Scott Ginsberg recently posted on the need to be specific when making statements to promote credibility. Those of us who in some way make a living from conveying information to people are told this repeatedly. Be able to demonstrate where your information comes from. Be able to explain or defend it.
In both the education world and the museum exhibit world, we are also taught to introduce an idea generally and then move to the specifics. Again, that is about getting down to the specificity that people respond to well. Scott does a great job of illustrating the need for being specific, for citing the provenance.
I was reading this white paper on the role of copyright in the digital domain over the weekend. Great read, but one thing jumped out at me: Barlow suggested that our intuitions based on physical objects as property do not transfer to information as property because information is “abstract.”
I’ve probably mentioned this a dozen times just because the question has never left my present thoughts, but one of the questions in my oral comps concerned the preservation of information. Basically, I was asked to consider information as an artifact. It was a fascinating question, and I loved debating it with my committee.
The concept of information may be abstract, however the practice of information is not. Preservation of information has long been a human concern. Oral traditions developed to preserve information. Writing developed as a means of preserving information. We develop recording devices still to preserve information, and we try to migrate our information through each of these changes.
Found via Library Link of the Day
You may have noticed a few changes on the site today. I certainly have!
I sat down this evening with the intention of playing with the galleries. Somehow or other, playing with the galleries became experimenting to see what was necessary to putting AdSense on the site. Then I decided to play with Feedburner. I still have a brief tweaking to do there so that it’s easy to subscribe to.
But I apparently wasn’t satisfied with just that. I then decided to redecorate the site! I had the theme already. I just needed to change the colors, upload it, and then cross my fingers and hope it would cross all of the subdomains. The good news is that it did, once I figured out that I had to activate the theme at each blog. The bad news is, I looked at the site and realized it looks almost identical to the site when it was Drupal-powered, except it looks less broken. Heh!
I did, however, manage to get the galleries organized somewhat. I still have some pieces to upload, but honestly, after three hours of working on websites the last thing I wanted to do was write copy for some very charming jewelry pieces. If you want to see the current gallery holdings, hop on over to JewelryNiche and click on the gallery link! (The link to JewelryNiche is in the left sidebar. The link to the gallery will be in nearly the same place on JewelryNiche’s home page!)
I’ve never made a secret that I’m not terribly fond of NCLB. No, it’s not what you think. I admire and support what it wants to accomplish, but I feel like it’s not the most realistic thing out there.
Yes, we need to raise the bar for our children to be able to face the current, ever-changing world, but we need to be mindful of how we do it. I read this article from Worthwhile on field trips being discouraged, and it really just got to me. The focus is on the children who would not under normal circumstances get to see certain things, but I think the damage this could do affects every single child.
We’re at this crossroads in the development of our education system. We’re at Point A. We acknowledge that Point A just isn’t good enough for our kids, and we know we want more. That’s a n incredible step forward right there. But then we look at Point B, and we say that in order to reach Point B, we going to remove relevant experiential educational opportunities from our children’s curriculum. The one thing that has the chance of keeping kids motivated, keeping them engaged, and we’re throwing it away in an attempt to make our kids competitive with children who do hands-on projects and go out and experience their world.
Is it just me, or is there something greatly wrong with this picture? Like we’ve managed to just take a great step backwards?
One of the things I miss most from my past life as a museum educator is the curriculum design aspect. I used to love holing up in my office, among all the astronomy books and videos, the old planetarium shows at my back, huddled over books and a notebook, and the old Apple they set up for me. The one that barely spoke to the network so I could send finished lessons and workshops on to the Education Specialist. I love the research and the creative process inherent in creating any piece of curriculum. It’s so much fun!
One of the challenges inherent when designing curriculum in an informal setting is trying to draw on the prior knowledge of the students. In the informal setting, the teacher is often confronted with this great unknown. What does the student bring with them when they walk into a workshop or class? Traditional curriculum can anticipate this question a little bit by designing not only the course, but also the prerequisite courses that will give the student the necessary skills to succeed in the current course. For the informal learning environment, this isn’t always possible.
I’m noticing more informal learning situations where a structured class system is set in place to give a student all the skills necessary to walk away from the series with useful skills and information. It’s a great idea because it promotes breaking up important information into relevant and digestible chunks and then creates reinforcing moments.
Inspired by this article from Experienced Designer Network, found via elearnspace
I cannot believe a month has passed already. Time moves far too quickly sometimes.
At any rate, this week, I’m trying to wrestle with some technical issues plaguing the business, the most important one being that there are no images in JewelryNiche’s gallery. This is a bit of a problem. What makes this even more challenging is that the original scans that I did are trapped on a computer that no longer recognizes the internet, so I can’t move them over that way. I have no network cable, so I can’t move them over that way. The scanner has decided to have a mind of its own, so I may or may not be able to make new scans to put them on this computer. Even if I could, my lovely software that lets me clean everything up is on the other computer.
It’s going to be a series of fixes, but I hope to have them fixed by the week’s end so that the gallery will be filled with lovely, simple pieces available for purchase.
