Internet was restored late yesterday afternoon, also announced on WRAL. I wonder if the loss of only Cable Television would have warranted a news alert. During the outage, my phone continued to provide me access to e-mail, but otherwise we were cut off.
With little else to do, I walked up to our neighborhood stores, about a mile from the house, to drop off a package, go to the bank, and then to do some grocery shopping. On my way back, it started to drizzle. Brenda called me on my mobile phone asking if I needed her to come out and get me. I was still four blocks from the house. I declined, because it was only a drizzle, and she replied that without Doppler radar, she could not see if there was harder rain on the way. She said that she felt blind.
It’s kind of an absurd statement, “I feel blind,” but at the same time, there is much to it. I remember when there were no satellites up in space looking down on our planet. Now, she can effectively, from her desk, see real-time weather patterns from space (and I from the mobile phone in my pocket), interact with people face-to-face around the world, circle the globe and zoom in to view buildings and local geographic features, often in great clarity, and so much more.
We can see and understand so much about our world. Yet we still misunderstand so much, and continue to fear and fight. I hope that our new eyes and our new ears will one day help us to learn to love.
Joyful holidays to everyone, and may the new year bring happiness, prosperity, and understanding to us all.
A pot of gold’s worth!
I got raked over the coals pretty good yesterday. There was lots of disagreement in comments over where IQ comes from, the purpose of education, my choice of sources, and more. It’s what I hope to see — civil, constructive conversation.
I grew up with machines that were designed to do one thing. Today, our machines are so much more. I seriously struggle with my mobile phone. I may be using 5% of its capability. But I imagine that if I gave my daughter fifteen minutes with the phone, should could show me another 25% of its features, if not more. 
Christmas came early this year with notifications from the NECC program committee arriving in my mail box yesterday evening. They have accepted two of the proposals that I submitted. I’m disappointed in the ones that were declined, but I’m happy to be presenting
One of the hottest educational ideas of the late 1990s was rubrics. As information and communication technologies (ICT) began to proliferate into many aspects of many societies and constructivist learning started to fuel the imaginations of educators, we needed a way to quantitatively assess the information products that students were assembling in their learning explorations. Rubrics helped us to solve this problem by enabling teachers to precisely describe the instructional objectives of their student projects and to define levels of performance or accomplishment in each of those objectives — and then to determine a score each level of performance.
To this end, I have spent the last many days getting digital grease under my fingernails as I’ve been tinkering and moding up the motor of a web tool I built many years ago, 
It was a simple phrase, but it illustrated pretty clearly how tumultuous this struggle is. We have been invaded and the conquerers are unkindly imposing a new way of thinking about information, the fuel of our economy.