Nearly 80 percent of classroom teachers received their bachelor’s degrees in education, according to the U.S. Department of Education. Yet a 2006 report written by Arthur Levine, the former president of Teachers College, the esteemed institution at Columbia University, assessed the state of teacher education this way: “Today, the teacher-education curriculum is a confusing patchwork. Academic instruction and clinical instruction are disconnected. Graduates are insufficiently prepared for the classroom.” By emphasizing broad theories of learning rather than the particular work of the teacher, methods classes and the rest of the future teacher’s coursework often become what the historian Diane Ravitch called “the contentless curriculum.”

Of Lemov’s plans:

Lemov is interested in offering teachers what he describes as an incentive just as powerful as cash: the chance to get better. “If it’s just a big pie, then it’s just a question of who’s getting the good teachers,” Lemov told me. “The really good question is, can you get people to improve really fast and at scale?”

Good pay, good teachers, and solid instruction and practice in the art of teaching. While Green does a good job describing methods as solutions, she rarely touches on the why’s of teaching beyond the problem of “scope” and “poor performance.” It’s never wrong to ask why schools “should” exist in their present form. The United States has millions of children to teach and thus requires millions of teachers. An additional issue has to do with the problem of educating the educators who educate the educators and how large of an issue this is. Another issue with the article is its emphasis on managing the classroom and holding the attention of students “in school.” Green and her subjects know there’s more to the problem but the examples invariably always come to the simple notion of attending to the teacher and to content. Fine. All one has to do here is examine TV to understand that the most basic attention skill is the ability to perform with a persona. Ultimately, questions about improving the performance of the entire system will come down to asking questions about the metaphors we use, such as classroom, student, teacher, school, schooling, and test, and whether schools frame a humane and ethical dimension of the life we want people to have in the future.

I never really understood the content of M.K.T. tests, but found this interesting:

Inspired by Ball, other researchers have been busily excavating parallel sets of knowledge for other subject areas. A Stanford professor named Pam Grossman is now trying to articulate a similar body of knowledge for English teachers, discerning what kinds of questions to ask about literature and how to lead a group discussion about a book.

I don’t understand what this means or the implications and context, other than it points to general abilities teachers should demonstrate informed discipline to discipline. What are the knowledge sets, which are going to be critical ten years from now when students heading out of schools in the future enter schools of education?

A study conducted by Trucost, a London-based consulting group, recently assessed the environmental use, damage, and loss by 3,000 of the world’s largest corporations.

The study draws conclusions and information from eight years of study, and was commissioned by the United Nations Principles for Responsible Investment and the United Nations Environment Programme. The report is the result of increasing concern for major companies not being held accountable for a level of corporate social responsibility in regards to environmental impact.

As policy remains in limbo, government and environmental officials continue to quarrel over abolishing the practice of subsidizing and replacing it with instating a cost for damage, and the stakes increase. Fresh water, fisheries, fertile farming soil, and human quality of life is being negatively effected each year as a result of negligent business practice.

The companies assessed by the report are from the UK-FTSE and 100 other major markets, including all 500 companies on the Standard & Poor’s list of the largest traded companies in the United States (Microsoft, Proctor and Gamble, Apple, Exxon Mobil, etc).

The report, which will officially be published in May, assessed the price tag on the estimated combined corporate damage at $2.2 trillion a year — more than the national economies of all but seven of the world’s countries in 2008.

A final observation is that having a digitally mediated component to the learning environment can be surprisingly inclusive. As teachers in Project K-Nect began to experiment with using the blogs and instant messaging for discussing math in the classroom, an unexpected (to us) dynamic emerged. It turns out that many kids who don’t like speaking up in class are completely comfortable speaking up online. Students who don’t like to raise their hands use the devices to ask questions or participate in collaborative problem solving. There appears to be something democratizing about having a “back channel” as part of the learning environment.

I find it interesting that not one of my Contemporary Fiction students has brought a laptop to class.

S wonders (not, where are the hypertexts) but where are the records and why weren’t they provided to all the people who need to know or should know.

The PCP’s Observations
The PCP knows the story and the narrative. The PCP has seen the evidence and has worked through a diagnosis. Diagnosis (Greek) means to discern, distinguish, and, more specifically, to take something apart for the purposes of knowing (gnosis). It implies, in medical application, lots of work and responsibility in the form of a narrative. It’s not conjecture, which is a toss, or interpretation, which is a specific kind of structured utterance, which is what patient’s bring the PCP in the first place, like a driver pushing their auto into the shop and sounding out the problem to the mechanic and the mechanic responding with nods.

The Patient’s Observations
The patient doesn’t really observe anything, as Ailment A is inside and can’t be seen.

The Solution
The PCP clicks a button and shoots “the narrative” to the Specialist with “backstory” in tow, so that simple questions, such as “what are you allergic to,” are ready at hand on the reading machine.

We don’t need to strive for efficiency. We just need to think with a healthy dose of theory, practicality, and humanism, and use the tools we have.

Disagreements?

A larger view

It was brilliant. I couldn’t stop laughing. It was a game but also a joke, a humongous joke. I felt gratified. I was anxious to read more from him. I needed a new hit, so I went to the library and took one of his first books at random, Llamadas telefónicas, a short story collection, and it didn’t suprise me at all when in one of the stories I met Arturo Belano once again. He looked younger but he was exactly the same. He was living at that time in Spain, near Barcelona. He was hiding, writing, and working as a watchman of a tedious camping club in the Costa Brava. He seemed unaware of what was waiting for him.

Thanks, Matt.

The core technologies are HTML, XML, CSS3, and javascript, with some dipping into Objective C for experiments with applications. I have mixed feelings about building device-specific apps but working with Xcode is fairly straightforward and the time spent won’t be wasted.

I was a little surprised at the ease with which EPUB handled html documents. Tinderbox, therefore, will play a key role in producing hypertext content. The content will then be tailored for mobile, iPad, web, and other reading devices. The territory looks pretty interesting at the moment.

As we know from arXiv.org, the 20th century model of publishing is inadequate to the kind of sharing possible today. As we know from Wikipedia, post-hoc peer review can support astonishing creations of shared value. As we know from the search for Mersenne Primes, whole branches of mathematical exploration are now best taken on by groups. As we know from Open Source efforts like Linux, collaboration between loosely joined parties can work at scales and over timeframes previously unimagined. As we know from NASA clickworkers, groups of amateurs can sometimes replace single experts. As we know from Patients Like Me, patient involvement accelerates medical research. And so on.

The beneficiaries of the system where making things public was a privileged activity, whether academics or politicians, reporters or doctors, will complain about the way the new abundance of public thought upends the old order, but those complaints are like keening at a wake; the change they fear is already in the past. The real action is elsewhere.

The Internet’s primary effect on how we think will only reveal itself when it affects the cultural milieu of thought, not just the behavior of individual users. The members of the Invisible College did not live to see the full flowering of the scientific method, and we will not live to see what use humanity makes of a medium for sharing that is cheap, instant, and global (both in the sense of ‘comes from everyone’ and ‘goes everywhere.’) We are, however, the people who are setting the earliest patterns for this medium. Our fate won’t matter much, but the norms we set will.

In the larger context, we need to think hard about markets in their broadest sense: ideas, goods and services, information, energy. The jobs figures still suck but in my estimation this has a lot to do with players sitting on their hands wondering what Mr/Ms Entertainment will do next, what new revelations will come, or about the fate of Google’s new phone. Google and Apple are apparently doing something, while, according to one speaker on a Sunday morning show, “businesses are reluctant . . . . and for good reason.” Nobody asked: what the hell are you talking about?

Kindle, Nook or Apple tablet? Should we wonder about the device already or about what goes in the thing: convention, links, other media. This headline from the Washington Post is an instance of a problem in logic: “U.S. job loss report is blow to still-fragile recovery” link. How does this make sense? The “report” is “blowing” the “recovery.”

One trend I’ve noticed in the camp who launched Obama into office is to kick back and wait for him to do something, to solve several pressing matters. A powerful narrative in the press (for most people this means TV World) at the moment is that Democrats will not come out for Congressional voting. Wow do we have short memories. Really, since when is everything Obama’s problem?

And then it occurred to me: Perhaps for the first time, we’re moving into narrative media that are not backwards-compatible. The written word can be spoken, the printed word written, movies can be translated to books, but games and hypertext narrative don’t go backwards.

I disagree but on nuanced questions.

I would submit that

1. The dramatic questions are different: what story would we tell with the latest rendering of Prince of Persia, given the game?

2. What path would we follow creating a script for the film version of Patchwork Girl? Or would we local a generalized core?

I would suggest that compatibility would work fine, if we synthesize PG and reconsider the narrative arc of the game. But these films would not “be” the original, as I disagree with the notion of adaptation by definition. There are no adaptations. There are narrative versions, however.