57th Carnival of the Liberals awaits your viewing at Worldwide Webers. It features some serious thinking about sex education, among other thought provokers.
156th Carnival of Education pitches the midway at Creating Lifelong Learners. One of the sideshows, Noirlecroi, caught my eye with a post on how to set up a classroom to teach social studies. Who knew?
4 Comments | 
Education, Maps, Politics, Technology, Technology in the classroom, Weblogs | Tagged: classroom setup, Education, Politics | 
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Posted by Ed Darrell
How young is too young to blog about education?
Michael Guggenheim is twelve years old, a full-time 6th grade student in southern California. He’s recently won the Volunteer Service Award from Secretary Spelling of the U.S. Department of Education and another award from the Inland Empire Branch of the International Dyslexia/Dysgraphia Association. He’s been interviewed by Good Morning America, the LA Times, and CNN. And he’s a blogger.
Michael Guggenheim uses his blog for education – as a teacher to document his nonprofit organization and his extracurricular activities teaching even younger students how to use a computer.
S.P.L.A.T. Inc. (Showing People Learning And Technology) was set up by Guggenheim to help him tutor youngsters at homeless shelters, low income housing projects, and community centers. Whatever funds he raises goes to the distribution of used computers, monitors, printers, and donated software. He himself teaches basic computer skills and also shows the younger children how to use computer learning games.
Got a classroom blog yet? This kid is ahead of a lot of teachers in blogging.
2 Comments | Best practices, Classroom technology, Education blogs, Education quality, Teaching, Technology in the classroom, Weblogs | Tagged: Education, Heroes, student blogs, Technology | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
Bloggers are out there looking for the good posts, the real meat of Bloggovia, to serve it up to you in a tight bundle. Here’s where you find such purveyors:
Leave a Comment » | Astronomy, Economics, Education, geology, Weblogs | Tagged: Astronomy, blog carnivals, Economics, Education, geology, History | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
Turkey changed its laws that completely forbade criticism of the government. Recent changes promoting freedom of conscience and speech do not change the fact that this blog, and a million others on WordPress, are still blocked in Turkey.
Remember the old Radio Free Europe? We need a Blog Free Turkey; a Blog Free China; a Blog Free Duncanville Independent School District.
2 Comments | Dissent, Free press, Free speech, Freedom - Political, Weblogs | Tagged: Freedom of Speech, Media, Politics, Turkey | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
Too early for Mardi Gras!
Not in the worlds of education, and history, and archaeology, and . . .
Catch up with these Carnivals of Education:
Short and maybe better for it, Carnival of the Liberals:
Expand your reading and thinking:
Great material for the classroom:
1 Comment | Archaeology, Education, Education blogs, Evolution, History, Paleontology, Weblogs | Tagged: blog carnivals, Education, Evolution, Politics | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
Adnan Oktar’s mean-spirited campaign against knowledge, science and evolution still makes headlines — this time in the blog of Die Zeit, the most widely-read newspaper in Germany.
I’m flattered at the mention. I’d be happier if I knew Turkey’s ban on blogs had been lifted. I’d be happier if Die Zeit’s view leaned much more toward protecting freedom of the press, and much less toward general xenophobia against Moslems. Perhaps I’m reading too much into the comments.
Millard Fillmore’s Bathtub is banned in Turkey, China, and blocked in the Duncanville, Texas, school system. What does that mean?
1 Comment | Adnan Oktar, Creationism, Freedom of the Press, Law, Technology, Weblogs | Tagged: Adnan Oktar, Creationism, First Amendment, Freedom of the Press, Law, Politics, Technology | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
Put your paper into Georgia, a serif font, and your grades may rise.
Some enterprising fellow at Fadtastic did the research (now available here in archives), and discovered Georgia-fonted papers tend to get A grades, Times Roman-fonted papers get A- grades, and Trebuchet-fonted papers get B grades (“The Secret Lives of Fonts).
Of course, that’s what the type designers, book designers and web designers have been telling us for 20 years — a serif font is easier to read, and makes the reader feel more at ease. When graders feel good, the paper gets a good grade. That’s logical.
Georgia Font examples, from Wikipedia
I also discovered that when faxed to news editors, sans serif fonts get better play. If the press release is legible, it goes farther.
And, when I was taking broadcast courses, my grades rose significantly when my IBM Correcting Selectric II arrived, and I started doing all my scripts in Orator font. The teacher, an active newsman at the time, graded higher when he recognized the font more — it was roughly the same font on the teleprompter at his station.
Pick your font and your transmission method accordingly.
The author of this non-scientific study is a web designer, of course.
I’ll bet you’ll find that conclusion, backed with some sort of research, in the book design and web design texts.
Remember when we all used typewriters, and such choices were not options at all?
Tip of the old scrub brush to Graceful Flavor.
5 Comments | Business, Presentations, Student projects, Technology, Weblogs, Writing | Tagged: Business, font choices, getting good grades, Media, Technology, writing well | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
Partly because Kenneth Miller in his recent Dallas appearance made such a big deal about his “aha!” moment with whale evolution and the charts in Carl Zimmer’s stuff, and partly because of several conversations I’ve had, including in blog comments and e-mail, whale evolution is on my mind. (Must write about what Miller said, soon.)
To the chagrin of Dr. McLeroy and all other anti-science creationists, whale evolution offers some outstanding evidence of evolution, and the stories about whale evolution offer great chances to students of the science to understand what’s going on.
Carl Zimmer at the Loom has a great, short post answering questions he’s gotten about the recent publication of the discovery of another whale ancestor that both offers information about evolution, and also shows how such knowledge fits into the puzzles that need to solve about the diversity of life. The new find, indohyus, is dated at about 47 million years ago (MYA), about the same time as whale ancestor ambulocetus. How can two ancestors be contemporaries? some people asked.
Of course, this is a scientific hypothesis that needs to be tested. And the way to test it is to find more species like Indohyus. If paleontologists are lucky, they’ll be able to draw more branches at the base of the whale tree. And if the current hypothesis is right, a lot of the species belonging to those deep lineages will be a lot like Indohyus. They may turn out to have lived before the oldest whales, or they may have lived millions of years later. But that’s not the heart of the matter. What matters is kinship.
In the annals of misleading science reporting, this may be pretty small potatoes. But mistaking relatives for ancestors does lead to confusion, and it gets in the way of appreciating some very elegant research. And, of course, some people pretend that the fact that relatives are not direct ancestors means that evolution is false. So it’s worth getting right–not just for whales, but for humans, flowers, or any other organism.
Zimmer is the calm, collected end of evolution advocates. Never any heated language, no heated exchanges with Discovery Institute stalking horses — just the science, in lay terms. Always.
And good illustrations. Are those drawings of indohyus out of Carl Buell‘s studio?
71 Comments | Evolution, Journalism, Science, Weblogs | Tagged: Evolution, Journalism, Science | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
Tangled Up In Blue Guy posted Squidmas greetings, and revealed his Squidmas post list.
With one notable exception*, it’s a list of blogs we probably ought to be reading. Seriously, go scan through and see if you don’t find one or two new listings for your bookmarks, if not blogroll.
* The Bathtub, of course.
1 Comment | Personal, Weblogs | Tagged: Media | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
Here’s a new blog carnival you may find useful: The Educational Technology Carnival. The 6th running of that particular midway is posted at Global Citizenship in a Virtual World.
Which rather reminds me that I’ve added to my list of things I want in a technological adapted classroom: Movie lighting. I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve been in a different classroom, and discovered that when the projector goes on, the lights must come down in order to see the image — and then discovered that when the lights go down, there’s not enough light to see to take notes, or to see for anything else.
I was filling in for a teacher who uses a lot of video (“Great!” I thought). Students picked up on the problem right away. “Another sleep lab today?” they asked.
But I digress.
I have fought in four districts to get filters off on sites that discuss evolution for biology students. In one district, it was easier to put filters on the creationism sites, IT told me, than get the filters off the sites that discussed the material the students needed. I discovered my own district now blocks this blog, which makes it difficult to refer students to specific material, at least from school. (Time to change districts?) So the discussion on who filters, and why, caught my eye. I’m not sure there is a good result.
This edition of the carnival also points to Rebecca Wallace-Segall’s Wall Street Journal opposite-editorial page piece on student competition in intellectual areas, a hot topic for me right now as I contemplate the Federal Reserve Board’s competition for economics students, the Fed Challenge.
So as you ponder why your school doesn’t give you lighting to view your projected material, why you don’t have adequate audio reproduction, where are you going to get a projector to show the PowerPoint presentation during 4th block, why can’t anyone make a non-boring, really dynamic PowerPoint, and whether your computer lab kids are downloading racy music videos to spike your bandwidth clogging problems, think that on your lunch hour you can take a look at blog carnival that at least empathizes — if it’s not blocked in your school.
Leave a Comment » | Classroom technology, Economics, Education, Education success, Literature, Teaching, Technology, Technology in the classroom, Weblogs, Writing | Tagged: Economics, Education, Technology | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
By now you should have learned this is not a place from which to get clockwork notes about blog carnivals to read. Sometimes I look at a carnival, and finding not much to interest me, I assume in all hubris that you won’t find much there, either. More often I get bogged down doing other things and just forget to note some.
I post about carnivals here when I think there is good material.
So, I gotta tell you: Run see the current 4 Stone Hearth, posted at remote central. It’s #29, and it’s a doozey.
For your geography classes, make a note here of Britain’s pyramid, “the inside story.” Didn’t know Britain had a pyramid?
See what I mean? How can you ignore stuff like that?
There are posts about volcanoes, posts about excavating shell mounds and prehistoric garbage dumps (no, Mr. Dembski, no Pebbles cereal boxes), your standard skeleton moving fees story, polyandrous sex and sexual dimorphism among human ancestors, and a couple of notes about the flooding of the Black Sea (“Noah’s flood”) and what that did to human civilization. And a bunch of other stuff.
This isn’t a kids’ carnival in any way. For your geography and history students, there is a lot of material in this one carnival about prehistory, material that simply will not be in the textbooks (but probably should be).
Great stuff. It’ll take a while to wade through all of it, and you will find material that will excite your students in class.
The next Four Stone Hearth is set for December 19th, at The Greenbelt.
1 Comment | Ancient history, Archaeology, History, Prehistory, Weblogs | Tagged: Archaeology, blogs, History, Science | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
Oh, boy, are we behind.
Here’s the latest Carnival of Education, at the Colossus of Rhodey. Considering the angst in Texas over science standards, and the recent angst in Utah over vouchers, and the national angst over science and math performance, it’s really a rather tame bunch of posts. Great stuff, though, in about every other one.
The 59th History Carnival was put up on December 2 at Westminster Wisdom. We’ve already missed a third of the month we had to read it! In the vein of “how do we know what we know,” the carnival points to Judith Weingarten’s musings/essay/research on the connection (if there is one) between the words “tiger” and “Tigris.” No, not “tigress.” See? You’re hooked on history already. And what can we do with “The Further adventures of Ben Franklin’s ghost?” (Ghost — hell’s bells! — son James was born on Ben Franklin’s birthday; that’s gotta be an omen of good, right?)
We need to get in the carnival mood . . .
Leave a Comment » | Education, History, Weblogs | Tagged: Education, History | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
The bathtub should pass 350,000 bubbles hits sometime today. Thank you, Dear Readers.
My apologies for posting so little over these past few weeks.
2 Comments | Administrivia, Weblogs | Tagged: Administrivia | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
Bad, from The Bad Idea Blog (the guy who uses that amazingly ugly fish with the huge proboscis-like thing as his avatar), has done a fine job of defending Darwin, evolution, science, reason, manners, Mom, apple pie, the American flag, free markets, liberty, and the 8th Amendment, over at a blog called Seedlings.
The proprietor of Seedlings is unhappy with people who contest his claims. That he’s let Bad go so long is a tribute to Bad — and worthy of your looking in. There is nothing quite so pompous as a creationist ruling that biologists don’t know beans about biology. It’s astounding such rooms full of balloons don’t attract more kids with pins.
7 Comments | Creationism, Evolution, Intelligent Design, Rampant stupidity, Reason, Voodoo science, Weblogs | Tagged: Darwin, Evolution, Science, Weblogs | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
Carnival of the Liberals #52 comes to us from Yikes! It’s number 52, marking two years of bringing the best of liberalism, classic and otherwise.
In honor of the Big Bloggy Meeting hosted by Americans United for the Separation of Church and State last week in Washington, this issue focuses on issues of separation of church and state. This is the 60th year of AU — so celebrate some freedom, will you?
The next edition of the Carnival of the Liberals will be hosted by Neural Gourmet, and will be a “best of” issue for the past year. Here’s the official plug:
The next edition of Carnival of The Liberals on December 5th is the first edition of CotL’s third year and will be hosted by Leo at Neural Gourmet.
CotL #53 will be the annual “best of” edition. The rules for this edition are somewhat different from previous editions of CotL:
- It is restricted to only bloggers who have appeared in CotL over the past year
- Bloggers should send in what they consider to be their “best” post from the past year that hasn’t appeared in CotL
- From those submitted I’ll pick what I consider to be the “best of the best” and run those (I’ll also link to the rest on the CotL site).
And finally, Carnival of The Liberals is looking for hosts for next year. If you would like to have the fun of reading ALL the posts submitted, not just the ones selected, email Leo (“tng”) Lincourt at: leolincourt AT gmail DOT com.
Leave a Comment » | Politics, Reason, Weblogs | Tagged: Carnival of the Liberals, Politics, Reason | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
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Ed Darrell on Texas's Colorado River
Come on in, the water's fine. Come often: Cleanliness is next to godliness.
Millard Fillmore's Bathtub 