Wednesday, December 31, 2008

Career Pathways Resources

Sally Loughlin shared two books that articulate the framework for a Career Pathways initiative. In conversations about the place Career Pathways might take in our work, she searched for a figure from the book Career Pathways: Preparing students for life (Howard and Ill, 2004). I saw potential application for iTeams both as a planning resource and as project material for an iTeam. So, I borrowed the book and found excellent resources (including templates and planning documents) and a helpful copyright statement:
All rights reserved. When forms and sample documents are included, thier use is authorized only by educators, local school sites, and/or noncommercial entities who have purchased the book.
Since the high school has purchased multiple copies of the book, we satisfy the copyright condition. I searched for related online resources and found a SlideShare presentation that summarizes the book in 33 slides. The figure that Sally called to my attention is slide number 4 in this presentation.

Thursday, December 11, 2008

GuestWiFi at Midcoast Hospital

I brought a book to read while I waited for my appointment. Last time I was here (a year ago?), I had to search high and low for a way to get access. The hospital library had one computer. Today, I found signs stuck on service counters that welcomed public access the the hospital's GuestWiFi. Now we can easily get access to additional sources of information.
Thanks!

Friday, December 5, 2008

Open governance: BigDialog

Theron recently asked me for information about our family's experience with math enrichment in the Pullman School District. He wanted to share it with a colleague at WSU.
When I sent him the information he wanted, he shared some links on open governance sites that are growing in parallel with Obama's campaign and transition: change.gov.

BigDialog is one of he efforts intended to increase participation. While it is interesting, I wonder whether a simple click on thumbs up or down is the kind of commitment required for substantive change. These are a user generated form of self-selected response polls. Note the interesting use of the mashup with Google Maps that indicate the distribution of responses that are color-coded.