Bud the teacher gets it right

A couple of people responding to my post, "Distracting Technologies," pointed me to this Bud the Teacher post: "Would you please block?" It's well worth sharing and considering:

Ever since we opened up lots more of the Internet in our school district earlier this year, the district has received several requests from teachers and other staff to block resources that are distractions in the classroom.  I’ve written a stock response to those requests that I thought might be worth sharing.  It’s my hope that their requests and the conversations that come from this response lead to changes in classroom practice.

Here it is:

Thanks for your question.  When we implemented our new filter this school year, we looked at all the things we were currently blocking, what things were required to be blocked by law, and what we were blocking that we shouldn’t be.

What we’ve decided is that we will no longer use the web filter as a classroom management tool.  Blocking one distraction doesn’t solve the problem of students off task – it just encourages them to find another site to distract them.  Students off task is not a technology problem – it’s a behavior problem.  It is our intention that we help students to learn the appropriate on-task behaviors instead of assuming that we can use filters to manage student use.  Rather than blocking sites on an ad hoc basis, we will instead be working with folks to help them through computer and lab management issues in a way that promotes student responsibility.  We know that the best filters in a classroom or lab are the people in that lab – both the educational staff monitoring student computer use as well as the students themselves.

This opens up possibilities for students and staff using websites for instructional purposes that in the past were blocked due to broad category blocks.  It requires that staff and students manage their technology use rather than relying on a third party solution that can never do the job of replacing teachers monitoring students.

That said, we will still block sites that are discovered to violate CIPA requirements.  If you discover one, please do not hesitate to share it with us.  Also, if you discover a site that shouldn’t be blocked, please pass that along so that we can open it up.

I hope this makes sense.  I’d be happy to speak further with you if you have further comments or questions.

If we are serious about trying to remove all distractions from our classrooms for easier classroom management, we might be better starting off with pencils and paper (doodling), windows, announcements coming over the intercomm, and, of course, girls.

Of course some kids might say we should remove the teacher who distracts them from their personal online information seeking activities.

Thanks, Bud, for a great letter and post.

http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/visualizations/the-hierarchy-of-digital-distractions/

Nerd fashion

Yes, the glasses above have little LED lights built right into them! I found these at a Brookstone store in the Atlanta airport. Are they cool or what?

One of the first signs of aging eyes was my having trouble reading small print in dim light. Perhaps had I had little LEDs built into my forehead, I'd still not need the damn reading glasses today.

BTW, my cheaters (that I buy from Target in packs of three) are migratory. In the middle of the night, they all get up and move to the same room - family room, bedroom, porch - where I am sure they have a little party and find themselves too exhausted to return to their original positions by morning. I have no other way to explain why I can never find the damn things.

What's the place of futurists?

Predicting the future is easy. It’s trying to figure what’s going on now that’s hard.
Fritz Dresser

One of the more interesting characters in literature is Cassandra from Homer's Illiad. She was a Trojan woman so babe-i-licious that the god Apollo gave her the gift of prophecy. But when Cassie told horny Apollo to get lost, he put a little curse on her: While her predictions would be dead on, nobody, but nobody would believe them. Which turned out not to be a wise move by the Trojans, as you know.

I thought about Cassandra reflecting on a comment to my post Dangerously irrelevant libraries. Michael Doyle eloquently responded:

Futurists are charlatans, and they know it, we know it, but it's fun to gaze into crystal balls, so we play the game.

Like fortune tellers and seers, they state the obvious in deep and mysterious ways, which is not hard, since the future is (in our heads, anyway) deep and mysterious.

Scott McLeod [whose futuristic comments about libraries lead to the comment] has a nice side job stirring folks up. So long as he doesn't get swallowed up in his own hype, he performs a necessary service, and he performs it well.

Any man who believes "we are currently preparing students for jobs that don't yet exist, using technologies that haven't been invented, in order to solve problems we don't even know are problems yet" then proceeds to predict the future anyway gives me pause. (I think the quote was Karl Fisch's, and to be fair, it was originally meant for a school presentation where hyperbole is encouraged.)

The last question posed (#9: "There is no conceivable future....") either reflects brilliant tongue-in-cheekiness, or a lack of imagination.

We are human. We eat. We breath. We poop and we pee, We play to make more of us. We get old. We die. We will always need food, and food will remain tied to the sun, the the earth, to the air.

The recent shift in ownership in this country is frightening; the unemployment rate is not just an accident of economics. We cannot educate ourselves out of replacing people with machines.

The McLeod's of our culture have found themselves a nice niche. If we ever took the time to deeply look at any of the questions posed above, we might have a wonderful discussion about what it means to be human, what it means to use a tool, what it means to place value on things ultimately useless.

Those kinds of discussions are not glittery enough to hold our attention, and we would not like the conclusions if we could sit still long enough to think them through. We've become more magpie than human.

I enjoy your blog because it encourages the kind of reflection shunned by so many other blogs. Posing a list of McLeodisms jars the reader seeking BlueSkunkisms, but it's a good reminder of what many of the tech elite believe.

Since I often play the role of futurist/charlatan in my own talks, Michael's strong words made me pause. What impact does predicting, warning, excoriating, and building dread or hope in teachers and librarians really have in how we actually act?

By describing the future are we creating a better future ... or is it just a coping mechanism for dealing with the present? Do we do a disservice to ourselves by not fully processing the implications of future trends and putting perspective to them?

Michael, thank you for your comments. You've give me deep pause.

By the way, Cassandra came to a rather bad end. She was raped, lost the power of prophecy, was taken to Greece as a war prize, and was promptly whacked with an axe by a jealous wife (as I remember). Perhaps futurists have never been all that popular.

Cassandra warns the Trojans. Engraving by Bernard Picart (1673-1733)
Online Source: http://hsa.brown.edu/maicar/Cassandra.html