GOLD LINK: This leading global resource on the science of olfaction is brought to you by the fragrance folks. The illustration above accompanies an essay on how the sense of smell works. If you are teaching in a school, as a mentor, or at home, here is a fine free learning resource. There are other informative articles and features on the Sense of Smell website. We learn for example: People recall smells with a 65% accuracy after a year, while the visual recall of photos sinks to about 50% after only three months. My English teacher, Mrs. Emma Burtis, used to say that mentioning the smell of something in writing a story is a powerful narrative trick. I suppose until we get digital fragrances figured out we will have to depend on Mrs. Burtis’ technique to convey olfactory images online. Just close your eyes and think of your Mom’s favorite perfume.
Sense of Smell Institute
Paleobiology MeetUp
Here is a quintessential example of how a slice of a science specialty forms a center in cyberspace for sharing and learning. Participating in this meetup are 145 researchers from 70 institutions in 12 countries, sharing 12145 published references, 45692 fossil collections and 460981 taxonomic occurrences. In your field how well do you share?
Wanna get upset? This will do it.
Take a look at just one sentence from the newly released “2004 Brown Center Report on American Education: How Well Are American Students Learning?” It evaluates how our children are being assessed by the widely respected and generally used standards of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). Here is the sentence:
Most of the arithmetic one would need to know to solve the average item on the eighth grade NAEP is taught by the end of third grade.
There is more, lots more here.
Little Screens Big Content
Nokia offers downloadable guidelines for creating mobile content from the internet to be browsed on the small screens of cell phones and other handheld devices. When will the tipping point come when the cascade it causes leaves the stationary monitor in the dust of digital history? The OQO wireless pc is getting us closer. Here is Nokia’s list of what is left to be resolved:
• Mobile devices have smaller displays, as well as a wide variety of display sizes.
• Current mobile devices with color displays support either 4,096 (12-bit) or 65,536 (16-bit) colors while some PCs are able to display over 16 million colors (32-bit). Secondly, color displays haven been available in mobile domain only for a couple of years now.
• Text inputting is slower in mobile devices than it is with a full PC keyboard.
• Mobile devices usually have no mouse for activating an object, which limits the possible user interface components and slows down object activation.
• Some mobile devices and/or browser view modes support only vertical scrolling.
• Soft keys are used for activating commands in mobile devices; the number and purpose of soft keys vary between devices from different manufacturers.
• Connection establishment and data transfer between the terminal and the server is slower than in a fixed domain.
• The amount of cookie data that can be stored in a mobile device is limited.
• The context of use cannot be predicted as easily as with, for example, an office PC application.
• Mobile users may have to pay for each piece of transferred data. Already-existing projects indicate that end-user perspective and usability are very important in mobile.
Teaching Thinking
An article in the Washington Post today describes simulation programs being purchased by the US military to teach soldiers how to handle real war scenarios. Situations simulated will range from how to avoid roadside bombs to what it feels like to drive around “with sewage in the streets and no one appreciates you.”
The goal, said David S. Henderson, deputy director for the directorate of training and doctrine at Fort Sill, is to teach soldiers how deal with tough situations.“It’s difficult to put a student in a training environment where you’re able to teach them how to think, not what to think, and that there are consequences to the decisions that are being made,” said Henderson.
Just think what the consequences could be if we were producing young people across the planet who knew “how to think, not what to think.” Computer simulations are digital and can thrive on the little and big screens our kids stare at all the time. Maybe they are learning to think as well as to type with their thumbs 
Cultural Pheonixes of the Golden Swamp
It seems natural to wince at a cellphone at the ear of a person of pure ethniticity, like this Tibetan woman chatting into edgy technology. We hear the lament that cultural diversity is being lost for all time. In a New York Times story today about the apparent swamping of Tibet by Chinese, the careful words of a Tibetan village teenager are quoted: “There are some differences between our own beliefs and the way we are taught,” he said, diplomatically. “You could say we have many legends and tales which are not taught to us in school.”
Something quite wonderful has been happening because of the internet to the legends, tales, languages and other possessions of diverse cultures. They are being preserved digitally and shared broadly. Thousands of languages are already well preserved online. Take for example this website on Native American Culture. Do you need the Cherokee font? wants some language tapes in Cheppewa? or a list of 1900 words in Saanich. Only a tiny number of specialists, separated by great distances, could have possessed such things before the internet. Even more interesting is to realize entirely new areas of comparision and study are created by aggregating once widely dispersed cultural materials. New understanding arises with digital rebirth of peoples of the past.
Yogi Berra Blog Wisdom
This week’s Edge features an article on “Indirect Reciprocity . . . .” As always with Edge, the discussion is top flight philosophy and science, featuring this time an interview with Austrian mathematician Karl Sigmund. At one point Sigmund introduces the main idea of indirect reciprocity with this from Yogi Berra:
“There is a famous anecdote about the American baseball player Yogi Berra, who said something to the effect of, ‘I make a point of going to other people’s funerals because otherwise they won’t come to mine.’ This is not as nonsensical as it seems. If a colleague of the university, for instance, goes faithfully to every faculty member’s funeral, then the faculty will turn out strongly at his. Others reciprocate. It works.“
It struck me that we bloggers go to other people’s blogs at least in part so they will come to ours.
The Genie in the China Swamp
It surprised me to learn this morning that 10 percent of the people in China are online. The article reporting that number in the New York Times today concludes:
“China’s Internet is a hothouse of content on a wide range of topics and interests,” Mr. Clark said, “especially those embraced by the teens and 20-somethings who make up the bulk of the online population still. China’s rapidly emerging middle classes, numbering tens if not hundreds of millions, are dependent on the Internet and the Internet is dependent on them,” he said. “There’s no putting the genie back in the bottle now, and no real attempt to do so.”
The story focused on censorship and Chinese industrial growth. But bigger is the absolutely revolutionary idea that 10 percent of the people in China can visit the Smithsonian, or study physics at MIT, or read your blog? The real stunner is they can respond – and that is the genie emerging from the swamp and giving us the global golden age.
Teachers In Top Hats
A devastating flaw in our ways of educating is that teachers often have little creative opportunity because they are at the very end of the authority chain – after administrators, principals, AP’s, faculty policies, parent committees, politically correct mandates, the muddlers of textbook content, and even the polices of the custodians. The Edutopia November issue has a story about what happened when a couple of teachers ran off and started a circus.
Perhaps we are moving toward a happy day when teachers are independent professionals who have private practices similar to doctors and lawyers. Schools could then be institutionalize for what they often are: centers of day care, athletics, and social activities. Teacher professionals would rent space in or near the centers and/or elsewhere to teach subjects such as: reading, writing, arithmetic, history, science, and trapeze. Kids would split their time between receiving teaching from creative professionals, apprenticing in the real world, and the non-teaching activities of the revised “schools.” Our children’s lives would occur in something like a three ring circus and boring would become very 20th century.
Wireless Wizards of 85th Street
Living in Manhattan, I know I am in one of the most connected places on earth. And I can give you increasing evidence that is true. A couple of years ago a Starbucks opened on the corner of my block at 85th Street and First Avenue, providing of course wireless access if you went there for coffee. I have a cable connection in my apartment for internet access to my Mac. Last spring I bought a wireless PC laptop and decided to get my own transmitter to connect by splitter to my cable. Before I even got the transmitter operational the internet appeared on my laptop screen. I thought maybe it was from Starbucks, but that did not turn out to be the case. When I checked my list of “Wireless Network Connections” there was one named Jim. I don’t know where Jim lives – maybe in my building or across the backyards in one of the apartments I can see out my window. Jim was on the list last spring and I used his connection until my transmitter was set up. Late this summer Dogmaster Wireless appeared on the list. We have a lot of dogs in the neighborhood and sometimes you see a professional dogwalker with a bunch of pooches. I wonder if one of them is providing the wireless signal I can pick up. Another new one showed up on the list in September; it is called 8511. Last week Slytherin appeared – which in my book is very appropriate because it all seems like wizardry to me.
Lenovo Laptops Could Happen
The New York Times is carrying an article today about The Lenovo Group, a Chinese computer manufacturer that is in the mix to possibly buy the PC division of IBM. Lenovo had $3 billion in sales last year and is a not so sleepy Chinese industrial dragon. What jumped out of the story for me was the fact that Lenovo sells PCs for as little as $360 in China. Last week a court-appointed panel told the New York City schools they needed to spend $5.6 billion more each year than they are now plus $9.2 billion in capital improvements in order “to provide the opportunity for a sound, basic education that they are guaranteed by the State Constitution.” Buying each student a Lenovo PC would be chump change in the context of those numbers. We know Lenovo would leap at a contract for a wireless laptop for each of the million or so students in the New York school system. With an order that big the price might be less than the $360 PC even after things are sorted out about tariffs.
Then there is the obvious observation that the kids in China are already getting PCs more cheaply than the kids in New York City can. The implications of that conjure another sort of dragon altogether.
A World Less Savagely Separate
A major reason we allow among our schools savage inequalities, as Jonathan Kozol indelibly named them, is a wide and deeply held certainty that other people’s children cannot achieve very well under any circumstances. Charles Krauthammer makes the same point today in his column explaining why Europe worries about democracy only in the Ukraine:
“But this struggle is less about democracy than about geopolitics. Europe makes clear once again that it is a full-throated supporter of democracy — in its neighborhood. Just as it is a forthright opponent of ethnic cleansing in its neighborhood (Yugoslavia) even as it lifts not a finger elsewhere (Rwanda, southern Sudan, now Darfur). . . . They pretend, however, that this opposition to America’s odd belief in spreading democracy universally is based not on indifference but on superior wisdom — the world-weary sagacity of a more ancient and experienced civilization that knows that one cannot bring liberty to barbarians. Meaning, Arabs. And Muslims. And Iraqis.”
When Europe’s empires were behind “wooden walls,” as United States President John Adams called navies of his colonial era, other people could be safely demeaned from a distance. The distance between what went on within the insular school buildings of the 20th century was greater than the oceans of the days of sail.
Sailing ships are gone and satelites connect us all. The kids are communicating digitally over any distance they choose. We are quickly going to find out a great deal more about the capacity of other people for democracy and other people’s children for leaning.
The Notion (Emotion) of Schools
It occurred to me somewhere over Missouri as I flew toward New York last week. It is the notion of schools that makes it so hard to change the schools. We all have such powerful feeling about the school experience – good or bad – that we find it nearly impossible to jump beyond them to imagine no schools at all. How do you respond when I tell you that we might need to start all over on figuring out what our kids do all day as they are growing up? How much alarm takes over your thinking when I tell you that schools might cease? How quickly do arguments come to your mind that induce you to dismiss me as plain wrong, so that you are no longer hearing what I am saying? When that happens you have joined the ranks of the defenders of the Education Establishment.
If there actually is something far better that we could offer our children, why does it alarm us so much to even consider slaying the real culprit of dumbing down and delinquency: the schools? I think the answer is very simple: our association is so powerful between childhood memories and schools that we cannot imagine a childhood without schools. We need to get over it. Future posts will elaborate.
Video Games for Heroes
The New York City Fire Department guys are training in dealing with terrorist hazards by playing video games. The project called Hazmat that is building the games is based at Carnegie Mellon University. The video games for heroes are part of a trend reported today by Reuters in which “serious games demonstrating everything from flying a jet plane to negotiating a hostage crisis are used to train workers who can’t afford to slip up on the job.”
My opinion is that a lot of subjects our kids have to take by boring spoonful after boring spoonful in classrooms could be fascinating fodder for their minds as video games. Can we afford to let another generation slip up on the job of learning algebra and history and vocabulary and science and all the rest?
