eppur si muove

In a pilot program announced at FETC 2010 in Orlando, 12 schools in the Indianapolis Public Schools (IPS) system will replace traditional textbooks with digital content from Discovery Education. The program also includes curriculum alignment services, professional development, and hardware. The company's curriculum alignment team analyzed the IPS district pacing guides and chose the digital content that it determined was most appropriate for IPS, including audio and video segments, images, articles, games, and interactive resources. "Across the country, school systems are learning that textbooks are not the way to go, but that technology is the way to go," said Gene White, superintendent of IPS.  "To date, we are very pleased with this pilot.  The powerful resources from Discovery Education have brought alive our social studies curriculum in a new way, and we look forward to tracking the results of this effort." As part of the program, the company is also providing IPS with access to its MediaShare content sharing system, which allows teacher collaboration using uploads, file sharing, and distributing both user-created and licensed content. The system also includes access to Discovery Media Servers, which allows users to access content with consuming external bandwidth.

I only worry that this is a bit too, er, corporate sponsor-y. Also that it's adopting technology for technology's sake.

The difference between me and David Hampton isn’t that he’s a con artist and I’m not; the difference is that I only told lies I could live up to, and I knew when to stop. That’s not a different type of behavior, it’s just a different amount.

And it looks to me like women in general, and the women whose educations I am responsible for in particular, are often lousy at those kinds of behaviors, even when the situation calls for it. They aren’t just bad at behaving like arrogant self-aggrandizing jerks. They are bad at behaving like self-promoting narcissists, anti-social obsessives, or pompous blowhards, even a little bit, even temporarily, even when it would be in their best interests to do so. Whatever bad things you can say about those behaviors, you can’t say they are underrepresented among people who have changed the world.

 

There's something in American culture in particular which values the pushy and the determined, but we've all worked with people whose confidence massively outstrips their abilities, who cannot work together with other people because they think they're superior to everyone else. And we've also met a whole bunch of people in the industry who do nothing but self-promote, working day and night to sell themselves, and achieve positions massively disproportionate to their tangible abilities. There are people in our industry in positions of substantial power whose reputation is built upon the way in which they present themselves as being visionaries and experts. Some of them have found that it's simply more efficient for them to spend their days building that reputation through PR and self-promotion than it is to demonstrate it through the things that they make, the value that they create.

just who is the self-proclaimed "queen of twitter" identified in the comments below?

Comments are one thing, but sometimes people take it a step further and send me an e-mail saying things that are pretty shocking. When I politely respond to these e-mails and apologize for offending enough to incite such bitter retort, every single time, without fail, I get a response that says something similar to, “Oh, I’m sorry, I feel bad now, I didn’t realize anyone would actually read this.” Yes. A human being reads it.

Perplexingly, people resonate with things Jarod Lanier writes.

Off-line, the post office does not send someone to burn your correspondence after an obituary appears in the paper. The deed and title company does not send a crew to tear down your home. But online, under the agreements that users accept, that can be the default setting.

“When you have a real, tangible sword or gold coin, you can have an exclusive right to that object and the law can recognize that,” said Greg Lastowka, a law professor at Rutgers University in New Jersey who is writing a book on property rights and virtual goods. “But when you have the mediation of the network software and the owner of the virtual environment, they have an interest as well. They’re caught in the middle.”

By their very names — MySpace, YouTube — companies promote a sense of ownership about content that users create. But control of digital assets is often disputed, and the mediators — whether they provide e-mail services, social networking or virtual real estate — have a big say.

“Access and control are the two big levers,” said Deven R. Desai, a visiting fellow at the Center for Information Technology Policy at Princeton University in New Jersey and professor at the Thomas Jefferson School of Law in California. “Assuming it’s yours, can you access it, and how easy is it to move it around?”

Virtual property rights!

We track everything. Every photo you view, every person you’re tagged with, every wall-post you make, and so forth.

HO LEE CRAP Facebook is evil.

Key lesson learned: plan smaller.

The struggle, of course, is between presenting something that will catch the eye a funding agency like the MacArthur Foundation's Digital Media and Learning Initiative and identifying a project that's small enough to be feasible.

IT was supposed to be a carefully guarded secret but in short order word spread via Facebook after a teacher at Collège Sturgeon Heights Collegiate on Dec. 18 gave his class the essay topic for this week's provincial Grade 12 English exam.

Senior education officials said Friday telling students they would be writing about environmental issues was a serious breach of confidentiality, but what is not yet clear is how many of the 7,000 Grade 12 students across Manitoba who wrote the exam this week had prior knowledge of the exam topic, and what if any advantage they gained.

It turns out that social networks can be used for good AND for evil. No word yet on which category this group action falls into.