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

work, unexpected

Just when I no longer expected it: I have a part time gig, web 2.0 marketing, PR (the web presence thing), primarily via blogging and social media. for Harbor Homes, LLC, the parent company, located in Georgia. Although the emphasis is disaster relief not oil patch, the nature of the company's products and my responsibilities resonate to past experiences, validating the adage that no knowledge or experience is ever lost or a waste. The opportunity to reuse either can return when least expected.

How To Ease the Pressure of Blogging

Blogging and writing about it surely fit in "work and life" ~ even if unpaid. Why is it (socially) considered (worthwhile) work if we are paid for it?


A few thoughts on Life and Work: categories of work (paid, unpaid, knowledge work, manual labor, housework, volunteer work, drudgery) or not (fired, I quit, downsized, folded, etc) as subsections, not unlike my series "Poetry Matters," "Mountainair Wired," etc on Mountainair Arts. By that mark, blogging is a work phase.

How To Ease the Pressure of Blogging via ProBlogger Blog Tips by Darren Rowse

A Guest Post by David Turnbull of Adventures of a Barefoot Geek

After the initial excitement of launching a new blog fades most bloggers are a few steps away from being overwhelmed with the pressure of blogging to the point that they quit, losing the momentum they were building up and all the progress they'd made. This is an unfortunately common occurence.

Writing. Guest posting. Commenting. Responding to emails. Continuous learning. It's a lot to take in and if you're not adequately prepared to face challenges as they appear there's a likelihood that one day you'll choose not to publish another post and then you're back to square one.

5 Levels of Effective Communication in the Social Media Age

5 Levels of Effective Communication in the Social Media Age

via Mashable! by Soren Gordhamer

Soren Gordhamer is the organizer of the Wisdom 2.0 Conference, which brings together staff from Google, Facebook, and Twitter with others to explore living wisely in our modern age. Mashable readers can use code 'Mashable' for a discount when registering.
In the era of social media, our networks are much larger than they have ever been, and we have more ways to communicate with those in them. Even if you are not very active on Facebook or Twitter, my guess is that your sphere of communication has expanded significantly in recent years. Who you communicate with and how you communicate has changed radically. This new connected era brings both opportunities and challenges.
In the past we had a set of contacts, all of whom generally knew how to reach us — via phone, e-mail, or regular mail. Today, thanks in large part to social media, we have many different levels of communication, each with a specific purpose and etiquette. When we do not understand the role of these levels, they can become huge time wasters. When we do understand them however, they can help us more effectively engage and navigate these new waters.

BlogLife: New Debate on Comments Brewing

or would that be "blog work"? Hmmm... a differentiation still up grabs. Is work life, life work?

A New Debate on Blog Comments is Brewing via Mashable! by Stan Schroeder

If you've been following the blogging and social media scene over the last five or more years, you know that there's one heated debate that keeps on showing up: the debate about comments on blogs. Should blogs have comments? Should these comments be moderated? When has a comment gone too far? Judging from a couple of recent events, it's once again time to rethink these issues.