Handuprisings and handschooling

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Posted on 29th January 2011 by Judy Breck in Mobiles | Next

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Handhelds are empowering revolutions. Why are we not using them to empower education?

This morning at Howard Rheingold’s SmartMobs.com, where I am on the blogging team, I posted this: Could Egypt be having a “Flash Mob Revolution?” I quoted a post by Jazz Shaw who described how mobile devices are used to organize scattered mobile device owners to takes some sort of action.

Another SmartMobs.com blogger, Mark A.M. Kramer, writes about how the Egyptian government has shut down wireless communication in order to halt the demonstrations.

I just heard on the news that U.S. State Department spokesman P.J Crowley is using Twitter to send policy messages about Egypt.

Lesson: The way to reach Egyptians is through their handheld devices.

Question: Why then do we not deliver knowledge for the learning in the same way? Why not?

If the Sphinx knows he is not talking.

A gumball perspective on global handschooling

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Posted on 25th January 2011 by Judy Breck in Equality | Mobiles | Next

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In this video presentation from NUMBERSUSA.ORG, Roy Beck uses each gumball to represent one million impoverished people. The theme of Beck’s presentation is the futility of immigration as a means of curing poverty. He concludes that it is much more effective to bring the change to where they live to lift the 5.6 billion people represented by the gumballs, than to solve their woes through immigration.

Let’s use the gumballs to think about handschooling:

Most of the 5.6 billion people represented in the gumballs already have a mobile phone. Soon essentially all of them will.

Impoverish people, as Beck calls these billions, are trending strongly to leapfrogging stationery computers to use the internet, connecting online with their mobiles instead.

Most of the student-aged population in the gumballs have inadequate schools or none at all. The task of building, equipping, and running enough schools could take decades — if indeed it can be done at all. Each gumball = a million students, which is the number of students in the world’s largest school system, in New York City. That system has more than 1600 individual schools. Even a handful of gumballs is many hundreds of schools.

Instead of pouring money into building a hundreds of old time brick and mortar schools each year, to enroll a gumball or two worth of students, why not enlightened Beck’s full jars of student-age and older people right away? They can use their mobiles to browse the Web to locate knowledge and learn it.

I suggest you watch Beck’s video and think about it in terms of education instead of immigration. The massiveness of th challenge of building schools is made dramatically clear — yet the handschooling solution is within our easy reach.

HT/R. Dalke

“Academically Adrift” book reveals college realities

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Posted on 18th January 2011 by Judy Breck in Findability | Mobiles | Schools we now have

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Appalling academic inadequacies revealed in the new book Academically Adrift are buzzing across the education world and into pubic awareness. From today’s headlines:

USA Today: “Report: First two years of college show small gains”

Chronicle of Higher Education: “New Book Lays Failure to Learn on Colleges’ Doorsteps”

At Amazon.com, even though only the hardcover (for $66) is offered, Academically Adrift, released three days ago, is already selling in the site’s top 5,000 books. The publisher, Chicago University Press also offers a $25 paperback.

Why the big interest? The pie chart from the book (and USA Today) breaks down how students spend their time. The USA Today story begins with this summary of the results of what kids are actually accomplishing academically on campus:

Nearly half of the nation’s undergraduates show almost no gains in learning in their first two years of college, in large part because colleges don’t make academics a priority, a new report shows.

Instructors tend to be more focused on their own faculty research than teaching younger students, who in turn are more tuned in to their social lives, according to the report, based on a book titled Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses. Findings are based on transcripts and surveys of more than 3,000 full-time traditional-age students on 29 campuses nationwide, along with their results on the Collegiate Learning Assessment, a standardized test that gauges students’ critical thinking, analytic reasoning and writing skills.

How long could it be before colleges could address this situation and truly change it? Who knows? And can we really expect education as served up at colleges to get better?

Yet an individual student’s mobile web browser — smartphone, iPad, laptop — offers immediate access to anything he or she would want to learn. Shall we fix the colleges? Sure — but what about the current generation of students?

While the colleges are figuring out 21st century education, current students can go ahead and learn using the new great source of knowledge that they already have in their hands.

And if you are thinking: Gosh, will the kids really do that? My answer is individually many, many of them will. Handschooling is the great future port for academic knowledge, and it is reachable now for today’s students who want to go there. We can be certain students will stay academically adrift if we perpetuate the myth that the way colleges are doing academics now will somehow deliver to them the knowledge they want to learn.

UPDATE: I posted the above text at 10AM. By 5PM, as I add this update, Academically Adrift is #34 on the Amazon list of best-selling books. Amazon is now selling the paperback version for $18.

No minority short sticks in handschooling

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Posted on 3rd January 2011 by Judy Breck in Equality | Mobiles

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“Minority Students Get the Short End of the Democrat Stick” writes Kerri Toloczko today on the BigGovernment blog. As education moves on to the center stage of politics, one of the key questions is how to make the opportunity to learn equal for all children.

In the United States there are decades-old inequalities that affect mostly African-American and Hispanic students. In just about every country’s and culture’s education there are groups to whom the short stick of education is the norm. Eradicating these habits is not easy, and at best will take time. The minorities now school age are very unlikely to get their hands on a long stick of learning.

YET THEY CAN DO JUST THAT!!

With a mobile device in a student’s hands, browsing the open Web connects to exactly the same knowledge to learn for every student. The online knowledge each student connects to is identical. The device and those who created the knowledge have no idea who is connected to the subject matter, so they cannot have prejudices against the student.

The FamousTrials website, for example, does not know if someone studying The Dakota Conflict Trials of 1862 is Korean, Nigerian, American, Black, White, Hispanic, or Sioux.