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Mooresville’s Shining Example (It’s Not Just About the Laptops) - The New York Times

MOORESVILLE, N.C. — Sixty educators from across the nation roamed the halls and ringed the rooms of East Mooresville Intermediate School, searching for the secret formula. They found it in Erin Holsinger’s fifth-grade math class.

There, a boy peering into his school-issued MacBook blitzed through fractions by himself, determined to reach sixth-grade work by winter. Three desks away, a girl was struggling with basic multiplication — only 29 percent right, her screen said — and Ms. Holsinger knelt beside her to assist. Curiosity was fed and embarrassment avoided, as teacher connected with student through emotion far more than Wi-Fi.

“This is not about the technology,” Mark Edwards, superintendent of Mooresville Graded School District, would tell the visitors later over lunch. “It’s not about the box. It’s about changing the culture of instruction — preparing students for their future, not our past.”

As debate continues over whether schools invest wisely in technology — and whether it measurably improves student achievement — Mooresville, a modest community about 20 miles north of Charlotte best known as home to several Nascar teams and drivers, has quietly emerged as the de facto national model of the digital school.

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Is the Keyboard Going the Way of the Typewriter? →

Styluses, eye trackers, contact-lens displays, and devices that capture gestures in the air were shown at the Consumer Electronics Show

Great discussion of the latest gadgets that might replace the “traditional” keyboard on the Techwise Conversations podcast.

(Source: oclc.org)

Blogs vs. Term Papers - New York Times →

Professor Davidson makes heavy use of the blog and the ethos it represents of public, interactive discourse. Instead of writing a quarterly term paper, students now regularly publish 500- to 1,500-word entries on an internal class blog about the issues and readings they are studying in class, along with essays for public consumption.

She’s in good company. Across the country, blog writing has become a basic requirement in everything from M.B.A. to literature courses. On its face, who could disagree with the transformation? Why not replace a staid writing exercise with a medium that gives the writer the immediacy of an audience, a feeling of relevancy, instant feedback from classmates or readers, and a practical connection to contemporary communications? Pointedly, why punish with a paper when a blog is, relatively, fun?

Because, say defenders of rigorous writing, the brief, sometimes personally expressive blog post fails sorely to teach key aspects of thinking and writing. They argue that the old format was less about how Sherman got to the sea and more about how the writer organized the points, fashioned an argument, showed grasp of substance and proof of its origin. Its rigidity wasn’t punishment but pedagogy.

Their reductio ad absurdum: why not just bypass the blog, too, and move right on to 140 characters about Shermn’s Mrch?

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via the OCLC’s “Above the Fold” newsletter, which was really fantastic this week—I think I clicked on (and probably posted) every single link.

News: Penguin Ends E-Book Library Lending And Relationship With OverDrive - paidContent.org

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"Sometimes all it takes is a librarian to shake the Web."

Digital Content Curation Is Career for Librarians | Backtalk

An interesting article about how librarians can save us from “filter failure.”

Thanks aaknopf for the LJ link!

(via libraryjournal)

(via libraryjournal)

Study: How College Students Manage Technology While in the Library during Crunch Time →

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Making the rounds on Twitter again today: What Big Media Can Learn From the New York Public Library

Libraries, Meet Boing Boing →

Apple Sold 15.43 Million iPads In Q1 2012 →

O’Reilly to Host First Ever eReader Petting Zoo at TOC 2012 - eBookNewser

If you haven’t made plans to attend the Tools of Change Conference, which is coming up in another few weeks, be prepared to drool with envy. O’Reilly will be having an eReader petting zoo on the last day of the conference, and we already have a couple dozen devices waiting to go on display.

[…]

The critter list covers most of the major US eReader makers (Sony, Amazon, B&N, Kobo), as well as Apple, and several smaller tablet manufacturers. We also have commitments for some lesser known devices including the new Ectaco Jetbook Color, Kyobo Mirasol eReader, iriver Story HD. And there’s going to be an Endangered Species table (space permitting) with an HP TouchPad, RIM Playbook, and eReaders as old as the Sony Data Discman.

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