Your kid is not an empty storage container, ready to be filled with curricular content.

Stories like this creep me out, even if they say Primary school testing and targets are to be streamlined to make exams for seven-year-olds less formal and part of a wider teacher-led assessment yada yada.

Testing programs are not about educating kids. They're about perpetuating the bell curve. As a kid who spent most of his formative years at the back ends of nearly every bell curve the system could throw at him, and who regarded his school experience as a 13-year prison sentence that commenced at age 5, I can tell you there isn't a damn thing in any top-down government-mandated educational testing program that answers any kind of market demand from kids themselves ? who are born with extravagantly unique souls, each with its own agenda and an endless series of questions (there's your real demand) for the purposes of its own education. Few of those questions are addressed by official curricula, testing programs, or even compulsory school attendance.

The unintended agenda of bureaucratized education is laid out very nicely in The Six Lesson Schoolteacher, by John Taylor Gatto in 1991. Dig it.

[The Doc Searls Weblog]

Well, it is an article about England but many of the points are just as true for American public schools. They are all top-down hierarchies that are ill-equipped, in my opinion, to deal effectively with this curent era. Where they work, it is through the botton-up approaches taken by individual teachers. Teachers who are seldom rewarded for their effort. The Six-Lesson Schoolteacher is well worth reading, even if you disagree with it. Modern public education is an outgrowth of the needs of the Industrial Revolution. Standardization is what drove this revolution and these processes were applied to education.We need a new reformulation of public education to deal with the Information Age. I hope we see this in my lifetime. I fear it will be as big a battle as any but the groups that learn how to do this will succeed at a more rapid pace than those that follow old processes. This will, of course, scare the old guard which will react in ways that will only hasten their own demise.  3:38:54 PM    

Follow along. Or contribute. Or both. Whatever. Welcome to DIY journalism, folks..

Microdoc News: Dynamics of a Blogosphere Story. Very interesting shit.

[The Doc Searls Weblog]

Tremendously interesting. We are in the beginning stages of novel ways to transmit information. How it moves and why will be an important area of research.  3:34:54 PM    

Disney To Offer Their Own Video On Demand Service. Disney sure is getting aggressive when it comes to new forms of movie distribution. Last week they got a lot of attention for selling self-destructing DVDs, and now they're going to offer their very own video-on-demand service that completely bypasses the local cable or satellite provider. Of course, you have to rent yet another set-top box for this to work. Does this mean if every movie studio goes this route, we're going to have a stack of about twenty set top boxes to put on our TV? Disney claims that they'll offer movies from other studios, but you have to wonder how prominently displayed they'll be. From the sound of it, this is really a modified DVR. It comes "pre-stocked" with 100 movies, and 10 new movies are "downloaded" to the box every week. Users have to pay both a rental fee on the box, itself, and then on each movie they want to watch. There are, of course, plenty of annoying restrictions on top of the fees. Once you start watching a movie, you have to watch the whole thing within a 24-hour period - or pay again. Fees haven't been decided, but they'll likely be about the same as it costs to rent a movie. This will seem too high to most consumers, since they know that Disney is saving money by offering movies this way. It will also be interesting to see how the various cable companies and other video-on-demand providers respond to this attempt to cut them out of the business. [Techdirt]

Disney has yet to come up with anything that I find very exciting. These all sound like items from a DIlbert cartoon, where the marketing dweebs have taken over. I will need to get ANOTHER set-top box, find someway to hook it up to my TV, allow Disney access to all sorts of nice demographic info on what movies I watch, etc. all so I can pay them for the privilege. Since Tivo is having problems, with a device that actually helps the enduser, how many people are going to invest in this? I have to pay rent even if I watch no movies. I bet the movies are not even at DVD resolution. Say a DVD normally holds 5 Gbytes (a single layer disk hold about 4.7). 110 movies gives you over 500 Gbytes, if stored at current resolutions. That is an awfully big, and currently expensive disk, if it is a DVR. I just do not think this will be very popular. But I guess it is a way to get a money stream without really having to create anything novel. Sounds right up Disney's alley.  3:22:31 PM    

Wireless Suddenly Enticing To AT&T, MCI. I was surprised a few years ago when AT&T announced plans to break into different groups and spin off their wireless and broadband sections into completely separate companies. I was wondering what that left Ma Bell with (other than cash from the spinoffs) - since it's been pretty clear for some time that mobile phones and internet connections are increasingly going to take away money from regular phone service. However, they went through with it, and are suddenly realizing that they could really use a wireless offering - so they're forced to go make a deal with their former division AT&T Wireless. Meanwhile, MCI, which ditched their own wireless offerings a while back, has realized the same thing, and is trying to make a deal of their own (possibly with T-Mobile). It makes you wonder why they bothered to ditch these plans in the first place. It was fairly obvious years ago that this was the direction things would, and offering a bundled solution was a way to protect a core business from cannibalization. [Techdirt]

One of the sure signs that the very companies that are in charge of the digital highway do not have a clue about new technology. They sell off the parts of their companies that are really worth anything then decide several years later that they need to have them. I'm almost certain that even if they have wireless companies they will not manage the technology correctly.  3:01:51 PM    

Tiny Seaside Town Goes Wi-Fi

Horne (the engineer with the laptop in La Di Da) lives in nearby El Granada, where he has Internet access through the cable company, Comcast. So far, the company, he said, has been unresponsive to any technical hurdles he has encountered with the service.

'The (customer-service) hotline is pretty much useless,' Horne said.

Now he is helping Coastside find a spot in his area to put up an antenna. Because Coastside is a small company with less funding, 'they have a much greater need to look after their client base,' Horne said.

'The advantage of wireless is that it is relatively cheap to install,' he said. 'Small companies like Coastside can cover an entire area and compete with the cable company.'

Small companies can get this up and going so much faster than the big ones, who really just do not understand the needs. It will become very easy for a community to contract with a smaller company to provide wireless internet access for the group at reasonable rates than what the cable or telecoms want to charge. The customer will go to where they can get their needs met without having to be charged an arm and a leg. I expect that the big companies and their lobbyists will really start turning up the heat to try an keep their decaying business structures alive a few more years. But eventually, the market will shift and they will be out of luck if they can not adapt.  12:21:27 PM    

Doc On NYT Arhives

The Times wouldn't even have to make access free to profit from a freer flow of information. WSJ subscribers can get the whole online edition for $29 a year; the Times seems to think its readers will pay that much to read just 10 of my columns. I'm afraid not.

12:13:11 PM    

From Unwanted Tower to a New Hit on eBay

11:53:44 AM