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Wednesday, September 11, 2002 |
Radio Advocacy (promoting Radio Userland to wider audiences)
- Why is USA Literacy on the decline?
- I believe
- rise in TV and digital music lowered youngster interests in traditional literature,
- while spread in Personal Computers dramatically increased literacy.
- The US News & World Report article quotes English teachers blaming flat English test scores on:
- a general decline in a national culture of reading;
- high stakes GOV standardized tests in which the way to succeed is rote learning to pass the tests, with former values no longer important, unless they are in the testing;
- large class sizes make it difficult to assign and thoroughly grade as many essays as teachers would like.
- If this is a true, fair representation of reality, then perhaps the schools need classes in multi-author Radio user blogging with students encouraged to engage in category debate teams to enhance their communication and reasoning skills.
- How might we get something like this started?
- One way is to follow model of IBM's Partners in Education.
- IBM "Partners in Education" is like local business community computer education cooperation. Teams of local businesses, sometimes working through their Chambers of Commerce, "sponsor" local colleges & secondary schools curriculum in state-of-art information technology.
IBM provides state-of-art hardware to the schools, that are participating in PIE, at extremely deep discounts (I would not be surprised if IBM is doing this at a loss), and various IBM business partners provide relevant software on similar pricing so low that if it wasn't for the fact that it is coming directly from the original vendors, you'd think it was stolen.
IBM throws in tech support & upgrades for free, like improvements to operating systems to keep everything state-of-art.
The teachers attend a two week class at IBM Rochester Minnesota in the summer. IBM provides this for free (anyone else must pay thousands of dollars for the equivalent education.) ... the teachers only need to pay their transportation & lodging while attending IBM University & this is often subsidized by businesses in their home communities.
IBM is not going to do this for any school in the absence of local business support.
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Big Co national alliances, that today seem to be pro-Blogging for their employees, might make donations of resources to local education, and help with establishing a national recommended curriculum.
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Just as IBM has a catchy name for their PIE, Radio Advocates also need a catchy name, with appropriate words into an acronym - All I can think of so far is Project Internet Literacy (PIL). Take the PIL to enhance your e-brain power.
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Enterprises in various communities band together to provide all resouces needed for specific programs to raise local school computer literacy, including tools to enhance communication skills of kids whose reading and comprehension and verbal scores are no good. Recruit semi-retired Star Trekie Technicians who have been helping Captain Dave, and now want to help Radio Userland colonize the Federation planets.
10:14:33 PM 
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Radio Gossip = How many Webloggers are out there anyway?
According to Wired article One Nation under Blog, Newsweek estimated 1/2 million weblogs on the internet, but perhaps this number should be cut in half to allow for people who start off with standard/user-number then relaunch their weblogs to domain naming that better reflects their identity, or when their interests change.
QUOTES
People restarting weblogs is a pretty popular trend, said Cameron Marlow, an MIT graduate student who's studying the phenomenon using blogdex.
A computer-generated list that probes 15,000 active blogs a day, blogdex rates each site based on the numbers of links to and from various Web pages.
You can always tell when someone starts a new weblog or changes their URL because there will be a huge switch in traffic and the number of links to a certain site over the period of a day. And really what's happening is that everyone is updating the links on their own page and redirecting them to the new Web page, said Marlow.
- Radio Userland has approx 50,000 users and grows by 4,000 per day.
- Blogger claims a registered user base of 700,000 customers growing by 1,500 to 2,000 a day.
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Moveable Type and Greymatter don't require users to provide personal information before downloading, so there's no way to know who's using free software.
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Some of these figures may be distorted by people who try out software, run into a wall trying to figure it out, and abandon their efforts.
UNQUOTE
3:36:42 PM
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Radio Userland Problem Solved. (= Radio Lesson)
- Earlier I reported on JVT and his Calendar problem.
- It has been solved.
- It was not solved by re publishing his whole site.
- It was yes solved by re publishing his whole site twice.
- Instructions how to do that here.
- So Radio Tip for those people struggling with Radio Userland Mysteries.
- If you don't succeed, try try try again.
- (Old Scottish Proverb)
12:45:21 PM
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© Copyright 2002 Al Macintyre.
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