The Third Bit

(The yellow raincoast isn’t really part of the costume—blame Hurricane Sandy for that.)

Family

We received an email from the Ontario Science Centre this morning about their upcoming sleepover camps.  It said:

SPACE ODYSSEY: Families, Beavers, Cubs, Scouts and all other groups
Calling all junior aerospace engineers and mission specialists! Come to a fun-filled night of space exploration. Blast off for an out-of-this-world overnight experience!

ASTRONOMY ACES: Sparks, Brownies & Guides
Reach for the stars and become a real Astronomy Ace as you gaze out at our galaxy and explore the night sky! Cap off your cool cosmic adventure by dancing your heart out at the DJ/PJ party!

For those who aren’t from around here, Beavers etc. are for boys, who are being invited to come and be aerospace engineers, while Sparks etc. are for girls, who are welcome to look at the night sky and dance. I’ve mailed to ask whether girls can be engineers too; I’ll let you know what they say.

Later: and here’s what they said—long story short, the Scouts are co-ed, but the Guides have a girls-only policy for overnight events, and the wording for the events was taken from the Scouts’ and Guides’ own material. My apologies to the Ontario Science Centre for not waiting until I heard back from them before writing this post…

Whereas Girl Guides is a girls-only organization, Scouts Canada is co-ed.  We separate the dates for the two main groups because Girl Guides of Canada have their own policies on participating in female-only overnight events. Girl Guide groups are always welcome to attend any of our Sleepover events if the dates or program appeals to them.
The themes are established each year to coincide with Science Badges in the two different organizations.  The Leaders have told us that they really appreciate that our program is a unique way for the participants to work towards earning a badge.  When we develop the Sleepover activities, we use the Scouts Canada Badge Requirements; and the Girl Guide Badge Requirements as tools to create the content that will be most suitable to their needs.  We often also use wording similar to theirs to reflect this alignment.  This is the reason why, and the only reason why, there are two distinct themes.
The other elements of our Sleepover program – the film; exploration of the Science Centre; the DJ/PJ party; are offered on all of our Sleepover dates for all participants.
We do have information that speaks to this on the website, but did not include this level of detail in the email that we sent.

Equity

Equity

I’d like to take a few tens of thousand WordPress blog posts and turn each into a standalone HTML page. I have the text that WordPress stores in its database, but there’s a problem: WordPress doesn’t (usually) store <p>…</p> paragraph tags. Instead, it (usually) interprets a blank line as a between-paragraph marker.  I say “usually” because inside a <pre>…</pre> block, WordPress leaves blank lines alone.  Oh, and it does funky things with tables, and… You get the picture.  So what I want is a command-line tool suitable for batch processing that’ll take the text stored in the database and produce exactly the HTML that WordPress actually hands off to browsers. Problem is, I don’t speak PHP, and don’t have a couple of hours to browse the WP code base. If someone already has what I’m looking for, I’d be grateful for a pointer…

Uncategorized

How I think of myself when I’m giving a talk:

How the audience sees me:

Uncategorized

Union Square Ventures (a venture capital outfit) posted their “research” into online education yesterday (blog post , links page). I put quotes around the word “research” because as far as I can see, only one item (a report from Stanford’s Ed School) is actually research: the rest is articles from the popular press, opinion pieces from various bloggers, and a handful of TED talks. It appears USV doesn’t know there are people who actually study this stuff carefully, rather than just have opinions about it. *sigh*

(Of course, it doesn’t help that a lot of the real research is hidden behind paywalls, and only available in practice to academics who are then, funnily enough, invisible to the people who make policy and fund new ventures. Double *sigh*)

Later: I spoke with Christina Cacioppa by phone yesterday after she commented on this post. She talked a bit about the constraints they work under: busy people won’t read narrowly-focused papers reporting micro-progress on nano-topics — they need overviews they can absorb in a hurry, because they have nine other meetings this week to prepare for. One of her questions was, “What do you think we should have included?” I think it’s a fair question, so my offering is Fagen, Crouch, and Mazur (2002): “Peer Instruction: Results from a Range of Classrooms” (warning: as of this writing, Harvard’s preprint server hangs midway through the download, which is a perfect example of why non-academics don’t read this stuff). What are yours?

Later still: prompted by Larry Cuban’s latest post, I would add Labaree’s paper on educationalization to the “must read” list.

Learning

This term, 58 students from 16 universities are working on 8 projects as part of UCOSP. I’m really pleased this has continued to thrive, and impressed once again by all the great work the students, mentors, and organizers are doing.

Student Projects