Fun & Exciting Stuff

with apologies to Homer S. in the title…

CNN has this article on a PhD student who has created a teaching robot that will respond to your facial expressions.

“Classical ITS typically have a somewhat rigid architecture of ‘first I ask a question; then I wait for a response; then I talk some more; then I wait for another response.’ Facial expression recognition, I believe, will allow the feedback from student to teacher to happen while the robot teacher is talking,” Whitehill said.

I don’t know if this will replace a regular teacher or how it would be used. The kids would have more fun making faces at the thing to get a response out of it. Teachers would be turned into computer technicians and “fileclosers“. What happens when you get the blue screen of death? Would the robot call home when there was a problem. Maybe email? Assuming every parent in the district has email access. (Twitter?) I would happily let the robot go to meetings for me and grade anything they want to. I would also like to be at the first parent/teacher meeting with the robot.

I think it is a nice idea in small doses. I don’t know that it can replace a teacher and the many jobs they do. It sin’t something that can be outsourced or automated. Teaching is not a business or an assembly line. Every person is different and you need someone to adapt to that.

So, what is the future for today’s teachers, classrooms, and textbooks?

Olney felt that human teachers would always have an important role, but said the current classroom set-up faces change.
“The traditional model of learning is consistently shown as one of the worst ways to teach people. It’s much better for a student to have one-on-one interaction.

I think we have violated a couple of these ideas already. By we I mean Gates Beatles. And by violated I mean the small fast projects (no. 4). ACE & School of Tomorrow were big broad projects that included many students but not many teachers. It would be nice if we could move some of our teachers out of the web -1.0 arena into the web 1.0 section.

Besides the fact that the choice of color for all these Walmarts is on the *ahem* “snotty” side, this is a pretty neat map. Sad, but neat.

Karl Fisch brings up some great points about what we should be teaching in Social Studies.

Past and present activities.

Organizations of people associated together for [various] purposes.

Human society past and present.

Informed and reasoned decisions for the public good . . . in an interdependent world.

I think we need to look at how much we “cover” and how we can adjust to the changing world.

Wired magazine has this interesting article on the site Wikileaks.org Wikileaks is “…the net’s premiere document-leaking site.” Basically, if you have a secret about your place of business, government, even religion, this is the place to share that secret with the world. The problem is, that,

If Assange is unflustered by criticism of Wikileaks, he acknowledges that one of its founding ideas has not panned out. As conceived, Wikileaks would employ an army of volunteers to collaboratively evaluate the documents it leaks — that’s the “wiki” in Wikileaks. But despite the site’s growing reputation and its emergence as a cause celebre on the net, nobody’s shown much interest in poring over pages of documents that reveal the world’s secret workings.

So information is put out to the world at large, but no one is doing any kind of fact checking. I like it, but I don’t like it. It exposes secrets, but there are some secrets that don’t need exposing. The article talks about a US missile system Wikileaks exposed. That sort of thing doesn’t need to be out there.

By using the universal language… Oprah-speak!!!

So, to make RSS much easier to understand, in Oprah speak, RSS stands for: I’m “Ready for Some Stories”. It is a way online for you to get a quick list of the latest story headlines from all your favorite websites and blogs all in one place. How cool is that?

I am sure this would make more sense to some of our techno-scared teachers.

Wired has this:

A San Francisco web designer used Twitter to pop the question Thursday, asking his co-worker to marry him in what looks like might be the microblogging service’s first-ever second marriage proposal.

What happened to good old fashioned romance?? Sheesh!

I have created a Twitter account. It was one of those “Everybody’s doing it” – moments. Please feel free to add me (id: mrpotter) and we can Twit @ each other like 2 Twit-wits. See, I made a funny.