Researchers in the Republic of Congo recently observed (and videotaped) two gorillas having sex in a face to face position. They were holding each other and looking one another in the eye. One scientist told TIME that they had not seen this behavior in 13 years of research. I am pretty sure he was talking about the gorillas.

They held hands afterward.

I am actually curious about the possibility that the gorillas observed this particular behavior in the researchers or other nearby humans at some point. TIME did not ask.

MIT has shipped its course materials on hard drives to 84 sites in Africa. This is to enable institutions to store the educational material locally on their own networks. These resources are readily available online, but accessing them via the Internet would have been too much for the African schools’ networks to handle. Elite universities in the USA are going open source with a lot of course material these days and people in developing nations around the World are able to benefit from the information.

Another prestigious school, Berkeley, is putting entire course lectures on YouTube. Here is one of them, if you have 40 minutes to spare, check it out…

Source for this post: Wired News

I am an underachiever. They told me that in school. I was allowed to continue as an underachiever well into my adult life. I have above average intelligence and yet I spent 10 years working in a sawmill after I finished my Bachelors degree. The circumstances and stages between that and my present lofty attainments are complicated.

Some boarding schools for teenagers like the Fenster School take in underachievers and turn out achievers. They also offer the chance for bright and motivated students to excel. This is a school in Arizona that also offers intensive ESL for high school aged students.

In hindsight, I don’t think I had enough confidence as a teenager to decide what I wanted to do in my adult life. I chose to apply to the college that was nearest to my parent’s home and I have not had much use in my working life for the specific field of study in which I had enrolled.

I think being inspired and enabled with regard to getting accepted into a University that will serve your interests and aspirations is of huge benefit to the rest of your life. College and University acceptance is a primary goal at Fenster School.

I am going to point out one key aspect of how this school works and encourage the curious to look into it further…the school sends WEEKLY progress reports to parents.

I said yesterday that I was going to present a diagram of a chaotic system. Here it is.

If the water flow from the tap is at just the right level, this water wheel will change direction at irregular intervals. It is, by definition a chaotic system.

It is not random. There is a way to graph a record of the direction changes over time that reveals an intricate pattern. I think.

I have a very happy and satisfying relationship because we are in agreement about almost everything that matters. A broad topic where we sometimes diverge is education. I have somehow been indoctrinated to think that progressive education is a fine idea.

The arguments that Catherine makes against it are compelling and reasonable. I just have this selfish and emotional urge to participate in progressive education. We used to work together at a democratic school.

Now that our kids are safely ensconced in public schools where they don’t have to worry about learning anything, I am feeling that urge. I have decided to engage my blog reader(s) with a really cool example of a chaotic system. It would be even cooler if you were to build one of your own and send pictures to me

Check tomorrow for my really cool diagram of a chaotic system…

Depending on where life takes you, skills like ballroom dance and hip hop dance might come in handy.

When Karl Rove was put in front of a crowd and forced to engage in an improvisation with the ‘Whose Line is it Anyway’ dudes, the only Hip Hop move that he could do was to cross his arm and stick out his lower lip. He left his job at the White House not long after that. Maybe it was for being too white. Imagine if he had possessed the foresight to buy an instructional video and learn how to Downrock.

I suspect that he has mad skills with ballroom dance, it is a staple of Washington society.

DanceCrazy.com has loads of videos for a broad spectrum of dance styles. Check out this video for the Rumba…

I have some training as an English language teacher. I remember my practice teaching quite vividly. That might be related to the fact that I was teaching a bunch of 20 year old French women.

I have also been a language student in recent years, taking a course in Spanish. We had thought that our adventures might take us to Central America. We decided to be cautious and go somewhere with no poisonous snakes and very little bad weather or political turmoil.

I feel very fortunate to be a native English speaker. That skill opens a lot of doors. It is becoming apparent that Mandarin may soon be the second most advantageous language to grasp. It’s a matter of numbers. The population of China is huge and its economy is also huge. By helping outsiders learn Chinese - Yao Mandarin School is creating possibilities.

The language instructors are probably quite focussed on the task of teaching a rich and expressive language to tongues which have never touched it before. They may not even take time out to thing about some of the consequences. As China inevitably rejoins the World economy, the World will also be joining the Chinese economy. I hope there are people with ideas that will create positive change in China, and I hope they can make someone listen to them. Speaking Mandarin is a positive step towards being heard in China.

Yao Mandarin School is located in New York. They can have students actually speaking Mandarin after 30 hours of instruction.

I think it is now officially back to school season. I can tell because every time my kids get on my nerves in between 8am and 3pm, I have a shouldn’t you be in school reflex.

It’s also time to start thinking about school supplies. Identity Direct has all kinds of great personalized items that your child will greatly appreciate as you send them out the door. I think these packs that include a pencil case and colored pencils, pencils and ruler, all with your child’s name embossed on them are a great idea. For younger kids, this will help them learn to recognize their own name. I think it would also help them maintain possession of the items longer.

Ideally, a set of web based training tools should should effectively create a virtual learning environment that engages the learner in much the same way that a hands-on instructor would work.

I think one of the ideal uses for eLearning is new employee orientation. One of the main reasons that I say that is that if you were to go the traditional route of assigning the duty of new employee training to someone in the workplace they may frequently fall into the ‘everybody knows that’ trap. There are many occupations that develop a lot of short hand and specific jargon.

eLearning has proven ROI and the systems from Resource Bridge have a lot of labor saving features. One particular one that I noticed is that program can test students and record their scores for you. I have participated in several vocational training courses and the testing process has never been very efficient with regards to time.

Resource Bridge provides training solutions to all businesses of any size.