jan's diary

I just attended a seminar webinar about games in education. The main speaker talked about Whyville. This was the software used to present the webinar.

The webinar was recorded.

James Simons was a mathematician for 20 years and then a businessman. His advice on how to get employees to thrive and do a good job is well worth listening to.

• Pay them well.
• Pay them according to how the company does as a whole, not as how they are doing individually.
• Ask the employees to communicate their new ideas on a weekly basis.
• Hire good people, fire bad ones.

James Simons is now a philanthropist. He founded Math for America:

We are a nonprofit organization with a mission to improve mathematics education in US public secondary schools by recruiting, training and retaining outstanding mathematics teachers.

Every morning I skim NY Times online? Why? Because it is free for “strangled her baby and then her four cats” and “see what famous1 eats for breakfast.” Instead, I can read interesting stuff on why iPad, who was slaughtered in the tech press, sells better than warm loaf and how the standard of time has evolved over the years, just to mention two recent articles.

Yes, it does cover Libya and the tsunami in Japan as well, but there is so much more to news than war and catastrophes. A secret not realised by most news papers.

Ah, one more thing. NY Times filters the comments from readers, making those who are published sometimes more valuable than the article itself, compared to unfiltered comments in other places that read like pure and poor garbage.

One sad thing about NY Times is that they are planning on going commercial, charging for access. They tried it once before and failed. I hope they fail again.

Another sad thing is that their videos can’t be embedded in blogs. Here is a must see video on iPad.

Click the image to see the video.

Sir Ken Robinson suggests a new model for education, away from linearity and conformity, while Jan Thomas and Sebastian learn three languages in a natural way.

I admire Sir Ken for the way he presents his ideas. An ounce at a time, realising, perhaps, that this is the maximum dosage that can be swallowed. I also hate him for the same reasons. Don’t we deserve more than a tease of what he sees as the way forward?

Per Øyvind Heradstveit, a famous political reporter in Norwegian TV, did a lot to give seniors ICT skills, partly through the webiste http://www.treffpunkt.no. Heradstveit died in 2004 and the site seems to have died with him.

When I search for the url or his name I get few pages as a result. I found a newspaper article from 1999 and a Wikipedia entry, but little more.

So what is a poor guy supposed to do? Think about it if you like before reading on.

The answer:

Internet Archive is a non-profit digital library offering free universal access to books, movies & music, as well as 150 billion archived web pages.

Here is the site from August 04 2003.

Why the interest? Two things, I am fascinated by how one individual can move mountains and how the mountains stop moving without him. Secondly, as an ICT educator I am interested in how seniors can attain ICT skills.

… building schools is a better bet for peace than firing missiles (especially when one cruise missile costs about as much as building 11 schools). – More

Last weekend we got up early (at 5.00) to go to an Open Source conference in Bangkok. Fortunately, the school had set up a van so we were travelling in luxury. I went to the conference 9-16 on Saturday and 8-16 on Sunday. Saturday night we strolled from My Hotel to Central World where we enjoyed a wonderful buffet in an Italian restaurant.

Sebastian and JT enjoyed the change of surroundings and to have a TV in the bedroom for one night!

My incomplete report from the conference is here. I came to learn and learned a lot! I also met quite a few interesting people from China, Cambodia, Viet Nam, as well as Thailand.