Archive for: September 2004
§ ¶Voting 101
Kottke.org has a nice non-partisan Voters Information Guide for the November election. The site mentions that some states require voter registration by October 2, so take a look while you’ve got time!
This guide is a starting point for people wanting information on voting in the upcoming national election on Tuesday, November 2, 2004. Voter information varies from state to state, so please use the sites and phone numbers listed to find out about the particular procedures in your state.
§ ¶Wired: Creationism 2.0
Wired’s cover story this month is the recent push in many states to push creationism into the public science curriculum. It’s useful to understand how the arguments for creationism have changed from earlier attacks against teaching evolution in schools. I recommend the Panda’s Thumb as a rapid response site for current creationism controversies — they’re doing a good job tracking related news and picking apart the arguments.
§ ¶BBEdit 8
All you OS X users, go get BBEdit 8. Daring Fireball has a detailed review of the venerable (that adjective seemed permanently attached to BBEdit) text editor. One new feature that jumped out at me is the ability to define language modules through XML definition files (e.g. an immediately useful Apache config language module). Previously, you had to write and compile code to do this, which greatly limited who could contribute new modules.
§ ¶First Education Satellite
India’s launched an education satellite.
Millions of illiterate people in remote, rural India could soon have access to an education, as a satellite devoted exclusively to long distance learning was launched on Monday. It is the world’s first dedicated educational satellite, according to the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO).
The satellite seems primarily geared towards broadcasting educational programs to rural areas, and the main benefit is economic — this enables the use of cheap satellite receivers without expensive access fees. I’m curious if there’s any support for interactivity or internet access planned for down the road.
§ ¶Writing with Markdown
I’m constantly looking for a good text to HTML conversion utility. I hate having to enter HTML tags manually; I find it slows me down considerably, and the need to close tags creates an unnecessary step. (In most cases, the end of the paragraph should implicitly close the currently open tag.)
One nice thing about Pivot is that it lets you use Textile. Textile is a pretty good conversion tool, but it suffers from one major design flaw: if you use it, you give up the ability to use raw HTML, because Textile will convert, for example, <p> to <p>. And since Textile manages only a subset of HTML for you, it means that if you want to use anything beyond what Textile can handle, you have to ditch Textile altogether and write everything in straight HTML.
Recently I discovered Markdown, which fixes this major flaw: it lets you mix raw HTML with its own, vaguely setext-like syntax (but without some of setext’s more annoying bits). Even better, it turns out there’s a php port that integrates very nicely into Pivot. Markdown is definitely worth a look if you’re using a php-based weblog tool.
§ ¶Carnegie Learning in the News
The NYTimes has an article on Carnegie Learning’s cognitive tutoring software and its success in classroom settings. I haven’t seen cognitive modeling succeed beyond K-12 mathematics, but for that domain, it’s pretty effective.
§ ¶Town Hall Forums for NCLB
EdWeek reports on a series of town hall forums on NCLB.
Three national education groups, including some of the profession’s most distinguished scholars, are launching a series of public forums this fall to lend some academic context and counterpoint to discussions about the No Child Left Behind Act.
More information about these forums, including a schedule, can be found at Kappa Delta Pi’s site.
§ ¶THEN Call for Submissions
Passing on a call for a new journal.
THEN (Technology, Humanities, Education, & Narrative), a new peer-reviewed journal of technology, humanities, education and narrative, is now accepting submissions of articles, reviews, and multimedia. THEN provides a place to publish humanities-based approaches to research on technology in education, including work that draws from anthropology, critical theory, ethnography, historical inquiry, narrative analysis, and philosophy. Alternative media and experimental formats are encouraged. Published work will be available both online and as print issues available on-demand.
THEN aims to showcase work that develops innovative models and approaches for using and understanding technology in education. We are especially interested in scholarship that does not fit into traditional categories within schooling and educational research — for example, work that mixes the creative and the empirical, bridges academic and popular culture, blurs the lines between study and play, or blends scholarship and social activism. There is a special section called Section 16 for work created through collaborations among students, teachers, and/or researchers. Submissions should be accessible to a wide audience of researchers and practitioners from fields related to education.