TJ is home to geniuses, the merely brilliant, and yes, a fair number of kids who are bright but not wildly so, or who somehow manage to find things other than academics about which to be passionate in their middle teen years. The Shame And Horror Of The B-Minus Student - Raw Fisher
My parents homeschooled me so that I could get more experience in the world, not so that I could shelter myself from it. Learning Curve, Bitch Magazine
English 115F: Worlds of Wordcraft Fall 2007
Are online games generating new interactive modes of narrative? How do multimedia environments transform the age-old patterns of quest romances that structure much game play? Is the line between virtual and real experience erased by the fusion of online communities, role playing, and escapist fictions? Can computer games be pedagogical tools, as some academics maintain, or are they only addictive, sedentary, and antisocial activities? These questions will animate our consideration of digital narrative forms. You can audit this AWESOME course as a podcast through iTunesU.
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Let’s see you do that in four lines of Java! Go Logo! Kick Java’s ass! Download UC Berkeley’s Logo for X11 Download a prettier Logo for Mac OS X
randomWalks' greatest hits: One Evening When She Was Two
One day I told my students (freshmen at a prominent east-coast university) to pull out a piece of paper. They all did. I told them to print their names in the upper right-hand corner. They all did. I told them to tile the paper “A Syllabus of Syllables,” and then underline the title. They all did. I told them to write the following syllables next to the numbers: “ge, sha, la, urb, orb, go, vin, sko, sti, cer.” They all did. I told them to form a word from each of the syllables. They asked me a few questions - they wanted to be sure exactly what it was I wanted from them - and then they all hunched over their papers and did it. I told them to fold the paper in half. Deborah asked which way. I said lengthwise. Then I told them to hand in their papers. They all did. I stood there with a handful of 15 papers folded lengthwise. Everybody was looking at me.
Not one of them asked me why we were doing this. Not one of them told me to go screw myself. Not one of them – not one – even looked at me strange.
Why should they? Nothing strange had happened. this was school. School is where you give up your power, you do what you’re told, and you don’t ask questions. In school, we all learn not to care anymore, not even to care that we’re being humiliated, because everybody keeps telling us that we’re being educated.
If we sat around and deliberately tried to come up with a way to further enlarge the achievement gap, we might just invent homework. Elementary-school students shouldn’t do homework. By Emily Bazelon - Slate Magazine It’s being referred to as “the homework debate,” but I haven’t seen anybody argue that homework is good pedagogy. Hey, check this out: The word comes from the ancient Greek paidagogos, the slave who supervised the education of slave children in whatever given trade they were forced into. Children who lived in under the supervision of Paidagogos were always slaves as no free person took orders from a slave. It was the Paidagogos job to act as a “Drill Sergeant”, and insure that the slaves performed their daily routines as expected by their Master. Wikipedia: Pedagogy
Tremendous! Fantastic! Erica Jacobs has her 108 high school English students blogging!
Elmo and Zoe are on an exercise routine. Singing vegetables and talking fruit have invaded the neighborhood. Miles has a new song. It is about broccoli. And, darkest of all, Cookie Monster has been stripped of his piles of quickly and loudly consumed chocolate-chip cookies.
Cookie Monster's gluttonous binges mirrored the insatiable furball inside each of us young viewers and eventually elicited an innate recognition of "too much" — an understanding much more powerful when arrived at personally. If Cookie Monster is now learning lessons of moderation in our stead, we'll have to learn our own lessons elsewhere.
No doubt I'm but one among many former children mourning Cookie Monster's diminished id, but the most frustrating part of this moderately tragic turn of events is that the Children's Television Workshop already had a perfectly righteous Captain Vegetable with his very own catchy theme song.
What to Tell Children About God by Alan Watts.
God also likes to play hide-and-seek, but because there is nothing outside God, He has no one but himself to play with. But He gets over this difficulty by pretending that He is not Himself. This is His way of hiding from Himself. He pretends that He is you and I and all the people in the world, all the animals, all the plants, all the rocks, and all the stars. In this way He has strange and wonderful adventures, some of which are terrible and frightening. But these are just like bad dreams, for when He wakes up they will disappear.
“Processing is a programming language and environment built for the electronic arts and visual design communities. It is created to teach fundamentals of computer programming within a visual context and to serve as a software sketchbook. It is used by students, artists, designers, architects, and researchers for learning, prototyping, and production.”
Tagwebs, Flickr, and the Human Brain (by Jakob Lodwick)
Tagging, as seen on Flickr and other sites, allows you to organize things in a way that makes sense to your brain. You may also notice that tagging photos on Flickr is the first time that organizing something has made perfect sense.
This is fantastic and reminds me of the eternal golden braid, but I'm a little bit worried that this guy's mind is about to turn inside out like Robert Pirsig's did.
It is absolutely imperative that you develop the habit of making decisions as soon as possible. I use a 60-second rule for almost every decision I have to make, no matter how big or important. Once I have all the data to make a decision, I start a timer and give myself only 60 seconds to make a firm decision. I think people too often delay making decisions when there is no advantage to putting them off. Many people probably spend more than 60 seconds just deciding what they'll eat for dinner.
History's New Look (washingtonpost.com)
For years [the National Museum of Natural History] displayed artifacts in old-fashioned dioramas with mannequins of Indians in sparse hunting gear. As part of its renovation, it has been tearing up those exhibitions. This summer it dismantled the hall in which they resided. It has also returned to tribes many items that had been collected and donated by scientists. One of the most famous was the brain of Ishi, who for years was believed to be the last Yahi-Yana of Northern California. His brain was sent to the Smithsonian by an anthropologist and remained in museum storage for 83 years. It was returned to his kin from other tribes in 2000.
The new National Museum of the American Indian avoids the anthropological approach in an effort to correct past museum practices by reflecting "authentic voices of native peoples themselves". (bugmenot, washingtonpost.com)
Merlin Mann's 43 Folders is brilliant, full of lifehacks for geeks.
Ultimately about learning how you work, where you get bogged down, and how your brain wants to operate. Once you develop the tweaks for your own contexts and special situation, you’re golden.
Reviewer: Stewart Brand
Subject: Better than Whole Earth Catalog...
...because 1) it's current, 2) it focuses on real tools rather than books, 3) it's completely Web-active.Compulsive reading, eager shopping for real value, better living as a result.
Macworld: Shoot Action Like a Pro by Derrick Story. Because a little bit of video technique is a dangerous thing.
The key to recording good action footage lies in learning how to hold the shot. The subject should be moving, not the video camera.
Hampshire College Student Uses J.K. Rowling's Quidditch as Basis for Artificial Intelligence Experiment: "Crawford-Marks now calls his earliest work 'kiddy Quidditch,' as it evolved teams that played like he thinks six-year-olds might. But, now well past the 50th generation it starts to look a little more like Rowling's game, with a practically uncatchable Snitch."