In the last speech of his life

“A state trooper pointed the gun, but he did not act alone,” King said. “He was murdered by the brutality of every sheriff who practices lawlessness in the name of law. He was murdered by the irresponsibility of every politician, from governors on down, who has fed his constituents the stale bread of hatred and the spoiled meat of racism.”

While a sanitized image of King as a Southern civil rights crusader has been enshrined in popular memory, his dream of ending American militarism has proved more difficult to accept.

King’s speech to Memphis sanitation workers a month before his 1968 assassination, on the economic disparities between blacks and whites, is a better measure of his mature thought. His words could have been written in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis: “When there is vast unemployment and underemployment in the black community, they call it a social problem. When there is vast unemployment and underemployment in the white community, they call it a depression.”

Ian talked about having students in his college courses annotate the syllabus with suggestions and comments. Joe talked about the power of the crowd, coming together on a single document (apparently, that is going on tonight with the State of the Union speech) as an example of social networking. Jeremy (of Hypothesis) talked about (or wrote about) how teachers can keep track of student work, and the article references how this might fold into student learning portfolios. Terry noticed Karen working all through the hour, and talked about how one might video-capture with reflection the act of annotation as a way to show your learning and thinking. Remi noted how this kind of active annotation might have more value than Twitter chats and other social gathering activities, where too much affirmation and cordiality might soften some deeper learning and sharing of insights.

hung out in a Google Hangou

We did not have a solid answer, except to note that teaching the art of curation is getting relatively short-thrift in a lot of our classrooms. Ian noted that by not teaching curating, we are missing an opportunity and important skills in the information-rich Digital Age.

animated GIFs

But the act of annotating an online article together, as a crowd, is always an interesting experience. There are a lot of tools out there to do this, from the comment feature in Google Docs to Genius to Diigo and more. Hypothesis is a nice tool, clean to view, and if the tool is activated, when you come to a page that someone else has annotated, it allows you to view and comment and add to other people’s annotations.

A portfolio should incorporate some principle of selection. (“Curation,” if we really have to have a no-longer-trendy buzzword.) There should be some metacognitive element, wherein the learner is able to reflect on all their experiences–academic, co-curricular, undergraduate research, athletics, work-related–and demonstrate their accomplishments in a meaningful way.

As Quantified Students declare majors and continue to accrue skills, four years of academic work will find a permanent home in the cloud rather than in the trash.

Quantified Students will be able to map current skillsets against the requirements of target careers, evaluate the gap, and then select the educational program or path that gets them to their destination quickly and cost effectively.

If so, why are American citizens paying so much of that bill?  Why ain’t anyone else helping foot the bill?  I suppose the answer is that we all are paying and that because Americans benefit the most they should pay the most.  It is interesting that while I jack up my barn, I am connected intimately to the fate of the Chinese economy.  No one is an isolated jack handler unto himself.

And here is some fun I had with a quote from the book and my new best app friend Legend.

I teach with two important principles in mind.  One is iconoclasty and the other is improvisation.  This book is full of lots of improv principles and applications that might really messify your classroom/office for the better. Here are a few of those principles boiled down in this marvelous list from the end of the book

Decide which podcasts give the best ROI and why I think so. Describe how I derive better signal over noise as I listen more intentionally over the next year. Get Bryan (and other podcast afficionadi) to articulate how they decide what to listen to.

Looks like I will be “reading” Bryan Alexander’s blog post, “Fine podcasts for 2016: a mega-list of what I’m listening to“, for quite awhile.  Or should I say I will be living his listening life.  I am a huge podcast fan as well, but I have a problem–how do I unpack this?  How do make signal here out of what I consider to be an overwhelming mass of  beautiful noise?

Those with money and power will gain greater control over the decisions that could send a young soldier to war, or allow another economic disaster, or roll back the equal rights and voting rights that generations of Americans have fought, even died, to secure.

And if we want a better politics, it’s not enough to just change a Congressman or a Senator or even a President; we have to change the system to reflect our better selves.

Fifty years of isolating Cuba had failed to promote democracy, setting us back in Latin America.  That’s why we restored diplomatic relations, opened the door to travel and commerce, and positioned ourselves to improve the lives of the Cuban people.  You want to consolidate our leadership and credibility in the hemisphere?  Recognize that the Cold War is over.  Lift the embargo.

carpet bomb

Gas under two bucks a gallon ain’t bad, either.

You’ll be pretty lonely, because you’ll be debating our military, most of America’s business leaders, the majority of the American people, almost the entire scientific community, and 200 nations around the world who agree it’s a problem and intend to solve it.

how do we reignite that spirit of innovation to meet our biggest challenges?

Anyone claiming that America’s economy is in decline is peddling fiction

It’s how we reformed our health care system, and reinvented our energy sector; how we delivered more care and benefits to our troops and veterans, and how we secured the freedom in every state to marry the person we love.

It promises education for girls in the most remote villages, but also connects terrorists plotting an ocean away.

Several years ago, the website Genius (formerly Rap Genius) was established to annotate music lyrics hosted on its platform. It’s proven to be something young people happily do on their own, discussing the word choices and poetic devices used by their favorite musicians in the same way their teachers ask them to discuss great works of literature in class.

What explains this difference? The experience of Union City, as well as other districts, like Montgomery County, Md., and Long Beach, Calif., that have beaten the demographic odds, show that there’s no miracle cure for what ails public education. What business gurus label “continuous improvement,” and the rest of us call slow-and-steady, wins the race.

At various stages in the campaign, some commentators have deemed me either "too black" or "not black enough."

This was one of the tasks we set forth at the beginning of this campaign - to continue the long march of those who came before us, a march for a more just, more equal, more free, more caring and more prosperous America.

Then Justice Antonin Scalia deepened an already painful wound when he questioned the abilities of black students to succeed at fast-paced institutions, an idea rooted in the widely discredited “mismatch theory.” Their questions left many black scientists, myself included, reeling from the psychological blow.