Serendipity35

Howard Zinn is a historian and playwright who may be best known for his book A People's History of the United States: 1492 to Present. Perhaps, you read it for a course or use it in your teaching.

There is a YouTube video that is an animated version of Zinn's essay, "Empire or Humanity? What the Classroom Didn't Teach Me about the American Empire".

A People's History of the United States was considered a rather radical approach to the textbook with its inclusion of the voices of blacks, women, American Indians, war resisters, and others. Zinn explains his perspectives this way:

"My point is not that we must, in telling history, accuse, judge, condemn Columbus in absentia. It is too late for that; it would be a useless scholarly exercise in morality. But the easy acceptance of atrocities as a deplorable but necessary price to pay for progress (Hiroshima and Vietnam, to save Western civilization; Kronstadt and Hungary, to save socialism; nuclear proliferation, to save us all)--that is still with us. One reason these atrocities are still with us is that we have learned to bury them in a mass of other facts, as radioactive wastes are buried in containers in the earth."

It would be an interesting exercise for student and teacher to read the original essay and then look at the video (below or on the YouTube site) and see how the two mediums differ in their presentation. A good lesson in historical perspective...

A virtual school (AKA cyberschool) is an institution that essentially teaches courses through online methods. Plenty of schools offer online courses and degrees, but far fewer are totally virtual.

I see the term used more for schools at the secondary level. Many states have their own virtual school. I didn't really have any contact with a virtual school until I was contacted by an instructional technologist at one who wanted help doing training as they moved from Blackboard to Moodle. I asked Chris Shamburg for some background because I knew he did some teaching for NJeSchool. Chris told me, "It's an initiative for New Jersey kids who want more than their schools offer or who have special circumstances that keep them home bound. It offers a mix of traditional courses (e.g. Algebra, American History) and more niche offerings (e.g. HS English courses based on student podcasting, fanfiction, and writing college admission essays)."

NJeSchool is a virtual school in New Jersey as part of the Hudson County Schools of Technology, a county-wide school district serving the high school and adult populations. There is also the NJ Virtual School. Its classes are web-based and students can satisfy their high school requirements at anytime and from anywhere. They began offering courses in 2005. Course offerings at both schools are consistent with New Jersey State graduation requirements and aligned with the New Jersey Core Curriculum Content Standards. All courses are taught by New Jersey State Certified instructors fully trained in online instruction. The NJVHS is modeled after the nationally recognized Florida Virtual School.

Virtual schools around the country and world offer different instructional and enrollment models. Instructional design ranges from fully independent self-paced courses, to more traditional semester teacher-facilitated courses. Class sizes range widely with small seminars of 15 and large lecture-hall styled courses of 200 students both being available.

As with online courses in higher ed, students interact with teachers and other students using course management systems like Blackboard or Moodle and sometimes with older tools (email, phone) that have largely fallen away in colleges.

Another example is the new Connecticut Virtual Learning Center which had its first term in January 2008 with 300+ of the state's public high school students taking online courses as supplemental options to their traditional classroom curricula. You can see their course listings at ctvirtuallearning.org.

42 states reported in 2007 some sort of virtual learning for their students, and there are at least 147 virtual charter schools operating in the U.S. They serve students who fallen behind, need more time to work, have dropped out of traditional classes for emotional, physical, or academic reasons, students who want enrichment and can't fit it into their schedules. Students are using IM, Skype, Twitter, Moodle and all the tools we use at the college level. These schools also encounter the same problems like training online instructors and dealing with the feeling of isolation that new online students often feel.

MORE

• List of virtual schools on Wikipedia
• an article on virtual schools on techlearning.com
• on NJeSchool

Yesterday, I was reading an announcement that Blackboard is partnering with Syracuse University to try to integrate its commercial product with the open source alternative  Sakai. They made the announcement at the Blackboard Developers Conference this week which precedes the BbWorld conference (both in Las Vegas) that many higher ed technology professionals will attend. (It started last night.) It's not a total shock. There was a Blackboard blog post about the general idea at the end of June, but I'm curious to see the general community reaction.

I'm not sure what my own reaction to this news is now, or will be as I learn more about the partnership. Guys in white hats join the black hat gang? Blackboard tries to embrace open everything? The end of Sakai? Blackboard finally realizes it must deal directly with open source? Unfortunately, for Blackboard, they have picked up an evil empire reputation in the same way that Microsoft did - too big a player, monopolies, patent suits, buy out & squash other products etc.

I attended a spring semester Blackboard presentation here in NJ and you could hear hints of all this integration then. They were calling the new product Project NG (for"Net Generation" though the "No Good" comment ran through the room too) and this new plug-in is called the "Blackboard-Sakai Connector" which is part of the Learning Environment Connector that is supposed to allow you to integrate data from an external CMS/LMS to Blackboard in version 8. The word on the Net is that Blackboard is also working with another university to work for integration with the other big open LMS, Moodle.

Some Syracuse users apparently use the Sakai ePortfolio with Blackboard and the plan is to allow you to import Sakai data into Blackboard or vice versa. Not so radically different from the “Building Block” idea that Blackboard has had running for years.

Blackboard says this project was “community-driven” in that it was customers who wanted this ability to use a commercial & open source mashup. PCCC didn't send me to the Sakai conference in Paris earlier this month, but Blackboard says the reaction there was "actually mostly positive.”  Stay tuned.

more at Inside Higher Ed

Remember how the band Radiohead turned the idea of giving away an album but still making money into reality last year? (No? Check here)

That was 2007. Now, they have made a video for their "House of Cards" song (from In Rainbows) but they wanted to make the video without any cameras. They used lasers and data.

They employed two 3D scanning technologies. One, from Geometric Informatics was used to capture close objects. The second, a Velodyne LIDAR system uses several lasers to grab the wide shots.

According to info on Google, they used 64 lasers rotating and shooting in a 360 degree radius 900 times per minute to produce all the exterior scenes.

The Google folks were interested enough to post the video, and a behind the scenes video.Go play with the data visualization using a 3D viewer and you can use your mouse to manipulate the data. That's how I made the image in this post.

If you're more ambitious and a better coder than me, download the data and create your own visualizations.

If you create something cool, share it on the House of Cards YouTube group. At least watch the videos - all the toys are at code.google.com/radiohead.