Starbulletin: “Khan’s tutorials display promise of broadband”.
PBS NewsHour: Math Wiz Takes Education to New Limits on YouTube
Related:
Category Archives: Journalism, norgs, the future of news
Online heroes – David and Barbara Mikkelson
NPR.org profiles the hosts of Snopes.com in “Mom-And-Pop Site Busts The Web’s Biggest Myths”.
I have a feeling some of this applies to becoming a better communicator overall
NYTimes: “Building a Better Teacher”:
But what makes a good teacher? There have been many quests for the one essential trait, and they have all come up empty-handed. Among the factors that do not predict whether a teacher will succeed: a graduate-school degree, a high score on the SAT, an extroverted personality, politeness, confidence, warmth, enthusiasm and having passed the teacher-certification exam on the first try. When Bill Gates announced recently that his foundation was investing millions in a project to improve teaching quality in the United States, he added a rueful caveat. “Unfortunately, it seems the field doesn’t have a clear view of what characterizes good teaching,” Gates said. “I’m personally very curious.”
When Doug Lemov conducted his own search for those magical ingredients, he noticed something about most successful teachers that he hadn’t expected to find: what looked like natural-born genius was often deliberate technique in disguise. “Stand still when you’re giving directions,” a teacher at a Boston school told him. In other words, don’t do two things at once. Lemov tried it, and suddenly, he had to ask students to take out their homework only once.
It was the tiniest decision, but what was teaching if not a series of bite-size moves just like that?
Related:
Change This: Jon Wortmann: “The Best Communicator in the World”
“So what will it mean to bear witness in the future?”
They say that history is written by the victors. But now, before the victors win, there is a chance to scream out with a text message that will not vanish. What would we know about what passed between Turks and Armenians, between Germans and Jews, if every one of them had had the chance, before the darkness, to declare for all time: “I was here, and this is what happened to me”?
– Anand Giridharadas in the NYTimes in “Africa’s Gift to Silicon Valley: How to Track a Crisis”.
Ushahidi sounds inspiring.
The project is on Github.
Seth Finkelstein’s Pew Research answers
Seth Finkelstein has posted his answers to a Pew survey on the future of the Internet, and Google making us stupid (or not) in a thought provoking yet grounded (which is rare on the Web – admit it!) post.
Seth – if you’re reading – I miss your blogging.
Two from the Boston Globe on the Need for Better Filters
Boston Globe: Joe Keohane: Imaginary fiends: In 2009, crime went down. In fact it’s been going down for a decade. But more and more Americans believe it’s getting worse. Why do we refuse to believe the good news?
Boston Globe: Easy = True: How ‘cognitive fluency’ shapes what we believe, how we invest, and who will become a supermodel
Shirky confirms Shenk
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.
danah boyd On Facebook, Class, Privacy, and Public-ness
danah boyd: “Facebook’s move ain’t about changes in privacy norms”
Public-ness has always been a privilege. For a long time, only a few chosen few got to be public figures. Now we’ve changed the equation and anyone can theoretically be public, can theoretically be seen by millions. So it mustn’t be a privilege anymore, eh? Not quite. There are still huge social costs to being public, social costs that geeks in Silicon Valley don’t have to account for. Not everyone gets to show up to work whenever they feel like it wearing whatever they’d like and expect a phatty paycheck. Not everyone has the opportunity to be whoever they want in public and demand that everyone else just cope. I know there are lots of folks out there who think that we should force everyone into the public so that we can create a culture where that IS the norm. Not only do I think that this is unreasonable, but I don’t think that this is truly what we want. The same Silicon Valley tycoons who want to push everyone into the public don’t want their kids to know that their teachers are sexual beings, even when their sexuality is as vanilla as it gets. Should we even begin to talk about the marginalized populations out there?
Recently, I gave a talk on the complications of visibility through social media. Power is critical in thinking through these issues. The privileged folks don’t have to worry so much about people who hold power over them observing them online. That’s the very definition of privilege. But most everyone else does. And forcing people into the public eye doesn’t dismantle the structures of privilege, the structures of power. What pisses me off is that it reinforces them. The privileged get more privileged, gaining from being exposed. And those struggling to keep their lives together are forced to create walls that are constantly torn down around them. The teacher, the abused woman, the poor kid living in the ghetto and trying to get out. How do we take them into consideration when we build systems that expose people?
Related:
Bruce Schneier: “The Eternal Value of Privacy”
Nicholas Carr: Other people’s privacy
New York Times going with the frequency-model?
I’m cautiously optimistic about this and am excited to see it play out. There is dire need for continued experimentation.
The strategy being discussed this go around is a Financial Times-like metered system (they call it the “frequency-model” – more at Portfolio). This would, theoretically, allow the New York Times to retain its reach and users driven to it via search, links, etc, while deriving revenue from heavy readers:
At an investor conference this fall, Nisenholtz alluded to this tension: “At the end of the day, if we don’t get this right, a lot of money falls out of the system.”
But with the painful declines in advertising brought on by last year’s financial crisis, the argument pushed by Keller and others — that online advertising might never grow big enough to sustain the paper’s high-cost, ambitious journalism — gained more weight. The view was that the Times needed to make the leap to some form of paid content and it needed to do it now. The trick would be to build a source of real revenue through online subscriptions while still being able to sell significant online advertising. The appeal of the metered model is that it charges high-volume readers while allowing casual browsers to sample articles for free, thus preserving some of the Times’ online reach.
Read all about it in New York Magazine’s “New York Times Ready to Charge Online Readers”.
On blaming the victim
It used to be common place when a women was raped to blame her in America: to say that she wore the wrong clothes, she was at the wrong place at the wrong time, or sent out the ‘wrong signals’. Unfortunately, this attitude still exists in parts of the world.
It is still commonin America to take the default position that when a person loses their job, their house, their lively hoods, to put the blame on their shoulders. Even in the ‘Great Recession’ we are now in. They didn’t work hard enough. They didn’t move with the times fast enough. They were losers or uneducated due to their own laziness.
I have heard, horrifically, when people have lost children, or gotten cancer, or were dealing with mental illness, they simply didn’t *pray* enough. That God must be teaching them a lesson.
All this is echoed in what Rush Limbaugh and Pat Robertson spewed this week.
I’m a free speech absolutist, so I’m not going to say these creatures don’t have a right to speak.
But fuck them.
You have the power to walk away, turn the channel, delete that bookmark.
Events like the earthquake in Haiti do put things in perspective. In addition they help separate those that actually *care* for other human beings from those that think they are the center of the world or are the marketers of that.
Update: Satan writes Pat Robertson a letter.
As Fred Clark says Pat Robertson would tell Jesus he must have deserved it.