Posted on 28th February 2010 by Judy Breck in Equality | Mobiles | Nurture
glo, Somali, students, TiZA_school
We have been programmed to assume that what kids are taught at school is better knowledge than what they get by connecting to the internet. We are also assured that schools standardize subjects so each youngster will learn the same material — at least at a minimum.
For both of these supposed articles of faith for schooling, the opposite has become true — sometimes radically so. Yesterday the Minneapolis-St. Paul StarTribune published a column by Katherine Kersten describing a legal “battle royal” regarding a public charter school TiZA where the enrollment is mainly Somali.
We can suppose — because TiZA is a taxpayer supported public school — students will go through preparations for and taking required standards tests. But it is hard to assume that the students would not learn a lot of the material they study from the perspective of Islam. After all, their Somali parents would see that as a benefit — as a chief reason for sending their children to TiZA. The StarTribune columnist writes: “During her tenure, [a witness] says in an affidavit, she saw ‘no real distinction’ between the operations of TiZA and the Muslim American Society, with which the school shares a building.”
Schooling has always involved culture and nurture. To what extent that is good or bad is not the subject of this blog and website. Visualizing schooling as a pizza focuses thinking about the knowledge-acquiring aspect of schooling. Until recently the level where the issue of knowledge biases and slants was struggled with was among the pepperoni and onions in the above illustration: curriculum, textbooks, and what is in the library.
Handschooling is a brand-new doable step that absolutely equalizes and vastly expands the knowledge available for students — worldwide, no less — to study and learn literally from the same webpage.
To add the olives layer by providing each TiZA student with his and her own mobile web browser would not need to change any of the other layers. It would add, for each individual student, a connection to the new layer that no other generation has ever had: the global knowledge commons that emerges in the intertwingularity.
It is false to justify not letting kids have handschooling because it would be substituting the olives for the pepperoni and onions. But forbidding the olives is increasingly less possible. The world has changed for school people who would limit to their own biases what children learn. The new intertwingularity layer hovers above every school, and increasingly the new generation is connecting on its own.
Posted on 19th February 2010 by Judy Breck in Mobiles | Obamaschool | Schools we now have
laptops, school, spying, students
“Student claims school spied on him via computer webcam” is a headline today at the Philadephia Inquirer. Click on the image above for the local news video report. From the same video, in the smaller image below, a student from the high school is pointing to the webcam on her school-issued laptop. The school security set-up made it possible for the webcam to grab a shot of what she was doing or what her screen was displaying — wherever she was with the laptop.
It is interesting to listen to the interviews of high students and parents on the video. It does not seem to occur to them that students should or could be be trusted to own, take care of, and control their own mobile device. The mentality remains stuck in the notion that the laptops belong to the school and the school should control them.
Why? Let’s look at own, take care of, and control.
Own? It is intellectually better for a student to own his/her own laptop — like, long ago, I owned a 3-ring notebook in which I organized my high school life. How would you feel if you knew that in a few months you would have to return the computer you use for writing and browsing to someone else who owns it? How much would it curtail your creativity if you knew that at any time the real owner of your computer could look at what is in it? Over years of education, a student’s cumulative drafts and projects become rich resources — and having someone from the outside peek at them is embarrassing. A student’s learning is enriched when it can extend freely into a personal mobile. Where else can a sophomore in love keep his emerging poetry?
Take care of? Laptop mobiles cost less than $500 now, and the price is dropping. This is a far cry from the “wire the schools” times in the 1990s when shared computers costs thousands. I would also bet my iPod that high school students will take far better care of mobiles that they own, than the school-issued sort.
Control? Ah, and it is here that the education phoenix must set its nest afire and let the flames consume the old control freak bird. The generation now in school is already connected online — and every generation that follows will be too. The new schooling for connecting is about teaching the young explorers how to travel the open networks of knowledge in the online commons. Controlling and curtailing brief sorties is very 20th century.
