My Beauty Best Teacher

Sickness is everywhere. In my house. In our schools.

Sitting here at 6:42 am in the morning, I am in my comfy chair for a brief moment at the start of my day about to head a school after another night with a sick child. The worst has past and she should sleep comfortably through the day with her bottle of Gatorade nearby. I know because she is the fourth of the five of us to have this same virus. (I'm the only one left standing but as the nurse, I have to admit I'm completely worn out.)

Last Wednesday afternoon my iphone got sick. It would not update to iOS5. I was getting Error 3200 (like many other hundreds of thousands of people, it seems.) I got on Twitter and eventually got onto some reputable blogs to determine that this error that no one had ever seen before was due to lack of capacity on Apple's servers.

Last Monday and Tuesday, hundreds of thousands of Blackberry Messenger (BBM) customers around the world, primarily non US, could not use their messenger service. This was due, we now know, to a major switch failure where the backup switch did not take over.

Measuring and Placing Blame for Failure
As I was facing my own 3200 error on Wednesday, it struck me that in the US, we have a whole different standard of measurement for businesses versus schools.

When we judged Apple for the 3200 error, everyone knew it was a systemic problem and that somewhere there was a technical reason for the error. We also knew that if Apple was an effective company that they would move heaven and earth to take steps quickly because their core mission was at stake. They would spend what they had to, do what they had to, because an inability to scale up in this way would harm their long term growth. They are positioning themselves for the next ten years, not the last.

When we judged BBM for their error, they took quite a bit longer to fix it, but we still knew there was a systemic error somewhere. Many do think that their inability to find the problem more quickly points at bigger problems within the company.

But in neither of these cases did you hear:

• All of the engineers at Apple are sorry wastes of human flesh who are just drawing a paycheck.
• BBM engineers should all be fired for this.
• All technology companies have bad, sorry, engineers and programmers.

If someone said this, a whole industry would be up at arms. And yet, for example in Rhode Island last year, a school literally fired every teacher.

When business fails we blame the system. When education fails we blame the people.

The other struggle is that you can see an Apple or a BMM outage immediately but often it takes a decade to see a failure at a certain grade level. We should be able to "deconstruct" what is happening with the failed classes that are coming out. We have plenty of students and parents (and teachers) to interview. Where did they lose interest? What happened? When did the situation turn for the negative with this class of students? Are we deconstructing today's failure and analyzing what we did 10-13 years a go to cause it? Ships like educational institutions don't turn on a dime.

Find the problem and fix it.
Neither can we say "one thing" has gotten us here. That one thing isn't just teachers that one thing isn't just administrators. Never to shift blame, we must examine ourselves closely for any failure in the system, but let's look at some other things too.


There are a few questions I think we should ask ourselves in every schools. (In my few brief moments I have left in this chair before I go help my fourth grader review his wordly wise words (again) for his big test today.)

• Discipline. One student can disrupt learning for a whole class. Are we so eager to give another chance that we've made teachers impotent? Are the corrective measures we're using actually correcting anything? Does one student have the right to disrupt learning for everyone else? Can't we use video and document what is happening and stop having one persons word against another?
  
  
• Classroom environment. Each classroom should be a place where learning can happen. Are their noise interruptions or basic flaws that are preventing learning from happening? When these happen, are the systems in place to promptly fix the problems? (Leaks, loud/broken Air conditioners, etc.) Do administrators and others respect class time and rarely interrupt on the intercom or impromptu assemblies?
  
  
• Class size. There is definitely a point where it becomes significantly harder to teach a class. My largest class was 26. We had to be in desks because I only have 21 computers (not counting mine at my desk.) One time I had 22 students and had to let a student use the computer at my desk. I have to say that the 26 and the 22 situations were very tough to manage for me. It took everything I had and I know for a fact that I couldn't cover as much as I did when I had 18 or 12. For me, the point where it becomes a bit more challenging is somewhere around 19 or 20. I don't know why it gets tough at that point but I have a computer lab and it is. I have friends with 30 and even more in a class. I've heard of 40. In South Africa, I saw a teacher who had 150 students. She said, "I couldn't help everyone but I helped the ones I could."
• IT Purchasing policies. Why do we buy what we buy? There is no doubt, corruption in the system. Right now in Alabama, their 2009 move to a glitchy  state-wide SIS system without going to bid has raised eyebrows and my inside sources say that it is sparking an investigation. (The Mobile School Board demanded it this summer.) IT is not an afterthought it is as important as the plans for the new school building. We need people who understand the specific needs of education making decisions and the position of IT directors escalated to a level where less temptation for corruption is there. Many IT decisions should really be curricular decisions anyway. We still treat it like a black box in most schools.
  
  
• How we look at research. We talk about research based best practices and in some ways it has become the Achilles heel of education. All a company has to do is go out and fund research proving their product improves learning and we'll buy it and cite the research. Are we blind? Are we so eager to believe there is a quick fix that we'll swallow such nonsense? When I dated guys, I knew not to believe half of what they said about themselves on the first date because they were trying to make themselves look good. Salesmen are trying to SELL. If we're sick we get a second opinion. Take a look at the What Works Clearinghouse but know also that sometimes we should test new things and innovate as well. Can we "BETA" test before we go full scale? WE should.
• Do we listen to contrarian voices? Stephen Downes and Gary Stager, God bless 'em, they are often contrarian voices. I read them for that reason. While I don't always agree with how they disagree with  people sometimes (everyone deserves respect) I do think that we need to listen to all sides of issues and topics. If you only listen to people just like you when people just like you are wrong, you'll be wrong too. Balanced voices make for good decisionmaking. Contrarians are sometimes right and the general viewpoints are sometimes wrong. Get the facts, listen to both sides and make up your mind.
  
• Do we educate parents on their role? One thing that could improve learning by next week for every school would be if parents made sure their children got 8-9 hours of sleep a night. That one thing. Read Brain Rules: 12 Principles for Surviving and Thriving at Work, Home, and School and other research and you'll find that student learning is negatively impacted by lack of sleep.(One study equated the IQ drop of 1 hour less of sleep to that of lead poisoning.) Yet, parents persist on letting their kids sleep with their constantly buzzing cell phone on their pillow denying them the ability to get a good night's sleep. If we know that a child drops two grade levels in their ability to perform in class after losing an hour of sleep, then do we have systemic problems with our education system because of a nationwide inability to put our children to bed at a decent hour and take cell phones out of their hands?
  
  Don't stop there. How about having a place to do homework? Making sure they have their assignments written down and are bringing homework home. If the kid has "no homework" then are they studying anyway. Studying for a test is homework too. To think you can have a good school system without parental involvement is like thinking you can be a healthy athlete without drinking anything. Parents are a higher indicator of success than teachers.
  
• Are teachers free to teach? (I wrote about this in a Washington Post oped this summer.) Who is the customer? How much time are teachers spending filling out paperwork for administrators?
  
  What is a better measure of a good teacher: good paperwork and detailed lesson plans or what is happening in the classroom with the students? What makes a good bureaucrat doesn't make a good teacher and yet we have a system that consistently rewards teachers who are good paper pushers and hurts teachers who aren't. The customer is our students after they've graduated from high school. Will they thank us for what we taught them?
  
  I had a time during my teaching career where I had to do detailed lesson plans and honestly, sometimes I realized that I had finished my plans but wasn't ready to teach. I hadn't made the copies and done the work to really teach. Flat Classroom was invented the year that my interim headmaster (now my curriculum director) said - stop filling out lesson plans and start teaching - keep a general overview of what you cover in your lesson plan book but I'll be in your classroom 3-4 times a week. Then, I really started teaching. I was a good teacher but focusing on teaching and my students is what made me a great teacher and that was when this blog was born too.
  
• Do we look at what is happening in the classroom? Are administrators in your classroom more than once a week? Do they know what is happening there? A poor teacher becomes a bad teacher without supervision. A great teacher loves showing off and feels valued when their administrator comes by. All teachers appreciate this because we have the chance to point out obstacles that administrators can fix. (i.e. that loud A/c unit.) Why do we make teachers fill out paperwork about what they are doing with students, couldn't we have a recorder of some time document what they are ACTUALLY doing? Paperwork is antiquated and unnecessary in a world of digital recorders. Is anyone looking at it anyway?
  
• Stop looking for quick fixes. Quick fixes don't fix education. If you have a massive failure, you have massive problems. A quick fix is what you do when your child scratches their knee and needs a band aid. Major surgery happens after a horrible car crash. This car has run into the 21st century head on and most in education weren't ready. Certainly, we have some work to do. As I said in Alabama last week - maybe it is time to kill some sacred cows if we can't afford to feed them any more.

My Management professor, Dr. Phil Adler, always said that

"Accountability without Authority is a recipe for disaster" 

and that is what we have in education right now.

We have a lot of accountability on the heads of teachers and administrators.

• But do we give them authority? 
• Can they change a curriculum that is not working? 
• Can they fix things that are broken? 
• Can they handle discipline and be backed up? 
• Can they appeal to have the schedule changed or class sizes altered? 
• Can they  get rid of a computer system that is causing problems for everyone? 
• Can an administrator who identifies a personnel issue actually have the authority to fire the person who deserves it? 
• Can an administrator who is constantly causing classroom problems be reported in a way to reduce the problems or let other administrators know that this person is harming the learning environment.

We've made educators into bureaucrats by this massive move to centralize the education system in America. Bureaucrats are infamously horrible at moving quickly to fix things. BBM and Apple would still be trying to get things fixed today if they had to push paper like many of my public school friends have to do.

I'm quite tired of business people criticizing educators for not running education like "a business." The last 30 years of lawsuits and centralization of education has turned many schools into behemoths where it is very hard to get anything done, even if you are in charge. I can say this because I've worked with public schools for the last 15 years and have many close friends who are administrators.

Let's hold people in education accountable but first, let's give them the authority to do something about the myriad of problems they face.

When you have a system wide problem with low test scores you have systemic problems.

No one can tell me that every teacher in a certain town is a sorry teacher or that every principal is a bad principle. The logic just doesn't add up. We have great teachers and great principals losing their jobs today.

Why Destroy and Start Over Doesn't Make Sense
And to those who say, just destroy it and start over. That would be like me saying that I'm going to solve this stomach virus in my house by killing my children and adopting new ones. Eventually my new children WILL get sick too. Besides, it would be a horrible waste of human life and all of my love for them knows that is a horrific thing to even suggest.

And yet, people ever day call to destroy all the schools and start over. It may solve your problem temporarily but if we keep moving "best practices" that aren't best practices at all to new places then we have problems. My private school friends who say they are having problems say they start when the public school testing environment moves into their walls. It kills learning.

If the chicken is always on the scale being weighed, she's never in the barnyard eating grain.

If we've learned anything in the last ten years is that much of what we've put in place in the last ten years should be called to question. When you have teachers who have thrived for 20-30 years getting out because of the system, its the system.

Let's open our eyes and look at 3200 error in education for what it is: systemic problems that require a fix. Stop blaming ALL the people and start getting practical here. We have a mission and the future of a nation is at stake.

Shocked and agast, my son's pants were agape. Last night was the final game on the season and, the 26th straight win for the Westwood Wildcats and my son blocked a 270 pound behemoth with his pants flapping in the breeze.

My Westwood Wildcats Football Team 2010, 2011 State Champs winner 26 straight football games

We were picked to lose by 13 or 20 points depending upon who you asked. They had 10 boys over 200 pounds and one over 300 and we had barely 2, maybe.

My son's pants ripped during the last football game. When I say rip, I mean a big old tear from crotch to way up the back. My son's gray sliding pants were his only salvation from indecent exposure.

Last week I had snatched up the pants and was preparing to mend them when my son interrupted emphatically:

"We're wearing the orange pants for state, Mom, don't touch 'em. They'll get fixed in the off season when they send them in to the shop."

OK, so the word "shop" should have let me realize that I was being taken to the cleaners. Imagine my shock when I look at those boys coming out of the locker room and there I see my son's grey sliding shorts and those pants and the big old rip traveling quietly up towards the waist band in the back like spilled syrup on my kitchen counter.

Isn't it funny how we're not shocked at our children as much as we say,

"What is everyone going to say about his Mama, not fixing his pants like that?"

But after the game. After we won a second state championship in a 33-21 nail biter (it was tied 21-21 with 2 minutes to go in the fourth quarter), he sheepishly said,

"Mom, it would have been bad luck for any of us to fix our pants. We all agreed to leave the tears in our pants. When you're winning, you keep doing what you're doing until it doesn't work any more."

At that point, I didn't care what anyone said about his Momma, I was just glad they won (and very glad he was OK.) But his words echoed in my ears.

Fixing What Works Breaks What Works
Sure, it was to the point of superstition and but all I could think of was some teachers I know caught in very nonsensical situations.

For example, in the state of Georgia, there were some schools that were climbing in Math scores but the state required them to move from Algebra I, Geometry, Algebra II, etc. to Math I, Math II, and Math III and many of the best math teachers were lost in some districts.

They tried to fix what wasn't broken for some schools to fix what was broken for others.

In the south the saying goes,

"If it ain't broke, don't fix it."

But we don't listen to that in education. Here are just a few examples I can think of:

• An amazing teacher does a great job at a certain grade level. She hits her stride and is really doing a great job after a year or two. But "they" decide it is time for a change and give her a new grade level even though she's already taught that grade level at another school and knows it isn't a great fit for her.
  
• A reading program works incredibly well but there is a new curriculum director and she wants to change it because she's "heard" another one is better.
  
• A history teacher has a phenomenal history program and has a book he loves. He's aligned the book with videos and has written quite a bit of content to go along with the book for his students. It is "time' to update the book and "they" go with another program and he looks at the new curriculum to decide if he really feels like starting over. The new book isn't just a new book but a whole new way of teaching it.
  
• A school decides that everyone is going to now be "on the same page" so the teacher who loved to quickly teach more "boring" topics (which were mastered, by the way) to accelerate into some great things that are more advanced is held back because the other teachers in the group don't want to do it that way.
  
• A good teacher is now given a script so administrators can know exactly what is being taught in every classroom over the complaints of those teachers who feel scripts stifle the good teaching they've been doing for more than 20 years. These teachers are told they will be replaced if they can't go with the new turn teaching has taken.
  
• I teach keyboarding with a class average of over 70 words per minute (or gwam as we say.) I use the same textbook my Mom did and teach it the "old fashioned way" because it works. We don't go into software until after I've taught them all the keys. My friends in other schools who were forced to move to a software-based approach run about 30 words a minute and the kids look at their fingers. Many don't care about the right way to teach typing, only that software makes it easier. I'm happy with my circa 1994 textbook and don't want a new one! I'll do it the old fashioned way because it works but in many schools, I wouldn't be allowed to be so "backwards." My students are still blogging, making videos, using QR Codes and doing incredible things but I just need a book to teach typing. (See my 8th Grade keyboarding portfolio using QR codes)

"Get better and better every day in every way."

Today I demonstrated Google plus to my students as we compared and contrasted Google Hangouts with Skype and Oovoo. As I went into Google plus, I just happened to be there as Stephen Downes pointed out a grammatical mistake I made on my Leadership post yesterday.

My students said:

"Hey, Mrs. Vicki, is that guy talking about you?"

Oops. He was. I had made a grammatical mistake (again.)

Stephen Downes' Google plus post about my mistake.

I don't want to debate my mistake here. I made one. Period. I aim for zero grammatical mistakes and this mistake wasn't in the original post but came when I went back and tweaked the post this morning - as I often do when I think I've written something I like. I didn't proofread after I made the correction and thus embarrassed myself greatly, especially because someone of the stature of Stephen Downes caught it and let everyone know. I totally goofed up.

Quite a debate with those who know more than I do about grammar has ensued, and yet, I don't defend my grammar. Here was my final comment on Google+ about why this particular post made me so incredibly angry.

I am not qualified to debate grammar and will let those more studied in the field do this. I do know subject and verb agreement and if I had proofread more thoroughly I would have caught it. Again, +Stephen Downes the issue I have here is that you called me on a mistake but did not tag me in the post, thus denying me the ability to 1) correct myself 2) learn from this and 3) include me in the conversation. It came across as a behind the back jab. THAT I made a mistake doesn't make me angry at anyone except myself - but with what I've been through lately including a pretty bad illness - I'm going to cut myself some slack and hope that the meaning behind my words is powerful enough to bring people back to my blog.
What made me angry is that you didn't tag me in the Google plus post and I found this by accident.
Thank you +Keith Hamon for sharing your thoughts. You are more qualified to discuss this than I am.

I was angry because this "felt" behind my back. He didn't tag me and so I might not have seen it. 


So, as my students watched me make the first response and fix the original post to correct myself. We finished up and then discussed what we have learned from this. Here are their findings:

1. Making grammatical mistakes can harm your credibility. (A good lesson for students to learn.)
   
2. There are people who will publicly embarrass you when you make grammatical mistakes. (They were angry that he did this to me, but I told them that because I have put myself out there and am writing for  a larger audience, the expectations are higher for me. Although I certainly have excuses, I will make none. The mistake was mine and mine alone and I DO know better. I have to continue to try to be better.)
   
3. When you talk about someone on a social network like Facebook or Google plus that it is BAD MANNERS to not tag them in the post. We discussed what would have happened if I hadn't been online at just the moment Stephen wrote this and WHY that made me angry.
   
4. Sometimes when something is new even experts make mistakes. I pointed out to them that Stephen Downes is someone that I respect a lot and learn a lot from his blog. I consider him an expert in the field of educational technology. I also think that from now on he will double check his tagging of people in Google plus as I will also work harder to do a better job of proofreading. One mistake does not write his expertise off in my book - hopefully one grammatical mistake will not write someone off in the books of my readers. If it does, then so be it. I feel like people deserve the benefit of the doubt.
   
5. A typo should not discredit someone's entire statement especially when written by a single author. When Stephen says the following statement, he misspells my name (I guess he didn't proofread either) - does that mean he doesn't know what he is talking about either? Of course not, he made a typo. "Why does this bother me? Because failure to align subject and verb demonstrates that the writer quite literally does not know what he or she is talking about. Vicking is talking about"
   
6. Making social netiquette gaffes can also harm your credibility.
   
7. The standards you use for others will come back to you eventually. In this case, in the same post. He publicly called me on grammar and as he did, he made a social media gaffe, so the public timeline also was told about his gaffe because he had made the conversation public in the first place. I hate it was public but it is OK in retrospect as there are a lot of teachable moments here.
   
8. You should always fix your mistakes if you can. Mistakes are human but not fixing your mistakes is unprofessional. Fix your mistakes, try to make things right.

In this four part series, I cover tagging, review building a PLN with an iGoogle page, notes on wiki editing, and end up with Leadership notes. This is taken from a blog post for my ninth graders. This is an update to my first blog post: Wiki Wiki Teaching: The Art of Using Wiki Pages to Teach but truly represents most of my current thinking on wikis.

How to Information:

• Project Help Wiki
• Current Digiteen Wiki

Wiki Editing
We met with the [Digiteen] teachers this week and this is where many students stare numbly at the screen and don't know what to do. You are doing "authentic" research - this means that you can't really go on some web page and copy information and have it be accurate. You can't google "individual awareness" and find what you need. Don't try - you are wasting your time. Here are guidelines for how you should spend your class time. I use this when I'm working on projects.

1) First 5 minutes of class - Read and Respond.

• Review your PLN to respond to discussions on the wiki and questions or MEANINGFUL wall posts on the Ning. You could use the chat to see if someone is online from your group but DON'T leave the chat up unless you want to ask me questions in there. It can distract you and you have work to do. Multitasking is a myth - you will pay attention to one thing and not another.
  
• Answer people every day on the wiki discussion tab!
  This brings another point - when you see someone leave a message on the wiki ANSWER THEM. One of the best gifts you can give a group is to let others know that someone is out there! We are communicating ASYNCHRONOUSLY which means NOT at the same time. This is a challenging form of communications. The leaders online are those who engage and communicate. Sure, a person will see that 15 or 20 people have READ their discussion but when no one responds, it doesn't feel real - in fact, it is worse, they will think
  

  
  "OK, so I left a message and NO ONE IS ANSWERING - either I'm not important or they don't care."

  
  Every day I should see you commenting and leaving messages on the discussion tab of the wiki. EVERY day that you edit. This is part of being a good digital citizen - to communicate with online teams. Engage with them. You will see that a multiplier effect kicks in - the more you communicate, the more others communicate and then you end up with an engaged, fun group to be in. This doesn't happen if everyone waits for everyone else to do something. This is called the bystander effect - the more people watching something happen - the less likely each individual is to step in and do something about it. Speak up. Engage. Connect!
  
  Why do we care about working with people around the world?
  Right now you are working on a digital citizenship document that people around the world will read. Tomorrow you may be a scientist editing the Encyclopedia of Life or working on the cure for cancer or writing a collaborative business plan with your partner who lives in a time zone 12 hours away! This is important for your future and the future of our world - we HAVE to be able to work with people in different time zones.
• Review the current Research and news and see if you should add it to your wiki.

2) Time in Between. Read and Write
Here are some tips.

• Look at your wiki and read your topic.
  
• Errors. Are there any obvious grammatical, punctuation, or glaring errors? (Fix it.)
• Repetition. Is anything repeated unnecessarily. (Consolidate it.)
• Missing Links. Do you see any places that really need links? (Add them. See tips on hyperlinks below.)
  
• Copyright issues. Does anything look plaigarized or need re-wording? (Edit it.)
  
  Take Ownership. This is OUR wiki page not yours, not theirs, not any one persons but it belongs to the group - work as a team and reach out. If you change a lot of things, leave a message. If you see it, it is your responsibility to edit it!
  
  
• Look for content that needs to be added.
• Missing? From your research or common knowledge is there anything left out of this section? (Add it.)
  
• Confusing? Does this information make sense to the average person who knows very little about technology? If it confuses you it will confuse others. (Clarify it.)
• Proper Place? Read the other sections of this wiki page. Does this section add to that information? Is anything repeated too much? (Put it in the right place- you can edit multiple sections - this whole wiki page belongs to all of you.)
• Summarized at Top? Does the summary at the top of the page reflect what you've put in your section? (Add it.)
• Included in the Guidelines? Do the digital citizenship rules reflect what you've put in your section?) (Add to them.) Are the recommendations accurate? (Work on them and discuss them if they are controversial.)
  
  
• Look for contextual hyperlinks to be added.
• In Context. Hyperlinks should be CONTEXTUAL or part of the paragraph in context. (You shouldn't put the full URL unless it is in a citation it should be PART of the paragraph.)
  
• Emphasize Important Words. Is the word essential to your topic? (Hyperlink it the FIRST time it occurs to a page that gives a good definition and is a good SOURCE of information.)
• Eliminate Distracting Hyperlinks. If the word is emphasized will it distract from the purpose of the page? (i.e. if a page is on digital netiquette I'm not going to link to a country's name about that country - it is not related to the page at hand unless it is a research study about netiquette related to that country.)
• Proper Nouns. Is the word the first occurrence of a proper noun that is central to the discussion in this section? (link it - this includes software, websites, and people, etc.)
• Watch for Dead Text. Teachers look for "dead text" as you should on Wikipedia. this is text w/ no citations. (We say "dead text is a dead giveaway" that students haven't researched and cited sources. Teachers and researchers will look to make sure that a paragraph is cited and true or if someone just made it up.)
• Concisely used. Less is more online. Never say "To find out more click here.
• Links to a good source. Make sure the source you are linking to is a good source of information and not just the first link you come to.
  
  
• Look to see how you should cite sources.
• Contextual hyperlink - Linking happens to clarify a topic as above and should be done to cite your source.
• Citation - In addition to linking a CITED source - if you quote something directly you must also CITE your source with a formal citation. This INCLUDES all photos and videos, research studies. This is done with numbers according to our project citation guidelines.
  
  
• Look to see how you should EDIT.
• Less is more. The flaw in past digiteen wikis is they are TOO LONG (some could say that about this blog post ;-)) Information is repeated because students don't want to edit each other's work. Edit, make it concise. Fix things!
• If you see it fix it. IF you see a mistake it is your responsibility to fix it. Remember that different forms of English exist around the world, make sure it is really a mistake (i.e. analyze vs. analyse. program vs. programme) Typos and grammatical mistakes shouldn't live for very long on an active wiki. If teachers see it we know that the students on that wiki aren't editing well.
  
• Put things in their place. Look at the wiki page as a WHOLE - where is the best place to say something. Teachers have the ability to look at the userid's of those who edit. If you edit, no matter where, you WILL get credit - even if it is "out of your section." 
• See the big picture. This whole page should flow as if written by one person even though it is around 80 or so students. Everyone working together can give it unity.
• One voice. Never use "I" on this - who is I? There are 80-100 of you on the page. Blogging is for "me" but wiki-ing is for "we."
  

3) Last 5 minutes of Class Recap and Write

• Recap what you did, ask questions. Post them on the discussion. The discussion tab should be a dialog that keeps work moving along. Not everyone is going to be as active or progressive as you are and hints of where they should start will help!
  
• Why Recap? This keeps the communication going and lets others know that you are "there" and working. They see edits but they do not know who is editing. Your discussions mark you as a leader, someone who is engaged and working, and a good team member. This habit will see you well. Not everyone knows how to see who is editing and contributing. The Recap closes your day. It is also a starting point for you to help you remember where you left off.
  
• A good recap. Include what you did today, other things you think need to be done, and where you plan to pick up next time. If you're going to be offline for a while, let others know. If you're done with the project, let them know as well.

4 Posts in this Series (Will link them after completed.)
Part 1 - How to Tag Properly
Part 2 - Building your PLN and RSS Feeds.
Part 3 - Editing Wikis and Placing Hyperlinks
Part 4 - Web 2.0 Leadership

A new study from the bipartisan Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life found that liberals and Democrats are far more likely to believe in ghosts, psychic powers and astrology than their conservative/Republican counterparts. About 50 percent more Democrats than Republicans say they have spoken to the dead.

Michael Graham, writing in the Boston Herald, isn't surprised by this find at all- to him, it is obvious that the essence of contemporary liberalism is the ability to believe in nonsense:

This week, President Obama and his fellow Democrats told “60 Minutes” that they are serious about dealing with America’s debt problem. That very same Sunday, Senate Democrats pushed through a $1.1 trillion spending bill, every penny of which has to be borrowed.

President “No More Earmarks” is going to sign a bill that includes subsidies for Amtrak, a government pay raise and more than 5,000 individual earmarks for pork-barrel pols to send home the bacon. The ObamaCrats need to raise the debt ceiling by $1.8 trillion just to get through the 2010 elections. That’s as much debt in one year as the entire eight years of George W. Bush.

Then there’s the latest version of health care reform put forward by Sen. Harry Reid. We all know what great financial shape Medicare is in, right? (“It’s not technically bankrupt, it just needs more money” - Barney Frank).

Now Democrats want you to believe that the way to fix health care is to push millions of Americans into becoming new Medicare patients, while simultaneously cutting the Medicare budget by $500 million. It’s going broke, you’re adding millions of patients while cutting billions of dollars - and you think it will fix the problem?

I don’t believe in man-made CO2, that tiny fraction of all greenhouse gases in the atmosphere that Al Gore believes has the power to destroy the Earth. I don’t believe in Cinderella courtrooms with charms to turn international terrorists into mere criminals with all the rights of U.S. citizens. And I don’t believe in invisible jobs “saved” by magic “stimulus” money in Neverland’s 99th Congressional District.

I'm not surprised by this Pew Study either, having realized long ago that liberals will believe in almost anything (except that we have God-given rights to life, liberty, and property). Check out some of my ideas and thoughts about what Democrats believe in this post- The Religion of the Democrats.

Last year I wrote the following in a post called "Bombshell" Experiment: Global Climate Change Caused by Cloud Cover:

Times have to be getting rough on those who worship the Green God; science and reasoning are killing their religion in a way that it never could do with Christianity. For years people have been preaching that humans are the cause of global warming, that global warming is bad, and that the only way to reverse this climate change is to repent and tithe. Symbols of the evil of humans abound to these true believers- SUV's, air conditioning, electric power, comfort, happiness, etc- and these modern-day followers of Mandaeanism inevitably preach that humanity is responsible and needs to turn towards communism in order to stop the rise of the seas and the heating of the earth.

But it turns out this entire religion is built on a false premise- humans are largely not responsible for the changing of the climate and thus bear no obligation to give up any sort of symbols of progress to fix a problem that isn't theirs to fix. That doesn't mean that humans can pollute as much they want- there is still the tragedy of the commons, which can be solved by stronger rule of law and more property rights, which is the exact opposite of what environmentalists preach. But it does mean that government policies discouraging certain things and encouraging other things are built on a faulty foundation of unreality that will do more harm to society than good if continued.

Humans are not responsible for any sort of change in climate, and thus we should dash the dreams of Democrats and liberals and environmentalists and wake them out of their paradise world of railroads, bike paths, windmills, and other relics of the 1800's. CAFE standards, denying permits to mining and drilling companies, using the laws of the national government to stop developments everywhere, and cap-and-trade schemes are unreal, in the sense that they do not reflect the reality of the world. The only thing that these policies do in reality are empower elites in society to take and keep control of the means of production in order to put in place a more unjust world where life, liberty, and personal property is attacked- they do not do anything to the temperature of the globe or the environment or the climate.

The reason that these policies do not work is because humans are not responsible for any sort of changes in climate- the sun is. Shout it from the rooftops and yell it with passion at any environmentalist or liberal or Democrat whose party has been captured by these believers in the false Green God-

THE SUN IS RESPONSIBLE FOR TEMPERATURE OF THE EARTH!

Today on RealClearPolitics, I read a good article that touches on this subject again. Here is part of the article called The Galileo of Global Warming:

...Danish physicist Henrik Svensmark, who seems to have discovered the most important factor that actually regulates Earth's climate, and who is quietly in the process of proving it.

I linked last year to Svensmark's latest big breakthrough, but I didn't get a chance to discuss it much, so I want to give a little more detail now, then show one of the recent consequences of Svensmark's achievement.

Let me briefly sum up Svensmark's theory. The temperature of the Earth, he argues, is regulated by the intensity of solar radiation, but not in the obvious way. It is not that the increase is solar radiation heats the Earth directly. (It does, of course, but not to a sufficient degree to explain climate variations.) Rather, an increase in solar radiation extends the Sun's magnetic field, which shields Earth from cosmic rays (highly energetic, fast-moving charged particles that come from deep space). How does this affect the climate? Here is the crux of Svensmark's argument. When cosmic rays hit the atmosphere, he argues, their impact on air molecules creates nucleation sites for the condensation of water vapor, leading to an increase in cloud-formation. Since clouds tend to bounce solar radiation back into space, increased cloud cover cools the Earth, while decreased cloud cover makes the Earth warmer.

So if Svensmark is right, lower solar radiation means more cosmic rays, more clouds, and a cooler Earth, while higher solar radiation means fewer cosmic rays, fewer clouds, and a warmer Earth.

Those who have followed the global warming controversy over the years may recall that cloud-formation is one of the major gaps in the computerized climate "models" used by the consensus scientists to predict global warming. They have never had a theory to explain how and why clouds form or to account accurately for their effect on the climate. Svensmark has smashed through this glaring gap in their theory.

Like I said, Svensmark hasn't just put this theory out there. He has been working to prove it. He has done some studies that attempted to track measurements of cosmic ray flux against surface temperature and cloud cover, with some success. But his big breakthrough last year was a long-awaited experiment at Switzerland's CERN particle accelerator that demonstrated the most controversial part of Svensmark's theory.

It is widely accepted that the Sun's magnetic field helps shield Earth from cosmic rays, and it is also widely accepted that increased cloud cover cools the Earth (though expect this to suddenly come into question as Svensmarks' theory gains ground). What Svensmark needed to demonstrate was that cosmic rays form nucleation sites that seed clouds.

Hence the aptly named CLOUD experiment performed at CERN last year, with the results published last August. The experiment was actually more than a decade in the making, but as Lawrence Solomon explains, it was help back for years by the scientific bureaucracy because of its potentially unwelcome results.

The results are indeed unwelcome, at least for the advocates of the global warming consensus. Anthony Watts explained the experiment at his blog, Watts Up With That? The CLOUD experiment used CERN's particle accelerator to send a beam of artificially generated charged particles—simulated cosmic rays—into a gas-filled chamber and then measured the formation of aerosols, the kind of compounds that can serve as cloud nucleation sites. It found a direct and very significant relationship.

This is not a total demonstration of Svensmark's theory. The Nature paper on the CLOUD experiment notes that "the fraction of these freshly nucleated particles that grow to sufficient sizes to seed cloud droplets, as well as the role of organic vapors in the nucleation and growth processes, remain open questions experimentally." But last year's result is a clear demonstration of a crucial step in Svensmark's theory...

Full disclosure- I don't worship the Green God and don't hold true to the tenants of True Science, so emailing me to extol the virtues of your religion and way of life won't have any effect.

To loosely quote Mr. Universe, there is no official government news- the kind of puppet theatre that the government jesters push through their various institutions to the sleepwalking masses of morons- there is only the truth of the signal- what we see, what we know, and what is reality. And you can't stop the signal.

Henrik Svensmark is also the author of The Chilling Stars: A Cosmic View of Climate Change.

Times have to be getting rough on those who worship the Green God; science and reasoning are killing their religion in a way that it never could do with Christianity. For years people have been preaching that humans are the cause of global warming, that global warming is bad, and that the only way to reverse this climate change is to repent and tithe. Symbols of the evil of humans abound to these true believers- SUV's, air conditioning, electric power, comfort, happiness, etc- and these modern-day followers of Mandaeanism inevitably preach that humanity is responsible and needs to turn towards communism in order to stop the rise of the seas and the heating of the earth.

But it turns out this entire religion is built on a false premise- humans are largely not responsible for the changing of the climate and thus bear no obligation to give up any sort of symbols of progress to fix a problem that isn't theirs to fix. That doesn't mean that humans can pollute as much they want- there is still the tragedy of the commons, which can be solved by stronger rule of law and more property rights, which is the exact opposite of what environmentalists preach. But it does mean that government policies discouraging certain things and encouraging other things are built on a faulty foundation of unreality that will do more harm to society than good if continued.

Humans are not responsible for any sort of change in climate, and thus we should dash the dreams of Democrats and liberals and environmentalists and wake them out of their paradise world of railroads, bike paths, windmills, and other relics of the 1800's. CAFE standards, denying permits to mining and drilling companies, using the laws of the national government to stop developments everywhere, and cap-and-trade schemes are unreal, in the sense that they do not reflect the reality of the world. The only thing that these policies do in reality are empower elites in society to take and keep control of the means of production in order to put in place a more unjust world where life, liberty, and personal property is attacked- they do not do anything to the temperature of the globe or the environment or the climate.

The reason that these policies do not work is because humans are not responsible for any sort of changes in climate- the sun is. Shout it from the rooftops and yell it with passion at any environmentalist or liberal or Democrat whose party has been captured by these believers in the false Green God-

THE SUN IS RESPONSIBLE FOR TEMPERATURE OF THE EARTH!

This is a central fact about global warming that I learned several years ago that blew my mind and illuminated a truth that was previously hidden- that it is changes in the sun that cause the temperature of the Earth the change.

Oh, it is not fully understood yet how changes in the sun affect the temperature of the Earth, but it has been quite clear for some time that changes in sunspot activity correspond to changes in the temperature of the Earth. In times of active sunspot activity, the Earth gets warmer, such as in the 1980' and 1990's when there was considerable sunspot activity observed, or during the Medieval Warm Period (800-1300). And in times of passive sunspot activity, the Earth doesn't get warmer, such as the 2000's when sunspot activity slowed and so did the increase in global temperatures (if any of the data can be believed, seeing as so much of it has been purposefully falsified by worshipers of the Green God) or during the Little Ice Age (1400-1900), which only ended when sunspot activity began to increase again and was not related in any way to the start of the second Industrial Revolution.

But it was not clear how or why sunspot activity affected temperatures on Earth, so those who believe in the Green God rejected this science in favor of believing that they held the power to control the whole globe in their own hands and that they are the source of evil in the world and that they can transcend this evil by denying themselves pleasures and modern comforts and making the world in general better by telling other people that they are evil and working to deny them pleasures and comforts as well.

BUT THE SUN IS RESPONSIBLE FOR TEMPERATURE OF THE EARTH!

Henrik Svensmark, a Danish physicist, has for many years studied the effects of cosmic rays on cloud formation. His research and data forced him to present a new hypothesis: that solar activity is an indirect cause of global warming, and that the how and why sunspot activity was responsible for temperature changes on earth was a link through the interaction of the solar wind and cosmic rays and cloud cover.

The basic theory is that clouds are formed when cosmic rays hit the atmosphere. The more clouds in the atmosphere, the more sunlight that is reflected off our globe, and our globe cools. When the sun is very active, it's magnetism draws cosmic rays to it rather than earth, resulting in less cosmic rays hitting the atmosphere, less clouds, less cooling effect of these clouds, and temperatures go up. When sun is inactive, it has fewer sunspots, fewer magnetic activity, more cosmic rays hit the earth, resulting in more clouds, resulting in more cooling, and the temperature of the Earth goes down.

And when our solar system, Earth included in it, go through one of the denser star areas of the Milky Way, it doesn't matter what our own sun is doing, because the surrounding stars make lots of cosmic rays and overcome the sun's activity, resulting in many cosmic rays hitting our planet, leading to increased cloud cover, leading to a cooling effect, and temperatures go down.

It is a nice theory, and advances us just a little bit closer to understanding climate change. We now know that major perturbations in climate relate to the position and orientation of the Earth in its orbit around the Sun. For example, as Serbian mathematician Milutin Milankovic pointed out in 1941, as have many others since, initiation of the major ice ages on Earth correlate with a 23,000-year precession cycle, a 41,000-year obliquity cycle, and a 100,000-year eccentricity cycle in the position of the Earth relative to the Sun. Cyclic variations measured in oxygen isotope ratios that correlate with the growth of ice sheets and biogeochemical responses closely reflect the 23,000-year precession cycle. Also, a half-precession cycle appears to be related to the dynamics of the East African Equatorial monsoon. In addition, the 41,000-year obliquity cycle shows strongly in North American marine depositional records (source: The Science and Environmental Policy Project weekly newsletter).

And now we also suspect that suns, both our own and other suns who we may near by, also affect our climate by bombarding us with cosmic rays that escape from suns when they have periods of lower magnetic activity and less sunspot activity and more cosmic rays and more clouds and lower temperatures, or periods of higher magnetic activity and more sunspot activity and less cosmic rays and less clouds and higher temperatures.

To advance our knowledge a little bit more on this, we have to figure out what function high energy particles might have on cloud formation- in other words, what effect does cosmic rays have on cloud formation- do more of them create more clouds? This is exactly the sort of science that can be tested and verified. And that's what CERN recently did.

Via Ace of Spades I read that the CLOUD (“Cosmics Leaving Outdoor Droplets”) experiment, which examines the role that energetic particles from deep space play in cloud formation, has been successful in producing some sort of results, although those results are currently being actively suppressed by CERN Director General Rolf-Dieter Heuer because the results of these experiments "would go immediately into the highly political arena of the climate change debate," one imagines that if they prove that cosmic rays indeed do cause increased or decreased cloud cover, it would be yet another nail in the already buried coffin to the theory that global warming is caused by man. These findings are called "bombshell" by the Linking Canada Free Press.

For those of you who are interested in fully understanding how cosmic rays may affect cloud formation which many affect the temperature of our planet, there is a documentary film on Svensmark's theory, The Cloud Mystery, that came out in 2008 and is on youtube. It is broken up into 6 parts- check out part 1 by following this link.

Henrik Svensmark is also the author of The Chilling Stars: A Cosmic View of Climate Change.

Yesterday on 1310 I heard Al Frankin being interviewed. He was very hopeful that after Democrats adjusted the numbers, he would win the Senate seat there. The host of the show, thug Ed Schultz, also talked about how it was possible to 'find' more votes for the Democrat candidate. Neither talked at all about the process, the laws, the procedures, or anything legal. Neither seemed concerned about balance, oversight, or others viewing the process. The only thing on Frankin and Schultz's minds was power, and how to get it.

So it is no surprise that the fix is in. When the polls closed Tuesday evening, Minnesota's Secretary of State's office showed that Norm Coleman had a 725-vote win in his closely contested race against Al Frankin. By the next morning, however, Coleman's victory was already shrinking- has already been "corrected" to a mere 237 votes.

Now, mistakes are made. Somehow though I doubt corrections that find exactly 100 ballots all voting for Frankin and Obama. Somehow I am surprised when procedures were not followed in liberal districts, and then these liberal districts find more votes. Look at the story on powerlineblog- the technology and safeguards are there. The law is there. But I bet the fix is on, and Frankin will steal the election.

It has been a struggle for me to write about the financial reform bill, and I haven't commented before on it yet. But yesterday I came across an excellent article in the Washington Independent called A Guide to the Tangled Financial Reform Bill which breaks down each important provision of the proposed financial reform bill and attempts to give a balanced analysis of it. I urge you all to read this article before making any further thoughts or opinions on the bill- whether you are Republican or Democrat, liberal or conservative, it is important to look at the world around you with good information and analysis, which this article provides.

Here are the best pieces (edited and shortened by me) of the article A Guide to the Tangled Financial Reform Bill:

Audit the Fed. The Federal Reserve’s balance sheet is more than double its size before the financial crisis — swollen with $1.1 trillion in mortgage-backed securities purchased from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac plus toxic assets from failed companies like Bear Sterns — and a bipartisan group of senators want to force a thorough independent audit of the Fed’s books. A strong provision did not make it into the final Senate legislation.

End too big to fail by capping bank size. Dodd’s bill as currently written gives the Federal Reserve and other regulators the ability to seize and break up financial firms it deems systemically important and systemically dangerous. But that is meant only as a “last resort,” and members of both parties consider the language too wan. Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) and Sen. Ted Kaufman (D-Del.) last week introduced the Safe Banking Act, which they plan to offer as an amendment to the Dodd bill. It mandates hard leverage and size caps on banks and other financial firms; limits commercial banks’ assets to 2 percent of GDP and non-banks’ assets to 3 percent; and imposes a 16-to-1 leverage cap, among other provisions.

Reinstitute Glass-Steagall provisions. Another popular way to effectively limit bank size is to return to the Depression-era Glass-Steagall rules. The Glass-Steagall Act, mostly repealed in 1999, prevented banks from having both commercial and investment banking arms — as, for instance, J.P. Morgan Chase does today. Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.) and Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) plan to introduce an amendment reintroducing the rule and thus requiring big, diversified banks to split themselves up. Shelby, Sen. Johnny Isakson (R-Ga.) and Sen. John Cornyn (Texas) also support the measure.

An effectively similar, if functionally different, way of breaking up banks or limiting their size is by instituting the Volcker Rule — which bars banks from speculating with their own money by “prop trading” or investing in hedge funds. The current Dodd bill promises to institute something like the Volcker Rule, creating a commission to look at how to institute it down the road. But Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.) and Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.) have ready a measure introducing a more-stringent version immediately.

Fix the ratings agencies. The Dodd bill does little to fix the credit ratings agencies, whose profligate stamping of AAA ratings on collapsing subprime mortgage-backed securities helped to stoke the crisis. (The companies have a conflict of interest at the core of their business, in that they are paid by the companies whose securities they rate.) The Dodd bill creates a new office at the Securities and Exchange Commission to look closely at credit ratings agencies — but does little more to further reform them. Numerous Democratic senators have cited the issue as a major weakness in the bill, and Senate staffers say it is unlikely to go unchanged. Sanders has said he will introduce new language to strengthen oversight over and regulation of the agencies.

Guarantee no taxpayer money will go to bank bailouts. Republicans have derided the Dodd bill’s resolution authority fund — wherein the government will tax $50 billion from the banks, creating a pool of cash to be used by the Federal Reserve to shut down failing firms — as creating “permanent bailouts.” GOP politicians including Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) have cited it as a major point of contention. But Senate staffers say that rather than killing the resolution-authority fund, Republicans want language explicitly guaranteeing taxpayers will not be on the hook for future bailouts.

Keep the Fed the regulator of little banks. Under the Dodd bill, the Federal Reserve would have oversight only of banks with more than $50 billion in assets. But Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-Texas) and Sen. Richard Shelby (R-Ala.) oppose this measure and want the Fed to have oversight of small banks as well — ensuring that the Fed does not become overly concerned with the business of big banks and ensuring that it keeps an eye on the small financial companies that can be the bellwether of bad economic times. Hutchison has said she plans to “certainly have an amendment that assures that state banks and community banks will be able to have access to be members of the Federal Reserve.”

Make the Consumer Financial Protection Agency truly independent. Sen. Jack Reed (D-R.I.) has promised to introduce amendment moving the Consumer Financial Protection Agency outside of the Fed.

Improve hedge fund reporting. Reed also plans to introduce an amendment closing a loophole in the Dodd bill that might let some private equity firms, venture capital firms, and hedge funds avoid registering with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

This is a reminder that whatever the original bill that the Democrats brought to the floor, what matters is the bill that is passed at the end (and I don't mean by 'the end' when it passes the House and Senate and is signed by the President- now that Democrats run things in DC, that outdated model of passing legislation isn't followed and instead they deem things passed and then our dear leader runs things, and that is what I men by 'the end').

If the national government wants to save education in America, I have become increasingly convinced that it needs to let it go, and for that matter, if the states want to save education in America, they have to let it go to. The education of children needs to be shoved as hard as it can be shoved to the lowest local level of our governmental system so that parents, local community leaders, and stakeholders in the educational system can regain the power and control over the education of their children's lives. What made our nation great was decentralization, local control, and personal responsibility, and by moving more and more control to the state and national levels we have lessened the very things that made us great.

America is not China, nor is it Finland, nor is it Germany, nor is it Singapore- those nations, although perhaps doing well lately, didn't conquer a continent, win two major world wars, and in recent years become the world's sole superpower. So we should not look to them for solutions on how to build and design and run an educational system for our nation- we should instead take those things that made America great and helped it to become what it is and modernize them and improve them and build on them, and that means not adopting statist models built on communistic principles designed to suck massive amounts of wealth from the system and funnel it through large bureaucracies to favored politically connected groups within societies. That's not our model to follow- our model is to return power over education back to the local level, which will then experiment with public policy solutions and funding models in order to achieve a democratic solution to providing high quality education at minimum cost to society with little loss of efficiency.

Rules regarding what is taught in each district need to be returned back to the district. Funding for each district needs to be returned to the district. Rules regarding discipline need to be returned back to the district. Control over hiring and regulations over hiring and rules regarding hiring need to be returned to the district. School districts at the local level must once again be where the education of children is designed, set up, and practiced, and this power and money and decisions should no longer to sent off to far-away places where faceless bureaucrats who don't know your kids make decisions that are very important to your children and their futures.

Democrats and Republicans alike make the mistake of trying to fix education by moving more and more power to the national or state levels, killing any innovation that local districts may experiment with to build better educational systems in favor of trying to adopt one-size-fits-all models that not everyone wants and so no one adopts. Creativity, growth, and great ideas come from people who actually work in education and manage education professionals and whose children go through the education system, and yet in our nation, more and more of decisions, funding, and power is flowing rapidly away from those people to unelected bureaucrats, childless professors, and scheming politicians. Republicans and Democrats alike need to reject this siren song of government power fixing everything, and take a deep breath and a leap of trust and once more empower the people of our great nation to do what needs to be done to fix and improve education by returning powers and funds that once were at the local level- once when America was great- back to the local level.

DC Schools Chancellor Rhee (AKA The Broom Lady) gets the cover story in the soon to be released Decmber 8th issue of Time titled "How To Fix America's Schools". In the cover picture, Rhee appears with a broom. Sound eerily familiar to a former DC mayor Sharon Pratt Kelly who vowed to clean house with her infamous broom ? Some would argue that Rhee is on a singular mission to get rid of teachers (good and bad) and that she suffers from tunnel vision because she lacks multifaceted solutions to complex problems that plague public education and fails to include all of the stakeholders. Are you 'Yeah' or 'Nay' on Rhee's vision to save DC Public Schools ?