What Happens if the Charter School Companies Win?

Among the arguments made by advocates for charter schools is that they expand consumer choice and that given the state of education in many inner-city minority communities experimentation with alternatives can only help the situation. As buzz words, choice and experimentation always sound good. After all, we know about the disappointing performance of many students in inner-city schools under the current educational system so why not try something else?

Unfortunately, we already know what will happen if private-for-profit charter school companies take over K-12 education in the United States because for-profit proprietary companies have already successfully invaded what used to be called "higher education." These companies have defrauded the government, left families deep in un-repayable debt, and cheated students out of an education.

via huffingtonpost.com

Higher ed and K-12 are connected ~ what goes down in one, affects the other; "innovations," policies, programs, etc. implemented in one domain will eventually come home to roost in the other, trickle up or trickle down. It behooves each to trend watch the other.

Posted via email from Meanderings

The Future of Work

this bit of research on the Gartner site; while it dates back to August has some interesting speculation about the Future of Work.

“People will swarm more often and work solo less. They’ll work with others with whom they have few links, and teams will include people outside the control of the organization,”

“In addition, simulation, visualization and unification technologies, working across yottabytes of data per second, will demand an emphasis on new perceptual skills.”

-       Tom Austin, Vice President and Gartner Fellow

Gartner points out that the world of work will probably witness ten major changes in the next ten years. Interesting in that it will change how learning happens in the workplace as well. The eLearning industry will need to account for the coming change and have a strategy in place to deal with the changes.

via upsidelearning.com

So much of this applies as much to teaching and learning possibilities.

"De-routinization" of work (or teaching) could return to autonomy to teachers, already implied in Downes. Work swarms and teaming fit in at PLENK 2010 but seem less likely candidates for the entrenched academic mind.

And on down the list. Just because it could happen doesn't mean it will though.

Posted via email from Meanderings

Welcome to Harbor Homes

First blog for Harbor Homes: up a creek wrangling WordPress without a paddle. How different can blogging platforms be? Just do it, how Nike. Very frustrating to find out that once I leave the site, I cannot return and edit the first post, which was the auto-post that I edited after initial log in. So I started another post in the form of a sub-blog, thinking OK surely that one I can edit. And I could as long as I was on the page tweaking, Not today, I am logged in but there is no editing link. Maybe it's an admin thing. Maybe I'm blocked for inappropriate breeziness, a deficit of corporate style (a repeating chapter in my life story) in addressing an "educated audience." Maybe it's just the plug-in, not WordPress. 


So here's edited post #1, taking asylum here. However, I certainly don't want to turn this into a single subject blog. Work and Life IRL aren't like that. 

Allow me to introduce Harbor Homes’ new blog and myself, Vanessa Vaile, your resident blogger.  I’ll be blogging 3 times a week or more. da Blog is our way of informally telling the world more about our mission, becoming better acquainted with Harbor Homes LLC clients. suppliers, and associates as well as disaster relief agencies and organizations we work with.

For now, I’m feeling my way. Posts will be informational, sometimes serious, sometimes less so, but I hope always interesting. If you have questions, suggestions about related topics you want to know more about, ideas for posts, please email me or leave a comment below to let me know. I have ideas of my own that I’ll be sharing with you but want to hear your ideas too.

In closing, a brief word about the name change in the blog post title: the blog comes already named “deBlog”, but Harbor Homes is in Georgia, near the Gulf Coast. “deBlog” is not Southern (Creole maybe) but “da Blog” ~ like da Beeb, da Judge, etc ~ is.

Later ~ until then, y’all take care

Vanessa