Here are a few video clips from the day at the races. I didn’t shoot much of anything worthwhile and certainly not enough to tell an actual story, he said, again. But I have the video and it doesn’t have to live on my phone forever. So I threw a few of them together and called it “Things with engines moving very fast.”
And so another week begins, with the strings that drew the last week to a close pulling loose and then taut against the tendrils that start this week. In a conversation with a student on Friday evening barbecue kept coming up as a story example, which I interpreted as a clue that I needed barbecue. So I had some kind or another on Friday night, Saturday and last night. After dinner last night there was laundry and the blur of one week turns into the whirr of the next. Here we are.
Today we discussed feature stories. It was great, we sat out under an oak tree and batted around ideas that students are working on. It was a beautiful afternoon under a shade tree.
And then back to the newsroom, where I fixed something I’d broken Friday night. That took about an hour, wrapping up the ends of something I’d begun at the end of last week. And then office work, trying to wrap up the ends of a department project that goes on and on.
Also, there is a ceiling tile to replace. We had a saggy slab of high density mineral fiber pulp that finally gave way. And now all of the cold or warmth from outside is falling in through the attic. So a call to the nice people in the facilities department, who gave me a promise that they would come, sometime soon, to fix the problem.
There are, of course, also the tedious and silly routines and errands that really fill our day. Most of this particular day’s chores won’t even mean anything in the long run. It is a Monday, after all.
Things to read … because it is a Monday.
And now we’ve localized the American Ebola story, Alabama teacher on leave after traveling aboard same plane, but on a different day, as Ebola patient:
The Phenix City Board of Education placed a high school teacher on paid leave after learning the employee traveled on the same airplane that carried a person with the Ebola virus the previous day.
The school board placed the Central High School teacher on 21 days of paid leave despite the Centers for Disease Control and the Alabama Department of Public Health insisting there is no risk of the teacher being exposed to Ebola.
Superintendent William Wilkes wrote in a letter to parents dated Oct. 19 that the teacher was being placed on leave for the incubation period of the Ebola virus “out of an abundance of caution.”
The comments are almost all with tongue planted firmly in cheek.
I usually don’t enjoy Q&As, but this one is entertaining on a variety of subjects, In Conversation Marc Andreeseen:
You could probably bring in the whole online-education movement. But for me, the question is, who does the best with online schooling? And it’s mostly autodidacts, people who are self-starters. They’ve found that people from low-income communities actually get the least out of it.
It’s way too early to judge, because we’re at the very beginning of the development of the technology. It’s like critiquing dos 1.0 and saying that this will never turn into the Windows PC. We’re still in the prototype experimental phase. We can’t use the old approach to teach the world. We can’t build that many campuses. We don’t have the space. We don’t have money. We don’t have the professors. If you can go to Harvard, go to Harvard. But that’s not the question. The question is for the 14-year-old in Indonesia staring at a life of either, like, subsistence farming or being able to get a Stanford-quality education and being able to go into a profession.
The one other thing that people are really underestimating is the impact of entertainment-industry economics applied to education. Right now, with MOOCS,11 the production values are pretty low: You’ll film the professor in the classroom. But let’s just project forward. In ten years, what if we had Math 101 online, and what if it was well regarded and you got fully accredited and certified? What if we knew that we were going to have a million students per semester? And what if we knew that they were going to be paying $100 per student, right? What if we knew that we’d have $100 million of revenue from that course per semester? What production budget would we be willing to field in order to have that course?
You could hire James Cameron to do it.
You could literally hire James Cameron to make Math 101. Or how about, let’s study the wars of the Roman Empire by actually having a VR [virtual reality] experience walking around the battlefield, and then like flying above the battlefield. And actually the whole course is looking and saying, “Here’s all the maneuvering that took place.” Or how about re-creating original Shakespeare plays in the Globe Theatre?
Sorta makes you want to invest in VR, doesn’t it?
And, finally, speaking of James Cameron, here’s some deep diving that should be filmed. It would be a 12-minute long film. New World Record for Deepest Scuba Dive:
Due to the requirements of decompression and the need to expel nitrogen, the ascent to the surface required a staggering 14 hours.
Sorta makes breaking the surface anticlimactic, no?
