Group items tagged

Most of our communication technologies began as diminished substitutes for an impossible activity.

These inventions were not created to be improvements upon face-to-face communication, but a declension of acceptable, if diminished, substitutes for it.

we began to prefer the diminished substitutes.

it’s easier to check in without becoming entangled.

Each step “forward” has made it easier, just a little, to avoid the emotional work of being present, to convey information rather than humanity.

My daily use of technological communication has been shaping me into someone more likely to forget others.

Regardless of how they might appear, all educators think they are doing a good job and suggesting the opposite will only make them more defensive and less open to any recommendation for changing.

Fear freezes people into place and prevents meaningful change.

Most bullying-prevention efforts emphasize what shouldn’t happen:“Don’t bully others.” The implicit message is that the schools themselves don’t have to change; they just have to make sure that bullying doesn’t happen.

many students who bully learn to do it under the radar of adult supervision. Traditional rewards and consequences have little if any impact on bullying behavior in schools.

Tell a different story.

Stand on principles.

Translate principles into specific words and actions.

Get adult behavior aligned with principles.

All students can lead.

Becoming a more caring and respectful school community is the means and the ends towards preventing and reducing bullying in schools.

most students have unfettered access to these forbidden sites through the phones in their pockets and backpacks, on their home computers and in many public libraries – often with no adult guidance

it has to be learned in context in a supportive environment,”

(a) obscene; (b) child pornography; or (c) harmful to minors.”

defining the three measures is up to each community, creating widely varied implementation from district to district

and their answer to any requests was usually no.

Their view was that if the filter is blocking it, there’s no reason for you to see it,”

Krull implemented a teacher login system that lets staff override some blocked sites. He’s working on a similar system for students that would grant varying degrees of access depending on grade level.

nearly three times as many teachers of low-income students than those with middle- and high-income students said this lack of access was a “major challenge” in their ability “to incorporate more digital tools into their teaching.”

eliminating filters isn’t the answer to debugging the problems with CIPA.

There’s not a right or wrong; it’s a lot about community values

“It’s not if you have a filter or not, it’s really about to what degree do you filter, how do you filter?”

Seeing more and more aspects of our lives as games to win through maximization has a sort of self-perpetuating effect with perverse consequences, not the least of which is the impairment of what Diesing terms social rationality; the cherishing of unique relationships, personal connectedness, cooperative functioning, solidarity and sentiment.

If winning efficiently is the goal, then the rules (ethical, moral, legal, and spiritual), are essentially obstacles to game.

In our schools, competition for access to elite preschools, for grades, for social status, in sports, over positions of leadership, and for admission to exclusive colleges transforms one of our most basic institutions for fostering community, ethics and learning into competitive, individualistic corporate training-grounds. In these settings, the importance of competitive sports becomes paramount, for both financial and training purposes, and the artistry of cheating (see this year's Stuyvesant High School cheating scandal) and rule-bending (see Joe Paterno) revered. Such intense competition encourages the professionalization of parenting -- through tutors, highly-educated nannies, prep courses, and professional training camps (such as investment camps). You can imagine the deleterious effects these trends have on the ethos of care and moral responsibility in our families and schools, a critical buffer against bullying and violence in the lives of our children.

We become hyper-connected through technologies, boasting our number of "friends" on Facebook, and have less and less intimacy.

We choose friends with benefits or Internet porn over romantic relationships as they are less messy, more efficient.

Life is a race and we are losing.

The prescription for Facebook despair is less Facebook. Researchers found that face-to-face or phone interaction — those outmoded, analog ways of communication — had the opposite effect. Direct interactions with other human beings led people to feel better.

What needs to be taught is skills, not just information, and certainly not all the inaccurate information so much “Internet safety education” has disseminated over nearly two decades.

“properties” (“persistence,” “searchability,” “replicability,” and “scalability”) and “dynamics” (“invisible audiences,” “collapsed contexts,” and “the blurring of public and private”) – and now some of those, e.g., “persistence,” are changing with the arrival of “ephemeral,” or disappearing, digital media in services

media is both social and digital.

full, healthy participation in participatory media, culture and society.

what protects children online is what protects them offline.

life skills, literacies and safeguards that are both internal – respect for self and others, resilience, empathy, and a strong inner guidance system (sometimes called a moral compass) – and external, such as good modeling, parenting and teaching by caring adults, peer mentoring, instruction in digital and media literacy, social-emotional learning, protective technology used thoughtfully, family and school rules, well-designed digital environments, and well-established laws against discrimination, sexual harassment, bullying, and crime.

teach the skills of today’s very social digital media: digital literacy, media literacy and social literacy, which together address both media-specific risk reduction and proficiency in participatory media use.

ACCESS

ANALYZE

CREATE

REFLECT

“ACT:

These are the competencies that students need to navigate participatory media and culture.

providing access and opportunities to analyze, create, reflect and act as much with digital media as with older media right in core academic classes, schools are affording them the skills, community, and self-actualization that increase safety (resilience) as well as efficacy in and out of media. This is the real “Internet safety [or competency]” that needs to be taught in schools.