philosopher.
Alexandre Van De Sande (having a kick ass three part last name is the new black) has put together a pretty dope video showing the OLPC project’s Sugar interface as if it was OS X’s Aqua.
For a really great write up, check it out with our friends at OLPC News.
From Culture Jamming on the Wooster Collective, someone replaced the normal safety graphics on the train with ones that are way more interesting.
My personal favorite is the “Move to another car if your safety is threatened” graphic. Or possibly Satan riding the train.
The episode that I spoke about here is now available on NOVA’s website. Check it out.
About 2 weeks ago, we opened a really cool exhibit here with some amazing really rare maps. It is the center piece of the Festival of Maps, here in Chicago.
NavTeq, one of the sponsors, set up this virtual tour online, for those of you unlucky ones who cannot come in person. Check it out.
Tonight, Harper and Gabriel came over to talk about TinyLanguage, but we also spent a lot of time messing around on the XO machines we have. It is a lot of fun to have a couple of them together right next to each other, you really can have a good time with the collaborative editing and games.
While we were connected up to the community, a number of students joined in. They said they were from Thailand, Ban Samkha specifically. We quickly realized that we were currently talking to students in the pilot program! I got to tell them all about my job with the Field Museum, and how we have sent researchers to Thailand to study. I even got to speak to a teacher in the program, who has been using the laptops for 9 months. They told me that the students learn very quickly, but that the parents are also extremely excited. The students even knew where Chicago was… from maps on the internet.
From the 45 minute conversation, I gained a number of new pen pals and a whole slew of new perspectives. It is amazing to see the impact that these machines have.
I’m reading a book called Savage Inequalities by Jonathan Kozol (read it there). It is a brutal look at the American public education system, and how it reflects racial inequalities and the inequities of how our tax dollars are applied to the school system. It covers the Chicago Public School system circa the late 1908’s and early 1990’s, and discusses the atrocious conditions and lack or resources faced by our public school students.
It made me wonder, are we any better off today?
I am a regular reader of the District 299 Chicago Public Schools’ Blog, and I came across an article stating that nearly 10% of Illinois schools could be classified as drop out factories. It turns out that Wells High School, my neighborhood public high school, has a drop out rate of almost 50%.
While seemingly we have massive gaps in education today, just as in Kozol’s 1992 look at the schools. While we live in a world where 50% of our students, at any institution, FAIL to even graduate… we cannot consider ourselves successful as a society. By any measure, education is failing. Kozol comes back a number of times to recount the expenses in wealthy school districts versus poor districts. I don’t have the research behind me to show if this is still true or not, but it is probably safe to presume.
So while the public schools still struggle and the environment has shown little change, the context of what is available, for very cheap or free, has grown immensely. I ask this question, what resources can now be replaced? How much do we spend, per student, on books and libraries in school? Public school libraries are a waste of time and money, they are inadequate and outdated. Replace them with cheap computers and internet access. Provide free English tutoring (I guess I will plug TinyLanguage here). Give students Wikipedia.
Maybe instead of trying to find resources that aren’t there, and seeking help that just is not coming, we need to reorder how we think of the resources we already have. We may have to let go of some things that we hold as sacred.
Neil Schubin, Field Museum Provost and Associate Dean for Organismal and Evolutionary Biology at The University of Chicago, will be featured on this program tomorrow (Tuesday) night:
NOVA: Judgment Day: Intelligent Design On Trial
Airs Tuesday, November 13, at 8:00 pm on PBS (WTTW Channel 11 here in Chicago)
(Encore airing of this episode: Thursday, November 15 at 2:30 am)
One of the latest battles in the war over evolution took place in a tiny town of Dover in eastern Pennsylvania. In 2004, the local school board ordered science teachers to read to their high school biology students a statement that suggested there is an alternative to Darwin’s theory of evolution. Called Intelligent Design, the idea is that that life is too complex to have evolved naturally and therefore had to have been designed by an intelligent agent. The science teachers refused to comply with the order; alarmed parents filed a lawsuit in federal court accusing the school board of violating the separation of church and state. Suddenly, the small town of Dover was torn apart by controversy, pitting neighbor against neighbor. NOVA captures the emotional conflict in interviews with the townspeople, scientists and lawyers who participated in the historic six-week trial, Kitzmiller, et. al. v. Dover School District, et. al., which was closely watched by the world’s media. With re-creations based on court transcripts, NOVA presents the arguments by lawyers and expert witnesses in riveting detail and provides an eye-opening crash course on questions such as “What is evolution?” and “Does Intelligent Design qualify as science?” For years to come, the lessons from Dover will continue to have a profound impact on how science is viewed in our society and how it’s taught it in the classroom.
Watch it!
Oh man, it plays Quake. Now let’s wait for the 700Mhz auction in January to see the future of mobile communications.
While walking on the lake shore path near work a few weeks ago, I ran into my friend Zach biking north. He was out playing with a pinhole camera that he had just made, and took a couple of quick photographs of me at my most/least debonair.
Check them out:
