kk called it “if a poet wrote a physics textbook (and actually had a clue)”
Tag: education
Peruvian OLPC
Eduardo Villanueva fears a general disruption of the educational system that will manifest itself in the students overwhelming the teachers.
Baby Driving
With a 6-month-old at the controls, researchers at the University of Delaware are encouraging underage driving. Conventional wisdom has held that because of safety issues, children aren’t considered ready for that until age 4 or 5; the earliest age doctors might recommend powered mobility is age 3.
Damn. I still don’t have a driver’s license. Should we increase the autonomy of babies by giving them scooters and HCI interfaces so they can tell us what they want? Or does that make them grow up too fast? Discuss.
A foolhardy lot
it is common for young men and women, who have had years of education, to know nothing of the world, to have read nothing.
i am always shocked by the illiteracy and the lack of common knowledge with “college graduates” in the us.
SimCity donated to OLPC
The goal is to renovate it and take it in new directions, by applying Seymour Papert’s ideas about education, Alan Kay’s about oo programming, and many exciting ideas about blogging, game mods, and lessons learned from WoW, The Sims, Spore, etc
2007-11-30:
The goals of deeply integrating SimCity with Sugar are to focus on education and accessibility for younger kids, as well as motivating and enabling older kids to learn programming, in the spirit of Seymour Papert’s work with Logo. It should be easy to extend and re-program SimCity in many interesting ways. For example: kids should be able to create new disasters and agents (like the monster, tornado, helicopter and train), and program them like Logo’s turtle graphics or Robot Odyssey’s visual robot programming language!
heh. it appears the OLPC may be the best (last?) chance for alan kay’s ideas to be implemented at scale.
Reverse Globalization
London’s newest university— a branch of Limkokwing University, which is based in Kuala Lumpur and has campuses in Beijing, Jakarta, and Gabarone (the capital of Botswana)
love it. reverse globalization.
Achieving Childhood Dreams
inspirational talk from a dying professor
Mall Cop School
“Extremely quietly, a Maryland school district has launched the first public high school in the country dedicated to teaching homeland security. “From all I could tell researching the piece, this doesn’t mean questioning assumptions about national security and so forth — it means funneling 15-year-olds into a very profitable industry, and providing future workers for the companies that comprise it. Creepy/lousy.”
continuing the tradition of staffing this industry with illerates
More than 200 colleges have created homeland-security degree and certificate programs since 9/11
the us “education” system is worthless.
A Don’s Life
clever blog by a cambridge classicist
Torture school
The Judge Rotenberg Education Center, a private radical behavior-modification school is run by a rogue behaviorist who uses discredited “punishment” techniques — electroshock — on children as young as 9 to change their personalities.
from dr. mengele, with love.
Gregor J. Rothfuss 
