Stephen’s Untold Stories

PLEASE do not spend big buck for HDMI cables for you HDTVs. This article explains it all.

So where’s the scam? You can find the scam by going to any big box electronics retailer and looking in the cable aisle. There you will find HDMI cables priced as low as $25 or $30 (if not, definitely head toward your local discount retailer for better prices). But you will also find HDMI cables priced above $100. And if you talk to a sales person, he will definitely be steering you toward the most expensive model. That is the scam. You can understand the scam if you understand how an HDMI cable works and what it does.

Let’s begin by going back in history to the birth of really expensive cables. It started with speaker wire. When you connect a normal speaker to a normal stereo system, you are sending both a signal (in the form of an oscillating wave) and a lot of power (potentially hundreds of watts) through the speaker cable. Someone realized that to send a lot of power, a thick cable would cause less distortion. Thus, mega cables were born. And they were expensive.

But with an HDMI cable, you aren’t sending any oscillating analog waves, nor any power. What you are sending is a low-power digital signal. The digital signal is either on or off, and it is impossible to distort it without ruining it. The great thing about a digital signal is that, even if there is a little noise in the cable (and there always is, no matter how good the cable), the TV will clean it up when it interprets the digital signal. The whole beauty of moving to a digital world is that it eliminates distortion completely.

What this means to you is that there really is no such thing as a “better” HDMI cable. Either an HDMI cable works or it does not. If it doesn’t work, you will immediately know it. Your screen will freeze, or it will skip frames, or it will show big square blocks instead of a picture. It will be completely obvious that there is a problem. In that case you need to throw the cable away.

But if an HDMI cable is working correctly, your TV’s picture will look exactly the same no matter how much the cable costs. Paying more for a cable will have no effect on picture quality.

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Very nice article from the Washington Post.

Berkeley’s on YouTube. American University’s hoping to get on iTunes. George Mason professors have created an online research tool, a virtual filing cabinet for scholars. And with a few clicks on Yale’s Web site, anyone can watch one of the school’s most popular philosophy professors sitting cross-legged on his desk, talking about death.

Studying on YouTube won’t get you a college degree, but many universities are using technology to offer online classes and open up archives. Sure, some schools have been charging for distance-learning classes for a long time, but this is different: These classes are free. At a time when many top schools are expensive and difficult to get into, some say it’s a return to the broader mission of higher education: to offer knowledge to everyone.

And tens of millions are reaching for it.

For schools, the courses can bring benefits, luring applicants, spreading the university’s name, impressing donors, keeping alumni engaged. Virginia Tech, for example, offers some online classes free to its graduates.

As the technology evolves, the classes are becoming far more engaging to a broader public. (Think a class on “Bioinformatics and Computational Biology Solutions Using R and Bioconductor” sounds a little dry? Try reading the lecture notes, alone, on a computer screen.) With better, faster technology such as video, what once was bare-bones and hard-core — lecture notes aimed at grad students and colleagues — is now more ambitious and far more accessible.

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I’m about to start an action research project on student blogging in an area school system, and it is fascinating to see the results of this study. It is actually the dissertation written by Jeff Felix, Superintendent of Bonsall Union School District in Bonsall, CA.

Some quotes from the summary:

The data clearly show teachers using blogging as a motivational technique to encourage students to perform writing tasks, which they feel leads to greater depth of thought. As the students perform these writing tasks with deeper thought, teachers perceive that the students begin to make sense of what they are learning and make connections with previous experiences. They are also likely to explore the subject beyond the immediate requirements and are likely to have positive emotions about learning.

The results show that most teachers continue to be enthusiastic about the practice of blogging even after two years of use. This enthusiasm can be seen through the change in a teacher’s communication technique with students. The enthusiasm also seems to carry over to the use of blogging to increase students’ time and opportunity for writing. Because of the changes to instruction and the increased motivation of the students, a teacher will generally increase the time spent on practices that are perceived as beneficial. In this study several benefits were identified that seemed to be motivating teachers to invest time in blogging: (a) higher levels of student motivation, (b) increased levels of writing, (c) increased insights into their students through the personal exchanges of comments on readings and writings, (d) greater interaction and collaboration among students in the classroom, (e) increased computer competence, especially for older students, and (f) a teacher’s own professional development. A few teachers stated that achievement scores and proficiency levels had increased since they began using blogs. Almost all teachers in this study indicated blogging did take increased time, especially in the beginning when they were developing their skills, but all seemed to feel the time was well spent in terms of a time to benefit ratio.

Asking blogging teachers about how they are using the blog differently today compared to when they first began to use a blog for instruction elicited significant, animated answers. Teachers felt strongly that students were receiving better learning opportunities through additional collaborative learning sessions. These sessions came about because of increased use of the computer as the students participated in the classroom blog with the teacher and with each other. According to the Survey 2 respondents, 89% of them felt their instructional style changed as a result of blogging; this finding was also confirmed in the interviews. As teachers became more reliant on the online uses of the blog, their lessons changed to fit the blogging process, and they perceived that their instruction had gone to a deeper, more complex level.

Read the Summary Here (8 pages)

Read the Entire Dissertation Here (283 pages)

The next time you need to wow your colleagues or impress a grant committee, give this site a try.

A few favorites:

• revolutionize metacognitive cohorts
• synergize thematic pedagogy
• unleash assessment-driven curriculum compacting
• disaggregate integrated decision-making
• recontextualize student-centered systems

Educational Jargon Generator

This guy creates a Prandtl-Glauert condensation cloud by flying about 25 feet above the water.

The One Laptop Per Child project has reached Peru, and it looks like it is making a positive impact already.

Doubts about whether poor, rural children really can benefit from quirky little computers evaporate as quickly as the morning dew in this hilltop Andean village, where 50 primary school children got machines from the One Laptop Per Child project six months ago.

These offspring of peasant families whose monthly earnings rarely exceed the cost of one of the $188 laptops — people who can ill afford pencil and paper much less books — can’t get enough of their “XO” laptops.

At breakfast, they’re already powering up the combination library/videocam/audio recorder/music maker/drawing kits.

At night, they’re dozing off in front of them — if they’ve managed to keep older siblings from waylaying the coveted machines.

“It’s really the kind of conditions that we designed for,” Walter Bender, president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology spinoff, said of this agrarian backwater up a precarious dirt road.

Founded in 2005 by former MIT Media Lab director Nicholas Negroponte, the One Laptop program has retreated from early boasts that developing-world governments would snap up millions of the pint-sized laptops at $100 each.

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It’s always great to see how a dedicated teacher can really make a difference.

THE PROBLEM When Andrew Coburn, a teacher at the Met High Schools in Providence, R.I., met his new ninth grader, a Cambodian immigrant, she spoke fluent English but read at a third-grade level. Her slender frame seemed to radiate depression. School, Mr. Coburn thought, seemed a place she wanted to get away from as soon as she could. Even if she lasted for four years of high school, she would have nine years of academic ground to cover. But first the teacher needed to get her to stay in school.

THE SOLUTION Mr. Coburn, who has taught for eight years at the Met, a network of six small public high schools that serve primarily a low-income and minority population, said many of the students lack academic skills, and just as many hate school. But figuring out how to help has to be tackled student by student.

Mr. Coburn’s first step was to make sure that within the first 30 minutes of each day, he had either a brief conversation with the girl or a look at her work. She would often answer in angry monosyllables. He didn’t give up. He included her in the jokes, plans and reviews that occurred during the group morning meeting, even if she seemed unwilling to contribute and uninterested in interacting with other students. She remained angry and tuned out. She often kept her iPod in her ear, as if to let everyone know she did not want to talk.

“Cambodia just seemed like this big closed door for her,” Mr. Coburn said. “I felt that her reluctance to talk about Cambodia was part of her problem. Her curiosity and longing to know about her birth country would be part of the solution.”

So during her junior year, Mr. Coburn suggested that for her senior project, a graduation requirement, she should plan her first trip to Cambodia. He hoped her curiosity about Cambodia offered a path to her mind.

In the spring of her junior year, the girl studied a map and read about Cambodia. In the fall of her senior year, she tracked down an aunt who still lived there and arranged to stay with her on a visit. She called a travel agent to find out about flights, and she made plans to raise money for the trip by running in the annual all-schools marathon. She raised $1,300 in pledges, and began running with Mr. Coburn in preparation. The running also transformed her mood, the teacher said. Three months after she ran her first mile, she was running nearly every day, and inexplicably suddenly reading almost every day as well.

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Here is the final Google doodle for this year.

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The International Community School in Decatur, GA got a great write-up in the New York Times. It’s good that they decided to reach out to one of our schools. Maybe having David Pogue speak at our state technology conference helped a bit.

By the way, you can listen to selected speakers from the conference here on the conference podcast page.

More than half the 380 students at this unusual school outside Atlanta are refugees from some 40 countries, many torn by war. The other students come from low-income families in the community, and from middle- and upper-middle-class families in the surrounding area who want to expose their children to other cultures. Together they form an eclectic community of Buddhists, Christians, Hindus, Jews and Muslims, well-off and poor, of established local families and new arrivals who collectively speak about 50 languages.

“The fact that we don’t have anything in common is what we all have in common,” said Shell Ramirez, an American parent with two children at the school.

The International Community School, which goes from kindergarten through sixth grade, began five years ago to address a pressing local problem — how to educate a flood of young refugees. It has evolved into a laboratory for the art of getting along, a place that embraces the idea that people from different cultures and classes can benefit each other, even as administrators, teachers and parents acknowledge the many practical difficulties.

For example, the school’s weekly newsletter is published in six languages; yet it still is not intelligible to many parents. Some refugee children arrive at the school having never seen a book. And while the school devotes extraordinary energy to a specialized curriculum designed for refugees, it must still satisfy exacting American parents.

The children of these refugees present unique challenges for the school. Many suffer post-traumatic stress from the horrors they have witnessed. Few speak English when they arrive. Some have no formal education and are illiterate and innumerate, even in their native tongues.

To complicate matters, many refugee parents cannot help with homework or understand report cards.

Some children have had to be taught to stand in line, or the significance of raising one’s hand.

Linda Dorage, who teaches English as a second language at the school, said she has even had to introduce children to “just the concept of a two-dimensional image meaning something.”

One early student, a goat herder from Mauritania, did not know how to use a door knob. A Sudanese girl was so traumatized from war and relocation that she insisted on sitting on the floor beneath her desk each day.

“The teacher decided she would go under the desk with her and do lessons under there,” Ms. Thompson said. “She lured her out in her own good time.”

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Thanks to my friend Tricia for sending me the link to this. I hope that all my years of teaching Spanish were not in vain. This guy looks pretty suave.

Looks like they’re doing this again. The ones in the past were always pretty cute.

Day 1

Day 2

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From our neighbors in Canada.

My thoughts on Wikipedia have evolved over time. This post does a great of summarizing my feelings.

I encourage the students in my class to use Wikipedia. I encourage them to use it first and confirm what they find there by checking other sites. That being said, I encourage them to do the same at all other sites they find as well. Any site on the Internet is just as apt to be incorrect and biased as any other, and with the huge community of users editing and improving Wikipedia, errors, omissions, and biases are apt to be caught and corrected.

Knowledge is out of the gate.   

Read the entire post here.

Just in case you were wondering what the big deal is.

If you’ll look at the bottom of this and my previous post about FireFox Personas, you’ll notice a new button that will allow you to add the post to one of several social bookmarking options. I will remove some of the clutter from the right sidebar now that I have this new button.

If you want to add the button to your WordPress blog, you can download the plugin here.

Thanks to Wes Fryer!

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I’ve never been a big fan of using different themes in FireFox because it was always necessary to restart the program to see how the new theme would look. Now, there is an option that doesn’t require a restart. Check out FireFox personas.

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