Philosophy Without A Home

Try this, type ruby yacht of khayyam into Google or Yahoo or Bing . Go ahead I’ll wait. Bullwinkle (Photo credit: bbaltimore) Did you come up with a Rocky and Bullwinkle episode? Did it come up even before you finished typing yacht? I find it amazing that a a bad pun for a children’s show that has been off the air for years comes up so quickly and easily. I guess this goes to show you that I am not part of the digital native generation. I grew up with the idea that computers were stupid, if you didn’t spell things out exactly the way you wanted then you didn’t get what you wanted out. It even had its own acronym GIGO garbage in garbage out. I suppose we shouldn’t read too much into this. The pun after all is probably the only one like it. Then I’m sure some geek heard the pun as a kid years ago and spent hours searching the information in dusty encyclopedias in the library. With the invention of the Internet and Wikipedia and finally Hulu s/he then created the pag

This post can also be found on my blog It has been interesting to watch Bill Gates grow and evolve in his efforts to improve U.S. Image via Wikipedia education. Just an informal overview of the highlights I remember. There is High Tech High School in San Diego, which I think is a pretty successful group of schools. Technology infused with project based learning . There was the small school initiative which didn’t work out so well. Reduce the size of the student population. I thought there were better methods ( Leads , research ) to reduce school size without reducing the options available to students, but Bill tried his methods and admitted failure. He also tried measuring teacher effectiveness . The idea that teachers are the determining factor on student success has hinged on the research that states teachers have the greatest influence in student success. However influence and determining factors are different. A lot of educators are wary of value-added measurements