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Guest Thinkers —

Not so irrelevant 010

My latest roundup of links and tools…

By now we should be thinking about the Internet like we do water and electricity

Slate Magazine notes that

Camp McCain . . . fundamentally does not see the Internet as essential infrastructure. . . . Instead, Camp McCain dreams of a competitive market in Internet services, and so if Obama sees the Internet as a road, McCain takes it as a car: something that consumers will buy if they want it. In fact, in 2001, Michael Powell compared the Internet to a luxury car: ‘I think there is a Mercedes divide. I would like to have one, but I can’t afford one.’ Any too-ambitious government project to put a fiber cable in people’s homes, thinks Camp McCain, is likely doomed to failure.

All I have to say about this is that any country that doesn’t see the Internet as essential infrastructure for driving forward its national economy and societal well-being is doomed. Doomed, I tell you! [hat tip to Will Richardson]

Speaking of which…

  • The Partnership for 21st Century Skills just issued a new report on education and global competitiveness. Lots of yummy statistics in there about the changing American workplace. a plum reading choice for school leaders. Visit www.tinyurl.com/jobsarechanging

    • Huh?

    • It’s easy to find examples of why we need people to translate the world of educational research for practitioners. To most K-12 educators, for examples, paragraphs 5 through 7 of this study summary (which purports to report the instructional value of using interactive whiteboards) are complete gibberish.

      • The power of transparency

      • I love being able to peer into the innards of Dan Meyer’s mind and instruction. How many other teachers do we know that would even be comfortable with the thought of opening up their entire classroom curriculum for critique and discussion?

        • The power of the aggregator

        • A couple of weeks back, Doug Johnson had a great post about the power of RSS aggregators. I’ve been introducing our new principal cohort to Google Reader. Comment from last night’s class: There’s a whole world out there that I didn’t know about!

          • The power of prefetching

          • I like the fact that FeedDemon, the software I’m using as my primary aggregator, lets me read stuff offline.

            • Do you know the way to San Jose?

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