It’s probably old news, but Heap Media have developed a black version of Google, called Blackle.

In January 2007 a blog post titled Black Google Would Save 750 Megawatt-hours a Year proposed the theory that a black version of the Google search engine would save a fair bit of energy due to the popularity of the search engine. Since then there has been skepticism about the significance of the energy savings that can be achieved and the cost in terms of readability of black web pages.

We believe that there is value in the concept because even if the energy savings are small, they all add up. Secondly we feel that seeing Blackle every time we load our web browser reminds us that we need to keep taking small steps to save energy.

From Blackbelt Jones:

I switched off everyone outside London at the beginning of the month, in what I now know to be the mistaken belief that the value I was deriving from Twitter was geographically-bounded.

I thought what was near me was signal, as often you could act on it. Y’know: “I’m in town and wondering if anyone wants coffee”

It turns out that nearly no-one I know is in town or wants coffee. It turns out – as so often through the twelve or so years of having a digitally-mediated social life – the noise is the signal.

• Javascript widgets in Rails
  Walkthrough for a quick and easy sidebar widget…
  Tags: rails widget sidebar code

Just speaking to a friend Jon and he told me about a new research project at the BBC called Backpage.

It’s essentially a place for parents, children and teachers to share homework hints via video – a little like YouTube but homework focused. Probably reflects badly on me as a teacher, but I especially liked the Torture Square idea … At the moment, Backstage is a research project running for the next 4 months and they’re looking for clips with tips on Maths and English. As they say,

There’s no special formula – just send in tips that you think would help someone else help their kids with homework….

Fingers crossed this moves from research to production soon – it’s a brilliant idea.

… is clearly personal. And personally, I think using the holocaust, however unintentionally, to sell lipstick is a little crass, to say the least.

Perhaps Kiss And Make Up could remove this from the end of the post?

Buy some: Givenchy Rouge Interdit Lipstick | Shu Uemura Rouge Unlimited Lipstick

This has left me speechless. From the diaries of Lieutenant Colonel Mervin Willett Gonin, DSO. on the the liberation of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in 1945 [via Banksy]:

I can give no adequate description of the Horror Camp in which my men and myself were to spend the next month of our lives. It was just a barren wilderness, as bare as a chicken run. Corpses lay everywhere, some in huge piles, sometimes they lay singly or in pairs where they had fallen.

It took a little time to get used to seeing men women and children collapse as you walked by them and to restrain oneself from going to their assistance. One had to get used early to the idea that the individual just did not count. One knew that five hundred a day were dying and that five hundred a day were going on dying for weeks before anything we could do would have the slightest effect.

It was, however, not easy to watch a child choking to death from diphtheria when you knew a tracheotomy and nursing would save it, one saw women drowning in their own vomit because they were too weak to turn over, and men eating worms as they clutched a half loaf of bread purely because they had to eat worms to live and now could scarcely tell the difference. Piles of corpses, naked and obscene, with a woman too weak to stand propping herself against them as she cooked the food we had given her over an open fire; men and women crouching down just anywhere in the open relieving themselves of the dysentery which was scouring their bowels, a woman standing stark naked washing herself with some issue soap in water from a tank in which the remains of a child floated.

It was shortly after the British Red Cross arrived, though it may have no connection, that a very large quantity of lipstick arrived. This was not at all what we men wanted, we were screaming for hundreds and thousands of other things and I don’t know who asked for lipstick. I wish so much that I could discover who did it, it was the action of genius, sheer unadulterated brilliance. I believe nothing did more for these internees than the lipstick. Women lay in bed with no sheets and no nightie but with scarlet red lips, you saw them wandering about with nothing but a blanket over their shoulders, but with scarlet red lips. I saw a woman dead on the post mortem table and clutched in her hand was a piece of lipstick.

At last someone had done something to make them individuals again, they were someone, no longer merely the number tattooed on the arm. At last they could take an interest in their appearance. That lipstick started to give them back their humanity.

“People think of good and bad teachers as engaged in the same activity, as if education was a substance, and that bad teachers supply a little of the substance, and good teachers supply a lot. This makes it difficult to understand that education can be a destructive process, and that bad teachers are wrecking talent, and that good and bad teachers are engaged in opposite activities.”
Keith Johnstone in Impro

via Tom

From Banksy’s book Wall and Piece:

“The human race is the most stupid and unfair kind of race. A lot of the runners don’t even get decent sneakers or clean drinking water.”

Will Richardson has a good list of links that might come in useful if you’re trying to explain what social computing might offer to teachers. [Thanks to Ewan McIntosh for the link]

It’s no bad thing to try to explain it to teachers first, and let them use these tools as they will in classroom settings. A different way, which might be easier, is to reverse that. By doing so, the teachers and staff can learn from the ways the children use the technology.

Till recently I was working at a primary in Kew called The Unicorn. (It’s a great school! ).

As a side project, I set up a blog for them called Code Unicorn. It was intended to be a blog written by them, with as little as possible involvement from me. This opt-out wasn’t laziness, but instead an effort to encourage them to write about things they were interested in (rather than stuff my thirty-something brain thought would be fun). I didn’t announce it publicly, just said it’s up to the interested parties to spread the word.

It took a little hand-holding – albeit a lot less than I’d expected – and by the end of last term there were some regular contributors, and a switched-on boy called Max had done a little ‘viral’ marketing campaign round the school. He printed out some stickers and stuck them on friends jumpers, asking them to pass them on to a friend.

Anyway, teachers and parents started paying attention, and started commenting.

By watching how the children were using it day to day, it was much easier for staff to translate research and factoids about social computing to ideas for integrating it into the classroom. Ali Lim, the art teacher, has begun to use Flickr as another way of displaying the children’s work. And the big result was one of Roberta Linehan’s comments.

“I think this is a great site! Can teachers have one too?”

Roberta happens to be the head teacher.

• Ten Must Read Books about Mathematics
  Not for children, perhaps, but might be some good stories to mention in the lessons
  Tags: books maths to_read

Love this [via I Like]

What’s believed to be the world’s first video game is the second unit from left above, a small oscilloscope perched on a black box. It was part of this 1958 display at Brookhaven.

• 50p badges
  Design your own badges. Might use these for throwing round the classroom if someone does well
  Tags: teaching ideas commendation badges

• Harold Jarche » Learning through Storytelling with the PPCLI
  
  Tags: groups storytelling learning war Afghanistan
• The Eternal Value of Privacy
  
  Tags: privacy security articles
• What women talk about
  This might be the first time “footless tights” and Afghanistan have made it onto the same list. That’s not me being narky, go have a look …
  Tags: language women men research

• Javascript widget for addressbook access
  
  Tags: code software email address tools

I feel officially old. A very bright boy at my school has turned his talent to caricature. Sheesh.

July 03rd 2007 | Comments(1) | Life on aging cartoon school

There’s some grim jargon here – but I like the premise, namely that you can design spaces (or classrooms) in such a way as to make your job as a teacher easier.

The science behind learning, for me, is much more important than the politics. Just found a good list of 20 teaching tips derived from brain research.

1. The brain learns from its environment. Enrich the learning environment.
2. One’s personal, emotional state greatly influences what is recalled during a learning episode. Deal with emotional influences in your classroom before teaching.
3. Prime the brain for learning. Provide visual outlines or show select pictures representing different parts of the upcoming lesson.
4. give the brain time to process verbal information. Pause 3-7 seconds between important statements.
5. Wait 5 seconds after asking a factual question and 10 seconds after asking a complex question.
6. Present, rehearse, apply, then review.
7. Develop concept before content.
8. Teach by asking questions.
9. Teach pattern recognition. Often.
10. Research suggests that neurons need some downtime to consolidate information. Teach new information over time, providing periodic review.
11. The % of information remembered increases as the learning episode shortens and decreases as the lesson time lengthens.
12. Change the type of instruction or student activity every 20 minutes.
13. Teach students how to ask great questions while they are reading.
14. Periodically, have students record/share 3 things they learned from the lesson or 3 things they found interesting.
15. Sleep is required to store information into long term memory. John Hopkins University found that it takes 6 hours for a new skill to be consolidated and tagged for long term storage. (Teenagers need at least 9 hours of sleep a night).
16. Have students listen to music before writing and spatial reasoning activities.
17. On average, learners will only remember 5% of a lecture 24 hours after it is given. However, they will remember 90% of the information 24 hours later if they teach it to someone else.
18. Use personal, white, dry erase boards in class to check for understanding as you are teaching.
19. Very specific and positive comments will be remembered over time and will be immediately motivating to the students.

and then, just to keep bloggers happy,

1. Journaling has been found to improve memory and cognition. It enhances motivation to read and reading comprehension.