• Vertical gardening and sky farming ~ Pictures of several approaches (via)• Jeff's Pirate Cove on the Pacific side of Guam is one of best places on island for a hamburger. I've now discovered that it is also one of the best places for local weather information. I suppose the old pirate compiles it all in one place so he can avoid weather surprises on his pillaging and plundering excursions. ~ Link
• "Textbooks would have to be eliminated from (Arizona) classrooms that move to a digital curriculum under legislation that would provide a new way for schools to pay for computers necessary for 'e-learning.'" -- Sounds like a half-baked concoction -- excited about the future but disengaged from present reality. Give it a few years and let the innovations unfold naturally. ~ Link
• Lessons from our children -- the word "CamelCase" -- the use of medial capitals in compound words or phrases where the spaces are dropped. We're all familiar with them but I didn't know what they were called until today when it came up in Cheryl's phone conversation with Kirk -- our oldest. Examples of CamelCase: iPod, YouTube, BradBoydston.com, iTunes, RealPlayer, CamelCase... About half of the applications on my desktop are CamelCase. Blame Internet protocols for most of it.
• Ikea has opened its first US factory -- Danville, Virginia ~ Link
2 comments:
Kindle for the classroom? :-)
Law making bodies and school districts have been talking electronic books off and on for years, but there's another force stopping them... jobs. When a district discusses it, their threatened with the idea that it would put hundreds of factory workers out of a job as it only requires a small crew to deliver an "ebook" compared to a large printing and binding factory.
Should that stop them? I don't know. But, I do know that most people I know hate reading text books off of a computer screen.
Once publishers realize they can make more money off of ebooks, they'll push for the switch. With ebooks, they can prevent transferring or sale of the book. Right now, they blame student-to-student sales (Half.com, anyone?) for the high cost of textbooks because students aren't keeping texts like they used to. Less new books are being bought, so they raise the prices to make up for it. However, an ebook I bought this last semester cannot be sold, or somehow transfered to another person unless I print out the entire thing and try to sell it that way. It's the future, for sure, it's just going to take an industry shift to make it happen.
"Kindle for the classroom?"
Absolutely! It's coming and welcome. My only concern is that some politicians thinking that they're saving money are going to get too far ahead of the technology and will strap the teachers. We're going to go through a period where we're double funding everything -- textbooks and technology. That's the nature of transition.
Then you've got those setting such as out here on the islands where there is neither technology nor enough textbooks. Nor are there trained teachers to use the books or the technology if it were available.
At PIBC we get the second tier of students (academically speaking -- the small first tier will go to university in the states). Most of them cannot do basic arithmetic, have never had a science class, and they don't have written language skills in even their first languages. That's just the way it is -- for now.
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