Year: 2004

Categories
National politics

Interesting Thought

I just had an interesting thought. I have been looking at our presidential candidates and what they have been saying and I just recognized a difference in the campaigns.

President Bush is running for the office of president of the United States. (Anyone reading that is going to say “Duh, what did you think he was running for?”) The interesting things is that I just realized that Senator Kerry is not running for the office of president of the United States (Now those same people are saying “I thought he was running for president of the United States, what do you think he is running for?”) he is running for the office of “Leader of the Free World.”

Is there a difference? Yes.

Which one should they be running for? That is for the voters to decide.

Categories
National politics

Spin

The DNC is busy making sure that Bush doesn’t win the debates on spin after the fact so they have made sure to send their followers to make their voice heard at the polls.

Online polling is unscientific at best no matter which man wins, but they’re making sure that there is no chance of balance when they make such a blatant effort to misrepresent public opinion by overloading the poll results with the votes of the democratic faithfull. It sure looks fishy when CBS News has Kerry winning by an 80% margin when all the other polls have margins of 9 to 40%. I guess the republicans don’t vote CBS.

Categories
Education

Really? Great?

This is slightly off the path of the original discussion, but when Rovy said “it would be great to have adaptive, exploratory, multi-path instruction for everything we have to learn” it got me thinking. Would it be so great.

Rovy would probably agree with me – based on his post – that there are some things where it really makes no sense to go to the expense, time and effort to produce that kind of instruction. When we attempt to make everything so interactive etc. what we end up with is edutainment at its best. While we could certainly use more well designed and interactive instruction our goal should not be to make everything so engaging but to use engaging where it actually enhances learning.

Categories
life

Me and People

I was having a discussion with Laura last night about me and how I react to people. It is more pronounced in groups, but the fact is that I keep myself distant from people. Laura told me that it comes across as arrogant. For my part I was complaining that people never take me seriously. They always seem to think that I am naive or inexperienced and that really grates on me because I think that I have something to offer (most of the time) in most situations.

I got thinking about that whole thing and the thought struck me that the two things might be related. I realized that, for whatever reason, I expect that people will not place any value on what I say. I expect them to disregard what I have to say and so I don’t speak up loudly – why waste my breath. Because I have preempted people the whole thing becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Having figured that out, now I need to figure out how to correct it.

Categories
Education

Design vs Procedure

I think that Alan has perfectly illustrated the difference between a “design formula” – ADDIE in this case – and real design. It is not that ADDIE is not good design, but if you A then D then D then I then E you have copied someone elses design.

We need to get better at teaching how to think through design so that there is no more need to rely on ADDIE or First Principles to produce our instruction. We can use them to help us understand how the learning process generally occurs and then think about the layers of design and the criteria for the specific project/product and create a design rather than finding the material and then following a rather rote procedure.

Categories
National politics

Cracking the Blocks

Thanks to electoral-vote.com I discovered the efforts of Colorado Democrats who hope not to be disenfranchised in the presidential election this year as reported in the Rocky Mountain News at the beginning of August.

This is exactly in line with what I was advocating in response to the New York Times editorial about abolishing the electoral college. Right now there are too many states taken for granted in every election but if we put the vote of every elector in play to some degree we will have a much more democratic system as it was designed to be. I suggest that the voiceless Republicans in California and New York try to get similar measures on their ballots for November.

Categories
National politics

Some Real Issues

I thought this really shows the difference between “politics” and “issues” by highlighting some issues. I would add just one thing – if either candidate can give a simple answer to any of these issues I won’t believe him.

Thanks to David Anderson for bringing this to my attention on his blog.

Categories
technology

phpGedView

I got the family genealogy site up in skeletal fashion. Enough to know that it basically works. I can’t wait to get it fleshed out and get more people adding to it as time goes by. At the suggestion of a cousin of mine I used phpGedView to manage the gedcom files on the site. So far I am very pleased.

Categories
life

Scary

Perhaps I am losing my optimistic outlook that people are basically good, generally smart and usually engage their minds in life, but I get a little disappointed the more I am on the web and notice that there are so many basic errors. I find it ironic that the mainstream media talk about bloggers being fundamentally unreliable and unprofessional in their reporting and then the New York times offers this which was a decent article but it included this “‘Were not terrorists, were not subversives, were just decent dads'” as a quote from Batman’s accomplice. I am fairly certain that what he said was “We are not terrorists” rather than “{We} were not terrorists, but today we decided to be terrorists.” I know I’m nit-picking but they have editors and reviewer who are supposed to do that, yet it got published the wrong way. Why would I expect them to get their facts just right when they cannot even catch the most basic spelling and grammer before publication – and this is the New York Times, not some small town paper running short on staff.

9/14 P.S. – Not surprisingly the article has been corrected now, but it still got to publication before it made it to the spelling and grammar department.

Categories
life technology

Genealogy Site

I have got the genealogy site that I talked about in Online Genealogy. It is located at www.miller-genealogy.us although right now it is only a message which talks about the site before redirecting any visitors back to this site.

I will report progress on the site development here as it progresses . . . slowly.