Romance and the long tail and other random thoughts

Another reason why school administrators need good tech skills

This morning's Star Tribune reports that Minneapolis Public Schools' superintendent, Thandiwe Peebles, is on her way out, due in large part to allegations that she asked her staff to do research for her class assignments. Had Ms Peebles good technology skills, she could have simply downloaded her papers off the Internet.

Don't let Dick Cheeney read books

I'm convinced Mr. Cheeny's request for Google records comes after he (or a staffer) read  John Battelle's The Search and his concept called The Database of Intentions - "Google knowing what our culture wants" based on what search terms are popular and which are not. I'm a couple chapters into The Search. It's excellent.

Don't judge a book by its cover

Excellent.

 

Not excellent. (Reads like a combination Landmark Biography and company promotional brochure.) Don't be fooled like I was by similar covers...

 Romance and the long tail

Privacy issues have been making the news quite a bit lately - cell phone call records available for sale, registration required for Amazon's Look Inside the Book, and of course the feds request for Google records after already gotten them from MSN and Yahoo.  We've long taught our teachers and students that nothing is private on the Internet, including e-mail. Yet no one seems to take such admonitions very seriously. Even if one's e-mail isn't made public today, the old stuff is probably sitting on a  yahoo, gmail or your school's back-up server somewhere.

Should some enterprising and extremely bored individual ever decide to do some datamining on e-mail from my past, s/he would likely encounter some rather embarrassing e-mail exchanges between the LWW and me from our courting days. The e-mail flew hot and heavy between Mankato and Minneapolis for a while. And we still exchange a romantic sentiment now and again.

So here is my advice for virtual lovers and the plan that the LWW will be adopting: code phrases. From now on in my email:

• Dear = Hey, hot baby
• curriculum meeting = lovemaking
• differentiated instruction = that thing you do I really like
• yours = love
  

 So,

Dear Anne,
At this evening's curriculum meeting let's look into differentiated instruction again.
Yours,
Doug

Don't say I didn't offer a means of escaping the long tail, you romantics out there.

Comments

[John Pederson]

"Honey, what you doing in there?"
"Nothing dear. Just read the blog.

[John Pederson]

On a more serious note, let me put on my "modern jackass" hat and say something that has been on my mind for a while regarding the Thandiwe Peebles thing...believe me...I know almost nothing about the sitaution.

What does it mean if she can send somebody else to take notes and absorb material, all the while evidentally passing the coursework? I'm not knocking the U of M or the instructors, nor am I saying that it's ok to use district staff to do her coursework. I'm just asking the question. Part of me things "creative and resourceful". How much of getting her MN superintendent's licensure was about seat time? If she could circumvent the broken system with a messed up system of her own, I think that's something we need to look harder at. Was she learning, or was she getting schooling? Would it have been different if she hired an undergrad student to go in and take notes for her?

Remember, "modern jackass". There's probably much more that I (we) don't really know about this situation. I just thought I'd peel this banana from the bottom.