA excuse to sell more ad pages) locked behind a subscription firewall.]

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Spooks 2.0

May 6th, 2008

Not too long ago, I taught at a high school that is right around the corner from the CIA.

Driving down the road you wouldn’t know it was there since there was no indication that anything unusual was going on in the compound labeled as belonging to Department of Transportation behind the high fence.

But even so, we all knew exactly what it was and where it was.

Things change, however, even in the world of spies.

Now there are large signs directing people approaching from all directions in the area to the “George Bush* Center for Intelligence”.

And the National Intelligence Agency now has an RSS feed on their “flashy, newly designed public web site“. I guess we’re only days away from the announcement of their blog.

Welcome to spooks 2.0.

[* That's Bush the elder.]

Tags:   · · · Filed under: other rantsNo Comments

Safety is the Smallest Part of the Equation

May 5th, 2008

I’ve ranted before about the law passed by our state legislature requiring all teachers to include lessons about internet safety in their curriculums.

But, while the web is a fast changing place, things move pretty slowly here in the real world: the bill was enacted two years ago.

Virginia public schools will soon launch Internet safety lessons across all grade levels, responding to a state mandate that is the first of its kind in the nation. Even though today’s students have known no life without the Internet, only a couple of states have laws that recommend schools teach online safety.

In Virginia, local school systems have been rewriting policies, running pilot programs and putting final touches on lesson plans to be offered from kindergarten through 12th grade starting in September.

At least the state got it right in one big way. The message must come from the teachers and be integrated with their other instruction, instead of something like a single inoculation-type assembly.

Before they work with the kids, however, the teachers themselves need to understand internet safety and we still have far too many adults who actually believe the email from the IRS about their lost tax refund.

It would be best if we could do that instruction face-to-face, including meaningful discussions about how to best present this to the kids.

But since our overly-large school district has more people involved in instruction than many systems have kids, we fall back on an automated approach. Our teachers will be learning about internet safety by watching a series of online videos.

As you might expect, the material presented in those videos is rather negative. Not at the Dateline/Fox Alert level, but still pretty bad.

However, instead of teaching “internet safety” by warning kids about talking to strangers in chat rooms or posting nasty stuff on MySpace, I wish we could take a more positive approach to integrating this into the classroom.

Internet safety should be part of information literacy, the process of helping students understand that there is good and bad material on the web and how to tell the difference.

We need to teach them how to be constructive web publishers as part of their work in learning science, social studies and the rest of the subjects we expect them to know, not just how to be “safe”.

Because this really isn’t about “safety” anymore. Knowing how to responsibly and effectively add content to the web is fast becoming a life skill.

Many students will be doing just that as part of jobs in their future life, in addition to the recreational publishing activities they’re involved with now (whether we like it or not).

So the bottom line to teaching internet safety is that scaring kids (and adults, for that matter) into responsible use of the web only covers part of what they’ll need going forward.

A very small part.

Tags:   · · · · · Filed under: teaching and learning2 Comments

It Could Be An Explosive First Period

May 5th, 2008

This latest charter school theme scares me on so many levels.

By way of the ever vigilant Boing Boing, we learn that Wilmington, Delaware has approved a charter school with a focus on homeland security.

Curriculum choices for students, who are to be called Cadets, range from SWAT (Special Weapons and Tactics) through prison guard, water rescue, paramedic, fireman, professional demolition and emergency response operator, according to a Board statement.

There’s absolutely nothing wrong with any of those jobs, but I wonder if high school isn’t a little early to be making the choice to join the SWAT team.

Not to mention learning “professional demolition”.

Tags:   · · · Filed under: education reformNo Comments

Getting Attached to the World

May 3rd, 2008

My skills as a “futurist” are pretty poor but I’m pretty confident with this one.

Cuba lifting the ban on personal ownership of computers this week will have a much bigger influence on changing that country’s government than the idiotic embargo supported by generations of American politicians.

The cost of getting one is still beyond the income of most people and internet access is still severely restricted, so it won’t happen immediately.

But this is a big first step.

Tags:   · · Filed under: other rants2 Comments

An Educational Futures Market

May 3rd, 2008

The New York Times reports on the trend of some school systems to post student grades online for parents to view.

I have no problem with this. Pretty much anything that can get parents more involved with their children’s education, not to mention talking to them about it, is a good thing.

But this may be taking the concept too far.

With some programs, not only is a student’s grade recalculated with every quiz, but parents can monitor the daily fluctuations of their child’s class ranking. The availability of so much up-to-the-minute information about a naturally evasive teenager can be intoxicating: one Kansas parent compared watching PowerSchool to tracking the stock market.

Following the education of a teenager is like tracking the stock market?

Most economists (at least those not being paid by a talking head channel) will tell you that the day-to-day moves of the market mean very little. You’ve got to invest for the long term.

The same should be true of children and their education.

Tags:   · · · Filed under: teaching and learningNo Comments