Category Archives: Space

NCEE and Learning Costs

In one of our favorite fun games, the main character must save a people from an evil, world dominator. The character must, however, purchase weapons and upgrades from the very people she’s trying to save. Fun game, really dumb concept, and easily fixed.

So what to make of the NCEE’s $20 Saveus proposal. Maybe this shouldn’t burn me so, but I’m a little worn over being cented to death. This is the same problem I have with cancer cures and heart transplants and the price of knowledge.

In any event, it seems to me that wages will begin to rise in India as cost of living and quality adjust in their economies. But I’m no economist so I could be wrong. Maybe I’m not a very good capitalist.

In another any event, I think the NCEE will be important reading, especially for those of us involved in new media curriculums. The NCEE proposes a system-wide overhaul, which I’ve clipped down:

1. A stiffer exam at the 10th grade built on international benchmarks
2. Better distribution of savings from #1
3. Top-third teacher recruiting; change compensation and retirement standards
4. Develop modernized standards of evaluation and assessment practices
5. Contractualize governance with direct teacher involvement and direct state funding
6. Universalize early ed
7. Equitize practice and finances so that the most needy don’t get left out
8. Provide current workers with access to new literacies
9. Fed should fund learning for current adults
10. Develop regional-based outcomes

Here’s a link to the Executive Summary of the report.

Going forward with such a system would demand the kind of high concept and system thinking not currently in vogue in our own national leaderships’ collective thought space. And I’d suggest that altering systems without bringing human-scale design to urban spaces will simply result in more disappointment.

21st Century Education

A list of responses to Time’s recent headliner:

The way we teach kids has not changed very much over the years. Yet all around our schools, society has changed in astounding ways. We are able to put humans into space, and yet, students in America’s urban schools couldn’t explain how a vehicle put into space is able to orbit the earth. The curriculum of our schools is designed to keep kids thinking inside the box, and discourage innovative thinking. Yet, there are currently calls for finding ways to bring our schools out of the 20th century. Time Magazine’s lead article this week addressed this issue.

The Art of Teaching Science

To me “powerpointlessness” is something that died a long time ago that is just an annoying tool that adults use to bore audiences to tears. First graders using tools on the internet is great but what about some of the old school logo type programming. I just don’t understand why a child putting a PowerPoint presentation together is so exciting. If a first grader programmed a logo turtle to move through an obstacle course then I would be very impressed!!

21st Century Educator

Trained and experienced educators run the schools. But perhaps more than anything else, education in the 21st century is about conversations, and our schools must operate within conversations between classrooms and homes, schools and communities, and lots of potent, two-way conversations between students and their learning experiences.

Most of the rest of the story includes some inspiring examples of schools that are moving to the edge of the wave. But what they make me wonder is if all schools might become charter schools. Each school is free to reshape itself within the context of a dynamic curriculum that reflects today and tomorrow, but incorporating local needs, local opportunities, and a desperate need to make schools powerful engines for improving neighborhoods, villages, cities and the world.

2 Cents Worth

At the moment we’re being pressed with lots of “reports” about the state of American education and education in Connecticut. Here’s an example. And the soon to come assessment by NCEE. I hope people keep in mind that global engagement is hypertextual. What do we mean by globalist thinking and internationalism? What will we mean by technology and literacy?

Urban Living and Rules of Exclusion

How Far Can We Extend This?
Here’s an interesting take from Seed:

Experiments have shown that social rejection prompts people to make poor decisions, such as eating more than they know they should or drinking too much. Now, a study in the current issue of the journal Social Neuroscience uncovers the neural basis for such poor decision-making. Researchers report that the feeling of social exclusion changes activity in specific regions of the brain responsible for self-control.

I’d bet that we could infer further about negative decision-making in stressful living environments in general, such as low-opportunity urban centers or in populations weighed down by debt.

Then Again
In another SEED article we can call into question bad decisions in general. Yes, metaphorically, we could always kill the elephants.

Elephants repeatedly rampage through residential areas of Sumatra island because of deforestation that has reduced their habitat.

Touring

I’m currently in Lewisburg doing a tour with K of Bucknell U. The food is great, the company engaging at my brother-in-law’s place across the street from the university. We’re here to think about the science offerings and the next four or five years. It’s been a wonderful road trip. More soon.

Seasons of Congress and Elections

Here’s a quote from the Toronto Star

Researchers warn in the journal Science that 90 per cent of present-day marine fish, crustaceans, shellfish and other currently eaten species of seafood could vanish in 50 years.

The truth of this will be born out someday but such a potential problem is a real issue. This is one frustrating problem with politics in America. It’s not Congress as an institution, but the fact that the people currently holding office can’t seem to project an operational habit of perspective.

Our young are often accused of being slouchers, ignorant, and lazy. Schools need to be held accountable. And we need wars on poverty, terrorism, and sex. It is office holders who need to be held accountable, need a nice dose of learning, and need to be held accountable. I’d love for Senators to hold themselves accountable and to come into office with a new ethic. “I need to work on real problems and argue best practices with an open mind and with hard critical tools.”

Unfortunately, people are now using the office for their own good, not for the good of cities, states, and the commons. Case in point. Pharmacies are now a law-enforcement arm. I have been fighting a cold for some weeks and typically use lots of Pseudoephedrine. In order to purchase this, I have to go the counter, sign my name away, and am limited in my supply. The counterperson isn’t happy at all about this because the process takes time and adds to the complexity of a relatively simple transactional space. In order to solve a problem that could be handled in much more creative ways, millions of people’s health has been complexified by bad apples. We lack creativity in our solutions.

Discourse is another matter. Political discourse has been destroyed by bad manners, demagoguery, and economics. John and Jane Doe are effectively cut out of politics because their voices have been drowned out by money and bad manners. To run for a position of leadership and responsibility should be a privilege, worthy of respect and encouragement. Electronic voting machines are simply another addition to the bad dream of the present. And yet another influencial fool has had his mask removed.

Priorities, real problems–all these have been drowned out by nonsense and issues that make for entertainment, not adult responsibility and robust effort. We should be worried about fish. We should be worried about health. We should be building on human creativity. If we continue on our present course, we will end up hating our neighbors because they worship snakes. The stock market looks good, but that isn’t the issue. More jobs can take the form of good and bad. In CT we are only gaining low-pays. Gas prices are down so buy that SUV and lose yourself to the peace of forgetfulness.

Walls and Fences

It strikes me that in Frost’s poem, Mending Wall, fence is a term used somewhat loosely. There’s a difference between a wall as border and fence as border. I’d suggest that animals are more tied to fences than borders and that walls imply more of something permanent. A border fence is a dumb idea, I think, and that for the future, other kinds of impulses need to be the call of the moment. What about human trafficking as a simple question of consequences?

The 2,000 mile US-Mexico border is complex. It’s more than just a magnet and playground for drug cartels. It’s a metaphor for relations. If this is so, then words have to be more powerful than chain-link. In this case, poets are more important than polititians. Friends more than enemies.

Updates and Rethinking

One of the problems with updating this space for the last couple of weeks is that I’ve been working elsewhere, behind the scenes with another weblog, in front using one as a course hub, and doing a whole bunch of thinking about RSS, library research work with some fabulous colleagues (R and A), and Ability-based education work–and all of this has taken me away from thinking through the weblog.

Now there’s more to think about. bbPress is moving and WP Multiuser is something to now reconsider. I’m also in an ecclectic space: where a common theme is difficult to organize thinking into. Hypertext, learning approaches, alternative approaches to classroom presentation, storage, novels–what is the common thread, if any?

One common issue is with the weblog as an effective organizer for teaching and its relation to other organizations at the college, such as the library. Feeding information out to college held weblogs is a good idea and can be done even at the research database level since we’ve been able to do pretty well placing search alerts from EBSCO into Vista course shells.

By the way, could someone send me Neha’s new URI?

Idea Flows

Ray Hudson in the October Progress in Human Geography writes in “Regions and place: music, identity and place”:

‘Places’ can be thought of as complex entities, ensembles of material objects, people, and systems of social relationships embodying distinct cultures and multiple meanings, identities and practices. As such, places are contested and continually in the process of becoming, rather than essentialized and fixed, open and porous to a variety of flows in and out rather than closed and hermetically sealed (Hudson, 2001: Chapter 8 ). How then can music be thought of in relation to the (un)making of place?

I’m less interested in the question than I am in the use of the word “flow.” It’s a nice metaphor here given that a weblog can also illustrate the notion of in and out flow, much like a neighborhood, whose streets one year may bring in a succession of different families, thus contributing to the continuity and change of a place.

Sidebar note: in rhetoric, we should try to eliminate the givens and thus leave space for what may not be known or assumed. Knock out the assumed. “ensembles of material objects” = yikes.

Chambers

In the United States we now have a concrete star chamber. It’s all about trust, right. The press, in mind, hasn’t done enough to inform and evaluate citizens about the language of 3929. If this can be said

SEC. 106. HABEAS CORPUS MATTERS.

(a) In General- Section 2241 of title 28, United States Code, is amended–

(1) by striking subsection (e) (as added by section 1005(e)(1) of Public Law 109-148 (119 Stat. 2742)) and by striking subsection (e) (as added by added by section 1405(e)(1) of Public Law 109-163 (119 Stat. 3477)); and

(2) by adding at the end the following new subsection:

`(e)(1) No court, justice, or judge shall have jurisdiction to hear or consider an application for a writ of habeas corpus filed by or on behalf of an alien detained by the United States who–

`(A) is currently in United States custody; and

`(B) has been determined by the United States to have been properly detained as an enemy combatant or is awaiting such determination.

This language “exists” outside reviewable scrutiny, doesn’t it? In other words, other than principles, who would be able to evaluate “properly detained” and “is awaiting such determination”? This last bit just kills me: “detained by the United States who . . . is awaiting such determination”?