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The other night, The Daily Show had a great piece on CNN's new blogging feature. It basically is two young woman sitting in front of computer screens reading blogs. Stewart gets in some great comments. Lisa Rein has the clip...
More Is Better: "The "new and improved" SAT test was offered for the first time in March and, in one of the major changes, students were required to write an essay as part of the annual ritual. The College Board thinks this alteration makes the test more relevant. Others are not so sure it's an improvement.
On Thursday, Tim Stahmer wrote about a report from National Council of Teachers of English that is critical of the writing component of the new SAT. He points out that it looks like the more you write, the better your score. The report, and an article linked from Tim's post, points out that the longer the piece, the higher the score. Les Perelman of MIT suggests that students write as much as possible and include lots of facts... Doesn't seem to matter if they are correct, just put in a lot of them... Not exactly how we teach the writing process at Lewis...
Update: NPR's Weekend Edition Saturday has an interview with Les Perelman this morning. The audio will be available after 1:00 pm Eastern time.
Time Travelers to Meet in Not Too Distant Future:
"Some students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have organized what they call the first time traveler convention."
If you are reading this in the future, please note that it is a potluck... Also the organizers ask that you please bring something to prove you are from the future... Maybe the program from the 2099 World Series...
"We boomers won't be remembered as the "Greatest Generation." Rather, we'll be scorned as the "Greediest Generation.""
In today's New York Times, Nicholas D. Kristof details the extent to which we demonstrate our lack of concern for children while catering to aging baby boomers...
A View from the Classroom -- Lehmann's Log: Losing A Wonderful ResourceChris Lehmann points to an article that points out that the Eisenhower National Clearinghouse (ENC) for math and science education has losts it funding and is moving from being a resouce provided to teachers by the Department of Education to a paid subscription service. Starting in the fall, school districts will have to pay $329 a year to subscribe to the service.
The ENC has been a very successful resource for teachers. It is a shame that we can't find the funding to keep this resource freely available to teachers and administrators.
Update: Tom Hoffman points to this information and asks all the right questions... He's right... The Feds (that's you and me) bought and paid for the content... Why now do the folks who were paid to write the content get to make a service out of it. I understand they are planning on adding additional content, but what about all the stuff they wrote while being paid by the Department of Education? Just throw it all up on Wikipedia or some other type endeavor and let it be free... Good job Tom!
Open Source Radio Tod Maffin's latest radio piece for CBC Radio was done in an Open Source manner. He solicited ideas and suggestions from readers and listeners throughout the creative process. A kind of a public editing. This got me thinking in terms of my school and our School Improvement Planning process. I'd like to incorporate some of the methods Tod and others have used to share our work with the larger school community and gain ideas and feedback on the plan as we are writing it... More later…
GovTrack lets users track activity of specific legislators. It can also send updates via RSS, or Real Simple Syndication. The site collects information from Thomas (thomas.loc.gov), the Library of Congress's legislation-tracking site, and the official sites of the House of Representatives and the Senate.
On the Media - December 31, 2004
On The Media's John Solomon illuminates a few aspects of the radio production process that might come as a surprise to some listeners.
A very entertaining piece from the NPR program On The Media detailing how pieces that are heard on NPR are edited. As the guy says, I always wondered how everyone sounded so articulate on those shows... the secrets are revealed... Podcasters take note... You too can learn to cut out the "uh, um's," and "you know's"
Also the show itself is available as a MP3 download and as an RSS enclosure for download to your iPod...
A Woman of Our Times (washingtonpost.com) Katz was a refugee, born in Germany, fleeing the Nazis as a child, then walking with her family away from Nazi-occupied France through the Pyrenees to Spain, then going on to Portugal and, finally, New York.
David Broder has a nice article on our mayor and her career as her term of office ends. Vera Katz has had a very interesting life and career and Broder hits the highpoints...
Christian Lindholm, father of the Series 60 interface, has made an abstract of his book, "Mobile Usability: How Nokia Changed the Face of the Mobile Phone" available for WAP download to your Series 60 handset as an interactive Maxdox app (JAR file). Rather a nice format, actually, and certainly worth a gander if you're interested either in the book itself (I've already read it) or one possible face of mobile documents to come.
Mobilewhack points to an abstract of Christian Lindholm's book "Mobile Usability: How Nokia Changed the Face of the Mobile Phone" The abstract is available as a download for Series 60 phones. I just installed it on my Nokia 3650. It is formated for my phone. Is interesting to think of having content like this available for phones. I am more and more using my Nokia 3650 as a PDA. I already sync my address book and calendar to it. With the installation of the Opera browser, viewing web pages is now an option. I've started pulling off content from my school district web site and saving it to my phone. I can now pull up schedules and memos and such for viewing on my phone when away from my computer. The one thing holding me back was the way that AT&T Wireless charges for data. Can get pretty expensive pretty quickly... Last week I read how to connect my 3650 to my laptop (Share2Blue2th 2.0 )via Bluetooth and utilize the laptop connection to pull web content on to my Nokia 3650 via Opera. Now I can pull the content for later reference without worrying about AT&T data charges.