So as I’ve been telling folks whenever I can, I am trying something new for the coming school year.  As often as I can, I’m going to be creating digital versions of my lessons and lectures for my students to watch and take notes on for homework.  This will be in place of a problem set.  The idea is that the next day, after a breif discussion of the lecture, we will be able to devote the bulk of our time to actually solving problems and doing activities.

This is the first attempt I’ve made.  It is an introduction to the statistics unit for my 7th grade math class.  I would love your feedback.

Introduction to Data Analysis

This is a humorous site that still touches on a key element to how some people best understand the world.  Certainly worth a look at your next faculty meeting.

indexed.

Ok, so the title is a little over the top.  But I’ve been thinking about how the services which are collectively called “Web 2.0″ work, and what they do to people, and perhaps it’s not hyperbole after all.

This all began with a game I played with friends called the Poll Game.  The idea is that one persons asks a question, and everyone tries to predict how many people will answer “yes” to the question.  It’s a step above Scruples (shudder), but can be a way to kill 20 minutes.  Anyway, the question in question (hah!  made a funny!) was, “Do you think that we will have established a working colony – no families, just astronauts and scientists – on the surface of another planet or moon within 100 years?”

This seemed like a ridiculous question to me.  After all, you should ask questions where the answers of the other players is not obvious.  I immediately pulled the “10″ out of my hand, indicating that I thought all of us would say “yes.”

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First, an update.  I installed the new motherboard yesterday (kvetch if you want, Dell still has pretty fast response times, as long as you don’t need to talk to them about a computer that’s out of warranty).   And. . . a whole lot of nothing.  I mean, the new board is fine, the install went swiftly and witout a hitch, but still had no USB support in the Welcome screen.   Two hours of surfing forums later, with no love for my issue, I gave up.  I assumed it was a driver or port or IRQ (does the registry still use IRQ settings?) conflict, and I did a complete factory restore.

That did the trick, and now I’m merrily (No, I’m not grinding my teeth.  Why do you ask?) reinstalling programs (easy, but time-consuming) and restoring settings.  The most annoying is iTunes, which I had not backed up recently.  Oh, the music is fine – it lives on a different drive – but I had to rebuild the database from scratch and now I have to re-sift through all of the stuff I don’t want to be on my iPod.  And on a related note, can anyone tell me why iTunes keeps losing a random set of album art every so often?  And why some of my albums are inexplicably missing the first track?

Enough!  This is NOT why I logged in at this late hour.  I wanted to take a moment and talk about the most brilliant producer/writer/director of American television content in this millienium.  Continue Reading »

What a day I’ve had.  It all started well enough, with me happily tooling around the intertubes at 8:30 am.  First I went to the Ustream (I’m not linking to the stream, as it is broken) of the Laptop Institute’s Keynote address for today, and it broke.  Then I went to the Ustream of the edubloggers un-conference, and it wasn’t very fun.  (I’m sure it was for the participants, but there wasn’t much to do from the outside other than listen to people talk about technology in education.)

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