Posted on 13th July 2010 by Judy Breck in Findability | Mobiles | Nurture | Obamaschool | Schools we now have
education_debacles, mobile
Education is a deeply entrenched sector of liberal, government, progressive, public — whatever word you like — control and management. Federal control of this sector is increasing, and that is doubling down on debacles in the sector. The preceding statement is not speculation. An article in today’s Political gives background and details: The Democrats’ education debacle. It begins:
Education for Democrats these days is an education itself — a lesson in how dysfunctional this White House and Congress can be on domestic policy. [Lots of details follow.]
So if you are a kid now school age, what do you do as schooling debacles bring chaos to your education? Increasingly, there is a really good answer to that question. What you do is take your schooling into your own hands. Get what you can from the school you are in, but do not expect a good education to be forced on you. Learn to be a consumer of the useful debris instead of folding your arms and demanding an entitlement from the dysfunctional folks in government.
In your hands schooling
If you are in preschool or the early grades, learn the 3Rs on your own from computer toys and children’s mobile computers. Get yourself a reading device into which you can download books — and read, read, read!
Once you are into learning subjects like history, sciences, arts, and the rest, get your own mobile browser for the internet. You can learn anything you want to online, either by connecting directly to knowledge itself, or working with subject tutorials.
Education powered by government will fizzle during your school years. Take schooling into your own hands where you can double down on true learning.
Posted on 24th June 2010 by Judy Breck in Equality | Findability | Mobiles | Obamaschool
assessment, diploma, pedagogy, success
The picture of the girl reading American Negro Poetry is from the Gates Foundation website. Getting the analog book into her hands undoubtedly cost the foundation quite a bit of money. She could, instead, use her smartphone to read comprehensively in the Negro poetry genre for free.
If you will go to the page where the girl is reading and click the picture, you will be cycled through some other classroom projects funded by Gates grants. The starfish dissection (one of the pictures) provides a strong illustration about how much more can be learned through subject websites than in a small classroom module. Sure, actually cutting up a dead starfish has dimensions the virtual experience may not, but wow: a student can learn a very great deal about starfish on a website like this one where there is even a video of a starfish dissection.
In what follows, I am committing the highest level of pedagogical heresy:
I do not understand why the Gates folks pour their support into this bottom line (from the page where the picture of the girl above appears):
“We believe that all students should graduate from high school prepared to succeed in college, career, and life.”
My italics in the sentence above capture the new trend: Do what it takes for all students to graduate from high school and then college. How long will this take! Obama has set the goal for 2020 — ten years from now.
Why not first get a smart phone to every student so they each can read the world’s poetry and virtually dissect starfish? Some of the students equipped and trained do that may miss the assessment credits pedagogues think they need to receive high school and college diplomas. But if youngsters now in school can learn online — not waiting for the halcyon days when all kids succeed in school — far more of them will be prepared to succeed in career and life.
Posted on 21st June 2010 by Judy Breck in Mobiles | Next | Obamaschool | Schools we now have
mobile, roil, turbid, turbulence
These are great words, with definitions from Merriam-Webster:
Roil means: to make turbid by stirring up the sediment or dregs
These are the origins of turbid: Latin turbidus confused, disordered, turbid, from turba confusion, tumult, crowd; akin to Latin turbare to throw into disorder, disturb, make turbid
Turbulence means: wild unruly disorderly commotion : disposition to stormy unruliness : violent agitation or disturbance : great perturbation : disorderly or tumultuous conduct
In many ways, education is roiling. Money is running out, teachers unions picket, textbook committees argue through the night, politicians promise, parents anguish, pundits prattle — and the goal of elevating learning for yet another generation eludes us.
This disorder and commotion are forcing consideration of what children do all day while they are growing up. Under the umbrella term “education,” issues of culture and nurture loom larger and larger. In a Politico article today, Congresswoman Judy Chu (D-Calif) sketches turbulence in the life of kids who are prevented from focusing on learning.
How long will education be turbidus? Who and what can fix it? Or will education fix itself, with the sediment and dregs that have been stirred up settling into a new pattern in a changing world. I think the latter is true: education will reconfigure itself around the network of what is known by humankind that is emergent on the internet. The world will become a far better place because all the young global generation will connect to the same virtual pages online to learn their knowledge. Separately, and largely locally, what kids do all day will be resolved in many different ways.
Already we can put individual students into the calming future.
While education roils on, we can snatch one mind at a time out of the turbulence. The action is simple: provide the youngster a mobile device and connection that provide him with his own web browser. We may not soon replace the turbid schools Judy Cho describes, but this very day, she could provide a student there with his own connection to what is known by humankind.
Posted on 12th June 2010 by Judy Breck in Equality | Mobiles | Next
What would the slave boys shown in a newly discovered 1860ish photo have been able to do if they had had mobile devices connected to the internet in their pockets? The discovery of the photo, with its attached record of John’s sale for $1,150 in 1854, is causing an outpouring of remarks about the way slave children were treated a century and a half ago.
There are those who would assume that the social stuff would have to come first to open the doors for a slave boy: political emancipation, financial support, social acceptance of his different skin color. Fifteen decades after this picture was taken, there are still many children for whom political/social barriers remain. They are still trapped in real and virtual kinds of slavery of many sorts in lots of places around the world.
When the picture was taken, there was no way to connect the actual John shown in the photo with knowledge beyond his slave shack and his master’s grounds. Today it is possible to connect every child on earth individually with the sum total of what is known by humankind. We can put all that into every youngster’s pocket. Certainly there would be some — many! — who would break beyond their shacks and the limits set by their masters.
Posted on 10th June 2010 by Judy Breck in Mobiles | Next | Obamaschool | Politics
deficit, golden_age_of_learning, individual, taxes, teachers
As failing socialized education once more is cutting teachers and looking to pour federal tax paid money to save salaries of some of them, why not do something different: cut textbook costs by delivering learning content using mobiles. Roughly speaking, one teacher’s salary of $100,000 could provide 100 students with a smart phone for each and an access plan for each lasting many months.
But why fire the teacher? Why spend more at the federal level, increasing the deficit? Why cut down more trees to create paper to print resources that are out-of-date before ink is rolled?
Instead, we can chop down the local textbook/analog budget, then use the money saved to equip students with mobiles. That way, we keep the teachers out of the budget cutting morass. By saving billions through virtual resources, money remains for human teachers.
There is a picture of Congressional Appropriations Committee Chairman David Obey in an article today in Politico: Dems eye stimulus to pay teachers. There is no suggestion in the Politico report of any answer to school money woes except to fire teachers or pay them by sending federal dollars to states. Obey, a chastened liberal is quitting Congress — yet another sign that the socialist solutions he has long supported are not working.
Education needs something new, and we have it! In fact pivotal positive innovation is not only possible, but unstoppable. Wrongheaded actions like perpetuating the status quo through federal money dumps slow innovation down, especially for the failing schools that are perpetuating a dependent class. But as the Obeys fade from the failing big government era, we will enter a global golden age of learning.
Handschooling is a major driver toward that golden age. As it delivers the global knowledge commons online, handschooling is moving learning back to the local level and into the hands of individual learners.
Let’s use the money crunch that is worrying Obey’s brow. It is an opportunity to speed up the switch to virtual resources and save some teachers — and quite a few trees while we are at it.
Posted on 14th May 2010 by Judy Breck in Mobiles | Schools we now have
smartphone
The New York Times today has an article titled “Cellphones Now Used More for Data Than for Calls.” It ledes with:
She taps out her grocery lists, records voice memos, listens to music at the gym, tracks her caloric intake and posts frequent updates to her Twitter and Facebook accounts.
The one thing she doesn’t use her cellphone for? Making calls.
“I probably only talk to someone verbally on it once a week,” said Mrs. Colburn, a 40-year-old marketing consultant in Canton, Mass., who has an iPhone.
For many Americans, cellphones have become irreplaceable tools to manage their lives and stay connected to the outside world, their families and networks of friends online. But increasingly, by several measures, that does not mean talking on them very much.
The article continues to describe many ways iPhones, BlackBerrys and other smartphones are used by adults. Kids are mentioned for sending lots of text messages.
So what has education done to use this now pervasive adult tool? Essentially: nada, almost zero.
Education’s turned back to these devices is particularly absurd when using them would save billions of dollars in textbooks and other learning tools like binders, paper, and pencils. There are potential educational applications for each of the adult activities described in the Times article.
Thirty years ago, when Mrs. Colburn was in school, something similar happened. The desktop computer was moving into offices. Almost always, each individual office worker was provided with his/her computer — the machines were not shared. The young Ms. Colburn, though, would not have her own computer. Schools were slow to get computers and almost always locked them away in “labs” — making students share them for brief times during a school day.
Today there are a few enlightened classrooms where students use their smartphones for educational purposes. The rest of education echoes my own school days in the 1940s and 50s, when we thought a ditto machine was modern, and a public address system cutting edge.
Education’s resistance to change is inexcusable.
