Sun May 11, 2008
If You Love What the Bush Administration Has Done in Iraq...
When overseas colleagues criticize American foreign policy, I've been known to respond, "If you like Iraq, you'll love what the Bush administration has done to public education."
That's how my favorite educational iconoclast, Gary Stager, starts his first posting at the Huffington Post. In The Surge Against First Graders, Gary takes a look at the some of the policies implemented by the current administration and draws apt parallels between the war on public education started by the Bush's and their cohorts in the publishing industries and the rhetoric that led our nation into the disastrous war in Iraq.
Luckily education policies haven't led to thousands of deaths or caused our nation to plummet into debt. But plenty of folks have gotten rich in order to follow policies based on faulty research (intelligence) and wrong-headed policies. If you think that the precepts of NCLB and the methods forced onto educators aren't part of a greater belief among the Bush's that public education is fundamentally bad and ought to be replaced by private and religious schools, then you haven't been paying attention to what they've been saying. Kudos to Gary for kicking things off with such a definitive and defiant look at what's really going on behind the curtains.
Thu May 08, 2008
Blissfully Ignorant to How Accomplished Today's Kids Really Are
I've been to a couple of workshops recently, and had the chance to synthesize some of my thoughts during a taping of our local technology TV show yesterday morning.
In our conversation about parenting in the internet age, Lee Keller and I started by discussing all the *great* things kids are doing with computers and technology. The show will eventually get to the point that parents have to be involved in their children's online world, including establishing limits and being aware of the--shall we say--less-healthy world of the internet where cyberbullying and inappropriate content and even predators are a concern.
But we wanted to start on a positive note to get the message across that the great majority of what our kids are doing is truly awesome. In a talk I attended on Saturday, Stephen Abram made a number of these points, including the assertion that IQ scores have risen among North American kids by 20 points over the last ten years and that during that time young people invented their own language with IM speak and text messaging.
Now think about that for a moment.
Invented
their
own
language.
Gosh, we ought to be proud, right?
And think about the explosion of creativity that has occurred at the same time as personal publishing of your own work intersected with a new social dynamic that allowed teenagers and young adults to gather and discuss the videos, poems, songs, essays, and personal expressions of who they are in a virtual world that reached around the globe.
Whoa. Who saw that coming 20 years ago? For that matter, who sees the value in what our kids are doing today? In a landscape littered with standardized testing and much hand-wringing about whether our students will be prepared for the "jobs of the future", and where we rank compared to other nations, we've completely missed the fact that kids in North America are leading the way in this new explosion of personal creative expression.
So, cheer up all of your school administrators and policy makers and principals and classroom teachers. There's a revolution happening right under your nose, and it's likely that you, like most adults, are completely missing the point of what's happening. Because while you're developing the next big program or watching that 'viral' video bemoaning the ways our kids are slipping, they're already way ahead of you, blazing their own trails and moving on without you.
Good thing they're doing it without us.
Because when you live in a world of bean-counters who want to draw a direct line between educational inputs (teaching) and educational outcomes (test scores) the value of creativity, expression, and communication gets no place in the matrix of what's good and bad in education.
Good thing the kids know better.
Fri May 02, 2008
An Illustrated Fireworks Quick Tip
One of the things that we try to do over at Community MX is provide practical, real-world examples in the tutorials that we write. Sometimes those can be tips that are pretty simple, but that might make your time at the computer more productive.
Such is the case with my latest tutorial---A Fireworks Quickie - Vacuuming Pixels--which looks at a simple tip for removing parts of an image. What's the secret? Easy. It has to do with you taking your hands off the mouse when using one of Fireworks' bitmap selection tools.
But you can read that for yourself. This particular article is free!
Sun Apr 27, 2008
Six Words That Will Totally Underwhelm the Recipient of Your Gift
Look! I got you a Zune!
Wed Apr 23, 2008
How Do You *Really* Spend Your Time at Work?
This week we had to complete a task at work, detailing to our boss the percentages of our time that went to the different projects we all work on. Nothing unusual with that, so we each took a stab at the figures, trying to determine how much time went into different aspects of our job over the course of a year.
Truth is though, there are an awful lot of things that really fill my day. An accurate representation might be something like this:
50%--Deal with E-mail (more on this in a bit)
20%--Look at stuff on the Web
10%--Shooting the breeze, kvetching, meeting with, and otherwise interacting with co-workers
10%--Filling out paperwork, complaining about paperwork, trying to understand the maze that needs to be navigated to get the paperwork processed and/or approved
10%--Making stuff, writing, planning, and otherwise doing my primary job
Now I can hear you saying, "Kim, you can't possibly spend that much time on e-mail. Can you?"
And the answer is "Absolutely!" E-mail takes a huge chunk of my day. If I were to break down the time that takes 50% of an average day it would probably come out like this:
15%--Composing e-mails
10%--Responding to e-mails
5%--Writing replies a second time because the respondent didn't read the first message
5%--Writing apologies to people who threw out the e-mail before it was read and now claim you never sent it in the first place.
5%--Resending e-mails that were supposed to have an attachment the first time you sent them
5%--Trying to understand what the person is writing to you actually wants you to do
5%--Reading replies from your boss that come two weeks after you made a decision on your own
I'm sure I'm missing something just on the e-mail side alone, and perhaps in my main categories as well. So, if you'd like to chime in with a new category that I missed, or something you routinely do at your work, please feel free to post a comment.
Mon Apr 21, 2008
Fun With: A New Tutorial Series For Fireworks and Flash
I've been shifting the focus of my freelance writing a bit as I'm getting back into the writing groove after some time off. It's good to be writing again, but it's been a little tough coming up with article ideas.
So, I've decided to revive an old device that I've used in the past--the simple opportunity to play around with design tools like Fireworks and Flash just to have fun and pick up some new techniques. The idea behind these tutorials is not to show you step by step how to get something done, but to present ideas on how something might be done, and then set you loose for your own creative play.
These articles will run at Community MX, along with all my others (Over 100? Really?), which will mean some are commercial and others may be free.
In my first article I looked at having fun with bitmap selection tools in Fireworks and how Live Filters can be applied to get some pretty striking effects, like this photo of my daughter at a dolphin encounter.
Next up I'll be looking at how glows and shadows can be used for creative effects in Fireworks, like the groovy and outlined text you see here.
I'm looking forward to some fun projects ahead and the chance to let that playful, fun, and creative side of myself out to just experiment and try new things. Hope you're able to join me.
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