I’ll get to my thesis in the second paragraph, but first some background. Two weeks ago I was involved in a rather interesting discussion surrounding American education. It all started with a posting I made in response to YouTube’s Spotlight ‘08 posting from former Massachusetts Governor and presidential candidate Mitt Romney. He wanted to know what we thought was America’s greatest challenge and what we would do to face it. I said “adaptability in a changing world” and suggested improving public schools. To his credit, he posted a reply to my video, using it as a starting point to provide his own thoughts on adaptability. He didn’t, however, have much to say in relation to my suggestion that we improve public schools. You can judge the quality of the exchange for yourself. I’m putting all of the candidates’ Spotlight ‘08 postings along with my replies here. This is so I’m not tempted to blog every time I upload a reply. Check back weekly, as I intend to respond to each of the candidates.
What struck me most about the conversation was the impression I got that most people mistakenly think it’s a simple matter. Perhaps the largest misconception (more…)
In the past two year’s I’ve had the “pleasure” of contributing to the mission statements of two “learning institutions.” Unfortunately, these statements always seem to fall short of asserting any strong educational philosophy. More often than not, they are meaningless exercises in window dressing. So I decided to give it my best go. Below you’ll find my mission statement for public/state education. Tell me what you think.
Public education should aim to provide students with the skills and experience necessary to individually and collectively construct, acquire, evaluate, and apply robust emotive, descriptive, and predictive models of their world.
Noting these tasks are most often performed within the context of a community and recognizing its role as a public service, schools should aim to assure that individual learners understand their role in the healthy operation of society and that in an ever-changing world, a deliberative democracy is most healthy when comprised of individuals holding a diverse set of beliefs.
Update: 2006-04-29. That last sentence is too long and needs some clarification.
Last time we covered the two postulates of special relativity, and next time we’ll use geometry to derive some of its consequences, but first we need to learn some nomenclature. It’s not exciting, but it will prove helpful in the long run.
In its latest incarnation, “Phylm,” a portmanteau of “physics” and “film,” is both an attempt to increase interest in physics and raise the profile of digital media in education. As a high school teacher, I’m tired of new technology being met with the knee-jerk reaction “let’s ban it.” I’d much rather see educators asking “how can we use this?” (more…)
The First Annual Phylm Prize got its first entry today, and it’s from the people over at Science Made Fun, a student-run podcast over at the University of Manchester, England. One of the great joys of running this contest has been finding other people just as passionate about science education as myself. That being said, there’s still time to put together an entry. Check out the rules: http://www.phylm.com
The bizarre consequences of special relativity arise from two postulates, two things which once accepted lead to Einstein’s space-time. In this series of five episodes, we will introduce and build upon these postulates to derive the consequences of special relativity.
First, I apologize for what some readers may see as a “boring” diversion from our usual educational content, but to piggy-back on my last posting, check out this debate between Mark Cuban and Fred von Lohmann from the EFF. It’s a rather balanced look at some of the issues surrounding the Viacom Google lawsuit. However, I do see a problem with Cuban’s argument for filtering, namely that it doesn’t address the filtering of fair use content (see this post). Anywho, give it a look, and you decide.
Back in March when Viacom filed its $1 Billion lawsuit against Google I wrote a post expressing frustration with the media coverage. My contention was that the suit had the potential to chill fair use on the internet by making sites such as YouTube proxies for wealthy copyright holders. That is, if YouTube is denied safe harbor protection under the DMCA the burden of determining fair use effectively shifts from the courts to sites such as YouTube. Such a shift would force these sites to adopt overly cautious content polices or face costly litigation. (more…)
The quadrant is a simple tool for measuring the altitude (angle) of an object above the horizon. This episode makes use of a printable template found at: http://www.davidcolarusso.com/handouts/quadrant.pdf
