Tuesday, April 30, 2024

Greetings Starfighters,

I’m sorting through my feelings about kids, social media, smartphones in schools, and dopamine. There’s quite a growing roar online about the time kids spend on social media and the number of notifications they get during the school day. Of course, leading the charge is Jonathan Haidt, who wants you to take away your kid’s phone.

I haven’t read his book yet and likely won’t for some time, but if we’re worried about notifications on phones (you can turn them off, and we can teach kids, and ourselves, responsible usage) and how much time kids are spending on social media and phones, we have more work to do than to take the phones away.

Bans don’t work, and the kids just model what they see adults doing. Also, I remember a time when the old folks said that kids shouldn’t spend all their time playing video games (also getting dopamine hits) or watching TV, and there’s an awful lot of us that turned out just fine.

Quote of the Day

“The research proves what gamers already know: within the limits of our own endurance, we would rather work hard than be entertained.” (Jane McGonigal, Reality Is Broken)

Musical Interlude

Yo-Yo Ma has traveled to several national parks, performing in beautiful environments. He performed inside Mammoth Cave last year (I’m still bummed I didn’t get to see the concert), and on Earth Day 2024, he performed in Alaska.

Long Read of the Day

This year marks the 40th anniversary of the pivotal “A Nation At Risk” report, an event that shaped educational discourse in the United States for decades. In a thought-provoking partnership, The 74 has joined forces with Stanford University’s Hoover Institution to launch the “A Nation At Risk +40” research initiative. This collaborative project delves into the wide-ranging impacts of forty years of educational reforms through a series of expert analyses, offering a critical look at how far we have come and the areas where we falter.

Despite the urgent tone of the original 1983 report, which revolutionized educational standards and accountability, it notably omitted discussions on the crucial aspects of funding and budgeting. Here is a chapter from the new research on school finance and education funding priorities.

Final Thoughts

It’s Derby Week here in Kentucky, and I can’t help but wonder what state our public schools would be in if our state leaders were as concerned with education as they are with a horse race.

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Monday assorted links

A bit of techno typing

What happens when you give kids support and an open playground?

Austin Kleon’s son, Owen, dropped his latest SoundCloud album.

He’s 11.

My favorite track, Typing, is embedded here. It’s a banger of creativity. And heavily influenced by Kraftwerk and Daft Punk, just like I am.

Oh, the possibilities.

NASA, Voyager, and long-term project-based learning

The premise for the first Star Trek film featuring the original series cast proposes that a probe from Earth, Voyager 6, traveled so far and accumulated so much information as it traveled the cosmos that it achieved sentience. And when it did, it wanted to return to “The Creator” and deliver all that information.

Trust me, that first Star Trek movie is the most “sci-fi” of the entire series, except maybe Star Trek: Beyond.

While no probe named Voyager 6 ever launched, the idea of a probe transmitting data back home after traveling billions of miles is still very much a reality and not science fiction.

However, you may have heard that Voyager 1, launched nearly 50 years ago, began transmitting gibberish back to NASA a few months ago. Many feared the worst. Voyager kept transmitting data, signifying it was alive, but something happened to the data transmissions.

After five months of work, the Voyager team worked some coding magic to restore the code and restart regular transmissions.

“When the time came to get the signal, we could clearly see all of a sudden, boom, we had data, and there were tears and smiles and high fives… Everyone was very happy and very excited to see that, hey, we’re back in communication again with Voyager 1. We’re going to see the status of the spacecraft, the health of the spacecraft, for the first time in five months.”
Linda Spilker, project scientist for NASA’s two Voyager spacecraft at JPL

Talk about project-based learning at work…

Perhaps there’s no better example of the importance of project-based learning in schools than a story like this. When has anyone tried to change the code on an object over 15 billion miles from the Earth?

Never. There’s no guidebook for a project like this, no curriculum to refer to, no content standards. Just a group of experts trying everything they know to solve a problem.

And this project has been going for nearly 50 years. Share that with your students when they think they’ve been working on a project for too long.

The Meta-Diaries of Marion Milner: Prescribing Creativity

MARION MILNER, SUMMER BEECHES. — **MARION MILNER,** *SUMMER BEECHES*.

Marion Milner’s unique approach to self-discovery involved using her creative explorations in literature and art as a therapeutic project. Through her meta-diaries, she abandoned preconceived goals and embraced free writing to uncover hidden thoughts and dark instincts. Milner’s focus on creativity influenced her self-discovery and guided her therapeutic practice with patients like Simon, emphasizing the importance of creative expression for maintaining a sense of the future.

Since 1926, Milner had been writing diaries in which she recorded her impressions of life in ways that seem ordinary enough. She would, for example, note seeing “a little boy in a sailor suit dancing and skipping by himself on his way to look at the sea lions,” or reflect, “I realized how untrustworthy I am in personal relationships … always agreeing with the person present.” But in the thirties Milner turned her diaries, as a sort of raw material, into her first books, which were published as essayistic reflections about her diaries: A Life of One’s Own (1934) and An Experiment in Leisure (1937). In them she invented something new and a genre of her own: a diary about a diary, or what the critic Hugh Haughton has called a “meta-diary.” Contemporaries like W. H. Auden responded with enthusiasm.

20 Minutes of Charles Schulz Drawing Peanuts Comics

Pardon me as I date myself, but I have loved and always will love the Peanuts comic strips. The cartoons were staples of my childhood, and I have no plans to stop watching them anytime soon.

I love to see creators create, so this 20-minute video of Charles Schulz creating his famous characters is a delight.

If you need more inspiration, here’s a video of Chuck Jones demonstrating how to draw Bugs Bunny and other characters.

Meta wants to put students and teachers in Quest VR headsets

woman using vr goggles outdoors — Photo by Bradley Hook on Pexels.com

Meta plans to make Quest VR headsets a key tool for classroom learning, offering students immersive educational experiences. The push for VR in education raises questions about the future of learning and student engagement. Despite concerns like cybersickness and limited accessibility, Meta sees VR technology as a promising avenue for transforming education.

Meta will release a suite of visually engrossing education apps for teachers to use with students ages 13 and older in time for the fall 2024 semester.
Teachers will be able to manage multiple Quest devices at once without preparing and updating each device individually.

Three Writing Tips Backed By Scientific Evidence

woman writing on a notebook beside teacup and tablet computer — Photo by Tirachard Kumtanom on Pexels.com

As my doctoral colleagues and I near the end of Year 2, we’re thinking more and more about writing our dissertations. While that process involves much research and planning, it also involves a whole heck of a lot of writing.

So, how do you write better? Here are three tips based on scientific evidence:

Of course, this isn’t an exhaustive list, and it doesn’t mention the most important part about becoming a good writer…

Writing. All. The. Time. The more you write, the better you’ll get. 2,000 words a day, according to Stephen King.

So, get to writing, my friends.

There is no audience

empty seat — Photo by Tuur Tisseghem on Pexels.com

Stop worrying about what you think other people think of you and what you do. They don’t care. They’re too busy worrying about themselves.

Years ago, when I was in my 20s, a bold and artistically daring older friend who has since passed on gave me what I often think was the best advice I have ever gotten. I was worrying what 'people would think' of a decision I had made, and she said, "Amanda, There is no audience."
— Amanda Fortini (@amandafortini) March 18, 2024

Teachers and students, this is your call to get busy doing your own thing, and don’t worry about what anyone thinks.

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