It’s been a while since I’ve posted any Animaniacs clips. Here’s a fun song about the US Presidents.

This is just my way of saying that the surroundings may be new, but it’s still the same old blog. Enjoy!

Discuss.

Here’s a good example of a high school English teacher using a blog to post and collect student assignments. This is one sample assignment for students in the middle of reading A Midsummer Night’s Dream:

Your assignment now is to take this mixed-up love mess and bring it to a conclusion with a happy ending. As it stands right now, everything is messed up and needs resolution. Assume the role of a narrator and finish the story. This is your chance to predict how this all turns out in the real play.

The students can now write a response to this and read what others have written as well. It seems like a lot of this is going on at home, but as more and more schools adopt one-to-one computing environments (something I’ve personally been very active in for the past year and a half), the more this sort of thing will become commonplace classroom practice.

This presentation from Karl Fisch has been making the rounds.

Students entering kindergarten this September will graduate from high school in 2020. How will the world be run then? How old will you be in that year? It’s not really that far off, is it?

Discuss.

Fox News has a reputation for being nothing more than a right wing propaganda machine, and that may be true to a point. But it should be remembered that they do a pretty good job covering a wide range of non-partisan arenas, for example, financial news.

Of course, there will always be some that see right wing bias everywhere, but I’ll let you be the judge.

Well, the conference is over and it was fantastic. We focused mostly on pedagogy today, so I felt a lot more in my element. We also talked about the changing nature of the canon. Yesterday we did a lot of 19th century historical analysis of Shakespeare instruction, which was fascinating, but made me feel like I had a lot of catching up to do. (And when I do that catching up, I now know to start here.)

Anyway, I’m still processing it all. I’ll probably blog more on the conference when I return to NYC, but until I get back, please enjoy this video. In line with the theme of the Shakespeare classroom, here are a very young Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie showing us how it’s done:

Enjoy the rest of your weekend!

Via the original creators of Charlie the Unicorn, it is my great honor to be able to share the German re-dub of Charlie the Unicorn.

Discuss.

I’m off to the baby naming for Lilah, so no time to post anything original this morning. Instead, I leave you with this Animaniacs song about Magellan, that for some reason really cracks me up. Enjoy!

Blinking electronic signs advertising Aqua Teen Hunger Force recently triggered a terrorism scare in Boston.

Fortunately, the staff of the National Lampoon reacted quickly and professionally, and put together this 24/ATHF mash-up parody before any damage was done:

I found this really compelling, both in form and content:

I gave my take on the long-term ramifications of this in earlier posts Beggar’s Canyon and Optimism. What really struck me about this video was the idea that HTML tags define the form, while XML tags define the content. So when text from an XML document is exported, it can be classified and formatted by any number of disparate machines. That’s why I can have a blog, because I can just fill in fields in a form, rather than having to understand what a MySQL database is, or how to create one.

I also enjoyed the idea of the users of the Internet teaching the Internet about ideas that only humans can have. What is a hyperlink if not one person’s definition of the relationship between two realms of information? And with machines powerful enough to process those definitions in the aggregate, the Internet becomes an über-democratic negotiation about the nature of meaning. It’s a step beyond Wikipedia, where anyone can visit to add or revise content. It’s Google News, which proactively aggregates news stories from thousands of sources worldwide.

What about pictures? How can we really search for images, when computers can only see them in pixels? Some people tag their photos, but that’s just a start. Enter schemes like The ESP Game in which players log in and are randomly assigned an anonymous partner. The pair is then shown images and they have to come up with words to describe each image. Once they agree on a word, they may move on to the next image. They win if they can label a certain number of images in the pre-determined time. It’s packaged as a game, but what it’s really doing is finding humans to complete a task that computers can’t do, which is label a large quantity of images, so that they can join this network of information.

Some might be troubled by the thought of the “average” person defining the nature of information. Don’t we have specialists and experts who constitute a small minority of the population, but who can give us a much richer understanding of their field of study? Yes, and as their influence grows, we will be able to identify and access them much more easily through the shared mind of the Web. And they, in turn, will have greater access and ability to share their ideas with a wider audience. It will be a pure meritocracy.

There’s a website, FaceResearch.org, that allows you to digitally create the average of a number of different faces that you select or upload to their site. They discuss the hypothesis that the more average a face looks, the more attractive it is perceived to be. This may be partially because average faces tend to be more symmetrical and have smoother skin. But it’s a wonderfully egalitarian idea, if you think about it. The most attractive among us may not be any one of us, but may just be the average of all of us.

Web 2.0, then, may ultimately be a way of taking the average of all of our conceptions of the world and finding the most attractive face, the essential truths of human understanding, heretofore locked only within our collective unconscious. And then we may say, along with John Keats:

‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty, – that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.’