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YouTube - Did You Know?
The "Did You Know?" video, which has been making its viral rounds through various social networks. Breathless, admittedly amazing facts, prepare to meet a firehose of information. ("What does it in-form?" is another question...)
Amsterdam cracks down on prostitution, cannabis: lessons for Victoria? « Robertrandall’s Weblog
Rob blogged about Amsterdam's re-think of its liberal laws regarding drug use (and prostitution, too). I left a *long* comment, a thinking-out-loud about how the factory system of education, coupled with a repression of creative risk-taking and innovation in the culture, enables and exacerbates turning to drugs.
FINAL REPORT | DIGITAL YOUTH RESEARCH
Portal page for the Digital Youth Research :: Kids' Informal Learning with Digital Media project.
QUOTE
"Kids' Informal Learning with Digital Media: An Ethnographic Investigation of Innovative Knowledge Cultures" is a three-year collaborative project funded by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. Carried out by researchers at the University of Southern California and University of California, Berkeley, the digital youth project explores how kids use digital media in their everyday lives.
UNQUOTE
Toward Society 3.0: A New Paradigm for 21st century education - SlideShare
Slide show presentation from John Moravec, U. of Minnesota, on getting schooling (? education) into the 21st century and into a 3.0 mode.
Why would teachers use Diigo? | Diigo Message System
This is an open thread on the Diigo "direct messaging service," which highlights some of the ways that teachers/educators on Diigo are using this application.
Richard Florida and The Creative Class Exchange: Real Education
Richard Florida quotes from a WSJ article (http://online.wsj.com/article/SB120425355065601997.html) that describes how successful Finnish high schoolers are compared to other students in other countries. I left a very long comment on this entry, as it's a topic obviously close to my area of concerns.
Click through to read Florida's post, and the numerous comments this one generated.
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High-school students here rarely get more than a
half-hour of homework a night. They have no school uniforms, no honor
societies, no valedictorians, no tardy bells and no classes for the
gifted. There is little standardized testing, few parents agonize over
college and kids don't start school until age 7.Yet by one international measure, Finnish teenagers
are among the smartest in the world. They earned some of the top scores
by 15-year-old students who were tested in 57 countries. American teens
finished among the world's C students even as U.S. educators piled on
more homework, standards and rules. Finnish youth, like their U.S.
counterparts, also waste hours online. They dye their hair, love
sarcasm and listen to rap and heavy metal. But by ninth grade they're
way ahead in math, science and reading -- on track to keeping Finns
among the world's most productive ... -
Add Sticky NoteFinnish teachers pick books and customize lessons as
they shape students to national standards. "In most countries,
education feels like a car factory. In Finland, the teachers are the
entrepreneurs," says Mr. Schleicher, of the Paris-based OECD, which
began the international student test in 2000 ...- Taylorization in public (and private) education hasn't allowed students to leap into post-factory economies. The factory model of education deserves to get the boot. - on 2008-03-02
- 2 more annotations...
"Schoolhouse Rock" - WSJ OpinionJournal
- profile/ overview of Michelle Rhee, the D.C. schools chancellor who's rocking the traditional bureaucratic boat of public schooling:
"She says she keeps hearing from worried city council members that some teachers and administrators are frightened of her. They are feeling pressure and that's a problem. Her answer? Get used to it. 'I'm going to hold people accountable and I'm going to hold their feet to the fire. If they're feeling pressure--good! I feel pressure every day because I have the education of 49,000 kids in my hands.'"
- I say go for it, and damn all the complaining from some sectors. Any time a bureaucracy serves primarily itself instead of its clients/ constituents, it needs a wake up kick in its nether regions, as well as a major dismantling. You can't decentralize centrally (Marshall McLuhan, paraphrased).
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Add Sticky NoteHer name first came to Mayor Fenty's attention through Joel Klein, the chancellor of the New York City School system. She was known as an out-of-the-box thinker, a relentless advocate of reform. And that made her just what the young mayor was looking for.
The alliance she and the mayor formed that day is now one of the strongest cards in the chancellor's hand. Their agreement was that as long as she acted in the best interests of the kids, he would back her up no matter how loud the screaming of the unions and community groups. "And since then, he has been unwavering," Ms. Rhee says with a note of awe in her voice. "He has never ever said to me, well, we need to think of the political ramifications."- - that's leadership; wish we had some of that at the municipal level in Victoria. - on 2007-12-26
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To be effective, Ms. Rhee believes, reforms must begin with the people closest to the children. When she first took the job, she made time to meet individually with all 159 principals in the school system. "People thought I was crazy, and it was very time consuming," she says, "but it was the best use of time . . . it was very telling."
Telling of what? Ms. Rhee quickly came to the conclusion that principals who were succeeding in their schools were her best resource. They were the ones who could tell her what she needed to do. She called in a group of top-tier principals and asked them for their wish lists: "I called them together and told them, 'You're the unsung heroes. This place creates such a bureaucracy that you can't get stuff done efficiently. Be creative, tell me what you want to do.'"
At first, the principals looked at her blankly. "They were like, what? And then when they got it, they were so excited." One principal asked for permission to run her school as a STEM school--focusing on Science, Technology, Engineering and Math. And she said that she wanted to keep her kids all the way through 8th grade. She explained that if parents had a school they believed in, they'd be less likely to take them out of the public system. - 2 more annotations...
the eyeopener online: "Higher Learning Inc."
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But what if we take Drucker's words in a different way? What if by distance learning, Drucker meant not co-op and correspondence courses, but an increasing sense of detachment? What if Drucker was speaking not so much about the crumbling of physical ivory towers, but of symbolic ones? And what if, as much as governments and big business, students are the ones to blame?
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Apathy, he says, is rampant. He recounts an incident from last year when a small group of students protesting the second inauguration outside Van Hall were beat up by police officers. "Nobody cared," he says. "They all felt the students deserved it. They said 'It disturbs classes.' That's the point!" What's left him bitter is not the quality of his professors or the courses he studied, but what he sees as an overemphasis on practicality amongst fellow scholars. "The attitude of so many students is: 'When am I ever going to use this again?'"
- 2 more annotations...
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I have at least 3 friends who are former teachers. They all said they left because "I loved the kids and teaching. I hated the union, the mandatory testing, the bureaucracy."
My wife's sister and her husband taught at a rural California school. They're avid birders and every year as part of science would take middle schoolers to the Klamath refuge to look at migrating waterfowl, bald eagles, etc. The kids loved it. But when No Child Left Behind came along they were told to stay in the classroom and teach to the tests.
Combining the Finnish model with the City as Classroom ideas of the Remixing cities would probably do more to reform education than another decade of blue ribbon studies.