Good intentions. CocoLoco to Read proposal is now finished and its time to reinitiate the blog!

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Steve Denning, Contributor 17 minutes ago

[This is from last July, sorry, but I'm transferring from another blog.]

Watch The Timestamp: Lightning slowed down 300x. [VIDEO]:

Wow! This is great fodder for a lecture in grade school through post-Grad. I only wish that Wimp.com had the ability to put in a lecturer of some sort to tell us all about this, blow-by-blow...er...strike-by-strike. "How was this filmed?" she wonders.

Thinking way back on it, music was not really MY choice as a career. As a granddaughter of a concert pianist with a 50+ student piano school in upper-class Webster Groves in Missouri, I received free piano lessons from the age of six and layed the ground for a fine technical basis to enter college as a music major.

But what I really needed and what is now possible was the opportunity to really understand what occupations derived from what educations. Begin with the end.

What I want to build as part of CocoLoco is a "warehouse" of occupations with interviews with key people in multiple levels of jobs explaining how their degree in say Civil Engineering or Math or Environmental Science really played into their job. How were they able to use various courses...or not. Right now, career counseling goes not gather, refine and use the web to really give students an idea of both what's available and where it can lead.

For instance the following. Why not construct a series of videos showing for instance how civil engineering can lead to essential, absorbing, rewarding jobs. The following is an example of one candidate. What kind of careers lead to working on one-ton flywheels? Or electrical engineering leading to developing batteries that are better and better, or turbine generators. Hey, as the daughter of an airline mechanic, I would have loved to have been able to see where mechanics could lead beyond my father's chosen profession.

How's this for stimulating an interest in science, electronics, etc.:

Pushed Along by Wind, Power Storage Grows - NYTimes.com: "Electric companies are using other strategies for storage and frequency regulation. In Stephentown, N.Y., near Albany, a Massachusetts company, Beacon Power, is building a bank of 200 one-ton flywheels that will store energy from the grid on a moment-to-moment basis to keep the alternating current system at a strict 60 cycles.

Atop each flywheel is a device that can be a motor at one moment and a generator the next, either taking energy and storing it in the flywheel or vice versa. The Energy Department provided a $43 million loan guarantee to assist in the $69 million project.

The Energy Department is also supporting storage projects that rely on compressed air. Surplus electricity is used to pump air into an underground cavity; when the electricity is needed, the air is injected into a gas turbine generator. In effect, it acts as a turbocharger that runs on wind energy captured the previous night, instead of natural gas burned at a peak hour.

Aggressive maneuvers for autonomous quadrotor flight. [VIDEO]

Teacher Evaluations May Get a Video Assist - NYTimes.com:

My usual antipathy to all thing Microhard, make my reactions to this suspect, however, this sentence to me describes one of the core problems with MS in general.

"Researchers and educators involved in the project described it as maddeningly complex in its effort to separate the attributes of good teaching from the idiosyncrasies of individual teachers.

Mr. Gates is tracking the research closely. The use of digital video in particular has caught his attention. In an interview, he cited its potential for evaluating teachers and for helping them learn from talented colleagues.

The Keynotes and Concept papers for both Connections and its offspring CocoLoco to Learn are both finally done. Now the "selling" to a government or int'l ngo begins.

However. I'm all too aware that now is the time to really clamp down on time use. A Google search finally brought me to OfficeTime, which while not free like a few others available, certainly seems to live up to its $47 price from reviews and a run through of features. So full-scale accountability will be implemented tomorrow. Wish me perseverance!

Being persnickity certainly takes time when you're working through three programs just to put up a little ol' Keynote (ppt in Microsoft language) on a blog. Lessons for the learnin'. But both the English and Spanish versions for Cocoloco are done. NO MORE CHANGES, PLEASE!! Even if they're self-imposed, they're a pain.

It's the battle between brevity and understanding. But basically the Keynotes are to just get funders interested enough to look at the long form which then really does lay it all out in near splendid detail!

One of CocoLoco's tricks to make learning interesting and enticing is to use "Elves"... little characters to make instructions and dialogues more fun and enticing.

I just copied this little guy from Sitepal's website to show you how attractive they are. His Sitepal commercial name is Chester, not very Latino sounding, so I call him "Benito" instead.

Here's Benito!  Benito, a sample darling Elf!  

Ok, call me naive. I'm quite amazed, only slightly non-plussed by the complexity of the LMSs - for the uninitiated, Learning Management Systems, for onine learning. At least two...and probably more...are developed as open source, Moodle and Connexions, which means they're free, but I still don't see them applicable to gLearn...whose name in Spanish will be CocoLoco para Aprender, btw.
I just wanted to make sure there was not something out there already that would be usable. There is a Peru Moodle group, but it seems very defunct at least on the web. Sigh.

Ah, an excellent topic for calm discussion over a copa (glass). But in the meanwhile, I think there will be ever more new ways, systems, gadgets, websites whatever to do the filtering. Although Google, et.al.'s mission is to make all the world's information accessible, it's pretty obvious that we don't need ALL that damned information. We only need what we need or want or enjoy.  So...

What does that mean? It means there have to be better and better ways of filtering it. Google is making a mighty gesture through the search engine, but darn it, it just can't read our minds...yet!  The same is happening with the media. At least in the US we used to have the major city papers, two usually in each major town. You had three TV stations. You could have 'trust' in them and choose which you liked best of those few choices, you came to know their weaknesses...or political biases...and their strengths. They were our filters, to get rid of the dross, the silly, the un-useful and give us what they considered the best of the days news or information.

Our need for a certain certainty of trust, belief, conviction that what we're hearing, reading, looking into is valuable is still valid. The question is where do we now find it--easily...not spending months diving into every internet cubbyhole to find it.

I believe that is what is next, a return to filters, to entities we have enough trust in to feel that they will give us the best of the best. Will Google try to fill that gap? Will we not only have Google News, but Google Investigations, Google Thinks (major thought pieces, papers or websites)? Hummm. Maybe. Maybe not. Another wait and see. 

Ay, Dios mio, what a very depressing article...

A Textbook Example of What's Wrong with Education: a former schoolbook editor parses the politics of educational publishing.  By Tamim Ansary

Even if written five years ago. It's a major blast at the way publishing companies write/publish textbooks and at the way states decide the one-size fits all choices. I have actually at times considered going back to the States to teach. Not. At least not after reading this. If you're in education or have kids in the US this is well worth reading.

Update. (I commit to keeping my blogs up-to-date.) I said goodbye to the wireframe. The Oversite program simply did not have a good enough help section for a neophyte like myself. So back to simply thinking. Two challenges at this point: how to make the course building program available in the most simple, uncomplicated way. Should this be via a discreet Web 2.0 program like SketchUp which can be downloaded by a Builder to use with the result, i.e. a course, then uploadable and made public?

Then how can one get test and dialogue results back if the course is truly public? Via numbered Google Forms sent to every Learner who registers for the course upon their clicking on a question? Ark. What would be the easiest way to do this? Where's my programmer! :-)

Ok. Yesterday was a Diffuse day, i.e., one in which I totally lost focus on getting started on my wireframe program on Oversite.  I just realize that I am such a total neophyte at this, no matter how well intentioned. So I poked around a bit in other programs to see what all I might put in the various menus, such as those at the top of the Firefox screen or in left-side menus as Tools. Ark!

There's a very basic little wall in my thinking. What happens when you hit bookmarks for instance? So there one comes up against the very basics of programming, which I'm not at all inclined to try to pursue. So I decided that since the Google guy told me they could "tweak" SketchUp to perhaps accomodate the program, I decided that maybe other programs could also be tweaked, like Google Forms, because it's there, the questions and dialogues could be implemented. Ark... But then as usual, I'm not sure that will ever come to past, so back to the wireframe for the rest of the weekend. Wow, this is a real challenge.

When you're in Peru...or perhaps any under-developed country, the overwhelming lack of a decent education for the vast majority is wrenching to comprehend. So I got to thinking... there ARE a lot of people around both in and out of Peru who have expertise that they would be glad to share with that great majority which has suffered from a stunted, inadequate educational system, meaning the governing authority as well as its woebegone teachers.

So why not provide experts or very knowledge folks the opportunity to give others the benefit of that knowledge and simultaneously give students the benefit of that knowledge...for the good of all.

So how do you do that? CocoLoco will provide accessible, understandable software programs. One for the course Builders to use to create a course; the other, a program for the Learners to use to take the course. Then you create a way for real conversations to occur within the programs in a friendly non-academic way, the way you do in real life.

What 'way' is that? Well, for right now, I'll wait until the approach gets fully developed, but I thought I'd do a bit of blogging on the way. Since the great majority of us software users really are totally ignorant of how the wonderful, at times challenging, absorbing, and really fascinating experiences we have on the web are created, I thought as a total neophyte, I'd try to relay just a bit of what I'm gleaning about that software development world, as well as plumb the possibilities of gLearn itself. So, bear with me, here we go...