This morning was mostly consumed by attending a meeting about the design for a new building on campus. I'm rather disappointed in the results. The visions I had for the building, the teaching spaces, and the computer resource center there have all been completely gutted. Few of people involved share any kind of constructist vision for education, so the innovative features that support learning have to be fought for constantly over and over again and most of the interesting ideas have been eroded away. It will be nice for the people involved to have a new building, but all the features that were interesting or innovative has been lost because they're inconvenient, so you can get more chairs in the auditorium or conform to some particulr aesthetic. So what we're left with is a nice, new, but entirely traditional design.

I did find a bit of time to get set up to run a Mr Bayes job for a student on Friday. We checked everything over this morning to make it was all working, and on Friday afternoon, we'll get it set up and running. Hopefully, it can run over the weekend and we'll see the results by Monday.

This afternoon I attended the parent teacher conferences for both boys. School seems to be going well for both of them. They each have challenges and things they need to work on, but I have a lot of confidence in the teachers they have this year and have been satisfied so far with the outcomes.

Speaking of schools the other day, Randy and I were talking about teaching and learning. Randy was saying that he's come a lot farther in realizing that there's no value in asking students questions about models themselves, ie about the facts of biological systems. You need to ask students to actually engage with the models and use them to solve problems. I agreed and said that just knowing the biology facts wasn't useful, in the absence of being able to apply to solving problems. Randy wasn't sure he'd go that far. "Well, but in the right paradigm, that might be useful. If you could find a paradigm like that..." he said. I said, "That paradigm exists -- its called SCHOOLWORK."

I suggested that startu.net start including the RSS feed for flickr images with the tag Esperanto, so they did. Unfortunately, the software they're using can't handle the thumbnails. Bummer. Well, it's a start anyway.

StevenBrewer