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Newton Public Schools - School Committee Documentation

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The main Newton Public Schools Documentation Project page is here: Home Page

This project and information is not affiliated with the Newton Public Schools or the Newton School Committee. It is an independent effort by private citizens intended to help the people of Newton learn more about the Newton Public Schools

Much of this information is extracted from the document archive linked from All School Committe Docs

Additional comments and information from public sources have also been included. The contents and links may have been edited as well. No representation is made as to the accuracy or validity of this information. This page is only intended to help people more easily keep in touch with the work of the Newton School Committee

Please add your comments on the discussion page and add to or update any other pages

Newton Public Schools Web site

Newton School Committee Web Site

Main Page for BSEA Documentation http://wiki.laptop.org/go/BSEA:Decisions

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This project and information is not affiliated with the Mass DESE. It is an independent effort by private citizens intended to help the people of Massachusetts learn more about the Special Education in our state.

Much of this information is extracted from BSEA Searchable List of Rulings

Additional comments and information from public sources has also been included. The contents and links may have been edited as well. No representation is made as to the accuracy or validity of this information. This page is only intended to help people more easily keep in touch with the work of the Bureau of Special Education Appeals

Please add your comments on the discussion page and add to or update any other pages. Make sure to preface the names of any new pages with "BSEA:"

Notes or Links Needing a Home...

http://www.oyez.org/cases/1990-1999/1993/1993_91_1523/argument

A proposed model for developing software

Below is a brief introduction of my vision for a revolutionary development process that informs and is informed by the educational model of One Laptop.

I plan to start collecting user feedback and examples of educator - developer interactions that led to new software being built and used on One Laptop. I want to find the examples of how educators and students learn to build the XO software that is relevant for them

I will post links of examples on my talk page.

I'm a believer in constructionism based on my own learning experience and that of my children. My personal philosophy of education is most influenced, by my three children, by my wife who works at Educational Development Center (EDC) training school systems in violence prevention and by Paolo Freire.

I want to contribute to the theory of constructionism, but my most immediate value would be in helping implement the praxis of a problem-posing methodology in relation to the development of the technology.

For the last 10 years I have been a product manager for Video, Streaming Media, Content Delivery Networks and Core Networking products. My primary role is to engage with customers and users to generate requirements and communicate those requirements with engineering.

I'm a technologist but my specialty is listening and engaging users to determine the priorities for development. As a product manager I influence the engineering community to build products which satisfy the users needs. The users learn what is possible and the developers learn what is valuable to the users. My role is to facilitate the discussion, refine the design, and determine the right priorities within the constraints of available resources. Its an iterative process of communication and collaboration.

That's my vision of the product manager role in commercial software development. However, commercial software is limited by the hierarchical nature of the corporations involved. The user - developer relationship is also restricted by the need to generate revenue. The more a customer will spend the higher priority we give their requests.

Open source development addresses those limits with a decentralized and non-hierarchical model. The decisions about what gets built are informed by the developers own experiences and by developers responding directly to input from users. Thus, open source has significant advantages for developing software and hardware for a constructionist educational system.

That said, any development model needs an optimal process for synchronizing the work with the users expectations. Developers don't fully understand user's daily activities and users don't fully understand the constraints of the development process. Even for open source, the challenge remains how best to achieve a problem-posing methodology of mutual education. Both sides need an efficient way to engage the praxis (action and reflection) of creating relevant applications. Transformation of the process from developers giving users features (banking method) to developers-users learning from each other (problem-posing method) needs attention that empowers all to participate.

That challenge is especially acute when there are large gaps of culture, age, economic status, language, and geography (urban - rural and north - south). Even as users learn to develop their own code, there's a need for all users to have a say in what gets prioritized and delivered.

I'm not suggesting that I know better how to implement the development process. Only that I'm ready to engage a design dialogue that uncovers the principles and models of thinking which allow the XO to optimize the goals of the education systems.

Those are my ideas and I want to hear what you need.