Always read Mimi Ito: When Youth Own the Public Education Agenda

Excerpt:

"I've devoted my career to researching how young people take up new technologies like computers, mobile phones, and the Internet and make them their own. If we pay attention to what young people do when they are socializing and having fun with these new media, it's clear that they are both highly engaged and learning a great deal. For most young people, however, this is about learning how to get along with their friends, what it takes to get a date, or how to get to the next level in Halo, and not the kinds of academic learning and civic engagement that schools are concerned with. As a parent and educator who is also an anthropologist committed to appreciating youth perspectives, I stand at the cusp of two different learning cultures--one that is about youth-driven social engagement and sharing, and the other that is embodied in educational institutions' adult-driven agendas. My biggest challenge has been to find what it would take to get alignment between the energy that kids bring to video games, text messaging, and social network sites and the learning that parents and educators care about. I have been on a quest for examples of educational institutions and programs that can bridge this cultural divide, and I'd like to share an example that has come out of collaborations I have had with some of my colleagues in the MacArthur Foundation's Digital Media and Learning Initiative.

Last month, I paid a visit to the YouMedia space in Chicago Public Library's Harold Washington Library Centre in downtown Chicago. The space was teeming with teens sitting on bright comfy sofas, chatting and eating, playing Rock Band, mixing music, heads down in front of laptops, and getting feedback from digital media mentors. Check out spoken word artist and mentor Mike Hawkins freestyling if you want to sample what YouMedia has on tap. Unlike any other library experience I had growing up, YouMedia is loud, sociable, and hip -- but it's still all about the public mission of the library to serve as a point of access to culture, information, and the media of the day, staffed by smart guides to knowledge and literacy. Nichole Pinkard and Amy Eshleman, who oversee the site, took me aside to explain that over a hundred teens come through the space every day to check out laptops, make media, read books, engage in workshops and special projects, or just hang out with friends in a safe environment. They say that since they opened their doors to this teen-only media space about a year ago, news spread by word of mouth, texting, and social media messaging peer-to-peer among teens across the city, and their population includes young people in diverse public and private schools, as well as home schoolers...."

Read full post on huffingtonpost.com

Oh please save us: Sarah Palin: 'We've got to stand with our North Korean allies'

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Excerpt:

"Sarah Palin never claimed she could see Russia from her house – that was Tina Fey – but she went one better on Glenn Beck's radio show in discussing the tensions in the Korean Peninsula and saying: "We've got to stand with our North Korean allies".

A transcript of the radio show reads:

Interviewer: How would you handle a situation like the one that just developed in North Korea?

Palin: Well, North Korea, this is stemming from a greater problem, when we're all sitting around asking, 'Oh no, what are we going to do,' and we're not having a lot of faith that the White House is going to come out with a strong enough policy to sanction what it is that North Korea is going to do. So this speaks to a bigger picture that certainly scares me in terms of our national security policy. But obviously, we've got to stand with our North Korean allies – we're bound to by treaty....

Interviewer: South Korean.

Palin: Yes, and we're also bound by prudence to stand with our South Korean allies, yes...."

yikes.

Fascinating: Dark energy on firmer footing : Nature News

galaxiesThe distribution of pairs of galaxies that orbit one another has verified key elements of the standard model of cosmology — suggesting the presence of dark energy.NASA/ESA

The claim that mysterious dark energy is accelerating the Universe's expansion has been placed on firmer ground, with the successful application of a quirky geometric test proposed more than 30 years ago.

The accelerating expansion was first detected in 1998. Astronomers studying Type 1a supernovae, stellar explosions called "standard candles" because of their predictable luminosity, made the incredible discovery that the most distant of these supernovae appear dimmer than would be expected if the Universe were expanding at a constant rate.1 This suggested that some unknown force - subsequently dubbed dark energy - must be working against gravity to blow the universe apart.

Since that time, studies comparing variations in the cosmic microwave background radiation — an echo from the Big Bang — with the distribution of galaxies today have allowed cosmologists to trace how the Universe has expanded, supporting the idea of dark energy. They have also suggested that the Universe is 'flat' — that is, it contains just enough matter to keep it delicately poised between collapsing in on itself and expanding forever2.

“It's a very clever idea, it's unexpected, and it's going to take a while to determine whether it's accepted or not.”

Charles Alcock
Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, Cambridge, Massachusetts

These two assumptions have become a fundamental part of cosmologists' understanding of the Universe. Now Christian Marinoni and Adeline Buzzi of the Centre for Theoretical Physics at the University of Provence in Marseilles, France, have independently checked these ideas by analysing the geometry of orbiting pairs of galaxies. Their study is published this week in Nature3.

The researchers used a version of the Alcock–Paczynski test, which relies on identifying symmetrical objects in space and using them as 'standard spheres'. Any distortions in space caused by the expansion of the cosmos would cause the most distant standard spheres to appear asymmetrical. "This provides a similar level of accuracy to supernovae," says Marinoni. "It's a direct proof of dark energy."

Object lessons

For example, if the universe is expanding outwards due to dark energy, distant objects will appear elongated along the line of sight from Earth, because Earth and the objects are being propelled away from one another along that direction.

Several groups have tried to apply the test, for example by considering clusters of galaxies as the standard spheres, but largely failed because they could not measure distant objects with sufficient accuracy.

To get round this, Marinoni and Buzzi instead studied the distribution in orientations of pairs of galaxies that orbit each other. In a Universe without dark energy, that distribution is expected to be spherically symmetrical — in other words, the number of galaxy pairs oriented in any particular direction should be the same.

The researchers found that the farther away the galaxy pairs were, the more asymmetrical the distribution was, with more galaxy pairs oriented along the line of sight from Earth. The pattern matched what would be expected in a flat Universe expanding due to dark energy.

The reliability of the test depends on the assumption that the distribution in orientations of galaxy pairs doesn't change depending on their distance from Earth — an idea that is largely untested. But researchers are still excited by the result.

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  • References

    1. Riess, A. G. Astron. J. 116, 1009 (1998).
    2. Spergel, D. N. et al. Astrophys. J. Suppl. Ser. 170, 377-408 (2007).
    3. Marinoni, C. & Buzzi, A. Nature 468, 539-541 (2010).
    4. Alcock, C. & Paczynski, B. Nature 281, 358-359 (1979).

Swedish Storytelling as Creativity Catalyst from Gary Hirsch :: Influxinsights

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Swedish Storytelling is the answer to the following question:

Original Post by Ed Cotton:

"2. What do you believe a controlled and inspired crowd of thinkers can bring to the table that an individual can't?

More heads are better than one, under the right conditions. But instead of listening to me pontificated, try this:

1. Pair up with someone
2. One of you is the storyteller and the other does nothing
3. The storyteller comes up with a made up title of a story that has never been told before
4. They tell the story

Now try this:

1. Pair up with someone
2. One of you is the storyteller, and the other is the word giver
3. Have the word giver give the storyteller a made up title of a story to tell
4. The storyteller begins telling the story. During the story, the word giver will call out random words that have nothing to do with what the storyteller is talking about. For instance, if the story is about a trip to the beach, the word giver avoids helpful worlds like "sand", "waves", "surfboards", etc..Instead you give completely disassociated words like "pudding", "dinosaur", and "Sean Connery"
5. The storyteller has to instantly incorporate the random words into the story. The word giver must wait until the word just given is incorporated into the story before calling out a new one
6. After a while, the storyteller finds an ending to his/her story and then the players switch roles.

This is called Swedish Story Telling (for no apparent or obvious reason that I can see).

Which story is more memorable? Which was easier to tell? A Swedish Story forces new connections. It slams agendas and expectations together and allows the unexpected to emerge. It's created by more than one person. It's co-created (yes, that word again) and it's a hell of a lot more fun to tell."

Read the full interview on influxinsights.com