roybot

Clay Shirky - "You're gonna miss us when we're gone has never been much of a business model"

So today must be a day to write about the newspaper business. Here is another good post from another favorite author, Clay Shirky.

It makes increasingly less sense even to talk about a publishing industry, because the core problem publishing solves — the incredible difficulty, complexity, and expense of making something available to the public — has stopped being a problem....

...When someone demands to know how we are going to replace newspapers, they are really demanding to be told that we are not living through a revolution. They are demanding to be told that old systems won’t break before new systems are in place. They are demanding to be told that ancient social bargains aren’t in peril, that core institutions will be spared, that new methods of spreading information will improve previous practice rather than upending it. They are demanding to be lied to....

Last year Clay Shirky wrote Here Comes Everybody a book about how online collaboration has changed different areas of society. One of my favorite examples of this is Consumerist.com now owned by Consumer Reports.

The Future of News

So the newspapers it seems are going to die (and from what I have been reading lately perhaps a shorter than expected death) but in this new piece Steven Johnson (a favorite writer) argues that perhaps the future isn't so bleak for news in general

"What’s more: the ecosystem of political news also included information coming directly from the candidates. Think about the Philadelphia race speech, arguably one of the two or three most important events in the whole campaign. Eight million people watched it on YouTube alone. Now, what would have happened to that speech had it been delivered in 1992?"

You can read the rest here. I can completely identify with Steven when he talks about stalking the college bookstore to get the new copy of MacWorld. I used to spend Sunday mornings beside the radio so I could record American Top 40 and know which songs were popular. (And this data was 2 weeks old by the time it aired) Now I can click on the Mediabase website and get accurate chart information updated hourly. I definitely feel much more in touch with the news I want to read more than ever before. Living in India today is a completely different experience than living in Morocco when I was in high school, much because of the access I have to news and other information on the internet. Its amazing. More soon.

Why You Need A Manual for Wikipedia

There is a great new article in the new issue of The New York Review of Books on Wikipedia (1), The article is also, ostensibly, a review of O'Reilly's new Wikipedia The Missing Manual Book. Its amazing to read about all the bureaucracy that has developed inside Wikipedia, how the site has evolved over time from a wild-west to an ordered system -a system so complex that you now need to buy a book if you want to fully participate in it.

(1) Wikipedia remains my go to site for quick, reliable information. On Friday for example after school we were reviewing for the IB Math HL exam when Akshay wanted to know exactly how many points he needed to pass the IB (this sort of plan, while initially very attractive I warned him, with personal experience from Calculus III, is generally not a good strategy for exam success). His instinct was to go to the IBO website where he searched in vain for the details for about 10 minutes. I launched wikipedia and found the answer almost immediately.

Who Owns The Organics?

So this is a cool chart showing who owns the big organic companies. Its from LawGeek via Good Magazine. It connects well with some of my favorite books lately including The Omnivore's Dilemma, In Defense of Food, What to Eat, and Animal, Vegetable, Miracle.

A New Math Study

So a new study is forthcoming from the government on the state of math education in the US. You can read an interesting article about it in the NY Times here. It suggests that common ground must be found between constructivist and more traditional direct instruction approaches. This is no surprise, I like to think I am pretty constructivist, but I still find myself at the board sometimes helping the students get their heads around what we have been learning or solidifying connections between the different areas of a topic we have been studying. My current batch of students are surprisingly eager to learn how to do everything by hand (1) so sometimes I will also get up front and show them how to do certain problems on their calculators and encourage them to try these approaches.
These math wars have been going on for a long time. I fondly remember my first year teaching at John Stark in NH. Right out of college and gung-ho I had all my kids write weekly math journals (2). The best outcome of this was a long dialog I had back and forth with one of my students, Matt Corsetti. Matt had found some articles from the California group Mathematically Correct on the internet and was wondering what was up since we were doing some of this "bad" stuff they talked about in our class. It was cool to discover how fruitful discussions could be with students. I find these conversations, whether about learning, the classroom environment, or whatever, keep me connected, inform my teaching, and improve my practice. This is something I try to do as much as possible now, even though I am not currently doing it through journals.

(1) This is probably because the IB has changed and now includes includes a non-calculator part so none of us are completely sure exactly what kinds of questions we need to be ready to do by hand.

(2) This, by the way, was not the most popular set of assignments I ever came up with and not one I would necessarily recommend for first year teachers -although now the lugging of journals could be done away with and kids could write blogs which teachers could evaluate painlessly with an RSS reader

Wikipedia, The Gibb Brothers, & Everything Is Miscellaneous

So if you have been reading the blog you know that I am a big fan of the book Everything Is Miscellaneous by David Weinberger. Friends from home know I am a life long Bee Gees fan, and my students could tell you that I am often extolling the virtues of Wikipedia. Since even before I read that Wired article I have been hooked on the site. I've even made a couple of edits here and there. This all connects today in this amusing Onion post about genuine & surprising Wikipedia debates about various topics.

Teachers Behaving Badly

So I mentioned Scott McCleod's Dangerously Irrelevant blog here the other day. The site is truly thought provoking. The current post is about students videotaping their teachers behaving badly. When I first saw the clips last Wednesday my first reaction was wow, these videos are awesome. Awesome in the original awe inspiring sense of the word. The next thing I did was to tell as many people as I could about them and begin discussing. If you haven't seen the post yet go check it out here now. Today (Sunday morning) I got back to the post to read the comments. The comments are riveting and appalling. It is sad to read some of the comments blaming the students, and wishing them ill. These comments are even more troubling when you have to figure that many of Scott's readers are probably fellow educators.

Here are a few choice comments that caught my eye:

"Fortunately most of these kids will end up in jail or dead."-Sick of rudeness
- there are sadly many responses like this and they don't deserve replies, why are teachers thinking this way? Why are these people in classrooms?

"I was pretty shocked to see that kids have cellphones and i-pods in school. They should be confiscated at the door of the school like weapons are."-June Marie
- I am not sure if the person who wrote this really meant to imply that cell phones and ipods are weapons (although I think they did). But certainly the devices are not the problem it is the classroom environment, teaching (or lack there of) and engagement. We have as much technology at my school as any in the world, and yet kids are still engaged in their classes. When I see a student surfing the web, or facebooking, or whatever in class my first reaction is to question my lesson and its relevance and certainly not to pull rank and confiscate their technology.

"You know what, those kids deserve to get yelled at. It's obvious that the teachers receive no respect, that they students are complete troublemakers, and they deserve harsh punishment. I don't think the phone was used as "journalism", it was just to record kids being bastards to their teachers as a joke."-Mandie
No one deserves to be yelled at. Many of the posts refer to respect as some sort of divine right that needs to be granted to teachers. This is not the case. Each of us, teacher or not, needs to earn any respect that we receive. Certainly sometimes getting the respect of a class of students can be very difficult work but its achievable. In his current book Letters to a Young Teacher Jonathan Kozol does a good job of describing situations where teachers in neglected inner city schools can manage to engage and earn the respect of their students. With this in mind it can certainly happen in prosperous surburban schools too and in international schools like mine.

"Its like continuously poking a stick at a helpless dog through a cage and then getting upset when the dog eventually bites back."-Sublime
-The person who wrote this comment is speaking about the teacher as the helpless dog, but I think it makes more sense viewed the other way around.

Many teachers would probably feel uncomfortable showing these clips to their students. So instead I suggest the clip A Vision of Student's Today. It is about student lives today, and is great for discussion. It was created by Mike Wesch who also did the clip related to Everything Is Miscellaneous I linked to last week. The quote at the beginning is classic. Thanks for reading and posting. More soon.