Big, little paradox - another view

I don't how much of what Mr. Stager writes he truly believes and how much says just to stir the pot. In his latest post, Big, Little Paradox, Stager argues that younger students are being shortchanged by being give lower powered computers, especially iPads. He writes:

Sure, the iPad is light, easy to use and has a good battery life, but of all the students in a school or district, younger children need the most computing power for speech, graphics and video.

While Gary often states that kids need full-powered computers to do real learning tasks, I don't remember reading exactly what those tasks are. An iPad won't run CAD/CAM programs,  heavy-duty video or photo editing software or crunch masses of numbers. But I am not sure how many third graders are doing or ought to be doing 3-D graphics rendering anyway.

iPads are just fine for word processing, spreadsheet building, photo editing, and video/audio composition. You can use them to draw pictures and created mindmaps and timelines. They can be used for collaborative work and communication. They work with most online tools.

And the real advantage that Gary admits - that they are "light, easy-to-use and have good battery life" -  makes them powerful indeed since they will actually BE USED more often and in more places and for longer periods of time. (See Apple as at right.)

Gary, spell out specifically what tablets and similar devices won't do that you feel are so essential. You may change my mind.

But for now you're sounding like a shill for computer manufacturers, I'm afraid.

Social networking policies: you can't fix stupid

 When men are pure, laws are useless; when men are corrupt, laws are broken. - Disraeli

You can't fix stupid. Ron White

Teacher posing and then posting with a male stripper.

Two interesting blog posts crossed my radar this week. The first was from a couple years ago (via Dr. Doug Green) about the stupid and mean things educators have done on Facebook. (Eight Ways Teachers Get in Trouble Using Facebook. Sites and Blogs, April 2011.) Included in this post are egregious examples of educator bad judgement:

1. Making fun of a student's hair by posting her picture
2. Complaining about the low character of students
3. Joking about a little girl's death
4. Posing in pictures with alcohol
5. Flirting (or worse) with students
6. Leaking standardized test information
7. Mocking the poverty of your school district
8. Appearing in pictures with a stripper

Eight out of, what, three million plus K-12 teachers in the U.S.? Given that 46% of Americans qualifies as mentally ill at some point in their lives*, teacher are a remarkably sane group. Or perhaps the people who committed these acts were stupid (see quote above) or drunk (see poster below). So while thousands of teachers and student use social media daily without incident, we create rules for the idiots and the irrational. But I suppose this is also why we have helmet laws and plenty of other policies as well.

The second post is Scott McLeod's insightful "My thoughts on a proposed social media policy for school employees (Part 2). In it he takes Iowa educational leaders to task for creating a social media policy for employees that he doesn't much like. (Actually I think most of it comes directly from those that Jen Hegna and I wrote in back in 2009.) He opines:

• The policy reads as if you don’t trust your educators.
• For those occasional instances of inappropriate use, I don’t believe that you need a separate ‘social media policy.’ (Are we treating these resources differently because of format bigotry?)
• You’re alienating your most technology-savvy educators.
• The policy is unwieldy and partially illegal.

While I did not fine the proposed policy nearly as onerous as Scott did, I agree with his general sentiments. The major disagreement I have with Scott's criticism that such a policy is not needed at all - that such a guide indicates a distrust of employees. Social networking and its role in education (and society) are new phenomena, uncharted territories for which most of us don't have a good map. To me, the Iowa document would be better described as a set of guidelines than as a policy. And I do think thoughtful guidelines are necessary for the use of any technology that may cause harm to the user or others (see examples above.) 

Logically, people would automatically apply past experiences, rules, and ethics to any new situation created by technology. And this is not so difficult when we are using technology to simply enhance current educational practices. But when Scott and others foment for radical restructuring of the educational process with the assistance of technology, it is more important than ever to assure those being restructured have some guidelines.

It's interesting that since Jen and I wrote (what I think were some of the first) social networking guideline, how the conversation has changed from "Don't use social networking with students at all" to "Use social networking for a purpose and with caution." A healthy transition that I can remember going through with questions the internet itself  and e-mail in the mid-90s. We cautious educators tend to ban it until we can figure it out - and since kids' well-being is at stake, the only ethical approach.

Oh, Facebook itself has a guide authored by Steve Anderson called “How to Create Social Media Guidelines for Your School.” The document takes no stance (wimps) but defines a process for creating social media policies. Worth a read. Facebook in Education

I didn't want my boss thinking this was picture of me drinking so I used a monkey.
Odds are good she'll know the difference.

*Kessler RC, Berglund P, Demler O, Jin R, Merikangas KR, Walters EE (June 2005). "Lifetime prevalence and age-of-onset distributions of DSM-IV disorders in the National Comorbidity Survey Replication". Arch. Gen. Psychiatry 62 (6): 593–602. doi:10.1001/archpsyc.62.6.593. PMID 15939837

BFTP: Shuffling toward geezerdom

A weekend Blue Skunk "feature" will be a revision of an old post. I'm calling this BFTP: Blast from the Past. Original post June 3, 2007. (Amazing how five years after the original post, weekends can be so similar...

A beautiful, wet Sunday here on the lake. I got the lawn mowed yesterday just before the rain started. And I was inordinately happy that I managed to get this one over on mother nature until it occurred to me that "lawn pride" is just one more sign that geezerdom is not just close, but may well have arrived. This entire past week seemed filled with such portentous signs:

• I thought my workshops were going pretty well last week. Until lunchtime when I noticed that I had given the entire morning's session with two large coffee stains on the front of my white shirt. While I do remember drinking coffee that morning, I don't remember there being any spillage. Have I become one of those pathetic old guys who routinely sport stained clothes, miss great swatches of whiskers shaving, and wear their trousers with an over-the-belly at the waist and high-water at the cuff look. 
• I am re-reading Neal Stephenson's book Snow Crash. When the LWW asked if I liked it as well the second time, I couldn't really tell her since I remembered so little about it from the first reading. It is a great book that is prescient about MUVE's, global information systems, and the privatization of government services. 
• I spent yesterday morning doing helping my Kiwanis Club clean the trash out of our two-mile section of road ditch just south of town. Who'd of thunk it would be so much fun to do a civic-minded volunteer program with these codgers? And then to join them at the coffee shop afterward to grouch about the piggishness of the human race?
• This 2012 weekend, I've been noticing just how much pleasure one can derive taking mental snapshots of the 2-year-old grandson in action - petting the cat, eating with gusto, flashing a joyous smile. Senility or maturity or zen?

So how does the old expression go again - "Getting old's a bitch... but it beats the alternative"?

 

Social anthropologist Jennifer James explains why old people have a "the world's going to hell in a hand basket" mentality. At some point, we recognize our own mortality and we find that fact easier to acknowledge if we think we are leaving a world that is getting worse rather than getting better. At least I am not there yet - I think the world's still getting better. Not fast enough for sure, but better.

 

And there are some definite advantages to getting older, believe it or not.

• If one enjoys watching young women, one's definition of "young" encompasses a vastly larger percentage of the population.
• There seem to be fewer and fewer "hills worth dying on" at work. That leaves one time and energy to engage in the important things. 
• One can relax knowing that one's potential for becoming a professional athlete, musician, or porn star are long past.
• It's a pleasant change to worry more about the lack of time than the lack of money in one's life.
• In athletic events, one doesn't have to finish first, just finish, for people to be astounded.
• It's fun to tease one's spouse about all the mailings she's getting from AARP.
• Shoes can be purchases based on comfort, not looks. (Oh, I guess I have always done that.)
• One word: Grandchildren.
• Mid-life crisis  - been there, done that, got the shirt. Moving on.
• With all one's children over 21, one is responsible only for one's own mistakes.
• One is expected to complain about one's aches and pains.

So far this aging thing, I'm happy to say, has been a lot more good than bad. I hope to be a problem to others for at least another 20 30 years.