The blog Oddee links to a variety of unusual topics. If you are reading this from school, however, there’s a good chance your school’s filter blocks the site, mostly because of its advertising. So far my favorite collection is 12 Hilarious Tombstones. I thought I’d share a few school-appropriate ones here — with captions but sans the advertising — because by Friday a teacher can use a good laugh.

Here lies my Wife in Earthy Mold Who when she Died Did naught but Scold Good Friends go softly in your walking Lest she should Wake and Rise up Talking

Niagara Falls, Canada

See ya later! In Lakewood Cemetery, Minneapolis, Minnesota

The entire collection can be found at http://www.oddee.com/item_87522.aspx.

Educator Mary Tigner-Rasanen teaches at Studio Academy Arts High School, a public charter school in Rochester, Minnesota. The school works to integrate the arts into all areas of the curriculum.

As part of a presentation at a preschool inservice workshop, Mary gathered projects she and others had been using and produced this matrix of ideas. The list includes these:

• Create tattoos for characters in fiction, non-fiction, or history, and write an explanation of their significance.
• Create pop up books of stories, processes, or historical events.
• Create paper or fabric ‘tapestries’ for representing historical events.
• Create Kamishibai, illustrated storytelling cards from Japan
• Create a soundtrack
• Plan a meal based on an historical period, a story, or ingredients available in a particular natural environment.
• Write dialogue between historical figures, scientists, natural elements, etc. (Carla’s note: How about “The ugly divorce of Mr. and Mrs. Uranium-235″?)

Mary plans to add to it the chart as she hears of or thinks of other possibilities. She adds that she will use this Web page as much as anyone: “Sometimes in the crush of the year my creative juices dwindle. The chart will be there as a reminder to me.”

And to colleagues everywhere. Thanks, Mary!

Dr. David Moursund of the University of Oregon has launched the nonprofit Information Age Education. He writes:

Its major current activities are embedded in the IAE-pedia, (Information Age Education-pedia) that is patterned after the Wikipedia, but aimed just at supporting and improving teaching and learning. Access at http://iae-pedia.org/.

The IAE-pedia currently has three main components:

1. Articles aimed at preservice and inservice teachers, teachers of teachers, parents, and other educators. Part of the initial focus in this area is to focus on what it means to empower students and their teachers, and how to better empower them. For me, an important part of empowerment is providing tools and instruction in use of the tools that increase their
   expertise in posing and solving hard problems. (For those of you who teach preservice and preservice teachers, a good team term project is to have a team write an article and post it to the IAE-pedia.)
2. Digital filing cabinets. Imagine a preservice or inservice teacher receiving electronic copies of the types of material that experience teachers have stored in their filing cabinets. Imagine a teacher of teachers receiving the same thing, but also the types of materials that teachers of teachers have stored in their filing cabinets. This is a huge project that needs lots of volunteers who will contribute some of their materials and help in editing the materials. If you have good materials you want to contribute, please contact me. These materials need not be just about computers in education. Rather, consider anything that contributes to children getting a modern, Information Age Education.
3. The computer in education Pioneers project. The goal is to identify the pioneers and tell their stories. I am particularly interested in personal stories written by people who know some of the pioneers and/or who are some of the pioneers.

Moursund adds that volunteers are welcome, including those who work in languages other than English.

Every fall Beloit College in Beloit, Wisconsin, publishes its Mindset List, helping teachers and professors understand incoming freshmen. This year’s list has 70 items. Listed below are a few that caught my attention:

Most of the students entering College this fall, members of the Class of 2011, were born in 1989. For them, Alvin Ailey, Andrei Sakharov, Huey Newton, Emperor Hirohito, Ted Bundy, Abbie Hoffman, and Don the Beachcomber have always been dead.

• What Berlin wall?
• Humvees, minus the artillery, have always been available to the public.
• Rush Limbaugh and the “Dittoheads” have always been lambasting liberals.
• They never “rolled down” a car window.
• They have grown up with bottled water.
• Nelson Mandela has always been free and a force in South Africa.
• Rap music has always been mainstream.
• Russia has always had a multi-party political system.
• They were born the year Harvard Law Review Editor Barack Obama announced he might run for office some day.
• Wal-Mart has always been a larger retailer than Sears and has always employed more workers than GM.
• Fox has always been a major network.
• MTV has never featured music videos.

Read the complete list.

Mike Palmquist, Director of the Institute for Learning and Teaching at Colorado State University, has announced updates to their Writing Studio, a terrific resource available to anyone with Web access.

He writes:

The Writing Studio is an open access writing environment for students and instructors, available without charge. The Writing Studio class tools now include shared ePortfolios and a new Wiki-based Class Projects tool that allows members of a class to work collaboratively on a shared project. (A similar Group Projects tool will be available shortly for groups of students in a class.) The Writing Studio continues to offer a wide range of planning, composing, and commenting tools for writers, as well as access to the guides, activities, links, and other resources on the larger Writing@CSU Web site. Some of the most popular tools include our Blogs, ePortfolio, Working Bibliography, and Drafting tools. Visitors to the site are supported by a multimedia help system that offers more than 200 brief, how-to videos and text descriptions of key tools on the Studio.

Last year, Palmquist adds, the Writing Studio resources were used by thousands of writers at hundreds of schools globally. It uses a course management system comparable to Blackboard; teachers with “instructor” accounts can create courses and share materials with other instructors.

Simply clicking through the robust resources available at the site reveals the commitment to authentic writing that informs the site. The folks at Colorado State are generous to share this freely!

Here are more stories to help us remember that teachers aren’t the only ones who deal with unexpected sinkholes of consciousness.

Directory assistance

A caller asked for a knitwear company in Woven, Scotland.
Operator (after searching): “Woven? Are you sure?”
Caller: “Yes. That’s what it says on the label — Woven in Scotland.”

Tech Support

Tech Support: “I need you to right-click on the Open Desktop.”
Customer: “OK.”
Tech Support: “Did you get a pop-up menu?”
Customer: “No.”
Tech Support: “OK. Right-Click again. Do you see a pop-up menu?”
Customer: “No.”
Tech Support: “OK, sir. Can you tell me what you have done up until this point?”
Customer: “Sure. You told me to write ‘click’ and I wrote ‘click’.”

At a travel agency

Caller (asking about legal requirements while traveling in Europe) “If I register my car in France, and then take it to England, do I have to change the steering wheel to the other side of the car?”
Operator: (long pause)

More Tech Support

Tech Support: “At the bottom left hand side of your screen, can you see the ‘Start’ button displayed?”
Customer: “Wow! How can you see my screen from there?”

Really not a bad idea, in theory

Caller: “I deleted a file from my PC last week and I just realized that I need it. So, if I turn my system clock back two weeks will I get my file back again?”

Library instruction is a rite of passage for our high school freshmen. The English teacher escorts classes to the library, and our librarian coaches them through a series of activities designed to help them learn the card catalog, common reference books, the Reader’s Guide, and periodicals. Over the years we added online resources to the instruction.

The activities looked good on paper, but the kids worked through them halfheartedly. How interesting can it be to learn where things are in the library?

The people at the Gould Library at Carleton College in Minnesota seem to have figured something out, though. Their program involves a mock murder mystery staged after regular hours and limited to 50 students. (They report having to turn away students who enjoyed the experience so much their freshman year that they returned as sophomores to do it again.) With a little creativity something similar could be staged in a high school library, perhaps as a culminating activity.

Just make sure school security personnel know what’s going on … we wouldn’t want the situation to be misinterpreted!

Ray Bradbury was born on this date in 1920. His birthplace, Waukegan, Illinois, was the inspiration for the setting “Greentown, Illinois” in Dandelion Wine and Something Wicked This Way Comes. Although he is considered primarily a writer of science fiction, he has also written horror and fantasy.

President and Mrs. Bush awarded Bradbury the 2004 National Medal of Arts.

Bradbury is most famous in schools for short stories like “The Veldt” and “There Will Come Soft Rains” and for Fahrenheit 451, his novella set in a dystopian future when a fireman’s job is to find books and burn them.

I always thought Dandelion Wine was a delightful book, but I could never convince my students of it. The “magical” aspect of the novel was too unsophisticated for them. The feel of a new pair of sneakers never reminded them of antelopes or gazelles. When new technology was introduced, they didn’t mourn the loss of the old; and they didn’t question the human relationships involved. An old person telling stories would never seem like a time machine, and we won’t even think about what they would expect a Happiness Machine to do!

The stories near the end of the book hit closer to home. They could relate to Doug’s despair and to the support of Mr. Jonas, a caring adult, in “Dinner at Dawn.” And we all know someone like Aunt Rose in “The Magical Kitchen,” someone who means well but doesn’t understand the problems they cause.

My hope is that, when they’re 30, the book will return to them. As they read, I hope they’ll be better able to appreciate both the magic and the loss in the stories, the innocence and the danger, the importance of friends and family, and the value of memories made from ordinary situations, sweet as wine, stored safely in the basement.

• Senator Whatsername is stopped late Tuesday night while driving erratically, paparazzi catch the Senator with police on tape, and Wednesday it’s all over the media. Wednesday night someone from her office edits her Wikipedia page, removing any mention of the incident and leaving only glowing highlights of her career to date.
• After 60 Minutes investigates ghost employees on the governor’s payroll, someone from his office removes all references to the interview from his Wikipedia page.
• A major defense contractor is under investigation for supplying substandard repair parts for critical defense equipment. Every time a reference to the investigation is added to the company’s Wikipedia page, someone from the company’s home office deletes it.

I know what you’re thinking: how do we know who did these edits? Wikipedia is a global encyclopedia with thousands of contributors editing millions of articles. Anyone can participate, with or without an account. Teams of editors scour pages to watch for bias, hacks, and silliness. If an edited article remains unoffensive, it’s possible no action will be taken. Sometimes an article’s bias is noted, but the article itself remains online. The edits in the hypothetical examples above could be the work of zealous supporters, and no one would know.

Until now. Virgil Griffith, a student at the Santa Fe Institute and soon to be a student at Caltech, has invented Wikiscanner, software which analyzes the IP addresses of article edits. An IP address reveals the location of the computer used to make the edit, though it can’t identify who does the typing. However, as Griffith points out, the IP address reveals that the edit comes “from someone with access to their network. If the edit occurred during working hours, then we can reasonably assume that the person is either an employee of that company or a guest that was allowed access to their network.”

An article in Wired magazine addresses the seriousness of this issue and should be required reading for every high school student who uses Wikipedia for research. Wired also tracks some overtly biased edits.

If ever there were an anticipatory set activity for a unit on Information Literacy, this is it.

“Google Plants Solar Trees” was the headline of the Wired link in my inbox. I thought it was a joke and considered going straight to snopes.com, but something made me decide to read a little first. Turns out it’s actually a terrific metaphor at work.

This Park ‘n’ Ride in Vacaville, California, built by Energy Innovations, has solar “trees” and plug-ins for hybrid vehicles.

Google isn’t planting trees; they’re installing huge solar cells on supports in the parking lot. The solar cells will generate shade and protection from the elements, and will produce enough energy, it is hoped, to meet about 1/3 of the electrical needs at the complex.

Envision Solar, a company that produces a similar product, says this:

It is a graceful analogy, really — just as a citrus grove absorbs sunlight to produce food we consume, a Solar Grove™ absorbs sunlight and produces energy. The language of the analogy continues — the frame and modules of the Solar Tree become its “canopy,” the support structure becomes the “limbs” and “trunk,” while the support structure and wiring beneath the earth is known as the “taproot.” … During the day, these translucent models allow dappled sunlight to pass through to the ground — again, a bit like leaves on a real tree would allow.

A similar design is already in place at Kyocera in San Diego, where the panels have generated more electricity than originally expected.

Web users can track the amount of energy produced at Kyocera and consider different types of pollution that were avoided because this technology was introduced.

Another measure of the concept’s success lies in capturing the public imagination. Seeds for a solar tree, anyone?

Students sometimes wonder why we ask them to think in terms of metaphor and analogy. Here’s one more object lesson you can point to.