Alan Schwartz, writing for NYT:

“This is not about the technology,” Mark Edwards, superintendent of Mooresville Graded School District, would tell the visitors later over lunch. “It’s not about the box. It’s about changing the culture of instruction — preparing students for their future, not our past.”

This weekend, the blogosphere has been a-buzz with contrasting opinions on the implementation of “silent” on the iPhone. Read Hivelogic to get up to speed if necessary.

Short version: iPhone’s silent switch is actually not a “Silent Mode” in the Nokia or Blackberry sense of the word. It is a “Ringer Off” switch. That means that certain user-triggered activities, will still produce noise. Apple notes this in the iPhone User Manual:

Important: Clock alarms, audio apps such as Music, and many games still play sounds through the built-in speaker when iPhone is in silent mode.

Nevertheless, some bloggers are calling for the switch to be changed to a Mute-All switch. This would do away with one of my favourite iPhone design decisions. In fact, I have overslept at least one important business meeting because I’d left my Blackberry on silent the night before.

I need a phone that:

• Stops making noise (phone calls, emails, messages) when I go to bed,
• and then starts making a lot of noise when its time for me to wake up (alarm clock).

It’s pretty simple.

That power jack will accept the tablet’s regular AC adapter, but also other sorts of power sources, including a hand crank.

Love the idea of a tablet hand crank.

There is a nasty micropolitics of schooling at play here. It is common knowledge that schools, under tremendous political pressure to improve their pass rates, do two things.

They hold pupils back in earlier grades, especially Grade 11; and they downgrade pupils into easier subjects, such as mathematical literacy over pure mathematics.

In other words, the greater the chances of pupils in Grade 12 passing, the better the school looks, the better the province looks, the better the country’s averages look.

The department acknowledges what it calls “culling”.

Pause for a moment and just think about that.

This is (partly) how our education system lost 539 102 learners between enrolling in Grade One in 2000 and now.

• 8-inch, 1024×768, PixelQi display
• Marvell Armada PXA618 processor
• 512Mb RAM
• Android or Linux Sugar Operating System
• Rugged case and soft-rubber cover

OLPC has noted that the $100 model won’t include the expensive PixelQi display but instead has a normal LCD.

A digital mock-up of the XO 3.0, from The Verge

If you have a kid who’s even slightly interested in computer programming – let them play with this.

With the society that sets the bar for performance so low, I have serious problems. Slowly, slowly we are digging our collective graves as we fall into a sinkhole of mediocrity from which we are unlikely to emerge.

Behind a massive wave of populism, and in the misguided name of regstelling (setting right the past), we open access to resources and universities to young people without the hard work necessary to achieve those gifts and to succeed once there.

Straight to the point, as always.

The Department of Basic Education has printed open-licensed science and maths textbooks for every grade 10 learner in the country, and will follow up with grades 11 and 12 soon. I’ve heard estimates that this is around two million textbooks in each grade.

This is a big deal. And I suspect it’s not the last disruption the textbook industry will see this year.

Just making the coursework available for free, of course, doesn’t make people use it, no matter how good it is.

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve started the Stanford iOS course.