To celebrate its 100th anniversary, the Cairo Museum has created a website here of true grandure. It is large in content and concept, aptly reflecting its subject. History
Eternal Egypt
Refugee look up storm
The only online service to which I pay to subscribe is the Merriam-Webster unabridged dictionary. It is possible to do a lot for free at Merriam-Webster online, by which they get traffic and do a service. But I subscribe so I can get their full resource for every look-up.
For paid subscribers there is a monthly newsletter which includes a list of the ten words most looked-up the month before. In September Number 1 was refugee. The MW experts assumed Katrina stirred the interest. At one point refugee was being looked up over 1000 times every hour! I would guess more people were using the Internet to look it up than were doing so in a book — but I can’t prove it.
Number 14 last month was blog. We can be sure more folks were at least finding that definition online instead of in a book because any dictionary printed more than a few months ago would not include the word blog. Hardcopy dictionaries have been blown off their foundations, or submerged by the digital flood. (Pick your metaphor. Metaphor was Number 5 most looked-up world last month BTW.)
Archimedes’ death ray at MIT
Process engineering students at MIT report here how they set a replica Roman ship on fire duplicating the 212 BC feat by Archimedes during the seige of Syracuse. Engineering
Physics
Chic and geek, but learning not mentioned
When we can wear the Internet around our necks — as this Washington Post article today describes for cell phone delivered images — doing that could be the uber replacement for a student’s backpack loaded with books. As usual, mentioned in the Post article are chic and geek goals for the new devices, but not the potential for making education better.
It won’t be long until students can use chic/geek image devices hanging around their necks to interact with instructors, courses and the web’s bountiful open content learning links like those featured daily in the Golden Swamp Subject Sampler. Thus far this is not happening with visible support from the education industry. Why not?
Dot Mixer
The Exploratorium exhibit here lets you mix musical sounds by dragging and clicking them. This is fun and cool, but it is also a place to learn some music fundamentals in a new way. Click the Exporatorium logo on the page to go to more interactive learning exhibits. Arts
Learning about the Roof of the World
The stir of interest in Kashmir caused by the tragic earthquake this month would have been less intense in my youth. At most a few images might have appeared in newspapers, magazines and at the movies in newsreels (weeks later). Today I began following Kashmir links online and quickly discovered the one here about Himalayan rivers. We cannot underestimate the power of this content current online for engaging and enlightening young people today. The source here is a travel service. The knowledge offered is free, thorough and rich. It is authentic, I believe, in a way that adds a transforming new dimension to learning. It is not by academics, but by people who are luring travelers to areas they know well. This sort of information is a useful complement to the publications of experts who research and write about a topic in which they may never have swum.
General Geometry
The page from Mathworld here is a definition of geometry with links into specifics, and from there to detailed topics. Mathworld is a superb resource. It is also increasingly a wiki, with contributors from the mathematical community. Running the gamut from the most basic ideas to the most complex, this Internet interface to math is many multiples superior to textbooks. Math
Neuschwanstein Castle
The jewel of a web site here reflects the fairy tale sparkle of King Ludwig of Bavaria. It is history, biography and a choice slice of the good life lived by European royalty in the 19th century. The marvelous web site finding crew at the Scout Report pointed to the castle in this week’s newsletter. History
Heretical suggestion for saving government money
Last night a news report I heard was agonizing over where the money was going to come from to pay for wars, hurricane and earthquake relief, retiring baby boomers and towering government debts. The report mentioned that education expenses are soaring upward — as usual.
Looking down the next decade and beyond, the migration of what is known by humankind online, which has already happened, can/should remove billions of dollars from the education budget line. Taking the already unnecessary $4.3 billion the USA alone spends on school textbooks and multipying it by a decade is a nice savings right there.
We should be thinking beyond the 19th-century box of outmoded education structures and methods. It is interesting that a lot of folks must feel the same way, as seems indicated by the MIT $100 laptop page here. The first thing they have to say is the machines are not ready nor will be sold to individuals.
One hopes at least some of the inquires MIT gets are from people wanting to give the machines to their kids. Do you suppose your local or state government has been in touch with MIT about $100 laptops for your kids to replace the textbooks costs for your children?
How about thinking heretically of future education as a way to save money instead of a perpetual budget drain? I’ll bet we could get better learning and better-equipped graduates — the best bargains of all.
Earthquake Action
The remarkable website from the USGS here illustrates the location and intensity of earthquakes everywhere on earth in almost real time. Not only that: the information is detailed deep and retained permanently. It is a resource for earthquake information of richness and veracity unimaginable before the Internet emerged. Earth sciences
Wireless Philly Update
Today’s Washington Post describes here the steps Philadelphia is taking to provide wireless access as a city service. The Post article lead paragraph reports:
Philadelphia yesterday announced a plan to build the biggest municipal wireless Internet system in the nation, the latest of a growing number of cities to treat high-speed Web access as a basic municipal service like water, electricity and trash collection.
Philly was, of course, the hometown of Benjamin Franklin, who established the United States Post Office. The modern city fathers and mothers are proving to have just as much vision as Ben did.
So what does a $100 laptop look like?
The MIT Media Lab now has pictures here of the laptop they are developing. Click to take a peek at the emerging golden age of global learning. Thanks to Stephen’s Web.
Nobel Prize Ulcer Bug
It was announced today that two Australian scientists won the 2005 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine for their discovery of a bacterium that causes stomach inflammation, ulcers and cancer. Cells Alive here provides a colorful description of Helicobacter pylori, the infamous ulcer bug that they discovered. A Google search for the bug by scientific name results in a rich and comprehensive store of knowledge about the bug and its discoverers — coverage impossible to imagine back a few years ago when we still thought stress caused ulcers. Cellular biology
21st Century typing two-year olds
A few minutes ago I returned from lunch at a Tex-Mex restaurant on the corner of 85th and Second in Manhattan. I eat there often and have gotten to know the staff. Today I took the printer’s proofs from my new book so I could proofread some pages while waiting for my Santa Fe salad. My waiter today is a very friendly guy from Mexico. He asked what I was doing, wanted to know what the book was about and got very enthusiastic when I told him it was about kids learning from the Internet.
He said he has a two-year-old daughter and she loves to work at the computer. He then added that his seven-year-old niece is frustrated because she has to do her (hardcopy) homework before she can do something she likes much better: Learn stuff from the computer.
WAKE-UP CALL TO EDUCATORS: You are not the ones who are deciding whether kids will use computers. The real question is whether the school system as we have known it will fit in to the way kids born of the 21st century will learn. Earlier in the day I had my first look at the moot court problem the Fordham Law School moot court board has written for a New York City wide public high school competition underway this semester. The subject of the problem to be argued by the student attorneys is the extent of the powers of the state and schools to enforce guidelines on students when they use the Internet at school. My prediction is that by the time two and seven-year-olds like those in my waiter’s family are teenagers, they will equate limiting their online freedom with the book-burning that was attempted in the early years of printing.
