Author: Larry Sanger
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Fund me to make 50 educational videos for kids!
I have a Kickstarter project that will close in two days! Unless I get a bunch of pledges in that time, I won’t raise the money. I haven’t tried very hard (actually, almost not at all)—been busy with other things. Some salient points: • I’ve made 26 educational videos for kids in my spare time (put on…
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Some thoughts, 15 years after Wikipedia’s launch
It’s been 15 years since I announced the opening of the new Wikipedia.com site, with a little message that said: http://www.wikipedia.com/ Humor me. Go there and add a little article. It will take all of five or ten minutes. –Larry I am still sometimes called “Wikipedia’s sharpest critic,” but if you actually look at the panoply of…
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Wake up, people! Minecraft sucks as an educational tool.
<rant> You don’t have to cite studies to me. I already know that various kinds of video games can have some positive educational effects. As somebody who has wasted way too many hours on video games since 1977 or so, this isn’t surprising to me. The notions that it might help train kids to think ahead, improve reaction time…
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Report about the boys, January 2016
I’ll dive right into H’s schooling. He’s now age 9. The new tasklist orientation. This past year the biggest problem has been motivating him to study enough. Until November, it was a struggle. Although Mama’s helping quite a bit more, especially with E., H. still requires management and I still have to work full-time. While he…
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Our Moral Abyss
First, let me state my basic thesis poetically. To some, it will sound unoriginal, implausible, and overwrought: We in the West are falling in a moral abyss. We are in mid-fall. It’s been long since we careened off the precipice, though we have not hit bottom. Poetic language is vague, so let me explain what I mean. 1. Plumbing the abyss We…
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Infobitt’s Future, and Mine
I’ve just posted the following announcement to the big Infobitt mailing list. ======= Friends, I have some unfortunate news. While I don’t wish to give up on Infobitt, we have run out of money. I’ve let the programmers go, and I’m looking for a job myself. But I’ll still be contributing, and I hope you…
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I kept my “no social media during work” pledge just fine
As I wrote in my last blog post, I’m pledging to abandon social media networks when I am at work, except for narrowly defined work purposes. And I’m asking you to hold me to it and slag me mercilessly if you catch me at it! And I’m inviting you to take the pledge, too! Yep, so for one…
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How to pop the education bubble
1. Soul-making and the education bubble One of my biggest pet peeves is the reduction of education to an economic transaction—to the gaining of marketable skills in exchange for fees. That’s all wrong. Professional and vocational education is all fine and well, but education at the K-12 and college level is essentially soul-making. To be educated, we…