An article in the January New Yorker here reports how U.S. Army guys are learning battle lessons from each other online. Why isn’t this sort of thing happening more in U.S. schools? The young Army officers sharing knowledge on the combat websites are, says the article, Generation X and grew up with the Internet. Yet our school kids, younger than our soldiers, are stuck carrying backpacks that would make a corporal stumble. One of the battle lessons described in the article is that printed stuff, which is what the kids carry, does not measure up to website knowledge.
If you are thinking the soldiers are just sharing immediate events you are missing the deeper pedagogy. The cumulative and ongoing wisdom of participants in combat action is interfaced on the websites. Similar websites for youngsters to use in school would involve following the activities in genetics, agriculture, archaeology, literature, etc.
New Yorker Battle Lessons
Have a Look! – Measuring Waves from Space
The GSI Geospatial Resource Portal’s Have A Look! story this week recaps how scientists calculated tsunami wave heights using data from space. One of the scientists explains:
“By chance, these satellites were in the right place at the right time,” said Walter H.F. Smith, a geophysicist at the NOAA LSA, which routinely monitors sea-level variations from space using radar measurements taken by several satellites.
GIS is dedicated to fostering “the growing network of those interested in geo-informatics worldwide and Asia in particular.” Its weekly Have A Look! stories are an example of open content available to education with just a link at no cost. This one is far better than any textbook page on measuring tsunami wave height: authoritative, up-to-date and bristling with related knowledge to click into and connect some cognitive links in you head.
Kids Zoo Gate
The Smithsonian National Zoological Park, known in Washington DC as the National Zoo, has many gateways into its remarkable website. Click here to enter an entrance designed for kids.
Throwing Money at Testing
If nothing else, the billions (yes, billions) that we spend on testing is creating a highly profitable testing industry. This story in today’s New York Times has the staggering numbers. The testing industry justifies itself by a public demand for accountability from the educational institutions. We seem to be hoping for a way to prove our educational system is working somewhere. So far we have not had much luck with that.
Teaching Lessons from the Baseball Coach
What a treat from the New York Times: a cogent essay from a leading authority describing a pivotal flaw in how schools teach! Although it is a little scary when you think what it tells us we are doing to our children, anyone who cares about kids should read it here. The essay is by Professor Alison Gopnik of Berkeley, author of The Scientist in the Crib.
Archaic Handwriting
A Washington Post reporter’s story is here of a dry run he sat in on preparing scorers to evaluate what students write in the new essay portion of the SAT. Reading the handwriting of the students who write the essays is often very difficult. Handwriting quality is not included in the scoring, nor should it be in this day and age. The generation being tested grew up writing on keyboards. My guess is their work would be more creative if they could type it— perhaps even with their thumbs on their cellphones. Handwritten expression is fading into history as media like blogging on Hiptops emerge.
Out of This World Noises
The ESA website has posted some incredible stuff. The radar echos from Titan’s surface are a unique sound that could only be heard from scanning that real moon. Christiaan Huygens, for whom the exploration module is named, coined the phrase “golden swamp” to describe Amsterdam, where he lived during the Dutch Golden Age. How very much he would have enjoyed the ESA website and amazed to have seen his name there!
Edutopia Lauds EdTech Student Input
We all joke about consulting the kids for help with things digital. Here George Lucas’ forward-looking Edutopia congratulates the Department of Education’s new report for doing just that.
Who Is Bubba?
The sea turtle in this picture is Bubba. He was released into the ocean in San Diego, along with two female turtles, Mihali and Crackers. The turtles had been in re-hab since the 1960s at Sea World. After 20 years away from the ocean, they were released with transmitters glued to their backs to see if they would swim across the Pacific, home to Japan. They did. Their story is here.
I don’t know what is being said about Bubba in the site where I found the above image. His tran-Pacific fame is a reminder that the internet is worldwide. I wonder how “Bubba” is pronounced in his native Japan.
Lifeblog for Learning
Nokia proudly announced in a recent press release a software and service called Lifeblog. It powers a cell phone to collect images and video which the software then organizes chronologically and makes available for reuse. This principle would be ideal for gathering materials for learning something, like lesson assignments and page scans. The kids already have the phones. But the way schooling is set up the wireless world is turned off. That is increasingly a reason school is becoming irrelevant, or at the least, out of touch.
Sideways for Credibility
The checks and balances referred to this morning by John Hinderaker in this post on Powerline are evidence of as general a principle of the open internet as Newton’s laws are in the physical world.
. . . I suspect that most of the discussion may be about how bloggers can become more credible by adopting the standards of mainstream journalists. My own perspective will be a bit different. So far, the blogosphere has a far better record of honesty and accuracy than mainstream organs like the New York Times and CBS. This isn’t entirely a matter of personality; it is also a function of the checks and balances of the blogosphere, which are far stronger and more effective than the alleged “checks and balances” of the mainstream media, which, in the absence of political and intellectual diversity, may not operate at all.
These checks and balances are why the link you are looking for on google comes up close to the top. Fundamentally the checks and balances are built into the laws of networks. Hinderaker is writing about why vertical CBS was not as effective as the blogosphere network at vetting the National Guard letters about George Bush. The vetting hierarchy at CBS is as different from the vetting network of the blogs as up and down is different from sideways in the physical world.
This deep difference is vitally and wonderfully important in many fields, including education and human connectivity. My book Connectivity is about why this is true and what it may mean.
Wiki Sprouts Somasteroids
The picture above is actually a Camponotini and not a Somasteroid. Both are from the Tree of Life Project: the somasteriods among the most recent additions and the camponotini image from the project’s Picture Sampler.
The Tree of Life Project is of the web species wiki (a website for which there are several or many contributors). Almost 400 biologists have added species to the tree over the past dozen years. The history of the project here is an overview of its development and an informative look at how the wiki has matured as an internet tool for interfacing knowledge.
Two Teachers and a Judge
This afternoon, a Saturday, I found myself at a New York City public high school chatting with two teachers about how schools should (can?) be made better. A We The People competition had just concluded in which the two teachers had been coaches and I had been a judge. None of the three of us think the schools are effective.
One of the teachers was a young man originally from the Caribbean now teaching in a Brooklyn high school. He said, passionately, that he would not give up. He argued that outsourcing is undermining America because we don’t invest in our young generation. The other teacher just kept shaking her head and saying “it doesn’t work and I don’t know the answer.” She has been teaching high school for decades in Brooklyn and has produced teams of her kids that repeatedly win speech tournaments at the highest level. She would be leading kids into excellence one at a time, no matter in what system she found herself.
I was struck by a piece of good news from the younger teacher. He was actually complaining, saying all the kids don’t have computers and some of them have to go to the library to type a paper. That says to me that the rest do have computers, which is big progress compared to a year or two ago.
My comment was we need to be willing to think about backing off from schools entirely and starting over. I didn’t get very far. But if schools don’t work why can’t we think about starting something new?
Refreshing Plug for Laptops and Cell Phones
The machine crisis reported in this New York Times story is not about crashing computers. Those days are fading as digital equipment keeps getting more dependable and we more dependent on it. The panic reported here was about finding machine juice. The story tells us about cafe digirati deftly sharing plugs to recharge their laptops and phones.
Wi-Fi In Nepal Exchanges Yak Info
Five villages in rural Nepal are now connected wirelessly through the internet to each other and to the rest of the world. That is a big improvement in a place where there are no telephones and some villages are separated by a two-day walk. The project is described here in a BBC story. The image above of the boy standing by a telephone pole rigged with a wi-fi antenna is stylized from a photo in the story. Yak farmers use their wi-fi to buy and sell animals and other commercial and personal exchanges. Distant learning projects are planned for the wi-fi project, making it possible for a teacher in one of the villages to simul-teach in all five and for students to study materials from across the world.
