NYTimes: A Teachable Moment

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A Teachable Moment - Education in a Post-Katrina New Orleans - NYTimes.com

The city’s disastrously low-performing school system was almost entirely washed away in the flood — many of the buildings were destroyed, the school board was taken over and all the teachers were fired. What is being built in its place is an educational landscape unlike any other, a radical experiment in reform. More than half of the city’s public-school students are now being educated in charter schools, publicly financed but privately run, and most of the rest are enrolled in schools run by an unusually decentralized and rapidly changing school district. From across the country, and in increasing numbers, hundreds of ambitious, idealistic young educators like Hardrick and Sanders have descended on New Orleans, determined to take advantage of the opportunity not just to innovate and reinvent but also to prove to the rest of the country that an entire city of children in the demographic generally considered the hardest to educate... can achieve high levels of academic success...

Simplify Media: Music Streaming from your Computer...

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Simplify Media is an application that allows you to share your music over the net. In addition you can listen to up to 30 other streams from your friends music collections. In addition they have a nice application for the iPhone/iPod Touch that allows you to access music from your own computer, or from friends computers, using our iPhone/iPod Touch.

[From Simplify Media - You've Been Invited]

Stanza eBook Reader for the iPhone/iPod Touch

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Lexcycle.com has an application called Stanza, an ebook reader for the Mac. I recently wrote about Stanza and use it quite a bit to convert content for use on my Kindle. The version I used before also had the ability to export a book into a Safari bookmarklet format. By saving the bookmarklet file to your Safari bookmarks, you could then tranfer the file to your theiPhone via a sync. While this worked, it did cause performance issues for the Safari browser.

Lexcycle has now created an iPhone/iPod Touch application that allows you to easily transfer books and other documents from your Mac to your iPhone. In addition you can also download them directly from online directories such as Feedbooks. A local wireless connection is made between your computer and device and you can then browse for open Stanza documents and import them into your iPhone/iPod Touch. Below are some screenshots that highlight this process.

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Knol

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With up to 30% of Google/Yahoo searches returning links to Wikipedia, Google sees an enormous non-adsensed space. The traffic of Wikipedia makes ad providers salivate. To combat this untapped market, Google opted to create a service called Knol, where articles can be written by experts (sometimes). Anyone can create a knol and invite others to contribute. If several people decide to write a knol on elearning, both are allowed to exist. The community can vote and rate article quality. Authors of knols can also add Google's adsense service to the site and make money in the process.
It will be interesting to see how this unfolds. Google is essentially stating that individual ownership of articles is important. How will knols be listed in Google searches? Will they receive better search returns than Wikipedia articles? A part of me would like to dislike this service (how much more of our soul must we give up to Google?). But the idea is well conceived. The service seems to function well, without the hideous editing text of mediawiki. Feedback loops are in place through comments and ratings. The opportunity for economic gain will likely also draw some participants. All those factors combine to suggest Knol has a real chance for success. Currently, the resources on the site are quite scarce, however.

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links for 2008-07-21

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