Saturday, September 30, 2006
My classroom doesn’t work the way I want it to. In the Age of Accountability, I focus on process, and see product as a secondary concern. I’m an ill-fitting peg, uneasy about participating in what, for me, amounts to a charade – emulating archaic practices designed for kids from bygone eras. Looking at the group [...]
Tuesday, September 26, 2006
It’s been frantic, the last couple of days, getting the kid site going. Yesterday, Day 1, students all had material ready to go, saved in portable keyboards and on a file server, so everyone could jump in together, and we wouldn’t have to be concerned with “creative flow” and technical procedures simultaneously. After they logged [...]
Monday, September 25, 2006
Harris Salat, from the Visual Thesaurus, interviewed me last summer. Harrris is a good interviewer, and we talked about many things that didn’t get published. He was most curious about what we call our “Alaska lifestyle,” which mostly meant salmon fishing when I spoke with him. Even though I don’t believe the word, cute, is [...]
Friday, September 22, 2006
What does global warming have to do with educational meltdown in the 21st century? Global warming, the war in Iraq, hurricanes, earthquakes, and fake educational crises are all ripe with opportunity for government contracts. Government regulation spawns new business opportunity when new interventions are mandated. Never mind that the fix may have no impact on [...]
Tuesday, September 19, 2006
It may be the pressure of new school year ambitions weighing on me, with one eighth of the academic year gone, and with the strongest sense of being still at the beginning stage with this group of students, that two posts seem to describe this rocky hard place. The Rock Reporting on the stone, Artichoke [...]
Friday, September 15, 2006
Henry Jenkins, Director of the MIT Comparative Media Studies Program, announced the development of a new media exemplar library, and posted a link to one of the first exemplars, Cory Doctorow. Jenkins described this project as a “a library of short digital films focused around media-makers and the craft and ethical choices they face in [...]
Thursday, September 14, 2006
The National Council of Teachers of Mathematics issued a news release announcing their new Curriculum Focal Points. What’s this? I wondered. They anticipated that I’d want to know, and they published a Questions and Answers page to satisfy me and anyone else who might want to learn what this has to do with the Mathematics [...]
Tuesday, September 12, 2006
Posted on Artichoke’s Knowledge Building wiki page: Next to the wisdom of youth, the knowledge of people who’ve managed to survive with minimal technology for millenia has been all but fogotten. This survival feat was accomplished by assuming a relationship of respect for all things. We’ve had many discussions up here in the North about [...]
Monday, September 11, 2006
After reading How do I open up the subject with children? The key word here is LISTEN. Most experts agree that it is best NOT to open up a conversation with children by giving them a lecture – even an informal, introductory lecture – on the particular tragedy that is on the news. Don’t burden [...]
Saturday, September 9, 2006
Monday is the 5th anniversary of the World Trade Center Atrocity, and Teaching for Change has resources for educators who want to help elementary and secondary level students untangle the rhetoric about terrorism [via Chris Lott]. Meg Spohn provides the link to the official 9/11 Commission report. A special issue of Rethinking Schools, called War, [...]
