Should children be watching films at school?

From The Times Online:


Should children be watching films at school?: "

Joanne Jacobs asks this question, about School Time TV on her blog. She writes about how children in (American) schools seem to be watching an inordinate amount of videos during school hours and quotes one mother who discovered that her daughter had watched Enchanted in English class and Ratatouille, The Incredibles, Ice Age and Finding Nemo in German class. This mother asked her daughter:

“How many movies do you watch a week?”

She thought a bit, counting up on her fingers and trying to remember. “Oh — I don’t know — five or six, maybe more. We watch TV pretty much every day in at least one class and any time we have a sub they put in movies or something."

It's worth reading the post to see how many people have had similar experiences. And my feeling is that this happens here too, and not just at the end of term. I recently wrote about using Night at the Museum 2 for educational purposes, so I'm not anti "modern" aids in the classroom, but I do think they need to be relevant. I remember watching Franco Zeffirelli's Romeo and Juliet at school, but that's about it. My daughter has recently watched (and for no apparent educational reason) Oliver and Harry Potter (which I would quite like to have known about in advance, as it's not something I would necessarily have shown her in case she got too scared!), while my son has seen some of Ice Age 2. I've also heard stories of children who watch videos as a regular part of the school day. What happens during wet-play is another moot point.

What do you think? Are films useful in a classroom, or just as an occasional treat? And are they being used as babysitting tools when children should be learning...?

Read School Gate:

Three DVDS in one day. Shouldn't kids do something more useful at the end of term?

Film rentals go up in line with exam texts. Which is your favourite?

Would you send your child to Hogwarts?

How a hit film can make learning come alive

"

Video-Game HR Recruiting a Near Reality

From Read Write Web:


Video-Game HR Recruiting a Near Reality: "

Editor's note: we offer our long-term sponsors the opportunity to write 'Sponsor Posts' and tell their story. These posts are clearly marked as written by sponsors, but we also want them to be useful and interesting to our readers. We hope you like the posts and we encourage you to support our sponsors by trying out their products.

Would your company recruit skilled employees using a video game?

That isn't a rhetorical question. Recruiting the right people is an unavoidable and costly challenge for many organizations.

Sponsor

Enter SkyTroller (iTunes link). This $1.99 iPhone app lets would-be air traffic controllers assign flight altitudes to aircraft entering their airspace. The game ends on the third 'critical separation loss.' And, if the stars align, high scorers might one day receive a call from an ATC recruiter.

SkyTroller could help address a pressing HR issue. The Federal Aviation Administration, on which Ronald Reagan hit the reset button early in his presidency, faces a huge loss of ATCs around 2016.

The FAA also suffers ongoing ATC shortages, at least according to the ATCs. The FAA insists that US control towers are not understaffed, but echoes of this 'disagreement' can be heard in places like Australia and Europe as well.

Could SkyTroller help match ATC organizations worldwide with people who show the raw talent to keep the skies collision-free? Maybe.

SkyTroller concept originator Dale Leier, a 20-year ATC vet (retired) with Nav Canada, now with iPhone app incubator HeavyLifters Network Ltd., says that the game contains about as much of the real thing as HeavyLifters could wedge into a phone screen.

And NavCan, Leier's old employer, has shown interest. (SkyTroller hasn't yet registered on the FAA's radar.)

Using technology to find promising staff is nothing new. There's even a B-movie precedent, The Last Starfighter, in which aliens recruit the protagonist, an American teen, using a video game based on the gunships used in a far-off intergalactic war. That game notified the recruiter when the teen recorded a high score.

To help aspiring ATCs get jobs, SkyTroller would need a similar alert mechanism, on top of buy-in from the FAA and its sister organizations.

While this recruiting scenario remains incomplete, it still seems promising:

• One low-cost app that could be used to test budding ATCs.



• Millions of iPhones and iPod Touches sold that run the app.



• Perpetual worldwide demand for ATCs.



• Extra time for newly unemployed owners of these Apple products to figure out if they can help meet that demand.

Do you know of other 'recruiting apps' made for handhelds? Would you develop such an app for your company? Let us know what you think.

Discuss

"

Royal Society puts 60 seminal scientific papers online

Boing Boing, you never let me down...

Royal Society puts 60 seminal scientific papers online: "The Royal Society of London for the Improvement of Natural Knowledge (aka The Royal Society) is celebrating is 350th birthday next year. Spun out in part of the fantastically cool Invisible College, the Royal Society's members have included Isaac Newton, Robert Hooke, Charles Darwin, Tim Berners-Lee, Lise Meitner, Stephen Hawking, Marie Curie, Francis Crick, and countless other smart folks. The organization kicks off its big anniversary year with Trailblazing, a new interactive timeline that includes 60 choice articles from the journal Philosophical Transactions. From the Royal Society's announcement :

Leading scientists and historians have chosen 60 articles from amongst the 60,000 published since the journal first began in 1665. Trailblazing will make the original manuscripts available online for the first time alongside fascinating insights from modern-day experts who are continuing the work of scientific giants such as Newton, Hooke, Faraday and Franklin and making vital new breakthroughs of their own in areas such as genetics, physics, climate change and medicine.

Highlights include:

• The gruesome account of an early blood transfusion (1666)

• Captain James Cook’s explanation of how he protected his crew from scurvy aboard HMS Resolution (1776)

• Stephen Hawking’s early writing on black holes (1970)

• Benjamin Franklin’s account of flying a kite in a storm to identify the electrical nature of lightning – the Philadelphia Experiment (1752)

• Sir Isaac Newton’s landmark paper on the nature of light and colour (1672)

• A scientific study of a young Mozart confirming him as a musical child genius (1770)

• The Yorkshire cave discovery of the fossilized remains of elephant, tiger, bear and hyena heralding the study of deep time (1822)

Royal Society's Trailblazing (Thanks, Bob Pescovitz!)

Image: 'Frontispeice to Thomas Sprat's A History of the Royal Society (1667)'

"

K12Online09 Presentation Schedule Available

Last year's K-12 Online Conference was excellent and this year's promises to be even better. Take a look at their schedule.


K12Online09 Presentation Schedule Available: "

Our schedule of presentations for the 2009 K-12 Online Conference is now online and available! This schedule is linked from the following locations:

1. At the top of our conference blog, in the header as the SCHEDULE link.


2. In the right sidebar of our conference blog, as the “2009 Schedule” link above our archive links.


3. On our conference Ning, as the main “Events” tab link at the top of each page.


4. On our conference wiki, on the main homepage, on the “For Participants” page, and in the left sidebar as “2009 Schedule.”

Per the posted schedule, our 2009 K-12 Online Conference begins tomorrow at 12 pm GMT, which is 7 am EST, with Kim Cofino’s pre-conference keynote, “Going Global: Culture Shock, Convergence, and the Future of Education.” Use this link to view the exact time when the keynote will “go live” in your local time zone.

If you have not already, read Kim’s post from October 11th giving more background about what’s coming in her keynote.

Bookmark / favorite our 2009 Conference Schedule page! As presentations are published each day of our main conference weeks, links to those videos will be added to the conference schedule as well as posted here on our conference blog. (They’ll “go live” here on the blog first.) Presenters will also be adding embedded links to their videos on our conference Ning, and adding discussion posts for their presentations in our Ning forum.

If you have not already, please join our conference Ning to participate in discussions there throughout and following our 2009 conference.

Technorati Tags:

education, k12online, k12online09, schedule, school, technology

"

Ask the Administrator: How to Change a Culture?

This is a really perceptive article from Inside Higher Ed that addresses the issues of cultural change in an academic environment. Much of it applies to k-12 settings as well.

Ask the Administrator: How to Change a Culture?: "Dean Dad"

Justice

If you haven't seen Michael Sandel's lectures, rush over to the series web site.


Justice: "

Talking of political philosophers’ job descriptions, Michael Sandel’s Justice: What’s the Right Thing to Do? (UK) has been out for a while now, but only just reviewed in the NYT (by Jonathan Rauch). It has the virtues that Sandel has honed over the years (and were notably absent from his first, influential, book): he has the remarkable ability to keep things clear and complex at the same time, and resists the temptation to repeat himself for the sake of the ungenerous or slow-witted reader. Rauch is right that the chapter on Kant is a gem, but equally striking is the chapter on Rawls which is accurate (as the earlier book wasn’t always), fair-minded, and to the point (and even, at the end, inspiring). The Economist review says, that he nudges the reader toward Aristotle, by being harder on the consequentialist and Kant-inspired accounts of justice, but that’s not really my read of the book: unless his experience has been radically different from mine, he believes that his students (and, probably, many of his readers) are unduly reluctant to incorporate a concern with personal virtue into their judgments and the book attempts to overcome that bias, putting the different accounts on a more level playing field. Every page makes some real world or literary reference that will be familiar to the non-philosophical reader. A couple of social scientist friends have recommended it to me as something to recommend to other social scientists as an excellent introduction to the field.

But more to the point, his TV show is almost all up online now, free.

I’ve only watched the first and eleventh episodes, which are both brilliant: the rest will wait till the break when my eldest has time to watch them with me. I’ve not been to see him teach this course, and now I probably won’t bother (at least I read the book). I have to say that his teaching seems superb—at the start he looks a bit of a showman, but that impression disperses quickly, and it must be the case that most of the students in the class are thinking most of the time during the class. His certainty that the class will not get away from him when he hands it over to the students, and (justified) confidence that he can structure things so that they teach each other are… awesome.

A question occurred to me while I was watching it: will the fact that we can all watch Sandel doing this now, on TV, radically improve the quality of moral philosophy teaching at American universities in the coming year or so?

(Parenthetically, this might be a good moment to thank Alan Bostick for his acerbic comment 4 years ago that had a substantial impact on the way that I teach).

"

Why Big Media's Anti-Google Counter-Revolution Will Fail

Why Big Media's Anti-Google Counter-Revolution Will Fail: "

The Empire always strikes back. Every revolution inspires a counter-revolution. Luke Skywalker and the Rebel Alliance didn't win independence overnight — and neither, it seems, will the www.

Microsoft is negotiating with News Corp to pay it to remove its content from Google's index. Uh-oh: the Empire — industrial-era business as usual — is striking back. Will the rebels be crushed?

Not a chance. Blocking Google is about as smart as eating a pound of plutonium. Here's why MicroFox is making a big mistake.

Substitution. The simplest flaw in the MicroFox's strategic logic? MicroFox is trying to create artificial scarcity instead of value. That might have worked in the 20th century, but in a hyperconnected world, creating artificial scarcity kills orthodox businesses dead. That's because though MicroFox can block Google, there's no way to block people from using Google to find stuff that doesn't suck. Artificial scarcity is usually a one-way ticket to oblivion, as people simply defect to better alternatives.

Network economics. Search engines live or die by network effects. Murdoch's challenge isn't "de-indexing" the stuff of the newspaper — but de-indexing all the viral and network effects that flow from newspapers. If MicroFox could remove all the tweets, links, and blog posts that flow from newspapers, their threat would begin to be credible. But they can't — and so the threat is limited in value.

Conflict. I spent a couple of days discussing MicroFox's move with investors, entrepreneuers, and media bigwigs. Many said: "a little competition in search? Isn't that great"? It would be — but this ain't competition. It's what I've termed conflict: the opposite of competition, or anti-competitive behaviour. MicroFox's goal isn't to offer a better alternative to consumers. It's explicitly, simply, to deny Google. It's what regulators call "exclusive dealing."

Unnovation. Isn't, I said to one notable investor, real competition about building a better search engine — not just cornering the market on content? That competition and conflict are so easily confused by those at the very pinnacle of the economy speaks volumes about why our economy's in a mess. The fundamental challenge of the 21st century is learning to make radically better stuff, because for the last several decades, most industries have been unnovating. MicroFox is just deal-making — not making a radically better search engine, or better news media. And for that simple reason, Google will always outcompete it.

Scarcity. As I point out in my recent IdeaCast, the challenge for newspapers is scarcity — real scarcity, not artificial. Can newspapers offer distinctive perspectives, rich with knowledge, expanded into topics, that make readers authentically better off? That's what scarce, distinctive news might look like.

Thick value. The real challenge for every industry today is learning to create thick value — value that makes society smarter, healthier, authentically better off. Yet, MicroFox, as ever, illustrates the shortcomings of 1.0 strategy perfectly. Murdoch's move is a page straight out of the thin value playbook: bluff, threaten, withhold. Yet, if Murdoch "wins," society is worse off. Readers lose, because choice in news is limited, and prices inevitably jacked up, without better news having been created.

At the end of the day, what MicroFox is missing is the big picture. The future of advantage is fair, not unfair.

Every Constructive Capitalist knows that Google's revolution wasn't just about search. It was about learning to not engage in unfair tactics like these. Google's far from perfect — but it strives to be less evil, less unfair, less, well, 20th century, than rivals. Its next great challenge? To get even more radically fair. Google's big flaw is that it hasn't kept exploding the boundaries of fairness in recent years, leaving its suppliers beggared. Today, Google must find radically innovative ways to share a portion of the thick value it has created with content guys, without the exclusive dealing that MicroFox uses. There's no reason that sharing value has to involve kickbacks and side deals.

What kind of publishers are likely to seek these sorts of exclusive deals? Those whose content isn't competitive on a level playing field to begin with. The same is true for search engines. That's classic adverse selection — uncompetitive players falling into each others' arms. And it's why this strategy is easily dominated.

Let me try and put it even more simply. FairTrade is turning food upside down through the power of a fair advantage. Who will create a FairTrade for media? That's every media player's next great challenge. MicroFox, still trapped in the confines of strategy 1.0, can't take it on. But somewhere out there is a Constructive Capitalist who will — and when they do, kiss big media goodbye.

Empires always strike back, but the Force is with the fair. It's awesomeness that gives you the power to, like Google, create real value. So how unfair is your business? Is the force with you?

* * *

NB — Here's some more basic econ for those who are interested:

How much will Bing will be willing to pay News Corp? The value of the advertising revenue that marginal traffic generates for Bing. But that value depends first on how valuable Bing ads are. If Bing ads were maximally relevant, no exclusive deal would need to be struck in the first place. The fee is an admission that ads aren't valuable enough to publishers alone. When Google's ads are valuable enough to offset the marginal gains from fees to publishers, exclusivity will fall apart. Conversely, Google will always be able to offer greater exclusivity fees than Microsoft, should it choose to do so.

"