Blurts

This from Wired on why Apple should also team with Verizon to offer the iPhone. Bring the iPhone to North Dakota. 

You may know someone who collects apps. My wife is like that. She has apps for her Touch that to me serve no logical purpose. For example, why would one download an app (there are many of this type) that turns your Touch into a flashlight? It turns out, this can be helpful if you are older and attempting to read a menu in a dark restaurant.

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I need to get out more. I was of the opinion tht things were going well. That better days were ahead.

As I have become more aware of the education news from other areas of the country, I see that this is not the case. So many lay-offs even with stimulus money.

I have been wondering. Given our high expectations for the educational process and for educators, is anyone taking the staff reductions into account? Are we again expecting educators to do more with less?

So much of NCLB would seem to depend on interpersonal relationships and time for interaction. We are talking about getting more low performing students past some achievement threshold. Students with a history of struggles generating personal pessimism, learned helplessness, or attributions for failure that make increasing effort unlikely. Students with knowledge deficits make future learning far less efficient.

Students with histories of success are easy and opportunities for these students offer a better return on investment.

So, just how is the input/output model here supposed to work. How does the logic of reducing the inputs and expecting increased outputs make sense?

We are attending the annual conference of the American Educational Research Association (AERA)in San Diego. One of the constant topics of conversation is how the down turn in the economy is impacting people who work at different institutions. This down turn is reflected in the conference itself. Attendance is down. San Diego is expensive and I am guessing this influences whether institutes can support graduate student travel. Even a junior faculty member would may have difficulty making the trip out of pocket.

We have attended many conferences here over the years. The picture below is of a tourist area (small shops, bars, etc.) near the conference center. During the lunch hour and after hours the location usually fills up with all manner of visitors. This is picture we took walking back from the conference today. A picture of the times.

The dedication of the folks who create open source resources is amazing. I have been having some difficulty with this site. The bug was strange. I could insert links to other sites, but if I attempted to create a link to another URL from my own server the URL would end up corrupted. A pretty strange bug and not something most users would encounter. I posted a description to the users site and over the next coupld of hours went back and forth with someone (the original coder I think) working toward a solution. We narrowed the problem down to a plugin that added WYSIWYG features making authoring posts easier. The individual helping me then sent a line of code I could add to the plugin that fixed the problem. Pretty amazing.

I have written previously about not being concerned with iTunes raised prices on new music, but I could get a lower price on new music downloads elsewhere (lala). Now, it appears that everyone is or will soon move to a similar level level pricing scheme. Oh well, I guess my interests tend to lean toward older music so the total impact of the shift to multilevel pricing should still work in my favor.