I showed up for breakfast Monday morning on Cajundome Boulevard and ended up in China, guided by two dozen Mandarin-speaking first and second graders and their teachers from Alice Boucher Elementary. The 75 adults at LUS’ Fiber for Breakfast event watched a lively, confident and comfortable exchange via live streaming video between the tiny students and an instructor in China, discussing Chinese geography, common daily tasks and the relative strengths of different types of dragons. Who knew?
Slated as part of INNOV8 Lafayette, LUS’ presentation focused on its broadband strength and the asset it represents for education in local schools. Judging from crowd comments, there were lots of “a-ha moments” about what’s already available and what’s possible given the foundation in place.
In the course of two hours, we were treated an impressive array of existing programs, including a virtual tour of the LPSS eCampus, now teaching 900-plus students over 40 courses, ranging from art to physics, including some advanced placement offerings not available on all campuses. Soon to be added: green planning/engineering and game design.
Students from the Academy of Information Technology at Carencro High demonstrated their expertise at virtual reality design projects (couple of notes: Watch for a report on AOIT in an upcoming edition of NBC’s Rock Center with Brian Williams. And, thought you might want to know that AOIT summer interns are available!).
St. Thomas More Principal Dr. Audrey Menard outlined the much-vaunted and impressive one-to-one tablet program adopted school-wide on her campus this school year. To accommodate the need for all STM faculty and students to be online at one time, the school is LUS’ first gigabyte-per-second customer.
The grand finale demo with the Chinese immersion kids gave a live example of the many ways LPSS is using LUS fiber to enhance learning in many languages.
LUS’ Fiber for Breakfast is part of INNOV8 Lafayette, a week-long showcase of Lafayette’s abundant assets to build a successful 21st century economy. For more, click here.
MAY 24 Blogger Robert Mann posts this entry about the Baton Rouge Chamber's recent report on Louisiana's higher education system. It's critical to economic development, and yet our system is facing a "funding crisis" with no way to resolve it, the report says. The Chamber says control of tuition and fees must be returned to the higher ed governing boards.
MAY 24 Here's a NBC33 story about Tyrann Mathieu. He has signed with the Arizona Cardinals, inking a $3 million, four-year deal. He gets a signing bonus of $265K, but gets another, larger bonus if he doesn't get cut from the team for doing drugs. The deal reportedly includes mandatory tests and meetings for the player.
MAY 24 Jarvis DeBerry posts here about the redonkulus rhetoric that would have us believe NOLA is a safe city with a murder problem. Maybe the city's crime stats don't compare with its murder stats because you can't manipulate a murder, he says: a dead body's a dead body. It just doesn't make sense, he says, and his readers agree: a poll asks if they believe the city is safe, and more than 90 percent say no.
MAY 24 Jindal administration officials announced Thursday that the privatization of public health care is going to cost a lot more than they budgeted for, the Advocate reports here. "I'm so surprised," said no one. Anywhere. The cost they're projecting now is more than $1 billion - a lot more than the $626 million budgeted for it. And, it's more than it cost the state to operate those hospitals. So why are we doing this again?
MAY 24 Blogger CB Forgotston ridicules the recent PR campaign by the state GOP in the wake of a legislative auditor's request to both major parties. The GOP (apparently unaware that the Dems got the same request) started yammering about being targeted because it had "killed" a tax increase. CB finds that laughable, but it's also pretty funny that the GOP was comparing this episode to the IRS scandal (Because the President has so much to do with our state auditor. Right?).
MAY 24 Politico details some recent fund-raising efforts by Sen. David Vitter, which have raised the question of his future political plans. This time, it is a $5,000 per head "bayou weekend" that includes "Cajun cooking" and an all-caps "alligator hunt," the story reports. Funds raised go to a super PAC that can spend money to support Vitter in federal or state races, the story points out.
MAY 24 The pink building on Royal in the quarter was sold at a sheriff's sale Thursday, this Picayune story reports. An injunction that would have halted the sale wasn't enforced because the family failed to post a $150,000 bond, the story reports. So the owner of the mortgages on the building bought it, for nearly $7 million. Now the feuding family will have to negotiate with that company to get a lease on the building that has housed their business for close to 60 years.
MAY 23 This post in Louisiana Voice tells us about a bill by a Winnsboro lege that would require all public high school students to take at least one Course Choice online class in order to graduate. (What?) Blogger Tom Aswell says it's a monument to "waste and corruption," especially in light of the problems he's exposed with the program in recent weeks. Idaho had a similar program, but voters removed it by a 2-1 margin, Aswell says.
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