homoLudens

Update via Bud.)

NAGoogle or GooNASA: “

Here’s an update on the Google/NASA collaboration.

About time, I am told by various Writing Project friends, that I post again. Given that there’s a bit of digital fun happening at Galileo with an upgrade to Manila and some experimentation with Google’s apps for education, I might find some content worth passing on.

For example, this tidbit from Bud in Colorado:

NASA & Google Hooking Up: This press release announces an event to announce a partnership between Google and NASA. Hmm . . . . I’ll be listening to hear what the announcement actually is. In the meantime, anyone want to harbor a guess?

The spaceref page has this additional editor’s note from Thursday:

From what I have learned, this announcement will unveil a NASA/Google collaboration that is rather unique - indeed exciting. This agreement represents a significant advance for how the agency might collaborate with the private sector in the future - specifically as to how the agency takes its vast collection of data and imagery and makes it more easily available to the world. Among the details of this new cooperative project, Google will be contributing funding to support NASA employees - and not just at ARC - but at other NASA centers as well.

NASA and Google. So the public education and Google thing is inevitable? It’s probably better than Houghton Mifflin.
more…

A 15 year old kid, never in the library that I noticed.

And I complain like bandwidth and tech-shy teachers are the real problems with public urban education?

The
weekend approaches, the last long weekend before the long summer.
Everything that could go wrong with tech integration at Galileo has
gone wrong this year. Final straw is the departure of our three most
tech-savvy teachers. Well, it is urban public education.

In hopes of reviving flagging spirits, I’m off next week to NetSquared, where I’m told I’ll find:

The line-up looks great and the non-profit angle certainly includes BAWP
and, at a stretch, public ed. It would be nice to get some advice on a
school-friendly content management system out of the experience.

For most of yesterday morning our school internet connection offered  us 78 kbps, a download speed of about 10 KB/sec.

It’s nice that, in New York at least, Eliot Spitzer gets it:

[via myDD]

According to Army News Service, “Individual Warriors will be the new label for Soldiers serving in the Individual Ready Reserve.”

When I got out of the Air Force in ‘77, the clerk in processing mentioned that I would be eligible for call up until 1983. “You’re crazy,” I suggested. No he wasn’t. Fact is that any recruit signs up for time beyond the 2 or 3 or 4 year enlistment period. In my day, call up was a remote possibility. Now it’s a definite “back door” draft. Read the details from Kos poster Oregon Guy.

Science Fiction author Chiaki Kawamata says: “A high school student wrote to me to tell me that he read 1,000 books in a single summer. There’s absolutely no way he could have done that with regular books and without having the novels on his phone instead.”

It won’t be long before there’s a PLA (Personal Library Assistant) that makes the Japanese novel-serializing cellphones described in that BBC piece look as out of date as word processing typewriters seem to us today.

Alan Levine is off to new adventures:

After fourteen years of doing technology ‘stuff’ here at Maricopa, I am making a break to run with a new pack… I have been offered (and accepted today) an excellent opportunity to join the New Media Consortium, where I will be something like ‘Director of Technology Resources and Member Services’. Whatever the title (like what does ‘Instructional technologist’ really mean?, I’ll take something like ‘web geek’) , it is exciting to be joining a Great Organization doing Cool Stuff. [via CogDogBlog.]

NMC are the Pachyderm folks. Cool.

From the BBC re: the latest military action in Iraq:

So things are heating up in cold, wet San Francisco:

Fed up with the slow pace of negotiations, on Wednesday March 15th, the Assembly of the United Educators of San Francisco voted unanimously to set a strike vote by the end of March.

And we can use the warmth. We haven’t gotten a cost of living adjustment in four years, in a city that’s the most expensive place to raise a family in the state (if not the country).

“No money,” the district says. No money to pay us. So there’s no staffing or budget for tech integration efforts that might include the sorts of cutting edge stuff that gets bandied about as ‘Web 2.0′ Hell, we’re at something like Web 0.2 in most of our schools. At Galileo, I’ve pushed the adoption of a few apps that might serve teachers well, but those efforts have been under the district radar. They can’t be sustained much longer. Several of the few teachers who’ve adopted tech through the library make quiet plans to bail the district for better-paying suburban gigs next year. They’ll be replaced by enthusiastic newbies who’ll learn a bit and leave in their turn. And even if we could train and retain most, the more teachers start to use galileoWeb, the more we need to bring hosting home and that just ain’t gonna’ happen. There is so simply no money to do this tech stuff.

Rain’s lovely tonight, with empty streetlight-reflecting streets. Reminds me of Shanghai and Taipei. China’s smart - they’ll find the money.