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Chalk and Technology Talk..Creating Learning Landscapes
Did you know that you can have the latest telescope on your desktop? It is called World Wide Telescope!
World Wide Telescope, Microsoft Research
After years of thinking and months of internal testing , Microsoft Research is releasing its World Wide Telescope software for the public to download and play with.
The program requires more computer firepower than other free online astronomy guides, such as Google Sky or Stellarium.
Abstract
The program is powered by Microsoft's Visual Experience Engine, which is optimized for smooth panning and zooming. Wong hinted that the same architecture could be used for other products as well - such as panoramic virtual-reality tours of earthly destinations.
The WorldWide Telescope is available for free download via http://www.worldwidetelescope.org
Check the Web site for full system requirements and support material.
Like other astronomical guides, the World Wide Telescope takes images from several world-class telescopes and knits them together into a seamless virtual night sky you can navigate with your mouse. You can click on celestial objects to get more information, from the program itself or from the Web. You can even figure out what the night sky will look like from your location, although other free offerings (such as Heavens-Above on the Web) make that job easier.
What sets this telescope apart is the growing selection of multimedia guided tours, often voiced by astronomers from the Space Telescope Science Institute, the Spitzer Science
Center, the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and
other world-class institutions.
Amazing Space
http://amazing-space.stsci.edu/
Telescopes from the Ground Up
http://amazing-space.stsci.edu/resources/explorations/groundup/
Online Exploration: Telescopes From the Ground Up
http://amazing-space.stsci.edu/resources/explorations/groundup/teacher/index.html
More than 30 tours have been created so far. You can sit back and watch as a professional astronomer (or even a 6-year-old kid) takes control of your browser-style window and shows you the sights. You can pause the tour and take a look around on your own, then resume the show or jump onto a related tour.
Take a tour.
You also can create your own tour, or download tours from other content creators - for example, through the online communities already set up by Astronomy magazine, Meade 4M and Sky & Telescope. Several tours in the first batch are voiced by Curtis Wong, the Microsoft researcher who heads up the WorldWide Telescope project
Extra goodies are included with the software: You can turn the telescope toward Earth, zooming through aerial imagery a la Google Earth. (The maximum resolution is not as good as Google Earth's, however.) You can scan the surface of other planets in the same way. You can also mouse your way around a couple of jaw-dropping 360-degree panoramas from Mars.
Compare World Wide Telescope to Stellarium and Google Sky/ Write up a report than compares, contrasts and highlights their differences
Amazing Space
You can learn about Stardust
http://stardust.jpl.nasa.gov/home/index.html
Dashboard Widgets
http://www.apple.com/downloads/dashboard/webcams/astronomypictureoftheday.html
Resources
History of Telescopes
Explore the history of telescopes from Galileo to NASA's Great Observatories. ... Resources for museums, planetariums, and other informal education settings ...
www.stsci.edu/outreach/
Astronomy Picture of the Day
Discover the cosmos! Each day a different image or photograph of our fascinating universe is featured, along with a brief explanation written by a professional astronomer.
Video World Wide Television
http://www.labnol.org/software/download/video-demo-microsoft-worldwide-telescope-universe/2434/
Amazing Space
is a great website for teachers and students of astronomy. Amazing Space has a great collection of virtual tours and online simulations. Each simulation contains valuable lessons about an astronomy topic. The screen shot to the left is the start page of a comet exploration tour. |
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May 13th, 2008 @ 2:41PM |
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Did you know that you can have the latest telescope on your desktop? It is called World Wide Telescope!
World Wide Telescope, Microsoft Research
After years of thinking and months of internal testing , Microsoft Research is releasing its World Wide Telescope software for the public to download and play with.
The program requires more computer firepower than other free online astronomy guides, such as Google Sky or Stellarium.
Abstract
The program is powered by Microsoft's Visual Experience Engine, which is optimized for smooth panning and zooming. Wong hinted that the same architecture could be used for other products as well - such as panoramic virtual-reality tours of earthly destinations.
The WorldWide Telescope is available for free download via http://www.worldwidetelescope.org
Check the Web site for full system requirements and support material.
Like other astronomical guides, the World Wide Telescope takes images from several world-class telescopes and knits them together into a seamless virtual night sky you can navigate with your mouse. You can click on celestial objects to get more information, from the program itself or from the Web. You can even figure out what the night sky will look like from your location, although other free offerings (such as Heavens-Above on the Web) make that job easier.
What sets this telescope apart is the growing selection of multimedia guided tours, often voiced by astronomers from the Space Telescope Science Institute, the Spitzer Science
Center, the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and
other world-class institutions.
Amazing Space
http://amazing-space.stsci.edu/
Telescopes from the Ground Up
http://amazing-space.stsci.edu/resources/explorations/groundup/
Online Exploration: Telescopes From the Ground Up
http://amazing-space.stsci.edu/resources/explorations/groundup/teacher/index.html
More than 30 tours have been created so far. You can sit back and watch as a professional astronomer (or even a 6-year-old kid) takes control of your browser-style window and shows you the sights. You can pause the tour and take a look around on your own, then resume the show or jump onto a related tour.
Take a tour.
You also can create your own tour, or download tours from other content creators - for example, through the online communities already set up by Astronomy magazine, Meade 4M and Sky & Telescope. Several tours in the first batch are voiced by Curtis Wong, the Microsoft researcher who heads up the WorldWide Telescope project
Extra goodies are included with the software: You can turn the telescope toward Earth, zooming through aerial imagery a la Google Earth. (The maximum resolution is not as good as Google Earth's, however.) You can scan the surface of other planets in the same way. You can also mouse your way around a couple of jaw-dropping 360-degree panoramas from Mars.
Compare World Wide Telescope to Stellarium and Google Sky/ Write up a report than compares, contrasts and highlights their differences
Amazing Space
You can learn about Stardust
http://stardust.jpl.nasa.gov/home/index.html
Dashboard Widgets
http://www.apple.com/downloads/dashboard/webcams/astronomypictureoftheday.html
Resources
History of Telescopes
Explore the history of telescopes from Galileo to NASA's Great Observatories. ... Resources for museums, planetariums, and other informal education settings ...
www.stsci.edu/outreach/
Astronomy Picture of the Day
Discover the cosmos! Each day a different image or photograph of our fascinating universe is featured, along with a brief explanation written by a professional astronomer.
Video World Wide Television
http://www.labnol.org/software/download/video-demo-microsoft-worldwide-telescope-universe/2434/
Amazing Space
is a great website for teachers and students of astronomy. Amazing Space has a great collection of virtual tours and online simulations. Each simulation contains valuable lessons about an astronomy topic. The screen shot to the left is the start page of a comet exploration tour. |
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May 13th, 2008 @ 2:41PM |
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I look at the picture of a young Michelle Rhee, NCLB documents in hand seeking data and making big changes in the DC Schools. I understand why the mayor wants change.
I am a DC resident, more than that I donated three years of teaching to Anthony Bowen School in SW Washington DC. My vision of the schools , the system is honed by my experience. I say I donated because no matter how much time, money and resources I had and I had considerable, I only made a little difference and I am a master teacher.We ha eleven books in the library , and the children got books once a week from the library so that the kids would not physically go to the library. Things have changed.
I could have been one of those teaching today
had I not run for the border. ( Arlington Schools in Virginia-Metro area).
Its the system, not the teachers.
i taught in Arlington Public Schools for most of my life. I have traveled the classrooms of America as a part of technology, and know pretty much the learning landscape. I am accomplished.
I too was defeated by DC Schools.
I keep waiting for someone to tell the young mayor, and Miss Rhee that to be a teacher in the District of Columbia is a very hard job shaped by all kinds of outside forces. I think about my three years I which I spent all of my savings contributing to the school system. I taught across from a large welfare housing in southwest Washington DC. The school is still there. They called me the pied piper of SW. I took children on field trips, taught them to use the museums on the mall to learn, did NASA Marsville with them and had wonderful reading scores. It was not appreciated. I was making trouble. That's why I left. Children followed me in the SW mall.
Children in trouble slept at my doorstep.
There was never enough time or money to address all of their needs.
I could tell you about rats as big as cats. Wood in the windows where panes were supposed to be you could see the Rotunda of the capitol.. and you knew not to sit too close to the window in winter. We had inadequate libraries and resources,
and the inertia of the school system from the top.
The children came from deprived homes, family were iffy. Nutrition was not at its best. The school system didn't provide much. Books. Little even then in the way of multimedia.
From time to time I go take a look.
I am a master teacher. I was run out of DC schools in a way because I was ambitious.But Arlington took me back and I flourished in a
system that cared about its teachers, students and in which there was some flexibility.
Why do I care about teachers being forced out , demeaned,demanded to leave.. this little lady with NCLB data in her hand sssking change, by ousting the people who stood in the schools when no one would dare to teach? Beats me.A new broom? Same problems.
It is particularly cruel to punish the teachers and the learning community when the variables of learning are a lot more than data points that one can collect they reach back all the way to segregation.
There was a time in which teaching was about the only occupation that was available to many, and they accepted the task.
Throw them out?Yes she will.
The disrespect of the "youth" ( I am not 25 is interesting. In an age where we have the knowledge divide, the digital divide , the technical divide, the social divide.. who and how does she think change will happen without some husbanding of the resources, experience and yes talent that some of these teachers have.
Choosing to teach in an urban school means that you go through hell and back from time to time. I would be more explicit but
what you do on a daily basis is not fun, its hard work. It is work from the heart.
Get rid of them as if they are the problem?
Maybe they are the problem in some ways
but there ought to be a better solution than just chucking them out.
Garbage men get a lot more respect in this town.
It is interesting for someone of another culture , very different to understand the world that some of these teachers and I came from. We sort of have integration now, but lots of the people standing in classrooms went into DC schools and stayed there out of
a desire to make a difference.
NCLB will die . I hope I am there when they take down the little houses that smack of the little red schoolhouse, and make toothpicks out of it. It will die a slow death because it was legislated.You will or may have noticed that none of the candidates have explicitly mentioned education.
Other teachers will take the place of the teachers that Miss Rhee is putting out to pasture. You think that anyone is viewing this in historical perspective? Urban schools are urban schools, There are ways to change them. There are also ways to create the teachers you want within the system, Change can happen , not just by getting rid of
the teachers.
I thought to volunteer. But not ...
I am free to say what I think.
You can't do that in most school systems.
To work for her, I would have to teach NCLB her recipe.
Norm Augustine and others are calling for broadening participation in science, technology, math and engineering.
Have you read "Is America Falling off of the Flat Earth?Margaret Spellings is even now talking science and STEM. Things change. Education will change, in a couple of years it will change again.
Selling the real estate will also create some funding fixes for a time, but the real issue
is not just DC schools. Its the politics of schools.
It is the short sitedness of being young
and not giving a damn about people who have to go to make the mayor's program work.Passion would create change that makes a difference for the people there in a world where finding good teachers is difficult. Programs and pioneering would help.
I wish that many more people had the opportunity to actually work in an urban school. The difficulty is unbelievable. On the other hand it is a very rewarding job because you can get satifaction from a job well done and touch the future at the same time.
We all know that every administration , principal, strong forces in education joust for oneupsmanship in classrooms.The K-12 teacher, however, usually gets blamed for it all.
Too bad that the teachers lose. I can't imagine that anyone would take such a low paying job to actually not teach to their best knowledge.It is not an easy job. Few people understand or care. |
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May 8th, 2008 @ 6:19AM |
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A recent article by a teacher from an upper crust school in Washington got my attention.
By Thomas Washington
Sunday, February 3, 2008; B02
As a school librarian, I wind up reading all sorts of damning reports on students' lack of reading skills. The latest dire news came from the National Endowment for the Arts' recent "To Read or Not to Read" study, which warned that "less than one-third of 13-year-olds are daily readers, a 14 percent decline from 20 years earlier." High school students are faring even worse: Among 17-year-olds, the percentage of "non-readers" has doubled over a 20-year period, from 9 percent in 1984 to 19 percent in 2004. This multitasking generation, we're led to believe, can't focus on any item for longer than nine minutes.
But despite the ominous reports, it's business as usual for students today, at least the ones I'm talking to. Like many of their peers throughout the country, the students at my school are college-bound, AP-saturated and upwardly mobile, with plenty of homework to keep them occupied. And if the early college admissions are any indication -- decisions went out in mid-December -- they are immune to the crisis. Georgetown, the University of Chicago and Middlebury are eager to have them. So what gives?
Educators or parents might start by framing the questions differently. Who isn't having trouble concentrating these days? Who doesn't find it nearly impossible to stick with a 450-page novel? I've come down with the same virus as the kids -- the very group I criticize for ignoring the library's "new arrivals" book display.
The other night, for example, I stumbled over this paragraph in Milton Friedman's seminal 1962 tome "Capitalism and Freedom": "The self-denying ordinance to refrain from majority rule on certain kinds of issues that is embodied in our Constitution and in similar written or unwritten constitutions elsewhere, and the specific provisions in these constitutions or their equivalents prohibiting coercion of individuals, are themselves to be regarded as reached by free discussion and as reflecting essential unanimity about means."
Years ago, I might have worked with Friedman's convolutions and tried to unspool the main idea. Today, I have neither the time nor the desire. Well, I probably do have time, but with so many other books by my bedside, queued like a fleet of 757s on a snowy runway, there's too much competition to endure such prose. I put Friedman down for good after page 30.
I witness a similar edginess from younger readers in the library. "How long is it?" has replaced "Will I like it?" The students' finicky inclinations, as well as my own recent hasty approach to reading, bothered me enough to try to trace the root cause. I suspect that the tipping point in information overload has tipped. Students' aversion to reading does not necessarily signal a weakness, much less a dislike of reading. For them, and now maybe for me, moving on to something else is an adaptive tactic for negotiating the jungle that is our information-besotted culture of verbiage.
These kids manage to survive by bushwhacking through the muddle -- while seamlessly dealing with an e-mail, a Word document or a 50-page PDF from the scholarly database JSTOR. It's taken them just a few years to arrive at the same conclusion that I've reached after a lifetime of sustained reading: The pursuit of knowledge in the age of information overload is less about a process of acquisition than about proficiency in tossing stuff out. By necessity, we spend more time quickly scanning manuals, king-size novels, the blogosphere and poems in the New Yorker than we do scrutinizing their contents for deeper meaning.
This is the price we pay for the changed demands in reading. Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer Stacy Schiff defines this new reading terrain as "the paradox of our age." We've grown into a culture of searchers, not readers. "Surely, we have never read, or written, so many words a day," Schiff writes. "Yet increasingly we deal in atomized bits of information, the hors d'oeuvres of education."
Of course, I still believe that students have to pay their dues as readers. English teachers turn students into more skilled readers by moving from "The Catcher in the Rye" to "King Lear" in something akin to the way a fitness trainer slowly increases the heaviness of a weight to create muscle. But in the process, if we're going to insist on extracting the main ideas from chunks of text (the idea behind such 21st-century reading initiatives as "information literacy") instead of admiring, as we once did, such aesthetic values as a book's form, rhythm and content, then we need not kid -- or berate -- ourselves for our failure to mount an assault on Denis Johnson's thorny "Tree of Smoke."
Reading is all about testing these days. As the NEA reports, it is also about some prospective employer who ranks reading comprehension as "very important." Students know this. It's part of the reason they're in SAT preparation overdrive in their freshman year.
Living in the era of information overload forces a few key questions on all readers. What do we need to know? Why do we need to know it? And, given that by the end of our lives we will have absorbed and converted to knowledge only a sliver of the information available, should we bother knowing it?
tvwashington@gmail.com
Thomas Washington is upper-school head librarian at the Potomac School in McLean.
IT would be interesting to hear what a teacher in the inner city would write in response.
In the era of No Child left Behind and every teacher in the poor schools being left behind by the dire cuts in finances, what could an inner city teacher say, or a rural teacher deprived of broadband and books and the best of teachers say.
Many teachers are voting with their feet to leave the profession. An award winning teacher who is my friend, has left the building.A young teacher, she sees no interest of the public in supporting education, is tired of the politics in teaching and is burdened by the scholarships she got to be a teacher . She is first in her family to be college educated ( she is not black). She has won a number of prizes working with student with special needs.
But my friend is discouraged by the lack of funding, interest and the difficulty just witn the school system.
Let us hope that some teachers will be left behind of good will and who have a love of children in this era of the "Education President" George Bush.The school system in DC where the president works is one of the worst in the country and the politicians ride their limos past the schools and students without blinking an eye. The problems of the school system in Washington are so bad that a recent rating ranked the DC schools as worst in the country. |
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February 7th, 2008 @ 4:38AM |
3 Comments
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Post a Comment
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A recent article by a teacher from an upper crust school in Washington got my attention.
By Thomas Washington
Sunday, February 3, 2008; B02
As a school librarian, I wind up reading all sorts of damning reports on students' lack of reading skills. The latest dire news came from the National Endowment for the Arts' recent "To Read or Not to Read" study, which warned that "less than one-third of 13-year-olds are daily readers, a 14 percent decline from 20 years earlier." High school students are faring even worse: Among 17-year-olds, the percentage of "non-readers" has doubled over a 20-year period, from 9 percent in 1984 to 19 percent in 2004. This multitasking generation, we're led to believe, can't focus on any item for longer than nine minutes.
But despite the ominous reports, it's business as usual for students today, at least the ones I'm talking to. Like many of their peers throughout the country, the students at my school are college-bound, AP-saturated and upwardly mobile, with plenty of homework to keep them occupied. And if the early college admissions are any indication -- decisions went out in mid-December -- they are immune to the crisis. Georgetown, the University of Chicago and Middlebury are eager to have them. So what gives?
Educators or parents might start by framing the questions differently. Who isn't having trouble concentrating these days? Who doesn't find it nearly impossible to stick with a 450-page novel? I've come down with the same virus as the kids -- the very group I criticize for ignoring the library's "new arrivals" book display.
The other night, for example, I stumbled over this paragraph in Milton Friedman's seminal 1962 tome "Capitalism and Freedom": "The self-denying ordinance to refrain from majority rule on certain kinds of issues that is embodied in our Constitution and in similar written or unwritten constitutions elsewhere, and the specific provisions in these constitutions or their equivalents prohibiting coercion of individuals, are themselves to be regarded as reached by free discussion and as reflecting essential unanimity about means."
Years ago, I might have worked with Friedman's convolutions and tried to unspool the main idea. Today, I have neither the time nor the desire. Well, I probably do have time, but with so many other books by my bedside, queued like a fleet of 757s on a snowy runway, there's too much competition to endure such prose. I put Friedman down for good after page 30.
I witness a similar edginess from younger readers in the library. "How long is it?" has replaced "Will I like it?" The students' finicky inclinations, as well as my own recent hasty approach to reading, bothered me enough to try to trace the root cause. I suspect that the tipping point in information overload has tipped. Students' aversion to reading does not necessarily signal a weakness, much less a dislike of reading. For them, and now maybe for me, moving on to something else is an adaptive tactic for negotiating the jungle that is our information-besotted culture of verbiage.
These kids manage to survive by bushwhacking through the muddle -- while seamlessly dealing with an e-mail, a Word document or a 50-page PDF from the scholarly database JSTOR. It's taken them just a few years to arrive at the same conclusion that I've reached after a lifetime of sustained reading: The pursuit of knowledge in the age of information overload is less about a process of acquisition than about proficiency in tossing stuff out. By necessity, we spend more time quickly scanning manuals, king-size novels, the blogosphere and poems in the New Yorker than we do scrutinizing their contents for deeper meaning.
This is the price we pay for the changed demands in reading. Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer Stacy Schiff defines this new reading terrain as "the paradox of our age." We've grown into a culture of searchers, not readers. "Surely, we have never read, or written, so many words a day," Schiff writes. "Yet increasingly we deal in atomized bits of information, the hors d'oeuvres of education."
Of course, I still believe that students have to pay their dues as readers. English teachers turn students into more skilled readers by moving from "The Catcher in the Rye" to "King Lear" in something akin to the way a fitness trainer slowly increases the heaviness of a weight to create muscle. But in the process, if we're going to insist on extracting the main ideas from chunks of text (the idea behind such 21st-century reading initiatives as "information literacy") instead of admiring, as we once did, such aesthetic values as a book's form, rhythm and content, then we need not kid -- or berate -- ourselves for our failure to mount an assault on Denis Johnson's thorny "Tree of Smoke."
Reading is all about testing these days. As the NEA reports, it is also about some prospective employer who ranks reading comprehension as "very important." Students know this. It's part of the reason they're in SAT preparation overdrive in their freshman year.
Living in the era of information overload forces a few key questions on all readers. What do we need to know? Why do we need to know it? And, given that by the end of our lives we will have absorbed and converted to knowledge only a sliver of the information available, should we bother knowing it?
tvwashington@gmail.com
Thomas Washington is upper-school head librarian at the Potomac School in McLean.
IT would be interesting to hear what a teacher in the inner city would write in response.
In the era of No Child left Behind and every teacher in the poor schools being left behind by the dire cuts in finances, what could an inner city teacher say, or a rural teacher deprived of broadband and books and the best of teachers say.
Many teachers are voting with their feet to leave the profession. An award winning teacher who is my friend, has left the building.A young teacher, she sees no interest of the public in supporting education, is tired of the politics in teaching and is burdened by the scholarships she got to be a teacher . She is first in her family to be college educated ( she is not black). She has won a number of prizes working with student with special needs.
But my friend is discouraged by the lack of funding, interest and the difficulty just witn the school system.
Let us hope that some teachers will be left behind of good will and who have a love of children in this era of the "Education President" George Bush.The school system in DC where the president works is one of the worst in the country and the politicians ride their limos past the schools and students without blinking an eye. The problems of the school system in Washington are so bad that a recent rating ranked the DC schools as worst in the country. |
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February 7th, 2008 @ 4:38AM |
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A discussion of emerging technologies created quite a stir among the members of the center. I thought that it would be a good idea to get other insights.
My ideas of emerging technologies have always been put down. But I have important businessmen and civic people who have the same concerns that I have. Social networking is one thing but ongoing innovation, imagination, insight, constructivism, ingenuity, impact and invention are important too. Look at http://www.compete.org. The business people say it better than I can.
Because of our ongoing discussions, I examined the ideas of 2.0 and thought of 1.0 where lots of people are in technology in education, and got excited about the work in Super Computing which I have been priviledged to participate in as a learner, a teacher and a person with a project.
SuperComputing?
Henry Neeman says,
What is Supercomputing?
"Supercomputing is the biggest, fastest computing right this minute.
Likewise, a supercomputer is one of the biggest, fastest computers right this minute.
So, the definition of supercomputing is constantly changing.
Rule of Thumb: a supercomputer is typically at least 100 times as powerful as a PC.
Jargon: supercomputing is also called High Performance Computing (HPC)."
Computational Science also has my attention and you can find that at Shodor.org just a lot of great information and student, parent, and community ways to learn. It is my sad duty to report to you that rural and distant folks can't access most of what we take for granted every day on the web. There are countries where broadband for all is a priorty. Pathways to understanding math and science, real math and science are there.
Look folks, the kids have to develop "habits of mind" and ways to have" hard fun "collaborative ways of working, and develop problem solving skills.It must start early. It must start in the early grades for all. Some of us who have been using technology a long time can testify as to the advantage it has given students who are still in touch with us because of the use of technology.
You already know that the Jack Kent Cooke Foundation has a report on the Achievement Trap, in the press release they say,the needs of high potential and high-achieving students should not be pitted against the educational needs of underachievers."
We Need to Broaden Engagement
Overlooked under the No Child Left Behind law, these 3.4 million extraordinary students are larger than the populations of 21 individual states and largely representative of the race, ethnicity, gender and geography of America as a whole. The report's authors say the faulty assumption that these students don't need help to achieve at high levels is causing an enormous, but preventable talent drain in our nation's schools. As a result, the top 25 percent of students are disproportionately higher-income. Translated? There is one heck of a digital divide.
K-12 findings:
Even before they enter first grade, lower-income high achievers are off to a bad start - only 28 percent of students in the top quarter of their first grade class are from lower-income families, while 72 percent come from higher-income families.
>From first to fifth grade nearly half of the lower-income students in the top 25 percent of their class in reading fell out of this rank.
In high school, one quarter of the lower-income students who ranked in the top 25 percent of their class in eighth grade math fell out of this top ranking by twelfth grade.
In both cases, upper-income students maintain their places in the top quartile of achievement at significantly higher rates than lower-income students. The report..Achievement Trap: How America Is Failing Millions of High-Achieving Students From Lower-Income Families.
Back to the Concern
I suppose since I worked as a member of the NIIAC, I see lots of the descriptions of emerging technologies in 2.0 as having reached the stage where they have become disruptive in education and therefore are accepted and learned. I will come back to this in a few paragraphs.
You know that we had the digital divide to try to help solve and that we needed to broaden participation so that most of the schools in America had access. We had willing partners to help us do the research and get the initiatives going.
Perhaps in education when a large mass of people are interested, then the technology is adapted. We have been blogging some of us before it had a name, but that doesn't mean anything in technology. What seems to be important is how one invites, educates and brings others to the technology so that there are many instead of one.
At this time , based on the Convocation on the Gathering Storm, and the work of many committees and groups that have gone to Washington, we have a need for bipartisanship investment of time, effort and initiatives to solve that problem again. Many groups have gone to Washington to share their concern about our status in technology in the world. You can find the information on that one at http://www.benton.org/publibrary/kickstart/home.html.
HISTORY
When Al Gore, pushed us to create a presence for academics, that included people in the classroom on the Information Highway... we worked hard to make that happen. We started that work in 2003, and created a lot of documents that have actually no author, since they were a combination of what we on the committee thought. In fact, often the information ended up at the Department of Education in outreach to teachers , and other professionals. Our work
was not under copyright. You can still find some of it carefully saved at the Benton site.
While teaching a class of teachers in preparation at American University. I realized that many of the students were in First Grade when we were doing this work. I suppose in 8 years or more of a great difference in education the paving of the way to utilize technology in America has been forgotten. In an era of No Child Left Behind, technology has been used to deliver testing and testing components, more and more and more. The actual use of technology in meaningful ways seems to have ceased except for many casebook studies that you can find on various websites. The George Lucas Educational Foundation continued to push the use of innovation in education and there have been university initiatives here and there.
Our idea was to connect America much in the same way as Gore's father helped to create the infrastructure of highways that link America. We were an interesting bunch of people and I was probably the only one who was essentially powerless. Teachers don't get much play in Washington unless they are called on to testify. With the help of people on the council, I was able to get a project started, and done that was essentially the only project that was done, called KickStart , for education. We worked in several ways to inform, bring technology to education in the nation by doing outreach, creating the E-rate, demonstrating the technology in CyberEd , which was a traveling van with computers, phones, fax machines and a station that allowed us to use the infrastructure in the communities we traveled into demonstrate the possibilities of the use of technology. It was a combination of resources from the major technology providers in the interest of sharing technology with Americans. We created the E-rate I am proud to say.
Behind the scenes, the Vice President helped with a number of initiatives, Globe and with creating the buzz in education , attending conferences and actually putting hands on the computer at several educational conferences. At the time President Clinton also joined him for a few of the conferences. They wanted to show the nation the uses of technology. Ecology and the environment have always been an agenda item for Al Gore, but for some time students in America also were called to think about the earth. There were also some specialized projects called KidsNetwork that created a project between scientists, geographers, teachers and students on specialized projects that helped them to learn, technology served the projects, but the actual project based learning was a way to implement technology in meaningful ways into the schools.
The IITF group, Information Infrastructure Task Force, paved the way to domesticate, technology and demonstrate it for various reasons, that would be a governmental initiative.
The Department of Education and other groups created what I call greenhouses , to help move the use of technology along, you may remember the RTECs the regional technology centers for education.
Here are two wake up calls.
The Large Hadron Collider
I am a CERN Fellow from WSIS, and I applaud this work Cern, near Switzerland is developing LHC.. it may be our Sputnik moment, but few people probably know what it is. The Large Hadron Collider is the worlds biggest science experiment , which starts in May this year. When subatomic particles such as protons and neutrons are smashed together in the LHC, they will break apart and give scientists a peek into how these building blocks of matter are made.
So why is this not being done in the US?
This may not be interesting to you, but I think DNA was probably not all that interesting at first as well. I think it took us time to understand the ramifications , of DNA. We could also think about STEM cell research as a interesting way to get the attention of many.
To learn more about the LHC I have a few footnotes from the Guardian and many photographs.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/gallery/0007/nov/20/cern?picture 330365575
The real wake up call has been issued to America in an essay by Norman Augustine, who helped to place Americans on the moon. His essay is entitled " Is America Falling Off of the Flat Earth can be found here , http://www.books.nap.edu.openbook.php.record_id=12021&page=2
NO CHILD LEFT BEHIND IS NOT WORKING!
America must repair its failing K-12 educational system, particularly in mathematics and science, in part by providing more teachers qualified to teach those subjects, and the federal government must markedly increase its investment in basic research, that is, in the creation of new knowledge. We must think of the role of science in the information society.
I was one of hundred of teachers who heard Margaret Spellings deny that we have a problem in science. Reading and skill drill math will not keep us as leaders of the world in technology and innovation. See Compete.org, and the Innovation Proclamation.
Quotes from the book. "The World Economic Forum dropped America from first to seventh place in its ranking of nations’ preparedness to benefit from advances in information technology; the number of US citizens entering engineering school declined still further; the remnants of the legendary Bell Labs, the birthplace of the laser and the transistor and the home of many Nobel laureates, were sold to a French firm; a new generation of semiconductor integrated circuits—the mortar of the modern electronics revolution—was introduced; the largest initial public offering in history was conducted by a Chinese bank; another $650 billion has been spent on US public schools while the performance of its students on standardized science tests of those about to graduate declined further; American companies once again spent three times more on litigation than on research; and in July, for the first time in history, foreign automakers sold more cars in the United States than American manufacturers."
"Former President Bill Clinton observed that “where once nations measured their strength by the size of their armies and arsenals, in the world of the future knowledge will matter most.”
The leaders of other nations are unlikely to overlook the ubiquitous impact of investment in science and technology. For example, of China’s top nine leaders, eight are engineers, the other a geologist. In contrast, in the United States, the number of members of the most recent 435-member House of Representatives who listed their field as “engineering” was three, the same number who categorized themselves as “actors or artists.” As for scientists, none was to be found in the Senate, but representation in the House recently ballooned to five."
I am all for blogging, Facebook, Myspace , and YouTube and Second Life. But I am more interested in STEM, the pursuit of Science, Technology, Engineering and Math. Having been a teacher, a real teacher in elementary, junior high and high school I know the lay of the educational landscape.
I have taught these subjects and the resources are available. I want students, teachers and professors, and researchers to be involved in projects on line, similar to the kind of project that CILT was. I want more than social engineering for goodness sakes. Will we be the biggest loser as we let the media divert us from educational pursuits and research?
But first, we have to wake up. Social is great. STEM , Science, Technology, Engineering and Math are a dire necessity. As Henry Jenkins stated collaborative communications can help,
but America, we have a big problem !!
One group of people sees the problem up close and personal.
The Businessmen Get it.. IT and STEM...
Henry Neeman is my mentor from a course,, along with the people in education from SCO8 especially those who disseminate Little FE.
http://sc08.supercomputing.org/ and Scott Lathrop of the Teragrid.
Little-Fe: A Portable, Educational PC Cluster
Tom Murphy, Charlie Peck, Paul Gray
Transferring educational aspects of "big iron" to the undergraduate curriculum is a noble goal discussed in recent HPCWire articles:
"New Directions for Computational Science Education"
(http://news.taborcommunications.com/msgget.jsp?mid=461139&xsl=storyxsl)
"Talk Xanga: Capturing Gen-Z's Computational Imagination"
(http://news.taborcommunications.com/msgget.jsp?mid=471717&xsl=storyxsl)
"Getting an HPC Education"
(http://news.taborcommunications.com/msgget.jsp?mid=472396&xsl=storyxsl).
This article continues these themes by focusing on our "little iron" piece of the computational science infrastructure.
One of the principle challenges to computational science and high performance computing education is that many institutions do not have access to HPC platforms for demonstrations and laboratories. Paul Gray's Bootable Cluster CD (BCCD) project (http://bccd.cs.uni.edu) has made great strides in this area by making it possible to non-destructively, and with little effort, convert a computer lab of Windows or Macintosh computers into an ad-hoc cluster for educational use. Little-Fe takes that concept one step further by merging the BCCD with an inexpensive design for an 8 node portable computational cluster. The result is a machine that weighs less than 50 pounds, easily and safely travels via checked baggage on the airlines, and sets-up in 10 minutes wherever there is a 110V outlet and a wall to project an image on. The BCCD's list-packages feature supports curriculum modules in a variety of natural science disciplines, making the combination of Little-Fe and the BCCD a ready- to-run solution for computational science and HPC education.
Ok, that's for undergraduates you think. Think so, I have been with the team in high schools and I know that they have installed Little FE in a Navajo community. The promise of the Internet to the Hogan is that it is the first IP network The entire IP network of 660 phones will eventually serve all 110 chapter houses of this 27,000 square mile, three-state nation, much of which is still not served by electricity or paved roads.
And elementary schools. Well ,first we have to teach science and real math. The team at SuperComputing taught teachers mostly high school, but we do outreach to middle and elementary. I am sure that teachers need content upgrading and time to learn to use and integrate the technology.
Bonnie Bracey Sutton |
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January 13th, 2008 @ 10:40PM |
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