Category Archives: Education

Shirky confirms Shenk

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Clay Shirky, in a recent talk at Web 2.0 Expo New York, challenged us to stop talking about information overload as an excuse, recognize it as a fact (one that’s existed for a long time and will not diminish in the future), and to work on building better filters.

Watch Clay Shirky on information overload versus filter failure:

Titles like the Boing Boing one are kinda unfortunate because they frame Shirky’s view to be one that would be in opposition to lets say, David Shenk’s from his book “Data Smog”.

Far from it.

David Shenk attempted to identify the information landscape we are living in now way back in 1997. In a 2007 piece in Slate he took a critical look back.

As with any look forward, the book wildly missed the mark with some of its more grim predictions, but in many ways still has much to offer and think about.

In particular, towards the end of the book Shenk proposed a personal call to action for building better filters (learning to be our own for example) and to be better information producing citizens (being our own editors). Big foreshadowing of Shirky’s talk there.

Most reviews of the book focussed on Shenk’s definition of the problem and pooh-poohed his suggestions. So here we are, many years down the line, and most of the focus is *still* grousing about ‘information overload’.

Clay Shirky’s point is its high time to stop doing that and get busy building the tools, protocols, customs and businesses that will help us not only deal with it, but thrive from it.

A Thank You to Sesame Street

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The Muppet Newsflash: Sesame Street Celebrates 40th Anniversary with Two New History Books

Old clips of Elmo with Kermit on YouTube helped me expose Emma to the Muppets a few years ago. Now Muppets are part of the Sesame Street universe for her, as it was me and Richelle when we were growing up. Here are two great ones:

YouTube: Sesame Street: Kermit Reports News On Elmo’s Idea:

YouTube: Sesame Street: Kermit And Elmo Discuss Happy And Sad:

Gotta love Cookie Monster:

YouTube: Sesame Street & The Origin of Om nom nom nom:

YouTube: Sesame Street: Cookie Monster Sings C is for Cookie:

Or Ernie:

YouTube: Sesame Street: Ernie and his Rubber Duckie:

I could post a million videos but you’re better off just visiting the Sesame Street channel on YouTube

And as Emma knows, Kermit’s my personal favorite. Its great that we can watch the old Muppet movies with her and she loves them is so much fun.

YouTube: Muppet Movie – The Rainbow Connection:

Lately on YouTube, the Muppets Studio has been posting new videos, this one is genius!

YouTube: The Muppets: Bohemian Rhapsody:

And one last one, not to show to kids, but too funny not share:

YouTube: The Song of the Count – Lemon Demon Version:

I wonder, now that the Muppets and Sesame Street are owned and operated so separately, will there ever be a moment in any future movie like the wedding chapel in Muppets Take Manhattan? When Emma saw Big Bird and crew in the pews, she yelled with surprise and joy.

I think we used Sesame Street as a guide for what constituted ‘good’ children’s television for us. The Backyardigans, Jack’s Big Music Show, The Wonder Pets, Blue’s Clues (did you know Blue’s Clues was created by former Sesame Street writers?), Dora and Diego, all are in its spirit. No Baby Einstein, and nothing that had more quick shot cuts than Sesame Street for example, Yo Gaba Gaba. Good songwriting, flow, encouragement of imagination and *thinking*. That’s what we were looking for in children’s television. And I think we can say thanks to Sesame Street for that.

Related Articles:

NPR.org: Lessons Of ‘Sesame Street’: Letters, Numbers And TV

NPR.org: 40 Years Of Lessons On ‘Sesame Street’

NYTimes: Same Street, Different World: ‘Sesame’ Turns 40

NationalPost: 101 Muppets of Sesame Street

Links related to the changing economy for November 24th, 2009

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Douglas Ruskoff: Video Radical Abundance: How We Get Past “Free” and Learn to Exchange Value Again.: We are at a crossroads. Right now we have the ability to optimize our systems, our technologies, and our currency to humans, rather than optimizing humans to them.

Metafilter discussion of previous: “The Plague of Free.”

Awful Marketing: St. Louis Newspaper Has Web Commenter Fired: In this new information age, newspapers are having a hard time hanging on to their old business models, and are struggling to hold on to readership and monetize their on-line content. The St. Louis Post-Dispatch has obviously not run into this issue, or they wouldn’t be shooting themselves in the foot by getting people fired when they post to the paper’s online comment boards.

HavardBusinss.org: The Digital Economy’s Coming Subprime Crisis: Uh oh: it’s the economic equivalent of the subprime crisis. The parallels, to me, are too striking to ignore.

Anil Dash: The Web in Danger: We cannot say we were not warned. We will not be able to say “nobody saw this coming”.

Susan Ohanian: It’s the Poverty, Stupid, Not Pre-K Skills: If our corporate-politicos would look at the November 2009 issue of the Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine, they would see that half of American children receive food stamps, which means they live in food insecure homes, and studies show that Adults who grew up in poverty are more likely to have impaired physical and mental growth, lower academic achievement, and to remain impoverished.

Joe Bageant: Shoot the fat guys, hang the smokers: At heart, it’s a predatory society. So damned mean we no longer even notice its inherent cruelty. A strongman’s democracy in which bodily appearance has become political, and the only allowable vice is self-righteousness.

Philly.com: USDA: Hunger rises in U.S.: Referring to the increasing numbers of children who suffered the most from hunger, Philadelphia hunger expert Mariana Chilton, a Drexel University public-health professor, said: “This is a catastrophe. This is not a blip. This recession will be in the bodies of our children.”

Time: The ’00s: Goodbye (at Last) to the Decade From Hell

Newsweek: Partying Like It’s 1999: Think the U.S. economy has come a long way? Think again.

Clay Shirky lays out the issues confronting the future of news journalism

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Read the whole thing. Nieman Journalism Lab: Clay Shirky at the Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy:

…in the nightmare scenario that I’ve kind of been spinning at for the last couple years has been: Every town in this country of 500,000 or less just sinks into casual, endemic, civic corruption — that without somebody going down to the city council again today, just in case, that those places will simply revert to self-dealing. Not of epic, catastrophic sorts, but the sort that just takes five percent off the top. Newspapers have been our principal bulwark for that, and as they’re shrinking, that I think is where the threat is.

…So we don’t need another different kind of institution that does 85 percent of accountability journalism. We need a class of institutions or models, whether they’re endowments or crowdsourced or what have you — we need a model that produces five percent of accountability journalism. And we need to get that right 17 times in a row. That’s the issue before us. There will not be anything that replaces newspapers, because if you could write the list of stuff you needed and organizational characteristics and it looked like newspapers, newspapers would be able to fill that role, right?

It is really a shift from one class of institutions to the ecosystem as a whole where I think we have to situate the need of our society for accountability. I also want to distance myself — and I’ll end shortly. But I want to distance myself, with that observation I also want to distance myself from the utopians in my tribe, the web tribe, and even to some degree the optimists.

I think a bad thing is going to happen, right? And it’s amazing to me how much, in a conversation conducted by adults, the possibility that maybe things are just going to get a lot worse for a while does not seem to be something people are taking seriously. But I think this falling into relative corruption of moderate-sized cities and towns — I think that’s baked into the current environment. I don’t think there’s any way we can get out of that kind of thing. So I think we are headed into a long trough of decline in accountability journalism, because the old models are breaking faster than the new models can be put into place.

Again read the whole thing.

People tend to pick apart Shirky’s writings to find what supports their arguments. Which, I partially just did in fact, so don’t do that – absorb the nuance because the opportunities and problems at hand are far more complicated than the either naysayers or utopians would lead us believe.

40 year old ongoing study into preschool still providing insight

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American RadioWorks: Emily Hanford: Early Lessons: “doing well in school, and in life, is about more than a test score.”:

“Now you’re getting into something really deep,” says economist James Heckman. “How is it that motivation is affected? What causes motivation?”

Heckman is a Nobel laureate who teaches at the University of Chicago. Preschool was not among his interests until he came across the Perry Study several years ago. What caught his attention is the apparent paradox at its core: The people who went to preschool were not “smarter” than their peers, but they did better.

The assumption at the heart of a lot of economic theory is that measured intelligence is the key to everything. But with the Perry Preschool children, something else made the difference. It was not IQ. Heckman is now working with psychologists to try to understand how the preschool may have affected the development of what he calls “non-cognitive” skills, things like motivation, sociability and the ability to work with others.

These are critical skills that help people succeed at school, at work – and in life.

And as it turns out, the Perry preschool children did do better in life.

Whitehouse.gov moves to Drupal

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Dries Buytaert: Whitehouse.gov using Drupal

Tim O’Reilly: Thoughts on the Whitehouse.gov switch to Drupal

PDF: WhiteHouse.gov Goes Drupal

Content Here: Is Drupal the right platform for whitehouse.gov?

I think you can trace this way back to 2004 and Howard Dean’s run for the presidency. Their team chose Drupal as the framework to leverage for their web efforts and it paid off as part of what was the most Internet-savvy campaign by that time. Inspired by that campaign and their use of technology, I had relaunched Philly Future in fact.

Dries Buytaert says of the choice:

First of all, I think Drupal is a perfect match for President Barack Obama’s push for an open and transparent government — Drupal provides a great mix of traditional web content management features and social features that enable open communication and participation. This combination is what we refer to as social publishing and is why so many people use Drupal. Furthermore, I think Drupal is a great fit in terms of President Barack Obama’s desire to reduce cost and to act quickly. Drupal’s flexibility and modularity enables organizations to build sites quickly at lower cost than most other systems. In other words, Drupal is a great match for the U.S. government.

I can’t help but agree.

On “games that increase children’s brain power 100-fold” Pokemon and Princesses

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The Daily Beast: Po Bronson: “Why Dumb Toys Make Kids Smarter”:

Our son taught me an extremely valuable lesson. When it comes to kids, we often bring moralistic bias to their interests. There’s a pervasive tendency in our society to label things as either good for children or bad for children. Cultivating children’s natural intrinsic motivation requires abandoning all judgment of good and bad content. Society has a long list of subjects that we’ve determined they should learn. But learning itself is kick-started when enmeshed and inseparable from what a child inherently loves. How many parents are ignoring this, pushing flash cards and phonics cards onto their kids, attempting to trigger learning in an amotivational situation?

My previous book, What Should I Do With My Life?, was a portrait of a generation that had spent the first two decades of life ignoring their intrinsic motivations. They were bright and talented, but had spent so many years doing what was expected of them, and studying what society told them they should study, that they were no longer in touch with their natural desires. They’d been praised endlessly, told they were smart, and had no internal compass when it came to making career decisions. Learning to recognize their own passions was incredibly difficult and stunted. It had been drilled out of them as children.

It’s important to underscore that this isn’t a philosophical argument–it’s a neurological argument. Motivation is experienced in the brain as the release of dopamine. It’s not released like other neurotransmitters into the synapses; instead, it’s sort of spritzed into large areas of the brain, which enhances the signaling of neurons. The motivated brain, literally, operates better, signals faster. Kids learn better.

Links on thinking, parenting, teaching, creating for October 4th, 2009

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Boston.com: Inside the Baby Mind:

One of the most surprising implications of this new research concerns baby consciousness, or what babies actually experience as they interact with the outside world. While scientists and doctors have traditionally assumed that babies are much less conscious than adults – this is why, until the 1970s, many infants underwent surgery without anesthesia – that view is being overturned. Gopnik argues that, in many respects, babies are more conscious than adults. She compares the experience of being a baby with that of watching a riveting movie, or being a tourist in a foreign city, where even the most mundane activities seem new and exciting. “For a baby, every day is like going to Paris for the first time,” Gopnik says. “Just go for a walk with a 2-year-old. You’ll quickly realize that they’re seeing things you don’t even notice.”

Boston.com: Thinking literally: The surprising ways that metaphors shape your world:

Metaphors aren’t just how we talk and write, they’re how we think. At some level, we actually do seem to understand temperament as a form of temperature, and we expect people’s personalities to behave accordingly. What’s more, without our body’s instinctive sense for temperature–or position, texture, size, shape, or weight–abstract concepts like kindness and power, difficulty and purpose, and intimacy and importance would simply not make any sense to us.

NYTimes: Can the Right Kinds of Play Teach Self-Control? :

In the end, the most lasting effect of the Tools of the Mind studies may be to challenge some of our basic ideas about the boundary between work and play. Today, play is seen by most teachers and education scholars as a break from hard work or a reward for positive behaviors, not a place to work on cognitive skills. But in Tools of the Mind classrooms, that distinction disappears: work looks a lot like play, and play is treated more like work. When I asked Duckworth about this, she said it went to the heart of what was new and potentially important about the program. “We often think about play as relaxing and doing what you want to do,” she explained. “Maybe it’s an American thing: We work really hard, and then we go on vacation and have fun. But in fact, very few truly pleasurable moments come from complete hedonism. What Tools does — and maybe what we all need to do — is to blur the line a bit between what is work and what is play. Just because something is effortful and difficult and involves some amount of constraint doesn’t mean it can’t be fun.”

NurtureShock: Are Time-outs for Tots Conditional Love? :

The real problem with Kohn’s articles is that, already, there is a lot of confusion about when to praise, and his pieces just add to it. They give the impression that parents must make a choice between unconditional love on the one side, and praise and punishment on the other. And that’s just not true.

Most research finds that kids need rules and structure – not as a form of prison, but a scaffold of autonomy they can build on.

Oberlin College professor Nancy Darling has surveyed thousands of adolescents, in the US, the Philippines, and Chile. She’s found that when parents set no rules, or when parents fail to enforce rules they’ve set, it sends a message that parents simply don’t care about their kids’ well-being or the kids’ actions. The adolescents think the parents just can’t be bothered by their transgressions.

While combining praise with a statement of love is problematic. For example, “You’re such a smart girl, and I love you,” sends a child a message that if she’s no longer is smart, the love will stop. But there’s nothing in the research that says parents should stop saying, “I love you.” It just that they should stop combining displays of love and affection and praise for achievement. Keep them separate. Once again, this isn’t an either or situation.

Stanford professor Carol Dweck’s perspective on praise is that – when we praise or punish – we need to make it clear that we are responding to what a child does, not who they are. We shouldn’t say “Bad Boy!” when the kid breaks a vase, and we shouldn’t say “Boy Genius!” when he made a vase in art class. Both “Bad Boy” and “Boy Genius” are wild overstatements of what we really think.

Instead, we can simply say, “You know you shouldn’t play ball in the house,” and “You worked really hard on that vase, didn’t you?” those are fine.

Beyond the moment, they teach children that we pay attention to what they are doing, and that we can be trusted to give them a fair and accurate response when they need it. Lessons we want them to remember when they’re 17, and they have a broken heart or just had a fender-bender.

As I said earlier, we just don’t have to make a choice between praise, punishment and unconditional love. That’s just a false choice.