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In the wake of Sunday's [July 5, 2009] deadly riots in its western region of Xinjiang, China's central government took all the usual steps to enshrine its version of events as received wisdom: it crippled Internet service, blocked Twitter's micro-blogs, purged search engines of unapproved references to the violence, saturated the Chinese media with the state-sanctioned story.

*In the wake of Sunday's [July 5, 2009] deadly riots in its western region of Xinjiang, China's central government took all the usual steps to enshrine its version of events as received wisdom: it crippled Internet service, blocked Twitter's micro-blogs, purged search engines of unapproved references to the violence, saturated the Chinese media with the state-sanctioned story. *"They're getting more sophisticated. They learn from past mistakes...."

7.20.09 *In the wake of Sunday's [July 5, 2009] deadly riots in its western region of Xinjiang, China's central government took all the usual steps to enshrine its version of events as received wisdom: it crippled Internet service, blocked Twitter's micro-blogs, purged search engines of unapproved references to the violence, saturated the Chinese media with the state-sanctioned story. *"They're getting more sophisticated. They learn from past mistakes...." *"For Twitter or the Internet, when they see too many factors they cannot completely control, they shut down and block. But for foreign journalists, they feel that as long as they can keep those people under control, it may serve better the government's purpose."

7.20.09 *The media landscape that we knew, as familiar as it was... that professionals broadcast messages to amateurs is increasingly slipping away. *We are increasingly in a landscape where media is global, social, ubiquitous, and cheap. *...a world of media where the former audience are now increasingly full participants. *...media is less and less about crafting a single message to be consumed by individuals and is more and more often a way of creating an environment for convening and supporting groups. *The really crazy change...the fact that people are no longer disconnected from each other. *The size of the network, the complexity of the network is actually the square of the number of participants. *As recently as last decade, most of the media available for public consumption was produced by professionals. Those days are over, never to return. *They [barackobama.com] had understood that their role with MyBO.com was to convene the supporters, but not to control their supporters.

1-Technology is only technology to those who were born before it. 2-We need to prepare students for THEIR future not OUR past-Ian Jukes, educator and Futurist. 3-Teachers need to stop saying, "Hand it in," and start saying "Publish It." Alan November 4-We have moved from "know what" learning to "know where" learning. 5-The largest number of podcasts in education are about Podcasts in education.-Marco Torres. 6-Kids DO want to learn, but schools get in the way. 7-Digital Media enables us to build more stages for our kids to express themselves. - Marco Torres 8-What gets us in trouble is not what we don't know. It's what we know that just ain't so. Mark Twain. 9-We need to replicate in the classroom the world in which students are living. 10-If we teach today the way we were taught yesterday we aren't preparing students for today or tomorrow.

7.15.09 1-Technology is only technology to those who were born before it. 2-We need to prepare students for THEIR future not OUR past-Ian Jukes, educator and Futurist. 3-Teachers need to stop saying, "Hand it in," and start saying "Publish It." Alan November 4-We have moved from "know what" learning to "know where" learning. 5-The largest number of podcasts in education are about Podcasts in education.-Marco Torres. 6-Kids DO want to learn, but schools get in the way. 7-Digital Media enables us to build more stages for our kids to express themselves. - Marco Torres 8-What gets us in trouble is not what we don't know. It's what we know that just ain't so. Mark Twain. 9-We need to replicate in the classroom the world in which students are living. 10-If we teach today the way we were taught yesterday we aren't preparing students for today or tomorrow.

*...research shows three reliable effects when students are graded: They tend to think less deeply, avoid taking risks, and lose interest in the learning itself. *Rubrics are, above all, a tool to promote standardization, to turn teachers into grading machines or at least allow them to pretend that what they're doing is exact and objective.

http://www.alfiekohn.org/teaching/rubrics.htm downloaded on 7.15.09 *...research shows three reliable effects when students are graded: They tend to think less deeply, avoid taking risks, and lose interest in the learning itself. *Rubrics are, above all, a tool to promote standardization, to turn teachers into grading machines or at least allow them to pretend that what they're doing is exact and objective. *As long as the rubric is only one of several sources, as long as it doesn't drive the instruction, it could conceivably play a constructive role. *students whose attention is relentlessly focused on how well they're doing often become less engaged with what they're doing. *What all this means is that improving the design of rubrics, or inventing our own, won't solve the problem because the problem is inherent to the very idea of rubrics and the goals they serve. *Neither we nor our assessment strategies can be simultaneously devoted to helping all students improve and to sorting them into winners and losers. *We have to reassess the whole enterprise of assessment, the goal being to make sure it's consistent with the reason we decided to go into teaching in the first place.

http://www.alfiekohn.org/teaching/rubrics.htm downloaded on 7.15.09 *...research shows three reliable effects when students are graded: They tend to think less deeply, avoid taking risks, and lose interest in the learning itself. *Rubrics are, above all, a tool to promote standardization, to turn teachers into grading machines or at least allow them to pretend that what they're doing is exact and objective. *As long as the rubric is only one of several sources, as long as it doesn't drive the instruction, it could conceivably play a constructive role. *students whose attention is relentlessly focused on how well they're doing often become less engaged with what they're doing. *What all this means is that improving the design of rubrics, or inventing our own, won't solve the problem because the problem is inherent to the very idea of rubrics and the goals they serve. *Neither we nor our assessment strategies can be simultaneously devoted to helping all students improve and to sorting them into winners and losers. *We have to reassess the whole enterprise of assessment, the goal being to make sure it's consistent with the reason we decided to go into teaching in the first place.

As John Maeda recently noted, the missing partner to STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Math) is IDEA (Intuition, Design, Emotion, Art). As a person who was trained on both sides and now works and plays across STEM and IDEA, I feel strongly that our education programs need to combine both in order to create the T-shaped people that can go out and make a difference in the world (Principle 6).

"What good is a dream house if you haven't got a dream?" -Julius Shulman

""Chaos isn't the problem; how long it takes to find coherence is the real game." -Doc Childre and Bruce Crier"