TECC Talk

Anna Roys was our Wanderers MVP, between Dr. Livio and Dr. Haack. She even summoned the courage to venture onto Don's boat, a symbol of having achieved inner circle hood vis-a-vis Wanderers in some way. She came straight from PDX to our Appreciative Inquiry workshop with Helen Spector.

Her staying at the Kennedy School (McMenamins) was likewise apropos, given the purpose of her visit: to visit her grandson Sammy, and to carry on with charter school work in Matsu District, where she has already successfully started Twindly Bridge, now in its fourth year of operation.

Planning meetings for TECC tend to happen in Palmer, at the Vagabond Blues, whereas more Twindly plots were hatched at the Digital Cup in Wasilla. There's an Office of Innovation in the US Department of Education that's focused on facilities grants, but the Alaska legislature has yet to write the codes for tapping in to those funds, which would cover about 90% of new campus costs.

We drew a lot of diagrams for one another, mapping out various players and their interconnections. I also got into my sphere packing spiel, tying the 1, 12, 42, 92 of the cuboctahedral sequence, to the 1, 3, 4, 6 of my IQ Test, which ties to NCLB the way I look at it. We had our laptops going, so it was easy to tap in to the On-line Dictionary of Integer Sequences and show the virus links (getting the connection between cuboctahedral and icosahedral numbers is more easily explained with the Jitterbug Transformation, but I didn't take the time to go into that piece of it). The charters have websites filling in with more details.

MIT OpenCourseware was also mentioned, plus I had my XO handy, yakked about OLPC. Ms. Roys showed me the Elluminate platform (Java based), which she uses to participate in distance learning classes, in both learning and teaching capacities. That seems like a capable system, and am glad to know about it. Our curriculum won't have to go begging for sponsors for too much longer maybe. Alaska has lots of key players.