http://spajal.targeteil.org:80/?q=node/248

Systematic Acquisition

Right now I'm working on something I call Systematic Acquisition. The focus is vocabulary and grammar.

Vocabulary

On the vocabulary front, I'm doing two things.

First, I'm compiling a wordlist (currently 27746 words) from various sources such as the the Dolch Sight Word List, the General Service List, the Academic Word List and the Collins COBUILD Learner's Dictionary. It's all going into an Excel file called Multilist. Multilist includes information about presence in a list, frequency in a corpus, type of entry in a source, inflections and alternate spellings. All this information will be used to construct a systematic list which I will use to create vocabulary learning materials.

Second, I'm refining a vocabulary teaching technique which combines Language Item Management (LIM) and Discourse Loading (DL).

Language Item Management empowers the learner to rapidly assess his or her own knowledge of various language items (including vocabulary and grammar) and to make decisions about which items should be learned to which degree. It begins with a five-item (Lykert) scale called the NUMPY Scale (No-Unlikely-Maybe-Probably-Yes). Learners grade each item in a list (for example, the target words in a reading passage) according to their answers to the question: Would I recognize and understand this item if I saw it in a sentence? The instructor verifies the assessments by asking for definitions or examples. Faulty definitions are corrected and unfamiliar words are explained. In the full form of LIM, the NUMPY Scale is applied to five Acquisition Fields and objectives for all items are set based on an agreed assessment of how well each item should be learned. Each acquisition field is a box which combines two parameters: Production-Reception and Competence-Competition. Production is active use of an item in speech and writing. Reception is passive use of an item in listening and reading. Competence is current and constant facility with the item. Competition is opportunistic facility in response to an ephemeral situation such as a language test, an interview or a presentation. An item may be assessed as productive-competent, productive-competitive, receptive-competent, receptive-competitive or null (neither competent nor competitive in either production or reception). On the NUMPY Scale, Y corresponds to productive competence, P corresponds to receptive competence, M corresponds to productive competition, U corresponds to receptive competition and N corresponds to null. Items may be bumped up or bumped down as learner and instructor agree based on learner needs.

Discourse Loading is the practice of generating "teaching sentences". A teaching sentence is an individual sentence or set of sentences that contains sufficient contextual information to make the meaning of its target item unmistakable. Imagine the blank in a cloze item without an accompanying list of previously distinguished vocabulary. To draw the learner's mind to a particular word out of the thousands the learner may have acquired, the sentence must contain an abnormally large amount of distinguishing information. For the word ant, a sentence like "There was an ____ in my sandwich" would be woefully inadequate if the environmental context of the sentence provided no clues. Ignoring the phonemic clue of "an", the target could be any noun whose real-world counterpart was small enough to fit in a sandwich, anything from a bacterium to a pickle to a small mouse to a cigarette butt. If we add sufficient context to the sentence (or set of sentences itself), the possibilities become limited to one word or one set of words which share one meaning--and meaning is the desired element in a discourse loaded sentence. "There was an _____ in my sandwich. It must have crawled in there when I set the sandwich down on the blanket at the picnic. There were thousands of the little black insects hunting in the grass for food to take back to their colony" tunes the choices down to pretty well one. Crawl, blanket, picnic, thousands, little, black, insects, hunt, grass, food, take back and colony all work together to restrict the potential meaning of the omitted item.

The advantages of Discourse Loading are at least four. First, in order to imagine the context necessary to limiting the possible meanings of the target item, the learner must concentrate very keenly on the target item's meaning, creating a tighter association between meaning and form. Second, in order to build the required context, the learner must recycle previously learned vocabulary, thus refreshing or reactivating the selected vocabulary. Third, having generated the context-laden sentence, the learner has an example for future reference. Fourth, the example makes the meaning of the target item so unmistakably clear that even ten, twenty or thirty years later, the item will be instantly reactivated if the learner happens upon the sentence in notebook or memory.

Grammar

On the grammar front, I am developing an approach to teaching grammar called Behavioural Grammar. The impetus for this project arose from the realization that a Grammar Gap exists between those who are able and those who are unable to translate the conceptual grammars taught in most language courses into behavioural grammars. Grammar is traditionally taught as a concept to be mysteriously transmuted in the learner's mind from a set of ideas to a set of procedures. Communicative and interactional grammar teaching seek to facilitate the process of translation by making grammar immediate and urgent; however, translation of concept to procedure is still left to the learner. Just as some but not all would-be musicians take rapidly and apparently effortlessly to musical procedures, with or without conceptual training, so some but not all would-be language learners take rapidly and apparently effortlessly to linguistic procedures. Rapid and apparently effortless acquisition of any procedure stems from what I call operance, or a natural tendency or inclination to emit behaviours that naturally lead to acquisition of a procedure. A learner who is operant in regard to a particular subject will seem to learn it rapidly and effortlessly, while learners who are respondant or, worse, resistant, to the subject will either struggle or rebel. One advantage of teaching behavioural grammar is that the non-operant learner is not required to translate concepts to behaviours.

The relationship of operance to respondance can be clarified by analogy to genius and ordinary intelligence. The formula for calculating the length of the hypotenuse of a right-angled triangle is annually acquired and applied by millions if not billions of ordinary adolescent minds the world over. Yet never in a million or billion years would even the average engineer have come up with that formula on his or her own. It takes a genius like Pythagorus to discover or invent such a thing, but any normal mind can comprehend and commandeer it. Even the formulations of later luminaries like Newton and Einstein are perfectly accessible to ordinary minds. How is this so? It is so because each genius translated his conceptual insight into a procedural formula and nearly anyone can grasp and make use of a formula. In principle, anything can be taught to anyone if it is taught as a behaviour and all useful concepts are eventually translated into behaviours. In terms of achievement, the ordinary learner is equivalent to the genius if he or she is able to acquire and apply the genius's insight. The only difference is that the genius acquired the insight and developed the procedure operantly, by virtue of his or her own natural tendencies, while the ordinary learner acquired the procedure respondantly, that is, in response to instruction aimed at instilling the insight and conditioning the behaviour.

At present, I am working on verb inflection. I have distilled a formula for consistent correct inflection of English verbs and am developing activities for conditioning this behaviour in all of my students, from those in individual classes to those in large group classes. Preliminary results are encouraging and I am swiflty refining both approach and technique.

 

Differential Acquisition Theory

Concerned about helping my students really achieve real native-like fluency in vocabulary and grammar, I have been striving to understand how first (L1) and second (L2) languages are learned and acquired by people of various ages. From all this cogitation, based on experience as a learner/acquirer of an L1 (English) and four L2s (French, Haitian Creole, Russian and Mandarin), on observations as an ESL instructor in Ukraine and Taiwan, and on reading in language acquisition theory and learning theory, has emerged a theory I call Differential Acquisition. In brief, it recognizes that human beings go through three stages of development when it comes to language learning: innate, instinctive and intellectual.

The Innate Stage

The innate stage may also be termed the neural stage, because all language activity at this stage is essentially neural. The idiolinguoverse (individual language universe) is "hooking up" with its instruments of reception and production, the auditory and vocal tracts. This corresponds by analogy to the early development of the universe as a growing collection of elements under high energies. This elemental stage is characterized by high activity and low organization. All activity at this stage is random, the elements behaving according to their properties and under no other control than their inherent nature. It is the stage of speciation, at which the individual acquires the the characterisitics of its species, including a characteristic set of faculties, among which is the language faculty (whether or not this faculty is separate from a general learning faculty).

The Instinctive Stage

The instinctive stage may also be termed the social stage, because language activity at this stage becomes increasingly social. The idiolinguoverse has come into contact with the sociolinguoverse (group language universe) and is chiefly concerned with copying it. This corresponds by analogy to the development of life on earth with a focus on survival. This biological stage is characterized by continuing high activity and increasing organization. It is the stage of genius for most individuals, the stage at which activity and organization are both high, resulting in frequent environmentally responsive reorganization. Early activity is random, but becomes increasingly subject to a developing instinct, an instinct focused on survival within the group and therefore on becoming recognizably of the group, that is, acquiring the culture and so, by inclusion, acquiring the language of the group to a degree that marks the individual as belonging to the group.

The Intellectual Stage

The intellectual stage may also be termed the individual stage, because language activity at this stage becomes increasingly achievement-oriented. The idiolinguoverse focuses now on its own ends, which often do not entirely coincide with those of the group, usually as a complex, but occasionally as separate objectives. This corresponds by analogy to the development of technology in human culture. This technological stage is charaterized by decreasing activity and increasing organization. It is the stage of lost genius for most inidividuals. The tension between activity and organization has settled in favour of organization and reorganization becomes increasingly difficult. Activity at this stage is mainly deliberate or intellectual. The individual already belongs to a group and is seldom sufficiently motivated to fully acculturate with another group. Lingustic interaction with other groups focuses on specific material ends rather than general acceptance.

Efficiency

The overriding principle of lanuage acquisition is efficiency. Each stage is naturally tuned to maximize efficiency in handling its material. Newborns essentially ignore the sociolinguoverse because they must first develop the idiolinguoversal equipment to perceive, interpret and respond to it. Very young children indiscriminately absorb the characteristics of groups to which they feel they must belong because belonging increases the chances of being cared for and protected and therefore of surviving at a time when the individual is incapable of surviving without a great deal of tending. Teenagers and adults (and younger children not exposed to language under survival conditions) aquire only those elements of new sociolinguoverses they find necessary to achieving their ends (which may range from very basic interaction through various levels of communication to conscientious artistic performance).

 

A Cure for Efficiency

Systematic Acquisition provides a means to access or at least mimic the dormant instinctive stage. When language items are taught as behaviours and accurate behaviour is crucial to success, intellectual learners revert, at least partially, to a survival-oriented acculturation approach. Of course, the elements of the target culture to be acquired and the degree to which they must be acquired come under the control of the instructor, whose artificial culture, one which demands greater instinctive accuracy than does the natural intellectual culture of the real language world, will push the learner's achievement closer to the native standard than the non-operant learner could manage by simple immersion.

http://spajal.targeteil.org:80/?q=node/229

While the latest version of my wordlist uploads, I'll pop into this cooliris window and post a blog entry for the first time in six months or so.

It's been a fine time for me. Just got back a week ago from three weeks in Victoria (brother) and Prince George (parents). One of the big highlights was a two-hour canoe trip with my old friend Brock and my five-year-old son, Ben. Ben's a natural. With a little coaching and observation, he was dipping and feathering like a pro. Unfortunately, here in Kaohsiung, we won't get many opportunities to glide on lakes.

One little event that will have repercussions for the next several months at least is my invention of behavioural grammar. I had been reading Skinner's The Technology of Teaching and was just starting Chomsky's The Minimalist Program when it hit me that grammar-in-use is behavioural, not conceptual, and that I could develop a behavioural grammar that would guarantee consistently, continuously correct performance. I got on it right away and wound up with a good start on a behavioural grammar for verb inflection.

These days, though, I'm back to slogging it out over Multilist. I still have half a dozen sources to input, but yesterday I decided I had enough to start an acquisitional wordlist. Basically, I'm paring the list down to useful items, grouping the items by useable base form and splitting the result into two lists: the first containing the base forms and the second containing so-called derivations. The idea is to teach the base forms as a resource for extrapolative reading, add the derivations as fodder for extrapolation, and leave students with a solid intermediate vocabulary and trusty vocabulary building skills. Naturally, I'll eventually put together a complete basic-through-advanced list, but it will take time. I'm hoping to have the current project done by Saturday so I can test it on a new TOEFL student.

http://spajal.targeteil.org:80/?q=node/218

Missing in action might have been a more appropriate title, but most of what I've been doing away from the blogosphere is leading, I hope, to a well-earned academic title, among other things (fame and fortune, to name but two of the least).

Phased Acquisition Theory has turned out to be but a drop in the bucket of Differential Aquisition Theory, my current unified theory of language acquisition, inspired by reading in cosmology, evolution and computer programming and bolstered by reading in theories of language acquisition and theories of learning. Naturally, working out the theory, its hypotheses and potential research topics has taken a lot of my time.

Even more time-consuming has been the seminal phase of LIDbIT (Language Item Database of Integrated Tables), Multilist (Multiple Source Wordlist), a composite of wordlists from something like a dozen online and print sources. Got to View/Wordlists to take a boo.

I've also been developing this site, one of a complex of spajes, or student, professional and academic journals. The platform is Drupal and one of the kicks is setting up various content types to cover the range of contributions users might someday make. Another challenge is figuring out how to collect all of a single user's contributions to one view for feeding to other sites. At the moment I have My Blog and Subsites, but the blog module is not configurable and the Mysite module does not access user-generated content types. As far as I can tell, user-specific views are not yet creatable.

http://www.kassblog.com/?itemid=431 I have successfully imported addresses for 260 families into Google Earth. Now, does anyone know an application that will automatically calculate best-fit bus routes for these homes?

http://www.kassblog.com/?itemid=430 Homebound for a few days, I have spent more than the usual amount of time reading blogs. Digging deeply, I followed more links than usual and came across a number of blogs that I wasn't reading before. Check out the new blogroll. I hope I'll be able to keep it up once I'm back at the office.



I also followed the Laptop Institute and am following Building Learning Communities much more closely than I have tried before. I have to tell you that following the Laptop Institute through RSS feeds was not a satisfactory experience -- there wasn't much happening online. Thank you, Vinnie Vrotny, for filling the gap! Building Learning Communities, on the other hand, has been extremely active, perhaps thanks to the summarizing expertise of Ewan McIntosh. Ewan writes narrative summaries and takes lively photos of the sessions he attends, which allow me to really capture what happened at the event.

tags: blc07

http://www.kassblog.com/?itemid=429 We have heard a lot in recent years about technologies designed reduce the cost of computer lab implementation. Several network-based terminal server solutions exist (Microsoft terminal server, Citrix, and K12LTSP), some are trying to build extremely inexpensive laptops (OLPC, XO), and others speculate about the potential for phones to meet the needs of some computing activities. Now, it appears that nComputing has come up with a device that allows multiple users to share the same computer without using the network. Based on KVM technology, the x300 allows one computer to run multiple keyboards and mice, kind of like a small-scale mainframe technology. Typically, the users would sit right next to each other, since the cables are meant to carry data and power over short distances. Like other resource-sharing solutions, this will work best for software applications where the computer itself is idle much of the time because the user is reading or thinking, for example word processing and web browsing. I would love to take this for a test drive!

http://www.kassblog.com/?itemid=428 (notes to myself, gleaned from Jim Heynderickx and Deri Bash's presentation)



iEarn



Creative Connections



IECC



KidLink



ED.gov guide



Global Voices Online



ePals

http://www.kassblog.com/?itemid=427 This tool allows you to install a bookmark in your web browser that looks up a book from Amazon in your local library, so that you may get it there instead! John Udell, master of moving information among sites, created this tool five years ago. I would like to try this with Portland-area libraries that our students use.



LibraryLookup

http://www.kassblog.com/?itemid=426

Wondering what open-source alternatives exist for the commercial applications you use? Try OSalt. Click on a software category, select a commerical title, and OSalt provides a list of open-source alternatives. I knew about GIMPshop, but I used the site to learn about potential replacements for Illustrator and InDesign.

http://www.kassblog.com/?itemid=425 I recently discovered that osCommerce does not automatically remove credit card information for old orders. Here is a little script that I dropped into admin/orders.php that silently masks credit card numbers for orders older than 14 days. One day, I will learn how to create a legitimate module.



$cc_numbers_query = tep_db_query("select orders_id, cc_number from " . TABLE_ORDERS . " where orders_status=3 AND last_modified < (DATE_ADD(NOW(), INTERVAL -14 DAY))");

while ($cc_num = tep_db_fetch_array($cc_numbers_query)) {

$fullcc = $cc_num['cc_number'];

if ($fullcc && (!strstr($fullcc, 'x'))) { // hasn't previously been processed

$newcc='';

for ($a=0;$a<(strlen($fullcc)-4);$a++) {

$newcc .= 'x';

}

$newcc .= substr($fullcc,-4);

$editcc_query = tep_db_query("update " . TABLE_ORDERS . " set cc_number = '" . $newcc . "' where orders_id = " . $cc_num['orders_id']);

}

}

http://www.kassblog.com/?itemid=424 I updated our insideCatlin design layout over the past few weeks to use the new school publication colors and improve legibility. This is in line with trends among web 2.0 tools to increase font size and simplify page layout. I had used the old design for five years between two schools!



I started by applying the Aberdeen theme to Drupal and adjusting the colors to the Catlin web palette. Then I applied the Chameleon theme to Moodle and adjusted the font and color settings to very nearly match the Drupal theme. Finally, I adjusted the HTML template that our custom Perl and PHP scripts use.



Comments welcome.



Old design







New design

http://www.kassblog.com/?itemid=423 Working with a teacher today, I came across the following Moodle features, some of which are probably new to version 1.7 or 1.8 and some of which were probably there all along, and I just didn't notice them!



Complete activity reports



Click on any student icon -> Activity Report -> Complete Report, and you can actually see all of the individual pieces of work a student has submitted. This satisfies a request that two teachers specifically brought to my attention and probably many more have wanted for some time.







Media filters



I turned on media filters just for fun while attempting to implement Speex, and presto, Moodle automatically inserts a Flash player when I upload a MP3 file! This will make audio work so much easier, especially in language classes.







Assignment type: upload multiple files



English teachers invariably follow a writing process model, which requires submission and review of multiple drafts of each written work. Moodle now provides an assignment type that permits both the student and the teacher to upload multiple files. In this way, they may exchange multiple revisions and commented versions until the paper is complete.







Inline assignment commenting



I had known about this before, but it dovetails nicely with the previous feature. If students are comfortable writing directly into Moodle (tough for three-page essays), then the teacher may insert comments in a different color directly into the text. Sure, it's not "track changes," but most teachers want to provide advice rather than directly edit the student's text.



Bravo, Moodle! You have developed a strong capacity to provide features that teachers rely on and respond to their continued needs.

Testing Audio Post: [You do not have permission to access this file]

http://www.kassblog.com/?itemid=422 Since we upgraded Moodle to 1.8, I have been bothered by how the web and file resources displayed after the conversion. A new, intermediate screen appeared asking the user to click to open the requested resource, a bother if you were used to clicking on the link and seeing the page immediately open.







I discovered today that Moodle 1.8 (or was it 1.7?) eliminated the "display in a frame" option for resources, which had been the default option in 1.6. We were getting this new screen for any resource that had the frame option selected. I'm not sure whether this was an intentional omission from the Moodle upgrade scripts or not. It's worth mentioning that all other aspects of the Moodle upgrade went extremely smoothly!



How could we update all of the resources with this problem at once? I looked into the database and developed the following query to do the trick.



update `resource` set `options`='' where `options`='frame';



This changes all resources that used to open within a frame so that they will open in the same window.



Please note that tinkering directly with the database of any application is only recommended if you have first thoroughly tested the change and have a solid backup of your data! One way to test is to run the query on individual records within a test course before applying it to real courses. I certainly feel a lot better about making global changes in this manner during the summer when the site is inactive.

http://www.kassblog.com/?itemid=421 Over the past couple of months, I have been skeptical about the usefulness of Twitter. Bloggers seemed wildly enthusiastic about the new technology, but many suggested that they hadn't found a useful purpose for it yet. Thank you to Dave Warlick for shedding some light on this mystery. Dave suggests that Twitter tells him "where my friends brains are at." I think he is saying that microblogging deepens the blogging environment. If blogging allows me to read a message from a person in my network a few times a week, microblogging technologies such as Twitter allow me to touch these individuals several times a day. I find great value in my online network of colleagues in the constant inputs I receive that help inform my work. Microblogging could draw this network of far-flung individuals a little closer together. Perhaps that is why it has taken off so quickly. Twitter makes the quality of contact with the individuals in your network richer and more frequent.



This reminds me of a comment that Hoover Chan made last year, that the new social web technologies are all new forms of the same old social networking concept popularized through MOOs and MUDs. People continue to search for and develop new online environments that allow the richest possible interactions between individuals who are temporally and geographically widely dispersed. Though the technologies have changed from all-text environments to client-based applications (email, chat) to web-based tools (blogging, social networking tools), the goal has remain unchanged throughout. Perhaps we may understand Second Life in the same way. People seem strongly attracted to the 3D, visual nature of this virtual environment, even though I read that there is an amazing tendency to recreate traditional learning (and shopping) interactions in Second Life. If you find value in the visually rich online interactions, then perhaps you will get something out of Second Life. I haven't yet tried it.



In a subsequent post, Warlick considers the potential of Twitter as a teaching and learning tool. He wonders whether students engaging in a reading activity during class would find value in sharing their thoughts on the text as they read. Each student would gain an instant snapshot into the thoughts of the others at the same time -- an interesting possibility. I find that other social networking tools have value in schools in the same way they have value to adults in the blogging community. They bring the entire community closer together by enriching dialogue throughout the school -- in classes, clubs, and in fact anywhere and anytime that students get online. School communities that might otherwise fracture into cliques based on social status and age are drawn closer together. In San Francisco four years ago, I found that students who would ordinarily never speak with each other (say, a senior girl and a freshman boy) were engaging in rich conversations in our online forums.



If we consider microblogging an extension of other social networking tools, then perhaps we will find that it has the greatest educational value by simply making it available to teachers and students and seeing how they use it. In the era of web-based social networking, I have had the most success with discussion forums, Moodle, and photo galleries. Each time, I have found that teachers and students adopt the tools in a great variety of manners, much more than I imagined or suggested that people should. I can already see students using Twitter in the same manner they already use texting -- to stay in touch and share ideas throughout the busy school day. Teachers might gain a new appreciation for the challenges facing students in a traditional school schedule if they followed students' Twitter feeds for a day!



My challenge with Twitter is twofold: will the individuals in my blogging network adopt Twitter? I have already had little success persuading the tech director colleagues I most respect to go online with their thoughts. At the same time, I have found new colleagues across the country through blogging. Will they Twitter? I can only give it a try and see. Hopefully, I'll start this week, though my feed will be a lot more interesting once the school year has started again.

http://www.kassblog.com/?itemid=420 While 35 of us attended a regional conference in Washington state, EduBloggerCon became one of the big stories at NECC. The two events had something in common -- participants in online networks found added value in face-to-face meetings. PNAIS TechShare participants mostly communicate through a listserv. This week's conference allowed us to put names to faces, meet old acquaintances, and intensively explore ideas that we had kicked around via email for months. EduBloggerCon participants expressed the same ideas. Bloggers who had spent the previous year reading and commenting on each others' posts found great value in sitting down with each other for an entire day.



Ad-hoc organization is an essential ingredient in such meet-ups. Participants show up having only loosely framed some essential questions or lined up a couple of internal speakers. Conversations twist and turn among different topics, keeping a high level of vitality and facilitating participation by many. Any participant can take the conversation in a new direction by asking a question, throwing a curveball into the discussion, or driving the data projector for a while.



I and many other members of such affinity networks profess that they have greater value for one's professional practice than traditional, highly organized conferences. Everyone seems to be doing it. BAISNet is a fine example of a group of education professionals who chat daily by email and then spontaneously organize informal meetings at one member's school when one topic appears particularly hot. Paul Nelson recently organized a Moodle meet-up at the NWRESD. And those are just the networks that I have found out about first-hand! I look forward to more of this high-value professional networking.

http://www.kassblog.com/?itemid=419 I tried a different kind of Moodle training today at the PNAIS TechShare conference. Leading a session on Installing and Managing Moodle, I decided to try for a proof of concept activity, much like we did a couple of years ago with K12LTSP. I set up my own Linux server for the first time (Ubuntu, in case you are wondering) and created a local account for each workshop participant. I then led them step by step through installing Moodle from scratch, including downloading it using wget, creating a database using phpMyAdmin, and editing the Moodle config.php file using nano. Nearly everyone made it within 75 minutes! By the end of the session, we had a dozen Moodle sites and a few disgruntled participants! In retrospect, I wonder whether it was the best use of our time, since it turned out that most of the participants run IIS web servers and would have benefited from more work on the admin menu options. However, it certainly proved that Moodle is pretty darn easy to install and configure!

http://www.kassblog.com/?itemid=418 We are wrapping up day 2 of the PNAIS TechShare conference just now with a playground session for toying with the software applications we have discussed all day. The conference format has been fantastic, allowing participants to freely ask questions and the discussion to range among a variety of topics of people's interest. For a blow-by-blow account, check out PNAIStech.org.



One major point of discussion this afternoon was an effort to take the PNAIS Tech Directors online community to the next level. Partly, we planned to increase our participation in our email list to the next level. We also discussed posting regular content to pnaistech.org. I feel that it all starts with the email list. If we can build enough momentum there, then we might be able to carry over to the Drupal site.



In other news, Bill White has got a version of MoodleSpeex running on his 1.8 test site, but he doesn't quite have the install process packaged in a way that others can use. The Moodle community is getting closer and closer to a working version of Speex for Moodle 1.8! I hope we will make it in time for the start of the school year!

http://www.kassblog.com/?itemid=417

This is very nearly what I want. Does anyone have another favorite mapping service that will allow meeting participants to specify their locations on a map?

http://www.kassblog.com/?itemid=416 I recently moved a site from a shared server that had the Perl library Image::Size installed to one that had Image::Magick. Though Magick has more commands, I had trouble finding a relatively simple function: image size. I wanted to get the image dimensions so that I could create a floating div appropriately sized to an image's dimensions. After many attempts at Googling and experimentation, I finally found the answer in the Get command. I hope you find this tip useful.



use Image::Magick;

$image = Image::Magick->new;

($width, $height) = imgsize("$file");



sub imgsize {

$image->Read(@_[0]);

$height = $image->Get('height');

$width = $image->Get('width');

return ($width,$height);

}

http://www.kassblog.com/?itemid=415 I finally split my iPhoto library in two. My 13,000 photos had slowed iPhoto to a crawl. Unfortunately, I was duped into buying the pay version of iPhoto Library Manager, which offers the ability to drag-and-drop albums to split a library. Once I read more closely, I discovered that I didn't really want to copy albums to another library -- I wanted to copy all images shot between particular dates! The software wouldn't do this, and I did it manually instead. I completed the following steps.

• Quit iPhoto
  
  
• Create a new, empty folder within Home -> Pictures to serve as the new library folder
  
  
• Copy as many of the photo folders (the ones named by date) and all of the supporting library files into the new folder, leaving a copy behind (hold down the Option key when you copy).
  
  
• Launch iPhoto, holding down the Option key. Choose the new Library.
  
  
• Delete all of the images from the earlier years not included in your copy operation, and empty the trash.
  
  
• Relaunch iPhoto with the original library and delete all of the images that you moved.

Now I have two library folders, one with the newest images that loads quickly, and a larger one containing older photos. I hold down the option key when iPhoto launches in order to change libraries. I did this with iPhoto 5.



I would love to hear your iPhoto library management suggestions.

http://www.kassblog.com/?itemid=414 Students and teachers are all gone, and we are off to a quick start with our summer projects. The entire list is too long to reproduce here, but we have set an ambitious and optimistic agenda. We won't shed a tear if we don't finish some of them. We have a lot to show for just a few days into summer.

• Two veteran summer interns (Kaitlyn and Eric) on board
  
  
• 46 MacBook and 10 ThinkPad orders placed for incoming ninth graders. The families have been superb with getting their orders in on time, and the ratio of Macs to PCs is a huge swing from the previous class.
  
  
• Faculty/staff workstation transition plans complete
  
  
• Follett Destiny library system installed and running, with a few tweaks left to make
  
  
• The family directory for next year exported from Education Edge and ready for publication
  
  
• Sonicwall VPN concentrator in pilot phase. This works brilliantly as a web front-end to VPN -- no more client software to maintain!
  
  
• Admission inquiry web software in pilot
  
  
• Curriculum map data ported to mySQL as proof of concept
  
  
• Dant house data and signal cabling approved and installed. Projectors for Dant and Humanities have arrived, and I found a great Rolls mixer/amp for the classroom installations.
  
  
• Middle School summer reading forums set up for student conversations
  
  
• David H.'s wedding planned and ready to go!

I can't wait to see what next week will bring!

http://www.kassblog.com/?itemid=413 While migrating some data from Excel to mySQL, I came across the following life-saving tip.

create a second column =SUBSTITUTE(SUBSTITUTE(A2,CHAR(13),""),CHAR(10),"
"). This will handle both UNIX and Windows carriage return-line feed combinations.

source

http://spajal.targeteil.org:80/?q=node/19

CTV and CBC have reported over the last couple of days on a piece of research involving babies watching videos of people speaking English and French. The study revealed that the children attended to the facial movements of speakers of the two languages in a manner similar to that in which they attended to the speech sounds of speakers of the two languages. Briefly, children in the process of acquiring language tend to attend more intently to sounds which differ from those they have already dealt with. This is considered an essential strategy in childhood language acquisition. The conclusion drawn by both news outlets is that small children can distinguish between English and French just by watching people's faces.

Although it makes perfect sense to me that children in what I'll call accelerated acquisition mode would be sensitive and attentive to differences in sound and sight, whether linguistic or otherwise, I do not think we are justified in assuming that the subjects of the experiment in question perceived facial movements as linguistic acts. As children learn to articulate the phonetic elements of languages, they most likely do pay attention to movements of lips and tongue. Mine, who happen to be bilingual Mandarin and English speakers, do, particularly when attacking their father tongue (English), to which they experience much less exposure. However, linguistically motivated attention to movements of lips and tongue is generally accompanied by attention to sound. In other words, it is quite possible, probably most likely, that the children in the experiment were responding to the facial movements in the videos as visual stimuli, not as speech acts and not as models of phonetic articulation.

I do not doubt that children combine attention to facial movement and attention to speech sounds as they acquire the phonetic inventory of languages they plan to acquire. Even adults do that. My objection is to the assumption that children interpret differences or sets of differences in facial movements as differences between languages.

I'd like to read the paper itself, but will have to wait, not doubt, some time for the electronic version to become available.

 

Other Sources

Yahoo! Canada News

Globe and Mail

University of British Columbia’s Infant Studies Centre: Visual Language Discrimination in Infancy

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