Author: YJ Soon

Elite Education

The American Scholar – The Disadvantages of an Elite Education – By William Deresiewicz

So when students get to college, they hear a couple of speeches telling them to ask the big questions, and when they graduate, they hear a couple more speeches telling them to ask the big questions. And in between, they spend four years taking courses that train them to ask the little questions — specialized courses, taught by specialized professors, aimed at specialized students. […] We are slouching, even at elite schools, toward a glorified form of vocational training.

What does it mean to go to school at a place where you’re never alone? Well, one of them said, I do feel uncomfortable sitting in my room by myself. Even when I have to write a paper, I do it at a friend’s. That same day, as it happened, another student gave a presentation on Emerson’s essay on friendship. Emerson says, he reported, that one of the purposes of friendship is to equip you for solitude. As I was asking my students what they thought that meant, one of them interrupted to say, wait a second, why do you need solitude in the first place? What can you do by yourself that you can’t do with a friend?

Once Upon A School

Dave Eggers, TED Prize 2008 winner, on making a difference in the classroom. Very inspirational.

You can do and use the skills that you have. The schools need you. The teachers need you. Students and parents need you. They need your actual person. Your physical personhood and your open minds and open ears and boundless compassion. Sitting next to them, listening and nodding and asking questions for hours at a time. Some of these kids just don’t plain know how good they are. How smart and how much they have to say. You can tell them. You can shine that light on them one human interaction at a time.

I’m moving on to a new posting in January, and I have strong suspicions these next few months will be my final times as a professional teacher. Even so, I’m not quite sure I’m done teaching yet, so I’m just making a mental note here to revisit this video a year down the road.

Once Upon A School, Mr. Egger’s challenge for adults to support their local schools, is here.

YouTubed

Just got back from an interview at the mothership, and wondered if I should check what nonsense is associated with my name on Google. This one is new to me:

This and last week’s “demo lessons” in Changchun actually make me miss teaching Physics a little… I just had a lot more room for self-expression, instead of struggling to design a coherent lesson package.

Chicken vs. Shot Put

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Some Things To Mention In Point Form.

  • Going to start posting comics on flickr as well. Go there for high-resolution (rather, super grainy) versions.
  • Related to above, from the left side of the page: “You’re the only person who has used “stupidchicken” as a tag.” YEAH I’M SO ORIGINAL WOO
  • The comics-only page is now accessible at comics.stupidchicken.com.
  • Sooner or later I will make a comics-only blog.
  • (Bet on later.)
  • Recent turn of events have made me so annoyed I can’t even begin to describe how much I want to kick a small animal or two right now.

That is all.

Chicken vs. Shoes

It’s been a year, but we’re back!

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Experimenting with new lazy method — draw on whiteboard, take picture, touch up image, post. The uneven lighting and levels are very frustrating, though, so I might have to dig out the tablet..

The good, and the mind-numbingly depressing

First, the good:

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Designer Jon Hicks’ From Design to Deployment, a 50-minute, 100-slide presentation (downloadable slides at the link, unfortunately no video) on building an entire site (seen here: Cheesophile) from the ground up. Lots and lots of pertinent information about web design packed into some of the most concise and high-impact slides that I could spend hours marvelling at. Most of it is stuff I wish someone had neatly summarised for me years ago, but I definitely picked up some good pointers too, e.g. IE6 debuggery* using hasLayout, an old-browser friendly basic CSS file, and the skipLinks feature. Great stuff.

Then, the depressing:

So the team and I are building a pseudo-content management system for my workplace (as previously mentioned). With the limited amount of time we have, we’ve been unable to develop a full-fledged system (no rich text editor, no role management, limited input/output flexibility, among other things), though the plan is to launch the bloody site as soon as possible, then figure things out on the back-end as and when the need arises.

There was some discussion over email about what our ideal CMS would be like, and Akmal linked us to Swiiit — a local CMS solution that seems promisingly feature-rich. I took a look.

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Arrgh! The pain! I begin rant.

  • The site itself uses table-based layouts. Not a good sign.
  • Uploading files looks like it *requires* ActiveX, so it’s not cross-platform compatible.
  • They’re running on Commontown, which I’ve heard quite a few nasty remarks about from colleagues who’ve used it. All I know is that among the South Cluster sites they’ve created, none have DOCTYPEs.
  • They have some truly terrible copywriting, and can’t even decide between spelling American (“humanization”) or British (“customisable”).
  • The copywriters leave spaces before punctuation marks — unforgivable in its own right, but I suspect that could be a feature of the system. I’m not sure which is worse.
  • A choice quote: “Did you know ??? Swiiit is so efficient that it can handle uploads at the wink of an eye ? This is due to a robust back end engine which fuels its hunger.” It fuels its hunger! But only on Windows browsers.
  • There’s a “test” link on the (rather unintuitively laid-out) menu right now.
  • Hint: When you can’t get the domain you want (swiit.com has been squatted on since 2004, these guys registered swiiit in 2006), adding another vowel really doesn’t make your webpage any easier to find.
  • For that matter, the top-level domain, swiiit.com, doesn’t even bring visitors to their actual page right now, instead bringing users this excellent error message: [pagetree error: Domain ‘swiiit.com’ and owner mismatch (Page ID:374 owner:7 domain:)]
  • Also amusing: Take a look at the stock photo on the swiiit.com homepage, then at the IPTV World Forum Asia homepage (thanks Steven for that one).

How do these guys even survive? I wouldn’t be so annoyed by some amateur web company that looks like it’ll die off on its own, but they happily trumpet their golden ticket on their front page:

Swiiit is awarded the Ministry of Education’s bulk tender “The Provision of Development and Maintenance Services for School Websites” (August 2007). We will endeavour to provide the best services to the schools who are included in this tender and will strive to increase their productivity and communications through the use of Swiiit portals.

Arrrgh! (And not just for the questionable grammar.)

In my last few months in a position to make or influence IT decisions at work, I’ve come across quite a few truly hideous systems that have been brought in. Some were purchased by previous decision-makers, others were pushed down by the Ministry of Education, and some (I’m ashamed to say) I had a part in approving, tacitly or otherwise. Nobody really knows that most of these vendors are offering some truly horrendous products until it’s too late, and teachers and education administrators just aren’t the sort who bother to go around identifying something better (or if they do, they just aren’t able to convince their bosses that the last $20,000 purchase was wasted).

It saddens me that this is happening, but I guess the fact that there’s so much crap lying around the local education scene means there’s a good opportunity for people — especially those who know what schools want — to deliver these needs effectively.

Something to think about for the next 2 years and 4 months until the bond is up, I guess.

* I’m pretty sure “debuggery” is not the word I’m looking for here.