New tinysides are coming soon. That makes me happy.

Copyright law, with respect to K-12 education, is severely broken. I just got an e-mail from a teacher who would like to compose a course that’s made from freely available materials, but how does one put together a broad course using only materials available in the public domain? I think the next step will be writing lots of letters, asking for permission to use this poem and that story. This would not be an issue, except that we want to share the course with other teachers.

Danah Boyd on the death of the English language:

SMS is, of course, taking this to a whole new level. This is pretty
well known outside of the US where SMS-speak has destroyed native
tongues everywhere, but we’re only about a year into massive texting
adoption amongst teens in the States. Now, they’re trying to be
expressive using as few characters as possible. Remember when
secretaries used to learn shorthand? Imagine how fast a teen today
would be at that. Maybe we should train them to be secretaries and give
them phones? Scratch that. But once again, the solution to a
technological limitation is to mess with the English language. Hmm.

I cut out on work today to hit the ballpark with McFee. The Bulls had an 11 AM game with the Norfolk Tides in a matchup of Triple-A teams whose major-league affiliates have spared them absolutely no talent. Seriously, JR House was the best prospect on the field. Yep, this guy.

It was “Education Day,” which meant that just about every school between here and Lumberton bussed students to the baseball game. The program advertised a “day of learning and baseball.” Michael defied me to spot where the learning was occurring. I found only the baseball.

Still, we had seats about three rows behind the on-deck circle for the Tides, and it was a brisk, well-played game. Bulls 3-2, all three runs coming in the sixth after Michael predicted a breakout inning and I scoffed at him. All hail the prognostications of McFee.

I’ve spent the last couple hours doing a little work and sorting through submissions to Inch. Poetry submissions are outnumbering microfiction about 10-to-1. Whoa.

I’m in Caraway with a group of science teachers. The other group here with us is a leadership symposium for student government types. We have bonded over the Secret Order of the Polar Bear, a dice game/puzzle which uses the following poem:

Polar bears around the ice hole
in the days of Genghis Khan,
like petals around a rose
looking up toward the sun.

Are you a member of the Secret Order of the Polar Bear? If so, leave me a RARRR in the comment section. If not, find me sometime when I have five dice on me.

It’s official now, so I can tell those of you who have been wondering why I have been curiously silent on e-mail the past week or so: I have been hard at work! I’ll be teaching an Introduction to Poetry class at UNC this fall… I start my course on August 24.

I worked so hard after leaving the high school English classroom to reform myself, but apparently I just can’t shake the urge to seek out young minds and fill them with thoughts about poetry. If you’ve been reading along with this blog, you’ve seen some of the poems I’ve been thinking about a great deal over the past few days; you can probably surmise that many of those have found their way into my syllabus.

I’ve long held that the greatest way you could possibly ever thank the teachers who shaped you (short of immense fiscal remuneration, which I will also gladly accept in the future) is to take what you have learned, expand upon it, and teach it with passion equal to or greater than that of your teachers. I’ve been very lucky over the years to be paired with like-minded instructors on many levels, friends and teachers who share my peculiar interests and understand and support some of my poetic obsessions. In the past few months, before the opportunity to teach at UNC arose, I found myself increasingly grateful to the teachers who shared their wisdom about poetry with me. I am infinitely more grateful to them now, and hope to do justice to their teaching over the next semester.

–Donald Justice

I have reserved this, my 1500th entry, for telling you just how much I think for-profit education sucks.

Suck it, for-profit education!

Looking more at how one might take education online, Martha sent me this link: Technology creates lectures on demand. My immediate thought has a pricetag– I don’t see a heavy implementation in the K-12 arena right now because the cost to equip the classrooms is so high. Universities tend to have the capacity to create high-tech classrooms, high schools are generally lucky to have projectors.

And the question continues to come up– who wants lectures? The article mentions that universities are using these lectures as recruiting tools. I’ll admit that I’d prefer a university where I don’t have to show up for class over one where I do, but given the investment in hardware and licensing, wouldn’t you rather look at a university that’s doing something more cutting-edge than having one person stand up in front of a group and disseminate knowledge?

That said, if you are going to be standing up disseminating, then YES, we want your lectures captured and preserved for posterity. I can’t imagine the knowledge that has been lost over time because finer points of lectures were not captured, because interested students didn’t have the chance to go back and review. I see tons and tons of potential for new teachers to succeed by using pieces of older lectures when they’re stuck on a particular topic. I see digital libraries full of lectures and lessons on similar topics, so if a student doesn’t get it one way, they can search the library for a different clip that might shed some light. And I see the role of the teacher changing from “the one true authority” to “the person who shows you how to find and effectively implement information.”

That would be a good thing.

While we wait for Apreso to become affordable, let’s rock handhled cams and YouTube.

If you’re interested, I’m performing live at DSI Comedy Theater tonight and tomorrow, 7:30 PM.

I spent some time tonight in Second Life with Dan Winckler, and I’m seriously intrigued by the educational potential of the environment. Now seems like a very, very good time to do some research, so we’re playing a little with Moodle at LEARN, and I’m goofing with some ideas that might bear some fruit.

SL isn’t all that intuitive yet, but it seems like a rapidly developing community and I get the sense that a lot of people in there are interested in some of the same kinds of things– freedom of information, collaborative learning, etc. I wonder about the feasibility of having a LEARN NC event in SL sometime soon, as a tool for recruituing prospective students.

Last night, Bill and I headed down to Hoke County High School, where we presented LEARN’s online courses to students and parents at their GEAR UP event. There was a lot of enthusiasm in the school for sending students to college, and I think they did a great job of getting students out to the event, which was held at night and wouldn’t have been as well-attended in many other areas.

The keynote speaker spoke in the school gym. Click on the picture to see my favorite part of the school gym:

Our speaker was a graduate of Hoke County High, and he’s now in Charlotte, where he operates his own company and is a pastor. His speech centered on providing vision for young people, and was very well-received, but I couldn’t help giggling at one point in his speech, when he stressed that young people who surround themselves with negativity and negative influences will often end up negative. He was addressing the parents, telling them about how good books could be a salve for the negative influences, and said, “When negativity goes in, what comes out? Negativity. When you make sure to surround your children with books, when positive reading material goes in… what comes out? Positive reading material.”

Great debate on lottery and education. I even resorted to name-calling. When I get off work tonight, this may be where all my time goes. If you choose to enter, be nice. These people are my friends.