One Trick Pony

I haven’t had much surfing time lately, but here are a few things that have caught my eye.

• Caring for Your Introvert from The Atlantic. Describes how society so cruelly misconstrues us.
  
• Free Online Spanish Lessons - Nicely done in Flash. A teaser for a boatload of CDROMs that I’m tempted to get.
  
• The Classical Language Instruction Project at Princeton - Hear Homer, Plato, Virgil and others in the original Greek and Latin.
  
• Improving Hill Tribe Education with Solar Power - The chronicle of an IQP (interactive qualifying project) of a student at WPI, my alma mater. It tickles me to see that IQPs are still going strong, as helping faculty figure out what they were was my first post-Peace Corps job in the 70s. What an adventure for a college kid!
  
• The Republic of Cascadia - A not-too-serious call for a new nation made up of British Columbia, Washington and Oregon. It’s interesting to wonder, though, when the map of North America will be redrawn. Nothing lasts forever.
  
• eSKUeL - A PHP script that does everything that phpmyadmin does, only better. Very nice!
  

I got back Friday from three days of workshops in Missouri with the EMINTS project. What a great group of people: smart, well organized, hard working and congenial. They’re using WebQuests as part of a larger effort to promote contructivist teaching in a network of tech-rich classrooms [see video]. Each EMINTS classroom has a computer for every two kids, a smart board, and videoconferencing capability. Each participating school has two such classrooms, usually in grades 3, 4 or 5. The important part, though, is the overlay of ongoing support and motivation provided by a team that has had no turnover over the years.

I’ve been a regular visitor to EMINTS since late 1998 and I’m proud to be associated with them. Of all the large scale change efforts I’m aware of, this one is my favorite. Missouri has something to teach the rest of us.