Poet Ponders the Digital

Visalia Direct: Virtual Valley March 2010 Issue January 23, 2010 Will Textbooks Go Digital… and Free? California schools spend nearly $500 million each year on textbooks, according to state reports. That is up $250 million over the last decade. As any parent or teacher knows, a significant portion of this expense goes to replacing lost or damaged books. We also have a growing student population. In many schools, there aren’t enough books for complete class sets. Students end up sharing books or working in small groups. Every few years, the California State Board of Education adopts new standards, known as frameworks, for our public schools (http://www.cde.ca.gov/be/st/ss/). When standards undergo major revisions, textbooks need to be updated and replaced. The adoption of a new standard is a lengthy and expensive process, with textbook publishers eager to pitch their books to the state for approval. School districts must adopted texts that meet state criteria. California, T...

Visalia Direct: Virtual Valley November 2008 Issue October 8, 2008 Less Internet, for the Sake of Children? You can always tell it is an election year when politicians get tough on crime and take action in the name of children. For the sake of “protecting our children” the Internet is getting slightly less useful. A seemingly minor change could have major repercussions. Long before the World Wide Web, there were newsgroup servers. The most famous network of these text-based message forums was the USENET. To this day many hardcore computer programmers, hackers, and other “uber geeks” prefer the forums known as the Usenet newsgroups to exchange ideas and debate technical concepts. In a July 21, 2008, letter to Internet Service Providers, New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo accuses the ISPs of trafficking in child pornography by carrying the Usenet newsgroups. The two-page letter reflects a complete misunderstanding of the Usenet and of Internet technologies in general. Unfor...

Visalia Direct: Virtual Valley October 2008 Issue September 11, 2008 From the Virtual Highway to Highway 99 Spending hundreds of dollars a month on gasoline meant my wife and I were cutting dinners out, DVD purchases, and our day trips to the national forests. My beloved Jeep was affecting our lifestyle. We made the decision to buy a new, high-mileage car. Like many people, we first looked at the cars in person. I like to look after hours, when the sales staff is not around. Sure, I could look online, but it’s nice to see the car. Once I had seen the cars and looked at sticker prices, I went to the Web site of each manufacturer. The sites are all nicely designed. Most let you see previews of various colors and options. I have to admit, the Mini Cooper site was a lot of fun, but my wife had already ruled out the car as impractical for trips to Home Depot or Costco. I settled for looking at practical cars in their mix of exterior and interior colors. Having studied the option...

Visalia Direct: Virtual Valley September 2008 Issue August 11, 2008 Checking on California via the Web As an educator, I have always used a lot of maps. If data can be mapped, they have been. We’re all familiar with weather maps, population maps, and the infamous political “red versus blue” county maps. As a birdwatcher, I consult maps to confirm where some species reside. My wife uses maps to determine what plants grow best in a region. It turns out, there are maps some of us don’t expect to find. These are maps that change more frequently than books or magazines are published. A “live” map of earthquakes is definitely something a textbook could not include. There were 1324 earthquakes in North America during the first week of August, 2008. A third of these were in or adjacent to California, half were in Alaska, and the remainder were scattered about the West. These data are from the U.S. Geological Survey, better known as the USGS, which maintains a live map of earthquakes ...