Pollan via Rhulman:

Train a new generation of farmers, spread them throughout the land, and make farming a revered profession.

I'm looking forward to Will finally bringing his work around this bend, although he's taking his damn time about it.

Kos:

Ah yes, us loony bloggers, fighting for universal health care, to protect social security, to keep our government from unconstitutionally spying on us, and to promote a sane foreign policy that doesn't unnecessarily cost us blood and treasure. You know, loony things supported by a majority of the (apparently also loony) American people.

Here's what too many people still don't understand -- there's nothing loony about the netroots. This isn't fertile territory for the McKinneys and Kuciniches of our party. This is fertile territory for the Howard Deans of our party -- sensible, pragmatic progressives who aren't afraid to be Democrats. Why? Because we're the nation. We're not clustered in DC and NYC, we're spread out over all 50 states, and we know better than anyone what it takes to win in our own backyards.

We didn't rally around Webb, Tester, Schweitzer, Trauner, Brown, Massa, Burner and so many other moderate Democrats because they were little Kucinich clones, but because they were perfectly suited for the states and districts they seek to represent. It's that simple. Howard Dean wasn't an anomaly. He was our ideal.

We are not the elites, we are America, and we're situated squarely in its ideological center. We proved it in 2006, and we'll prove it again next week.

W. Lance Bennett & Deen G. Freelon:

Digital communication technologies increasingly enable young people to invent new forms of civic engagement such as peer-to peer knowledge sharing, participatory media production, bottom-up network creation, and direct action initiatives.

In my brain, there is a direct link from "civic engagement and young people" to the youth movements of the sixties and seventies, so I've got that loaded into RAM while I'm reading this article. Then I go through the list of "new forms of civic engagement" and check off each one as "not new." Doesn't everyone think this way?

I'm not trying to make a clever semantic argument here; I just don't get this whole rhetorical strategy. All people who are actually interested in this subject know that they're just saying bullshit for no reason. This seems to be aimed at people who are not interested in civic engagement and students. If I was trying to speak to people who knew or cared at all about the topic, I'd say "Digital communication technologies lower the bar for long-standing forms of civic engagement such as..." I don't understand the motivation to take the bullshit approach.

I just noticed that The Shuttleworth Foundation has canceled the Kusasa project:

Kusasa is a curriculum-aligned learning system that can:

• be self taught, peer mentored, and evaluated without expert supervision;
• provide learners with tools for analysis which they can use in all of their learning areas;
• be an exercise machine for analytical and creative thinking.

Helen's explanation is a bit difficult to parse:

“It was apparent that the project success would depend on teachers developing skills we did not initially anticipate,” explains King. “Teachers would need to develop confidence in the Etoys modelling environment used by Kusasa in order to effectively manage classroom interaction. The original vision placed very low demands on the teachers and was to some extent intended to remedy individual teacher challenges.”

It sounds like (I haven't spoken to Mark or Helen about this) they couldn't route around needing a lot of teacher training.

Trying to avoid teacher training seems kind of perverse. The problem is that if step one (or two) of your plan is "successfully train a generation of teachers in a largish, mostly poor country to implement something sophisticated and unfamiliar," well, that's probably at least as hard as the problem your original plan is supposed to solve. Probably a lot harder. It is worth taking some strategic risks to try to break that bottleneck.

Anyhow, it is also worth noting that all the content (LAMS modules and eToys stuff) they completed is freely available and can be reused, remixed, recontextualized, etc.

Matt Yglesias is talking about high speed rail here, but it matches pretty closely my thoughts about selling OLPC:

On the idea that ridership estimates are unrealistically optimistic, it seems to me that the sad reality of politics is that it would be irresponsible for advocates of any large-scale infrastructure project to do anything other than present unrealistically optimistic measures. For better or for worse, that’s politics. Similarly, I never really understand the sentiment that Large Infrastructure Project A shouldn’t be done because Large Infrastructure Project B might be better. Sometimes you really do get asked “should we do A or should we do B” in which case, of course, if B is better than A you ought to answer “B.” Similarly, sometimes doing A really does prevent you from doing B — like if A and B would both require the same right of way. But that’s not generally the case, and it’s certainly not the case when you compare a statewide HSR system to a series of different local transit projects. In general, large infrastructure projects should be evaluated on their own merits. If California HSR is worth doing, then it really doesn’t matter if there may be other transit projects that are also worth doing. You do the HSR, and then you start organizing for the other projects. Doing worthwhile infrastructure projects ultimately grows your capacity to do future infrastructure projects.

Laura Varlas:

In Kentucky, a small pilot study is demonstrating the benefits of this textbook technology for students with different learning styles. Instead of re-creating a complex math problem as a static image file, digital texts that use math markup language, or MathML, are able to speak words and equations while highlighting corresponding elements on a computer screen.

MathML-enabled digital texts helped the study's very small cohort of students struggling with printed text outperform peers who used traditional print texts. Many students said that before MathML, they'd see a problem but not know how to say it. Hearing the formula and how to say it was a big help to these students.

Can't pass up a post from the ASCD on markup languages. Also, Connexions supports MathML.

I'm tiring of Dan Willingham's rhetorical strategy of starting with a bold title like "Why Web 2.0 Will Not be an Integral Part of K-12 Education" and ending with a more reasonable-sounding conclusion like:

There will doubtless be more teachers like Michael Wesch who use Web 2.0 technology with great effectiveness. These teachers enjoy the technology and thus teach from the heart. There will also be teachers like David Cole (blogging in this forum tomorrow) who are not interested in using technology, and who are effective in the methods they use. The wisest course may not be to find “best practices” with the expectation that they will apply across the board, but rather to expect that teachers will select pedagogical practices based on their own strengths and the material they teach, and to support them in that choice.

I suppose whether or not these contradict each other depends on how strictly you want to interpret "integral." But to me if you're going to support teachers in the use of technology, including Web 2.0 technologies, then you're going to, you know, have to make this stuff readily available -- which it isn't in many, many schools in the US.

I think I more or less agree with Willingham, I just think that better, cheaper, more robust hardware and software is the key part of the solution, so that every discussion about technology doesn't have to be framed as a cost-benefit analysis of a high-cost item, so that teachers can have the right technology on hand to use (or not) when it is pedagogically appropriate (or not).

Update... Dan points out that he didn't write the title. Fair enough.

The moment has passed for teacher merit pay, but we'll still be reading articles about it for a while. The only way it happens now, due to the fiscal crisis gripping our cities and states, and what looks to be the nastiest stretch of white-collar unemployment we've seen maybe ever, is if muscle philanthropy moves from their current position where they leverage a high amount of influence over policy at relatively little risk and cost (vis a vis the cost of public education overall) to one where they essentially "bail out" public education and take much greater responsibility for very large, long-term investments in urban systems with a correspondingly greater share of the blame when things go wrong. I don't see that happening. On the other hand, it is hard to guess how they will respond, since they are opaque, un-democratic organizations.

LD:

The one concession I've made to maintain some form of sanity is that I've taken to censoring my news, just like the old Soviet Union. The citizenry (me) only gets to read and listen to what I deem appropriate for its health and well-being. Sure, there are times when the system breaks down. Michele Bachmann got through my radar this week, right before bedtime. That's not supposed to happen. That was a lapse in security, and I've had to make some adjustments. The debates were particularly challenging for me to monitor. First I tried running in and out of the room so I would only hear my guy. This worked until I knocked over a tray of hors d'oeuvres. "Sit down or get out!" my host demanded. "Okay," I said, and took a seat, but I was more fidgety than a ten-year-old at temple. I just couldn't watch without saying anything, and my running commentary, which mostly consisted of "Shut up, you prick!" or "You're a fucking liar!!!" or "Go to hell, you cocksucker!" was way too distracting for the attendees, and finally I was asked to leave.