via youtube.com
Lovely storytelling
via thedailyshow.com
John Stewart interviewed Akbar Ahmed who did a study of Islam in American and provided some interesting historical perspectives about what the founding fathers thought of Islam. Worth a watch.
Sorry for the commercials at the start, but that's how Comedy Central does it. The interview starts at about 14:30 seconds in. You can fast forward.
-->Do your teachers/staff need to make their own website? Install OpenScholar from Harvard and you're off and running, no HTML knowledge needed. Very slick. And open source.
Q&A: Rumors, Cyberbullying and Anonymity
By DAVID POGUE
Published: July 22, 2010
via nytimes.com
David Pogue interviewed John Palfrey, co-director of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society about online rumors, cyberbullying, and more. It's worth a read if you work with children or have children of your own.
On a side note, I've been following John Palfrey for years after I met him at the 2005 NYSAIS tech/library conference (which I now co-chair). My blog post about it here. His blog post about meeting me is here. One of the other directors of the Berkman Center is Jonathan Zittrain who is also a Shady Side Academy alumnus, like me.
via nytimes.com
This article on tools to catch/thwart cheating made me sad. This kind of stuff has no place in a school context. If we need video cameras to monitor students we must be designing schools and assessments wrong. Our systems need corrected, not supplanted with monitoring technology. Totally grossed out right now.
I came across SchoolTVmadeEasy.com when looking for resources for my school's budding TV news production team. It's very useful if you use Adobe Visual Communicator as your software platform, and fairly useful even if you use a different solution.
Wow, this trailer for Waiting for Superman was difficult to watch. It appears to present a critical eye of how school works, from a parent/student point of view. Real assistance is needed for schools, and I'm at a total loss for what that help might look like. I am hopeful, but nervous all at the same time.
via @cacrandall
via moma.org
I just went to the Museum of Modern Art on a 10th grade studio art show. We were there to see the work of William Kentridge, a South African Artist. I won't do justice with an explanation, so I encourage you to check out their web version of the exhibition and of course, the real thing at the museum.
It is some of the most incredible drawing I have ever seen, and combined into a film medium with stop-motion animation that will blow your mind. The technical complexity was beyond comprehension, and the splicing of imagery, sound, film techniques, drawing, and more are simply sublime.
Because one of our teachers is a "Modern Educator," we were able to go on a day where the museum is normally closed to the public, and I even got a free pass to go anytime through September 2010. Sweet! Now, to wait on line when the museum is open to the public, argh.
I had a great conversation with our 7th and 8th graders about formspring a few weeks ago, which I blogged about here. I thought that the article by Rachel Simmons was pretty poor. She starts with, “Last week, a Long Island high school senior committed suicide, and the website Formspring.me is suspected as a cause.” She links to an article which says just the opposite! See these quotes from the article she linked to:
“Alexis' parents downplayed the Internet role, saying their daughter was in counseling before she ever signed up with formspring.me, a new social site, where many of the attacks appeared.”
"I believe in my heart that cyberbullying wasn't the cause of Lexi's death," said her mother, Paula Pilkington. "This is a mistake."
It also didn’t recognize what the site is capable of in a positive way. For instance, I purchased a new dining table that is unfinished wood, and wasn’t sure how best to treat it. So, I went to this wonderful design bloggers website and asked her a question about wood treatment via her formspring. She replied to me within an hour. Problem solved. By an expert. There is a place for every technology tool, and there’s a poor way to use all of them, too. That’s what parents and students have to negotiate.
The bigger issue here is talking to students about “anonymous” behavior on the Internet, and what it entails. I gave the girls a guiding principle that anonymous places on the Internet tend to encourage bad behavior and discourage good behavior. We want them to learn that lesson because formspring will be passé tomorrow (it actually sort of already is), and they have to be able to apply the same principles to the next new thing.
Rachel Simmon's gut instinct reaction and advice to parents is summed up in her point:
So what to do? Here’s what I suggest. Start a conversation with your daughter about Formspring. Ask her if people at school use it (don’t start off by grilling her about what she does or she may scare and fly away). Ask her what she thinks of it. Then ask her if she uses it.
If she says yes, tell her she’s banned for life from the website. Period.
This completely misses the mark. If you think you can solve problems by banning use, you're in for real trouble when kids experience the same problems in new venues - they won't tell you when they stumble into a mess for fear that you'll ban them from it. Prepare them for the world they are living in. Teach them about how it works. Set family expectations and guidelines. Connecting the tragedy of a girl with serious psychological issues to a website is hyperbole, and won't get you very far in setting your kids up for success.
Ms. Simmons, if you're reading, I'd love to talk to you more about this.
"Tolerance" is surely an imperfect term, yet the English language offers no single word that embraces the broad range of skills we need to live together peacefully.
The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. used the Greek term "agape" to describe a universal love that "discovers the neighbor in every man it meets." The various disciplines concerned with human behavior have also offered a variety of adjectives: "pro-social," "democratic," "affiliative."
In its Declaration on the Principles of Tolerance, UNESCO offers a definition of tolerance that most closely matches our philosophical use of the word:
Tolerance is respect, acceptance and appreciation of the rich diversity of our world's cultures, our forms of expression and ways of being human. Tolerance is harmony in difference.We view tolerance as a way of thinking and feeling — but most importantly, of acting — that gives us peace in our individuality, respect for those unlike us, the wisdom to discern humane values and the courage to act upon them.
via tolerance.org
Many people don't like the word "tolerance." I really like it. People have said to me that they feel it suggests that we should "tolerate" people who are different than us. I think the Teaching Tolerance explanation of word choice is elegant and clearly deals with the potential problem of wording. Do you use "tolerance" in your diversity discussions? Should we?
side note: Teaching Tolerance is one of the best educational resources I've ever come upon. It has material on so many issues from class to race to gender to sexual orientation to gender, and many more that I'm missing.