Erehwon Notebook

11:53:59 PM I received a really nice note this evening from Joshua Freeman telling me how much he liked my blog! Thanks a ton Joshua! It's nice to know someone is reading my ramblings. The esteemed Mr. Freeman has just started his own blog at www.freeman.dk. Take a minute and check it out.
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11:37:07 PM I guess I should also mention that I've finally managed to both get together a decent toolset for doing web work under Linux, and managed to get time to learn something useful about those tools. I've had The Gimp for ages, but haven't ever really taken the time to learn it. I'm no Gimp guru yet, but I picked up the basics today and can at least make some halfway decent images (even if I didn't really take the time to optimize them). After many trials and tribulations with SCREEM, I've ended up settling on Bluefish for my editor. Screem had a few nicer features, but it kept puking on the syntax highlighting and crashing. Bluefish seems very solid and has a useful feature set too. The new screenshot shows some of these tools in use while I was doing the site redesign.
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11:26:21 PM I completely re-vamped the look of the site today. I'm not sure why, but I've always really wanted to do a site that really looked like a note book, probably because I've always been big on notebooks and lists and the like. Between paper and electronic solutions, I bet I've tried fifty different note keeping ideas in the last decade. I've probably started journaling at least as many times. This attempt seems a bit more successful!
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This article adds to the growing evidence that some of our civic leadership is starting to get a clue as to the neccessity of addressing the "Digital Divide." I guess after a few years of metaphorical blows to the head, even a politician can begin to comprehend that the current global economic boom is being fueled by increasingly frictionless information access and technology. Of course, not all the politicians get it; it seems from the article that the Govenor of Maine (who is proposing this initiative) is facing some significant opposition from members of the legislature. According to these members of the Luddite party, repairing the "bricks and mortar" of their existing schools is more important of higher priority over ensure access to computers and the Internet.

Okay, geniuses, let me spell it out in words even a sixty year-old lawyer/legislator that's never touched a computer can understand: the American education system as it currently exists is fundamentally mismatched to the world that's around it these days, and destined to fail if it continues along the current course. You idiots (along with the existing educational power structure) continue to try an retrofit an industrial age institution with political bells and whistles, pointing to it, and declaring it's "modern." Modern like the 1950's, maybe. Get a clue. Huge, monolithic schools don't work. Teachers that can't get access to relevant training (or are too lazy to change lesson plans more than once a decade) hinder the intellectual development of our children. Paying them a dirt wage doesn't provide much incentive to get better, either, particularly in an economy where 20 year-olds are becoming overnight millionaires.

The technology exists now to create small, neighborhood centers of learning, staffed by master teachers, connected to an entire world's worth of knowledge and learning. Please stop using Henry Ford (or even Demming) for your model of educational excellence and start looking at today's organizational pioneers. A little creativity could go a long way here.
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GeoURL

Saturday, March 4, 2000