Clarence has a brilliant post on thinking about change:
Remote Access: Thinking About Change
Thinking About Change
All year I’ve been trying to teach the kids in my class to question things and look at possibilities. I always try to push them to see how things can be. I do not want them to accept things as they are, but to wonder instead about how they can be.
The biggest challenge we face in reorganzing the schools is in our unconscious assumptions about the nature of school.
Now, can we talk Clarence into putting his brainstorming tool into a wiki so we can ALL play along?
May 28th, 2006
Posted in Education
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May 19, 2006 — “Accountability Plus Standards Equals Success” appeared in the Poughkeepsie Journal.
FACT SHEETS, OP-EDS
Accountability Plus Standards Equals Success
I read this op-ed piece and the EducationWonk’s take on it and seems to me like EdWonk and SecSpell are both missing some components in their equation. Human Performance Technology (HPT) holds that there are six factors that lead to success. Secretary Spellings got two of them — standards and accountability — and EdWonk got part of a third — the involvement of the right people.
What is missing from this equation?
- Read the rest of this entry »
May 23rd, 2006
Posted in Education
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“The Internet changes everything.” We think we know what that means but I’ve come to believe that we’ve overlooked an important characteristic of everything.
We’re becoming more and more aware of the effect of the internet on geography. The meta-verse erases space. Online, everybody is the same distance from anybody else. The corollary of that has been slipping by us. If the meta-verse erases space, it must also erase time. For those who spend many hours each day onlne, I don’t mean that kind of time. Einstein gave us the models for non-Euclidean space-time and we’ve projected the web into space without paying attention to the effect on time.
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May 21st, 2006
Posted in Distance Education, Education, Observations
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Teachers don’t like to go to school.
This probably seems self evident. I suspect this is because they know what goes on in school and are less interested in subjecting themselves to the same kinds of activities that they subject their students to. This is probably doubly true of online classes.
And I’m also being quite righteously “tongue-in-cheek” here.
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May 7th, 2006
Posted in Distance Education, Education, Online Community
3 Comments »
Grants are a fact of life in higher ed. People who can write grants and get them funded are valued above those who merely engage in daily discourse with students. It’s getting harder to have grants funded because of the rules on defining “rigorous evidence” in educational research. Basically, it’s the medical “clinical trial” model. The reference document is a how-to guide for selecting interventions based on the quality of research behind them. Remember that NCLB REQUIRES that interventions be supported by relevant research.
First: The research MUST use randomized control experimental designs. This is not optional.
Second: The research MUST be done in at LEAST two schools, one of which is “similar” to the proposed application site.
What does that LOOK like when you’re trying to do the research?
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May 4th, 2006
Posted in Education
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Python is one of those languages that I feel like I should know better. I bought a book on it a couple weeks back and thought I’d try to figure out why I can’t get anything that’s Python based to work on any of my Linux machines. I figure that it has to be something common that I’m doing on all of them. There’s some default I’m setting/not setting.
Anyway. My daughter came to me the other day and said, “Dad? Can you teach me to read computer codes?”
“What do you mean ‘computer codes’? What kind of codes?”
She shrugged, “I don’t know. Whatever there is.”
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April 28th, 2006
Posted in Kids, Observations
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The BigDog asks these interesting questions — several of which have been on my mind lately.
CogDogBlog » Blog Archive » Online Community Megalopoli
[W]hat sorts of online community based things do you participate in? How many are outside your organization? What is your level of involvement? What would make one something that will sustain your interest.
I’ve been participating in online communities since before there was web, really. It started out with IRC in the late 80s and early 90′s then moved into the text based MUDs, MUSHes, and MUSEs. Tapped-In is an evolved version of MOO with a graphical component layered on top. What made those communities work — and there were often two or three hundred people at a time online — was that there was “something to do” and it was generally more fun to do it in a groups. In MUDs the objective is to slay beasts, gain treasure, and increase skills — sorta like the old Zork games on steroids. In MUSE/MUSH/MOO environments the objective was to create fantastic worlds and experiences — like writing your own interactive novels. Of course, making them ‘cool’ and sharing them with your friends was key.
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April 12th, 2006
Posted in Online Community
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It’s been just about 18 months since I’ve been carrying my MP3 player almost everywhere. I don’t think about it any more — unless I run it out of content and forget to reload. That happened recently and I was forced to turn on the radio in my car.
And just as quickly shut it off again.
Scrabbling thru my playlist I found a couple of podcasts that were worthy of a re-run and let them play rather than listen to the aggravating babble on the airwaves.
I realized at that moment that my iRiver has become the sound track in my life. Sometimes it’s music, mostly it’s not. But I’ve noticed some things that are different now than BP (Before Podcasts). Read the rest of this entry »
April 6th, 2006
Posted in Observations
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Part of the impetus for redesign came from an evolving sense of what I want this space to be, part from just wanting to do something cool. A couple of weeks ago I picked up a copy of The Zen of CSS Design which discusses the tricks and techniques exemplifying the designs on CSS Zen Garden.If you’re not familiar with CSS Zen Garden, it’s a site where only the style sheet changes, not the content. They have a huge gallery of various styles all displaying the same textual content in different ways. It boggles the mind.
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April 3rd, 2006
Posted in Observations
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Of course all the genetic templates for our new biota are Terran; the minds designing them are Terran; but the terrain is Martian. And terrain is a powerful genetic engineer, determining what flourishes and what doesn’t, pushing along progressive differentiation, and thus the evolution of a new species. And as the generations pass, all the members of the a biosphere evolve together, adapting to their terrain in a complex communal response, a creative self-designing ability. This process, no matter how much we intervene in it, is essentially out of our control. Genes mutate, creatures evolve: a new biosphere emerges, and with it a new noosphere. And eventually the designers’ minds, along with everything else has been forever changed.
Kim Stanley Robinson
Green Mars
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April 2nd, 2006
Posted in Observations
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