Dangerously Irrelevant

photo © 2008 Eddie~S | more info (via: Wylio)

This morning the New York Times published a phenomenal article on the struggles of parents to

1. keep up with their kids’ digital lives, and
2. respond when children’s digital interactions turn negative.

There are no easy answers here, but the solution is not for us or our children to withdraw. Withdrawing doesn’t change the behavior; it just removes our ability to know about it. Instead, we must engage with our children and be actively involved in these interactions – not in a behind-their-back monitoring sense but in a caring, responsible adult sense – so that we can help them navigate these new interaction spaces in which we all now live.

I’m going to recommend this article to every parent I know (yes, it’s that good), and I suggest you do the same. I’m also going to have my 12-year-old daughter read it and then we’re going to talk about it. Check it out. This is important stuff.

Here’s a clip from a video on the retouching of photos in magazines: 

The above clip reminds me of this Dove commercial: 

Given the incredible amount of media that our students consume, is your school appropriately stressing media literacy with its students? What is your school system doing to educate parents about media literacy issues?

If you’re like me, you have trouble keeping up with all of the great videos that are out there. I love it when others help me separate the wheat from the chaff.

For my column this month for the School Administrators of Iowa newsletter, I listed a dozen videos that I thought would help spark educators’ thinking about the changes that are occurring around us. None of these are videos that we already have used in the technology leadership training that we’ve done statewide for principals and superintendents. 

School leaders and/or educator preparation programs could show these videos to practicing or preservice administrators and teachers, school boards, or community members to maintain a heightened sense of urgency for change. I usually recommend to administrators that, every time they’re face-to-face with a group, they show a video or share something they recently read or learned. They also could, for example, assign one of these videos as ‘homework’ ahead of a meeting. The important thing is to keep sharing how our world is changing and to keep discussing what it means for our educational practice.

Here’s my list, in no particular order:

1. Sir Ken Robinson, Changing education paradigms (11 minutes)
2. Sugatra Mitra, The child-driven education (17 minutes)
3. Clay Shirky, How cognitive surplus will change the world (13 minutes)
4. Chris Anderson, How web video powers global innovation (19 minutes)
5. Dean Shareski, Sharing: The moral imperative (25 minutes)
6. Henry Jenkins, TEDxNYED (18 minutes)
7. Daniel Pink, Drive: The surprising truth about what motivates us (11 minutes)
8. Dan Meyer, Math class needs a makeover (12 minutes)
9. Jeff Jarvis, TEDxNYED (17 minutes)
10. Lisa Nielsen, Response to principal who bans social media (4 minutes)
11. New Brunswick Department of Education, 21st century education in New Brunswick (6 minutes)
12. Charles Leadbeter, On innovation (19 minutes)

Happy viewing!

Image credit: iPod Nano 3rd generation

American students generally have the legal right to express their opinions at home on their free time using non-school computer equipment. So here are a few students expressing their opinions about their teachers…

Do you know what your students are saying at home about your school? Is this something that educators should care about or just ignore?

WARNING: Language often is not safe for work or young children.

UPDATE: Some of you have asked what my intent was in publishing these videos without context and/or inferred that I don’t like teachers because of this post. Here’s some of my thinking.

See also: Cell phone cameras in the K-12 classroom: Punishable offenses or student-citizen journalism?

Today’s front-page headline on the paper version of USA Today: Has social media gone too far?

Seriously? That’s the headline?

When a drunk driver runs over someone, do we blame the car? When an abusive spouse knifes his or her significant other, do we blame the knife? When an arsonist burns down a house, do we blame the match? When a robber shoots a victim, do we blame the gun?

The Internet is not like weapons or illegal drugs, which arguably are inherently dangerous. It’s more like a car or an ice pick: a useful tool that also can be misused, just like any other.

So we can put blame where it should be - squarely on the offender - or we can be stupid about this. We can address the core issue - education and parenting – or we can blame the tool. In each case, I vote for the former. How about you?

Much like the New Jersey librarian who ‘just said no to Wikipedia,’ New Jersey principal Anthony Orsini received national attention for his letter to parents encouraging them to ban Facebook for their children. Here is an excellent rejoinder by Lisa Nielsen:

[Elena Elliniadis, thanks for bringing this to my attention!]

A new video from New Brunswick, in the Did You Know? (Shift Happens) style. Well worth a watch! 

Here are three quotes from Stefana Broadbent’s excellent TED Talk:

there are new, hidden tensions that are actually happening between people and institutions — institutions that are the institutions that people inhabit in their daily life: schools, hospitals, workplaces, factories, offices, etc. And something that I see happening is something that I would like to call a sort of "democratization of intimacy."

And what do I mean by that? I mean that what people are doing is, in fact, they are sort of, with their communication channels, they are breaking an imposed isolation that these institutions are imposing on them.

AND

And this has become such a cultural norm that we actually school our children for them to be capable to do this cleavage.

If you think nursery, kindergarten, first years of school are just dedicated to take away the children, to make them used to staying long hours away from their family. And then the school enacts perfectly well, mimics perfectly all the rituals that we will start in offices, rituals of entry, rituals of exit, the schedules, the uniforms in this country, things that identify you, team-building activities, team building that will allow you to basically be with a random group of kids, or a random group of people that you will have to be with for a number of time. And of course, the major thing: learn to pay attention, to concentrate and focus your attention.

This only started about 150 years ago. It only started with the birth of modern bureaucracy, and of industrial revolution.

AND

every day, every single day, I read news that makes me cringe, like a 15-dollar fine to kids in Texas, for using, every time they take out their mobile phone in school. Immediate dismissal to bus drivers in New York, if seen with a mobile phone in a hand. Companies blocking access to IM or to Facebook. Behind issues of security and safety, which have always been the arguments for social control, in fact what is going on is that these institutions are trying to decide who, in fact, has a right to self determine their attention, to decide, whether they should, or not, be isolated. And they are actually trying to block, in a certain sense, this movement of a greater possibility of intimacy.

Our students – and our employees – are reappropriating their personal spheres. Good for them.

Not sure how I missed this video last October but, in case you haven't seen it, here's You can't be my teacher. Happy viewing!

Here’s a 59-minute webcast of a forum on what kids learn when they create with digital media. The forum was sponsored by the MacArthur Foundation, the National Writing Project, and the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation.