Holding kids to higher standards

I love it:
Study: College students lack literacy for complex tasks.
Here's the dirt:

WASHINGTON (AP) -- More than half of students at four-year colleges -- and at least 75 percent at two-year colleges -- lack the literacy to handle complex, real-life tasks such as understanding credit card offers, a study found.

The literacy study funded by the Pew Charitable Trusts, the first to target the skills of graduating students, finds that students fail to lock in key skills -- no matter their field of study.

The results cut across three types of literacy: analyzing news stories and other prose, understanding documents and having math skills needed for checkbooks or restaurant tips.

Without "proficient" skills, or those needed to perform more complex tasks, students fall behind. They cannot interpret a table about exercise and blood pressure, understand the arguments of newspaper editorials, compare credit card offers with different interest rates and annual fees or summarize results of a survey about parental involvement in school.

But here's the good part:

Overall, the average literacy of college students is significantly higher than that of adults across the nation. Study leaders said that was encouraging but not surprising, given that the spectrum of adults includes those with much less education.

Please, please don't give me the test on comparing credit card rates!  (Do credit card companies want their rates understood?)  No, I don't understand George Will's arguments most of the time. And yet somehow, I manage to hold a job. Remarkable.

Bill, a teacher with whom I once worked, was enamoured of E.D. Hirsh's cultural literacy theory that every educated person should have at his or her command a certain amount of common historical trivia. One day he he was storming around the high school hallways bemoaning the fact that none of the kids he polled knew the significance of the date 1066. I caught up with Bill later that day and told him that my unscientific study showed exactly the same results - nobody I asked knew why 1066 was important. Oh, but I had been asking teachers, not kids.

Here's my new rule: require no high school tests that the legislators who vote for them can't pass.

For the life of me, I don't understand why we expect our kids to be smarter than we are.  Maybe because we know we aren't smart enough?

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Greetings from Indianapolis and the ICE Conference. Workshops today and a keynote and spotlight tomorrow. Stop by to say hello if you are attending.

Game cheats – and an encouraging discovery

I received the following e-mail today from a reporter:

I cover the federal court system for The Denver Post and I'm working on a story about a lawsuit involving game cheats. Specifically, one cheat site is suing another on copyright grounds…

I've heard about the book you've written, Learning Right from Wrong in the Digital Age and I suspect you would have some thoughts on some of the other issues I want to touch on in my story.

Beyond the issue of cheat sites cheating each other, I'm also interested in exploring the question of what children make of using cheat sites and how parents ought to view it. Game makers frequently embed cheats into games for a variety of reasons, including access for users. Are there circumstances under which it is ethically acceptable for kids to use game cheats? When not? Some make the argument that violent games beget violent kids. Do video game cheats beget dishonest children?

Since I have not played a computer game since the days of Zork, I gave a somewhat lame opinion based on what I know about my son's gaming and use of cheats. But, I also forwarded the question to Brady, now 19, himself. His reply:

I never thought cheating in video games was much of a problem unless you're playing with other people (multiplayer) This is normally viewed as dishonorable and down right annoying. Cheating in a single-player video game is only as bad as skipping a pages in book or knowing the ending of a movie before you see it. [He found the analogy I tried to find, but couldn't! - Doug]

Also there are two different types of cheating. Developer's cheats are the ones the creators of the game want you to find. The other type are the hacker cheats, which you have to buy special software for. You can buy these devices (Action Replay, GameShark) at any dealer that sells games. I sometimes use both when available, but only for difficult or frustrating games. Also, sometimes there are some interesting secrets that developers don’t want you to find. (Grand Theft Auto’s notorious Hot Coffee scene, and debug rooms)

I have never made the connection between cheating in games and cheating in real life. I always knew cheating was wrong and I never really remember cheating in school. (Well maybe I scribbled some vocab words in my hand once or twice but I never made a habit of it.) I guess I always had a clear understanding of what is fantasy and what is real-life. (I don’t leap off buildings expecting to respawn close by; I don’t jump on people’s heads in hopes that spinning gold coins will come out of them; and I don’t have a pause screen.) [Parallel construction! - Doug] The bottom line is school and work are the exact opposite of video games and recreation, and I think that’ s how most people view them. I just don’t see the connection of cheating in video games to cheating in school – there’s just too big of gap…

I was impressed, as only a father can be, that my son has both writing skills and a good intellect. And has perhaps inherited my writing style – for good or ill. (Who are you and what have you done with Brady?)

This also tells me that kids are capable of more sophisticated reasoning and ethical thought than we might think.

Can your students tell the difference between games and reality? Are we worrying too much about raising an amoral generation who have gotten their values from Mario Brothers?

Do We Become the Kids We Teach?

Taking a moment to just catch my breath after hearing David (2 Cents Worth blog) Warlick deliver his keynote “Riding the Wave of Change” at our fall MEMO conference. Compelling ideas about the role of technology in students lives and what it means to be literate in the 21st Century. Folks here at the conference are raving about the opening - an auspicious start! Hope the rest of the conference keeps to this high standard.

But it started me thinking (and that is dangerous…)

Olinger and Olinger in Educause’s Educating the Net Generation ask readers who work with Net Genners to take this simple questionnaire:

1. Do you write in longhand or online?
2. Have you turned over remembering to a device?
3. Do you go to meetings with a laptop or PDA
4. Are you constantly connected? Internet always on? Cell phone always with you?
5. Do you multi-task?
6. Do you play video or computer games?

Well, I had to say yes to 5 out of 6 (I’m not a video gamer, I’m afraid.)

I’ve long observed teachers react to school administration in many cases like kids react to them.

• Elementary teachers want a parent.
• Secondary teachers need somebody against who to rebel.
• Middle school teachers, well are confused, and on any given day can react like either elementary or secondary students. (I was a middle school teacher.)

So are you becoming more like the kids you teach? Is that good thing?