The front stairs at the Confederation Centre of the Arts this morning, after a week of snowstorms:

I’m off next Tuesday evening to Berlin to help organize and participate in PlazeCamp. Plans are coming together nicely for the event: there’s a good group of interesting people coming, and the agenda is a nice mix of formal and informal activities.

Plazes developer Tilmann Singer and I recorded an episode of the Plazes Podcast yesterday where we talked in a little bit more detail about what we hope PlazeCamp to be, and how the new Plazes API might be used.

One of the nice things about working with the Plazes crew is that crazy ideas I come up with in the middle of the night — “hey, maybe we should have a developer day!” — can be brought to life like this: now the crazy idea is happening, and it even has a logo. I’m really looking forward to seeing what cool stuff comes out of it.

If you can’t make it to Berlin in person, this page has some details about participating remotely.

This spring, while acting as Education critic for the then-Opposition Liberal party, Hon. Carolyn Bertram had this to say about the province’s so-called “common assessments” program (that is a code-word for standardized testing):

There’s testing that goes on to students every day in the classroom. Teachers test every day, but yet this government wants to spend three-quarters of a million dollars testing on a common assessment across this province. Every child learns differently and we can’t fit them all in the same box, and that’s what we believe in this side, on the opposition. We believe in each child, the whole child.

My question is this: Why are we spending three-quarters of a million dollars when you could be investing this money into frontline services into the classroom, more educational assistance, more teachers, more speech language pathologists? Three-quarters of a million dollars is a lot of money. Why common assessments, Madam Minister?

Hon. Ms. Bertram, a teacher herself, echoed my feelings exactly on this subject. My son [[Oliver]] has been in public school since September of last year, and if there’s anything I’ve learned from the experience it’s that, especially when compared to my own elementary schooling in the 1970s, the classroom is now indeed based on the notion that every child learns differently.

Teachers, principals and support staff live this out every day, and if you had been there when we sat down for two hours with everyone at Prince Street School involved with Oliver’s schooling at last fall’s parent-teacher interviews you would have seen this fact born out in ways that would amaze you: these folks know their stuff, they know my son, and they are, more than I thought possible, individualizing his (and every other child’s) education to learning style and skills.

The notion that we can somehow glean something useful from a province-wide multiple choice questionnaire about Bobby’s Big Toe, an “assessment” that distills the uniqueness of every child down into a set of statistics like “62 per cent of the students who wrote the assessment achieved the standard in reading,” is absurd. By the time the numbers are abstracted to a level there they can be used for policy-making they are so removed from the “whole child” that we might as well assume we’re teaching identical robot children who need a software upgrade to do better.

In other words, I, like Hon. Ms Bertram, think that common assessments are a waste of time and money.

But I also think they’re dangerous in another way: despite the suggestion that the role of the tests is to provide teachers “with the time and opportunity to study in-depth curriculum documents and to gain a better understanding of the expected outcomes,” they will ultimately be used, if not by educators then by the public, to rate and compare schools and teachers.

If your kid’s school scored “57 percent” and the one across town scored “75 percent,” what parent in their right mind wouldn’t start to wonder if they’re sending their kid to the wrong school. And if Ms. X’s grade 3 class did better than Mr. Y’s grade 3 class on the writing test, which class do you think the grade 2 parents are going to be angling for their kids to get into next year?

All of which happens to set aside completely the notion that “we can’t fit them all in the same box,” and that the ability to score well on Bobby’s Big Toe interpretation may in fact have nothing to say at all about the quality of instruction in a particular class or particular school.

It’s not that I think that all teachers and all schools are created equal, it’s just that I think that common assessments are a primitive tool to make judgments about them with.

Presumably this particular genie in this particular bottle was something that the Task Force on Student Achievement, the body that gave rise to the standardized tests in the first place, had in mind when they said:

Student Assessment … must not be used to for the ranking or comparison of either students or schools.

That’s all very well and good to suggest, but also extremely naive, as once the numbers exist, it’s inevitable that they’ll be used in this manner eventually.

All of this became very tangible to me last fall when, on a balmy Sunday morning, I found myself at a coffee shop in downtown Charlottetown eating breakfast at a table around the corner from a group of senior education bureaucrats who were discussing the results of the assessments. They were, I sensed, freaked out by what they’d found, and afraid of what was going to happen when word got out about how poor the results were.

Of course by the time a summary of the results was released later in the fall, the freaking out had been replaced by calm eduspeak.

Presumably because of the desire to avoid school and teacher ranking, the release of the results only included province-wide data.

Now you may think that, as someone who thinks common assessments are both a waste of time and money, and also a dangerous genie in a bottle, I would applaud this decision. But I don’t. The only thing worse than a genie locked up in a bottle is a genie that’s unlocked for some and not for others. I know that politicians, administrators, principals, and teachers have access to school-by-school data, and I know that, even with all the good intentions in the world, they are making, if not formal policy decisions, at least value judgments about schools and teachers based on the results.

I want to know what they know. And I want everyone to have access to this information so that, absurd and meaningless though it may be, we all have the raw data in front of us. Furthermore, I want those responsible for the common assessments to be forced to explain, when the data is available to everyone, why it shouldn’t be used to rank and compare schools (thus perhaps exposing, in some small way, it’s absurdity and lack of meaning).

And so, in early November, I asked for it.

And I was told that I couldn’t have it — as I expected because, to quote from the email I received, “The Department does not plan to release those results following the recommendation of the Task Force on Student Achievement to not rank or compare schools.”

And so I asked again, this time as a formal Freedom of Information request (what is FOIPP legislation for if not to put all of us, citizens and public servants, on the same data playing field?). Here’s what I asked for:

On October 25, 2007 the Minister of Education tabled the provincial results of “common assessments” conducted on Grade 3 students. In the public news release that accompanied the tabling, only provincial aggregate data was provided. I would like an electronic copy (spreadsheet, database, text file) of the results on a school-by-school basis, for the “Grade 3 Writing” and “Grade 3 Reading” common assessments, for every school on PEI where the common assessments were conducted.

Thirty days later I received this letter:

While my request was denied, it was denied because the Department, according to my math, plans to release the data on or before January 13, 2008 (10 days from now as I write). So in a couple of weeks I’m looking forward to receiving my digital data, data that I may very well mold into a handy (albeit meaningless and absurd) interactive mapping tool that will allow the very ranking and comparison that the assessors hope to avoid.

And I have every hope that the reaction to this will be a concerted effort by politicians and educators to reinforce how, to quote Hon. Ms. Bertram again, “[e]very child learns differently and we can’t fit them all in the same box” and “we believe in each child, the whole child.” Which is where our eyes should have been focused all along.

Taxi 07: Roads Forward, from The Design Trust for Public Space — “the first long-term plan for improving the taxi system” in New York City — may be the most well-designed report I’ve ever seen.

You can purchase a printed copy for $20, or download the PDF for free. Thanks to More Intelligent Life for the link.

Circumstances conspired to leave me without the time to prepare a detailed levee schedule for January 1, 2008, but fortunately The Guardian has a complete run-down. See you out there.

I’ve had an interesting email dialogue with my friend [[Rob Paterson]] today, extending from a post of Rob’s weblog in which he wrote, in part “I think and write about war because I think that it is part of who we are - it is an unavoidable part of being human.”

I took exception to that comment: I believe that we are all essentially good, and that war is a temporary aberration that we can eventually overcome. I realize that this puts me at odds both with reality, and with Accepted Religious Doctrine, but I simply couldn’t survive if I had to feel that conflict will win out.

Our dialogue led in several directions, and at one point I wondered aloud whether the Internet and “social software” might play some role in “bringing us all together:”

In other words, is the Internet, and the social networks that increasingly overlay it, the bringing to life of the old Coca-Cola commercial (“I’d like to buy the world a home and furnish it with love…”) and inasmuch as that is true, does it hold any promise in helping to mitigate or eliminate the brutality (i.e. it’s harder to shoot someone if they’re your Facebook friend).

Thinking about this some more, and with some additional push-back from Rob, I’ve realized that there’s a problem with this plan, and it is this:

The social software rhetoric is all about connecting with like-minded people. So whereas in the old world you were forced to hang out with the two other Mongolian comics fans in your small town, the Internet lets you connect with the thousands of others out there in the rest of the world, geography be damned.

Don’t like the girls in Smallville? The Internet is moist with the possibilities of the girls of Capital City. Miss the folks from the Old Country? You’ll find a Google Group full of them.

This is, almost universally, talked about as a Good Thing.

And if you’re a Goth in Nail Pond I’d have a hard time convincing you otherwise.

But here’s the thing: so much of what ails the world right now (and perhaps forever) has to do with our inability to connect with non-like-minded people. Whether the lines in the sand are religious, political, ethnic or otherwise, Rob’s state of “permanent war” is fed by conflict between people who aren’t drinking from the same Coca-Cola.

In other words, it might be hard to shoot someone if they’re your Facebook friend. But it’s unlikely that the person you’re keen on shooting is your Facebook friend because Facebook serves simply to reinforce old loyalties. It’s easy to befriend someone your brother went to school with; it’s unlikely you’ll befriend someone from the other side of the world with a worldview that’s completely in conflict with yours.

One of the great things about geography, at least some of the time, is that it often places us in situations where we have to learn how to live in harmony with a whole range of people. You want to praise God on Sundays while your neighbour wants to listen to Motorhead. I like french fries, you like gulab jaman. You raise goats, I play chess. You’re Catholic, I’m not. Learning to live, and thrive, with the thousand little incompatibilities we share with our neighbours and fellow citizens builds up “social dissonance muscles” and leaves us with skills that allow us to, at the very least, tolerate difference.

I’m wondering if the more we jump into the online orgies of the like-minded, the more time we spend exclusively with people who share our passions, the weaker these muscles are going to become.

Is it possible to create technology tools that work in the opposite direction, tools that somehow exercise our skills at mitigating conflict by exposing us, in some real and honest way, to people with whom we might otherwise never communicate? I’m thinking of a sort of Bizarro Facebook where our social network is made up of the least likely people we’d otherwise connect with.

Even as I write this it seems absurd, if only because it would probably be painful for most people. But it seems to me that the more we seek solace among the coalitions of the like-minded, the more Rob’s permanent war becomes likely.

Brickbats to Tabi, the Canadian clothing store, for having their robot call customers on Christmas Eve to crow about their Boxing Day sales. Not cool.

Guy has a great story about Amazon.com customer service.

The old Variety Video location on Grafton Street has been “under renovation” for a couple of months now. When we walked by yesterday we found out why: it’s being transformed into a delicatessen:

Some Googling about reveals a job ad (since removed) for two cooks with the following particulars:

Work Setting: Restaurant, Fast food outlet, Bistro

Cuisine Specialties: Canadian, Vegetarian

Food Preparation Specializations: Bakery goods and desserts, Stocks, soups and sauces, Eggs and dairy, Cold kitchen (salads, appetizers, sandwiches), Vegetables, fruits, nuts and mushrooms, Meat, Pasta, Pizza

All in all this seems very promising (although we’ll miss the handy source of video rentals).