Recently,Chris Penn was asked whether he would post a presentation of his to the web, and he said, “No.”  I have a recording of that presentation, and I am also honoring his “no” and won’t be posting it or my notes to the web.   Why would people very involved in the podcasting community and in shraing, people who host events about group learning decide to say no and withhold information from others?  Chris got a lot of email from people who were upset with him for saying no, for imposing a limit.  Yet my question is “Why do you feel entitled to his presentation and intellectual property for free?”

People were getting upset that he decided he would not share his information out further.  Chris decided to say no, simply and elegantly.  He set a boundary, and people got mad, just like the two year old who’s told it’s bedtime.

My question is this:  If you aren’t willing to attend someone’s session, if you aren’t willing to give him your presence when he speaks, why should he give you his information later on?  What have you done to earn or deserve it?  And why should someone else like me, who may have recorded the session, make that material available to you?

The community doesn’t like the word No.  They will tell you it’s against the very nature of bringing people together to set up limits and boundaries.  But these are the same people who said No to getting up early, to taking in an experience even if it was inconvenient.  The no’s balance out perfectly, and harmony should be restored.

One of the challenges internet communities have is that the all-access pass of communication, 24 x 7, gives an illusion that anything you want should be yours.  And that simply is not true.

Read the rest here.

Link to video

That’s what this 13-year-old did. Very funny observations for those of us who grew up with the walkman.

When I wore it walking down the street or going into shops, I got strange looks, a mixture of surprise and curiosity, that made me a little embarrassed.

As I boarded the school bus, where I live in Aberdeenshire, I was greeted with laughter. One boy said: “No-one uses them any more.” Another said: “Groovy.” Yet another one quipped: “That would be hard to lose.”

My friends couldn’t imagine their parents using this monstrous box, but there was interest in what the thing was and how it worked.

In some classes in school they let me listen to music and one teacher recognised it and got nostalgic.

It took me three days to figure out that there was another side to the tape. That was not the only naive mistake that I made; I mistook the metal/normal switch on the Walkman for a genre-specific equaliser, but later I discovered that it was in fact used to switch between two different types of cassette.

Another notable feature that the iPod has and the Walkman doesn’t is “shuffle”, where the player selects random tracks to play. Its a function that, on the face of it, the Walkman lacks. But I managed to create an impromptu shuffle feature simply by holding down “rewind” and releasing it randomly – effective, if a little laboured.

Read the full review here.

Earlier last week, New York Times reporter David Rohde escaped from a Taliban prison. He had been a Taliban hostage for the last seven months, but the general public had absolutely no clue. In a joint effort by The New York Times and Wikipedia, the story was kept quiet until his daring escape.

In November 2008, Rohde was captured and held hostage by the Taliban, along with a local reporter, Tahir Ludin, and their driver, Asadullah Mangal. But until he managed to escape, most of the general public had absolutely no clue. To prevent Rohde’s value in the eyes of his captors from rising, the New York Times kept more than 35 major news organizations from reporting on the story. They believed that the publicity from reporting his capture would inflate the value of Rohde’s life, increasing the difficulty of negotiating for Rohde’s release. Keeping 35 news organizations quiet was actually not the hard part – but staving off Wikipedia users from publishing the news? That was a bit trickier.

Through an elaborate and ongoing battle between Wikipedia editors and an anonymous contributor from Florida, the New York Times and the Wikipedia Foundation managed to keep the story quiet. For seven months, Wikipedia editors were in a constant back-and-forth with this user to delete news of Rohde’s capture off of the site. They were unable to contact the user directly, as s/he was anonymously posting on Wikipedia, and thus could not explain to the user why they were trying to keep the news quiet. Infuriated, the user threw insults at the editors who were deleting his addition, and blindly continued their futile fight.

All of this ended when Rohde and Ludin managed to climb over a wall and escape the Taliban’s clenches. In an interesting twist, the driver chose to join the Taliban and thus stayed behind, according to Rohde. This is a truly inspiring story, and the efforts of the Wikipedia editors and the New York Times are beyond laudable. In a recent tweet, Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales said that preventing the news from breaking may have saved his life. Regardless of the merits of this comment, it made Rohde’s escape more likely, and was a downright impressive feat of coordination by all parties involved.

Link to article.

This happened in the county where I grew up.

It was June 28, 1959. A normal summer Sunday afternoon in rural Georgia.

The first hint Saturday had that something was wrong came from the wooden train trestle.

Falling rail cars came down next, 16 in all – two with deadly cargo.

It was 3:40 p.m. and, with the train’s fall, life for scores of families would never be normal again.

At first sight of the derailment, some at the river that day stopped in their tracks, some moved away and some moved closer, natural curiosity taking over.

The danger came from propane gas, which started to seep from one of the ruptured rail cars.

“It settled like a fog,” one witness account from news reports at the time said.

A spark, some said maybe from a nearby barbecue grill, or from the train itself, caused the gas to explode. The second propane car loaded with 10,000 gallons of the gas ignited next.

News reports said the fire created a “raging inferno” within 30 seconds, killing 14 people, injuring dozens and reducing a 5-acre area to a pile of ash in a matter of minutes.

The fire was described as a “great red sheet of flame” that swept across the river and into the woods. Its path destroyed a clubhouse and cars parked nearby, and left a pile of gray ash where trees once stood.

When the dying finally stopped 10 days later, a total of 23 men, women and children had been buried.

Link to article.

Here is what it looks like today.

(click for larger version)

Here is more information, as well as a lot more photos and news clippings.

http://www.meldrim.com

Brigham Young University, a Mormon Church institution where students agree to live a chaste and virtuous life, has lifted its almost three-year policy of blocking access to YouTube.

Administrators lifted the ban on Friday, citing an increasing amount of educational material on the popular video-sharing site, a university spokeswoman, Carri Jenkins, said.

YouTube has its own filters for pornography, but the university added it to the list of Web sites blocked by campus online filters in 2006 because administrators felt there was too much content that could violate the university’s strict standards.

The university’s software also blocks pornography, adult content and violence from other sites.

The university cited limited bandwidth as another factor in the decision. But some professors have complained that they could not gain access to relevant YouTube content in the classroom.

“I think there’s no other way but to provide all of it,” Ms. Jenkins said.

Read the rest here.

Chipper Jones at the plate.

The Cows love the Braves.

View from our seats…section 224.

The Independent Curriculum Group is an organization of schools that has declared its independence from standardized tests that dictate curriculum. We are part of a growing movement of nationally recognized college preparatory schools that have either dropped or de-emphasized test-driven programs that marginalize authentic learning.

Students retain more knowledge, probe more deeply, and have more motivation when learning is not subordinated to test preparation. Students who graduate from ICG schools attend the nation’s best colleges and excel by every measure of academic achievement, including standardized tests. But each school’s curriculum reflects the passions of its faculty and students.

Find out more here.

The historic Georgia Theater in Athens was heavily damaged today by a fire.

Firefighters were called at about 7 a.m. to the theater, located at the corner of North Lumpkin and West Clayton streets, when a man walking home through downtown smelled something burning and found smoke billowing from the theater doors.

Within an hour, the roof on the historic building had collapsed.

Dozens of big-name acts had performed at the Georgia Theatre — musicians such as B.B. King, Muddy Waters, John Prine and Jorma Kaukonen, not to mention Athens-based acts like R.E.M., Randall Bramblett and Davis Causey.

The theater originally became a music venue in 1978, when Sheffy McArthur built a stage in the building and opened the venue with Sam Smart and George Fontaine.

Link to article.

If you aren’t on twitter, you really should be. Not because it allows you to keep up with the daily goings-on of Khloe Kardashian (although it does!), but because we are seeing for the first time what happens when a government that needs to control information to survive can’t control information. Iranians are using twitter to organize, to share information, and even to discuss which routes to take to rallies to avoid confrontations with the police. Although foreign journalists have mostly been kicked out of Iran, we’re still able to get pictures like this and this and this and this and this and this and this and this and this.

The regime has more sophisticated ways of stopping the flow of information, but so far at least the Iranians on twitter have stayed remarkably organized, and they’ve found ways to vet information. When false rumors have spread, they’ve been quickly debunked.

So, yeah. Twitter is not about what you had for breakfast, or Khloe Kardashian, or me. It’s about evening the playing field.

Link to article

1. Biography – This is a keyword for students and teachers alike.  Anytime you are discussing a historical or significant figure, using the keyword biography narrows down the search quickly.  Additionally, I would add site:edu or site:gov to give better results.
2. Discussion questions – This key phrase is a must for language arts and social studies teachers if you are looking for questions you can either put on a test or use in classroom discussions.
3. Practice Exercises – Math and grammar teachers need to grab a hold of this key phrase as you will quickly locate a wealth of premade resources for your students.  Some will be printable and others will be interactive.
4. Interactive – using this keyword will help you find websites that work great with interactive whiteboards.  Generally these are sites that allow the user to manipulate the website content in some way.  It’s a guaranteed winner.

Complete list here!

I am taking a directed readings course this summer for which I have to read and summarize 24 research articles. Earlier today I found the first five articles in PDF format, and I used the free conversion feature from Amazon to convert those files to the Kindle file format. I transferred the files onto the Kindle using the USB cable, and I have been listening to the first article using the text to speech feature. I expect that I will find several articles this summer that will serve as the foundation for the review of literature for my dissertation, which I will be starting sometime next year. The Kindle is making it easier for me to read and gain true comprehension of these scholarly articles.

It might not sound like the most exciting reason to have a Kindle, but it is the most important one for me right now.

http://www.teachertube.com/viewVideo.php?video_id=7672

In what many are describing as an upset victory of unprecedented proportions, Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad defeated the Pittsburgh Penguins last night to win the 2009 Stanley Cup, Iran’s Interior Ministry announced today.

According to the ministry, which Mr. Ahmadinejad runs, the Iranian hard-liner defeated the Penguins by a score of 6-0, scoring two hat tricks in the victory.

But Penguins star Evgeni Malkin immediately disputed Mr. Ahmadinejad’s claim, arguing that the Iranian president did not even appear in the game.

Mr. Ahmadinejad scoffed at Mr. Malkin’s charge, stating, “He’s just pissed that I was named MVP.”

The Iranian president took time out from celebrating his Stanley Cup win to announce that he had just been named Poet Laureate of England.

Link to article.

Click the image for the full-sized version.

Suppose you are a parent determined to make sure your child gets the best possible education. You understand intuitively what an ample body of  research proves: that your child’s education depends to a large extent on the quality of  her teachers. Consequently,  as you begin considering local public schools, you focus on a basic question: who are the best teachers, and where do they teach?

The question is simple enough. There’s just one problem—except for word of  mouth from other parents, no one can tell you the answers.

In fact, you would be dismayed to discover that not only can no one tell you which teachers are most effective, they also cannot say which are the least effective or which fall in between. Were you to examine the district’s teacher evaluation records yourself, you would fnd that, on paper, almost every teacher is a great teacher, even at schools where the chance of  a student succeeding academically amounts to a coin toss, at best.

In short, the school district would ask you to trust that it can provide your child a quality education, even though it cannot honestly tell you whether it is providing her a quality teacher. This is the reality for our public school districts nationwide. Put simply, they fail to distinguish great teaching from good, good from fair, and fair from poor. A teacher’s effectiveness—the most important factor for schools in improving student achievement—is not measured, recorded, or used to inform decision-making in any meaningful way.

Check it out here.

The animated logo is dislpayed on their home page today.

Very clever! Hope you’ve all got your digital equipment so you can watch TV!

New research suggests that more K-12 public school students will take classes online and will have longer school days in the next decade–and academic improvement and cost savings are two big benefits.

Online courses are already commonplace in higher education and are growing in popularity at the K-12 level as well. Orlando-based Florida Virtual School (FLVS) has quickly become the nation’s largest virtual school, serving nearly 65,000 students in the 2007-08 school year.

“Policy makers and educators have proposed expanding learning time in elementary through high school grades as a way to improve students’ academic performance, but online coursework hasn’t been on their radar,” said Catherine Cavanaugh, associate professor at the University of Florida’s College of Education and author of the report, “Getting Students More Learning Time Online: Distance Education in Support of Expanded Learning Time in K-12 Schools.”

Cavanaugh’s report found that the average yearly cost of online learning for a full-time student was about $4,300 in 2008, based on a survey of 20 virtual schools in 14 states.  The national average cost per student in a traditional public school in 2006, the most recent year in which data were available, was more than $9,100. Cost estimates included course development, teaching, and administrative and technical expenses.

“Online programs have little or no cost for instructional facilities, transportation, and related staff,” Cavanaugh said. “The value of distance education also increases when considering the broad range of available online courses.”

Read the rest here.

Steven Lee was able to graduate with his class at Rosemont High School Monday night, through Skype, an online videophone service.

Steven was miles away at UC San Francisco Medical Center, too sick to attend. But the technology allowed him to be there, even watch his mom walk on to the stage and accept his diploma.

“It was quite an experience especially being in the hospital and dealing with IT guys and dealing with my health as well,” said Lee.

Steven even got to toss his cap in the air, at the same time as his classmates.

Link to article – Be sure to watch the video!

I’m not sure it will cause a great deal of change, but I’m starting to enjoy it more these days.

The one thing you can say for certain about Twitter is that it makes a terrible first impression. You hear about this new service that lets you send 140-character updates to your “followers,” and you think, Why does the world need this, exactly? It’s not as if we were all sitting around four years ago scratching our heads and saying, “If only there were a technology that would allow me to send a message to my 50 friends, alerting them in real time about my choice of breakfast cereal.”

I, too, was skeptical at first. I had met Evan Williams, Twitter’s co-creator, a couple of times in the dotcom ’90s when he was launching Blogger.com. Back then, what people worried about was the threat that blogging posed to our attention span, with telegraphic, two-paragraph blog posts replacing long-format articles and books. With Twitter, Williams was launching a communications platform that limited you to a couple of sentences at most. What was next? Software that let you send a single punctuation mark to describe your mood?

And yet as millions of devotees have discovered, Twitter turns out to have unsuspected depth. In part this is because hearing about what your friends had for breakfast is actually more interesting than it sounds. The technology writer Clive Thompson calls this “ambient awareness”: by following these quick, abbreviated status reports from members of your extended social network, you get a strangely satisfying glimpse of their daily routines. We don’t think it at all moronic to start a phone call with a friend by asking how her day is going. Twitter gives you the same information without your even having to ask.

Read the rest here.

Math students in this high-performing school district used to rush through their Algebra I textbooks only to spend the first few months of Algebra II relearning everything they forgot or failed to grasp the first time.

So the district’s frustrated math teachers decided to rewrite the algebra curriculum, limiting it to about half of the 90 concepts typically covered in a high school course in hopes of developing a deeper understanding of key topics. Last year, they began replacing 1,000-plus-page math textbooks with their own custom-designed online curriculum; the lessons are typically written in Westport and then sent to a program in India, called HeyMath!, to jazz up the algorithms and problem sets with animation and sounds.

“In America, we run through chapters like a speeding train,” said John Dodig, the principal of the 1,728-student Staples High School here. “Schools in Singapore and India spend more time on each topic, and their kids do better. We’re boiling down math to the essentials.”

That means Westport students focus only on linear functions in Algebra I, taught in seventh, eighth or ninth grade depending on student ability, and leave quadratics and exponents to Algebra II, eliminating the overlap and repetition typical of most textbooks and curriculum guidelines. Westport has also scaled back exercises like long formal proofs in geometry, revising lessons and homework assignments to teach students to defend their answers to math problems as a matter of routine rather than repeatedly writing them out.

Westport’s curriculum overhaul joins other recent critiques of mile-wide, inch-deep instruction in the long-running math wars within American education. In 2006, the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics called for a tighter focus on basic math skills. Two years later, a federal panel appointed by President George W. Bush urged that pre-kindergarten to eighth-grade math curriculums be streamlined after finding that math achievement for American students was at “a mediocre level” compared with that of their peers worldwide.

Westport school officials say their less-is-more approach has already resulted in less review in math classes, higher standardized test scores and more students taking advanced math classes. The percentage of the district’s 10th graders receiving top scores on state exams rose to 86 percent last year from 78 percent in 2006. Advanced Placement calculus and statistics classes enrolled 231 students this year, from 170 in 2006, and a record 44 students will be able to take multivariable calculus this fall, up from four in 2006.

But while Westport’s new approach has attracted interest in the math education world, the vast majority of schools in Connecticut and elsewhere continue to race through dozens of math topics in each grade because of concerns that cutting back could hurt student performance on state assessments and SATs.

Hank Kepner, president of the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, said that most schools choose among prepackaged math curriculums, which have to be expansive enough to meet wide-ranging standards for every state, and that he had not heard of another district trying to write its own.

“I give them kudos for trying it,” he said. “But I’m worried that not many districts will have the amount of support needed to pull off a new curriculum and sustain it.”

Read the rest here.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lvZCDfhoNxA

An Ohio school district says it uncovered a cheating scheme so pervasive that it had to cancel graduation ceremonies for its 60 seniors — but will still mail their diplomas.

A senior at Centerburg High School accessed teachers’ computers, found tests, printed them and distributed them to classmates, administrators said.

Graduation was canceled because so many seniors either cheated or knew about the cheating but failed to report it, said officials of the Centerburg School District.

Superintendent Dorothy Holden said the district had to take a stand and let students know that cheating can’t be tolerated.

“I am alarmed that our kids can think that in society it’s OK to cheat, it’s a big prank, it’s OK to turn away and not be a whistle-blower, not come forth,” Holden said.

The district says it has identified a student who apparently accessed shared file folders on teachers’ computers.

Officials believe the cheating involved at least five tests in a senior World Studies class dating to early January. One of the tests quizzed students on Aztec Indian history.

Teachers had suspicions about some higher-than-expected grades during the semester, Holden said.

The cheating unraveled when a student discovered a congratulatory note to the perpetrator on a school computer Tuesday and gave it to Principal John Morgan.

Administrators learned Friday that the cheating plot may have involved underclassmen, as well.

Holden said so many students are involved that it was impossible “to separate the wheat from the chaff” in terms of deciding who could graduate. Instead, all students will be mailed their diplomas.

“We’re not going to put that type of honor out there knowing that many of you are walking through there and you cheated, you lied, you denied,” Holden said.

Read the rest here.