Whether it's the stick figure portraits hastily scribbled while the teacher's back is turned, the comic book hidden in your World Cultures textbook, the Mad Magazine under the covers with the flashlight, the dime novel hidden in the corn crib, or trying to burp softly enough that the adults don't notice but loudly enough to make your cousin laugh in church, kids and envelope-pushing go together.

A lot of good education happens when people are pushed outside their comfort zones. For some of today's kids, that means we should force them to read longer books. For some of today's teachers, that means we should force them to use MySpace as the basis of their next lesson plan.

I realize I'm preaching to the choir here, but the more teachers, parents, and concerned community leaders are out there in the social networking spaces, interacting with kids where they already live, the better off we'll all be.

Dennis G. Jerz
Jerz's Literacy Weblog

I'm with you, Dennis. I'm sick to this knee-jerk reaction to technology. Oh, it's "cool" and all the kids are into it; of course it must be bad! Somehow, it must be evil and corrupt, else they would hate it.

I must admit, though, that it's not always just the teachers who are resistant to this stuff. Students who have learned to excel in "old-fashioned" environments are some of the worst haters of innovation. "oohhh, please just let me write a paper!!! pleeeeaassse..." Shudder..By the Twinkie, if I have to read one more student evaluation complaining about "all this technology" I'm going to drop everything and play Nancy Drew: Danger on Deception Island.

Given that this is an amendment to a pre-existing statute, I see the proposed changes as both good and bad. The bad is the obvious--what we're reacting against now. The good is that the proposed change includes langauge that allows the filters/monitors/whatever to be turned off for two purposes: educational activities that are 'supervised' by taking place in a class-with-teacher-present context and for use by adults who are using the system without minors present.

Of course, the part of this and many similar attempts to legislate a kind of false sense of security based on some vaguely-defined moral imperative that really irks me is the stricture against content or activities that are "harmful to minors" -- but what exactly that might be is never adequately defined (or in this case not defined at all, but it apparently is anything someone in power doesn't like that isn't obviously sexual predation or obscenity, which are listed as separate categories of malfeasance).

So at least this takes context into account and provides some small acknowledgement that the use of "the Internets" shouldn't be banned altogether from the classroom (although I'll bet these legislatures long for the good ol' days of kids with pencils and paper--the biggest problem at that time was no running--someone could get an eye poked out...)

...you can bet that somewhere, anti-pencil legistlation will be drafted by an advocate of slate and chalks.

Dennis G. Jerz
Jerz's Literacy Weblog

I realize I'm preaching to the choir here, but the more teachers, parents, and concerned community leaders are out there in the social networking spaces, interacting with kids where they already live, the better off we'll all be.

You said it. I think it's interesting in our society that adults actively seek a seperation from their children like this. For whatever reason, they don't (on the whole, I'm saying) want to interact with their kids in a setting where their kids are comfortable.

For instance, what would be wrong with parents developing a MySpace profile for the family? Each kid could have their own MySpace profile added as a friend, they could post bulletins, read each other's blogs, etc. It would seriously open up communication between parents and their kids. They'd actually have some sense of what was going on in their kids' lives, for one thing.

Classroom profiles could be created for a similar purpose as well.

I think part of the problem is that parents, educators, and the authorities in general (Foo, Congress!), just don't want to embrace technology. They reluctantly make use of it, but where kids are concerned it's just easier for them to censor anything they don't want to take part in.

Sexual Predators don't have to be the only adults on MySpace. It's just that they're the only ones interested enough in young people to check it out. Think about that. It's a little sick, isn't it?

This hullabaloo reminds me of the whole usenet scare back in '96 I think it was. I believe the scare resulted from a study done at Carnegie Mellon, but I'm not about to search it out. The "study" looked at four newsgroups devoted specifically to pornographic images and found that, lo and behold, 98 percent (or some similar number) of what was in those newsgroups was--are you ready for this?--pornographic! Astonishing!

This, in and of itself, wasn't the problem. The problem was that this mis-reading quickly became evidence that 98 percent of the internet was pornographic, and comments to this effect were then made on the floor of the US Senate. Time magazine ran a cover article on this moral cesspool known as the internet (couldn't even keep it restricted to usenet). They circumvented their usual rules and publishing process in order to get the "exclusive" so none of the material was fact checked or vetted.

What Time got was an exclusive bunch of b.s. while heaping tinder on the fires of hysteria. About all I can conclude is most of our elected representatives are morons and they have a hard time with reality. So here we go, what's new is old and what's old is new again, and again and again ad nauseum.

bradley
bleckblog.org