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Elliot Madison was arrested last month during the G-20 protests...

Tue, 06 Oct 2009 08:03:42 -0800

Elliot Madison was arrested last month during the G-20 protests in Pittsburgh when police raided his hotel room. Police say Madison and a co-defendant used computers and a radio scanner to track police movements and then passed on that information to protesters using cell phones and the social networking site Twitter. Madison is being charged with hindering apprehension or prosecution, criminal use of a communication facility, and possession of instruments of crime. Exactly one week later, Madison’s New York home was raided by FBI agents, who conducted a sixteen-hour search. We speak to Elliot Madison and his attorney, Martin Stolar. (via Twitter Crackdown: NYC Activist Arrested for Using Social Networking Site during G-20 Protest in Pittsburgh

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TBogg » A pop-up book for Rich Lowrey to pop-up to

Wed, 30 Sep 2009 04:54:24 -0800

TBogg » A pop-up book for Rich Lowrey to pop-up to:

I agree to a certain degree with Steve (who has forgotten more about the publishing industry than I have ever known) that the Palin book with be a best seller out of the chute. Where I part company with him is the notion that those sales will be driven only by the true believers. Sarah Palin has achieved that unique brand of American freak show singularity by becoming equal parts Paris Hilton, William Hung, and a flaming NASCAR crash. We want to turn away appalled/disgusted/embarrassed by and for her but she is so alternately amusing and then infuriating and then baffling that we don’t want to miss an episode and so we sneak guilty peeks only to roll our eyes once again.

Author Arundhati Roy on the Human Costs of India's Economic Growth, the View of Obama from New Delhi, and Escalating US Attacks in Af-Pak

Mon, 28 Sep 2009 18:32:29 -0800

Author Arundhati Roy on the Human Costs of India's Economic Growth, the View of Obama from New Delhi, and Escalating US Attacks in Af-Pak:

AMY GOODMAN: We’re talking to Arundhati Roy. She’s speaking to us from New Delhi, India. She has just published a new book called Field Notes on Democracy: Listening to Grasshoppers. Arundhati, why “listening to grasshoppers”? ARUNDHATI ROY: Oh, it was the name of a lecture that I did in Turkey last year on the anniversary after the death of Hrant Dink, the Armenian journalist who was shot outside his office for daring to talk about the Armenian genocide of 1915, which you’re not supposed to talk about in Turkey. And my lecture was really about the historical links between progress and genocide. And “listening to grasshoppers” was—referred to the testimony an old lady called Araxie Barsamian, who’s the friend—mother of my friend David Barsamian, who is Armenian and who talked about how, you know, the wheat had ripened in her village in 1915, and suddenly there was this huge swarm of grasshoppers that arrived. And the village elders were very worried about this and said it was a bad omen. And they were right, because a few months later, when the wheat had ripened, the Turks came, and that was the beginning of the Armenian genocide for her. And so, I talk about—the whole lecture was really about how societies are prepared for genocide and how genocide is, you know, it’s like part of free trade, and how, you know, genocides that are acknowledged, and denied, and prosecuted, all have to—all depend on world trade, and always have done, and about how I worry that a country like India, that is poised on the threshold of progress, could also be poised on the threshold of genocide. And that essay was written in January of last year. And now, as you see, the troops are closing in on the forest areas where the poorest people live. And they will be sacrificed at the altar of progress, unless we manage to show the world that we have to find a different way of seeing and a different way of going about things. But here in India, there’s the smell of fascism in the air.

Meet the Hazzards

Sat, 26 Sep 2009 14:32:00 -0800

Meet the Hazzards:

by Nomi Prins and Christopher Hayes

As we mark the end of the first year of the financial bailout, the public seems to regard the government’s actions with a toxic combination of rage and confusion. People are pissed off but too bewildered to know what to do with that anger. The confusion isn’t an accident. The government hasn’t exactly been forthcoming about how it’s made buckets of money available to the banking sector. When it does disclose some information—such as in July’s SIGTARP report from the Treasury or the Federal Reserve’s weekly balance sheet—it’s in the form of intimidating descriptions, accounting mumbo jumbo and technical reports that do little to illuminate just what the hell is going on.

What’s worse, banks and the establishment press have portrayed TARP as the sum of the banking industry’s federal subsidies.

SmallTalk: King's dream vacated by a court in Chicago

Fri, 25 Sep 2009 20:08:31 -0800

SmallTalk: King's dream vacated by a court in Chicago:

While Arne Duncan was invoking the name of Dr. Martin Luther King, in an effort to rally support for NCLB re-authorization, a federal court, in his home town was putting the final nail in the coffin of Chicago’s 29-year-old school de-seg agreement. Catalyst’s Sarah Karp reports that, U.S. District Judge Charles Kocoras scrapped the CPS desegregation consent decree—a move that likely will result in the district abandoning the use of race as a factor in the admissions policies of magnet and selective schools. The move by U.S. District Judge Charles Kocoras also halted the court’s monitoring of the district’s bilingual program, which activists claimed is still inadequate and in need of supervision.

Why Standards Aren’t Sticky at The Core Knowledge Blog

Fri, 25 Sep 2009 12:16:35 -0800

Why Standards Aren’t Sticky at The Core Knowledge Blog:

Let’s be blunt: Find one single teacher drawing breath that needed a secretive committee of two dozen experts to tell her that high school students ought to be able to “discern the most important ideas, events, or information, and summarize them accurately and concisely.” This is not a standard, it’s a platitude. As a goal or statement of purpose, it offers as much guidance and direction as military orders to “win the war.” We do not lack clarity on our goals. We lack clarity on how to achieve them. The draft of the voluntary standards promotes tacitly the same flawed concepts that have driven reading instruction for decades.

RebelReports - Where is the Defund Blackwater Act?

Fri, 25 Sep 2009 04:13:00 -0800

RebelReports - Where is the Defund Blackwater Act?:

By Jeremy Scahill

Republican Congressional leaders are continuing their witch-hunt against ACORN, the grassroots community group dedicated to helping poor and working class people. This campaign now unfortunately has gained bi-partisan legislative support in the form of the Defund ACORN Act of 2009 which has now passed the House and Senate. As Ryan Grim at Huffington Post has pointed out, the legislation “could plausibly defund the entire military-industrial complex:”

Tuttle SVC: NCTE Response to Common Core Standards

Thu, 24 Sep 2009 05:23:00 -0800

Tuttle SVC: NCTE Response to Common Core Standards:

Not too bad. Even more galling than the Common Core‘ers disregard for the overall critique is their rejection of smaller suggestions for improving the clarity and precision of specific standards

Math Apprentice

Thu, 24 Sep 2009 05:22:06 -0800

Math Apprentice:

Who does Math in the Real World?

Intelligent YouTube Video Collections | Open Culture

Thu, 24 Sep 2009 05:19:37 -0800

Intelligent YouTube Video Collections | Open Culture:

This is something to keep handy for a day when you don’t have a lot going on.

Vagabond Scholar: More Proof That Torture Doesn't Work

Thu, 24 Sep 2009 05:18:11 -0800

Vagabond Scholar: More Proof That Torture Doesn't Work:

Torture is immoral, illegal, and does not “work” reliably at all if one wants accurate intelligence - in fact, humane and legal methods are significantly more effective. Sure, torture is great for inflicting pain, producing false confessions and terrorizing populations, but the truth-to-lies-because-oh-my-god-make -the-pain-stop ratio is pretty shitty. I would hope this was common knowledge by now. Scott Horton passes on some important additional evidence:

Believing in Wet Works

Thu, 24 Sep 2009 05:14:00 -0800

by digby

Scott Horton discusses the available scientific evidence showing that torture doesn’t work and then notes this new information:

Now another important contribution to the scientific literature has appeared. Irish neurobiologist Shane O’Mara of Trinity College Dublin, writing in Trends in Cognitive Sciences, takes a special look at the Bush Administration’s enhanced interrogation techniques:

the use of such techniques appears motivated by a folk psychology that is demonstrably incorrect. Solid scientific evidence on how repeated and extreme stress and pain affect memory and executive functions (such as planning or forming intentions) suggests these techniques are unlikely to do anything other than the opposite of that intended by coercive or ‘enhanced’ interrogation.

Official Google Docs Blog: Electronic Portfolios with Google Apps

Thu, 24 Sep 2009 05:08:00 -0800

Official Google Docs Blog: Electronic Portfolios with Google Apps:

An e-portfolio is created from many small, inter-connected pieces. Google’s suite of web-based products offers a rich environment for creating e-portfolios, which incorporates several different elements and tools, depending on your purpose:

“E-Portfolios for Learning” provide an environment to reflect about your learning, telling your own story of growth over time. These working portfolios are often structured as journals or blogs where you can include samples of your work along with personal reflections.

“E-Portfolios for Personal Branding and Self-Marketing” let you develop a “resume on steroids” for showcasing skills and samples of your best work to potential employers, customers, or graduate schools.

“E-Portfolios for Assessment/Accountability” are used by educational institutions to document achievement, sometimes replacing or supplementing standardized tests, or more traditional forms of evaluation.

If you are interested in creating an e-portfolio for one of these purposes, here is a recommended process…

Tuttle SVC: What "Internationally Benchmarked" Means

Thu, 24 Sep 2009 05:03:55 -0800

Tuttle SVC: What "Internationally Benchmarked" Means:

Of these, the Common Core standards only address the first — language for information. Arguably, language for social interaction is less applicable when English is the native tongue, but more alarmingly, we’re proposing to virtually remove “language for literary response and expression” from our curriculum. I’m not going to spend the whole evening looking up reading and writing standards for the rest of the world, but I’d be shocked if any other country had the narrowness of vision to impose such barren, culturally-inert expectations on their own children.

The complete lack of a philosophical explanation of the Common Core standards is symptomatic of the underlying problem. These things have to slip under the radar without ruffling any feathers or raising any questions about whether they can be “objectively” assessed.

Pass or Fail Jorge? A Teacher’s Dilemma « Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice

Wed, 23 Sep 2009 13:06:26 -0800

Pass or Fail Jorge? A Teacher’s Dilemma « Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice:

Pass or Fail Jorge? A Teacher’s Dilemma Jump to Comments Today, she must tell the principal who has to be held back. What should she do with Jorge? Jorge is a year older than everyone else in the class; he had been held back once. In reading and math he is still at least a year below grade level but he has improved a lot in each subject. He does his homework turning in papers often filled with smudges and wrong answers. In class, he raises his hand to answer questions, occasionally getting the right answer. He never stops trying. He is the most anxious-to-please eleven year-old the teacher has ever had. But he is at the bottom of the class academically.

Half an Hour: Facts versus skills

Wed, 23 Sep 2009 13:04:59 -0800

Half an Hour: Facts versus skills:

How do you define facts versus skills? Tracy, you get to the core of a deep issue very quickly. Let me try a brief response, with the admission that a longer response may be necessary. My response is this: there isn’t really a distinction between facts and skills; what we call ‘facts’ and what we call ‘skills’ are the very same thing. However, what people mean when they say ‘facts’ is something very different, and it is this sense of ‘facts’ to which I am responding in this essay. In this sense of ‘facts’, a fact is something that it is propositional, it is declarative knowledge, it is expressible as a sentence, it is stored atomically (as a ‘sentence in the brain’) in memory, it is privileged (that is, it is a proposition that is known to be ‘true’).

Education's Rotten Apples

Wed, 23 Sep 2009 12:59:55 -0800

Education's Rotten Apples:

But what if something that works to accomplish one goal ends up impeding another? And what if two very different strategies are inversely related, such that they work at cross purposes? As it happens, converging evidence from different educational arenas tends to support exactly these concerns. Particularly when practices that might be called, for lack of better labels, progressive and traditional are used at the same time, the latter often has the effect of undermining the former.

The Forgotten Technology

Wed, 23 Sep 2009 12:56:00 -0800

How It All Began

I am a retired carpenter with 35 years experience in construction. In my work experience, over the years, many times I had to improvise on tools that were not at hand in order to get the job done. At one of these times, about 12 years ago, I had to remove some 1200 lb. saw cut concrete blocks from an existing floor. The problem was that we did not have a machine that could reach some of the blocks. The only obvious answer was to break the blocks into smaller pieces with a sledgehammer and load them into a wheelbarrow. To me, this seemed to be too much labor at the time, so I improvised. Using a few rocks and leverage, I removed the blocks from below the floor to an area that the machine could reach them for removal. After doing this several times, the technique became very easy and quick. This experience had me consider the possibility that people may have used this technique before modern day equipment was available.

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More than 500 extra teachers rated "unsatisfactory" this year

Wed, 23 Sep 2009 12:51:00 -0800

More than 500 extra teachers rated “unsatisfactory” this year Ohanian Comment: Hats off for a wonderful statement! I’ve been preaching this for years, but Fiorillo nails it in a concise, passionate statement: Do you want to improve the lives of poor and minority students? Then improve the lives of poor and minority students: provide their parents with living-wage jobs, adequate housing, medical, dental and mental health care and, yes, adequately funded schools with committed (sorry, TFA) and qualified teachers. Amen. Thanks to Education Notes Online for this heads up. by Michael Fiorillo As a teacher, I’d be the last one to minimize our (potential) importance in the lives of students, but as others have pointed out, “Why the obsessive focus on incompetent teachers, to the complete exclusion of other professions and fields?” The US has a shamefully high infant and maternal death rate: why aren’t OB-GYNs being targeted with the same passion? The US has lower life expectancy than other developed nations: where are the witchhunts against primary care doctors and other health care professionals (let alone the real “death panels,” the insurers)? The US incarcerates more people than any other nation on earth, most of them minority, and many of them warehoused in private, for-profit prisons, providing a structural incentive for continuing incarceration: where are the corporate think tanks, foundations and PR firms making noise about this “Civil Rights Issue of Our Time?” The reason those debates have so little “juice” is because these fields have already been privatized, with free reign given to those who would count, measure, control and commodify and market everything. Public education, along with Social Security, is the last major universal, public good left to be taken over by the hedge funds, private equity parasites and venture capitalists. Thus, this unending campaign against teachers and their unions, and this absurd debate about teacher quality. I’m not proposing witchhunts. My point is that this very discussion proves the success of corporate ed deform in framing the issue of education solely as one of teacher quality. Even the unions have allowed themselves to be suckered into this twisted, unfair discourse, which they can only lose.

"Saturn rings"

Wed, 23 Sep 2009 12:46:00 -0800

“Saturn rings”

- Fantastic Photos of our Solar System | Photo Gallery | Smithsonian.com