Yong Zhao on how to use technology in the classroom

The Mercer Island education community is talking about Yong Zhao, a professor at Michigan State University with ideas on how to improve schools global competitiveness.

He'll be doing a presentation, open to the public, at Mercer Island High School on May 13th at 7pm, so somebody sent me a link to video of a talk he did in Singapore a few years ago.  You can skip the 60min lecture and just skim the powerpoint to get the basic idea.

Or if you want to hear the conclusion, skip ahead to about the 40:00 part of the talk (see slide 37).  Here's the gist:

• Why are computers not making an impact on classrooms?
  • It’s not the teachers: they’ve all been trained
  • There’s no shortage of great software

• Think of classrooms as ecosystems made of computers, students, teachers, etc. evolving toward an equilibrium
• “Innovation is like an invasive species” that can only succeed by displacing something else
  • E.g. IM chatting (which should be an innovation) is thought of as a distraction to be shut down instead of a great way to enhance
  • PDAs are wasted because teachers don’t bother understanding them well enough to integrate into the ecology.
  • “computers only help if used less than 3 hrs/day” -- after that it’s wasted.
  • Henry Ford thought cars would be great because they’ll eliminate congestion caused by horses. How wrong!

Summary of suggestions (starts at minute 50:00)

• Need a network of teachers working together, not as individuals
• Technology takes time to soak in
• Encourage teachers to play with technology instead of teaching it
• Connect to existing practices and beliefs
• Find the right niche where technology is natural, not forced

My takeaway: everything depends on the teacher, staff, and community. If you have proactive, intelligent, innovative teachers, your technology will help a lot. If people are just using technology because somebody told them to do it, it won’t work.

Note that this is no different than the situation in industry.  World-class companies require world-class employees and so do schools.  I still think the best place to start is the McKinsey study I mentioned before. 

What's good about McDonalds

Everyone loves to pick on McDonalds, but a paper by Adrian Tschoegl from the Wharton School of U-Penn shows how dramatically the hygiene standards improve in a country's other restaurants, thanks to the forces of competition when customers see McDonalds obsession with cleanliness.

I like this disclaimer the author makes at the beginning of his paper:

The author came to the US in 1960 and ate his first McDonald’s hamburger in Madison, Wisconsin, in 1961, at a time when the signs said, “Over 125 million served.” He has happily eaten at McDonald’s several times a year ever since, but unfortunately never bought its shares. He has not
consulted for McDonald’s or any other fast food company, and does not expect to in the future, though he would not be averse to doing so, having recently renovated the kitchen in his house. The author would also like to thank participants at seminars at Victoria University of Wellington and the University of Melbourne for their comments and criticisms of an earlier draft. (What motivated the disclaimer above was the response of a participant at one of these seminars, whose questions implied that only venality could explain the author’s suggesting that McDonald’s might not represent unalloyed evil, the participant having presumably ruled out an alternative hypothesis of stupidity.) This paper draws in part on information gathered for the case study, “The sun never sets on the Golden Arches”: McDonald’s internationalizes’ that the author and his colleague Mauro Guill´en prepared for classroom use at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.

I wonder what my favorite foodie blogger, Marion Nestle thinks about this.

[see also Don Boudreaux's summary]

Switch to P-I

I skim the Seattle Times print edition each morning because it's there on my driveway each morning, but otherwise virtually all my news about the world comes from the internet.  Here's a Nielsen list of the top on-line news sites:

Source	Viewers (M)
NYTimes.com	18.9
USATODAY.com	10.7
washingtonpost.com	8.9
Wall Street Journal Online	6.9
LA Times	5.7
New York Post	4.7
Boston.com	4.2
Chicago Tribune	3.8
SFGate.com/San Francisco Chronicle	3.8
Daily News Online Edition	3.3
Newsday	3.2
Village Voice Media	2.8
DallasNews.com	2.7
The Houston Chronicle	2.7
International Herald Tribune	2.6
Atlanta Journal Constitution	2.4
Chicago Sun Times	2.2
The Politico	2.1
Azcentral.com	2
Seattle Post Intelligencer	2
tampabay.com	1.9
Star Tribune	1.8
MercuryNews.com	1.7
Orlando Sentinel	1.6
Philly.com	1.6
Sun Sentinel	1.5
Detroit Free Press	1.5
Cleveland.com	1.5
MiamiHerald.com	1.5
The San Diego Union Tribune	1.4

  There it is, the Seattle P-I web site scores higher than the Seattle Times, which doesn't even make the top 30.  It even scores higher than the San Jose Mercury News (Silicon Valley's newspaper).

I wonder how much of the Seattle P-I score comes from their news department and how much comes from their popular blogs (like Todd Bishop's Microsoft blog).

 

[via Seattlest]

Edible Magazine

"I want farmers to be as famous as rock stars", says Jill Lightner, the editor of the new foodie quarterly, Edible Seattle.  As the grandson and son of Wisconsin farmers, this sounds like my kind of magazine!  So I rushed over to Metropolitan Market near the Space Needle, as soon as I heard it was on the newsstands.  (They don't yet have it at Whole Foods or PCC, at least when I called this weekend).

They focus on locally grown food, which of course always comes down to farmers like the people behind wooly pigs (featured in the first issue), or chickens (how to raise them in your back yard!). I can't wait till they do something with dairy farms and raw milk (hey maybe they could get my 90-year-old grandma to tell them how to milk a cow by hand--the way she showed me when I was a kid). It appears that most of the contributors have web pages and blogs, making it easy to follow up if you see something really interesting.

The $5 price tag is worth it for the excellent summaries of the local food calendar (which foods are in season and when), the farmers markets (they list Mercer Island's too), and various gems like the Tofu Restaurant on Jackson I didn't know sells its own tofu fresh every day.  (Unfortunately, an apparent typo in the magazine didn't list the shop's name, so I'll have to try calling or visiting them, maybe when I'm near there next Saturday).  I liked the "news bites" summary, which among other things was the first place I'd heard that distillery laws are changing this year, enabling smaller producers to get into the business.

The publisher has been putting out regional food magazines for a long time in other parts of the country for a long time.  I think I first heard about them in San Francisco, or maybe it was Portland, so it's nice they finally have one for us too.

Of all nights to forget to put the car in the garage

I woke up to see the neighborhood blanketed with snow.  It's April 20th, for crying out loud.

Puh-lease, will somebody turn up the heat?  This is making me want to move back to California.

Leap for Green

it was hard to find a parking place between all those SUVs, minivans, and BMWs parked at the Mercer Island Community Center this morning for the Leap for Green event.

I was surprised at the number of exhibits inside, including Island Books and Full Circle Farms.   Lots of kids everywhere.

Definitely worth a visit on a snowy April day.

Mike Cero's Carbon Challenge

Mercer Island City Councilman Mike Cero has always been a strong supporter of the environment, especially where it really counts at the local level.  On every issue, from HOV lanes to preserving parks to reducing airport noise, he is on the side of preserving quality of life.

He's also the the first local official I've seen who is brave enough to publicly talk about his own family's carbon footprint (in Nancy Hilliard's column in this week's Mercer Island Reporter):

From www.epa.gov/climatechange/emissions/ind_calculator.html,  I calculated [my family of five] at 120,692 pounds, which doesn’t seem too bad given that the average U.S. household of two is 41,500 pounds. According to www.climatecrisis.net/takeaction/carboncalculator, we create 14.3 tons, double the average family of about 7.5 tons. At www.nature.org/initiatives/climatechange/calculator, I found my family of five at 78 tons...

Taking Mike's challenge for my own family, I was disappointed to see that my household footprint is higher than his:

I'm not sure why Mike beats me, but I suspect that it might be due to my frequent business trips.  I'm going to start doing more to cut down on travel.

In honor of this Saturday's Leap for Green event at Mercer Island Community Center, I think it would be great to see the rest of our public officials follow Mike's lead and publish their own carbon footprints.