Dream deferred

Students used messages to protest in favor of the Dream Act, which was denied in a procedural vote Tuesday.

Lexical 'chunking'

A brief bit by Ben Zimmer on the habit of using idiomatic "chunks" of speech in relation to fundamental language learning. Actually, this Sunday's issue of NY Times Magazine is devoted entirely to topics of education and learning technologies, and worth reading.

Anti-incumbency doesn't (let's hope) begin to explain

Sink provides a sensibly thorough, while ambitious, agenda for public education. Scott states his opinion on the perennial issues. Why, then, is he ahead?

Also, I hope more Floridian Dems show up in November than did this August.

Scholarship Overhaul (front page)

"After all, the development of peer review was an outgrowth of the professionalization of disciplines from mathematics to history — a way of keeping eager but uninformed amateurs out."

Scholars Test Web Alternative To the Venerable Peer Review

What they won't tell you is how much, surely where the humanities are concerned, the (quite often "uninformed") academy owes to independent scholarship by dedicated, acutely studied, and non-funded outsiders who perhaps, if placed before a tenure panel, would stand out as anything but amateurs. I don't mean to say that the bureaucracy and benchmarks should completely disappear from selective reviewing, but if the professional gatekeepers want their institutions to continue providing dynamic, challenging, and (yes) with-it learning opportunities, they should be less afraid of having to trudge through the great influx of truly original ideas and perspectives that exist with or without academist sanctity. Of course, such a meager proposal would require professionalized scrutiny before even being considered, since, as Laurie Anderson puts it:
"Only an expert can see there's a problem,
Only an expert can deal with the problem."

Greater informational access=empowering.. and intractabilitating

I should return to this subject in the future, though it's apparent from the impatient glints of (often less than lucid) commentary on my part that a substantial interest in blogging has never skyrocketed. But I (also apparently) like making excuses, whether or not they are needed. My second round GRE is in two days, so I'll let the reader's encounter with the report do its own thing... That sounds socially-beneficial, right?

Computers at Home: Educational Hope v. Teenage Reality

The bewildering question, I think, isn't, "who didn't think One Laptop Per Child would nourish mind-capital for the respectively less informed," but rather, "what does this make (to outsiders) of the freedom of information philosophy we so dearly pride against a hyper-regulatory inaccess paranoia a la Beijing?"

-“there was no evidence linking technology immersion with student self-directed learning or their general satisfaction with schoolwork.”