>We were talking (and surprisingly agreeing) that grades were dumb. What would happen if we stopped grading? Wouldn’t that be awesome? > >So, what would happen if there were no grades? Here are some thoughts.
Read the post for some of their thoughts. What’s interesting to me is that these aren’t long-haired lefty liberal hippies calling for The End of Education. They are scientists and educators, realizing that grades don’t do what we think they do, and how that negatively effects the education experience.
We drove up to Jasper National Park for a few days of relaxation in the mountains. I played around with shooting video on the iPhone, and wound up with this (shot on the iPhone, and edited in Mobile iMovie):
A fascinating short experimental film, showing the flight patterns of insects through long exposure photography. An interesting way to visualize activity.
Leo had been using Google Buzz to post updates to 18,000 people. For some reason, Buzz stopped publishing his updates. This is what he learned from that :
No one noticed.
Not even me.
It makes me feel like everything I’ve posted over the past four years on Twitter, Jaiku, Friendfeed, Plurk, Pownce, and, yes, Google Buzz, has been an immense waste of time. I was shouting into a vast echo chamber where no one could hear me because they were too busy shouting themselves. All this time I’ve been pumping content into the void like some chatterbox Onan. How humiliating. How demoralizing.
I just posted the 1000th photo to my photoblog . The milestone doesn’t really mean anything, but I’m a little surprised that I’ve been able to keep posting daily there for 2 and a half years. I’ve now been doing the photo-a-day project for 3 and a half years, starting in 2007 . Who knew? It’s pretty appropriate that 1000 was taken while riding home, along the Bow River.
> Just to emphasize, whenever anyone talks about “delivering” education, the implication is that learning is a passive activity that can be brought to people - in other words, getting us back into “consuming” mode.
Learning is active. There’s no getting around that. Therefore, an effective education involves much more than simple content distribution. Framing education as being a series of exercises in content consumption (no matter how great the content may be) doesn’t serve anyone well. It’s also not as simple as grafting on a layer of social networking on top of content. Education and learning are so much more than that.
I just updated the excellent Relevanssi search index plugin (it makes the search feature of WordPress actually WORK, with relevant results rather than the lame built-in search). It reports on the top words in the search index. I’m a little surprised at the results (but, looking over the words in just this short post, I probably shouldn’t be…).
just (1226)
like (846)
i’m (820)
i’ve (675)
really (557)
new (538)
time (517)
use (500)
stuff (494)
got (477)
way (474)
using (461)
pretty (443)
blog (441)
cool (428)
that’s (426)
i’ll (408)
don’t (388)
going (387)
update (387)
work (376)
people (375)
things (370)
post (368)
sure (365)
I’m kinda surprised that “awesome” isn’t high up that list…
>Article 12. > >No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to attacks upon his honour and reputation. Everyone has the right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks.
