By Al Ravenna – Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, New York World-Telegram and the Sun Newspaper Photograph Collection.This image is available from the United States Library of Congress’s Prints and Photographs division under the digital ID cph.3c31540. Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1267378

A recent article in the New Yorker tells the story of Virginia Apgar, the physician who gave her name to the quick, simple assessment of babies’ condition at one and five minutes after birth. Apgar understood that doctors and nurses needed such an assessment to guide their approach to early intervention and treatment. She also understood that without such an assessment, current practice was unlikely to change, as there was no baseline from which to work.

Atul Gawande describes Apgar’s system this way:

The Apgar score, as it became known universally, allowed nurses to rate the condition of babies at birth on a scale from zero to ten. An infant got two points if it was pink all over, two for crying, two for taking good, vigorous breaths, two for moving all four limbs, and two if its heart rate was over a hundred. Ten points meant a child born in perfect condition. Four points or less meant a blue, limp baby.

The score was published in 1953, and it transformed child delivery. It turned an intangible and impressionistic clinical concept–“the condition of a newly born baby”–into a number that people could collect and compare. Using it required observation and documentation of the true condition of every baby. Moreover, even if only because doctors are competitive, it drove them to want to produce better scores–and therefore better outcomes–for the newborns they delivered….

The Apgar score changed everything. It was practical and easy to calculate, and it gave clinicians at the bedside immediate information on how they were doing.

The article got me to wondering: what if we could generate an “Apgar” for each class meeting? Here’s my idea. At the beginning of the class, students would assign themselves a score based on questions like these:

1. Did you read the material for today’s class meeting carefully? No=0, Yes, once=1, Yes, more than once=2
2. Did you come to class today with questions or with items you’re eager to discuss? No=0, Yes, one=1, Yes, more than one=2
3. Since we last met, did you talk at length to a classmate or classmates about either the last class meeting or today’s meeting? No=0, Yes, one person=1, Yes, more than one person=2
4. Since our last meeting, did you read any unassigned material related to this course of study? No=0, Yes, one item=1, Yes, more than one item=2
5. Since our last class meeting, how much time have you spent reflecting on this course of study and recent class meetings? None to 29 minutes=0, 30 minutes to an hour=1, over an hour=2

Ideally, students would transmit their scores electronically, and the teacher would be able to do a quick class average at the beginning of the meeting. The teacher should also assign him or herself a score, with “colleague” substituting for “classmate,” for example, or perhaps with a different set of questions altogether. The teacher’s score shouldn’t be averaged in with the students’, but it should be shared with them somehow.

It would be interesting to chart the class’s scores over a semester, and to compare one section’s scores with another’s. It would also be interesting to see if the class began to compete with itself to try to keep those “Apgar”s high. There’s also a merciful aspect here for the teacher, who could see pretty quickly that a particular day didn’t go well for reasons beyond his or her own failings. It would also allow the teacher to move quickly to a plan “b” if the score indicated either that students were not ready for a challenging, self-motivated day … or if they were, beyond the teacher’s expectations. (It does happen.)

Seems to me one could do this exercise with clickers, or with a Google spreadsheet the whole class could log into. With the latter method, it would be a good reason for students to bring their laptops to class.

Betsy at “It’s All Connected” shared this sonnet with me in a comment on the Keats podcast below. The poem spoke to me, and I wanted to try to read it aloud. I’d like to hear Betsy do it, and I’d like to hear my beloved English professor Elizabeth Phillips read it too (she very much enjoys Millay), but in the meantime here’s my attempt.

English geek mode on: I found it hard to catch the tone, which is somewhere between ecstasy, hunger, and agony. The emotion is very intense and it’s difficult to avoid melodrama in the reading. Millay herself saves the poem from melodrama in that breathtaking final couplet, where the four monosyllables sound like flat resignation mingled with anger and sorrow.

It’s a terrific poem and one of the few sonnets I know with two stanzas of seven lines each. The break usually comes at line nine (8-6) or twelve (4-4-4-2). The unusual break makes the poem all the more poignant.

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Computerworld story here. Andy blogs about RC2 here.

I’ve been a satisfied Firefox user since Andy delivered his impressive oration two years ago on “10 Reasons to Use Firefox.” Thunderbird is my email client of choice for my home ISP email account. It’s interesting and satisfying to see how Mozilla has kept on plugging away, patiently leading us into this open-source, collaborative world. The Mozilla wiki gives us all, even non-coders like me, a chance to give back. I’m grateful.

For the past few days I’ve spied Jack Frost on the grass around my house. The tang of fall is in the air, and in honor of the season, I read “To Autumn,” by John Keats.

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To quote Pete Townshend, “can’t pretend that growing older never hurts.” But hey, he made it to his 60’s and he’s still rocking, “My Generation” notwithstanding. 🙂

From xkcd, a site I picked up from Robin Sloan at Snarkmarket.

My boss very casually (or was it slyly?) sent me a link to something truly mind-blowing this afternoon. I hope she enjoyed the sound of my world being transformed. 🙂

Lyric poetry is very dear to me, as is writing generally, as is music. Imagine an idea that unites parts of each joy into a truly new whole. A simple idea, expressed elegantly, analyzed in depth and with great articulation in the supporting materials, but in its presentation to the user so simple that almost anyone could get a handle on it, from elementary school students to a grizzled Ph.D. like me.

Go take a look for yourself. I feel like a glider in an updraft just thinking about it.

There’s a prize of one million dollars for solving the Poincaré Conjecture. The yellow brick road to that payoff leads past many of the usual and important milestones in academia: conferences, papers, peer-reviewed journals. As a recent article in The New Yorker makes clear, it’s also important to circulate early versions of a proof strategically, to be sure the flaws are caught before you stake your claim to a discovery.

Russian mathematician Grigory Perelman went through many of the usual processes, according to the article. There was a Berkeley fellowship, contact with many distinguished mathematicians, job invitations from all over, and the like (if there is a “like” when one gets to those heights). But at age twenty-nine, Perelman chose to move back to Russia, to a low-paying university post and physical isolation from the very thinkers he had sought out.

Home. Alone. But not quite alone. Here’s the sentence that even in 2006 retains its power to astonish–and I hope it retains that power for a long time, though the article makes relatively little of it.

The Internet made it possible for Perelman to work alone while continuing to tap a common pool of knowledge.

Individuality and community, enacted at one of the higher reaches of human intellectual accomplishment. But it gets better:

On November 11th, Perelman had posted a thirty-nine-page paper entitled “The Entropy Formula for the Ricci Flow and Its Geometric Applications,” on arXiv.org, a Web site used by mathematicians to post preprints–articles awaiting publication in refereed journals. He then e-mailed an abstract of his paper to a dozen mathematicians in the United States … none of whom had heard from him for years.

Within seven months, Perelman completed the trilogy of Internet postings that seem to have proved the Poincaré Conjecture.

Questions of temperament aside, Perelman’s choices illustrate some of the enormous potential consequences of the Information Age and its media. Scholarship and the communities that form around it will be slow to change, and that’s not all bad. Education is conservative as well as liberal in senses that have nothing to do with partisan politics. Yet I look at the Perelman story and I’m struck by two things. One is that we are at the very outset of these changes, and many of us alive today will live to see dramatic and far-reaching shifts in higher education involving not only learning but also the community of scholars. That’s pretty obvious. The second striking thing, however, is that the New Yorker piece spends almost no time considering this revolution. I speculate that that’s either because that fundamental paradigm shift hasn’t registered on the authors … or because they’re already taking it for granted.

I’ll close with a small troubling thought. It is entirely possible for us in the scholarly community and in higher education generally to take something for granted before it’s actually registered on us. If that happens, we will be blown before the wind instead of steering by it.

How should we keep that from happening?

From MIT’s Technology Review, a story about design spaces and serendipity fields, explored and gathered by evolutionary algorithms.

The site says it’s in beta, but no matter: everything’s beta nowadays, so the word’s meaning is obviously shifting. I’m starting to think that beta is the only condition for a wiki … but I digress.

Wikiversity is up. Here’s the welcome statement:

Wikiversity is a community for the creation and use of free learning materials and activities. Wikiversity is a multidimensional social organization dedicated to learning, teaching, research and service. Its primary goals are to:

* Create and host free content, multimedia learning materials, resources, and curricula for all age groups in all languages
* Develop collaborative learning projects and communities around these materials

Learners and teachers are invited to join the Wikiversity community as editors of this wiki website where anyone can edit the pages. The community portal lists information about many aspects of Wikiversity.

Fascinating. Where will this initiative sit alongside the myriad other online learning initiatives? Will it co-opt them, take notice of them, co-exist with them, ignore them, re-invent them?

Wikiversity begins its work with two main categories: learning projects and learning groups. Here’s how they stand:

Learning projects involve the creation and development of Wikiversity pages that describe and facilitate the learning experiences of learning group members. Learning projects provide activities for learners.

At Wikiversity learning is by doing. Often this involves editing webpages and creating Wikiversity content. Sometimes this involves reading or engaging in activities in the world and writing about those.

A basic unit of community within Wikiversity is the Learning Group. Wikiversity learning groups are groups of Wikiversity participants with a shared learning goal. Learning Groups participate in Wikiversity Learning Projects that are relevant to achieving a group’s learning goals.

Someone’s obviously been reading up on how people learn. What’s interesting to me is how the doing is tied so closing to the reflecting and describing and the writing about. How rich can these projects be when there’s no face-to-face component, at least none that’s required? An interesting question, especially for anyone involved in e-learning.

The really dense reading right now, however, is on the Management page. I’ve had time only to skim it, but it looks like a cross between a worldwide faculty meeting, a PTA, and a university strategic planning session. Given that Wikiversity is guided by Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales’s mission to “to help make all free human knowledge available to all humanity,” I’m not surprised. My 64K question (and who would ever need more than 64K, or was that 640K?) is whether Wikiversity can do for teaching and learning what Wikipedia did for, or to, encyclopedias. Yes, time will tell, but something tells me that Wikiversity is even more ambitious than Wikipedia.

This is going to be very interesting.

UPDATE: I don’t know why I’ve never seen this page before–I’m certain there’s an analogous page on Wikipedia–but I must say that I admire the sentiment, at least in this context. Greatly. Be bold, not radical, and be bold in a context of civility. A fascinating set of socializing norms, and an interesting paradox. Boldness and civility are personal, that is, they are embraced and exemplified in human agency, one person at a time. Yet the goal is selfless collaboration. Much to think on here.

At the “Lunch on the Lawn” after church today, my son and I were talking about one of his favorite pastimes: playing Star Wars: Battlefront online with his friends from all over the world. “You should play it, Dad,” he said. I replied that I was certain to embarrass him and his clan by being such a noob (newbie). “That’s okay,” he said. “You’d get better quickly. Plus it’s a very friendly group. Most of us play just to hang out. We also have a birthday alert that lets us know when someone’s celebrating their birthday.”

I paused for a moment to mull over this new bit of information. A birthday alert for a bunch of guys flying X-Wings around and running scrimmages with other guys? Interesting. Suddenly Star Wars: Battlefront started to sound like YASN (yet another social network). Which of course it is … but here was explicit evidence.

To break the silence, my son went on. “Really, Dad, you ought to try it once. There are lots of Yodas in the clan.”

Yodas?

“Sure: guys over 40.”

You know, it could be worse. Ol’ greenie’s not too bad with a light saber, after all.

Next installment, I’ve promised my son I’ll blog about the game of “bowling” he invented for his clan buddies. It seems there’s quite a lot of play-within-play going on in-world.