Excitement is in the Air

One small step for Palooza, one giant leap for HISD. That's my thoughts about this morning's tuning session. How great it was to be in a room full of folk who were using the language of Web 2.0 and stepping forward together into the digital world that we must embrace to engage our students and teachers. We're definitely headed in the right direction, and it's nice that we're all headed out together with stable folks at the helm. Way to go, C & I.

Free Courses at MIT

Diametrically opposed to Sheneva's posting about schools paying students to attend school and learn, is an approach by MIT. Again, from the book "Wikinomics" I found that MIT offers open source courses that can be downloaded for free. They offer these courses to the world's family of self-learners in order to advance knowledge and educaiton and to serve the world in the 21st century. The readings for one course that I peeked at had exceprts from the Gutenberg Bible right there for me to download and interact with the course material. How tempting is that for life long learners? How available to all those students who cannot afford to attend MIT, yet have brains that can handle this challenging material to enrich themselves, and hopefully the world through their new understandings? I wonder if we hook students by paying them to learn at first, if they will ever want to avail themselves of these rich resources? What about you? The web site is: ocw.mit.edu

Wikinomics

I'm presently reading a book recommended by Ian Jukes called "Wikinomics." I love how it builds upon global collaboration, but not in the sense of everyone being face to face - but through the blososphere. The authors, Don Tapscott and Anthony Williams refer to this as "peer sharing" of just "peering." One example cited was how Rob McEwen, the CEO of Gold Corp, a large gold mining company put all of their geological data from the past 50 years on an open source web site in order to get the thinking from many sources around the world to solve the critical need for his company to discover at least six million more ounces of gold or risk bankruptcy. Since gold mining is a highly secretive operation, McEwen ran into great resitance, but went ahead with his plan anyway. Virtual prospectors from over 50 countries collaborated through a virtual medium. The participants in this contest ranged from students to mathematicians, to military offices.Their ideas lead to a discovery of over 8 million ounces of gold. The bottom line on the gold mine's profit margin went from $100 million to $9 billion and changed them from a company on the brink of closure to an innovative, cutting edge, highly profitable company. (Stock purchased in 1993 for $100 is now worth $3,000.) So, McEwen harnessed the collective genius of folks outside the boundaries of his company to make a huge impact on his company. This is the concept behind Wikinomics -global collaboration. Pulling from the minds of the best,no matter who or where they are and doing it in a way that is so open and easy to access that leads to greater success and creativity than any one (or any one company) can create on their own. This is the collaborative world we need to prepare our students to interact in. This is the collaborative world we need to participate in to make our business cutting edge and to challenge our thinking to new heights.

Bacteria Talk to each Other

I'm a big fan of the TED Talks (Technology Entertainment Design)web site where the most knowledgable people in a wide range of fields are invited to give their best 18 minute talks. The talks range from ant research over a 20 year period to how writers bring their real lives to the page. Today I watched Bonnie Bassler, a Princeton mircobiology professor describe how bacteria, a one celled organism, "talk" to each other using chemical language. In fact, she presents the social aspects of bacteria as both inter and intra species. Her presentation was so down to earth, funny, and amazingly informative. She makes it so easy to understand how virulent bacteria communicate and know when they've amassed enough of them to overtake a giant species like a human. On the flip side, she explained what good jobs bacteria do in all species. After all, we are about 99% bacteria, most of which are good she reminds us. At the end of her engaging talk, she showed a picture of her research assistants at Princeton, all of whom are under 30. These could be some of our future students if we can engage them in science by 4th grade (that's from other research I've read).
So, my advice to you is watch this engaging talk by going to the link below:
Use this to inspire you as a scientist. You'll never see yourself under the microscope in the same way again.

http://www.ted.com/talks/view/id/509

Encouraging Feedback from the Cracks

I recently interviewed ten struggling readers for an action research project. Nine of these students did not pass the recent state reading test. However, all nine still expressed a desire to get better at reading. I'm totally impressed that they still have the drive and the dream to see themselves moving into the winner's circle. This is such a tribute to them as learners and to their teachers for keeping that hope alive.

Testing has stripped learning of its intrinsic value

Excerpts from:

Education as Ritual
Uncovering Standardization's Depths
By Christian M. Bednar (former high school English teacher; not owns a tutoring company in Marblehead, Mass.)

We're on a mission. And whether or not the student is a failing Johnny or an A-plus Sally, he or she is suffering infinitely at the hands of an educational environment armed with more research than ever promoting the importance of critical thinking, yet ignorantly content to wallow in a basal-reader mentality.

Accordingly, learning has effectively been stripped of both its beauty and its intrinsic value.

Eliminating our present evaluative system would do much to reverse the suffocating climate in many of our schools. This change requires neither an exceptional degree of innovative thinking nor a supplementary allocation of funding. What it does demand, however, is the recognition that the process of learning is intangible and immeasurable. When we attempt to quantify that which is unquantifiable, we destroy.


http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2009/04/08/28bednar.h28.html?tkn=YPMFOz8s0F4pOIsuA4CP6l0RhGjHZ9QQPAfm

More time in School Proposal

Well it seems as if the secretary of education agrees with me that in order to compete globally, we need to educate our children longer. I think I posed this comment to one of Dan's querries. I know it will be a cultural war as summer vacation, and short school days are so embedded in who we think we are as a society. Yet, how are we to catch up on teaching children how to think deeply in a global arena if we don't make systemic changes? I say as inconvenient as this will be, that we must enbrace it to get to the front of the line of competitors. Otherwise we're going to wind up on a very long summer vacation while the students from India, China, and other nations are working all the available jobs around the world.

I see the stimulus money may somehow be tied to these changes. Now, that's a way to get buy in.

Anyway, read all about it at the following link: http://www.9news.com/news/article.aspx?storyid=113300&provider=top&catid=188