Yesterday I was involved in several interesting discussions -- it's nice when the semester is over to get a chance to catch up with people.
In 
Phil's Journal, he talks about a growing recognition that the modern social construct of adolesence has a bunch of serious negative consequences. I've been thinking for a number of years what a more sensible construct for school might be (with mixed age groupings, many more adults, and a focus on community service projects). The problem is that there is little interest in doing education well -- there is a huge interest in doing it cheap. It's perceived as cheaper to warehouse children and hire one adult to watch over them than to bring them into the workplace and accept the reduced productivity of appropriating them into the adult community.
I've been working on getting ready for the MECC talk next week, so I haven't spent much time working on my sabbatical plans. I'll need to get back to that over the weekend. The MECC talk is coming together nicely. I've install phpESP, which lets you easily build a survey and embed it into a webpage. Cool stuff. For a while, I was worried that that Data Aggregation Project I created was really just a poor way to do surveys, but its really not. It really does have a different focus that would be difficult to replicate using phpESP anyway. I felt better after deciding that.