Nearest book meme

A few other changes were made to the 1855 plate, but this map's primary purpose was to record for posterity the political decision associated with Minnesota taking its place in the Union, an event long predicted by the series of morphing territorial maps.

Minnesota on the Map: a Historical Atlas by David A. Lanegran.

Rules:
* Get the book nearest to you. Right now.
* Go to page 56.
* Find the 5th sentence.
* Write this sentence - either here or on your blog.
* Copy these instructions as commentary of your sentence.
* Don't look for your favorite book or your coolest but really the nearest.

It's the book I keep on the coffee table - a beautiful, fascinating history of the state of Minnesota told through maps made of the place. It only sounds boring.

Thanks to Stephen Abrams of Stephen's Lighthouse for this rather interesting (and easy) meme.

Bloggers, you're it.

Create better schools by creating better societies

If you want to change the world, change the world of a child. – Pat Schroeder

I've always believed that one can create a better society by better educating the members of that society. I still do. But I wonder if the reverse isn't just as true and important: the only way we will create better schools is by first creating a better society. (OK, so I know this is not a new concept, but we are all entitled to our own little epiphanies.)

The Gates Foundation tackled school improvement head on by working to create small, project-based schools in areas of high poverty that focused on relevance. Didn't work.

It's time to try the alternative approach well-expressed by Kevin Riley on his El Milagro blog where he recommends these "school improvement" efforts to President-elect Obama:

1. Provide health care for all of my students [at his charter school] to address the scourge of childhood obesity, diabetes, and poor nutrition;

2. Ensure that every child has access to comprehensive eye exams and appropriate interventions when they are struggling just to see– let alone to read;

3. Ensure that every child has regular dental checkups and access to highly qualified dentists so that my students’ baby teeth aren’t rotting in their heads;

4. Provide the funding support and infrastructure so that all of my students can attend preschool like the affluent kids do;

5. Create a way for every child in America to have a laptop and access to the Internet so that poor children aren’t pushed further behind by the technology divide that favors their more affluent counterparts;

6. Divert the 10 billion dollars we are currently spending every month in Iraq and re-invest in the modernization and construction of state-of-the-art school buildings in every community in America;

7. Guarantee a college education of the highest quality for all children so they are motivated to apply themselves academically;

8. Eliminate unemployment so that the parents of my students can properly provide the basic necessities for their children-food, clothing shelter;

9. Significantly raise the minimum wage so that our parents are not forever struggling against the tide…fighting the unwinnable battle to stay ahead of a runaway economy and its stunning indifference to the working poor…

And… let’s see… I guess this is a big one…

10. Eliminate politically motivated accountability systemsthat, for the most part, test our students’ ability to test while ignoring all of their other assets: like their creativity and their critical thinking and problem solving and communication skills; and their proficiency with technology and their ability to speak in multiple languages or lead others or serve their community…”

Eight of the ten suggestions Mr. Riley makes are fixes to society, not schools. And I bet each suggestion would actually make a genuine improvement in how well kids do in school.

I would riff a bit on Riley's tenth suggestion:

"Make all state and national tests be "value-added" rather than "normed." Let's work on getting the personal best from each child, rather than continue to sort the winners from the losers."

What is the one suggestion you would make to the incoming Secretary of Education that would actually have a chance of improving education for all kids?

Image "Impoverished mother and children from an etching by Jacques Callot." Life Magazine images available on Google Image Search

On ranking, awards and other nonsense

You do what you do out of your private love of the thing itself. - Anne Dillard

• Jason Priem has developed a very interesting "interactive, animated tagcloud of the top fifty edublogs" at <jasonpriem.com/feedvis>. It's a masterful piece of programming.
• Scott McLeod at Dangerously Irrelevant does a full-bore analysis of educational blog rankings and the rise and fall of their "authority" status.
• People's gettin' excited about the Eddie's blog awards. (Cathy and Joyce, anyway.)

But I just don't get it. What is the purpose of awards and rankings? Do we really need them in this long-tailed communication medium of blogging? In fact, might they even be counter productive?

I would certainly label the Eddies as a form of extrinsic reward for bloggers. Depending how they are used, rankings are the same. And as Alfie Kohn’s classic book Punished by Rewards: The Trouble With Gold Stars, Incentive Plans, A’S, Praise, and Other Bribes (Houghton Mifflin, 1993) demonstrates, rewards can punish those who do not receive them; rewards can rupture relationships between students and between students and teachers; rewards ignore the reasons for a desired behavior; and  rewards can discourage risk-taking. But the single most devastating conclusion he draws from his research is that rewards can actually discourage desired behaviors. (from my take on Kohn's book here.)

Do we actually want competitive blogging? How many of Kohn's negative behaviors may well be (or are now) demonstrated among the edublogosphere because of rankings and awards? Don't bloggers most write for their own intrinsic reasons - to clarify their own thinking, to record their daily observations, to reflect willfully, to share selflessly, to constructively converse with those of both like and unlike minds?

I suppose pissing contests are just human nature. But comparing the size (popularity) of mine to the size (popularity) of yours seems the antithesis of the "I'll share mine if you share yours" world of personal learning networks.

Do blogging awards and rankings have any positive uses?