Thursday, October 17, 2013

tweets

Daniel Pink (@DanielPink)
10/16/13 7:05 AM
Check out the next 3 great guests on Office Hours: ow.ly/pRiyC Then ask one of the a question:ow.ly/pRivz

Doug Belshaw (@dajbelshaw)
10/16/13 7:10 AM
@audreywatters Have you seen Mozilla's User Personalization (UP) idea?mzl.la/17JNk0u

has mozilla seen the comments?

Nilofer Merchant (@nilofer)
10/16/13 7:18 AM
"This country is going to do well over time." @WarrenBuffett#FortuneMPW


In 100 years we have gone from teaching Latin and Greek in high school to teaching Remedial English in college. - Joseph Sobran

Original Tweet: https://twitter.com/PoliticalLaughs/status/390523498570850304


@DataDiva it's not that we don't have ideas. It's just that our pd time is being controlled. Frustrating.

Original Tweet: https://twitter.com/rightingteacher/status/390560622163021825

less on figuring things out.. and more on setting people free.
the 7bill free people would will be quite capable of figuring things out  - no?

The most annoying problem for neo-liberalism (and any other manmade belief system): other people.

Original Tweet: https://twitter.com/superblyhuman/status/390735427642343424


Greg Satell (@Digitaltonto)
10/17/13 6:31 AM
4 Corny Business Ideas That Actually Make Sensep.ost.im/dWsDkr


Stage Five: Tribe (Less than 2 % of organizations) Mission driven culture.  The high performing biotech company Amgen saw itself as competing against cancer, rather than other companies and that’s typical of a Stage 5 culture..  Unfortunately, Stage 5 is unsustainable, high performing organizations pop in and out.

or... is it the most sustainable..
if we do it differently

This is perhaps the corniest idea of all, because it means that the true value creation in the digital age will be more human than ever.  As pattern recognition and intelligence, become automated, the key human contribution will be the ability to imagine and to dream.
And that is the essence of corny, because it elevates sentiment to the sublime.  In an age where efficiency is increasingly in the domain of machines, it is our distinctly human qualities that are most likely to differentiate us in the marketplace.

Jacob Appelbaum (@ioerror)
10/17/13 6:31 AM
A new ironic event in the history of cryptography - Adi Shamir Prevented from Attending NSA History Conference: blogs.fas.org/secrecy/2013/1…
So what is the bottom line of this whole unhappy episode? Clearly, no one in the US is trying to see the big picture, and the heavy handed visa bureaucracy you have created seems to be collapsing under its own weigh

Deb Mills-Scofield (@dscofield)
10/17/13 6:32 AM
What if being successful and serving others was mutually Inclusive?


Why schools should be funded federally, not locally. Once parents, higher-income people move away from poor areas. http://t.co/wKBypM1zIu

Original Tweet: https://twitter.com/zeynep/status/390879809921757184

Put simply, many Americans, especially those with resources, like residing in socioeconomically-diverse areas when they’re younger, but once they have kids, and want the best for them, they head out — not just to the suburbs, but to suburbs with better schools and richer people and less crime — even if they have to pay up.

Greg Satell (@Digitaltonto)
10/17/13 6:32 AM
How Technology Is Transforming Our Brainsp.ost.im/dWdMAL


Now there are new studies out that seem to support his argument.  One shows that using search enginesdecreases our memory and another suggests that GPS may atrophy our brains.  Discovery magazine has collected a half-dozen similar examples on its site.

I think the question itself is misplaced.  Clearly, we use technology to do things for us that we no longer are doing for ourselves and that means certain abilities degenerate.  Yet, it also means that we are freeing up cognitive energy for other things.  So what’s really important is not the skills we are losing but those that we need to develop.
and/or recapture/reclaim..
An expert has internalized the patterns of his chosen field and can act without thought or deliberation, but can operate seemingly by instinct
Yet computers can absorb material much faster than we can.  In How to Create a Mind, Ray Kurzweil estimates that the human brain can recognize 100,000 patterns,  In its first year as a med student, Watson took in 600,000 pieces of medical evidence, two million pages of text and 1.5 million patient records.
The first thing you’ll notice is how much medicine has changed.  You don’t see Dr. Welby ordering a barrage of tests or asking patients what kind of insurance they have.  In fact, he spends most of his time talking and getting to know each of his patients personally.  He was, by today’s standards, enormously inefficient.
In the decades since, we have learned to be efficiency driven machines.  We’re more data focused, evidence based and rational.  Mostly, we see this as an improvement.  After all, a doctor who treats more patients can cure more people.  Yet we’ve lost something too and letting machines take over gives us the opportunity to get it back.
As Sandy Pentland, a big data expert at MIT and one of the most cited computer scientists in the world, put it in a recent interview, “We teach people that everything that matters happens between your ears when in fact it actually happens between people.”
from link to Sandy's recent interview:
Pentland argued that more data scientists need to come from an electrical engineering background, rather than mathematics.
"One of the things that happened, which is sort of unfortunate, is most of the computer science type of data people are trained in a type of mathematics called discrete mathematics... [which is not best suited to] the sort of data that we're collecting now," he said.
"The people who are much closer are the electrical engineer types, who are used to signals and audio and video and stuff like that. But they also have to then extend themselves to become much more familiar with machinery and human behaviour," Pentland continued.
"And so the most effective data scientists have a background in things like signal processing, and then we're into machine vision and finally... human behaviour."
"There needs to be general literacy about data interpretation and also much more literacy about the way society works," he told Computing.
"For instance, the importance of social learning, learning from each other, that creates fads, that creates market crashes," Pentland continued. "We tend to teach people that everything that matters happens between your ears when in fact it actually mostly happens between people."

US Dept of Education (@usedgov)
10/17/13 6:57 AM
Good morning! The U.S. Department of Education is open. Have a great day.

imagining many will have fun with that tweet.

wondering if it would hold up as defense for practicing honest openness with public Ed funding. or even without it.
seriously.

Giorgio Bertini (@gfbertini)
10/17/13 6:57 AM
Ethiopian utopian village goes against the grain | Learning Community Changelearningtocommunity.wordpress.com/2013/10/16/eth…
The village is run by way ofcommittees where 50-percent-plus-one vote majorities decide all bylaws and decisions concerning the comm

west indies style



http://blogs.kqed.org/mindshift/2013/10/the-key-to-empowering-educators-true-collaboration/


It is about how you as an adult help a learner create their own need to know so they are on a learning path with you, so they have a motivation that is connected to a shared interest,” said Yowell. She has seen this approach work well in schools that are constructed around “quests” or “missions” that students care about, often projects that affect their own communities. Within the framework of a quest, standards and knowledge can be thoughtfully embedded without disturbing the learner-driven pedagogy.
One way Zhao envisions this type of collaborative learning is as a personalized learning ecosystem. Many college students already create a type of ecosystem by seeking out the most helpful professors, the best libraries, peer tutors and even social spaces. If K-12 education was envisioned in much the same way it could be more learner-directed with teachers acting as coaches and resources along the learning path. And for Zhao, it’s important to think of that ecosystem in a global context. Teachers and students from around the world can learn from one another, share lessons, best practices and even policy solutions.

indeed - our vision four years ago... but then we found that not sustainable..
ie: we can do better.. ecosystem of city.. with no package deals.. no strings..

these ideas are still in the old school structure.. even though we are claiming they aren't..
if we bring up any type of curriculum that isn't born out of a person.. ie: authentic curiosity - we aren't giving tech and/or us an authentic go.
and it may seem prettier/kinder/whatever for a while..
but it won't sustain.

perhaps sustainability will only come when we trust daily curiosities to drive us.. ie: whimsy.. so intense (curiosity is intense desire to learn - no?) that it produces a true grit - that most people have not seen/felt since they were five..

no?

But to move in the direction of a learning ecosystem, or Yowell’s definition of personalized learning, educators on the leading-edge of this work may need to redefine learning outcomes. Zhao cautions that if every new idea is justified using the requirements of an old system then it can never break free and realize its full potential.

spot on.
we know too much - to not do just that.
and we should be holding each other accountable for saying these things.. yet not finding the bravery to change our minds.. everyday. 
whimsy matters.
today - we can facilitate whimsy..
learning outcome - have we facilitated whimsy?
the intense desire to learn something.. that each person has if we give them back their 7+ hours a day.. no?

TAKING A CHANCE

Kecia Ray, executive director of learning technology for Metro Nashville Public Schools brought an in-district perspective to the discussion. According to her, teachers need two things to be convinced to take risks in the classroom: an understanding of how those risks will affect their evaluations and enough trust with students, parents and administrators to step out on a limb. She also said there are a lot of practical things like seat time requirements, textbook funding and other logistical policies that stand in the way of teachers experimenting with letting students become co-collaborators, creators and producers of new and authentic work.
“The collaboration is so significant for transformation that it cannot be underestimated,” Ray said. In her schools, if even a few educators can be convinced to take risks associated with blended learning or incorporating technology into their pedagogy, others follow. Collaboration helps educators feel that they are part of a movement, not alone and stuck. Supportive administrators are another key ingredient, remaining steadfast behind the teacher even when an experiment fails.
Many panelists acknowledged that the current U.S educational system has become so focused on standards, accountability and testing that there is very little room to use technology in the generative way that Yowell, Prensky and Zhao advocate. That’s why many of the education technology tools on the market place pander to the current, limited model.
“We have wonderfully inspired teachers and a whole set of tools and possibilities that we’ve never had before, but a bureaucratic system that’s preventing growth and opportunity,” Yowell said. She suggests trying out technology and its creative potential in more informal learning environments where the stakes for teachers aren’t as high. Once educators are more comfortable with students as creators and producer, they might have better success integrating those approaches into the classroom.
“We’re beginning to sense the need for an empowerment movement so that teachers can take charge of the learning environments that we’re talking about,” Prensky said. He believes this work will start from the ground up, growing in power until education policymakers can’t help but pay attention.
oh my.. this is taking a chance?

and our bold taking a chance - ness is schooling the world..
this is Philippe and Ann responding to this very post on facebook