my sometimes-skeptical social commentary

Archive for the ‘education’ Category

A friend at work wanted to give me a copy of this flyer, but I don’t have a copier, so I used my iSight camera to capture the details. I may go to the lecture… not sure yet.

the poster says:
Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Author and Environmental Activist
Keynote Speaker for the 2007 Daemen College Academic Festival

Wednesday, April 25, 2007, 7:30 p.m.

Wick Center at Daemen College
4380 Main Street, in Amherst
Event Information: Daemen College Conference & Events Office 839-8253

Free and open to the public

Why do we live where we live? I don’t mean, why do we live in a region of New York State that has snow and cold weather and high taxes and a losing NFL team, I mean, why do we choose to live in one neighborhood instead of another?

I suppose for most people, there’s an easy answer. For me and my family, we chose to live in what we feel is a good school district.

In the city of Buffalo, there are a lot of great houses. There are also a lot of shabby houses and abandoned houses and vacant lots. In the outer suburbs, there are people complaining that their farms are being turned into suburban developments. Too bad we can’t get the people building houses in the ‘burbs to move into the city. Imagine the tax base we’d have in place to support a great school district if that happened.

But why did folks move out of the city in the first place? Was it just the schools?

When I used to teach English, (many many years ago!) when I taught a unit on research, I banned students from the computers until after they had already hit the more traditional media for research. I gave them a checklist and assigned points to journals, newspapers, books, even the encyclopedia, and took off points if they used the internet (which was actually capitalized Internet back then), before they completed the other steps of the research. I did this because I knew (from experience) that students wouldn’t bother with traditional sources if they found “enough” material on the computers first.

Now I read that some schools are banning the use of wikipedia for research:

History professors at Middlebury College recently prohibited using Wikipedia as a research source in tests & essays. Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales last year discouraged students from using Wikipedia–or any encyclopedia–as a reference for academic research.

The declaration has got scholars and other information professionals engaged in an interesting discussion about the best use of open-source content. (Read the whole article at C|Net.

I think that the point is not that you can’t trust wikipedia, or other internet-based resources. The point is that you can’t trust any one resource on its own. A scholar needs to know how to tell the difference between good sources and bad sources. In other words, a scholar needs to know how to find multiple sources on the same topic and be able to compare them qualitatively. In other words, a scholar needs to know how to think, not just copy/paste.

Really?

I missed the startup of the LiveJournal online community by a few years. I knew people who were using it back when it first started, but I didn’t join, for a few different reasons, and it feels like it’s too late to join now. And I missed the big startup of mySpace and FaceBook and other social networking sites. As a latecomer to those social networking sites, I have not yet made a significant number of online connections. I did get onto the giant surfboard called flickr.com, though, and haven’t looked back (though I have never been able to attend a single Buffalo flickr meetup).

And I blog. WordPress, the software I use to blog, is mostly a stand-alone program. You can either buy your own domain name and host your own blog, or sign up for an account on WordPress.com, but either way, your blog is fairly independent of other blogs. You can choose your own color scheme, font, pictures, layout, how you want your posts to appear, etc. Even the way you link to other blogs and other web sites is your own choice.

There are some “plugins” for WordPress that users can install to do stuff beyond basic blogging, such as photo galleries, calendars, email lists, and with RSS subscriptions, there are ways of connecting blogs to other blogs and other syndicated sources. I think some of the better plugins and other tools are making WordPress work together with other blogs, creating more of the social networking aspects of mySpace and FaceBook.

Is that better? Depends, I guess, on your value of “online friends” compared to just regular friends. I recently signed up with a service called my blog log. As with any new service, its perceived value is only as great as its popularity. Imagine if only 100 people were using mySpace, it would quickly die off and be replaced by a more popular competitor.

To a certain extent, these new tools might make-it-or-break-it depending on the kind of people they attract. Let’s say there’s a really cool, super easy tool, but only people who ride bikes find it and use it. Depending on how many bicyclists are interested in this kind of online tool, it might never get popular enough to make any money (through advertising or subscriptions) and then it would fail. So you may have noticed over the years that some new online communities disappear, or at least the people you know stop using the service.

Which brings me to a point I hope isn’t too pedestrian. There is another kind of social networking that this online phenomenon is to a certain extent supplanting: face-to-face social networking. Remember the old days when you would go to a party and meet people that you had never met before, but they were friends of your friends? That is social networking. When I started my current job about five years ago, I was invited to a shindig or two and met people that I really liked, but whom I never would have met in the otherwise never-widening gyre of my own social circle.

Back before there even was an internet, even before they were capitalizing “Internet”, I knew some people who would have regular Monday-night dinners, taking turns at whose house it would be held. I’ve always wanted to host something like that, because I really feel lively when we’re socializing. I even had this idea that I would start a karaoke night (there is Mac software that I could use to play the music AND display the lyrics on a TV, how cool would that be?), just to have a good reason to have people who might not otherwise have anything in common over.

Well, sometimes life gets in the way of having a social life. I work two jobs, I take classes toward another degree, I have two kids who keep me busy in a good way. My friends (and potential new friends) have the same level of complication in their lives. Some of their lives are more complicated, more busy. Karaoke night has never happened.

So a lot of people resort to using the Web 2.0 to make meaningful social connections. There are some people I think will say that it’s better on the web than (a) hanging out in a bar or (b) sitting through meetings at a church or (c) stressfully pushing their awake-time too far into the night after a long day’s work in order to get together with some friends and some strangers and drive a half-hour home afterwards.

Some will say that they cherish their late-night online postings, when they get to sit quietly and read the blogs they actually like, and then carefully compose a comment for someone else’s entry or follow the links from that other blog to interesting articles, and use the time to edit their own blog postings. (I’m writing this posting mid-day, while two children are playing loudly in the living room. So forgive me if it go astray or sue me if I go to fast.)

Since I work at an educational institution that putatively prepares the next generation of teachers, we’ve been talking about how technology is (or isn’t) used to augment the educator’s skills. More than just having a PowerPoint presentation. We’ve been talking about the nature of the technological interaction between people, but specifically between students and teachers. Old-skool educationalists don’t believe it’s worth their time. Maybe they’re still upset that kids are using IM-speak in essays. (I remember how sickened I felt when I first saw a veteran English teacher allowing his students to read pulp instead of something from the Western canon.)

But there’s a different kind of interaction online. We don’t have to write in complete sentences, and sometimes someone will take an online discussion thread and run in the wrong direction with it, but when I look through old forum archives, what I see is that we’ve been exercising the thoughts-to-language muscles in our brains. It works in classrooms, and it works in blogs. Yes, we can easily delete something we said in the heat of the moment, but we also know it’s possible that someone will just post their copy of it elsewhere. It’s almost like the review process of academic publishing, only faster, and while it is sometimes dumber, it has the potential to be smarter, too. It would be a sad loss not to use it for what it can do.

As always, your comments are appreciated.

In the scan (above) of the last page of my test booklet (remember those blue books?), you might notice that I didn’t finish the last question, because I ran out of time, but I wrote enough of an answer that the professor was able to tell what I was doing and give me points for my answer.

Also, you might be thinking “he spelled kennel wrong”, but that is how the exam was written by the instructor, so that’s how I wrote my Java program.

This is the exam I wrote about recently that I was not studying for, did you read that entry? One of you readers wished me luck (in Java code, how cool is that!), and in fact, I did well. I missed one part of a question where a sample program was calling a non-static method from a static context, and I missed a part of a question where I was writing a constructor method and forgot to pass the parameters, but those were minor problems, and I got the second-best grade in the class (the student who beat me took C++ programming in high school, so he already knows all this stuff).