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Posts Tagged ‘Education’

Now, I trust all of you, so I’m hoping you can help me weigh in on this.

About once a week I see a thread on Fark.com like this one about a news story concerning youth unemployment, debt, or other factors in a failure to launch. Each and every one of these threads devolves into a raging flame war between people who believe young people aren’t working hard enough and twenty-something college grads who can’t get jobs.

I wonder why some people get so angry when college grads expect to get better jobs using degrees they paid thousands of dollars for. Why shouldn’t they? The government expects them to. Billions in student loans go out to colleges and universities every year with the expectation that they produce graduates that make enough money to pay those loans back. The US is facing another debt crisis because they can’t collect on these education investments.

Moreover, it’s not like getting a degree just involves smoking weed and arguing about Sartre. Students spend hundreds of hours doing research and writing papers in order to graduate. In essence, they paid for the opportunity to work hard at something. Does that not mean anything in today’s economy? Even if someone is over-qualified for a position, isn’t a degree a written guarantee that a person can get up in the morning and follow through with their degrees?

Probably not, given that there are millions of people out there with these degrees. It’s almost as if an important human element is now missing from the hiring process. We’ve put so much stock in degrees and certificates, but all we’ve done is create a soulless buyer’s market. Where is the future of industry going to come from if we don’t create a path for new workers?

Researchers at the University of Florida are working on an  video game that attempts to educate pre-teen Latina girls on how to resist peer pressure to have sex. Players will don motion capture suits to interact with the characters on the screen to practice proper social responses. Now, forget for a moment that it’s abstinence education. Forget that it’s the result of a $434,000 government grant. What we have here is a group of adults who have completely misunderstood children and video games.

The most obvious flaw in this project is the graphics. How is this game supposed to engage anyone if we’re scraping the bottom of the uncanny valley with these character designs? It seems like the researchers believe that realism is the most important aspect of engaging people through video games. Most best selling video games often feature cartoon avatars, or at the very least highly stylized human avatars. There is an entire genre of school simulation games like the Persona series that are based on simpler technology and would be way more entertaining and effective than this awkward monstrosity.

The game also seems to treat decision making as if it were some kind of pavlovian response. There are way more factors going into a child’s decision to use drugs or have sex than remembering to “just say no”. No matter how realistic the graphics might be, it’s much harder to model factors like the involvement of a parent, the availability of birth control, or the feelings you’ll have to manage when it’s a childhood friend applying the peer pressure. If you can express those concepts, your game might become entertaining, but then it’ll run the risk of being accused of glorification. Some parents think that just learning about a bad behaviour in an engaging way constitutes glorification. It’s a risk that educators run into more often than they should.

Dealing with peer pressure is an important part of being a child. The more education you have about peer pressure, the better equipped you’ll be to make good choices. However, if we design that education based only on adult assumptions about children and concepts adults are comfortable with,  all you’ll be left with is a half million dollars worth of creepy CGI corpse-children.

I have a conundrum for you. Let’s say a certain Churubusco High School in Indiana is being sued by the ACLU. The school had banned two female students from all athletic and extra-curricular activities for one year for appearing in some photos where they were in lingerie, licking phallus-shaped lollipops. Dan Savage, a sex advice columnist whom I have read for many years, spent the intro of his November 10th podcast episode carpet f-bombing the whole situation. How dare they stifle these girls’ freedom of expression! Their bodies are theirs to post on MySpace where “only their friends can see them”. Here comes the conundrum. Why do I think that suing this school over this is a galactically stupid idea?

Now again, I wouldn’t be ranting about this unless I read Savage’s column, or listened to his podcast. They are entertaining and open up an important dialogue about our modern moral values. However, if he’s willing to beat up a principal over this, he has no idea how these situations work. The reason this suspension seems like an authoritarian beat-down is that the schools can’t talk to the media like the ACLU can. They can’t provide details of sweet jack all if it isn’t approved by their lawyers. Details like where they got the photos, what else the girls may be in trouble for, or complaints from other parents regarding these girls’ behavior.

Still, even though the photos were taken off of  school grounds, since they made it into school grounds, that turns it into something the school needs to deal with. It’s not going to matter that the photos were posted in a private area of Myspace (no pun intended) if the girls have several hundred friends. Even if the school did nothing about it, the photos would probably  be used against the girls in some other way, which would have the girls’ parents screeching into the principal’s office waving around a bullying lawsuit with the fury of 1000 Elizabeth Hasselbecks.

What will the lawsuit accomplish anyway, even if the girls win? Posting racy pictures online is still a bad idea. They will make you look flakey and desperate for attention no matter how enlightened our society gets. Meanwhile, the school will have to make some cuts to pay for their legal fees. What do you think will be the first to go? Athletics? Nah, the soccer moms would tear them a new arse. How about services that fewer students use, like drug counseling, or special needs? Oooh, I know! They could cut sex education! And if you think that the Principal should have thought more about his students’ welfare before going on his crusade against women’s bodies, ponder this. If he’s like any other school principal in the country, between dealing with this lawsuit, his staff, and hundreds of other students and parents, he has no time to think of anything but his students’ welfare.

You know, I deplore censorship of any kind. I also think sexual expression is a beautiful thing. Even so, this should not be the hill we die on for those ideals. The administration of Churubusco High School made a tough call, but this punishment pales in comparison to the kind of difficulties these girls will face in the future if they think this behavior is okay. Photos like that could damage their careers and relationships. Now that the girls know better, they can avoid all that. Freedom is the supreme value of our time, but if we send our kids to these schools to learn how to make decisions and think for themselves, we have to appreciate the lessons in all their forms. Even the ones that get you kicked off the volley ball team.

[Today we have a guest post from Sara, who demonstrated the SMART board in my  SMARTboard Jungle post. ]

As a fairly young middle school teacher, I am never old to my students until I start talking technology.  They listen with fascination, and mouths slighly agape, as I explain to them that I can remember when the Internet was once only words, or that I received my first free Email account when I was in university.  My students and I are only seventeen years apart in age, but we are growing up in two completely different technological generations.  When I was in elementary school, a small computer lab with 15 tiny Macintosh computers was set up in the storage room behind the library.  15 students would go to the lab to type their assignments, 15 students would stay in the classroom to work on Math, and the teacher would run back and forth down the hallway to supervise.  Now schools are teaching children with more technology experience then I could ever hope to achieve.  The students I taught this year were born in 1998, meaning that they have never been without computers or the Internet.
However, just because students have technology skills, does this mean that they have technology savvy? There have recently been various articles and comments that decry the poor choices students make with regards to technology, like revealing personal information online, posting inappropriate pictures, and cyberbullying.  Children have the technological experience that surpasses that of adults, yet they lack the critical thinking skills that enable them to avoid dangerous situations online.  How can we both support and protect children as they are exploring a medium that they know more about than ourselves?
For many years, students have associated with their peers through passing notes in class or spending hours on the telephone saying nothing in particular.  Some of this communication had the potential to hurt others, but the consequences stayed within the confines of the home, school, or at the very most the community.  Today phone conversations have been replaced by text messages, and notes passed in class are now MSN conversations or social networking sites, yet the students are still relaying the same threats, slander, and gossip as before.  The difference is they are displaying this information on a public forum, where the whole world could potentially see their actions.  Kids now have the ability to post pictures, download videos, and correspond on Facebook. Many do not realize that the items they post for the enjoyment of their friends could be seen by other people for whom the items were not intended.

FYI, the issue of the creepy janitor at the end has already been addressed

One observation that I have noticed from explaining the Internet to students is that you cannot simply espouse on how evil the Internet is, and how they must never, ever post anything about themselves or they will be kidnapped from their homes in the middle of the night by a cruel cyberstalker.  Kids know this scenario isn’t really realistic, and because they feel their intelligence has been insulted they won’t want to listen to the better pieces of advice that you want to give.  Instead, be truthful.  Explain how the Internet is a great place for learning new information and for communication, but just like in any public situation, we need to be careful.  Instruct how to place privacy settings on the various Email and social networking sites the students use.  Explain that they should not place pictures on the Internet that identify where they live or where they go to school, and discuss why using an avatar without your profile picture would be advantageous.  As for cyberbullying, remind students that this is no longer a whispered piece of insult in the hallway, and that bullying in a very public forum could have public consequences.  Explain the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, and show how Canadian law interprets cyberbullying.  Make sure that students understand that any negative comment they place on the Internet, no matter how well-hidden they think it is, has the potential to be discovered.

Overall, try to explain Internet safety to children the way you would discuss computers with a colleague.  Explain simply the points that may be common knowledge to you, and never speak down or condescend.  The most effective analogy that I feel worked with my classes was to compare the Internet to a bulletin board at school: if you do not want information posted on the board for the entire school to see, then you should not post this same information on the Internet.  Children are not dumb.  Some Internet dangers may not have ever occurred to them, but if they are given guidance and knowledge most children can amaze you with the mature decisions that they make.

Being married to a teacher certainly reveals how much education has changed in the past 20 years. For starters, Sara teaches at a grade 6-7-8 middle school, something that didn’t exist in my school district when I was going to a k-7 elementary school and then an 8-10 junior high. Music programs contain Rock and Roll bands in addition to the traditional Jazz and Concert Bands. This development is promising, because as the baby boom generation gets older, who’s going to be left to teach our kids about The Who and Stairway?  Another thing I noticed when I first visited Sara’s classroom was that all the chalkboards were replaced with dry erase boards. Now it looks like even those white boards will be replaced by a new technology, the SMART board.

The SMART board is a large touch-screen connected to a digital projector. It’s hooked up to a classroom computer, and can display anything that you can put on a computer monitor. Because it is a touch screen, you can use either your fingers or the stylus markers included to draw or erase shapes on the smartboard. Here is my lovely wife Sara demonstrating.

Sara admits she was a little skeptical about the SMARTboard at first. When she saw it at a conference in Seattle, the presenter kept making mistakes with the machine in typical Microsoft product demonstration fashion. She was even more trepidatious when her school ordered one SMARTboard for each classroom. However, as she got used to the interface, she realized what a powerful tool she had. Her class has never known a world without an internet, and here was an interactive piece of technology that could be applied to hands-on, visual, or auditory learning styles. No longer would she have to deal with printing lessons on overhead transparencies, and she can even download Macromedia Flash animated teaching aids in a similar fashion to the iPhone app store.

“It’s quickly become a really useful tool in the classroom,” Sara said. “Even if you are not the best person with technology, you will be able to figure it out.”

Schools are constantly changing, just like the workplaces they are supposed to supply with labor. Once we leave grade school, we often maintain the assumption that methods and technologies used in education stay the same as when we were using them. Keeping up with the latest trends in education can reveal fascinating insights. At the very least, if you’re like me, you can envy all the cool toys kids get to play with at school.