I spent a lot of time hunting for a villain.

“In the 19th century,” when municipal governments were trying to institutionalize collection procedures, “civic clubs would have women walk around and talk to householders about how to separate their trash and what kinds of bins to use. There was a lot of education, modeling, and praise.” Today, we have a bulk mailer, “How to Get Rid of Your Stuff.” It goes out with the paper and cardboard in a clear plastic bag.

but reluctance to comply is baked into the history of waste.

We know how to reform garbage: Discard less, recycle more, separate better, compost plenty, burn whatever’s left, and dump in landfills as a last resort. (We also need to overhaul the plastics and packaging industries, but that’s a whole other story.) If we don’t do all that, it’s partly because every step of every procedure is fraught, and even the easy parts can be tricky.

Yet a system that depends on individuals conscientiously sorting their dregs is a fragile apparatus.

“This country has no national waste policy,” laments Michael Van Brunt, a Covanta executive in charge of environmental issues. “It’s left to local jurisdictions.

That’s not likely to happen.

One resident designed a High Acres stink-reporting app that has logged 26,000 complaints.

A landfill is a construction project

The word biodegradable is supposed to be benign, suggesting that a slightly more expensive version of a previously indestructible item — a drinking straw, a dog-poop bag, a detergent jug — will harmlessly break down, leaving nothing but some nitrogen-rich dust and a smear of moisture. What the term really refers to is anything that, once dumped in a landfill and sealed into an oxygen-free mound beneath more tons of refuse, undergoes a slow and messy kind of digestion.

they bake and stew.

a huge landfill, typically in a place where the nearest residents are either too far away or too lacking in clout to complain.

By Covanta’s calculations, every ton of refuse that’s processed in a waste-to-energy plant instead of slopped onto a landfill saves one ton of carbon-dioxide emissions.

ceaseless machine

sensors

Bianco points to an arsenal of pollution-control features: negative air pressure, which keeps odors within the walls, carbon-dioxide monitors, a ventilation system that flushes out all the air in the main pit at a hospital-worthy clip of 12 times an hour.

About 65 percent of everything city workers pick up goes into a hole, and for commercial waste the proportion is probably higher.

Indicators should therefore not only aim at measuring absolute wealth, but also relative wealth and the subjective wellbeing it produces.

The U.S. spends more on healthcare and gets less; the healthcare system is inefficient. Any good system of national accounts would reveal this inefficiency, but GDP does not because the more people spend the higher the metric.

Indicators reveal particular information about society. They thus embody values that people care about, or at least they should if indicators are to drive policies and thus society in a genuine direction of progress.

The 1998 Nobel Prize in Economic Science was awarded to Amartya Sen, whodefines economic development in terms of freedom of basic necessities such as edu-cation and healthcare.

Thus, the theory of market equilibrium needs to be replaced by a viewof markets as a dynamic, evolutionary process that is both shaped by our choicesand shaping our choices, mostly on an unconscious basis

Every time we produce and consume something, some sort of wasteis created, but these costs are usually overlooked.

The majority has been locked in acompetitive cycle for scarce capital ever since.

In fact, over the last two centuries these principles of competition and expansionhave been firmly enshrined in our capitalist legal systems, first domestically andmore recently also internationally.

ightLivelihood

Happiness is an experience derived from a state of mind,and mind/consciousness is distinct from matter.

The search for alternative indicators of economic progress is critically importantat the time that contemporary world faces a growing threat of ecological collapsedue to climate change, and ecosystem loss, and rapidly depleting natural resources.

Also new technology rarely completely replaces an older technology. Usually the old technology remains, operating within a more specialised ‘niche’, such as radio, or integrated as part of a richer technology environment, such as video in the Internet.

The courses were open to anyone and had no formal assessment.

Arpanet in the U.S.A was the first network to use the Internet protocol in 1982

PLATO was a highly successful system, lasting almost 40 years, and incorporated key on-line concepts: forums, message boards, online testing, e-mail, chat rooms, instant messaging, remote screen sharing, and multi-player games.

Until lecture capture arrived, learning management systems had integrated basic educational design features, but this required instructors to redesign their classroom-based teaching to fit the LMS environment.

Although the radio programs involved mainly oral communication, the television programs did not use lectures as such, but focused more on the common formats of general television, such as documentaries, demonstration of processes, and cases/case studies (see Bates, 1984).

The invention of the printing press in Europe in the 15th century was a truly disruptive technology, making written knowledge much more freely available, very much in the same way as the Internet has done today.

This may be the place to point out that most technologies used in education were not developed specifically for education but for other purposes (mainly for the military or business.)

recitation, not by writing.

To be learned, they had to be memorized by listening,

The same year that the military canceled Project Pigeon, Skinner came up with the idea for his teaching machine.

One cannot talk about education technology without talking about pigeons.

And to be clear, it wasn’t simply stealing computers; his intention was all about power.

In other words, they learn by experience.

These kinds of questions are designed to challenge students’ thinking and encourage them to think about things in different ways.

Fewer teacher questions requires deep thinking by the learner

Teachers often answered their own questions

For teachers, questioning is a key skill that anyone can learn to use well. Similarly, ways of helping students develop their own ability to raise and formulate questions can also be learned. Raising questions and knowing the right question to ask is an important learning skill that students need to be taught.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aircAruvnKk

And I think it’s really important that we include transfer in the equation.

Professor Hattie suggests that around 90% of classroom teaching and learning focuses on surface knowledge and learning. Do you think this is true of your own classroom? How could you find out? What strategies could teachers use to determine which phase of the surface-to-deep learning cycle a student is in? (clue, Bloom’s taxonomy, coming up soon)

Before you do the next problem, if you stop and ask the question, what are the similarities and differences between these two contexts, then transfer can happen.

Students are very smart. They don’t do what you ask them to do. They don’t do what you tell them to do. They do what they think, you think, is valuable. And what is valuable is using your assessments.

deep learning

In fact, one of the big mistakes we make is we go to deep learning sometimes far too quickly.

Surface learning is very much about the idea, the content, the knowledge and the information.

Deep learning means we add neural connections so that we can see the consequences, the benefits, applied in different environments, et cetera. That’s more of an extensive neural network, rather than a simple neural network.

My understanding of deep learning is that it’s a process of integrating new facts about the world into our existing semantic framework.

surface learning as immediate

deep learning as a consolidation process

consider the implications of how teachers plan lessons for diverse learners.

Artificial neural networks (ANNs) have undergone a revolution, catalyzed by better supervised learning algorithms.

Key Takeaways

Teach Like This 

teaching students how

Explicit Instruction

In other words, teachers rarely use either direct instruction or some other teaching approach—in actual practice, diverse strategies are frequently blended together.