Updated: 7/7/06; 3:25:06 PM.
Connectivity: Spike Hall's RU Weblog
News, clips, comments on knowledge, knowledge-making, education, weblogging, philosophy, systems and ecology.
        

 Thursday, November 14, 2002

In an earlier statement ( http://radio.weblogs.com/0106698/2002/11/12.html#a61") I mentioned that "preannouncing " a new personal knowledge development effort might be a way of drawing suppport to a that effort.

A special case of such drawn support might be special interest klogging groups such as the group-forming group [http://www.aquameta.com/gf/drupal] where special attention to the efforts of fellow-members; in that case a supportive response might be both faster and more likely. But the ideas I discuss below might be useful for in not only the case of the fellow special-interest-group member as well as the more occasional, or even utterly unknown, first time respondent.

Question: What is a good knowledge-making technique for the individual that also allows support, ie. friendly kibitzing.(I working on the optimal format for a "barely good enough" 'seed entry' that would serve the hurried first documentation purposes and yet activate a potential group of respondents at the same time.

I've come up with a couple of ideas. First, create a subsection of my weblogging operation that is devoted to initial thoughts (and from which later more sophisticated entries will derive). Thus I've created the "beginnings and not ready for prime time (NPRT)" category.

Idea: put placeholder statements and germinal ideas which are just beyond inarticulate in this category. My idea is that kibitzers who are interested in finding support-worthy ideas might look here[ http://radio.weblogs.com/0106698/categories/Seeds] for my really obvious candidates.

Another idea: leave a trail back to earlier efforts in the same cognitive territory. As you try to leveraqe your own knowledge-base a chronological trail of entries which link back to earlier efforts with similar material will probably help you, and possibly prospective supporters, to recreate the sequence of thoughts and, thus, to catch the gaps in reasoning that need interpolating and possibly to better guess possible extrapolation from present reasoning. Thus-- I' m trying on the idea of news aggregating my own entries so that I can take snippets and have easy linkage back to the earlier entry --- a flow of links to prior entries.

Who's the beneficiary, this way? For one, I am. I can trace my own thoughts more effectively through a backward trail of links. Also, any observer wishing to follow the same set of links may have a related thought induced by puzzling with the sequential, item to item stream.

The author's case is an instance of a problem prevalent in the underfunded and overbureaucratic school systems. One problem is throwing money at a problem. Another is the underappreciation of the complexity and needs of teachers and the systems within which they work.

Maine's Laptop Experience. Finally, an article that addresses my concerns about the wholesale deployment of laptop computers to a single grade in the state of Maine. Katie Dean looks at a more average school in Maine in Wired News today, and addresses the issues of teaching training and student understanding. I wrote back in May about how the program seemed to value the computers as a panacea rather than as an additional tool. What would they be used for? Would there be enough training? Would there be ancillary support? For the school surveyed, at least, the answers seem to be that teachers are largely left to their own devices, and laptops are used mostly as a way to access CD-ROM content or haphazardly search the Internet. More textbooks might have gone a lot further, or more advanced teacher training or additional teaching positions to reduce class sizes. When a teachers says, as they do in this article, that they couldn't get some students to crack textbooks, that's largely related to class size, a number of studies have shown. If tens of millions of dollars a year could go into improving teacher salaries and increasing teaching staffs at Maine schools, the result would be ... [GlennLog]

If it weren't so prevalent,if I hadn't seen it happen so many times as to become somewhat numbed, and if I weren't sick of litigious lawyers and class action suits I would try to find a group of law-trained idealists who would serve to instigate reform by conducting a series of criminal negligence suits against the educational bureaucracies. Our motivations would be 'pure' in a real sense because each child's underdeveloped potential is a tragic waste. But what if, in the process we undermine the creation and maintenance of interactive, mutually responsible,intelligent, small communities.

A more effective approach, I suspect, is to nurture the charter school movement and the precedent of using voucher dollars to support them. To this I would add published growth results for each school (and teachers within) and the ability of families to take their voucher dollars anywhere.

It seems that those of us who love, live in or live from the environment have common interests when all is said and done. The choice between Future A: A short-lived, ugly and uniform oil-based mall-world, on the one hand, and Future B: a world in which we limit our actions as necessary to preserve existence, ecological beauty and bounty, on the other, is obvious enough for even these two antagonists to collaborate.

Loggers, environmentalists cut deals. Loggers, environmentalists cut deals to prevent conversion of forests into shopping malls.... [NCPA Headlines]


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Spike Hall is an Emeritus Professor of Education and Special Education at Drake University. He teaches most of his classes online. He writes in Des Moines, Iowa.


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