Joe Nathan talks about Cincinnati
Joe Nathan published an opinion piece from the Star Tribune at Mpls Issues Forum. It's about the Cincinnati school system and what's working therel.
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Joe Nathan published an opinion piece from the Star Tribune at Mpls Issues Forum. It's about the Cincinnati school system and what's working therel.
At the request of Minnesota Congressman James Oberstar, Bart Andersen testified Tuesday before the U.S. House Subcommittee on Highways and Transit. He told lawmakers that "MnDOT doesn't have enough full-time bridge inspectors to keep motorists safe. It's impossible for 77 inspectors to check 14,000 bridges throughout Minnesota while performing all of the other tasks that are part of the job."
Of course, MNDOT disputes this. The sides can't even agree on how many bridge inspectors we have for the state.
Using symbols, manipulating facts, all were covered last week when On the Media did a story on the President’s veto of an expanded Children’s Health Insurance bill. They focused on the story of the symbolic children held up first to justify the expansion, then to show what's wrong with it (some of the symbolic kids went to a private school--oops they were on a scholarship).
As per Stone Chapter 7, "Numbers," the BBC reports that the U.S. is estimating 20% of our returning troops suffer from mild traumatic brain injury (mTBI). The Brits don't trust our counting and will conduct their own survey.
Hello Everyone – Just a few more comments about the role of media in covering public issues.
1. In addition to working with reporters, you should consider submitting opinion pieces and letters to the editor to the print media. According to local journalist David Brauer, letters to the editor are the most read part of the newspaper.
2. If misinformation is published about your endeavor, be sure that you challenge that misinformation – if possible in the same medium that published it.
3. I believe Eric Black and Sharon Schmickle, two outstanding journalists, will teach a Media and Public Affairs course at the Institute this spring. So look for that during registration if you’re interested in that.
Barbara Crosby
Thanks to Peter’s gently prodding, I offer an LCG blog post – a response to viewing a spectacular public arts project on Saturday in Seattle. Perhaps you’ve seen it – the Seattle Art Museum’s Sculpture Park, situated on the waterfront on a former Superfund site. The Olympic Mountains across the sound provide the backdrop to mainly abstract constructions (think Walker Sculpture Garden) arrayed in a park that zigzags across working railroad tracks. What I’d like to know more about is the cross-sector partnership that put together this very complicated project.
I heard about the project at this weekend’s NASPAA conference. (The initials are for National Association of Schools of Public Affairs and Administration.) According to a conference speaker, many levels of government, Gates Foundation, business people, the art museum, and no doubt the railroad were all involved over many years. My experience tells me that many people provided leadership and that the project had many stalls and revivals. It’s the kind of case I intend to keep probing so that my colleagues and I can help others better understand how to create and sustain the coalitions needed to achieve visible progress on complex public problems.
Barbara
Wikipedia has a good overview of the eighty-five articles that comprise the Federalist papers and discusses various categories. You may find others of interest. You can download the full text at Project Gutenberg.
A brief portion of No. 11 was tacked to the handout for Nos. 10 and 51. I started reading it and decided to finish. It's by Hamilton and discusses trade with Europe, trade between states, and creating a navy. According to Hamilton, Europe is oppressor and has a negative marketing campaign going relating not only to the degeneration of people living in America but also a horrific canine mutation:
The world may politically, as well as geographically, be divided into four parts, each having a distinct set of interests. Unhappily for the other three, Europe, by her arms and by her negotiations, by force and by fraud, has, in different degrees, extended her dominion over them all. Africa, Asia, and America, have successively felt her domination. The superiority she has long maintained has tempted her to plume herself as the Mistress of the World, and to consider the rest of mankind as created for her benefit. Men admired as profound philosophers have, in direct terms, attributed to her inhabitants a physical superiority, and have gravely asserted that all animals, and with them the human species, degenerate in America--that even dogs cease to bark after having breathed awhile in our atmosphere.
I invite all my TPP classmates (Fall, 2007) to join me in blogging. Send along an email and I'll add you to the author list. I intend to keep the blog going during my time at HHH.
Those of you who joined last semester, you're still here.
Report from Team Virtual
Six weeks into the course, our team is using several web collaboration tools and finding them useful. At least that is what they tell me.
We are currently using a mailing list, the UMWiki, del.icio.us social bookmarking, and Refworks. I have also set up Netfiles for file storage but haven't really found it necessary since the wiki has upload capability.
Mailing List
A mailing list provides a single email address that will reach all of your team members. Since we don't have large teams this isn't a big issue. Yahoo and Google Groups both allow you to create mailing lists free and to also store files and have a calendar and other cool things. Everyone must register and have an account to do this. You also get to view ads at no charge.
I chose the U of M Listserv but it is only available to staff and faculty or students representing organizations. The advantage of the listserv is we all have email accounts at the U and there are no ads.
http://lists.umn.edu/request.html
UMWIki
We are using the U's wiki space as our team home page. We have links to our other tools (del.icio.us, Refworks, Netfiles), it's our file repository, and we are now using it to track the literature review.
This is a great tool and very easy to use. You can create as many wiki spaces as you like. Wikis are open to public view by default but you can restrict them all the way down to a group or even one person. People outside the U can create free guest accounts and use a wiki if they are sponsored by someone from the U.
https://wiki.umn.edu/view/TPP_MDG/WebHome
https://wiki.umn.edu/view/TWiki/CreatingYourOwnWeb
Social Bookmarking
You are probably sharing links as you work on your project. Switching to a social bookmarking system makes sharing links very easy and makes your bookmarks easy to work with.
There are a few tools for social bookmarking but I'm partial to del.icio.us. It's been around for several years and has the support of Yahoo. We share a del.icio.us account together for this project.
To use del.icio.us, sign up for an account and install the tools in your browser. When you come to a page to bookmark, you click the "Tag" button, add some notes, and save. It's squirreled away on your del.icio.us page. (You don't have to visit del.icio.us each time you bookmark.)
Del.icio.us allows you to make bookmarks private and you can download your bookmarks locally.
http://del.icio.us/AG.TPP
http://del.icio.us
Netfiles
Netfiles is a file repository with some interesting features. First, you get 5GB of space so you can store a lot of average and even large files. Second, you can share files easily and with folks outside of the U. Third, you can provide a password for sharing the files (or not).
To use Netfiles, you first must enable it from your Internet account.
http://www.umn.edu/dirtools
There is also a link to Netfiles help from that page. It's easy to use and has a nice web interface. Windows users can download a desktop client.
Versioning via Netfiles
I haven't tried this feature but I understand that Netfiles has a check-in/check-out feature. Using this makes it easy to collaborate on something like a team paper (where you can run the risk of two people working on the paper at the same time).
Virtual Tool Teacher Benefits
Our use of these collaborative tools establishes various archives of files that then are available to future students. WebCT courses go away and most of us are not uploading work plans or discussing our readings in WebCT. Teachers can use this record as team examples. I personally don't have a problem uploading our final project to the wiki if that works for my teammembers.
If you have questions or need a bit coaching, let me know (fleck004). If you start using some of these tools (or are already using them), let us know in the comments.