It’s a pretty good rundown of the fight between Keynes and Hayek, conducted mostly after Keynes’ death in economics classrooms and central banks world wide.
Neil Shubin’s Your Inner Fish reads well, and it reveals evolution as easy to understand from a morphological view of life as revealed by fossils and modern animals.
Shubin released the illustrations from the book for teachers to use — a rather rare and great contribution to evolution.
Good teachers constantly search for good ideas and effective ways to make learning fun, efficient and thorough. So the search for new material and new ideas is constant.
Same on the web. Where are the good blogs? Where are the useful blogs? (Many days readers here ask those questions repeatedly.)
Older son Kenny nears graduation there, but we still get the newsletters to parents bragging on the school, and there is much to brag about. The Good Folks at the University of Texas at Dallas asked us to share this story. It’s right up the alley of a blog that worries about education, so share it I will.
After all, when was the last time you heard a teacher raving about students using their cell phones and Twitter during class? (Yes, I’m about three weeks behind the curve on this.)
Here’s the story from the press office at UTD:
ATEC Student’s Twitter Video Makes Waves
Project Documents History Prof’s Use of Popular Service as a Teaching Tool
June 11, 2009
An Arts and Technology student’s video account of a professor’s classroom experiment with Twitter is making waves on the World Wide Web, capturing thousands of viewers on YouTube and prompting an article in U.S. News & World Report.
UT Dallas graduate student Kim Smith’s video, “The Twitter Experiment,” shows how Dr. Monica Rankin, assistant professor of history in the School of Arts and Humanities, uses Twitter to engage her 90-student history class in discussion. The communication application helps overcome the logistical issues involved in having scores of students interact in a short time span and encourages shy students to participate in the course.
“The video is a living example of what my Content Creation and Collaboration course with Dan Langendorf was all about: using emerging media technologies as a tool for education, collaboration with other fields, and documenting the experience for everyone to have access to,” said Smith.
Twitter is a social networking and micro-blogging service that lets users send and read each others’ updates, known as tweets, in short posts of 140 characters or less. The Twitter video was a course project for Smith’s digital video class.
The video, which took roughly 20 hours to record and edit, was shot during two class periods, one at the beginning of the semester and one at the end. Classmate Joe Chuang helped with the video and editing.
The collaboration of Smith and Rankin began when Smith documented a class trip to Guanajuato, Mexico, in 2008. They kept in touch via Facebook, and developed the idea of using Twitter in the classroom at the beginning of the Spring 2009 semester.
Smith worked out details on Twitter with Emerging Media and Communication (EMAC) faculty members Dr. Dave Parry and Dean Terry, who referred her to individuals who had done similar experiments. To get students comfortable with using Twitter in a classroom setting, Smith created a simple how-to video and attended class to help Rankin introduce the idea to her students.
The video was first released on Facebook; Terry and Parry both tweeted about it on Twitter and it went global within 48 hours. New-media icon Howard Rheingold tweeted about it, which helped it further circulate in the “Twitterverse.”
“I have gotten several direct messages from people saying that they were more ‘traditional’ and would not have considered using the social networking and micro-blogging tools in this way, but opened their minds after seeing the video,” said Smith.
A few weeks later Smith posted the video on YouTube, and an entirely different wave of viewers picked up on it. On Monday, June 1, “The Twitter Experiment” registered 500 views in a few hours. Read Write Web and other popular blogs had picked up the video, causing views to skyrocket.
“I love my classes and experience at UT Dallas and want to master how to use what I learn in EMAC to help professors like Dr. Rankin, who are willing to consider new technologies intelligently and experiment with what they offer,” said Smith.
UTD, where the football team is still undefeated. Seriously, have you thought about using twitter in class, for coursework? Please tell us the story in comments.
Meanwhile, I’m wondering just how I could make this work, in a district where cell phone use by students is against the rules (ha!), and where students are discouraged from using laptops in class. In Irving ISD, where every high school kid gets a laptop, this could offer some great possibilities (anybody from Irving reading this; anybody try it yet?). I’ll have to check to see if our network can handle such traffic, and I’ll have to get an account on Twitter; we have 87 minute class blocks, and smaller classes, but it’s tougher to get kids to discuss in high school.
With the layoffs in Dallas ISD, support for new technology tricks in classrooms is essentially non-existent. Can I do this as a guerrilla teaching project and make it work before I get caught?
I may have to get some of these people at UTD on the phone. If you’ve already overcome these problems, put that in comments, too, please.
Spread the word; friends don't allow friends to repeat history.
The Sacramento Bee, one of America’s great newspapers which we hope can stay in business through these tough times, today put up a map of California unemployment, county by county. The map shows unemployment changes over the past year with an interactive slide that makes it great for classroom use in economics, but makes it impossible for me to embed here (it’s in Adobe Flash).
California’s unemployment is at about 11% statewide. Colusa County’s unemployment is 26.6%. Two counties away, in Marin County, it’s only 6.8%
California economics classes can use their knowledge of agriculture and industry in the state to make educated guesses about what is going on in each county. Surely there are uses the rest of us can find. Colusa and Imperial Counties are two of the hardest hit — with the internet, can your students tell what that is going to mean for prices on fresh produce and processed foods?
This is where computers and the internet step out ahead in the education tilts, with tools like this interactive map. Thank you, SacBee. Can you give teachers a download?
AfricaMap is based on the Harvard University Geospatial Infrastructure (HUG) platform, and was developed by the Center for Geographic Analysis to make spatial data on Africa easier for researchers to discover and explore.
Harvard's Africa Map, sample image, via Google Maps Mania
It’s an interactive tool. You can capture images (another add-on might be necessary) — but look at all the different layers you can use, live, on your computer.
I’m struggling. I’m looking for software that will allow me to make animations and movies for classroom use. I know very little about it, though, and I’m not sure where to look.
I was just about to tell Kevin to put away his I-pod, when I looked down and saw the graph of the function we were looking at on it. I did not know I-pods had this capability. He said that he downloaded a program with math applications and that is why he was able to do this.
Some days, I just love my job. I yelled at Kevin. “It’s kids like you that are keeping me from retiring.”
Who knew?
Of course, it takes a special teacher to be doing the job so well that the kids use their toys to learn the subject. Or does it? This is a special category of “discipline.”
How are things in your classroom today?
Spread the word; friends don't allow friends to repeat history.
VHS can now be considered dead, really most sincerely dead.* New tapes are not being produced for almost all programs, and the last, die-hard distributor who sold pre-recorded VHS tapes announced the company will stop those sales in the next few weeks.
For projecting programs in the classrooms in your school, is your school ready to switch to DVDs? I’ve never tried a poll here before, but I hope you will answer this one, especially if you’re a teacher.
Here’s a video from the guys at Fast Draw, about economic stimulation, offered first on CBS Sunday Morning on February 17. Great stuff for a high school economics course.
Will CBS make this available for teachers?
There is a commercial you gotta view for 15 seconds prior to the video — my apologies.
Write or call CBS Sunday Morning to plead for released copies: ADDRESS: CBS News Sunday Morning
Box O (for Osgood)
524 West 57th St.
New York, NY 10019
Depression presents a serious occupational hazard, moving back and forth between the classroom and business, classroom and internet. When do administrators and legislators get serious about catching up education?
I’ll wager not a single classroom in the nation is ready to make this work. If you disagree, I’d love to hear about the class that can make use of it.
System requirements for Photosynth won’t tax the computers that most high school gamers use, but they are beyond most of the classroom computers I’ve seen in the last five years.
Probably more to the point, curriculum designers in public schools don’t even have Google Earth on their horizons. Photosynth? I’ll wager it’s not even on the radar screens of GIS users in the nation’s Council of Governments (COGS).
Geography is an exploding discipline. GIS and computerized map programs make cell phone companies go, not to mention oil and gas exploration, coal mining, air pollution monitoring (for building new power plants, for example), and road building. GPS helps drive express shipping, and all other shipping. RFI and GPS together are revolutionizing retail.
You must know how to read a map just to get a job delivering pizza.
But 9th grade geography classes? The exciting stuff is absent today.
At the Texas Education Agency (TEA), officials fret about how to stop science from being taught in science classes, for fear the facts will skew the religious beliefs of their children. They need to worry about their children not even getting hired by the pizza delivery company for being ignorant of nature and science, and the maps that show them. In a competitive, technologically savvy world, inaction, dithering and damaging action by the TEA mean our kids won’t even have a prayer.
I can easily see a time when a student with a computer terminal gets an assignment to look at some of the activitiesavailable at a site like America by Air, with on-line quizzes as the student progresses through the exhibits.
How far away are we? Two questions: Does your school provide an internet-linked computer for each student? Do you have the software or technical support to give an on-line assignment and track results?
Teaching stays stuck in the 19th century, learning opportunities fly through the 21st.
Spread the word; friends don't allow friends to repeat history.
Or, until that account is unsuspended by the forces supporting Donald Trump: Follow @FillmoreWhite, the account of the Millard Fillmore White House Library
We've been soaking in the Bathtub for several months, long enough that some of the links we've used have gone to the Great Internet in the Sky.
If you find a dead link, please leave a comment to that post, and tell us what link has expired.
Thanks!
Retired teacher of law, economics, history, AP government, psychology and science. Former speechwriter, press guy and legislative aide in U.S. Senate. Former Department of Education. Former airline real estate, telecom towers, Big 6 (that old!) consultant. Lab and field research in air pollution control.
My blog, Millard Fillmore's Bathtub, is a continuing experiment to test how to use blogs to improve and speed up learning processes for students, perhaps by making some of the courses actually interesting. It is a blog for teachers, to see if we can use blogs. It is for people interested in social studies and social studies education, to see if we can learn to get it right. It's a blog for science fans, to promote good science and good science policy. It's a blog for people interested in good government and how to achieve it.
BS in Mass Communication, University of Utah
Graduate study in Rhetoric and Speech Communication, University of Arizona
JD from the National Law Center, George Washington University
Posted by Ed Darrell 
Millard Fillmore's Bathtub 