Posted on 6th September 2010 by Judy Breck in Equality | Mobiles | Next | Schools we now have
censorship, one_web, open
The Naked CIO writes this week about: Apple’s iPad – why it’s iBad for business IT. The article delves into this: “No one could fault the innovation behind Apple’s iPad tablet but the fact remains that this immature technology will cause problems for the IT department . . . .”
Delving into the same issue for schools raises this question: Should the devices a student uses be limited to those the school is equipped and staffed to control? There is a range of issues. On the practical end: Should student devices be able to interface the school’s content management and other IT (if any) designed for use in instruction? At the privacy end: Should students only be allowed to use devices in school that the IT staff can monitor?
There are two separate areas to which these questions apply to schools:
1) Tech stuff that is only inside the ivy wall of the school: When it comes to the internal applications the school uses, innovative devices like the iPad may well be iBad for the reasons described by the Naked CIO.
2) Browsing the internet: Issues of censorship by schools arise when they limit or prohibit internet browsing — issues that are very different than when schools require devices that work with the instruction technology within their own walls. A key policy of Tim Berners-Lee’s W3C, which sets Web standards, is One Web: the critical standard that the devices all essentially interface the same content from the open internet. Any device that allows a student to browse the internet should be welcome in schools, and the authorities at the schools should not take it upon themselves to alter and/or block that content before their students can browse.
You may disagree with this in terms of the safety of allowing kids to have full access to the internet. That is, however, a separate issue from the wading in by educators to manage learning content from the open internet before students are allowed to access it.
These are fascinating new issues that are just beginning to come over the horizon into mainstream schooling.
Posted on 2nd September 2010 by Judy Breck in Findability | Mobiles | Next | Schools we now have
networks, unbundle
Network laws are causing schooling to unbundle, just as they have been doing to other sectors: music, journalism, merchandising and more. The image above mashes a traditional school that is breaking into little pieces as it engages the Map of Science which reflects online networking of academic subjects.
The force behind school unbundling is the network out there which the Map of Science depicts. The map of academics subjects is not an illustration; it is the plotting of real data and relationships among the nodes of the network that emerges from the data.
Unbundling of schooling allows the individual student to connect directly to individual knowledge nodes. In spite of years of standing back, and then of pushing hard against it by established education, schooling is being broken apart and reconfigured to individual students by the spontaneous online academic knowledge network.
Brick and mortar of buildings or of curriculum cannot for much longer systematically keep the student from connecting directly. A mobile internet browser is all it takes for a student to be able to become a node who links and learns individually to the global commons of what is known by humankind.
Posted on 20th August 2010 by Judy Breck in Next
games, gaming, military_games
The major role of video games in teaching and training young U.S. military recruits is described in a featured article in Live Science. The picture the reader gets is of an effective new methodology for engaging adolescents and training them in battlefield skills. New games are being developed that aim to prepare the mind for war by simulating distressing battlefield situations and walking players through handling these crises.
Once established education shakes itself loose from its analog preconceptions — and someday it will — digital gaming will play a big role in future teaching and training. For now, the military, not the educators, are inventing this new venue for learning.
Why not the massively multiplayer mathematical game, where players are armed with calculus and trig? Or the Medieval Wars of Europe game in which player avatars are historical characters like Charlemagne or Macbeth — constrained in the playing by the facts of history and their own personalities? One supposes an adolescent playing a game like these would learn a lot more about the subjects involved than by for cramming for a high school standards test in math or history.
Sure, developing such games would cost a lot of money. But the scale to student in the open internet makes them very cheap. If a game cost $10 million and were made available to every student in the public schools of New York City, the per-student cost would be one dollar. (There are about a million students in the NYC system.) If the game were openly online and went viral, the per-player cost would plummet to almost nothing.
And while we are musing about the potential of gaming as schooling: Games may diminish the appetite of the new global gaming generation for war if they are playing each other virtually. The Live Science article includes discussion of how military games encounter the stressful reality of actual war. Perhaps the world’s youngest generation will learn to settle its disagreements virtually and live in actual peace.
All optimists raise your hands and say: “Yes!”
Posted on 19th August 2010 by Judy Breck in Next | Schools we now have
socratic_method, teacher, teaching
Socrates
An article today in The Chronicle of Higher Education probes the usually-assumed, seldom-challenged point that classroom teachers have to compete with technology. What if that assumption is not true? What if technology can prepare students to benefit from their teacher’s time, knowledge, and insights? There are many points and comments to value in the Chronicle piece, but why is the headline so negative toward the role of technology in teaching?: College 2.0: Teachers Without Technology Strike Back
Would not Socrates have loved it if he could have told students to take their laptops to wireless hotspots and there explore everything written in the world about a subject? Socrates would then tell these students to keep their laptops closed when they have returned to discourse that subject with him.
Socrates would likely view today’s assumed conflict between teaching and technology as a paradox.
Posted on 5th August 2010 by Judy Breck in Equality | Mobiles | Next | Obamaschool | Schools we now have
Hunter, New_York_City, public_schools
In a very revealing New York Times article today, a multiracial boy graduating from Elena Kagan’s elite Hunter public high school said this in his graduation speech:
“If you truly believe that the demographics of Hunter represent the distribution of intelligence in this city,” he said, “then you must believe that the Upper West Side, Bayside and Flushing are intrinsically more intelligent than the South Bronx, Bedford-Stuyvesant and Washington Heights. And I refuse to accept that.”
The article describes the throes of guilt the school is dealing with because its admission test has created these statistics: “This past year, it was 3 percent black and 1 percent Hispanic; the balance was 47 percent Asian and 41 percent white, with the other 8 percent of students identifying themselves as multiracial. The public school system as a whole is 70 percent black and Hispanic.” The Hunter admissions test, reports the article, “has remained essentially unchanged for decades” and was presumably taken by sixth-grader Elena Kagan to gain her own admission into Hunter.
Judson Hudson, age 18, refuses to accept the “demographics of intelligence” Hunter represents. If Judson is correct, what then is going on here? Surely there is something more to be done about this disparity than to use Hunter as a whipping boy on the front page of the New York Times.
The problem is not that Hunter is a great school. The real problem is that most primarily black and Hispanic New York City public schools are often just awful. Sixth-graders from awful schools score poorly on Hunter’s test.
How can the true demographics of intelligence of New York City be reflected in the level of educational achievement of the next generation of New York City youngsters? A powerful new tool is coming into prominence: individual access to online knowledge. There is today a seven-year-old in a Bedford-Stuyvesant project practicing her vocabulary outside of school, on her mobile. By taking schooling into her own hands, she has a real chance to sit one day on the United States Supreme Court.
That chance is virtually nonexistent for children whose only education is obtained in awful NYC public schools. Shoving a few kids from the projects into Hunter simply applies another bandaid to crumbling public [socialized] education and to our collective guilt.
Posted on 7th July 2010 by Judy Breck in Next | Schools we now have
branches, Dubai, universities
The Gulf education fiscal government role in the availability of Western top university branches is described in a Chronicle of Higher Education article, that says in part:
Michigan State University is canceling all undergraduate programs at its branch campus in Dubai, effectively reducing what was meant to be the university’s beachhead in the Middle East to a mere office. . . .
What set Michigan State’s Dubai campus apart from the branch campuses that many other prominent Western universities have opened in the Persian Gulf region was that the campus was eventually required to break even: Student tuition had to cover its operating costs.
For Western universities that have opened branch campuses in much wealthier locales than Dubai—New York University in Abu Dhabi or Texas A&M University in Qatar, for example—local governments underwrite everything from the cost of campus construction to faculty salaries to research. Student tuition is almost a bonus.
Not so in Dubai, which has minimal oil reserves and a local government that is unable to simply underwrite the costs of first-class higher education.
It is interesting to note that the rich locales in the Persian Gulf is where Western universities are viable. Why? Because the local government has the money to do it it: government pays the bills.
So what about the university-age population who are not in the locales where the money is? Many go abroad to study, if they have their own money or get the funding. The Chronicle article does not give the facts on who attends native higher institutions in the Gulf. Wikipedia reports that about 10% of the population of Dubai have higher education degrees.
The operative role of higher education money from rich governments — and rich people — is obvious. How long will the riches last is unknowable. Yet the bigger question is: what about all the other inquiring young minds among the 90% without money in Dubai. They, as well as the millions of educationally underserved of poorer countries are increasing able to access the knowledge the want to learn online. For example, Michigan State Universities Libraries have an extensive Middle Eastern Studies collection. Let us hope that soon this collection will be opened for use by students worldwide. All Dubai students, for example, could use the university’s virtual beachhead to enter superb knowledge venues. Instead the university was trying to raise enough from the tuition of less than 500 students in Dubai which allow just them to use the Michigan State University Libraries from on-site in Dubai.
