Will Bunch recommends this Bob Baker post.

Jay Rosen recommends this one by Charles Cooper.

I recommend both articles and both recommenders. [Tags: media]

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At the Irving Independent School District Symposium, 200 educators are meeting to talk about their craft and their charge.

Dr. Marie Morris, Assistant Superintendent, welcomes us by giving some of the demographics of the school: almost 50% Latino, 17% white, 13% African-American… The school has 450 kids from New Orleans. “We celebrate that diversity,” she says, and teachers who do not believe that all students can learn are not welcome.

Robbin Wall, the school’s principal, welcomes us. The school is 5 years old. Every student has a laptop. (Among the speakers today — via video — is Angus King who was governor when Maine gave each student a laptop.) Principal Wall says that this school is focused on training professionals; it offers no extra-curricular activities.

Anita Givens of the Texas Education Agency talks about the state’s technology immersion pilot project. The project intends to provide complete technology infrastructures, rather than counting on schools implementing technology one bit at a time. It’s paid with some fed money and some local.

As a result, attendance went up, parents were more involved, there was increased collaboration, and fewer discipline problems. She goes through the results of a study comparing control schools and schools implementing the project, but she’s cycling through the slides faster than I can type. She points to a Web site that has the data: www.etxtip.info.

Darrell Lynn of Apple, a sponsor of the event, introduces Angus King, former two-term, independent governor of Maine. King appears via his $129 iSite. He talks about the insights that guided him to the laptop policy.

First, he has no idea what the economy of the US and of Maine will be in ten years. But, he says he does know that whatever happens will require more education and a higher level of comfort with technology.

Second, every governor chases quality jobs for their state. “You don’t get ahead by keeping up.”

Third, everything governments do is incremental. Baby steps, not real change. In 1999, Maine had a surplus. So, King thought about how it could be used to bring change.

In 1996, he had lunch with Seymour Papert who told him that reducing the ratio of students to computers wouldn’t matter until the ratio is 1:1.

So, Maine started by giving laptops to every kid in grades 7-8. King thought this would be well received, but it wasn’t. He blurted out, in response to a question, that the computers would belong to the students, not the school. He says, “I got the living shit kicked out of me.” [Shit Barrier transgressed at 9:15am…and by a former governor!] The emails to his officce were 10:1 against. He persevered. (PS: The schools own the laptops.)

Lesson learned: Make sure the local school leadership is on board.

Why do this? Because students need intimate familiarity with tech if they want good jobs. And because the tech levels the playing field. [This is also an argument for muni wifi.]

“The results have been pretty amazing” although not (yet) in standardized test scores, although writing seems to have been improved. The key word is engagement. “If you watch a tape of Maine laptop classroom, you’ll see the kids focused on that screen, and they’re focused on the work they’re supposed to be doing.” Decline in disciplinary problems and an increase in attendance, signs of engagement. “The results are beyond my expectation.”

The project is only in 20-30 out of the 150 Maine high schools because the money ran out. “We need a cheaper device. We’re paying $300/student/year, including all costs including networking.” that’s 0.5% of the education budget.

The breakage rate is 3%. (The laptops are iBooks. Later King mentions that the Gates Foundation gave the program $1 million for professional development for teachers.) Some schools don’t let the kids take the laptops home after school. King thinks that’s a mistake.

Q: The school superintendent says that Irving is in its 5th year of 1:1 technology. But money is tight. How can vendors be brought to the table?


A: Negroponte is working on a $100 laptop. A prototype is being unveiled at the WSIS meeting in Tunisia.

[Tags: education]

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IndependentSources runs a chart of Paul Krugman citations now that he’s been moved behind the New York Times pay wall. It is what diminishing influence looks like.

The post also points to a Kaus post that wonders if the NY Times would have taken an offer of $6.1 million — what it’s made in subscription fees — to diminish its influence. [Tags: media]

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I’m keynoting a teacher’s conference in Texas. It’s being held in Irving, outside of Dallas, at the Academy of Irving, the local technology-focused public high school. It’s open and light. (My own high school, progressive though it was, instilled in me a lifelong fear of cinderblock.) And there’s wifi! My host told me on the drive from the hotel that it’s primarily a poor district, but this school does not feel that way. Good priorities.

The school library is modest but inviting. The books are shelved according to Dewey but the online catalog — there is no paper one — from The Library Corp doesn’t care about that. It seems mainly search-based, with suggestions of books and categories returned. While the Dewey hierarchy is offensive to modern sensibilities (and any stable hierarchy is going to be offensive to some because we just don’t agree on how knowledge is nested), shelved books exhibit no hierarchy, just a cloud of related topics. Now that the metadata is digital, the utility of Dewey’s shelving need not be marred by the provincialism of Dewey’s classification. [Tags: taxonomy DeweyDecimal EverythingIsMiscellaneous]

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Another excellent interview with Peter Morville, this one in BusinessWeek about his book, Ambient Findability. Here’s a snippet:

I use the term findability to encompass wayfinding in natural environments, as well as navigation and retrieval in digital spaces. So, in the physical world, that aspect of findability has existed for eons. [In my book] I explore the skills that enable ants, birds, bees, sea turtles and humans to wander without getting lost.

What’s new is the use of technology, much of it coordinated through the web, to create trans-media wayfinding experiences. We’re importing huge volumes of data about the physical world into cyberspace, and at the same time, we’re designing all sorts of new interfaces to our digital networks — Google Earth, Smart Phones, Intelligent Toilets, Web on the Wall, GPS Watches, iPods — and the beat goes on. To borrow a term from Ted Nelson, physical and digital are increasingly “intertwingled.” We really are at a pivotal point where things are beginning to get weird.

(In the Dept. of Predictable Irony, Dan Klyn on a mailing list points out that a search on the BusinessWeek site for “Ambient Findability” returns no results. And Peter points out that at Technorati Books, the metadata associated with the book are “…Dating, Kissing, Love, Sex, Romance, Marriage, Oral…” ) [Tags: taxonomy PeterMorville search]

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Judith Miller got the NY Times to publish her farewell in the form of a letter to the editor. It is a model of what transparency isn’t.

Jeff Jarvis raises an interesting question in passing: Do the terms of the agreement prevent either side from disclosing the terms of the agreement or, worse, what actually happened? Either restriction would be bad news for a news organization. How about some meta-transparency from the Times on that question? [Tags: nytimes JudithMiller media JeffFarvis]

On the positive front, Richard Sambrook, head of the World Service of the BBC, who has been blogging within the BBC firewall, now has stepped out into the public blogosphere. Richard’s been behind some of the BBC’s most progressive experiments in empowering its listeners…

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FWIW, expect light blogging today and tomorrow. I spent the morning with a client in NYC – they’re trying to figure out how tagging can help people find more of what’s on their huge site – and am giving a talk in Irving Texas to an educational group. Fun for me and less for you to read. Win win!

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Dan has announced the alpha of his new product:

The product is the wikiCalc program — a web authoring tool that creates web pages. It is for creating and maintaining web pages that include data that is more than just unformatted prose, such as schedules, lists, and tables.

Sounds cool. And Dan’s been known to put together a noteworthy product or two. [Tags: DanBricklin wikis SocialSoftware]

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Terry Heaton writes provocatively about the “unbundled newsroom“:

…our essential mission is to first serve the information needs of our community throughout the day, and then to create programs that will summarize the news of the day. This means a fundamental change in our approach to the news, for the best way to meet the needs of people during the day is to create news in an unbundled form. No longer can we simply repurpose content that’s created for a bundled program and distribute it elsewhere. On the contrary, our unbundled content is what should be repurposed to create our end-of-the-day summaries.

…field crews need tools for directly publishing to the Web, including text, stills, video, blogs, e-mail, cellphones, handhelds, and especially RSS. We need to see ourselves as pushing content at every turn in the creation and development of our journalism.

This is journalism made fully transparent. (There’s much more in Terry’s piece than those two snippets, btw.)

Terry sees the broadcast news programs as a rebundling of the bundles. I wonder whether the networks are going to be trusted as rebundlers worth listening to; already the editorial function has migrated to the Web to a remarkable degree for many of us. Why should we value the broadcasters’ editorial judgment enough to enable them to stay afloat economically? And if the news programs fail, why will the news divisions continue to generate unbundled content?

I’m not saying I have an alternative.

[Tags: news media TerryHeaton EverythingIsMiscellaneous]

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