Month: January 2003

Cindy sent me this reference. It is an interesting analysis of what the process of education is (should be) about.

What is the purpose of education?

The source for the reference was the Committed Sardine – a great education e-zine.

CNN has just announced a major attack on the Internet. The virus appears to be attacking Microsoft servers, but it doing no harm to the contents of individual computers. Perhaps becuase of this problem, I seem to be having great difficulty getting Blogger.com to post this comment.

I have been aware of online document translation for some time and always wondered about the quality. I imagined a test in which a native speaker would generate a translation that would be compared with what the software was able to accomplish (kind of Turing test). At the time a grad student from China was working with me, but we never completed the task before he left. Over the break my college freshman daughter was willing to give my idea a try.

Here is the source material (from an online newspaper). http://www.jornada.unam.mx/

Africa existe un mundo natural y otro sobrenatural; un mundo palpable que define a las culturas de ese continente. La exposici??n Africa, en el Museo Nacional de Antropolog??a, que ya ha sido visitada por 76 mil 554 personas desde que se inaugur?? en octubre, muestra en nueve salas la forma de vida y el pensamiento de los grupos ??tnicos africanos, y se ha convertido en el acto estelar de la cultura en esta temporada de asueto.

Kim Grabe – translation

In Africa there exists a natural world and a supernatural world, a world that defines the cultures of this continent. The exhibition Africa, in the National Museum of Anthropolgy that has already been visited by 76,554 people since its inauguration in October while in new rooms the life forms and thoughts of the africans have converted in the stellar of the culture in this temporary place. (Kim admits to having difficulty with the second sentence).

Here is the translation provided by Babelfish

(An identical translation was provided by Google – probably based on the same software)

In Africa it exists a natural world and another supernatural one; a concrete world that it defines to the cultures of that continent. Exhibition Africa, in Museum National of Anthropology, that already has been visited by 76 thousand 554 people since it was inaugurated in October, shows in nine rooms the form of life and the thought of the African ethnic groups, and it has become the stellar act of the culture in this season of break.

Here is one of the sources we follow to develop insight into how we all make use of the Internet. The Pew Internet and American Life Project has made a commitment to chronicle our developing and changing use of the Internet. Part of the project is devoted to providing basic statistics — who uses the Internet and for what.

Some attention is given to the use of the Internet in Schools. A late 2002 survey indicated that students make use of the Internet to address school tasks, but often outside of school and without the guidance of educators.

Martin Luther King Holiday – Some Sources In Keeping With The Theme of This Holiday

Stanford University papers project.
LessonTutor – theme for the week
Text of I Have A Dream speech
Martin Luther King Day of Service

An article in the Education section of the Christian Science Monitor outlined how history faculty members and grad students are using eBay to locate artifacts for their research. By accident, I had just made a similar discovery myself. eBay happens to be one of button bar options in the new Safari browser and I clicked it out of curiosity. While stumbling around, I ran into WW II memorabilia and was interested because Cindy is working on a history grant focused on primary sources. The prices were prohibitive for our purposes, but the items available were reminiscent of a multimedia project I once did called “Grandparents’ Attic. Someone was selling a World War II scrap book. This material is out there everywhere. I would rather see grandchildren ask their grandparents about such things and use what they learn in classroom projects.

I experience frequent situations in which I must capture part of the screen for use in a document or presentation. I knew what to do in the old days (OS 9 on the Mac). Command-shift-4 would allow me to select the part of the screen I wanted and save the selected area as a PICT file on the hard drive. Now I use XP and OS X and things aren’t so easy.

As far as I know, XP allows only Alt-printscreen. This captures the entire screen and allows this stored image to be pasted into an application (Paint) for editing. The clipping has to occur in the “paint” application. I know there are products that offer options, but nothing that is built in.

OS X is not much better. Command-Shift-4 – will save a selected area, but the file is PDF. What am I supposed to do with PDF files. Command-shift-control-4 (definitely a two hand move) saves the selected area to memory and a second application (e.g., Preview) can be used to save the contents of memory as a desired file type. OS X does come with the “Grab” utility. Command-shift-A and an area of the screen can be saved as a TIFF. Again, I have to open a paint program to save as PICT or JPG. I still like the old OS 9 system the best.

Looking for good utilities ……