Blogs

The Kaiser Family Foundation's recent survey of teen media use found that:

Today, 8-18 year-olds devote [emphasis mine] an average of 7 hours and 38 minutes (7:38) to using entertainment media across a typical day (more than 53 hours a week). 

I am struck by the KFF's use of the word "devote" here - it seems out of place.  "Devotion" implies (to me) a reverence for the time of one's life and the use of it for higher purposes.  More likely, I reckon KFF's survey kids "found themselves spending time with" media - they did not "devote themselves" to it. 

Most of of Liza Kindred's Lullabot Case Study will interest only Lullabot fans, but 9 minutes in, she tells a story that makes a great subject for an Open Source Education post.

In brief: a key Lullabot employee makes a small data import error late at night that causes huge legal problems.   She fixes the problem and waits for a "you're fired" call from one of the partners, Matt Westgate.  The call comes:

I once wrote a blog post castigating eSchool News for a tendency to view technology as the solution to all school problems.  The line between "how can technology help schools achieve their mission" and "students love computers, so the more schools use computers the better they will be" is not always guarded, particularly when corporate press releases are loosely disguised as news.

Traditional American public schools are bureaucracies (Max Weber), the best are learning organizations (Peter Senge), and most are in a transitional form between the two.

Bureaucracies

Bureaucracy supports tightly-coupled systems: organizational hierarchy, proscribed duties, and strictly enforced disciplines are designed for efficiency and control of people doing work. Factories, governments, and armies must be like this, so that everything keeps working predictably as people are replaced.

Inspired be Elana Leoni's post-Drupalcon Edutopia post, I'd like to map a path for how teacher teams in public schools, with little or no money, might connect the dots between Global Education on a Dime and Open Source Success Stories.

For two months, I rand Google Alerts for "Open Source Education" and "Open Source Schools". 

Almost all posts concerned SOFTWARE (adopting open source operating systems and applications), not CULTURE (values and models for school organizations), with the sole exception of posts like these by Miles Berry:

Keeping Up: EdWeek E-Blasts

It took me about an hour to go through all the relevant articles and resources that came to my email today from Education Week.  I hope this doesn't keep happening...

It's important to stay abreast of what's happening, of course, and helpful to rely on a publication to do the initial searching and sifting. Before the blogosphere, I would just pick one or two sources and read every issue (it was Education Week and ESchoolNews back then, I think). 

What does the open source model offer public schools?

"Open source" means more than "people can change it" and "free to use".

There's something also wonderful about the culture of open source organizations: the way communities form, establish norms, build systems, and induct new members, all for joy of sharing and contributing to a collective effort.

I think schools could be more like this, and this blog will be that exploration.

With the 2000 “election” of oilman George Bush II, control of all branches of government is gained by the Republican Party. The Clean Air Act has been all but scrapped.  Bills to open the Alaskan National Wildlife Refuge are attached to every energy-related piece of legislation (defeated each time).

Rather than pass proposed legislation requiring automakers to make their cars more fuel efficient, a $100,000 tax break for SUVs is kept in place, in effect subsidizing the purchase of gas-guzzlers.  

Japan's own cycle catches up with them - labor is expensive, real estate fiascos ruin many banks, government corruption is publicized.  A recession grips the nation, and production slows, as it has in the U.S.  However, the growth of the Information Technology industry staves off domestic economic woes.

The cold war ends, but the US keeps investing large sums of money in the military that could otherwise go to social programs and other public sector supports.  General Motors creates a financial division (GMAC) in 1998, financing the sale of its own vehicles.