In 1997, the Dickey Amendment was inserted into an appropriations bill. It prohibited the use of funds by the Centers for Disease Control to “advocate or promote gun control.” It was paired with a $2.6 million budget cut to the CDC: the exact amount used by that agency for firearm research the year before. The implication was clear: the CDC needs to stay away from … Continue reading Who Tells Your Story?
Twenty years ago, I was in the market for a new car. I wanted a mid-size sedan that was safe, reliable, and had good fuel economy. I gathered data from NHTSA and the EPA and combined it with reviews and reliability assessments from Edmunds, Car & Driver, and other resources. I had a lovely spreadsheet with all of the characteristics I cared about for every … Continue reading Shifting Bias
I’m pretty old. I was thinking about my first job interview. It was 1993. I was asked what I thought about Microsoft Windows. I told them it wasn’t a real operating system. It was just a shell that sat on top of MS-DOS. It was a resource hog, and it was unreliable. It made computers harder to use rather than easier, and it wasn’t worth … Continue reading Nostalgic Optimism
Francis Bacon is said to have coined the phrase “knowledge is power,” though it doesn’t appear in any of his writings. Thomas Hobbes used the phrase in the mid-1600s, and Thomas Jefferson employed it on several occasions 150 years later. But there’s evidence that it may be 1000 years older than that. By the time I first heard it from Schoolhouse Rock, it had been … Continue reading Attendentes Potentia Est
When I was 25, I believed that the anonymity of online discussions would allow the exchange of ideas without prejudice, and raise the level of human discourse. I’d been communicating online for five or six years. The web was brand new. Most of the forums were text based. There was lots of Usenet and mailing lists. And it didn’t matter who you were or where … Continue reading Beliefs
The media specialists were describing how the elementary schools are using technology. Because the first graders did a lot of work in Google last year, the second graders aren’t having any trouble at all with Google Classroom. They log right in, and can access the resources that their teachers are sharing with them. It took a couple days at the beginning of the year to … Continue reading Changing Standards
Shortly after school ended in June, the custodial staff descended on the high school media center. They removed all of the books and bookshelves. This move had been coming for a while. Book circulation has been remarkably low for years. This year, the number of books checked out was smaller than the number of students in the school, averaging fewer than eight books per school … Continue reading Sans Livres
I’ve had several conversations recently about school libraries. As schools evolve to meet the needs of next generation students, the role of the library is increasingly unclear. If the model of textbooks and teachers as the source of all knowledge is outdated, then the idea that a school media center can contain all of the instructional resources the school could ever need is equally obsolete. … Continue reading 5 Reasons We Still Need School Libraries
Taste of Tech 