Taking the Public Out of Education
This article contains a reasonably good assessment toward the spread of private schools - as founded on what may be called 'marketplace democracy' in which dollars, rather than votes, determine public policy. More...

The Social Life of Echo Chambers
The capacity to personalize the web, or at the very least to locate smaller and smaller content niches on the web, has led to the sort of criticism described in this article, that "The Internet is a set of echo chambers in which people get together to talk with people who believe exactly the same thing as they do." The problem with this observation, notes the author, is that it's probably false. More...

Vienna Photos
This may be my best collection of photos to date, so I hope you'll take the time to have a look. Remember that all my photos are licensed under Creative Commons, and you may use them without charge for any non-commercial purpose. More...

Shuls: Do Charter Schools Take Districts’ Money? Only If You Think Children, & the Funding That Comes With Them, Are District Property
Laura Fay, The 74, 2018/09/06
This is a crass piece of propaganda that needs to be called out as such. It is written in response to the oft-made argument that private schools drain resources from the existing public school system. Laura Fay writes, "How would you respond if you stumbled across a headline that asked, 'How much do farmers markets cost Walmart?' It’s a ridiculous question." Yes, stated that way, it's ridiculous. More...

Learning’s first principle – the most important thing i learned this year
Aaron Davis, 2018/09/03

Aaron Davis pulls together three links with a common theme: the idea that learning depends first on the learner wanting to learn, on motivation. This is for me an important ground for endorsing learner-led learning. More...

What's Going On
I was going to link to the Strategy+Business item on Power Laws and complexity, but they wanted me to fill out a form demanding to know everything but blood type (which they probably have on file from Microsoft), so I decided to link to Jay Cross's discussion instead, which requires no registration and is probably more accurate. Anyhow, Jay gave me some lemons when he came to visit the other day. More...

The Human Factor
It would be easy to miss the message in this article, which is not merely that 'simple is better' - but even if it is true that everything good is simple (which isn't really the case) it by no means follows that everything that is simple is good. More...

Nanniebots: Hoax, Fraud, or Delusion?
A few days ago I ran coverage of a story, first covered in New Scientist, about ChatNannies, conversational robots designed to counter pedophiles in chat rooms. It was fun to speculate for a bit, but now this article (and various others) suggest that the software is an elaborate hoax. More...

Making the Decision to Decentralize
This article constantly reminds readers that things are more complex than depicted, and although a good discussion of decentralization this caution is probably the key thing to keep in mind. More...

Signing Off
The Invisible Adjunct calls it quits - rather than face another year without anything like a career, he or she is leaving academia and finding a job that will last more than eight months. More...