Schoolboys plotted massacre online

Informing ourselves to death?

Been reading some classic Neil Postman stuff. This is from a speech given in 1990:

The computer and its information cannot answer any of the fundamental questions we need to address to make our lives more meaningful and humane. The computer cannot provide an organizing moral framework. It cannot tell us what questions are worth asking. It cannot provide a means of understanding why we are here or why we fight each other or why decency eludes us so often, especially when we need it the most. The computer is, in a sense, a magnificent toy that distracts us from facing what we most needed to confront -- spiritual emptiness, knowledge of ourselves, usable conceptions of the past and future. Does one blame the computer for this? Of course not. It is, after all, only a machine. But it is presented to us, with trumpets blaring, as at this conference, as a technological messiah.

Through the computer, the heralds say, we will make education better, religion better, politics better, our minds better -- best of all, ourselves better. This is, of course, nonsense, and only the young or the ignorant or the foolish could believe it .... it is only a machine but a machine designed to manipulate and generate information. That is what computers do, and therefore they have an agenda and an unmistakable message.

There is no escaping from ourselves. The human dilemma is as it has always been, and we solve nothing fundamental by cloaking ourselves in technological glory.

Nine in 10 US babies watch TV

About 90 per cent of US children under age 2 and as many as 40 per cent of infants under three months are regular watchers of television, DVDs and videos, researchers said on Monday.

They said the number of young kids watching TV was much greater than expected.

"We don't know from the study whether it is good or bad. What we know is that it is big," said Frederick Zimmerman of the University of Washington, whose research appears in the Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine.

A second study suggested excessive TV viewing could lead to attention and learning problems down the road.

The American Academy of Pediatrics estimates that children in the United States watch about four hours of television every day. They recommend that children under age 2 should not watch any and older children should watch no more than 2 hours a day of quality programming.

But 29 per cent of parents surveyed by Zimmerman and colleagues believed baby-oriented TV and DVD programs offered educational benefits.

"Parents are getting the message loud and clear from marketers of TV and videos that this is good for their kids. That it will help their brain development ... None of this stuff has ever been proven," Zimmerman said in a telephone interview.

Teacher fury at rating website, or ...

student's get some much needed payback?

Have those teachers who are complaining about websites such as ratemyteachers forgotten that they are in the business of passing partial, half-formed, and powerful ratings on their students?

This whole beat up is a good example of how many 'grown ups' just don't get (understand) how young people interact with each other and new media.

Robert Marley sang, 'Slave driver the tables have turned ... catch-a-fire you're gonna get burned'

Bring on ratemypolitician

Xavier pupils suspended after bullying caught on film

um?

Tech threatens family bonding: study

A study conducted by Australian Telco, AAPT, has investigated a range of parental attitudes towards young people's use of technologies. 1000 parents were 'surveyed'.

About 40 per cent of Australian parents believe their children's fixation with technology is robbing the family of precious face-to-face time, a study has found.

The research by telco AAPT has revealed that 16 to 20-year-olds spend an average of 3.2 hours a day using technology.

This compares with just two hours of face-to-face communication spent with parents.

Almost half of the 1000 parents surveyed believed two hours was not enough time and would prefer about seven hours of face-to-face time with their children throughout the day.

Despite this, almost 80 per cent believe technology has dramatically helped their family to stay in contact.

Interesting stuff of course. I recall something about studies done on the very low average time most fathers spend interacting with their teenage children each day: less than a minute.

It seems to me that here again, in research such as this where parents are interviewed about the 'problems' associated with their children's technology use, the responses are inevitably negative, with undercurrents that appeal to fears about alienation, social fragmention, addiction, youth deviance etc while at the same time finding that people also recognise the ways communication technologies have enabled broader family interactions.

While these two different 'findings' seem to be in contradiction, they are fairly normal findings. One one hand you have a kind of moral discourse about what good or normal adolescence should be with behaviours which fall outside of this being seen as a problem. The problem is of course technology, or violent computer games or internet addiction, or some other technological deterministic view of the power of technology to influence social behaviour of itself, as if technologies have some power to take over humans, or to influence those with less moral fibre or less will power to resist the urges to give in to it.

On the other hand, the discourse of technological advanncement suggests that communication technologies have radically altered social behaviours and allowed us to do things that were not possible in the past.

I guess in the end these two different discourses are not that different.

Research like this taps into such discourses, fears, insecurities, hype and hope, and rather than offer anything new, tends to perpetuate the same kind of simplistic view of young people's use of technologies: as dupes, deviates or cyberkids.

How to be an education expert (and warrior)

This is by Mercurius Goldstein (what's in a name ... right!) posted over at Larvatus Prodeo. Keep it coming MG.

Mercurius says:

Well, here’s my review of “Dumbing Down”. Actually it’s a review I wrote for Dr D’s last book, but I’ve since found you can use to review everything he’s ever written. It’s a kind of meta-review.

HOW TO BE AN EDUCATION EXPERT

You too can enjoy the public acclaim and consultancy fees that come with being an education expert! Just follow this prescription for success and a government grant can’t be far behind…

1. There is a crisis in education - your business depends upon it. Take every opportunity you can to point out the crisis in education. Think of it as advertising.

2. Teachers are Marxists. Teachers who deny they are Marxists are postmodern Marxists, which is worse.

3. Postmodernism is a world-view that makes it impossible for people to see that you are right. Postmodernism causes teenagers to challenge authority and spell badly. Before postmodernism, these problems did not exist.

4. There aren’t enough men in teaching. And by men, I mean real men, not these postmodern Marxist nancy-boys you see flouncing about our public schools (there’s something suspicious about them…). Be careful not to make too much of this however, because men will demand the same salaries they can get in other professions.

5. Repeat after me: repetition works. Studies have shown that a claim becomes true if you say it over and over again without listening to any alternative suggestions. Studies have shown that a claim becomes true if you say it over and over again without listening to any alternative suggestions. Try to make your claims truer than everybody else’s.

6. Paying for private education is a noble act of self-sacrifice, made by parents without any thought for the future social or material benefits that may result. Parents who send their kids to private schools love their children more and are better people than public-school parents. If public-school parents only loved their children more, they would be able to afford a private education for them.

7. Public schools are not failing enough students, and are heartlessly providing them with nothing but support and encouragement. Fortunately, there is lots parents can do to balance things up. Start by telling your child every morning what a disappointment they are to you, and provide them with years of shaming and criticism. This will result in a happy, well-adjusted individual ready to negotiate in the modern workplace.

8. Teachers are to blame for teenage delinquency, moral relativism, greengrocers’ apostrophes, multicultural policy and Leo Sayer’s comeback. However, to give credit where it’s due, we should remember that when young Australians make great achievements, or grow up to be decent individuals holding down a job and raising a family, it is all thanks to their parents.

9. In the modern classroom, students don’t do any real work. Instead, they get given namby-pampy “assignments” where all they have to do is think of a topic, find research materials, form a logical argument based on the evidence and make a persuasive presentation to their classmates. But since they do all that without copying anything down from the blackboard, they haven’t really learnt anything, have they?

10. The golden rule: If you ever let anybody think that Australian education is doing well, they won’t give you any gold to fix it.

Walking the streets of Cyberia

A perspective from Robyn Treyvaud, a former teacher, who is a consultant to the Centre for Strategic Education. The CSE is headed up by Tony Mackay. Some interesting representation on the CES board.

This piece makes interesting reading next to my own views to be published in ACER's Teacher Magazine in the next couple of months, which you can also find here.

New call to 'teach basics'

More of the same from Dr Ken Rowe. Here he is speaking with an Age education writer, Caroline Milburn, who seems to enjoy reporting Ken's research and press releases. Dr Rowe, research director at the Australian Council for Education Research, has conducted a study investigating the connection between teaching methods, (or teacher inputs), and students learning (or student outputs). Here the teaching methods are systemtic, explicit phonics, referred to as 'extreme phonics' by other researchers.

After giving the teachers a crash course in back to basics teaching, Dr Rowe 'was suprised by the results' and found that the kids 'took off like rockets'. This kind of rocketing seems to be connected to Dr Rowe's ideal of Singaporean spelling success: '110,000 kids in year 6 in Singapore are significantly better spellers than a comparative group in NSW.'

Are there other measures of success for year 6 students? Other important abilities and skills that might be work talking about?

From the description of the research project, one wonders if Dr Rowe considered whether the improvement in student results might have occured despite his program intervention where teachers where taught how to teach the basics.

The simple act of telling teachers that you (as a researcher) are interested in seeing whether students results improve after you (the researcher) have taught the teachers some new (or old) method/content, is likely to have a variety of effects on the way teachers respond and go about their normal daily work.

A classic case of the Hawthorne effect? Or perhaps the Rowe effect?