Bill: Education - International

Mon, 19 Jan 2009 22:09:57 GMT

Scots schools urged to do better. A landmark report says Scotland's education system has to improve after findings suggest pupils should be performing better. [BBC News | UK News | Education | World Edition]

Tue, 06 Jan 2009 06:01:11 GMT

Academies 'not school cure-all'. Politicians should not see academies as the panacea for school under-achievement, says a report. [BBC News | UK News | Education | World Edition]

Mon, 05 Jan 2009 13:08:35 GMT

Networked Learning: Why Not?.

So there seems to be a little string of really good blog posts that are laying out some definite re-vision of what schools can look like. This one, by Bill Farren, fits nicely with those Mark Pesce posts that I’ve been drifting in and out of here and here. But with Bill’s post the graphics are almost too good for description. How’s this for a visual on networked learning?

And I just love this description:

Opening up the institution may seem like a counter-intuitive way of protecting it, but in an era where tremendous value is being created by informal and self-organized groups, sharing becomes the simplest and most powerful way of connecting with external learning opportunities. Why limit students to one teacher when a large number of them exist outside the institution? Why limit students to a truncated classroom conversation when a much larger one is taking place all over the world? Why not give students real-world opportunities to learn how to manage and benefit from networked sources?¬[sgl dagger] Institutions that are opening up are betting that the benefits obtained by sharing their resources will outweigh the expenses incurred in their creation. These institutions understand that larger and richer sources of knowledge and wisdom are to be found outside their walls. They understand that allowing students to access these sources, sharing their own, and helping students learn how to manage and understand all of it, will add value to what it is that they do as institutions.

Again, this is higher ed context more than K-12, but I think there is much to think about here… Has me wondering what, realistically, we can expect from schools not just in terms of opening up their eyes to confront what is in front of them but then re-envisioning themselves accordingly. Funny, but as I read more and more of this, I grow increasingly excited and increasingly skeptical all at once.

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Mon, 05 Jan 2009 12:47:58 GMT

As Parents, How Should We Assess Schools?.

The other night at a friend’s holiday party, I started picking the brains of people who had kids going to school at the local high school, the one that my own kids are scheduled to attend in a few short years. I got a variety of responses, most of them pretty positive. It’’s a smallish country high school, about 950 students 9-12, mostly white middle class, and probably typical in most aspects. I don’t think anyone would rate it as outstanding, but it’ not near the bottom by traditional measures either.

It’s those traditional measures that struck me in the responses I got. One parent, who is a classroom teacher at another school, said “well my daughter scored really well on the PSAT’s, so they [the school] must be doing something right.” Another parent said “well, they’ve got like 10 AP courses which is pretty good.” And a few others commented on the fact that their kids were doing well socially and had a lot of friends. I was struck by how kind of programmed the responses felt. Almost like, it’s a school, what more can you say?

Ironically, I ran into an old friend right before the party who had recently retired from teaching at that school, and he articulated his assessment like this: “If you want your kids get the best experience, you have to advocate for them.” In other words, I’m going to have to find ways to help them get the “best” teachers and to be active in steering them through the program. “Look,” he said. “It’s like 25% of the teachers are great and your kids will learn a lot. Another 40% are fine, and they’ll make it interesting. The rest? They’re just doing their time. Not much different from anywhere else.”

Did I mention there is a board seat opening up this spring? Hmmm….

Finally, one of our good friends went and visited a Waldorf school nearby and spent the day watching students and teachers interact. It was interesting to listen to her talk about the experience. “It was amazing,” she said. “The kids were engaged, making things, talking to teachers. It was totally different.” They had a compost bin, too.

Now I know it’s not totally fair to make comparisons here, but I wish I would have heard more of those types of responses about the high school. I wish I would have heard stories of kids changing the world, of pushing through personal barriers, of creative expressions, of challenges met, of real work for real purposes. I wish it had been more than PSATs and AP tests.

So I’m wondering two things. How are you advocating for your kids? And more importantly, how are you assessing your kids’ schools? If you’re reading this, I’m thinking PSAT scores and number of AP courses probably aren’t too important. (Or are they?) In the 21st Century, what should we be demanding of our schools?

(Photo: “Rows Upon Rows” by natashalcd.)

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Would you Adam and Eve it?

Tue, 23 Dec 2008 02:37:16 GMT

Would you Adam and Eve it? Quarter of science teachers would teach creationism.

More than a quarter of science teachers in state schools believe that creationism should be taught alongside evolution in science lessons, according to a national poll of primary and secondary teachers.

The Ipsos/Mori poll of 923 primary and secondary teachers found that 29% of science specialists agreed with the statement: "Alongside the theory of evolution and the Big Bang theory, creationism should be TAUGHT in science lessons"

Some 65% of science specialists disagreed with the statement. When asked if creationism should be "discussed" alongside evolution and the Big Bang 73% of science specialists agreed.

That such a large minority of science teachers advocate teaching creationism has dismayed prominent scientists who believe supernatural explanations for the origin of the universe have no place in school science lessons. Professor Richard Dawkins, Britain's best-known evolutionary biologist and a leading secularist, called the findings "a national disgrace".

The teachers who advocate teaching creationism are also directly contradicting the government's guidelines on the subject, which state: "Creationism and intelligent design are not part of the science national curriculum programmes of study and should not be taught as science." The sample includes teachers from all types of maintained schools including comprehensives, grammars, faith schools and academies. It does not include fee-paying schools.

The survey also indicates strong support for the views of the Royal Society's former director of education, Professor Michael Reiss. He resigned in September over his views on how to include creationism in science lessons. But a majority of science specialists polled endorsed his argument that creationism should be "discussed" in science lessons.

In response to the poll, Reiss said: "School science lessons provide wonderful opportunities for students of all ages to be introduced to scientific thinking about the origins of the universe and evolution of life. At the same time, some students have creationist beliefs. The task of those who teach science is then to teach the science but to treat such students with respect."

Reiss argues that creationism should not be treated as a misconception but as a world view. "Just because something lacks scientific support doesn't seem to me a sufficient reason to omit it from a science lesson," he wrote on guardian.co.uk shortly before his resignation. "When teaching evolution, there is much to be said for allowing students to raise any doubts they have ... and doing one's best to have a genuine discussion."

At the height of the row, two Nobel prize winners and Fellows of the Royal Society - Sir Harry Kroto and Sir Richard Roberts - publicly called for Reiss to be sacked.

The Ipsos/Mori poll also canvassed support for the more hardline position of only mentioning creationism in the context of dismissing it. It found that only 26% of all teachers and 46% of science specialists agree with Professor Chris Higgins, vice-chancellor of the University of Durham, who is quoted as saying "the only reason to mention creationism in schools is to enable teachers to demonstrate why the idea is scientific nonsense".

The poll was conducted between 5 November and 10 December and the results are statistically weighted by sex, age and teaching phase to the known profile of primary and secondary school teachers in England and Wales. Many of the primary teachers polled for the survey may have a science specialism, but teach a range of subjects day to day.

Higgins said creationism as an alternative to Darwin's theory had been "thoroughly discredited". He added: "If a pupil raises it as a hypothesis then a brief discussion as to why creationism is wrong might be appropriate ... But it would undermine any educational system to purposefully teach discredited ideas which are now only perpetuated through ignorance or flawed thinking - one might as well teach astrology, flat Earthism, alchemy or a geocentric universe."

Phil Willis MP, chair of the parliamentary innovation, universities, science and skills select committee, said: "There are ample opportunities elsewhere in the curriculum to discuss belief rather than scientific theory. Science teachers should simply explain why evidence is crucial to good scientific practice."

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2008 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

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Sun, 11 May 2008 10:00:48 GMT

“Clueless in America”.

Still digging through my stack of reading that I neglected, and this Bob Herbert column from the Times last week bubbled up.

An American kid drops out of high school every 26 seconds. That[base ']Äôs more than a million every year, a sign of big trouble for these largely clueless youngsters in an era in which a college education is crucial to maintaining a middle-class quality of life [base ']Äî and for the country as a whole in a world that is becoming more hotly competitive every day.

Ignorance in the United States is not just bliss, it[base ']Äôs widespread. A recent survey of teenagers by the education advocacy group Common Core found that a quarter could not identify Adolf Hitler, a third did not know that the Bill of Rights guaranteed freedom of speech and religion, and fewer than half knew that the Civil War took place between 1850 and 1900.

I think that the lack of discussion about education in this election cycle is what is depressing me most about the state of change right now. We’ll be watching reruns of Paula Abdul’s “meltdown” on Idol last night for at least another week, or wasting even more time on Rev. Wright, but the idea of having a serious sit down about education that involves the interested parties (read: EVERYONE) just can’t happen.

I will say however, that if we are going to measure the success of education in America by how many people can accurately date the Civil War or identify Adolf Hitler, we may not be ready for the real conversation that has to take place.

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Tue, 08 Apr 2008 05:57:45 GMT

'Clearer' student access demanded. England's universities must have "transparent" admissions policies to show they are not biased, the government says. [BBC News | UK News | Education | World Edition]

Fri, 21 Mar 2008 11:01:37 GMT

UK student numbers 'set to fall'. Numbers of UK students are expected to fall over the next decade - but more students are coming from overseas. [BBC News | UK News | Education | World Edition]

Sun, 06 Jan 2008 12:55:21 GMT

Staying at School Ain’t Silly.

Nicholas Gruen draws my attention to a piece on school completion by CIS researcher Peter Saunders (based on a longer paper here), who argues:

Three-quarters of students currently stay to year 12, and most of them benefit from higher earnings and better job prospects as a result. But this doesn[base ']Äôt mean the remaining quarter would enjoy these same outcomes if they too stayed on, for the more we extend schooling, the deeper we delve down the ability pool.

The Australian Council for Educational Research finds that, far from benefiting from more education, low ability students lose from it. They increase their unemployment risk by three percentage points and reduce their earnings by 5 per cent by staying at school for two additional years. They are better off leaving after year 10 and getting a job.

This is the ACER report Saunders is referring to, which is mostly OLS (its IV stratagy uses instruments I find pretty unconvincing). By contrast, most¬[sgl dagger]published economic research on this topic finds large and positive wage returns for dropouts¬[sgl dagger]when schooling is instrumented using school leaving laws. In other words, the average across-the-board wage gain from another year of schooling is large, but so is the¬[sgl dagger]wage gain¬[sgl dagger]enjoyed by a child who is forced to stay on at school for a year by¬[sgl dagger]a compulsory schooling law. In the Australian case, here’s the abstract of a paper that Chris Ryan and I have forthcoming in the Economics of Education Review:

Estimating Returns to Education Using Different Natural Experiment Techniques¬[sgl dagger]
We compare three quasi-experimental approaches to estimating the returns to schooling in Australia: instrumenting schooling using month of birth, instrumenting schooling using changes in compulsory schooling laws, and comparing outcomes for twins. With annual pre-tax income as our measure of income, we find that the na[radical]Øve (OLS) returns to an additional year of schooling is 13%. The month of birth IV approach gives an 8% rate of return to schooling, while using changes in compulsory schooling laws as an IV produces a 12% rate of return. Finally, we review estimates from twins studies. While these studies have tended to estimate a lower return to education, we believe that this is primarily due to the better measurement of income and schooling in our dataset. Australian twins studies are consistent with our findings insofar as they find little evidence of ability bias in the OLS rate of return to schooling. Our estimates of the ability bias in OLS estimates of the rate of return to schooling range from 9% to 39%. Overall, our findings suggest the Australian rate of return to education, corrected for ability bias, is around 10%, which is similar to the rate in Britain, Canada, the Netherlands, Norway and the United States.

The person I think is most on-the-ball on this issue is Phil Oreopoulos, of the University of Toronto. Over the fold, I’ve pasted his conclusion, from a new chapter entitled Would More Compulsory Schooling Help Disadvantaged Youth? Evidence From Recent Changes to School-Leaving Laws.

This paper uses recent experiences in raising the school leaving age to 17 and 18 in order to assess whether such policies can increase school attainment, and can improve career outcomes. The results suggest that recent and more restrictive compulsory schooling laws reduced dropout rates, increased college enrollment, and improved several social economic indicators. Some caution is warranted, because focusing on more recent law changes leads to less precision, and the results appear to be driven mostly from Hispanics (born in the U.S.) obtaining more schooling. However, the overall estimated effects are quite consistent with previous studies and suggest that compulsory high school at later ages can benefit disadvantaged youth.

States that increased the school leaving age above 16 witnessed an increase in average years of schooling for 20-29 year-olds by approximately 0.13 years, while high school dropout rates fell by about 1.4 percentage points. Raising the age limit also increased post-secondary school attendance by about 1.5 percent, even though postsecondary school is not compulsory. This finding perhaps indicates that would-be dropouts reconsider post-secondary options after they complete, or come close to completing, a high school degree.

Among students who were affected by the more restrictive laws, I estimate that additional compulsory schooling significantly improved their early career outcomes by lowering (on average) the likelihood of unemployment, and by increasing earnings. Furthermore, these individuals were less likely to fall below the poverty line, and were also less likely to receive welfare. Exceptions, leniency, and weak consequences for truancy substantially weakened the effectiveness of these laws of increasing school attainment. Exceptions may be desirable, since some students would clearly not benefit from staying in school. The results in this paper do not determine whether those students for whom exceptions were made exhibit gains from being forced to stay. While allowing exceptions is probably necessary, the results point to the need for more resolve in cases where students begin to display signs that they are disengaging from high school.

Ideally, compulsory schooling laws would need only exist [base ']Äòon the books[base ']Äô if students wouldn[base ']Äôt want to leave unless their friends leave, and most students accept the established norm not to leave before the minimum possible age; in a cyclical pattern of peer influence, students who stay would encourage struggling students to do likewise, thus virtually eliminating drop outs before graduation Greater initial enforcement may help establish an acceptance amongst youth that they are expected to stay in school, therefore limiting the need to enforce such laws in the future. Students may also find it easier to accept staying if schools would offer more curriculum choice (such as traitbased training), as some governments have already done (for example, in the province of Ontario, Canada).

Overall, the results presented in this paper speak in favor of supporting an increase of the school leaving age to 17 or 18. Raising the school leaving age may offer an effective and affordable means to increase education attainment among the least educated, thus improving these individuals[base ']Äô subsequent employment circumstances and earnings potential.

[Andrew Leigh] [Central Ranges LLEN CEO Library]

Thu, 29 Nov 2007 08:46:20 GMT

HippoCampus. The Monterey Institute for Technology and Education has created this free, interactive site. It provides tutorials on Algebra, Biology, Calculus, Environmental Science, Physics, Religion and some American content such as US History. The site also allows you to create a custom page, enabling you to delete the content not applicable for you or your students and add announcements. [edna recently added]

Tue, 27 Nov 2007 23:02:35 GMT

Child database system postponed. Ministers are delaying the introduction of a database on every child in England, pending a security review [BBC News | UK News | Education | World Edition]

Tue, 27 Nov 2007 22:54:33 GMT

Concern at pupil data microchips. Pupils' school records are stored on a microchip embedded in their uniforms which teachers can scan. [BBC News | UK News | Education | World Edition]

Mon, 26 Nov 2007 05:27:01 GMT

"Doing What Works" Site Launched to Help Educators. The new "Doing What Works" website helps locate teaching practices that have been found effective. The first topic: English language learners. [U.S. Department of Education]

Thu, 11 Oct 2007 23:18:33 GMT

“School as Node”.

I’ve had George Siemens’ “Pots, Kettles, and other small appliances of like appearance” post open in my tabs for what, three weeks now, and it’s been percolating in my brain as I keep mousing across it from time to time, rereading, rethinking. (As a side note, that’s an interesting little shift in my practice that the advent of tabbed browsing and sessions management in Firefox has brought, isn’t it?) George writes:

We are at a point of real change in education (k-12, university, even corporate training). We (the edublog community) still carry the baton of change, but if we are unable to conceive a broader vision of systemic change, we’ll find ourselves passing the baton to others.

So, that “conceive a broader vision of systemic change” line brought me back (once again) to the shift I think we’ve been trying to make in this conversation. The one that moves from being about tools and “flatness” to one that begins to really think about and, more importantly, articulate school models and systems in different ways. And even in that discussion, there seems to be two natural camps evolving, those who say reform is next to impossible without totally blowing out the model, and those who feel that we already have some inroads to reform within the current structures, that there are already progressive school models that might begin to point the way. I struggle to find my own way here, for a variety of reasons. I admit that I have little contextual knowledge of this whole debate to bring to the table. My understanding of progressive school reform movements is thin at best, and I’m in catch-up mode. Yet I have two children in a system (not just local) that is badly in need of reform in light of what’s coming. Blowing up the model will not work for them (unless we decide to remove them from the system) and, frankly, I don’t think there will be a critical mass of folks willing to do this to the system for decades to come. Yet I am equally negative on the prospects that schools can meaningfully change in some sort of timely way without starting over. As a good friend of mine who is planning to leave education after 15 years said recently, “I have no hope that the educational system as we know it will appreciably change in my lifetime.” He’s in his 30s, btw.

Look, I’m a writer. I list to my right. I think in metaphor. So when George says we need a broader vision of systemic change, my mind runs to find words that might begin to piece that vision together in my own brain that might make sense. And as I’ve been mulling over all of this, of how to best begin to perhaps reframe the way I think and talk about schools that might allow me to think and talk about a “broader vision” of schools, my brain keeps coming back to something that I heard Tom Carroll of NCTAF say last month at that Institute of the Future seminar I was at. And I’m not sure he even remembers that he said it because it was just a few words in a much longer response about the future of teaching, but in the middle of that response he said “…school as node…”

I wrote that down.

I think for most people, school is still seen as the (THE?) place where kids go to learn. I know that’s the way it was for me. Yeah, there was a lot of informal learning that took place on the playground, on Main Street, in the back of cars, etc. But the “real” learning, the important stuff happened at school. It was the center of learning in my life, though I never called it that, per se. But I know that’s how my mom saw it. You went to school to learn because that’s where the knowledge was. And if the teachers at the school were good, they helped you understand why that knowledge was important. And that “vision” worked pretty well for a lot of years. It was pretty easy and consistent.

Problem now is, it’s not working any longer. School isn’t the only place where the knowledge is. Knowledge is everywhere. You don’t have to go to school to get it. And now, because knowledge isn’t stuck to a time and a place any longer, knowledge is contextual. It’s not one size fits all. The whole idea that 30 kids in a classroom need to learn the same stuff at the same pace at the same time just makes no sense any longer. In this environment, we can’t keep thinking of schools as the center of knowledge and learning. Instead, we have to start thinking of schools as a part of a much richer tapestry of an individual’s learning and education.

As a node.

Thinking seriously about schools as nodes in larger more expansive networks of personal learning changes the concept of what schools are for. It doesn’t diminish their role, but it does reframe it, and I think it places the emphasis where it more appropriately belongs these days: helping students create, edit, and participate in their own networks of learning. (What a concept.) What if we started seeing schools as the places where our students learn how to learn, where, when they are younger, the school may be at the center, but when they leave us, they have built a vast, effective network of learning of their own in which school and schooling is simply one node? Where we’ve helped them learn how to nurture and sustain those networks to serve them over the long term? Where we’ve shown them how to leverage those connections in safe, ethical and effective ways? Our roles as educators and systems would no doubt shift away from content delivery toward modeling and supporting each learner’s unique journey. And it would challenge us to rethink the ways in which we assess what our students have learned. But that would be crucial and important work, work that some semblance of traditional school structures might actually do pretty well.

But, as Hugh’s great, great drawing suggests, we’d have a lot of getting over ourselves to do for that to happen.

So anyway, just some thin early Thursday morning thinking thrown out for comment, pushback, hole-poking, name-calling, whatever from a node in the network… There is much, much more to consider here, but it is a reframing and some language that at this moment makes some sense to me at least.

(Just as an aside, after thinking about this for a while, I started imagining how school would look as just “a node” in my learning practice right now. As in following “school” on Twitter, or reading the “school” feed in my aggregator, or adding “school” as a friend on Facebook. All of those seem pretty bizarre at first blush, which either means this whole line of thinking is equally bizarre or it speaks to how inelegantly school currently fits into the personal learning network that I’m already a part of.)

Technorati Tags: networks, learning, education, schools, teaching, George_Siemens, connectivism, Hugh_McLeod, school_reform

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Thu, 11 Oct 2007 23:09:41 GMT

Study reveals stressed out 7-11 year-olds. National tests for seven and 11-year-olds feed into a "pervasive anxiety" about their lives, according to a report on primary school life. [Guardian Unlimited home | Guardian Unlimited]

Thu, 11 Oct 2007 23:06:35 GMT

Five-year-olds short on skills. Less than half of five-year-olds in England meet government goals for their learning and development. [BBC News | UK News | Education | World Edition]

Thu, 11 Oct 2007 21:52:24 GMT

Gore climate film's 'nine errors'. English schools can show the climate change film by Al Gore - but with the other side of the argument, a judge rules. [BBC News | Science/Nature | World Edition]

End of Divided School System??

Sat, 06 Oct 2007 22:12:18 GMT

Is there a major revolution stirring among England's independent schools? Have they rediscovered their social conscience or are they just finding new ways to survive in cash-strapped times? This week Birkenhead High School became the fifth independent, fee-charging school to announce its intention to become a state-funded city academy.

Source: [ BBC Education]

Thu, 02 Aug 2007 22:52:44 GMT

Laptop Programmes under the Microscope. Tiburon middle school puts a laptop on every pupil's lap -- teachers and students give the idea both passing and failing grades.

Del Mar Middle School in Tiburon is finding itself in the front row of a debate about the use of technology in the classroom. Two years ago, the well-funded public school became the first in the Bay Area to give a take-home laptop to each of its 335 students. Although Del Mar educators acknowledge that laptops have led to inappropriate classroom use by students -- playing games like Tetris and e-mailing buddies can be too much for a wired tween to resist -- the program, they say, has led to a positive shift in classroom dynamics. Teachers are less likely to lecture at students and more likely to assign them to do their own research, resulting in more hands-on learning. But a study in March by the U.S. Department of Education found no demonstrable link between educational software and higher test scores, putting laptop advocates on the defensive. A stream of news articles focused on school districts in New York and Florida that dumped laptop programs, citing high costs, misuse by students and the unfavorable results raised in the federal study.

[Source: SFGate.com] [Central Ranges LLEN CEO Library]

Mon, 21 May 2007 10:16:42 GMT

Landscapes of possibility: A conference and exhibition from Reggio Emilia. From the beginning of their work, over forty years ago, the educators of young children in the city of Reggio Emilia understood the need to connect their pedagogical principles, theories and philosophy with an innovative concept of organisation that would facilitate and support their practice. This is represented in the organisation of: the physical environment; support for the development of skills in the expressive arts; the continous inquiry of both children and educators; the professional learning of educators; support for the development of relationships both with and between groups of children, educators, families and the wider community. Three educators from Reggio Emilia are Keynote Speakers at this conference. [Recent Items]

Mon, 21 May 2007 05:41:14 GMT

Short degrees 'respond to demand'. Two-year degrees are making higher education more responsive to a wider range of students, a review says. [BBC News | UK News | Education | World Edition]

Mon, 21 May 2007 02:12:36 GMT

NZ schools in line for anytime, anyplace online education. Telecom New Zealand has added enhanced capability to the SchoolZone package it supplies to over a thousand New Zealand schools. SchoolZone is a web-based personalised learning platform that gives students access to all their tools in one place: web access, email, lesson plans and school intranet, allowing teachers, students and administrators to share online classroom and learning information. Teachers can provide students with resources and information as well as collaborative tools that enrich and augment classroom activities, all of which are accessible by students anytime, anywhere. For instance, students can access handouts, participate in threaded discussions and submit work online, while teachers can see which students have accessed trackable resources, comment back to students in collaborative journals and add resources that update immediately for the students. Editure, Media Release, 16 May 2007. [edna education news]

Wed, 09 May 2007 03:11:30 GMT

2007-08 Commonwealth Budget Overview. An overview of the 2007-08 Commonwealth Budget including the details of Realising Our Potential, the key areas of funding reform across various education sectors. Budget website, 9 May 2007. [edna education news]

Fri, 27 Apr 2007 12:54:07 GMT

How to get pupils learning again. How can teachers get the most disaffected of pupils to re-engage with their lessons? [BBC News | UK News | Education | World Edition]

Wed, 11 Apr 2007 11:41:02 GMT

Weblogg-ed 04/06/2007.

Sifry’s Alerts: The State of the Live Web, April 2007

Quote:
- 70 million weblogs
- About 120,000 new weblogs each day, or…
- 1.4 new blogs every second
- 3000-7000 new splogs (fake, or spam blogs) created every day
- Peak of 11,000 splogs per day last December
- 1.5 million posts per day, or…
- 17 posts per second
- Growing from 35 to 75 million blogs took 320 days
- 22 blogs among the top 100 blogs among the top 100 sources linked to in Q4 2006 - up from 12 in the prior quarter
- Japanese the #1 blogging language at 37%
- English second at 33%
- Chinese third at 8%
- Italian fourth at 3%
- Farsi a newcomer in the top 10 at 1%
- English the most even in postings around-the-clock
- Tracking 230 million posts with tags or categories
- 35% of all February 2007 posts used tags
- 2.5 million blogs posted at least one tagged post in February
Note: The quarterly update of the blogosphere from Technorati. I still find it all pretty amazing.

- post by willrich

Education Week: Let’s Abolish High School

Quote: “A century ago, there was no way to address these concerns, but, thanks to computers and the Internet, we now have rapidly improving tools that will soon allow virtually all young people to master essential material at their own pace, and to do so at any point in their lives. There will probably always be a place for the classroom, but it will be a place where intense and intimate learning takes place with highly willing students, not a step on an assembly line.”

Note: Pretty compelling essay by Robert Epstein that challenges, once again, the traditional beliefs about schooling and learning. It’s getting to the point where I’m either going to have to stop reading stuff like this or put my blog where my mouth is in terms of my own school system…

- post by willrich

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