Blog Juice for Educational Technology

I’ll be teaching a 2 1/2 hour workshop today on blogging for educators in Gaston County North Carolina (where I grew up).  In preparation, I have tried to address a question, or a series of questions, that I have sensed more than actually heard in my blogging workshops.  Most of the time in these workshops […]

Oh, good grief. Physics.org has just revealed that laptops can suddenly explode, posing a substantial risk when used in flight (and elsewhere). Apparently, the problem lies with faulty laptop batteries…Comforting information to read on your laptop–which seems to be located in a rather precarious location in the event of a explosion. Unfortunately, I’m sure if a laptop can blow up on accident, it can certainly blow up if some idiot takes it into his head to detonate it. Sigh. I wonder how long it’ll be before laptops are completely banned on planes?

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At the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) Ministerial in Athens, Greece, Secretary Spellings spoke about the growing importance of higher education and the benefits of partnering with the private sector to prepare students for jobs in the 21st century.

Collected Learning Units in Mathematics provides more than 200 instructional units in arithmetic, algebra, calculus, data analysis, fractions, geometry, number theory, pre-algebra, pre-calculus, probability, statistics, and trigonometry. The units were developed by teachers attending summer institutes sponsored by the National Security Agency. (National Security Agency)

Three members of Congress are complaining that Carnegie Mellon University may have received grants for cybersecurity research from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security because a university official has been serving as a senior administrator for the federal agency’s cybersecurity efforts.—Vincent Kiernan

A German court has handed Google’s controversial book-scanning project a significant victory, encouraging a publishing company to drop its efforts to file a preliminary injunction against the search juggernaut.

Like many other publishing houses, Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft (WBG) had objected to the digitization project, arguing that Google’s plan to post snippets of copyrighted books amounted to a violation of German copyright law.

WBG sought an injunction that would prevent Google from scanning its books, but the German court—the copyright chamber of a regional court in Hamburg—was unreceptive. The court did not rule specifically against WBG, but judges told the publisher that it was unlikely to receive the injunction it sought. WBG decided to abandon its efforts shortly thereafter, according to the Guardian.

In a statement posted online today, Google representatives defended the legality of their book-scanning project and said they were “delighted” by WBG’s decision to drop its petition. —Brock Read

A massive effort by internet users to prohibit telephone and cable companies from providing better service and prices to preferred customers failed to get through a Senate committee on June 28.

After three days of de…

So we’ve got buttons! 1,000 of them to give away at NECC in fact. They’ll be at the Open Source lab starting on Tuesday. (And Steve Hargadon was nice enough to ante up the $335 to get them made, so maybe we can figure out a way to make sure he gets paid back.) The […]

The Senate Commerce Committee yesterday approved major telecommunications legislation that would open the door for telephone companies to begin offering video services to compete with cable companies. The committee deadlocked 11-11 on a controversial amendment ensuring “net neutrality,” a provision favored by many education and consumer groups–and this tie vote means the full Senate will consider the bill without the…

The Senate Commerce Committee yesterday approved major telecommunications legislation that would open the door for telephone companies to begin offering video services to compete with cable companies. The committee deadlocked 11-11 on a controversial amendment ensuring “net neutrality,” a provision favored by many education and consumer groups–and this tie vote means the full Senate will consider the bill without the…

The North American Council for Online Learning (NACOL.org) an international K-12 non-profit organization representing online learning practitioners in the United States, Canada, and Mexico, and Florida Virtual School (FLVS.net), a leading provider statewi

It’s almost recess time for the Supreme Court justices, and we’re getting the usual flurry of decisions they hand down just before then. Passed over by most court reporters, who are focusing on higher profile rulings on campaign finance, the death penalty, and gerrymandering, was an important school law decision.

In Arlington Central School District v. Murphy, the Court ruled that the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) does not require school districts to pay for expert consultant fees when parents win special education disputes. Here’s what BoardBuzz had to say most recently on this case. NSBA applauds the decision here.

The opinions
Justice Samuel Alito and four other justices found that IDEA’s mandate to reimburse attorneys’ fees doesn’t also cover the costs of consultants, especially since the Spending Clause of the U.S. Constitution requires that Congress “unambiguously” set forth what strings are attached to federal funds so state and local governments can “voluntarily and knowingly” accept these terms. BoardBuzz readers may recall that the Spending Clause argument is a key point in the lawsuits over NCLB unfunded mandates.

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg couldn’t sign on to the Spending Clause part of the decision, but she was a sixth vote for the view that IDEA itself can’t be read to cover expert fees. “Congress did not compose [IDEA], as it did the texts of other statutes too numerous and varied to ignore, to alter the common import of the terms ‘attorneys’ fees’ and ‘costs’….,” Ginsburg wrote.

Justice Stephen Breyer’s dissent focused on IDEA’s legislative history and argued that paying for consultants is consistent with Congressional purposes in enacting IDEA. Much of the oral arguments in the case amounted to a debate between Justices Breyer and Scalia over statutory interpretation, in the form of questions to the lawyers. Scalia is skeptical about relying on chaotic legislative history, while Breyer is somewhat more willing to consider it.

The outlook
The decision is “decimating to parents,” says the director of the advocacy group founded by the consultant whose fee was disputed in the case, in this web-only article from Ed Week. She says the ruling “renders IDEA meaningless for those who have no resources.”

But as NSBA and its fellow amici pointed out to the Court, no one who’s ever dealt with IDEA thinks parents are powerless under this exhaustively detailed and prescriptive law. Notably, parents who disagree with a school district’s evaluation can obtain an independent evaluation, at public expense, by an education expert not associated with the district. What the decision does do, however, is avert some scary fiscal implications and limit another way to game the system. “We don’t view this as a victory for school districts over parents,” NSBA attorney Tom Hutton tells Ed Week. “It is a victory for the collaborative approach over the litigation approach.”

Georgetown law professor David Vladeck, who argued for the parents in the case, tells the Poughkeepsie Journal here that he hopes Congress will revisit this question. In fact, Justice Ginsburg wrote that it is not the Court’s role to “add several words Congress wisely might have included,” and “the ball, I conclude, is properly left in Congress’ court.” The ability of Congress to take away what the Court giveth provides even stronger incentives for school boards to make sure that districts are doing right by children with disabilities and that parents—and Congress—know it.

This latest development may be part of a trend BoardBuzz observed here when the Supremes handed down their last IDEA decision. In the last several years, all three branches of the federal government have shown that they’re a bit more willing to give America’s schools a little more benefit of the doubt when it comes to these difficult and emotional disagreements.

Considering the feds’ disgraceful bipartisan record of shortchanging IDEA and other education funding—a record that, unbelievably, is getting worse—it’s the least they can do.

Sometimes popular movies serve as a good vehicle for considering learning issues. The Karate Kid, one of the great schlock movies, “wax on – wax off”, offers many good views of learning such as providing good and easy to understand metaphors t…