Learning Aloud

If you listen to podcasts, here is another option. NASA now offers audio programs as podcasts. The link about is provided through Podcast Alley and you can locate other podcast sources at this site.

I tend to think I am aware of current trends, but sometimes I am wrong. I know that distance education has been working its way into K-12 settings and I knew there were companies and organizations promoting such opportunities and offering service, but I would have been very wrong in predicting the level of student participation.

The Center For Educational Statistics has released a study providing data on distance education participation through 2003. About 36% of school districts had students enrolled in on-line courses. The main explanation given by districts is that online courses provided opportunities not available within the district. For example, rural districts may not be able to provide AP or language courses. Two-way interactive video is the most common delivery format.

The largest provider category is higher education with other K-12 districts as the next most common.

University of Washington TV presents an interview with Google engineer Jeff Dean. The presentation provides a look behind the scenes.

I have become fascinated with the Library of Congress series on the digital future. I strongly encourage you to visit this site and view the series.

The final presentation happened to be on C-SPAN last night. The presentor was Neil Gershenfeld, the director of the Center for Bits and Atoms at MIT. As an academic, I always wonder how other academics get these exotic jobs. Several JNDs difference in productivity I assume. The Gershenfeld Presentation rambles through many topics. If you are willing to wade through the entire thing, you will eventually encounter his description of computer-controlled fabrication as a tool for production and learning. There are implications in this description for alternative educational models – learning by doing, learning by making. See if you don’t have the same reaction.

If you are a Lawrence Lessig (fair use, copyright) fan, you may enjoy a recent argument he advances based on the concept of “remixing“. As I understand the position, certain examples of remixing are allowed and some are not. He presents this as an inconsistency.

School Matters offers a web site allowing a detailed look into the finances and performance of K-12 schools at the state and even district level. You can actually access detailed information about school performance, how much money is spend per student, how money is spend, etc. at many levels of detail. You can supposedly identify the high performance schools in your region (although these data were not available for North Dakota :)). You can even determine the average adult salary in the state. I am trying to understand the motivation behind this site, but it is fun to see how your old high school is doing.

Red Lake, MN, is close and the tragedy has a special connection to my colleagues because it happened on a reservation. The department in which I work is involved in the training of clinical psychologists and has a special emphasis on the development of clinicians to work with Native American populations. A group has been working at the reservation since the shooting – see news story.

New information points to the unique role technology played (see role of Internet in perpetuating hate groups) in this tragedy. I tend to react against those who blame technology for such events, but I look to must look to others to explain such behavior to me.