Jeff Piontek is an author, keynote speaker and teacher (most importantly). He has worked with many at-risk school districts nationally and is a thought leader in on-line and blended learning.
Image copyrightThinkstockImage captionChildren with disabilities are often excluded from playgrounds
Disabled children are prevented from making friends and enjoying playtime because playgrounds and playgroups are not accessible, a charity report warns.
The Sense report says most parents of disabled children also find negative attitudes from other parents a key barrier to accessing mainstream play.
Disabled children and their parents end up being excluded from communities in England and Wales as a result, it adds.
The government says disabled children must not be discriminated against.
‘Vitally important’
The three-month Case for Play inquiry into the issue, chaired by former Education Secretary Lord Blunkett, found disabled children were missing out on play opportunities vital to their emotional, social and physical development.
It says insufficient funding at a local level, and negative attitudes to disabled children and their families are significant barriers.
Lord Blunkett said: “We know that play is vitally important for children with multiple needs and their families, bringing a wide range of developmental and emotional benefits.
“However, our inquiry found that all too often the parents of children with multiple needs point to barriers they face in accessing and enjoying play.
“It means that disabled children don’t have the same chance to form friendships, and parents are prevented from taking a break from caring.
“Both disabled children and their parents are excluded from their own communities.”
‘Turned away’
The inquiry heard from the families of 175 disabled children, with multiple needs, and received a further 175 pieces of evidence.
A snapshot survey of the families revealed nine out of 10 felt their child did not have the same chances to play as other children.
Two-thirds said they did not have enough information on accessible play opportunities in their area, while just over half had been turned away from play settings that had failed to meet their duties under the Equality Act.
The report also highlighted a lack of a strategic approach to funding play for children with multiple needs at a local or a national level across England.
A Department for Education spokesman said: “We are committed to ensuring disabled children can access early years education and that play opportunities are accessible to disabled children.
“We don’t want to see any children discriminated against and to help this we have introduced the biggest reforms to the Special Educational Needs and Disability system in a generation, focusing support on individual needs and aspirations.”
December 29, 2014 Educational technology is a dynamic field of research and study. This dynamism stems mainly from the constant flow of new educational web technologies and the emergence of novel Ed Tech concepts that provide theoretical underpinnings for these technologies. The challenge for teachers is not only in keeping up with this fast moving trend but also with understanding the basic foundational…
In anticipation of our third annual Student Editorial Contest (to be announced on Feb. 25), we’ve done the math, and below you’ll find the 100 most-commented-upon questions we’ve ever asked that call for persuasive writing.
Many of them are, of course, on topics teenagers care about — technology, video games, sports and gender issues. Others are classic debate issues like government regulation and gun violence.
But, perhaps unsurprisingly, the broad topic that seems to engage students the most? School — from questions about homework to cheating, bad report cards, bullying and gym class.
So skim the list and pick issues that interest you. Each question is linked to a related Times article, which you can access free, and includes additional subquestions to help you flesh out your ideas.
Our 100 Most Popular Student Questions for Debate and Argumentative Writing
“I Forgot My Phone” | Does technology make us more alone?
Are the Web Filters at Your School Too Restrictive?
Does Technology Make Us More Alone?
How Should Parents Handle a Bad Report Card?
Should Middle School Students Be Drug Tested?
Is Cheating Getting Worse?
Do Violent Video Games Make People More Violent in Real Life?
Do We Give Children Too Many Trophies?
Should Students Be Able to Grade Their Teachers?
Should Schools Put Tracking Devices in Students’ ID Cards?
If Football Is So Dangerous to Players, Should We Be Watching It?
Should Video Games Be Considered a Sport?
Do Teachers Assign Too Much Homework?
Does Technology Get in the Way of Learning?
What Is More Important: Our Privacy or National Security?
Should Stores Sell Violent Video Games to Minors?
Is a Healthier School Lunch Program a Lost Cause?
How Young Is Too Young for an iPhone?
Is Cheerleading a Sport?
Should the School Day Start Later?
Should Racial Epithets Be Removed From ‘Huck Finn’?
Should Schools Offer Cash Bonuses for Good Test Scores?
Can Money Buy You Happiness?
Should Women Be Allowed to Fight on the Front Lines Alongside Men? And, Should They Be Required to Register for the Draft?
Is There Too Much Pressure on Girls to Have ‘Perfect’ Bodies?
Should the Private Lives of Famous People Be Off Limits?
Is School Teaching You the Skills You’ll Need to Succeed in Life?
What Current Musicians Will Stand the Test of Time?
What Words or Phrases Are Overused and Should Go Away?
Can Cellphones Be Educational Tools?
Is School Designed More for Girls Than Boys?
Do Kids Need Recess?
What Time Should Black Friday Sales Start?
Do Photoshopped Images Promote Unrealistic Expectations of Beauty and Body Image?
What Should Be Done to Stop Cyberbullying?
When Should You Feel Guilty for Killing Zombies?
How Should We Prevent Future Mass Shootings?
Is It Unethical for Zoos to Kill Healthy Animals Under Their Care?
Is a Longer School Calendar a Good Idea?
Which Is More Important: Talent or Hard Work?
Should Couples Live Together Before Marriage?
Is Home-Schooling Better Than a Traditional Education?
Is Prom Worth It?
Do Students Learn Best When They Direct Their Own Education?
Should Reading and Math Be Taught in Gym Class Too?
Should Schools Be Allowed to Use Corporal Punishment?
How Young Is Too Young to Date? (Or, Is Dating a Thing of the Past?)
Do You Trust Your Government?
Are Children of Illegal Immigrants Entitled to a Public Education?
Should the Government Limit the Size of Sugary Drinks?
Has Facebook Lost Its Edge?
Should Tablet Computers Become the Primary Way Students Learn in Class?
How Necessary Is a College Education?
How Well Do You Think Standardized Tests Measure Your Abilities?
Are Some Youth Sports Too Intense?
Should Texting While Driving Be Illegal in Every State?
Can Graffiti Ever Be Considered Art?
Whose Fault Is It if a Child Is Failing in School?
Should the Dropout Age Be Raised?
Should a College Education Be Free?
Should People Be Allowed to Obscure Their Identities Online?
Does Class Size Matter?
Should Marijuana Be Legal?
Should You Feel Guilty About Killing Spiders, Ants or Other Bugs?
Does Classroom Technology Enhance What and How Students Learn? Or, Does It Get in the Way of Learning?
Should Parents Let Their Children Play Football?
When Is the Use of Military Force Justified?
Do Parents Have Different Hopes and Standards for Their Sons Than for Their Daughters?
Do Leaders Have Moral Obligations?
Should All Police Officers Wear Body Cameras?
Does Separating Boys and Girls Help Students Perform Better in School?
Is It Ethical to Eat Meat?
Is Smoking Still a Problem Among Teenagers?
Do Laws That Ban Offensive Words Make the World a Better Place?
Is TV Too White? And, What About Movies?
Is It O.K. to Refuse to Serve Same-Sex Couples Based on Religious Beliefs?
Should Parents Limit How Much Time Children Spend on Tech Devices?
Would You Feel Safer With Armed Guards Patrolling Your School?
Should You Go to Jail for Kicking a Cat?
Should Home-Schoolers Be Allowed to Play Public School Sports?
Is It Offensive for Sports Teams to Use Native American Names and Mascots?
Should Students Be Barred From Taking Cellphones to School?
How Important Is Arts Education?
Should the United States Stop Using the Death Penalty?
Is It O.K. for Men and Boys to Comment on Women and Girls on the Street?
Should Students Be Allowed to Skip Senior Year of High School?
Would You Trade Your Paper Books for Digital Versions?
Have Curse Words Become So Common They Have Lost Their Shock Value?
Should College Football Players Get Paid?
Are High School Students Being Worked Too Hard?
When Do You Become an Adult?
Does Reality TV Promote Dangerous Stereotypes? Or, Does It Ever Actually Do Some Good?
Should Colleges Find a Better Way to Admit Students?
How Should Parents Address Internet Pornography?
Can You Be Good Without God?
Do Our Neighborhoods Define Who We Are?
Does Life Exist — or Has It Ever Existed — Somewhere Besides Earth?
Should Computer Games Be Used for Classroom Instruction?
Should Companies Collect Information About Us?
Should You Care About the Health and Safety of Those Making Your Clothing?
Should We Rethink How Long Students Spend in High School?
A love for words (and the funny sounds they made) led me to write. A love for the craft of writing led me to write even when I wasn’t told to or didn’t have an assignment due, which (somehow) led me to think teaching writing might be a good idea, which led me to having a look-see for myself at the classroom from the other side of the desk, which led me to TeachThought.And by some impossibly chaotic by still entirely functional collection of digital possibility, you’ve turned on something electronic and ended up here, reading this. Things connect.
Teaching English
And so it was for me as a teacher. Being an English teacher—that is, a teacher of literature, the writing process, grammar, critical thinking, close reading, decoding, digital media, speaking and listening, and well you get the idea—was a very plaid experience—all divergent and striped and blocked and geometric but still somehow stitched together.
Oddly, elegantly unified.
As curriculum and content, “English” is really a matter of understanding communication—who said what, how did they say it, and how can you use similar patterns to say things yourself? Diction, tone, grammar, theme, thesis statements, mood, structure, idea organization, supporting details, main idea, literary devices, and dozens of other things are all pieces in service of communication—both sending and receiving.
For some reason, once you get to college, communication is chunked into a matter of public speaking, but that’s like teaching “shapes” independent of geometry. Speaking is first a matter of knowing.
So traditionally in English you take a close look at dead people that said noteworthy things, literature being “news that stays news.” You take apart what they said, try to understand why they said it, and write a paper or take a test on it. Franz Kafka, Robert Faulkner, Flannery O’Connor, Emily Dickinson, and countless other people that have lived but not anymore at one point were moved to say something, wrote it down, and here we are centuries later bubbling in scantrons about it all. It’s a bit weird.
But studying their poetry and speeches and novels and other recorded and highly formatted musings led me to see it all as a matter of purpose and audience. Every time we study a piece of literature, or the concept of writing, it was the same pattern.
What was said, and to whom?
The Order Of Thinking
This came in handy when I started taking a look at digital media and other technology in service of the study of English-Language Arts curriculum. A YouTube video, like a poem, has the same fundamental characteristics, just different modalities–word choice, structure, idea organization, tone, and the other bits that connote academic study. But each also has an audience and a purpose—and without understanding the audience and purpose, none of the other stuff makes sense.
You can’t evaluate the word choice of a poem until you have some kind of idea why it was written—and who it was written for (if anyone). The context. You can speculate all day long about what he or she said and how he or she said it, but you’re only speculating. You weren’t there.
You can analyze the meter or count the lines, but the poem itself is a conjuring born of audience and purpose—which makes it a nearly human thing itself. Something was said to someone for some reason, and everything works backwards from there.
Audience and purpose are primal. They have to come first or none of it makes any sense. And so it goes with pedagogy. Who are you teaching, and why? Who exactly, and why exactly?
When students start on projects for project-based learning, have them start with audience and purpose. What are you doing and why are you doing it? And for whom?
The same with ed reform. How can we revise a school or iterate education until we know what a school is supposed to do or what an “education” is? That’s purpose.
And most critically, who we’re doing this all for. Who is the “audience” of education? We don’t do this for curriculum or standards or test makers or corporations or universities or even ourselves. We can say it’s the students—so then let’s check that. Let’s look at all of our systems and parts and practices and see if they point to the audience. Or we can start with our audience and work backwards from there.
Understanding audience and purpose is critical for reading and writing. And project-based learning. And digital media. And ed reform. And pretty much everything else. The sequence of education itself begins with audience and purpose. So let’s start there, too.
Who are you teaching, and why?
This article was written by Terry Heick for edutopia, and updated for TeachThought; Audience And Purpose: Who Are You Teaching, And Why? image attribution flickr user tulanepublicrelations
March 6, 2015 Hashtags are social networking phenomena par excellence. They originated in Twitter a around 2008 and since then they adopted and integrated into many other popular social platforms such as Facebook, Google Plus, and Instagram. We have already shared several posts covering the educational potential of hashtags, most popular among them all is teachers’ simple guide on the use of hashtags. Today…
Steve Jobs is a name which is synonymous with cutting edge, innovative and groundbreaking technology.
So it may come as something as a surprise to learn Apple’s former CEO didn’t believe in letting his kids use some of his company’s greatest products – the iPhone and the iPad.
And it’s not because the Apple godhead was a closet Samsung fan either.
Jobs, who died in 2011, may have had an instinctive flair for technology but he was a low tech parent who firmly believed in restricting his children’s access to electronic devices.
“We limit how much technology our kids use at home,” said Jobs way back in 2010, expressing growing concerns about his children’s gadget use.
As all modern parents know, iPhones and iPads are extremely appealing to children. These little hand-held devices are state-of-the-art toys. Surrogate parents almost, capable of entertaining, distracting, and pacifying children during school holidays and on long car journeys when mom and dad’s attentions are focused elsewhere.
Yet instead of thanking Apple for these extremely convenient parent assistants, should we actually be concerned about the potential harm they may be inflicting upon our youngsters?
Steve Jobs certainly appeared to think so. In a New York Times article published this week, journalist Nick Bilton recalls how he once put it to Jobs that his kids must love the iPod, but to his surprise Jobs replied, “They haven’t used it. We limit how much technology our kids use at home.”
“I’m sure I responded with a gasp and dumbfounded silence. I had imagined the Jobs’s household was like a nerd’s paradise: that the walls were giant touch screens, the dining table was made from tiles of iPads and that iPods were handed out to guests like chocolates on a pillow. Nope, Mr. Jobs told me, not even close.”
And Jobs wasn’t the only technological guru who had substantial concerns about the long-term effects of kids engaging with touch-screen technology for hours on end.
Chris Anderson, former editor of Wired, also believes in setting strict time limits and parental controls on every device at home.
“My kids accuse me and my wife of being fascists. They say that none of their friends have the same rules. That’s because we have seen the dangers of technology first hand. I’ve seen it in myself, I don’t want to see that happen to my kids.”
Researchers at the University of California Los Angeles recently published a study which demonstrated that just a few days after abstaining from using electronic gadgets, children’s social skills improved immediately.
Which is definitely food for thought considering recent research showed that an average American child spends more than seven and a half hours a day using smart-phones and other electronic screens.
Jobs was undoubtedly a genius but he didn’t get that way through staring at screens and playing Angry Birds until the early hours or constantly updating his Facebook account.
Walter Isaacson, the author of Steve Jobs, spent a lot of time at the Apple co-founder’s home and confirmed that face-to-face family interaction always came before screentime for Jobs.
“Every evening Steve made a point of having dinner at the big long table in their kitchen, discussing books and history and a variety of things. No one ever pulled out an iPad or computer. The kids did not seem addicted at all to devices.”
So the next time the advertising department at Apple, Samsung, or any other major technological corporation attempt to sublimely convince you that life is somehow lacking without their latest little device, remember that the man who started it all, believed somewhat differently.
What is it and why is the Donnell-Kay Foundation taking it on?
Donnell-Kay announces a game changing, multi-year effort to create a new state public education system where learning is reimagined and students graduate energized and equipped to thrive in a rapidly changing world.
ReSchool Colorado intends to improve the experience of education in order to better match and keep pace with the needs and expectations of students living in the 21st century.
Needed: Education Designed for Today
Back when public education was first formalized, our lives and economy were more industrialized, based on a model characterized by repetitive routine and infrequent change.
Today, change is the norm and technology’s influence is significant. Digitally, we have access to just about any information, right in our pockets. Kids create music playlists or communicate instantly with the swipe of a finger.
And, it all happens anytime, anywhere.
It’s Time for a Mega-Leap Forward
It is no surprise the educational expectations of students and families have changed—dramatically.
To excel in today’s highly technical world, students require an educational system that adapts quickly to the fluid expectations of society and enables schooling to transcend time and place to better fit the learner.
For our centuries-old system to make this mega-leap forward, we need a game change—a fresh start, rich with new ways of learning.
The Road to Redesign Starts Here
To enable this much-needed fresh start for Colorado’s education system, the Donnell-Kay Foundation initiated ReSchool Colorado.
ReSchool Colorado’s ultimate goal is to design and implement an education system that pushes the boundaries of current thought and practice to provide an exceptional education for students living in this century, not the 20th century.
At full build-out, the system will serve students statewide and eliminate barriers between the key transition points of early childhood, K-12, higher education, and the workforce.
To do this, we will start small and grow over time. But, the system will not replace the existing Colorado educational system. Instead, it will be developed and operate in parallel with the current systems serving students in ECE, K-12, and higher education. Students and educators will choose to enter the new system at various points: some will migrate from their current path; others will start their education or career within it.
In addition, we hope ReSchool Colorado will inspire others, outside of Colorado, to take similar bold steps to envision their own new system and take action.
Ignite a love of learning through mastery of academic, personal, and professional competencies measured against international benchmarks.
Encourage a marketplace of dynamic educational opportunities that provide families and educators with more customized options.
Exist free from burdensome and layered statutes, rules, policies, and regulations that plague our existing education systems.
Be designed for today, adaptable to tomorrow, and never ‘finished.’ The system will evolve to meet societal demands and changes. It will nurture what works and discard what does not.
Minimize barriers to entry and enable diverse people to benefit. To ensure active participation and ownership, the new system will be co-designed with citizens and leaders who will be a part of it.
Be funded through a mix of private and public resources at no additional cost to taxpayers.
Design Process: Framework & Timeline
The Donnell-Kay Foundation kicked off ReSchool Colorado in 2013, with a Request for Information (RFI) that generated compelling ideas and identified experts suited to help plan the path forward.
Additional input from a variety of sources has resulted in a vision, strategy and timeline beginning to take shape.
Throughout 2014 and 2015, we will invite citizens and experts to inform the design of the new education system, including:
Policy design: System goals and policies
Learning Design: Student goals and opportunities
Communication: Information, inspiration, and engagement
We anticipate completion of the design process by the end of 2015, with policy and implementation strategy starting in 2016.
Sign Up to Stay Informed
Join us in transforming the lives of Colorado students through the creation of a vibrant, new education system. Please join our mailing listto stay abreast of ReSchool Colorado.
Ed note: This post has been updated and republished from a 2012 post by Terry Heick
Mobile Learning is about self-actuated personalization.
As learning practices and technology tools change, mobile learning itself will continue to evolve. For 2016, the focus is on a variety of challenges, from how learners access content to how the idea of a “curriculum” is defined. Technology like tablets PCs, apps, and access to broadband internet are lubricating the shift to mobile learning, but a truly immersive mobile learning environment goes beyond the tools for learning to the lives and communities valued by each individual learner.
It is only within these communities that the native context of each learner can be fully understood. Here, in these communities that are both local and digital, a “need to know” is born, knowledge accrues incrementally, progress resonates naturally, and a full picture of each learner as a human being fully emerges.
1. Access
A mobile learning environment is about access to content, peers, experts, portfolio artifacts, credible sources, and previous thinking on relevant topics. It can be actuated via a smartphone or iPad, laptop or in-person, but access is constant–which in turn shifts a unique burden to learn on the shoulders of the student.
2. Metrics
As mobile learning is a blend of the digital and physical, diverse metrics (i.e., measures) of understanding and “performance of knowledge” will be available.
3. Cloud
The cloud is the enabler of “smart” mobility. With access to the cloud, all data sources and project materials are constantly available, allowing for previously inaccessible levels and styles of revision and collaboration.
4. Transparent
Transparency is the natural byproduct of connectivity, mobility, and collaboration. As planning, thinking, performance, and reflection are both mobile and digital, they gain an immediate audience with both local and global communities through social media platforms from twitter to facebook, edmodo to instagram.
5. Play
Play is one of the primary characteristics of authentic, progressive learning, both a cause and effect of an engaged mind. In a mobile learning environment learners are encountering a dynamic and often unplanned set of data, domains, and collaborators, changing the tone of learning from academic and compliant to personal and playful.
6. Asynchronous
Among the most powerful principles of mobile learning is asynchronous access. This unbolts an educational environment from a school floor and allows it to move anywhere, anytime in pursuit of truly entrepreneurial learning. It also enables a learning experience that is increasingly personalized: just in time, just enough, just for me.
7. Self-Actuated
With asynchronous access to content, peers, and experts comes the potential for self-actuation. Here, learners plan topic, sequence, audience, and application via facilitation of teachers who now act as experts of resource and assessment.
8. Diverse
With mobility comes diversity. As learning environments change constantly, that fluidity becomes a norm that provides a stream of new ideas, unexpected challenges, and constant opportunities for revision and application of thinking. Audiences are diverse, as are the environments data is being gleaned from and delivered to.
9. Curation
Apps and mobile devices can not only support curation, but can do so better than even the most caffeine-laced teacher might hope to. By design, these technologies adapt to learners, store files, publish thinking, and connect learners, making curation a matter of process rather than ability.
10. Blending
A mobile learning environment will always represent a blending of sorts–physical movement, personal communication, and digital interaction.
11. Always-On
Always-on learning is self-actuated, spontaneous, iterative, and recursive. There is a persistent need for information access, cognitive reflection, and interdependent function through mobile devices. It is also embedded in communities capable of intimate and natural interaction with students.
12. Authentic
All of the previous 11 principles yield an authenticity to learning that is impossible to reproduce in a classroom. They also ultimately converge to enable experiences that are truly personalized.
• Every two days, mankind creates as much information as it did from the dawn of civilization until 2003.
• The amount of information that an average person is exposed to in a day is the same as a person from the 15th century was exposed to in his lifetime.
• The amount of information generated during the first day of a baby’s life today is equivalent to 70 times the information contained in the Library of Congress.
And you wonder why you’re exhausted?
In The Human Face of Big Data, Rick Smolan, a former Time, Life, and National Geographic photographer famous for creating the Day in the Life book series, and author Jennifer Erwitt examine how today’s digital onslaught and emerging technologies can help us better understand and improve the human condition–ourselves, interactions with each other, and the planet.
The 14 x 11-inch, 224-page coffee table book, arriving Dec. 4, employs a collection of images, essays, and articles (including one by yours truly) to explore innovative ways that business, science and medicine, academia, politics, law enforcement, and Hollywood are collecting and utilizing data–such as predicting crime and earthquakes, identifying counterfeit drugs, disease screening, home electricity usage, and understanding animals and nature–while raising questions about data ownership and privacy erosion. The one blissful omission: not a cat video in sight.
“This is the most challenging and satisfying project I’ve ever worked on,” says Smolan. “It’s like watching the planet develop a nervous system. The ability to collect, analyze, triangulate, and visualize vast amounts of data in real time is something the human race has never had before. This new set of tools, or Big Data, is being used to address some of the biggest challenges facing our planet. I hope the book will spark a global conversation about both the tremendous potential for good and the concerns about who owns data that you and I generate.”
“Big Data’s” Use of Big Data
The work capitalizes on some of this technology in its narrative. It’s the first coffee table book to utilize the Aurasma mobile app–enabling readers to trigger related video and other content by training their smartphone and tablet cameras on specially marked yellow key icons on some of the pages.
An interactive iPad version of the book will be available down the road, allowing users to interact with multimedia content exemplifying how Big Data addresses some of humanity’s biggest challenges.
Those elements culminate in the Human Face of Big Data project, a series of initiatives begun earlier this fall to spark global conversations about the effect of humanity’s ability to collect and analyze enormous amounts of data in real time. It launched late September with a free mobile app that gleaned a week’s worth of information from some 300,000 participants on how they lived, viewed their lives, and interacted with others with similar digital footprints. The crowdsourced collection of anonymous data will be made available to researchers, data scientists, and educators to study as a data snapshot of a week in the life of humanity in 2012.
On Oct. 2, the project sponsored Mission Control, a simultaneous speaker event in New York, London, and Singapore where tech leaders discussed what the concept meant to them, alongside a networking forum that showcased new startups. On Nov. 17, in conjunction with TEDxYouthDay, it launched the Data Detectives website as the student component of Big Data. Through the end of the year, it will collect answers to questionnaires and real-time data interaction from students in grades 6-12. Like its adult counterpart, that anonymous information will be available for researchers next year, and get young people talking about how new technologies will impact their thinking and expression during their lives.
An Unexpected Career
Smolan, who now lives in his native Manhattan, was working as a photographer in Australia in 1980, when he came up with the idea of a coffee table book that pooled a single day of shots of the country from leading photographers. When Smolan couldn’t find an interested publisher, he asked then-Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser, with whom he’d traveled on assignment for Time, for government money. Fraser declined, and instead helped him tap corporate sponsorship. The result, A Day in the Life of Australia, was not only a bestseller in that country, but spawned the bestselling Day in the Life book series that chronicles life in other countries.
“I could barely add up expenses at the end of an assignment, so the idea of me running a company was totally bizarre,” says Smolan. “But because I was turned down by every publisher, I had to learn how to be a publisher.”
Co-author Jennifer Erwitt
In 1989, Smolan and his wife, Jennifer Erwitt–daughter of the
famed photographer Elliott Erwitt–founded Against All Odds Productions to expand their storytelling to other topics and enhance it with emerging digital technology and interactivity. In 1995, Katya Able joined as COO. The projects run about 18 months, employing a global network of some 200 researchers, photographers, writers, illustrators, and designers. Past efforts include 24 Hours in Cyberspace, The Power to Heal: Ancient Arts & Modern Medicine, Passage to Vietnam (exploring that country’s opening up in the early 1990s), and Blue Planet Run (about the global water crisis). America 24/7 broke ground by inviting the public to shoot and submit photos alongside professionals. From Alice to Ocean, chronicling Robyn Davidson’s cross-Australia trek, was the first book to be packaged with a CD-Rom and is now being made into a movie starring Mia Wasikowska (Alice in Wonderland).
“All our books have been made possible via sponsorship–no publisher in the world would spend millions of dollars to create a coffee table book. Nowadays, they don’t even want to risk the cost of printing the book,” says Smolan. “Jennifer and Katya are the database, budget, and scheduling queens. Photographers are notoriously independent and difficult to manage. They coordinate the 200+ creative individuals scattered around the globe, making sure the work of one team passes seamlessly to the next. Photographers are notoriously independent and difficult to manage. Jennifer and Katya have the rare skill of being able to herd the cats.”
Smolan initially got the idea for Big Data early last year from Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer. (“She was the first person to describe Big Data to me in visual terms,” he says.) But the digital universe’s rapid expansion would have rendered a single-day snapshot obsolete by the time the book came out 18 months later. So instead of that type of random sample, Smolan wanted give an overall sense of the impact it was having on the planet.
Photographer and co-author Rick Smolan
With the economy reining in publishing money, Smolan once again tapped corporate sponsors: primarily IT solutions provider EMC Corp., with supporting sponsorships from Cisco Systems, VMWare, Tableau Software, Originate, and FedEx (which is delivering 10,000 copies to world leaders and Fortune 500 CEOs) and distributed through Barnes & Noble’s Sterling Books.
“Right now it’s primarily companies and governments who are thinking about the uses of Big Data,” says Smolan. “It’s really important that each of us also thinks about how this is going to affect our lives.”
To illustrate, he tells the story of one of the book’s profiles, Hugo Campos, whose pacemaker wirelessly transmits heart metrics to his physician throughout the day. Campos wanted to correlate pacemaker activity with his exercise, sleep, and diet. But when he asked the device manufacturer for a copy of his medical data, the manufacturer refused, claiming he did not own the data.
Another subject, scientist Craig Venter, is patenting new forms of life. “While these new forms are being designed for human good, it does make you think of unintended consequences, like Frankenstein,” says Smolan. “There are no laws governing this. All this stuff will be set in stone soon by corporations. My worry is that by the time individuals begin thinking about it, it will be too late.”
Click on the slide show for some of the book’s examples of how Big Data is being visualized and applied.
A total of 40 Ohio charters have been found to have “misspent” a total of $6 million dollars from taxpayers, a new series of audits from 2008-14 now shows.
“A majority of the unresolved findings for recovery are against individuals who operated or worked at the schools, and many of these schools are now closed,” the report says, with one former school treasurer in particular blamed for “misspending” $2.1 million — $500,000 of which he personally embezzled, according to the Columbus Dispatch.
The findings were undertaken in an attempt to satisfy a request from the U.S. Department of Education, which previously granted $71 million dollars to the state but has now placed stricter guidelines on how and when the award can be used.
Right now, it’s unclear what impact the new findings might have on the $71 million dollar federal grant that was previously awarded to the state. Previously, the state admitted to lax oversight of its charter schools, and the state’s school choice director was forced to resign after a high-profile grade-scrubbing scandal. Yet the soap opera didn’t stop there. As investigations into alleged fraud began, the Ohio state auditor decided against investigating charter data omissions in order to focus on misspending allegations instead.
The federal government’s review of Ohio’s original application for the $71 million dollar grant, which was written by the charter leader who resigned, is ongoing. Two federal bills have also been proposed in order to improve oversight for charters.
Bill Phillis, former deputy Commissioner of Education in Ohio, runs the Equity and Adequacy Coalition.
Highway robbery is legal in the Ohiocharter industry
The charter industry has been largely deregulated from the beginning. The charter promoters and operators have had unrestrained freedom to use public money recklessly and dumb down educational opportunities for children. This industry is not a part of the common school system but it is a bloated parasite extracting valuable resources from the public system.
It is legal or not illegal in Ohio‘s charter industry:
For a for-profit charter school company to hold title to real estate, furniture, equipment and other tangible assets that were purchased with public money
For a charter school board to pay a company allied with their for-profit management company $700,000 per year rent to house 150 students
For a charter school of 600 students to pay $185,000 in year for marketing and promotion
For an online charter school operator to siphon off funds set aside to educate students to operate other private companies that personally benefit the charter operator
For a charter operation to help subsidize a worldwide religious movement
For charter school board members to serve without being a citizen of the United States
For non-profit charter sponsors and charter school boards to pay outrageously high salaries and benefits that would not be tolerated in the public common school system
For a person with no training or experience in education to operate a charter school
For the presence of nepotism and contractual relationships that would not be tolerated in the public common school system
For a charter operator to buy legislation via obscene levels of political contributions
For charters to spend unlimited amounts of funds on marketing and promotion
For charter operators to operate in the dark and be shielded from public exposure regarding illegal activities
The list goes on and on…
Children in public school districts are being robbed of educational opportunities by the transfer of more than $7 billion from districts to the failed charter industry over the past 15 years; yet, state officials allow this fraud on the public to go on and on and on.
Under pressure from the public, the 131st General Assembly passed legislation that will rein in some of the abuse now authorized by law. But big money from the charter industry, ineptitude of the Ohio Department of Education and the $71 million federal grant to expand charters will work together to fatten this failed industry.
The only hope is for the public common school community and advocates to band together to demand the end of this debacle that has utterly failed.
