Wednesday, August 09, 2006

Long Tailed PORTALS for DIGITAL Content Creators

Time Warner Cable Launches User-Generated VOD Service

Time Warner Cable has launched a free, user-generated content service, called PhotoShowTV, that allows customers to create so-called "PhotoShows" out of their personal photos and videoclips and then place them on the operator's VOD platform for public viewing. The service is currently available on Time Warner Cable's Hawaii system, which has traditionally served as a test bed for the operator's advanced services. To use the service, customers must subscriber both to Time Warner Cable's digital service and to its Road Runner broadband data service. The service is based on software, dubbed PhotoShow Deluxe, which is located on the Road Runner portal and which is provided to Time Warner Cable by a company called Simple Star. The software is designed to enable end-users to easily assemble digital photos and video clips into multimedia presentations, complete with captions, music, animations, transitions and effects: customers submit their content by clicking on a "share tab" on the PhotoShow they want to upload (note: the software, which has been available on Road Runner since April, also allows customers to share their PhotoShows on other Web sites and via email). All submitted content is screened by Time Warner Cable, and, once posted to the operator's VOD service, is available for what the operator describes as a "limited" time, in order to accommodate new content. The user-generated PhotoShows on Time Warner Cable's VOD service are organized into such categories as Events, Pets, Family, Sports and Travel. "Marking another first in the history of television, Time Warner Cable's PhotoShowTV continues our company's tradition of innovation and being able to successfully match new products with customers' interests," Bob Benya, Time Warner Cable's SVP of on-demand product management, said in a prepared statement. "By converging our digital cable and high speed online service, this new feature brings sharing the family photo album to a whole new level and gives users the opportunity to put their favorite photos and videoclips on TV."

Blinkx Creators Launch UK-Focused Video-Sharing Site

--Blinkx Signs Deals with Trouble Homegrown, ITV Consumer

The team behind San Francisco-based video search service, Blinkx, has launched a video-sharing site designed primarily, though not exclusively, for people who like to shoot video using their mobile phones. Dubbed SelfcastTV and targeted specifically at UK residents, the site lets users upload their videos by texting 07893 111 222--though they can also do so via their PC. "Just as podcasting was the craze of 2005, video blogging and sharing is what is taking the world by storm in 2006," SelfcastTV founder, Suranga Chandratillake (who is also CTO of Blinkx), said in a prepared statement. "Whether it's making videos or just watching them and sending them on to friends, everyone's got the bug. What makes SelfcastTV stand out from the crowd is that our users can upload footage straight to the site with a simple text message. Unlike other popular video-sharing sites, SelfcastTV is a UK site, built specifically for the UK market and we've made sure we have tailored services and features that fit with what the UK audience wants."

Among other things, the new site allows end-users to create their own channels for their own or for their favorite videos; provides a MovieMode feature that allows end-users to combine their chosen videos into one continuous stream; and allows end-users to embed their video files into other Web sites, such as MySpace, eBay, Xanga and brit-journal.com. According to its founders, it supports more formats than any other video-sharing site; simplifies the process of uploading video by requiring users to fill out "only a handful" of fields in order to register, and even fewer in order to upload their video; and uses Blinkx's indexing and search technology (which the company touts as using speech recognition to generate metadata from videos).

In related news:

  • Blinkx has signed an agreement with Trouble Homegrown, a video-sharing site operated by Trouble TV (note: for more on Trouble Homegrown, see [itvt] Issue 6.62 Part 3), a Flextech-owned UK TV channel that targets youth. The deal will see Trouble Homegrown's videos indexed on Blinkx's blinkx.tv video-search site. "Trouble Homegrown recognizes that Garage Video--or user-generated content--is incredibly popular among Web users," Chandratillake said in a prepared statement. "By providing a space for users to upload their homemade videos, the site allows users to be creative and share their work online. Blinkx is very pleased to be a part of this initiative, and I know our users will enjoy viewing the large collection of Trouble Homegrown's Garage Video clips."
  • The company has also signed a deal with the ITV Consumer division of the UK's largest commercial broadcaster, the Independent Television Network, that sees the latter making behind-the-scenes footage and other videoclips from the currently airing second season of its reality TV series, "Love Island," searchable through blinkx.tv. As a result of the deal, new highlights and supplemental footage from "Love Island" is available on blinkx.tv immediately after each new episode of the show.

Fox Atomic Launches Broadband TV/Video-Sharing Site

--Partners with Jumpcut.com, StupidVideos.com

Fox Atomic, the new youth-focused division of Fox Filmed Entertainment (targets 17-24 year-olds), has beta-launched a broadband TV/video-sharing Web site, Foxatomic.com. The site offers a mix of original content, content from other Fox brands, and user-generated video. In order to ensure that the new site has a steady supply of user-generated content, Fox Atomic has partnered 1) with Jumpcut.com to offer an online video editing and viewing tool, which it is calling "The Blender," and 2) with StupidVideos.com, a user-generated video site devoted to humorous stunts, bloopers, standup and other comedic content. StupidVideos.com will provide video for "The Blender," which Foxatomic.com visitors can then use to create mash-ups (note: Fox Atomic is also making available for mash-ups a selection of footage from its new releases). "We're eager to watch the convergence of user-generated content with professional content, powered by a major studio, like Fox Atomic," Greg Morrow, president and COO of StupidVideos.com's corporate parent, PureVideo Networks, said in a prepared statement. "It's a powerful validation of the user-gen and viral video space. It will be especially rewarding to watch mash-ups that include our user-submitted videos." In addition to providing content for "The Blender," its partnership with Fox Atomic will see Stupidvideos.com providing the new site with a "Clip of the Day" that will be featured on the latter's homepage.

CNN Launches Site Devoted to User-Generated Content

CNN has launched a Web site, dubbed "CNN Exchange" (http://www.cnn.com/exchange), that is devoted to user-submitted video, audio, text articles and graphics, and that also allows users to interact with news reports, commentaries and polls. "User-generated content has the potential to play a pivotal role in journalism whether it's online or offline," Mitch Gelman, SVP and executive producer for CNN.com, said in a prepared statement. "With CNN Exchange, we've essentially created a one-stop shop for CNN.com users to share their contributions with other Internet users, as well as to weigh in on the day's most pressing news."

The new site, which CNN says builds on the success of its World Cup Web site, FanZone (note: according to CNN, the latter was "inundated" with content from around the world), includes a spotlight section featuring the best user contributions; an online "toolkit" with tips from CNN producers, correspondents and photographers on creating and submitting stories; a section featuring CNN.com's various blogs; polls; commentaries; and links to other "citizen journalism" sites. However, the main focus of the site is what CNN is terming "I-Reports," user- generated video shot on cameras, mobile phones and other devices, which the broadcaster says "will enable viewers to tell the world what is happening where they are through the reach of CNN's television networks and CNN.com." Viewers can submit video for I-Reports either through links located throughout CNN.com, or by emailing ireport@cnn.com. The uploading capability is enabled by software that CNN has licensed from Blip.tv, a New York-based company that specializes in hosting and distributing Web-based TV shows and videoblogs. CNN says that it will review all the viewer-submitted videos and that it plans to use them on multiple platforms, including its linear TV channels.

AOL Launches Video Portal

AOL has beta-launched its long-awaited AOL Video portal (http://www.aolvideo.com). The portal offers over 45 VOD channels, containing several thousand hours of programming from high-profile entertainment brands; free streaming content, as well as full-length content that can be purchased (for the most part for $1.99 per episode) and downloaded for viewing on multiple devices online or offline; access to millions of music and news clips, movie trailers and other short-form content; AOL Video Search, a search functionality based on technologies from Truveo, which it acquired earlier this year, and from Singingfish, which it acquired in 2003; a video player which AOL says can go full screen without losing picture quality and which supports AOL's Hi-Q video format (note: the latter, which is powered by technologies that VeriSign acquired through its recent purchase of Kontiki, is touted as enabling DVD-quality video online); and a new service, called UnCut Video, which AOL claims makes it easy for end-users to upload and share videos directly from their camcorder, Webcam, video-enabled mobile phone, or PC. "AOL has long been a leader in online video and with the new AOL Video portal we have created the best and easiest place online for anyone on the Web to find, watch and share the videos they're looking for," AOL EVP, Kevin Conroy, said in a prepared statement. "From originally produced and licensed programming to branded online video-on-demand channels to user-created videos that people create, upload and share on the Web themselves, AOL Video is truly the first one-stop source that brings the best videos on the Web together in one place and gives consumers more choice. If a video is out there, you'll find it here on AOLVideo.com."

The new portal's homepage centers on an EPG that lists the various VOD channels (featuring both free, advertising-supported and download-to-own content) provided by AOL and its programming partners. Those partners include A&E Television Networks (and its channels, A&E, The History Channel and The Biography Channel), Comedy Time, Endemol USA, Expo TV, LIME, MTV Networks (and its Comedy Central, Logo, MTV, MTV2, Nickelodeon, The N, Nick at Nite, Spike TV, TV Land and VH1 channels), National Lampoon, Procter & Gamble Productions, Sorpresa!, South Coast Golf, TBS, TNT, TotalVid, TV Guide, Warner Bros. Entertainment, Wild America and WNBA. Channels provided by AOL and its existing joint-venture partners include In2TV (note: for an in-depth overview on the latter, see [itvt]'s interview with Eric Frankel, president of domestic cable distribution at Warner Bros., in Issue 6.83), TMZ.com, Lat34.com, AOL Uncut Video, AOL Music, AOL News, AOL Coaches, AOL Television, AOL Viral Videos, KOL and Moviefone.

AOL Video's homepage also prominently features the new AOL Video Search engine. According to AOL, the search engine returns results from all the most active video sources on the Internet, including YouTube, Yahoo!, Google Video, iFilm, AtomFilms and others. It leverages "visual crawling" technology from Truveo, which is designed to automatically discover video files and related metadata on complex, dynamic Web pages (note: for an explanation of Truveo's technology, see [itvt]'s interview with Truveo founder, Tim Tuttle, in Issue 6.51 Part 1), and which AOL claims can find videos on the Web that other search engines are unable to find. AOL also claims that AOL Video Search has a much greater reach than any other video search engine on the Web, as it is available--in branded and white-label form--on AOL's network of search properties, which includes AOL Search, InfoSpace, and Real.

According to AOL, AOL Video is built using an open architecture that will allow the company to extend it across multiple platforms and devices, thus enabling end-users to view the site's content on PC's, plasma screens and handheld devices. AOL is currently working with Intel to offer a custom "10-foot" version of the portal that will be enabled by Intel's new Viiv technology-based PC's, and that will make the portal's content easily viewable on large-screen TV's and other devices. The companies say that they expect to launch this within a few weeks. In addition, AOL says that this fall it will make available open API's that will allow developers to incorporate AOL Video Search results into third-party user experiences, as well as tools that will enable developers and consumers to incorporate features from the AOL Video portal into other Web sites. The company also says that it is working with PC OEM's and broadband service providers to develop co-branded versions of the portal.





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Gotuit Launches Video Portal

Gotuit Media--which has developed a search/navigation system, dubbed "Gotuit On Demand," that combines segment metadata with VOD content, allowing viewers to use their remote control to quickly access the specific parts of an on-demand show that interest them, and which has used the system to power VOD services that have been deployed on a number of Time Warner Cable and Adelphia systems in New England, New York, Pennsylvania and Ohio--is entering the broadband video space. The company has launched a broadband video portal, Gotuit.com, which it touts as using its search and navigation technology to make "loading, buffering, and waiting to watch videos online a thing of the past." The portal features an array of free-to-view video from such content providers as Universal Music, Reuters, Associated Press, AccuWeather and Planet X, organized into four main categories: "Music," "News," "Sports" and "Entertainment" (note: the latter features movie trailers, celebrity news, and a large collection of short films). It currently contains around 5,000 titles.

Visitors to the portal can view programmed playlists, create playlists of their own, and share its videos with other consumers: Gotuit's flagship search/navigation technology allows them to search for specific segments within a video, which they can then combine into a "personal highlight reel." Thus a soccer fan, for example, could search multiple videos to find segments where their favorite player scores goals, and then assemble a personal highlight reel showcasing that player's talent. Surprisingly--in light of the current popularity of user-generated content--the new portal does not yet feature any facility for end-users to upload their own video. "It's no longer about making video available online, it's about helping consumers make sense of it," Gotuit Media president, Mark Pascarella, said in a prepared statement. "We're focused on enabling people to find the video they want quickly and easily. Our search and navigation technology, paired with professional content, gives viewers instant, relevant and precise access to the video they are most interested in seeing."

Gotuit hopes that the portal will appeal to advertisers because it offers "inventory that is more highly targeted to areas of interest and paired with valuable content." It also hopes to expand the reach and the volume of the site's content via co-branded partnerships with premium content owners, that will see the latters' content billed as "powered by Gotuit."

BBC News Begins Video Podcast Trial

BBC News has begun a 12-month trial, under which it is making available free video podcasts based on its flagship "Ten O'Clock News" and "Newsnight" programs. It is currently offering three separate video podcasts (at http://www.bbc.co.uk/newspodcasts): "Ten Weekly," a weekly selection of stories from the "Ten O' Clock News"; "Newsnight," weekly highlights from the eponymous show, presented by the show's regular team; and "STORYFix," which it describes as taking "a high- speed tongue-in-cheek look at the last week's news on the BBC." "Ten Weekly" is available every Wednesday, while "STORYFix" and "Newsnight" are published on Friday evenings. Later in the year, BBC News plans to offer a video podcast that will feature highlights from each week's episode of the talk and current-affairs show, "Question Time," as well as a video podcast that will provide a "daily news briefing" aimed at the morning commuter. The BBC also plans to offer video podcasts that will feature non-news content. "We view video podcasting as a convenient way for our audiences to consume BBC News content at a time and place of their choosing--both established programs such as the 'Ten' and 'Newsnight' but also content they may not have come across such as 'STORYFix,'" Adam Van Klaveren, deputy director of BBC News, said in a prepared statement.

The video podcasts appear to be popular with consumers: the "Newsnight" video podcast shot straight to number one on the iTunes news podcast chart, while "Ten Weekly" reached number six.

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The Long and the Short of "HEADS or TAILS" on The Long Tail of DIGITAL Education





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DIGITAL Education "Research & Development" Funding


Published: August 9, 2006
Commentary

Money, Momentum, and the Gates Foundation

What Will Warren Buffett’s Gift Mean for U.S. Schools?

By Paul T. Hill
—Bob Soulé

News stories about Warren E. Buffett’s huge donation to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, announced in June, tended to cite the foundation’s successes in international health. They said little about education. ("Gates Foundation’s New Billions Viewed as Boon, Challenge for Education Giving," July 12, 2006.) Does this mean that the foundation has made good investments in health and bad ones in education? Not necessarily, but it does reflect the differences in the problems Gates has addressed via its health and education giving, and the differences in its strategies in each area.

In health, the foundation has focused on delivering established remedies to people who previously could not get them. Thanks to the demand for innovative pharmaceuticals and medical procedures that exists in Europe and the United States, remedies are available for many of the illnesses that beset people in poorer areas of the world. Foundation grants can purchase medicines that poor people can’t afford, and create simple delivery systems in areas that have too few doctors, nurses, and clinics. In some localities, the foundation is bypassing corrupt government delivery systems, but in most, it is creating new mechanisms to do one or two things simply and well.

As in its health investments, Gates’ work in education is focused on creating new opportunities for the poor and disadvantaged. But in education, the foundation is investing in the United States, not abroad. Here, a delivery system made up of state education departments and local school districts already exists. In contrast to health care, there is no competitive market to create demand for new methods and technologies. The delivery system is frozen by politics, and has all but a small proportion of its money committed to employees and mandated services. Insider groups tolerate small-scale experimentation but resist wide adoption of new ways of doing things, because these can cause job insecurity and upset deals that have been painfully hammered out among organized groups.

Thus, in education, new ideas seldom get traction because the delivery system makes sure money and people don’t flow to them. Unlike in health care, where technologies exist to cure many diseases and the foundation can invest in delivery, dramatically superior methods don’t exist in education, and the delivery system prevents the kind of experimentation that can lead to continuous improvement of practice.

Innovations strong enough to make a difference in education aren’t just lying around waiting to be picked up, and won’t emerge by themselves.

The Gates Foundation understands this difference. It has supported studies open to new ways of funding and organizing public education, studies that encourage new ideas instead of being hostile to them. The center I lead is doing many of these studies. Gates also has funded successful charter school models and providers, as well as practical, nonideological ways of encouraging school choice.

But the foundation has also thwarted itself in two ways. First, it has awarded tens of millions of dollars to school districts, the greatest sources of resistance to widespread change, and it has done so through organizations with long-standing relationships with these districts. Second, it has not sponsored the kind of extensive and in-depth research needed to produce genuine breakthroughs in areas such as instructional methods, human-resource development, and the organizational dynamics of teaching and learning. The second mistake compounds the first, because innovations strong enough to make a difference in education aren’t just lying around waiting to be picked up (as they are in international health) and won’t emerge by themselves.

In searching for more effective methods, the foundation has favored the logic of venture capital—that market incentives are strong enough to spur innovation but that inventors need money to commercialize their products—over the logic of research and development, which is called for when market incentives are too weak to encourage new invention.

The Gates Foundation’s venture-capital approach hasn’t worked very well in education because the solutions really aren’t there. Though some existing school designs and instructional methods are able to move the needle slightly, even the best of them (like the KIPP schools and highly structured curricula for early reading) improve results for disadvantaged students but leave them far below the national average. Even if all of Gates’ venture-capital investments were adopted and rigorously implemented, the foundation would still be far short of its goal of equalizing opportunity for all children.

What can the foundation do? It would be a tragedy for America’s poor children if this new and larger Gates Foundation decided to place all its bets on international health care in the belief that improving U.S. schools is too hard.

A better option would be to acknowledge the primitive state of education methods and the paucity of good ideas about how to educate disadvantaged students effectively, and create grant programs to elicit and develop totally new ideas.

The education side of the foundation has shown that it can make good use of data and adjust its giving in light of experience. Results of a formal evaluation by the American Institutes for Research, for example, led to significant changes in Gates’ flagship high school reform program.

Given its base in Microsoft money, the foundation has been reluctant to press for the invention and trial of new applications of computer technology. But that sort of initiative is needed now. Grant programs could stimulate development of new online resources and, more important, new ways to mix teacher work with online information, extend students’ learning days beyond the hours when teachers are present, and use students’ and teachers’ in-school time more productively.

It would be a tragedy for America’s poor children if this new and larger Gates Foundation decided to place all its bets on international health care in the belief that improving U.S. schools is too hard.

Online methods could give poor and minority children, who now get the least-capable teachers, access to instructors who are true masters of their subjects. The possibilities would be even greater if new technologies were coupled with innovations in education finance. Such a marriage would permit schools to make trade-offs between teacher salaries and teacher-enhancing technologies, while providing poor parents with access to the specialized lessons and hands-on instruction that currently give the children of the wealthy a special edge.

New experiments with the use of time and money, including integrating social-services funds into school budgets so that disadvantaged children can go to school longer, and so that schools in high-poverty areas can become parish-like, general-support institutions, also are necessary. Government can’t lead the way on such ideas because all of its money is in separate institutional silos. But experiments set up by a vast foundation could provide real evidence of what it takes to bring poor and minority children all the way up to normal performance standards.

TalkBack
Join the related discussion, “Money, Momentum, and the Gates Foundation.”

Figuring out how to do such things would put the Gates Foundation into the research-and-development business— soliciting new ideas, funding the most promising ones, and taking risks with a few truly revolutionary proposals. When ideas under development show promise, the time is right for venture-capital investments. When school districts become desperate for options under the performance pressure imposed by the No Child Left Behind Act, that is the time for partnerships with school boards and superintendents.

New investments in research and development could create a situation in K-12 education that more closely resembles international health. The Gates Foundation has already shown that it can sponsor R&D, in its health program, which recognized that demand for malaria remedies in the United States and European markets was too weak to stimulate innovation.

The R&D approach can work in education just as it has done in other fields. The education of surgeons, pilots, and lawyers has already been transformed by the results of trial, refinement, and retrial of new methods. Only an inflexible delivery system has prevented similar cycles of innovation in K-12 education.

Research-and-development strategies are slow-acting. Even in purely technical fields like defense technology and cancer research, it can take years for ideas to be refined enough for field-testing, and even longer before they affect everyday practice. But in education, as in any field where the problems are clear but solutions are not, there is no good alternative to research and development.

In education, as in any field where the problems are clear but solutions are not, there is no good alternative to research and development.

The Gates Foundation could spend the next decade betting on superintendents and urging schools to innovate despite the regulatory and contractual pressures that hold them tightly in place. Or, it could spend the same amount of time and money creating the building blocks for much more effective methods of teaching and learning.

No other foundation has had the money and the long horizon that such a strategy requires. And the U.S. Department of Education has utterly failed to make the needed investments, due to its many politically driven shifts in emphasis.

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation can make as great a difference in domestic education as it is making in international health care. It already has made some very astute moves by shaking up the education delivery system. Now, as it doubles its annual giving thanks to Warren Buffett’s generosity, there is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for the foundation to reassess where it is and where it’s going in education.

All of the evidence before us argues that the pursuit of quick school gains will inevitably lead to disappointment—not because people don’t want them, but because we don’t know how to attain them. An R&D strategy, although slow, is a much more sensible approach, because it is the only strategy that makes sense when we are faced with problems that nobody has solved before.

TalkBack: What do you think should be the educational focus of a new and larger Gates Foundation? Submit your comments online. www.edweek.org/tb/

Paul T. Hill is a research professor in the Daniel J. Evans School of Public Affairs at the University of Washington, in Seattle, and the director of the Center on Reinventing Public Education, which is based there.
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Monday, August 07, 2006

PERFORMNG ARTS Digital Practicum......MIGHT look something like this!
























Do Re MySpace

Something Clicks in the Experimental Teen Musical 'Edit: Undo'

By Adriane Quinlan
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, August 7, 2006; C01

Offstage, there's been the usual high school drama, and onstage there's been more of the same.

It's all part of the creation of "Edit: Undo," an experimental musical that debuts tonight in a two-day run at the Kennedy Center's Theater Lab.

Last week in the auditorium at Fairfax's W.T. Woodson High School, 39 high school actors from around the country had the surreal experience of learning how to play high school students using a script and score conceived, written and composed by high school students.

The props and costumes were from high school, too. The chairs onstage were carried from the cafeteria down the hall. The graduation robes were donated by a neighboring school. The "Dance Dance Revolution" video game came from the prop master's basement. The iPods, backpacks, cellphones, hair clips, binders, sneakers and laptops were all the actors' own.

And that half-eaten pizza sitting backstage -- "Is that for the next scene?" a techie asked. No, that was lunch.

Onstage, slouching on a couch playing a video game, the football-playing female protagonist complains after getting a one-day suspension: "There goes law school."

"Edit: Undo" is not the time-worn story of high school crushes and clique wars, although there is some of that. What's most unusual about the musical is also what's most unusual about this generation of high-schoolers: the digital boom. When the characters onstage chat about being "Me-myself-and-I-space" friends, it's with a snicker. Offstage, online, the actors are part of the Myspace.com group Edit: Undo.

The two-act, 16-song musical centers on female jock Rory and her love interest, a wannabe video game designer who leads the tech-savvy students of fictional Wiley High ("Wi-Hi") into a strike against the town's adults. The kids say they're through helping with iPods, cellphones and TV on Demand. The teens sing such songs as "Ring Our Phones," which turns the ubiquitous buzz of a cellphone ringtone into high art, and snap along to "O-M-G, L-O-L," a doo-wop number sung by the school's reigning three cheerleaders, who speak in chat room shorthand. But although the kids are having a great time, Wiley's adults devolve into a bunch of doddering fools in high-rise khakis and bad hairdos. It's a comedy about the strife between parents and children and the difficulties of the 21st century, as seen through the eyes of teens.

The teen savvy that is suggested onstage is evident offstage, too: Kids are just fine without adult supervision. (A few adults, however, do have some involvement.)

Over the past five years, the Critics and Awards Program for High School Theater has asked student critics in high schools all over the country to help pick the year's best student actors. The top vote-getters are invited to Washington in mid-July to form the all-star cast of the summer "Cappies" production. Talented 14- to 18-year-olds have come from as far off as California and South Florida and stay with host families when they're not at grueling 12-hour rehearsals.

This is the first year that the show has also been written by high-schoolers. All the students who worked on the script live in the D.C. area. Since October, the team has met every Sunday at the McLean home of Cappies volunteer Bill Strauss, founder of the Capital Steps troupe.

"People say teens today aren't interested in real theater, that they don't read, they don't write," Strauss said. "But here you have teens who are not only interested in theater -- they wrote their own show."

At a table in the school's empty cafeteria last week sat 18-year-old writer Robert Rome of Fairfax's Robinson High, who has written several plays and performed in Scotland. "There are musicals that appeal to teens, and there are musicals about teens that appeal to adults," Rome said. "There are no teen musicals about teens, for teens. This is it."

What Rome and his co-authors came up with is confidently advertised as a "new musical comedy for the digital age . . . not your typical standard conventional formulaic high school musical." The students who wrote "Edit: Undo" have no use for Disney's adult-written "High School Musical," and studied the conventions of "Mean Girls," "Heathers" and "Grease" in order to destroy them.

"We hated the character of a jock bully," said K.K. Bracken, 16, of Fairfax, who fleshed out Rory's character in the script -- she's a girl who is great at sports, gets straight A's and still is not that popular. The writers populated Wiley High with what they saw in their own high schools: kids who could be confident in one situation but insecure in another. Girlie-girls could feel threatened by tomboys, jocks could feel unsure in a roomful of computer geeks. In "Edit: Undo," dorks tease jocks with such lines as "I don't even think she has a screen name."

Another high school stereotype, the naturally brilliant pothead, is turned goofy in the musical, mouthing tired platitudes. ("The only thing necessary for, like, the triumph of evil is for good people to, like, do nothing.") And adults aren't reduced to the stereotype of Charlie Brown's blithering voice boxes; they often make their own children seem absurd, mocking them in PTA meetings for "roaming the malls, where they buy $200 pre-ripped, pre-faded jeans that don't even fit properly over their bottoms."

The young composers tried to write songs that spoke of high school's universal realities--the hard crush (thus, "Falling in Like") and great tragedies, such as having to wake up far too early (the catchy "Seven A.M.," sung by students half-dozing at their desks). Other numbers were more experimental. One song puts dancers in the costumes of instant-messenger emoticons.

"It's all an exaggeration of the everyday high school experience," said Dallas Sweezy of Chantilly, who plays a loner Goth kid with kohl-ringed eyes, "but it's closer to it than most."

At a dress rehearsal, Jess Speck, a teacher at Montgomery County's Churchill High School and the adult called in to direct, assumed the whole cast was listening to her notes. In reality, Sweezy and two friends were playing "The Legend of Zelda" on a laptop computer, held just below the level of the seat in front, while down the row an actor played a high-speed car chase game on a cellphone. Speck, 30, called out props she noted were missing -- where were those pencils to outfit the villainous Mr. Langston, owner of the Abacus Pencil Co.? Did no one bring a single pencil?

No one brought a flashlight, either. To follow the script in the darkened wings, these 21st-century teens use illuminated cellphone screens. They also use their phones as lights in the play, onstage. A self-described "stoner kid," leaning nonchalantly against the grubby high school tile, 17-year-old Cincinnati actor Kyle Smith effused the "too-cool" attitude of a 21st-century James Dean. He claimed he was "typecast" for the role of "stoner kid" Kyle Thompson. "When I come in to rehearsal late, they're like, 'Whoa, this is perfect, he's in character!' "

"But I'm, like, not acting," Smith said. "I am Kyle."

Either everything offstage had become material for the production onstage, or what was onstage was a good mirror for life off of it. When the character of Maxwell compares the video-game formula that tempts players "up-a-level" to the pressures of SATs, AP courses and college that loom over high school students, he says, "Art imitates life imitates art."

In the typical happy ending of a musical, all of the actors in "Edit: Undo" pair off into couples. It's the main gripe cast members have with the show -- that the ending feels "cheesy." But backstage on Saturday, awaiting the big finale, actors stood in pairs, snuggling. Said Smith, "I think about six of us have hooked up since we met here."

Edit: Undo, at the Kennedy Center Theater Lab, 2700 F St. NW, today and tomorrow at 7 p.m. $20. For information, go to http://www.editundo.org/ .

© 2006 The Washington Post Company
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Friday, August 04, 2006

Handheld PC Operation Everything......AND a blog-site

AIM PROGRAM BLOG-SITE:
http://www.aim-06.blogspot.com









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Thursday, August 03, 2006

"The Rest of The Digital Story"
























How the Web Was Won

By Leslie Walker
Thursday, August 3, 2006; D01

The Internet is transitioning to a new era, and so am I.

Nearly eight years have passed since I started this column chronicling business on the Web. While dot-coms came and went, and the Internet passed through periods of boom, bust and rebirth, the trends I wrote about in 1998 are surprisingly alive and intact today. The Web is still empowering individuals to be more creative , spawning new electronic middlemen and struggling to make advertising more personal .

As I sit to write my final column (I will be editing technology news at The Washington Post through year-end, then taking an early-retirement offer and doing personal writing while pursuing new opportunities) I have been re-reading what I wrote in the early years, when the Web still mystified most people even as it kicked off an investment stampede that ended badly in 2000.

Back then, I kept a folder on my desk labeled "big, bad bets," into which I dropped news releases about start-ups that raised gobs of money for loony ideas. The folder grew so fat I gave up trying to write about obvious losers. Remember Beenz and Flooz , creators of Internet "currency''? How about CueCat, that feline-shaped bar-code scanner that magazines thought would whisk readers from print ads to Web commercials? All are long gone. Then again, I chuckled at how I mocked CBS Corp. for investing in "the latest logic-free Internet business plan," iWon.com , which planned to give away $10 million a year to people who clicked on its links. Today iWon is a popular sweepstakes site, owned by the parent of Ask.com.

As a rule, though, I tried to focus on Internet visions with promise. Maybe that's why in reviewing my writing, I was surprised at how many old themes still make headline news. The biggest then is the biggest now -- how the Web is turning people formerly known as consumers into media producers. To me, video-sharing site YouTube and teen hangout MySpace are latter-day versions of early pioneers such as personal Web page provider Geocities. Hard to believe Yahoo paid nearly $3 billion for Geocities in 1999, isn't it? That makes News Corp.'s $580 million purchase of MySpace last year look like a bargain.

In 1998, before "blog" was even a word or MySpace existed, the 10 fastest-growing Web sites "were ones where users create the content ," I wrote. But newer services were already overtaking them, including Yahoo Clubs (still kicking), Excite Communities (bit the dust) and DejaNews (a window into the old Usenet discussions, it was sold to eBay, which closed it and sold the archives to Google, which folded it into Google Groups). Additional publishing tools soon came along, including the blog -- short for Web log -- which displayed short entries in reverse chronological order. Today the Web has tens of millions of blogs.

While citizens were using the Web to write, chat, freely distribute music and show wacky home movies, entrepreneurs were racing to transform commerce. A new breed of electronic middlemen developed giant Internet brands -- search king Google, auction queen eBay, travel assistant Expedia and local-listing service Craigslist were leaders of that pack.

Traditional media companies, meanwhile, agonized over whether to charge for content online. Last year, the New York Times put many columnists behind a subscription wall. This year, London's Financial Times is rethinking whether to go the other way and scrap its Web subscriptions. I expect it will take many more experiments before established media companies find the right Web formula, but I'm confident they will.

In retailing, the big national chains adapted to the Web much faster than I thought and sell a ton of goods online . More startling has been the expansion of niche retailing. When I received Internet Retailer magazine's annual report on the Top 500 Web retailers last week, I was surprised by how many specialty start-ups I chronicled in the early days are raking in mega-bucks. The top 500 included print dealer Art.com , discount clothier Bluefly Inc., shoe supplier Zappos.com, Mattress.com and Furniture.com. All those and more helped Web retailing surpass mail-order in sales a few years ago. Now if you count eBay's auctions, the Web claims 5 percent of all retail sales in the United States. I expect that to surpass 10 percent in this decade and eventually go higher.

Less clear is how advertising dollars will migrate from TV and other mass media into the Web's micro-formats. The future of advertising was fuzzy in 1998 and remains so today. Its evolution has packed many surprises, the biggest being the birth of search-engine ad auctions , which displaced banner ads to claim the lion's share of Internet ad dollars.

I learned my lesson in the unpredictability of Web business after visiting Google's tiny Palo Alto office in 1999 and writing about its "toddler business model" of showing links to books for sale at Amazon.com on search-results pages. But the ad breakthrough didn't come from Google, a company I was watching closely. It came from a rival I disdained called GoTo.com, which renamed itself Overture and later was bought by Yahoo . GoTo's innovation was showing search results that were mainly links to advertisers, ranked entirely by how much each merchant agreed to pay in a live Web auction. Advertisers paid GoTo only when visitors clicked on their links. Google copied the idea, with a better implementation, and pay-per-click advertising took off.

To me, though, the most fascinating story of all was how people took to the Internet to create and share information . In the past year, thousands of new Web communities have popped up offering twists on MySpace and YouTube. Partly these start-ups are the result of something I didn't anticipate -- Internet publishing costs falling through the floor, at a time when Web software grew more powerful. Some estimate that the cost of launching a Web business today is barely 20 percent what it was in 1998. Forget the nutty ideas. Falling costs will turbo-charge personal publishing even more by letting the good ones reach the Web quickly.

Just last week, I tested a new blogging service planned for release this fall. Called Vox, it aims to entice mainstream folks into blogging by offering simpler software and privacy controls for determining who can read postings. While testing it, I sensed the Vox style of blogging was like no other writing I have done. With photos scattered alongside links to private pages kept by real friends rather than electronic strangers, Vox feels more like a silent conversation than a publishing system.

Soon, it won't feel like the Web, or even the Internet. These communication tools we focused on while struggling to understand a strange new medium are already receding from consciousness. What we do with them is finally taking center stage. I don't know about you, but I'm already pondering how I will use the Net to develop " Leslie 2.0 ."

Thanks to all who read my weekly musings , participated in my online chats, visited with me in the District and sent helpful feedback. I hope you'll continue the dialogue by sending mail to leslie@lesliewalker.com .

See you on the Net.

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Wednesday, August 02, 2006

A "WIKI" in Our DIGITAL Future?

Detroit Free Press Home | Back

EVERYMAN'S ENCYCLOPEDIA: A more consistent -- but still cool -- site is goal of contributors’ first U.S. meeting

BY HEATHER NEWMAN
FREE PRESS STAFF WRITER

August 2, 2006

photo

Wikipedia "is the way people are looking for information," Kestenbaum said.

Local Wiki references

Michigan has thousands of references inside Wikipedia, ranging from local history to modern rock bands. Some excerpts:


On the Detroit Tigers: "After years of being a laughingstock of the major leagues, the Tigers surged to the top of the American League standings in the first half of the 2006 season. ... The team has held the best record in baseball for most of the season. In addition, the team's success has attracted a whole new generation of fans, who had never seen winning baseball in their town before."


On Henry Ford: "Henry Ford (July 30, 1863 -- April 7, 1947) was the founder of the Ford Motor Co. and father of the modern assembly line used in mass production. His introduction of the Model T automobile revolutionized transportation and American industry. As owner of the Ford company, he became one of" the "two or three richest and best-known people in the world. ... He had a global vision, with consumerism as the key to peace."


On Kid Rock: "Kid Rock's talent can be illustrated by the fact he is credited on his albums for not only vocals, but guitar (steel, rhythm, electric and acoustic), bass, percussion, mixing, mellotron, keyboard, backing vocals, slide guitar, scratching, programming, producer and even banjo. He is famous for his high-energy personality on and off stage. "


On Joe Louis Arena: "Several plans for a replacement arena have been raised for years; presently, JLA is considered somewhat outdated due to its lack of luxury boxes and other revenue-generating amenities. In addition, some proposals for the expansion of Cobo Hall have required JLA to be demolished. No firm plan for a replacement is in place."


Heather Newman
What's a wiki?

Wikipedia defines it as, "A wiki (pronounced WICK-ee or WEE-kee) is a type of Web site that allows users to easily add, remove or otherwise edit and change some available content, sometimes without the need for registration."


Really, though, it's a bus.


Ward Cunningham, who created the first Wiki in 1994 -- WikiWikiWeb, a computer science site -- named it after the WikiWiki line of buses at the airport in Honolulu, where he was vacationing. "Wiki-wiki" means "quick quick" or "hurry quick" in Hawaiian.


While Wikipedia is easily the largest Wiki online at the moment, there are plenty of others to browse, covering a wide variety of topics. Some examples:


www.wikihow.com/Main-Page -- An attempt to create the world's largest how-to guide.


http://lostpedia.com/wiki/Main_Page -- A Wiki on topics related to the television show "Lost."


www.wowwiki.com -- A Wiki about things related to the hugely popular video game "World of Warcraft."


www.wikiindex.com/Welcome -- A Wiki all about Wikis, including a fairly comprehensive directory.


Heather Newman
Wiki dos and don'ts

You can use Wikipedia to bolster your career, add some snap to your small talk and woo that lovely intellectual in your life. Just be careful not to fall into the common Wikitraps:


DO use Wikipedia to look up information quickly on the interests of party guests or your boss. "Is that figurine a Precious Moments? I hear that's one of just a few porcelain figurine makers left in the world."


DON'T use Wikipedia to put together your company's annual report. "And in conclusion, our sales in East Lansing, where the average IQ of the residents is 72 and it's foggy 320 days a year, will help to propel us into the 21st Century."


DO use Wikipedia to look up tidbits you can add to your social conversations. "Isn't the Fisher Building amazing? I hear it's often called 'Detroit's largest art object.' "


DON'T use Wikipedia as a substitute for going outside and having social conversations. "I disagree! I think the entry for 'sneeze' clearly shows more supposition than fact and needs attention paid to its etymology."
Dos and don'ts of Wikipedia

There are some traps to avoid with Wikipedia:


DO use Wikipedia to look up tidbits to add to your social conversations.


DON'T use Wikipedia to put together your company's annual report.


• More dos and don'ts, and more facts about Wikipedia, 8A

There's one place on the Web where you can go for authoritative articles on subjects from Zimbabwe currency to Grosse Pointe's connection to "The Simpsons."

It's Wikipedia.

And on Friday, hard-core volunteer writers and editors from Michigan and all over the world, who assemble the online encyclopedia, will pour into Harvard's law school for the first U.S. convention to debate the finer points of "Wiki style" for entries on the Web site visited by millions each month.

Wikipedia is the place wired hipsters go for info. Completely peer-posted and edited by a dedicated force of thousands of readers-turned-editors including hundreds of Michiganders, www.wikipedia.org has made the leap to being one of the premiere destinations on the Web and is on the verge of becoming its own verb, like Google.

The number of articles on the site has skyrocketed to more than 4.6 million worldwide (more than 1.2 million in English). And Wikipedia is so popular that many general searches on Google will net a Wikipedia entry somewhere in the top five results.

Michael Karazim, a 22-year-old graduate student from Spring Arbor, says he uses the site 10 hours a week. He's contributed articles on Spring Arbor history and local roads and highways.

"I do enjoy using it, personally," he said. "It makes it really easy to go from topic to topic."

Part of Wiki's allure -- it's become one of the 20 most-visited sites on the Web -- is its quick summaries of everything from presidential biographies to television show plotlines.

But many who visit to check out a topic on the fly find themselves staying, drawn into the web of articles created by the words in each entry that link to other entries.

At lunch Monday, Karazim was reading a BBC news report on Zimbabwe and the dollar when he ran across a term he had never heard before, a "bearer check."

"I immediately went to Wiki," he said. That article said it was a check that is treated like cash -- it's payable to whomever happens to be in possession of the slip of paper it's written on.

But the entry also explained why the country had bearer checks and how they were used, and links in the item led him to other discussions of the euro, the governmental situation in Zimbabwe, reserve currency and eventually the U.S. dollar.

It's that serendipity that keeps people browsing Wiki long after they would have closed a paper encyclopedia.

Still, Wikipedia -- supported by a nonprofit foundation with donations -- has often been the source of controversy.

The reason it has reached its enormous size and popularity is because of the volunteer efforts of thousands of amateur and professional writers and editors who post, discuss and refine each entry.

But the fact that anyone can edit any article leads to inaccuracies, some of which are caught sooner than others.

Coincidentally, the most controversial inaccuracy in Wikipedia so far was about a figure best known in journalism circles: former editor of the (Nashville) Tennessean newspaper John Seigenthaler Sr.

As a prank, an operations manager of a delivery service in town edited Seigenthaler's biography to suggest that he was linked with the assassinations of John and Robert Kennedy.

The hoax went unnoticed for four months, when it was drawn to Seigenthaler's attention. He blasted the site in a column published in USA Today.

Wikipedians admit that the site does see a fair amount of changes -- some well-meaning, some not -- that result in articles containing inaccurate information or information with a point of view, a no-no in Wiki circles.

"Some of the pages get vandalized a lot," said Larry Kestenbaum, clerk and register of deeds for Washtenaw County and a frequent Wiki contributor. "Malcolm X. The Kennedy assassination. The East Lansing page."

But despite edits motivated by everything from religious views to football rivalries, most pages are reasonably accurate, he said.

Part of that is because people tend to track the articles they've contributed or edited, noting changes and reverting those pages or correcting errors that have been added.

He has all the county pages in Michigan on a watch list that he checks once a day, for example, which shows him changes.

"It's very easy to be dubious about it because any random person can make changes. But on the whole, most people are well-intentioned," he said. "Given the amount of traffic Wikipedia gets, the number of changed pages is relatively small."

And it's actually the urge to correct or update information that most Wikipedians say has sucked them into contributing to the site.

Every time a change is made, the previous versions of the page are saved, so later editors can see exactly what happened and revert the page if necessary.

Kestenbaum says if he doesn't get in to fix a change on a Michigan page within an hour, someone else has usually beat him to it.

If a page is frequently changed, it can be locked by the site's core group of administrators. The pages are run by a nonprofit foundation.

"This is the way people are looking for information," Kestenbaum said. "They're looking to Wikipedia for it, so Wikipedia better be ready for it."

He compares Wikipedia to "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy," the often-flippant, always-friendly electronic encyclopedia from the Douglas Adams novel of the same name. That too was compiled by correspondents from all over the universe.

"There's no way that an organized, paid editorial staff could ever keep up with all this stuff," he said. "It's still impossible. But it's less impossible."

Contact HEATHER NEWMAN at 313-223-3336 or hnewman@freepress.com.

Copyright © 2006 Detroit Free Press Inc.

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Handheld PC "Bluetooth" Practicum / Copyright @ Dr. Shedrick Ward






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A.I.M. Program Begins with the End in Mind!

From Desktops to Wireless Handheld PC's.......AND World's Beyond.........











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Wednesday, July 19, 2006

Get In Alignment with Educatational R&D


Published: July 12, 2006

Gates Foundation’s New Billions Viewed as Boon, Challenge for Education Giving

By Erik W. Robelen

The recent announcement by the investor Warren E. Buffett that he will donate some $30 billion to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is spurring questions about what the gift will mean—and should mean—for education giving at the nation’s wealthiest philanthropy.

The Gateses made clear during a public forum with Mr. Buffett that education will stay a top priority for the foundation, whose biggest focus is on issues of global health and development. Bill Gates, who is the chairman of the Microsoft Corp. of Redmond, Wash., called ensuring a high-quality education for all U.S. students “our second big goal.”

Warren Buffett, right, appears with Bill and Melinda Gates at the New York Public Library on June 26 to discuss his donation.
—Stuart Ramson/AP

“You could say we’re five or six years into our education thing, and we need another probably three to five years before it’s very clear which models are working,” he said at the June 26 New York City forum.

The Gateses did not offer any specifics for how the Buffett gift might affect their education giving, and a Gates spokeswoman also declined to do so, other than to reiterate the philanthropy’s commitment to the work.

The foundation has an endowment of more than $29 billion. Since 2000, it has committed about $1 billion to support the start-up of small high schools or the restructuring of large schools into smaller units. Disappointed by the outcomes of some of its small-schools work, the foundation increasingly has been giving money to help urban districts with broader efforts to improve curriculum and instruction in high schools.

Call for R&D

Mr. Buffett announced last month that he plans to donate most of his fortune, estimated at more than $40 billion, to several philanthropies, with the majority going to the Gates Foundation. The gift will go out in annual contributions of stock from Berkshire Hathaway, the Omaha, Neb., company he founded.

“This is going to be a very big investment for a long time,” said Paul T. Hill, the director of the Center on Reinventing Public Education, located at the University of Washington in Seattle, whose work has received financial support from the Gates Foundation. “The question really is, their feet are wet, what do you do if you want to make a fundamental difference?”

Mr. Hill is hoping the foundation will shift toward a major emphasis on research and development in education, suggesting there remain far too many unanswered questions about how to successfully educate disadvantaged students.

“The foundation would actually ask for innovative ideas in instruction and instructional management, in integration of social services, in use of online and other resources,” Mr. Hill explained. Beyond that, he suggested, it should back efforts to implement pilot initiatives using those methods.

Frederick M. Hess, the director of education policy at the Washington-based American Enterprise Institute, said the growth at the foundation poses challenges.

“There’s a danger that, kind of like moths to a flame, reformers and researchers will flow to whatever Gates is doing, because there will be such a concentrated amount of resources.”

He added, “They’ve got to redouble their efforts to ensure that they’re speaking to folks who are thinking about the challenges in different ways, and seeking out thoughtful criticism and feedback.”

The Gates Foundation has provided funding to support Diplomas Count, an annual Education Week report on high school graduation.

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Something Beyond NORM!


Techlearning blog

July 14, 2006

Traditional education won't take us where we need to go

When are our leaders going to realize that the traditional, "tried and true" methods of instruction are not adequate to prepare students for the 21st century workforce environment and for success as a global citizens in a network economy? According to the July 5th article in the Houston Chronicle, "How English is taught in Texas likely to change:"

Many on the [Texas State School] board want to replace a student-centered curriculum that calls on students to use their own attitudes and ethics to interpret texts with teacher-centered instruction that emphasizes the basics of spelling, grammar and punctuation.

I think I am going to become actively sick.

The ridiculous emphasis we saw last year in our second grade son's classroom on spelling tests and scripted writing activities-- where literally every student in the class was forced to write a "how-to" essay on "how to make a hamburger" and not permitted ANY CREATIVE CHOICE in writing topics-- was a huge reason I was glad to be job hunting and looking for public school districts with more progressive and authentic approaches to literacy instruction. I was a fourth grade writing teacher, so I definitely don't have a problem doing a sample writing activity with students on something like making a hamburger. You need to ask kids to write where they are "deep" and have some schema, and most kids know about hamburgers. But PLEASE!!! Give the kids some choices when it comes to independent writing. Invite them to connect writing with their own lives, their own lived experiences, their attitudes, their interests and their opinions. We do not need a new generation of mere fact regurgitators. This continuing trend in Texas education to further limit curricular autonomy and hamstring teachers into teaching from a narrow script is going in EXACTLY THE WRONG DIRECTION for the twenty-first century. Do we need to buy copies of Dan Pink's book "A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future" and send it to the Texas State School Board members? Would it help? What would help? I am at a loss.

Bob Pearlman has the right pedagogical philosophy in mind in his recent Edutopia article from June, "New Schools For A New Century." Pearlman writes:

No matter how sophisticated the tools we put in classrooms, the curriculum designed to educate students to meet the new standards is sorely inadequate to help them after they leave school. In short, learning -- and schooling -- must be totally transformed.

"Today's graduates need to be critical thinkers, problem solvers, and effective communicators who are proficient in both core subjects and new, 21st-century content and skills," according to "Results that Matter: 21st Century Skills and High School Reform," a report issued in March by the Partnership for 21st Century Skills.

These include learning and thinking skills, information- and communications-technology literacy skills, and life skills.

Students of today enter an increasingly globalized world in which technology plays a vital role. They must be good communicators, as well as great collaborators. The new work environment requires responsibility and self-management, as well as interpersonal and project-management skills that demand teamwork and leadership.

Instead of the "more of the same, harder and harder" traditional educational approach many Texas educational leaders seem to be supporting, Pearlman makes a persuasive case for project-based learning. The tasks we ask students to do in school must change, and so must the assessment methods. Check out this from the article:

Current assessments don't do the job. State testing and accountability are aimed at schools, not individual student learning, and reports are released once a year, after students have moved on to other teachers. Periodic assessments in managed curriculums mainly provide information to teachers. Students can't improve or become managers of their own learning without constant, real-time assessment and feedback, referred to in PBL instruction as assessment for learning, as opposed to assessment for school, district, or classroom accountability.

New Tech schools, highlighted in the article and supported by the New Tech Foundation, have a simple strategy for reaching the objectives of preparing students in our schools with the skills they will need in the 21st century workforce:

To learn collaboration, work in teams. To learn critical thinking, take on complex problems. To learn oral communication, present. To learn written communication, write. To learn technology, use technology. To develop citizenship, take on civic and global issues. To learn about careers, do internships. To learn content, research and do all of the above.

Will someone please tell the Texas state school board members to catch a clue?! We are in the 21st century now. The world is flat, and we need to help our kids learn to have "a whole new mind"-- one that is encouraged to be creative, think out of the box, and solve problems that haven't even been invented yet. And we need them to do these things powerfully, using the latest technology tools. Can anyone tell me with a straight face that emphasizing traditional grammar and spelling tests, and stopping kids from writing based on their own attitudes and experiences, is going to do that?! I don't think so.

I've taken my own children out of Texas schools and moved to another state. We are still sticking with public schools, but can I make a stronger statement about my opinion of the current state of affairs in Texas education? Certainly there are many WONDERFUL teachers and administrators in Texas, and I have been blessed to work with many professionally-- and have had several teach my own children. But the system itself is sick. We need a sea change. And we need it tomorrow, because our kids are in schools RIGHT NOW (or at least they'll be there again soon in August) and they don't have time for the pendulum to swing over a period of several years.

PLEASE. We need strong, visionary leaders for the twenty-first century who understand the importance of engagement and assessing real-world skills in education, not just content dipping to assess the knowledge/comprehension level of Bloom's taxonomy. High stakes accountability is not saving our schools and our kids, it is ruining it and making many of the kids hate learning and school. For Pete's sake, we have schools formally stopping recess at 3rd grade, so the teachers and kids can spend more time on test prep! This is an immoral crime, people! Listen to Dr. David Berliner on this subject. We need to move forward, not backward. We need to speak out in the F2F world on this, beyond the blogosphere. Apparently the Texas state school board members aren't subscribers of Edutopia or reading reports like "Results that Matter: 21st Century Skills and High School Reform" (PDF).

They should be.

Thanks to Scott Floyd for bringing this to my attention.

Posted by Wesley Fryer at 06:00 AM
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A Story About a Fellow Named "NORM"

Hey isn't that NORM over there.............?

The New York Times
Printer Friendly Format Sponsored By

July 19, 2006
Editorial

Public vs. Private Schools

The national education reform effort has long suffered from magical thinking about what it takes to improve children’s chances of learning. Instead of homing in on teacher training and high standards, things that distinguish effective schools from poor ones, many reformers have embraced the view that the public schools are irreparably broken and that students of all kinds need to be given vouchers to attend private or religious schools at public expense.

This belief, though widespread, has not held up to careful scrutiny. A growing body of work has shown that the quality of education offered to students varies widely within all school categories. The public, private, charter and religious realms all contain schools that range from good to not so good to downright horrendous.

This point was underscored last week when the United States Education Department released a controversial and long-awaited report comparing public and private schools in terms of student achievement as measured on the federal math and reading tests known as the National Assessment of Educational Progress. As with previous studies, this one debunked the widely held belief that public schools were inferior to their private and religious counterparts. The private schools appeared to have an achievement advantage when the raw scores of students were considered alone. But those perceived advantages melted away when the researchers took into account variables like race, gender and parents’ education and income.

The National Education Association, the nation’s largest teachers’ union, quickly asserted that the study showed public schools were “doing an outstanding job.’’ That seems absurd, when we consider the dismal math and reading scores that American children racked up on last year’s national tests.

What the emerging data show most of all is that public, private, charter and religious schools all suffer from the wide fluctuations in quality and effectiveness. Instead of arguing about the alleged superiority of one category over another, the country should stay focused on the overarching problem: on average, American schoolchildren are performing at mediocre levels in reading, math and science — wherever they attend school.

Say Hello to NORM when you see him!
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