education Archives - Daniel Bachhuber

STEAM in Oregon

Variety of assorted programs:

Innovate Oregon – Spearheaded by TAO with programs in Amity, Dayton, Newberg, Willamina, and Yamhill-Carlton.
TiE Young Entrepreneurs – School year program with state competition in May.
Tualatin Mobile Makerspace – Product of the ABC competition that's now transforming to a Tualatin STEAM non-profit.
Oregon Robotics Program – Amazingly broken website. Implements FIRST programs in Oregon.
Oregon MESA – Year-long program run out of PSU focusing on underrepresented middle and high-school students.

Hazelbrook Middle School part of Tualatin’s ‘STEAM pipeline’

Hazelbrook Middle School part of Tualatin's 'STEAM pipeline'. Look at me, doing something that's not on the computer. Oh wait, I'm on the computer.

What they teach in schools these days

Response given in Leah’s nutrition class:

On the internet, I used web addresses that ended in “gov”, “edu”, or “org” because the textbook indicates any web address ends in“gov”, “edu”, or “org” provide reliable information. I trust the information from these websites.

Houston, we have a very serious problem.

The conference I want to attend this year

Blogging about the conference I want to attend this year because I don’t have the bandwidth to put it together. Let’s call it AgencyCon.

The key idea is to bring together a bunch of agencies that build on top of WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, and whatever other frameworks. Personally, here’s what I’d like to get out of it:

Learn how others are turning their agencies from guns for hire to experts in developing particular types of projects. For instance, with Human Made I would love to see more inbounds that refer to the product work we’ve done (e.g. Happytables and WP Remote) and want to hire us for similar. Rather than just doing work with a particular type of tool because you’re good at it, we be doing more work that we have proven ourselves leaders of.
Hear horror stories of situations other agencies the gotten themselves into, and want for no one else to ever repeat.
See the cool projects other agencies have been building but can’t publicly discuss. I want to be inspired.

Ideally, it would be a two or three day retreat-like event in some great location. Solid presentations, but lots of time for networking. I’m a fan of conferences as a model for continuing education largely because many of us are making this up as we go along, and they’re high-bandwidth opportunities for sharing knowledge.

Let me know if you know of any events like this, or are up for planning it yourself. I’d really love to see this conference happen.

Do universities hear the critics of journalism education?

New techniques and technologies are born monthly and it takes two years to get a new class through. Major new forms of media arise in less time than it takes to get a PhD.

I doubt academia will handle the digital age well. It still hasn’t accepted that this is the biggest leap since Gutenberg conjured the age of mass media with movable metal type.

Eric Newton, Knight Foundation — Do universities hear the critics of journalism education?

How to run a good workshop

How to run a good workshop. Very useful tips from Scott Berkun.

Status

Neat idea from Daniel Sicar tonight: non-technical journalists should learn enough HTML/CSS (and maybe JavaScript) to build a single-serving website for one of their stories. Originally it was pitched as a skill to learn in 30 days, but it could be great one-day workshop material as well.

Napster, Udacity, and the Academy

First, the people running the old system don’t notice the change. When they do, they assume it’s minor. Then that it’s a niche. Then a fad. And by the time they understand that the world has actually changed, they’ve squandered most of the time they had to adapt.

It’s been interesting watching this unfold in music, books, newspapers, TV, but nothing has ever been as interesting to me as watching it happen in my own backyard. Higher education is now being disrupted; our MP3 is the massive open online course (or MOOC), and our Napster is Udacity, the education startup.

We have several advantages over the recording industry, of course. We are decentralized and mostly non-profit. We employ lots of smart people. We have previous examples to learn from, and our core competence is learning from the past. And armed with these advantages, we’re probably going to screw this up as badly as the music people did.

Clay Shirky – Napster, Udacity, and the Academy

Bigger Than Facebook

Let’s put it this way: if you can build a $100 billion company by using the Internet to replace the college yearbook — imagine what you can do if you use the Internet to replace college.

Robert Tracinski — Bigger Than Facebook

Jeff Jarvis again on disruption

Elizabeth Eisenstein, our leading Gutenberg scholar, says that after the press, people no longer needed to use rhyme as a tool to memorize recipes and other such information. Instead, we now relied on text printed on paper. I have no doubt that curmudgeons at the time lamented lost skills. Text became our new collective memory. Sound familiar? Google is simply an even more effective cultural memory machine. I think it has already made us a more fact-based; when in doubt about a fact, we no longer have to trudge to the library but can expect to find the answer in seconds.

[…]

The real need for education in the economy will be re-education. As industries go through disruption and jobs are lost forever, people will need to be retrained for new roles. Our present educational structure is not built for that but in that I see great entrepreneurial opportunity.

Jeff Jarvis — Rewired youth?