Sarah Hanawald's List: PhilosophicalTech

• The YouTube Wars

    

  Prof. Akalın was probably pleased last week when, for a few days at least, we lost our access to that Eurovision winning song. In response to a satirical video that was offensive to the memory of Atatürk, the founder of modern Turkey, a Turkish court shut down any access to YouTube.com. The offending video was uploaded supposedly by Greeks wanting to antagonize their neighbors, and it prompted a war of offensive and counter offensive videos and endless (and pointless) comments.  It is against the law here to insult Atatürk, but since the offenders were "out there" somewhere beyond prosecution on the Internet, punishment was levied on Turkish Internet users instead.

    

  The story is even sadder as I remember attending a conference in Athens last fall with several Turkish colleagues, and we were pleasantly surprised at the warmth of so many Greeks, including several who spoke with us in Turkish.

• new study of young people’s well-being by nef shows that young people’s well-being drops drastically at secondary school, with significant effects on their personal development.

• This article is an attempt to objectively define the phrase “creepy treehouse” as coined by Chris Lott, and in current usage by ed tech folks such as Scott Leslie, Marc Hugentobler, John Krutsch, and others
• In the field of educational technology a creepy treehouse is an institutionally controlled technology/tool that emulates or mimics pre-existing technologies or tools that may already be in use by the learners, or by learners’ peer groups.
• nstructors push down hot Web 2.0 technologies, while students push back with vocal objections or passive resistance.

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• Gaming helps students hone 21st-century skills

• Ignorance in the United States is not just bliss, it’s widespread.
• I mean our high schools — even when they’re working as designed — cannot teach all our students what they need to know today.”

• The wide disparity in the literacy and math skills of both the school-age and adult populations. These skills, which play such a tremendous role in the lives of individuals and families, vary widely across racial, ethnic and socioeconomic groups.

  • The “seismic changes” in the U.S. economy that have resulted from globalization, technological advances, shifts in the relationship of labor and capital, and other developments.

  • Sweeping demographic changes. By 2030, the U.S. population is expected to reach 360 million. That population will be older and substantially more diverse, with immigration having a big impact on both the population as a whole and the work force.

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• I heard a   vice-president of IBM tell an audience of people assembled to redesign   the process of teacher certification that in his opinion this country   became computer-literate by self-teaching, not through any action   of schools. He said 45 million people were comfortable with computers   who had learned through dozens of non-systematic strategies, none   of them very formal; if schools had pre-empted the right to teach   computer use we would be in a horrible mess right now instead of   leading the world in this literacy.
• In modern society,   said Dewey, people would be defined by their associations--not by   their own individual accomplishments. It such a world people who   read too well or too early are dangerous because they become privately   empowered, they know too much, and know how to find out what they   don't know by themselves, without consulting experts
• Dewey said the great mistake of traditional pedagogy was to make   reading and writing constitute the bulk of early schoolwork.
• New York State, for   instance, employs more school administrators than all of the European   Economic Community nations combined.
• rederich Froebel, the inventor of kindergarten in 19th century   Germany, fashioned his idea he did not have a "garden for children"   in mind, but a metaphor of teachers as gardeners and children as   the vegetables.
• Kindergarten was created to be a way to break the   influence of mothers on their children.
• Violence, narcotic addictions, divorce,   alcoholism, loneliness...all these are but tangible measures of   a poverty in education.

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• The world's narcotic economy is based  upon our own consumption of the commodity, if we didn't buy so many  powdered dreams the business would collapse - and schools are an  important sales outlet.
• Senator Ted Kennedy's office  released a paper not too long ago claiming that prior to compulsory  education the state literacy rate was 98% and after it the figure never  again reached above 91% where it stands in 1990
• in the United States almost nobody who reads,  writes or does arithmetic gets much respect. We are a land of talkers,

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• That is a pointed foreshadowing of the massive Ritalin  interventions which would accompany the student body of the future.
• Schools were conceived to serve the economy and the  social order rather than kids and families -- that is why it is compulsory.
• Managing  children is what professional childcare is about in America. Schools are part of  the professional child care empire and education has nothing whatsoever to do  with it.
• chool is a place where children learn to dislike each other
• Those of you who took rat psychology in college will  know what I'm referring to -- just like the experience of rat psychology, the  bizarre behavior kids display is a function of the reinforcement schedule in the  confinement of schooling to a large degree. I'm certain of that. Children like  this need extensive management.
• to  realize the potential in machinery and fossil fuel, that the bulk of the  population would have to be dumbed down and made dependent -- not to hurt people -- but because only in this fashion could a population of producers, which  surely characterizes the American scene then, be turned into the consumers  required by a commercially intense economy.
• Schools would serve as "instruments of managed evolution, establishing  conditions for selective breeding before the masses take things into their own hands"
• certain kinds of mental training in history, in philosophy, in rhetoric, for  instance, made students resistant to manipulation because it developed  independent intellect, it reduced their plasticity.
• n our dreams, people yield themselves with perfect docility to our  molding hands. The present education conventions of intellectual and character  education fade from their minds and unhampered by tradition we work our own good  will upon a grateful and responsive folk. We shall not try to make these people  or any of their children into men of learning or philosophers, or men of  science. We have not to raise up from them authors, educators, poets or men of  letters, great artists, painters, musicians, nor lawyers, doctors, (he's really covering the whole gamut of employment isn't he?)  statesmen, politicians, creatures of whom we have ample supply (whoever the pronoun we is meant  to stand for there). The task is simple. We will organize children and teach  them in an perfect way the things their fathers and mothers are doing in an  imperfect way".
• Carl Rodgers and Dave Maslow, who were used really as the religious text for psychologizing a classroom for years. At the end of both of those men's lives, they repudiated their life's work.

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• Technology of the 21st century provides educators with new and exciting possibilities for engaging gifted and talented students in enrichment programs. T

• • Jim and I went to school together--could be a great professional development oppt'y.

• a minority of your students can provide unfiltered access to the web to their mates in our increasingly collaborative classrooms,

• watching TV is no longer the de-facto spare time activity that I'm going to simple force people to watch it when they claim not to understand how I have no time to watch television.

• every interaction with a customer / client / patron /  stakeholder / visitor is a marketing interaction. It’s  an opportunity for us to build or erode our brand, a chance to increase or  decrease the trust and goodwill of the people with whom we are interacting.
• every time a parent walks  away unhappy from an encounter at school, that’s a marketing interaction.
• Every time a member of the  community walks through an uninviting building,

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• • OK, I'm scared.
• • remember Gattica?
• a new social-networking service that allows customers to compare their DNA.
• encourage consumers to get DNA testing, potentially creating a novel research resource in the process
• people can find each other by their alleles
• most of the controversy centered on the medical applications. Customers can learn their genetic risk, compared with the general population, of myriad diseases, including Alzheimer's, diabetes, macular degeneration, and cancer. But many scientists and physicians say that it's unclear whether the average user can truly comprehend this information, and whether knowing her genetic risk will actually improve her health
• allows people to compare their genome with those of family members, friends, and even strangers who have offered up their DNA data

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