Dangerously Irrelevant

I was disappointed to read recently in the Des Moines Register that Kalona Elementary School here in Iowa is discontinuing its Arabic language program due to lack of funding. Not only is it wonderful when school systems teach languages to kids at the elementary rather than secondary level, this country benefits from having more people who know how to speak Arabic.

In 2006 the United States government established the National Strategic Language Initiative (NSLI), “an inter-agency effort … to dramatically increase the number of Americans learning, speaking, and teaching critical need foreign languages.” Languages targeted by the NSLI include Arabic, Bengali, Chinese, Darwazi, Farsi, Hindi, Korean, Russian, and Turkish. The NSLI has a number of programs for K-12 schools. Its August 2008 report noted that nearly 47,000 elementary and secondary students had been served to date.

Finding qualified instructors to teach these languages often is difficult for school systems. Finding initial or ongoing funding is a challenge as well. As a society, however, we need to figure out how to make this happen. French, German, and Spanish – the holy trinity of school language instruction – still are important languages but the growing ascendancy of non-Western countries on the global stage also makes other languages important for both economic and cultural reasons.

Photo credit: EidMubarak

Yesterday Ben Grey highlighted an issue that often arises when educators think about technology initiatives:

If a public school teacher writes a grant for technology, but the district can’t sustain the program in other buildings or potentially refresh the equipment once it reaches end of life, should the grant be granted? Is it better to deny the students in the classroom where the grant would be in effect so as to ensure equity across the district, or is it better to afford students an opportunity to reach higher, even if it means others won’t have that experience? Would allowing the grant to go forward specifically advantage one group of students over another, and thus present ethical issues for a public entity?

The person I was talking with was adamant that we should not allow classrooms to have that which other classes in the district can’t.

Is this all-or-none mindset equity or idiocy? Head over to Ben’s blog and chime in on the conversation.

[hat tip to Kelly Hines for pointing me to Ben’s post]

I’ve probably watched this video clip of Paul Potts a dozen times and I still choke up when I see it [click on picture to see video]:

Now Britain has Susan Boyle:

There’s a lot of undiscovered potential out there. As schools and societies, we often fail to create the conditions in which talent can be nurtured, recognized, and utilized. I hope that one of the lasting impacts of this Internet age will be that people’s skills and talents get noticed and used more effectively. Sure, there still will be a lot of junk that will get in the way of this happening. But the potential for ordinary citizens to express their talents and reach others is greater than it ever has been before.

Do you have a story of undiscovered talent in your local school organization? I bet you do…

I’m pleased to announce that Jeff Mao, Learning Technology Policy Director for the State of Maine, will be our first-ever official guest at 4 Guys Talking. Jeff will be joining us on Monday, April 20, at 2:00pm Central to share the latest on Maine’s statewide 1:1 laptop initiative, including its recent push to expand the program to include all students in grades 7 through 12.

We have started brainstorming some questions for Jeff on our wiki page. Feel free to add yours! You also may wish to first listen to Jeff’s conversation with the EdTechTalk crew back in June 2007. Hope you’ll join us on Monday!

Photo credit: An Apple in the dark 2

This is a long overdue post that Episode 3 of 4 Guys Talking, the new ‘talk radio’ podcast series from CASTLE, is now available. As usual, our conversation ranged a bit but our focus was on reinventing schools. Justin Bathon said that we may have been a little negative. You’ll have to listen to see if you concur.

FYI, you’ll see that we had some hosting glitches at the beginning. If you start at 5:45 into the podcast, you’ll skip all of our confusion!

You can download the podcast or listen to a Web-streamed version here:

• www.blogtalkradio.com/uceacastle

You also can subscribe to the 4 Guys Talking feed using iTunes or a RSS reader.

Thanks to those of you who joined us live, either by calling in or listening over the Web. Future dates/times are as follows (all times Central):

• April 20, 2pm to 3pm
• May 11, 9am to 10am
• May 26, 1pm to 2pm

My hopes to rework CASTLE Conversations, the old CASTLE podcast channel (which will include all previous and podcasts such as 4 Guys Talking), are on hold until the end of my semester. I'll post about it when it's ready.

Happy listening!

A pilot study at Ohio State University has found that Facebook users in college have lower grades and spend less time studying. I pieced together the following chart from the news release:

Aryn Karpinski, a co-author of the study and doctoral student in education at Ohio State University, said that:

There may be other factors involved, such as personality traits, that link Facebook use and lower grades. It may be that if it wasn’t for Facebook, some students would still find other ways to avoid studying, and would still get lower grades. But perhaps the lower GPAs could actually be because students are spending too much time socializing online.

The news release noted that:

Typically, Facebook users in the study had GPAs between 3.0 and 3.5, while non-users had GPAs between 3.5 and 4.0. In addition, users said they averaged one to five hours a week studying, while non-users studied 11 to 15 hours per week.

Karpinski said it was significant that the link between lower grades and Facebook use was found even in graduate students.  She said that graduate students generally have GPAs above 3.5, so the fact that even they had lower grades when they used Facebook — and spent less time studying – was an amazing finding.

My reaction when I started reading the news release was “They found some undergrads who aren’t using Facebook?” Then, sure enough, I found when I calculated the numbers that there were a mere 15 undergraduate non-Facebook users in the study.

I confess that I’m a little wary of some of Karpinski’s generalizations. Although she noted that other factors may be involved besides Facebook use or non-use, the ones that she hypothesized have to do with personality traits and/or predilection for online socialization.

Right now I’m not totally convinced that these findings don’t just represent the fact that about 80% of her non-Facebook users were graduate students. I think it’s safe to say that grad students generally spend more time studying than undergrads. Also, as she noted, grad students’ GPAs typically are higher.

In my mind, the overall generalizations from the study don’t seem to adequately recognize the extremely heavy skew in the non-Facebook group toward graduate students. If I saw that the data (to which she alluded) show that the lower grade trend for grad students was of equivalent size to the undergrad group, then I’d have more confidence in the overall generalizations that are being made in the news release.

Maybe Karpinski will find this post and share some more about her study. Clearly it’s a provocative topic and, if replicated at a larger scale, might provide some really useful information. While her data likely won’t curb Facebook use among college students, they might at least help us understand the potential impact of social networking on postsecondary academic achievement.

One final note: We all should look at – and think carefully about – any research findings that get reported out like this. We need to ask questions like Does this make gut-level sense? and Are the generalizations limited to the data or overbroad? and What more do I need to know to be confident in these findings?. Being informed consumers of research is critical if we are to make research- and/or data-driven decisions to benefit our students.

Tomorrow is Iowa State University’s first-ever symposium for the new ComETS group here on campus. Modeled after a similar group at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, ComETS is an attempt to bring together all of the folks at the university who care about technology integration into one place. George Siemens from the University of Manitoba is our headliner; he’s doing a morning workshop and an afternoon keynote for us. Other events on the schedule include affinity group meetings and ‘lightning strike’ sessions on interesting technologies.

To conclude the symposium, I’m moderating a panel of students that will be discussing how they think about technology in their personal and academic lives. I’ve set up a wiki page where we’re generating questions for the students. If you’d like to add a question, please do!

I’ll probably be live-blogging George’s keynote and/or workshop tomorrow. Stay tuned at my Twitter feed for more details…

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