You'd better watch out

A friend just sent me this. Like to share with you all.

You'd better watch out
You'd better not cry
You'd better keep cash
I'm telling you why:
Recession is coming to town.

It's hitting you once
It's hitting you twice
It doesn't care if you've been careful and wise Recession is coming to town.

It's worthless if you've got shares
It's worthless if you've got bonds
It's safe when you've got cash in hand
So keep cash for goodness sake, HEY

You'd better watch out
You'd better not cry
You'd better keep cash
I'm telling you why:
Recession is coming to town!

Finance products are confusing
Finance products are so vague
The banks make you bear the cost of risk So keep out for goodness sake, OH

You'd better watch out
You'd better not cry
You'd better keep cash
I'm telling you why:
Recession is coming to town.

Which direction should the screens face in a computer classroom

Today, I was talking to Dr Ki Wing Wah, a good friend from Hong Kong University. We touched upon the monitoring issues of students working in a classroom with computers. As a teacher, we cannot deny the duty of care including the kind of websites the students are accessing. In Hong Kong, many such classrooms have the computer placed in rows with students sitting facing the teacher. Effectively, there is no way the teacher can see what is happening on those screens.

Ki mentioned that he has seen a teacher who arranged the students' computer screen to face the teacher. When the teacher is talking, all the students will turn around to face him. Hence no one will be using any computer. When working alone, students will face the screens with backs towards the teacher. The teacher can effectively see all the screen activities and provide necessary assistance.

A simple change in screen orientation, a great improvement in classroom management!

How to say "I" in Chinese

My brother sent me this.
{translation in brackets like this}

有一個老外為了學好漢語，不遠萬里，來到中國，拜師于一位國學教授門下。第一天老外想挑一個簡單詞彙學習，便向老師請教英語「I」在漢語中應該如何說。
(A foreigner, wanting to learn Chinese, travels a long distance to China to find a Chinese Literature professor. On first day, the foreigner wants to start with a simple term. He asks the professor the Chinese equivalant of "I".)


老師解釋道：中國是一個官本位國家，當你處在不同的級別、地位，「I」也有不同的變化，就像：
(Teacher explains: Chinese respects status. As your rank or status changes, “I” also has the different form. For example:)


你們英語中的形容詞有原級、比較級、最高級一樣。比如，你剛來中國，沒有地位，對普通人可以說：「我、咱、俺、余、吾、予、儂、某、咱家、洒家、俺咱、本人、個人、人家、吾儂、我儂。」
(Like adjectives in English has different comparative degree, so is I. For instance, you being just came to China, do not have any status, you may use to an average person: “我、咱、俺、余、吾、予、儂、某、咱家、洒家、俺咱、本人、個人、人家、吾儂、我儂。”)


如果見到老師、長輩和上級，則應該說：「區區、僕、鄙、愚、走、鄙人、卑人、敝人、鄙夫、鄙軀、鄙愚、貧身、小子、小可、在下、末學、小生、不佞、不才、不材、小材、不肖、不孝、不類、走狗、牛馬走、愚小子、鄙生、貧生、學生、後學、晚生、?學、後生晚學、予末小子、予小子、餘小子。」
(If you see a teacher, an elder or a person at a higher authority, then should use:"區區、僕、鄙、愚、走、鄙人、卑人、敝人、鄙夫、鄙軀、鄙愚、貧身、小子、小可、在下、末學、小生、不佞、不才、不材、小材、不肖、不孝、不類、走狗、牛馬走、愚小子、鄙生、貧生、學生、後學、晚生、?學、後生晚學、予末小子、予小子、餘小子。")


等到你當了官以後，見到上級和皇帝，則應該說：「職、卑職、下官、臣、臣子、小臣、鄙臣、愚臣、奴婢、奴才、小人、老奴、小的、小底。」
After you become an official, when you see the higher authority and emperor, then should use: "職、卑職、下官、臣、臣子、小臣、鄙臣、愚臣、奴婢、奴才、小人、老奴、小的、小底"


見到平級，則可以說：「愚兄、為兄、小弟、兄弟、愚弟、哥們。」
(When you meet other colleague, you can use: "愚兄、為兄、小弟、兄弟、愚弟、哥們")


見到下級，則可以說：「爺們、老子、大老子、你老子、乃公。」
(In front of the subordinate, then may say: "爺們、老子、大老子、你老子、乃公")

如果你混得好，當上了皇帝或王爺，則可以說：「朕、孤、孤王、孤家、寡人、不轂。」
(If you become the amperor, you say:"朕、孤、孤王、孤家、寡人、不轂")

如果你不願意當官，只好去當和尚、道士，則應該說：「貧道、小道、貧僧、貧衲、不慧、小僧、野僧、老衲、老僧。」
(If you are not willing to be an official, and become a buddhist priest or taoist priest, then should say:"貧道、小道、貧僧、貧衲、不慧、小僧、野僧、老衲、老僧")


最後一點必須注意，一旦你退休了，便一下子失去了權利和地位，見人也矮了三分，只好說：「老朽、老拙、老夫、愚老、老叟、小老、小老兒、老漢、老可、老軀、老僕、老物、朽人、老我、老骨頭。」
(Last, once you have retired, then all of a sudden you have lost the right and the status, you had to call yourself: "老朽、老拙、老夫、愚老、老叟、小老、小老兒、老漢、老可、老軀、老僕、老物、朽人、老我、老骨頭")


上面一百零八種'I'，僅僅是男性的常用說法。更多的'I'明天講解。
(The above 108 kinds of 'I', is for the male only. More ' I' explanation tomorrow.)

老外聽了老師一席話，頓覺冷水澆頭,一個晚上沒有睡好覺。第二天一大早便向老師辭行：'學生、愚、不材、末學、走。'退了房間，訂了機票，回國去了。
(After hearing all these, the foreigner feels like a bucket of cold water has poured all over him. That night, he cannot sleep. Next day, he says to the professor: "學生、愚、不材、末學、走。" Checks out from the hotel, buys an airplane ticket, returns home.)

I have some questions for the religious evangelists

I have some questions for the religious evangelists. If you are willing to politely state your view, please leave comment as answer to my questions.

I check out wikipedia and found that about 28% people believe in Christianity and 22% in Islam.

As a religious evanglelist, you, I suppose, will argue for your faith. So my first question is why you are convinced that 3 quarters of the people in the world is wrong and you are right that your god is the true god?

A follow up question is for the Christian and Islam evangelists. Why the god of the other faith (e.g. if you are Christian, the other god is that from Islam) is NOT the true god?

Finally, please convince me that I should believe in your god. If you are attempting this part, bear in mind that I hate tactics like sending me to hell in the after life stuff. I won't buy. Tell me good things. For example, any good deed that normal people without religion will never do, i.e. good deeds that only religious people will do. Hint: you will need quite a lot good deed facts to counter-balance the bad thing religions have done to human civilization and human moral advancement. Mother Teresa of Calcutta is NOT a sufficient example as what she has done, while great and good in nature, can also be done by any good people without regilious belief. In fact, she later expressed grave doubts about God's existence and pain over her lack of faith. See this extract

Where is my faith? Even deep down … there is nothing but emptiness and darkness … If there be God—please forgive me. When I try to raise my thoughts to Heaven, there is such convicting emptiness that those very thoughts return like sharp knives and hurt my very soul … How painful is this unknown pain—I have no Faith. Repulsed, empty, no faith, no love, no zeal, … What do I labor for? If there be no God, there can be no soul. If there be no soul then, Jesus, You also are not true.

Experience and Learning

From Ted.com: Jonathan Drori: Why we don’t understand as much as we think we do

Jonathan asked four questions near the beginning of his talk:
1. A seed weights next to nothing. Where does the stuff of the tree come from?
2. Can you light a little torch bulb with one piece of wire, a battery and a bulb?
3. Why is it hotter in summer than winter?
4. Can you draw the orbits of the planets?

Surprisingly, I was able to answer all questions correctly, honest! How about you?

The take home lesson of this talk is that learning is more than just collecting experience. Intuition, our collection of experience, is often wrong!

Watch the video to find the answers to the questions above. Near the end of the talk, Jonathan throws two more questions to us:
1. How does an aircraft's wing create lift? (ensure you also explain how planes can fly upside down.)
2. Why is the sea blue? (and why is it blue on cloudy days?)

Google Chrome speed

The general comments from the Web is that G-Chrome has a decent speed. But my little experiment did not support that.

I have a javascript implimentation of Lempel-Ziv compression. I applied that to a file of pure ASCII text of 363382 bytes. Here are the times that each of these browsers took to complete the task:

Mozilla Firefox 2.0.0.16: 23.765s
Microsoft Internet Explore 7.0.5730.13; 37.812s
Google Chrome 0.2.149.27: 138.046s

Google Chrome is the slowest by a large margin.

However for the decompression:
Mozilla Firefox 2.0.0.16: 0.625s
Microsoft Internet Explore 7.0.5730.13; 0.671s
Google Chrome 0.2.149.27: 0.115s

Google Chrome is the fastest by a large margin.

G-chrome - its implication for learning

The 800-pound G has launched its browser, albeit beta 0.2 and has attracted a lot of attention.

First, the bad news. For learning technology developers, we have one more browser to check in order to ensure that our products are compatible with. Can we test against Google Chrome in lieu of Safari? Probably not!

The potential good news.

Google Chrome has built in Prism functionality. By a single click, a shortcut is created on the desktop for the current web application. This is useful for courses if such application, when created, can also store the user credentials. If yes, students access to courses will be greatly simplified. At the time of writing, Google Chrome does not store any user credential.

Google is also working on a technology called Google Gears which makes a web application into an offline application by storing data locally at the client's harddisk. When such application is installed, the access of some local resources by javascript have been relaxed to allow much smoother and streamline interaction with the application. Again, at this point in time, I don't see signs that Google Gears has been integrated into Google Chrome.

The real good news.

This is a recognition of the importance of Javascript as a significant programming language and that the current Javascript virtual machine is not fast enough. While Google is not the first to do that, (Apple is making significant advances on which Google Chrome is based and Mozilla organisation is also implementing significantly faster virtual machine for its Firefox 3.1 browser), the emphasis on speed in Google Chrome's launch did throw some weight behind such an important issue.

After some preliminary reading, the improvement makes to the virtual machine by these open source effects (Apple, Mozilla and Google) are complementary and not mutually exclusive. Hopefully, someone will pull them together to give us a really fast and robust Javascript virtual machine.

Johnny Lee's inventions with potential in Education

Here are three youTube videos which I believe have great potential when used creatively in education/training settings:

Low-Cost Multi-touch Whiteboard using the Wiimote


Haptic Pen


Automatic Projector Calibration with Embedded Light Sensors
Note how he use a model car as the protected surface for visualization [at 3:30]

Heat 1 of Men 100m freestyle in 2000 Sydney Olympics

The comments were a bit cruel. However, it was a true spirit of sportmanship.

The Element Song

Experience and knowledge 1

The recent exchange of posts and comments shows the difference between Stephen Downes and me is more than just on the semantics of the word "experience". So let me just state the meaning I attach to this word and let Stephen do the same if he so chooses.

To me, experience refers to the total stimulations, entered via our perception systems, that have caught our attention. Experiences should be able to be recalled.

Closely related to experience is the notion of "intuition" which is the belief (or world view) based on our past experiences. Note here that culture is built up via our part experiences in interacting with other human.

One of the interesting observation related to the examples I used in Experience *alone* is a poor teacher is that the current accepted truth in both cases are counter-intuitive. In fact, a lot of important discoveries are made when obvious intuitions are being challenged.

The point I was trying to make in that post was that experience ALONE is not the sufficient condition to enable learning. In many cases, however, experience provides a good foundation for understanding.

Learning is a deliberate effort by the learner. Speaking and hearing is almost effortless if one is bought up within a community using that language. Writing and reading, however, requires deliberate effort - one needs to learn to read and write. Experience alone, i.e. seeing groups of letters on newspaper every day, does not lead to understanding of the news.

In this era, knowledge is the kind that requires learning - beyond just experience.

Experience *alone* is a poor teacher

Stephen Downes left a thoughtful comment to my last post pointing out the poor example given by Halpern & Hakel, 2003:

In fact, experience is a very good teacher - if we listen to it consistently and with rigour. And indeed, it is the only teacher we have.

I agree. The emphasis should be on the word *alone*.

Let me try to give examples:
If we push an object along a horizontal surface, our experience will tell us that when we stop pushing, the object will eventually stop moving. No matter how many times you repeat this experiment, it will have the same answer.

For all practical purposes, including building high-rise building, we can treat the sruface of Earth as flat.

Science now tells us that both of these experiences are wrong. We now know that these experiences are wrong^*. In the first case, our experience is masked by 'friction'. In an ideal situation where is no friction between the object and the surface and when there is no other external force acting on the object, the object will move at constant velocity forever - inertia! In the second case, the Earth being spherical can be noticed when we are watching a ship sailing towards the land. The highest point of the ship will come in sight first because the Earth is NOT flat!

We have millions of experience daily. Among those, a large amount do not attract our attention any more. For instance, our excitement of being able to brush our own teeth has long fainted away. Yet a lot has been repeated so many times that they have become "truth".

The key to use experience as a teacher is to "triangulate" and seek coherent explanation beyond just the experience itself. The additional effort beyond experiencing the experience is where the real learning occurs.

^*In light of the comment by Stephen Downes, I have changed this sentence. See today's post.

Experience alone is a poor teacher

from Applying the Science of Learning to the University and Beyond; Teaching for Long-Term Retention and Transfer
Halpern, Diane F., Hakel, Milton D.. Change. New Rochelle:Jul/Aug 2003. Vol. 35, Iss. 4, p. 36

Experience alone is a poor teacher. There are countless examples that illustrate that what people learn from experience can be systematically wrong. For example, physicians often believe that an intervention has worked when a patient improves after a particular treatment regime. But most patients will improve no matter what intervention occurs. If the patient does not improve, then physicians may reason that he or she was "too sick" to have benefited from effective treatment. There are countless examples of this sort of erroneous thinking in both professional practice and everyday life, where current beliefs about the world and how it works are maintained and strengthened, despite the fact that they are wrong.

People, therefore, frequently end up with great confidence in their erroneous beliefs. Confidence is not a reliable indicator of depth or quality of learning. In fact, research in metacognition has shown that most people are poor judges of how well they comprehend a complex topic.

The fact that most people don't know much about the quality of their comprehension is important, because there is a popular belief that all learning and assessment should be "authentic"--that is, nearly identical in content and context to the situation in which the information to be learned will be used. But what is missing from most authentic situations--and from most real-life situations as well--is systematic and corrective feedback about the consequences of various actions.

To return to the example of physicians, many medical schools have now adopted simulated patients as a teaching and testing tool--actors trained to present a variety of symptoms for novice practitioners to diagnose--because unplanned clinical encounters with real patients can't provide the necessary variety and feedback.

Survival of mankind and its solution

Mandatory watch for all politicians worldwide. (starts at 2:15 min)

League of Worlds Oct 2008

1. Just a short reminder that abstract summaries are due on the 20th of July 2008
Submit all proposals in Word, RTF, PDF or HTML format to:
Dr. Stephen Bronack (bronacksc at appstate dot edu)

2. You can now register for the conference on-line from http://www.leagueofworlds.com - click the Conference Registration link - that will take you to a registration page.

3. We have come to agreement with James Morrison, the editor of Innovate, http://www.innovateonline.info for a Special Issue of the journal (due May/April 2009) on our conference theme "Future Worlds: virtual worlds today and tomorrow" with guest editors: Stephen Bronack, Owen Kelly and Roni Linser, that will publish some of the better papers from the conference.

All are invited, whether they present at the conference or not, to submit a manuscript for publication relating to the conference theme directly to Innovate for that the special issue. You can find author guidelines at http://www.innovateonline.info that includes the following statement:

"We will consider a manuscript that has been presented at a conference or even published in conference proceedings. Disclose conference information at the end of the manuscript, imitating this example: [This article was modified from a presentation at the EDUCAUSE annual conference in Atlanta, GA, October 2002.] If possible, provide hyperlinks for the presentation file (if available in Web conference proceedings), the sponsoring organization, and the conference home page."

SPECIAL NOTE: Innovate will also publish a special issue on academics in virtual worlds as the October/November issue.

4. a quick reminder of
Important Dates

Paper submission - summary and explanation	July 20, 2008
Notification of Acceptance	July 29, 2008
1st Draft Due	August 20, 2008
Registration Deadline	September 5, 2008
Final Draft Due	September 5, 2008
Colloquium	October 13-17, 2008

Accepted presentations will be required to submit the following by September 5, 2008:

Periodic Table of Videos

American Got Talent - so were the Chinese

And this is the Chinese version

On Creativity, again

The three most important factors of being creativity are:
1. Try
2. Try again.
3. Try again and again.

see sufficient condition of creativity

Ligntning Strikes

What happen to you if your aeroplane is striked by lightning?


Dont worry. It is prefectly safe, Faraday's Cage!

What about when you are in a car?


At least, the camera survived to tell the story.

Coffee Art

Hope these videos can help you enjoy more of your coffee.

How raw Hubble image data is processed

This set of slides, with the accompanying notes, explain how the Hubble telescope's raw image data is processed to give us the beautiful images of the Universe.

The Hubble telescope has 4 cameras and 4 filters. For every image, two sets are taken. The story of how these 32 raw images are combined is VERY interesting.

We have OLPC, what next?

Computing devices, together with communication, are great cognitive extending tools, especially when they become affordable.

I have also seen cases where brand new computers were stored in locked rooms in the early 90's when schools were given computers from the government without adequate support. At the time, my thoughts were that we need education software. My thinking has since changed as Internet has become ubiquitous, but I still see the need of locally available information for community where high-speed connection to Internet is problematic. [Case in point, the connection speed in Australia is 3rd world. I live in Metro Melbourne and I still have only ADSL connection! BTW, I have two ADSL lines coming into my home, I will appreciate anyone telling me how can I combine them to give me better bandwidth!]

From lifehacker, pocket wikipedia is a 175 MB download with hand-picked material for mobile devices. This reminds me of the One Encyclopedia Per Child project. The 0.5 release is available from The Pirate Bay among other.

Kids are Quick

TEACHER: Maria, go to the map and find North America.
MARIA: Here it is.
TEACHER: Correct. Now class, who discovered America?
CLASS: Maria.
____________________________________

TEACHER: John, why are you doing your math multiplication on the floor?
JOHN: You told me to do it without using tables.
__________________________________________

TEACHER: Glenn, how do you spell 'crocodile?'
GLENN: K-R-O-K-O-D-I-A-L'
TEACHER: No, that's wrong
GLENN: Maybe it is wrong, but you asked me how I spell it.
______________________________ ______________

TEACHER: Donald, what is the chemical formula for water?
DONALD: H I J K L M N O.
TEACHER: What are you talking about?
DONALD: Yesterday you said it's H to O.
__________________________________
TEACHER: Winnie, name one important thing we have today that we didn't have ten years ago.
WINNIE: Me!
__________________________________________

TEACHER: Glen, why do you always get so dirty?
GLEN: Well, I'm a lot closer to the ground than you are.
_______________________________________
TEACHER: Millie, give me a sentence starting with 'I.'
MILLIE: I is..
TEACHER: No, Millie..... Always say, 'I am.'
MILLIE: All right... 'I am the ninth letter of the alphabet.'
_________________________________
TEACHER: George Washington not only chopped down his father's cherry tree, but also admitted it. Now, Louie, do you know why his father didn't punish him?
LOUIS: Because George still had the axe in his hand.
______________________________________

TEACHER: Now, Simon, tell me frankly, do you say prayers before eating?
SIMON: No sir, I don't have to, my Mom is a good cook.
______________________________

TEACHER: Clyde , your composition on 'My Dog' is exactly the same as your brother's. Did you copy his?
CLYDE : No, sir. It's the same dog.
___________________________________
TEACHER: Harold, what do you call a person who keeps on talking when people are no longer interested?
HAROLD: A teacher
___________________________________



PASS IT AROUND AND MAKE SOMEONE LAUGH!
LAUGHTER IS THE SOUL'S MEDICINE!!

fallacy: Necessary and sufficient conditions of creativity

I wrote about Sufficient condition of creativity, and the necessary condition for Eureka Moments, have I found the necessary and sufficient conditions for creativity? No!

If you think I have, you are in the trap of a logic fallacy. You see, the necessary condition is for Eureka moment - a type of creativity and the sufficient condition is for Darwinian evolution creativity, a different kind.

Eureka Moments

In Sufficient condition of creativity, I show that hard work can be called "creativity". Continuously improving designs until the working version is unrecognizable from it starting version. This is based on the Darwinian evolution concept.

Most Science advanced in the Darwinian way, paintakingly testing and disproving theories until an elegant new theory appears.

Other type of "great leap forward" is made when a sudden connection between two theories are connected and sparks off an insight. [see e.g. Brain Scans Show Working Memory, Moments Of Insight] This is the Eureka Moment - after the myth that Archimedes, fresh from discovering the principle of buoyancy during a bath, running naked through the streets of Syracuse yelling “Eureka!”

Since such Eureka Moment requires connection between previously considered unrelated theories, the necessary condition of Eureka Moment is the board scope of the creator. Without knowledge of the two theories, there could not be any connection. This again points to "diligence" as an important factor. In this case, a potential creator should read/understand a board scope of theories. When the spark lights, Aha! Eureka!

Wiimote Whiteboard vs. Commercial Electronic Boards

Verdict: Classroom - the cost of one classroom by a commercial solution will get you 7 classroom all equipped. WoW!

Sufficient condition of creativity

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
Arthur C. Clarke, "Profiles of The Future", 1961 (Clarke's third law)
English physicist & science fiction author (1917 - )

Creativity is defined as the ability to produce something new for a purpose.

The qualifier "for a specified purpose" is important because random new thing does not require any creative process. Hence, without this qualifier, creativity reduces to random changes.

"New" is a relative concept. Something new to me may not be new to you. It is new to me because I have not seen it before. Once I saw it, it is no longer new.

Since new is relatively related to "observer" and "time of observation". New does not imply prior non-existence. New only requires that the observer does not recognize any previous version of the thing at the time of observation. The sufficient condition of a thing to be new is that there are sufficient differences that the observer cannot notice the thing may be a previously observed version of the thing. [Note: this is NOT a necessary condition.] In other words, creativity is about the gap between the current public versions from the last public version. A creator is a person who shows the public things that are many versions apart.

Hence the sufficient condition of creativity is to make many "private" versions so that the accumulated difference from a public version is sufficiently large for the public not to notice the linkage from the previous thing.

Good News as a Learning Tool

The follow image from TreeHugger which is an image of a good news Web mock-up of Google News.


If you can get students to create similar pages, the impact will be tremendous.

Learning

A man maie well bring a horse to the water, But he can not make him drinke without he will. A dialogue conteinyng the nomber in effect of all the prouerbes in the Englishe tongue by John Heywood (1546)

The job of today's educator is to make the horse always thirsty and be prepared when the horse lead you to the water. Albert IP (2008)

I don't want to fry my brain with mobile

In 38 secs. you will know what I mean. Please watch.

eBook Reader

The above image from a TreeHugger showed red letters on a Kindle like reader which send me thinking in light of the potential competition from 2nd generation of OPLC.


Books are dead. Long live the books.

A4 e-ink reader

I have been waiting for this.
[image from Engedget]

it seems that I still have to wait, hopefully not for too long.

Songs with Science Themes by Prof. Alan Marscher

Music to liven up lectures? Yes, it is exactly that.


The title links to more Science-themed songs by Prof. Alan Marscher

Teen Helps Design Classroom DNA Experiments Using Common Food Dyes

ScienceDaily (May 14, 2008) — Agarose gel electrophoresis? Most teenagers wouldn't have a clue what this scientific term means, but middle school student Andrew Trigiano knows the protocol inside and out. When Andrew was 12, his father Robert Trigiano, a professor at the University of Tennessee, was looking for an interesting science project for his son. Setting out to compare differences in popular brands of Easter egg dyes, Trigiano's project soon grew into a full-blown scientific study and set of replicable classroom experiments.

And the Teacher guide is here

Is OLPC about learning? Apparently Not.

From ZDNet

Christopher Dawson reports that Ivan Krstić has an angry rant about OLPC, especially about running Windows on XO.

What strikes me is the following quote:

In fact, I quit when Nicholas told me — and not just me — that learning was never part of the mission. The mission was, in his mind, always getting as many laptops as possible out there…

I agree. So far, I have not seen any spectacular education/learning software developed on XO yet. (Correct me if I am wrong and point me some examples if you can.)

Christopher is right that no matter what has happened, XO has started an industrial wide for low cost market.

Ripples' Model

By Phil Race

I think these four 2-part questions that Phil has asked a lot of people are very inspiring. To get the most out of it, please type in your answer in the input boxes below (they will not be sent anywhere, just there to give you a place to jot down your answers.) You can then see the answers from most people by highlighting the blank space between the questions.

1. Think of something that you're good at, something that you know you do well.
How did you become good at it? Write a few words below.


practice
trial and error
having a go
repetition
experimenting


2. Think of something about yourself that you feel good about.
How you can tell that you feel good about this? What's your evidence to support this feeling? Write a few words below.


feedback
other people's reactions
praise
gaining confidence
seeing the results


3. Think of something that you're not good at, perhaps as a result of a bad learning experience.
What went wrong, and whose (if anyone's) fault it may have been? Write a few words below.


did not really want to learn it
could not see the point
bad teaching
could not make sense of it


4. Think of something that you did learn successfully, but at the time you didn¡¦t want to learn it.
What kept you going, so that you did indeed succeed in learning it? Write a few words below.


strong support and encouragement
did not want to be seen not able to do it
needed to do it for what I wanted next


How are you doing? What is/are the messange(s) in these four questions? Get the rest from the powerpoint linked to this post's title.

New Orleans, New Education System

New York Times reported a slight increase in the state promotional exam (12%) despite the still under-performance as a whole (60 percent of high school students got an unsatisfactory ranking in standardized English and math tests, a figure three to four times higher than the percentage throughout Louisiana).

What happened was that after Hurricane Katrina struck in 2005, the destruction

had offered, in a state official’s words, a “once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to reinvent public education.” In due course, that opportunity was taken:...Stripped of most of its domain and financing, the Orleans Parish School Board fired all 7,500 of its teachers and support staff, effectively breaking the teachers’ union. And the Bush administration stepped in with millions of dollars for the expansion of charter schools—publicly financed but independently run schools that answer to their own boards. The result was the fastest makeover of an urban school system in American history.

If that millions of dollars were put into the old system, would it produce the same "improvement"?

A "new" model of boardcasting, a new model of learning

The PBS Car of the Future program has a new format.

1. The material is "open" (Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0) meaning that they encourage users to remix the material.
2. Some of their content is contributed from audience.
3. The content also comes with a teacher guide which is very much in the old fashion way, (e.g. explains how petroleum is turned into gasoline). There is always a restriction that the program "can be used up to one year after program is recorded off the air."

Since this is open content, I suggest it would be much more educational if students are asked to add to and mix the content. Different group of students will tackle the problem from different angle. The web site already provides a very good example (the audio slide show of model of efficiency)