Category: Education

Gear by Joe WilcoxMay 20, 20161:33 pm

Psst — Here’s What Google Wants from Android Apps on Chromebook

Your kids. Chromebook leads laptop and desktop sales through U.S. commercial channels to schools, according to NPD. Education is overwhelmingly the primary market for the computers. The institutions can’t buy enough of the thangs, for their utility and low-cost compared to notebooks running either OS X or Windows. That cost is as much about extended webapps and services from Google (or its developer partners), available for free or comparatively next-to-nothing, set against software for the other platforms.

Wrinkle in the Google firmament: iPhone and Chromebook are like water and dirt. The sediment settles unless shaken up. Sure youngsters can do all their Googly things—Docs, Gmail, Maps, Photos, YouTube, etc.—on iOS but the experience is smoother and more homogenous when mixed Android and Chrome OS. What the kiddies lack, and their educators, is a swath of useful apps like the Apple kids get.

Society by Joe WilcoxJan 12, 20164:51 pm

Diverging from Divergent Education

As my daughter struggles to find college classes she can register for the Spring semester, I think about the Divergent series‘ faction system as a metaphor. Young adults choose to join one of five factions, and it’s a lifelong decision: Abnegation (the selfless); Amity (the peaceful); Candor (the honest); Dauntless (the brave); Erudite (the intelligent).

Many of my daughter’s desired classes are blocked to someone outside that major field. Meaning: Her interest in learning transcends the choices available. Her chosen major is Communications, but her interests touch psychology, graphic design, human health, and neuroscience, among many other areas of study. In the trilogy, people who don’t conform, whose capabilities span several factions, are Divergent, which the reader learns later should be human normal.

Living by Joe WilcoxMay 23, 20156:39 am

A Life Lesson

For three summers during high school, I participated in federal assistance program Upward Bound at Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine. My parents divorced when I was 13, and my then 31 year-old mother chose to raise four children alone. Jobs were scarce in Aroostook County during the early 1970s, and mom couldn’t earn enough. We were poor, by most American measures.

That circumstance and college plans qualified me to spend summers in Southern Maine and someday to attend a school like Bowdoin (I didn’t). The program has expanded such that if I were a high school student today, my UB participation would be at the University of Presque Isle branch rather than the one at Bowdoin. While closer to home (next town over), the benefits wouldn’t be as a great: Getting out of the County’s confines, experiencing life on such a prestigious college campus, watching Shakespeare at the Theater at Monmouth, or traveling—even for a day—to Boston.

Photo by Joe WilcoxMar 15, 20157:14 am

Flickr a Day 74: ‘Student’

Chilean Francisco Osorio describes himself as a “social anthropologist very interested in photography since childhood. I remember my father bringing home a book to learn how to make photographs, which I read from cover to […]

Apple by Joe WilcoxFeb 24, 201511:04 am

The Measure of Chromebook’s Success

Last year, I disputed ridiculous assertions, based on widely misquoted NPD data, that 2014 would be “year of the Chromebook”. It wasn’t. But that designation does belong to 2015—at least in the United States. Measures: Number of new models; adoption by K-12 schools; and overall sales, which are surprisingly strong. Read carefully the next paragraph.

Through U.S. commercial channels and retail, Chromebooks accounted for 14 percent of laptop sales last year, according to NPD, which released data at my request. That’s up from 8 percent in 2013. Commercial channels, largely to educational institutions, accounted for about two-thirds of 2014 Chromebook sold. Year over year, sales soared by 85 percent, and the trajectory continues to climb.

Money by Joe WilcoxNov 27, 20147:40 pm

Google, Give Thanks!

It wouldn’t be U.S. Thanksgiving without my writing about gratitude, and why some tech company’s executives, employees, and partners should prostrate and pray “Thanks”.

This year I to Google, which continues a great run that started with Larry Page’s return as CEO in April 2011. If he’s not all smiles this Turkey Day, someone should slap that man aside the head. I could tick off a hundred things for which he should give thanks. For brevity’s sake, so you can get back to the big game and bigger bird, I select some things that might not come to mind.

Society by Joe WilcoxFeb 14, 201410:24 pm

Darwin is More Evolved Than This

Ten days ago Bill Nye (yeah the Science Guy) debated Christian author Ken Ham about evolution vs creationism. Their live-streamed slugfest is a social media lovehug (for the sharing) and fistfight (for fierce debate). I see posts supporting one or the other, or neither, still several times a day.

Responsibility by Joe WilcoxAug 18, 201310:18 am

Conspiracy of Debt

We’re doing the worst thing people can do: lying to our young. Nobody, not even this president, who was swept to victory in large part by the raw enthusiasm of college kids, has the stones to tell the truth: that a lot of them will end up being pawns in a predatory con game designed to extract the equivalent of home-mortgage commitment from 17-year-olds dreaming of impossible careers as nautical archaeologists or orchestra conductors.

One former law student I contacted for this story had a nervous breakdown while struggling to pay off six-figure debt. It wasn’t until he tapped into one of the few growth industries open to young Americans that his outlook brightened. ‘I got my life back on track by working for a marijuana delivery service in Manhattan’, he says.
Matt Taibbi

Stupidity by Joe WilcoxSep 2, 200912:57 pm

Where the Rubber Room Meets the Road

I have a suggestion for Joel Klein, chancellor of New York City schools: Publish a teaching offenders list.

I must be a slow learner, because until Saturday I hadn’t understood New York City’s losing battle with the powerful teachers union. Once teachers achieve tenure—after 3 years—they are employed for life and damn near undismissible, even for cause. Journalism professor Samuel Freedman wrote about the situation for the New York Times two years ago: “Where Teachers Sit, Awaiting Their Fates.” I missed that one, but not Steven Brill’s shocking “The Rubber Room: The battle over New York City’s worst teachers” in Aug. 31, 2009, The New Yorker.

Photo by Joe WilcoxJul 9, 20097:17 pm

Macs in J Schools

Every picture tells a story. Apple presented this one during the October 2008 launch of unibody MacBook Pros. So many Macs among so many students seems outta sorts. Where are the Windows laptops? The students and Mac laptops go so oddly together.

Society by Joe WilcoxSep 11, 20075:51 pm

My Math Team Memory

One of my best friends (there were only two) from my senior year of high school tracked me down over the weekend. I had wondered about her for years. She’s back in Maine, although she […]

Living by Joe WilcoxMay 11, 20078:44 pm

No Class, No Reunion

My 30-year high school reunion will take place this year—if it hasn’t already. But, sigh, I have no high school where to return. During my junior and senior years, my mom moved the family from the town where I grew up to Maine’s second-largest city in the south. While other kids wallowed in the memories, I walked the hallowed halls like an odd duck. I was a stranger among strangers. I left my memories and friends 300 miles away, in the town where I was born and there the school system that educated me. No memories. No prom. No graduation parties. No fun.

I regularly cut classes in the new school, which was quite unusual for me. I had bulked up on extra classes through junior year and was one-quarter credit shy of graduation going into my senior year. I only needed to sustain grades for college.