Philosophy Without A Home

Using Twitter , Facebook, personal learning networks and time suck. An interesting tweet from @tryed. @glassbeed Interesting. Older students are dropping Facebook for Twitter In response I think to this retweet from @glassbeed RT @biggmaxx OK, this one's great...from one of my students today in class...."Twitter is Facebook for old people" When I was in college, the first time, we young students generally respected the older students. As a rule the older students worked harder and got better grades than most of us younger guys. We knew there was some sort of wisdom gained with age we just couldn't seem to use it. I mean doing homework, reviewing or even rewriting notes, going to sleep at reasonable hours, preparing for the day; we knew these sorts of things would improve our grades, but we just couldn't seem to do them. Here's my view of Twitter and Facebook. After reading I hope you will understand why it is not a wonder to me that older students wo

I was cleaning my oldest boy's room the other day. My wife saw me heading to the garbage can with a bag of broken toys. She wanted me to keep all of his toys because he will literally play with anything.  While it is true that I will often find him playing with broken toys, that doesn't mean we have to keep every broken toy in the bin because he will play with it if he ever gets to the bottom of the toy box again.  It did get me thinking though. Here's my theory on toys, gleaned from reading pop psychology articles over email. Plain boring toys, blocks, Legos etc, increase imagination because the child must build something with the toy, use the toy as a symbol or what ever that requires a bit of imagination. Trademarked toys, Lightning McQueen, or basically any Disney product, reinforce the story and hopefully the message it told. It builds some imaginative play but mostly helps retelling of stories and reinforcement of ideas. Video games and TV are mostly passive wat

So here I am reading this Clay Shirky post , Retrieved April 13, 2009, and thinking what would happen if newspapers did die out in our country. I don't have an answer that will save the newspaper industry, sorry guys. The fact is " Five years ago, the market value of the publicly traded U.S. newspaper companies was $80 billion. Today it is $5B ." or at least that is what I heard on 3:17 PM Nov 10th, 2008 on Twitter from @gcolony ). It would seem that the newspaper industry as we know it is dying and we really can't save it. On the other hand journalism isn't dead and it isn't dying. As I see it journalism is actually getting stronger, but we readers MUST be get stronger as well. Over the past decade of so my news source has changed from getting most of my news from the big 3, (Newspaper, TV, and radio) to most of my news from the Internet. Though I still get a lot of my information from major news sites. I tend to follow up with in-depth reporting from non-t

This is a long response to a comment on a LinkedIn article . Basically the parent wants to know why her middle school doesn't have quality Science support for gifted children.  In general the model for elementary schools in the U.S. is one teacher per grade teaching all subjects. This is the way one-room school houses worked, this is the way we still do it. That isn't to say it isn't the best way of doing things. In middle school the model moves from one teacher per class towards one teacher per subject. Then in high school the model moves to several teachers per subject. That isn't to say this always happens, just in general.  The biggest benefit of having one teacher (besides the lower cost of integrating several teachers into one) is the ease with which the teacher can integrate across subjects. The low level of mastery required for teaching the subjects at the elementary grade levels makes it possible to have just one teacher for all subjects. One problem I have