The current massive and unanticipated experiment in online education could transform higher education as we know it. We should begin these difficult conversations about the future of the liberal arts now, in cyberspace, before the new normal takes shape—whenever that may be. Even if we feel trapped in our own homes and beset with anxiety and cabin fever, we also have an opportunity to reconsider the aims of higher education not in the abstract but in this concrete historical moment, with attention to specific institutional needs, public policy proposals, ideological pressures, and the overarching economic crisis.
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shared by Ed Webb on 19 Sep 20
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Liberal Education after the Pandemic | AAUP - 1 views
www.aaup.org/...beral-education-after-pandemic
LiberalArts liberal_arts education future US USA pandemics economy sustainability science climate opinion
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A genuine commitment to ethical, historically aware, egalitarian, or democratic principles can land an individual in a world of trouble. I am thinking, for example, of the basic scientific literacy, historical awareness, and ethical commitment that equip an individual citizen to recognize the expertise of infectious disease specialists and reject the common sense of neighbors or the priorities and demands of an employer—or to spot the bogus claims, fundamental incompetence, or ethical depravity of some elected leaders. Such scientific literacy and basic familiarity with statistical analysis allow nonexperts to understand the arguments of climatologists and reject the sophistry of coworkers or talk show hosts or governors who point out, for example, that “the climate has always been changing.”
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The reason that individual institutions cannot pitch such potential outcomes under ordinary circumstances is that these intellectual faculties serve the public good but do not necessarily advance the economic interests or career objectives of individual prospective or current students, especially those incurring significant debt. Being a whistleblower, for example, is generally a costly, painful career move—but the public needs to know nonetheless if the US military is shooting civilians in the streets of Baghdad; or the pharmaceutical industry is engineering a profitable opioid epidemic; or the health insurance industry is denying legitimate claims.
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just as the current crisis represents an opportunity for the people who have been working hard to privatize everything imaginable, dismantle public education, sink net neutrality, and align higher education with the demands of prospective employers and industry moguls (think here of the interventions of the Koch brothers in higher education, for example), it also represents an opportunity to push for the basic conditions under which a liberal education might properly serve its public functions. We should use these months to advocate for the kinds of public policies, such as tuition-free higher education, that recognize liberal education as a common good. We must articulate the reasons why a liberal education is in fact a common good and why a liberal education is disfigured if it is made to promote the demands of prospective employers.
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We need a society capable of devising new and more humane social contracts, new political economies, new food and energy grids, and sustainable use of resources—whether or not these projects produce financial dividends for individual graduates or for their employers. An accessible, publicly funded liberal education decoupled from the demands of industry and prospective employers is the best way to prepare people to do these things.
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we should use these months of confinement to strategize about a long-term case for liberal education and for public investment in an educated citizenry. Now is the time to invest some of our intellectual capital in education advocacy that ultimately makes a difference not only in the lives of students but also for the collective well-being of our nation and the world
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shared by Caroline Bucky-Beaver on 12 Nov 08
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Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for Media Literacy Education - 1 views
wwwdev.ncte.org/...fairusemedialiteracy
medialiteracy bestpractices copyright fairuse 5 principles 2008 digitalcitizenship
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Fair use is the right to use copyrighted material without permission or payment under some circumstances -- especially when the cultural or social benefits of the use are predominant. It is a general right that applies even in situations where the law provides no specific authorization for the use in question -- as it does for certain narrowly defined classroom activities.
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guide identifies five principles that represent the media literacy education community’s current consensus about acceptable practices for the fair use of copyrighted materials
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code of best practices does not tell you the limits of fair use rights. Instead, it describes how those rights should apply in certain recurrent situations.
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Media literacy education distinctively features the analytical attitude that teachers and learners, working together, adopt toward the media objects they study. The foundation of effective media analysis is the recognition that: All media messages are constructed.Each medium has different characteristics and strengths and a unique language of construction.Media messages are produced for particular purposes.All media messages contain embedded values and points of view.People use their individual skills, beliefs and experiences to construct their own meanings from media messages.Media and media messages can influence beliefs, attitudes, values, behaviors, and the democratic process. Making media and sharing it with listeners, readers, and viewers is essential to the development of critical thinking and communication skills. Feedback deepens reflection on one’s own editorial and creative choices and helps students grasp the power of communication.
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Lack of clarity reduces learning and limits the ability to use digital tools. Some educators close their classroom doors and hide what they fear is infringement; others hyper-comply with imagined rules that are far stricter than the law requires, limiting the effectiveness of their teaching and their students’ learning.
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Educators and learners in media literacy often make uses of copyrighted materials that stand far outside the marketplace, for instance, in the classroom, at a conference, or within a school-wide or district-wide festival. Such uses, especially when they occur within a restricted-access network, do enjoy certain copyright advantages.
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Law provides copyright protection to creative works in order to foster the creation of culture. Its best known feature is protection of owners’ rights. But copying, quoting, and generally re-using existing cultural material can be, under some circumstances, a critically important part of generating new culture.
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In reviewing the history of fair use litigation, we find that judges return again and again to two key questions: Did the unlicensed use "transform" the material taken from the copyrighted work by using it for a different purpose than that of the original, or did it just repeat the work for the same intent and value as the original? Was the material taken appropriate in kind and amount, considering the nature of the copyrighted work and of the use? If the answers to these two questions are "yes," a court is likely to find a use fair. Because that is true, such a use is unlikely to be challenged in the first place.
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Both key questions touch on, among other things, the question of whether the use will cause excessive economic harm to the copyright owner. Courts have told us that copyright owners aren’t entitled to an absolute monopoly over transformative uses of their works.
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Another consideration underlies and influences the way in which these questions are analyzed: whether the user acted reasonably and in good faith, in light of general practice in his or her particular field.
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Through its five principles, this code of best practices identifies five sets of current practices in the use of copyrighted materials in media literacy education to which the doctrine of fair use clearly applies. These practices are associated with K–12 education, higher education, and in classes given by nonprofit organizations. When students or educators use copyrighted materials in their own creative work outside of an educational context, they can rely on fair use guidelines created by other creator groups, including documentary filmmakers and online video producers.
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The principles concern the unlicensed fair use of copyrighted materials for education, not the way those materials were acquired.
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where a use is fair, it is irrelevant whether the source of the content in question was a recorded over-the-air broadcast, a teacher’s personal copy of a newspaper or a DVD, or a rented or borrowed piece of media. Labels on commercial media products proclaiming that they are “licensed for home [or private or educational or noncommercial] use only” do not affect in any way the educator’s ability to make fair use of the contents—in fact, such legends have no legal effect whatsoever. (If a teacher is using materials subject to a license agreement negotiated by the school or school system, however, she may bebound by the terms of that license.)
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fairness of a use depends, in part, on whether the user tookmore than was needed to accomplish his or her legitimate purpose.
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In materials they wish to share, curriculum developers should beespecially careful to choose illustrations from copyrighted media that are necessaryto meet the educational objectives of the lesson, using only what furthers theeducational goal or purpose for which it is being made.
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Students should be able to understand and demonstrate, in a mannerappropriate to their developmental level, how their use of a copyrighted workrepurposes or transforms the original. For example, students may use copyrightedmusic for a variety of purposes, but cannot rely on fair use when their goal is simplyto establish a mood or convey an emotional tone, or when they employ popular songssimply to exploit their appeal and popularity.
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If student work that incorporates, modifies, and re-presents existingmedia content meets the transformativeness standard, it can be distributed to wideaudiences under the doctrine of fair use.
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Educators and learners in media literacy often make uses of copyrighted works outside the marketplace, for instance in the classroom, a conference, or within a school-wide or district-wide festival. When sharing is confined to a delimited network, such uses are more likely to receive special consideration under the fair use doctrine.
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Especially in situations where students wish to share their work more broadly (by distributing it to the public, for example, or including it as part of a personal portfolio), educators should take the opportunity to model the real-world permissions process, with explicit emphasis not only on how that process works, but also on how it affects media making.
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This code of best practices, by contrast, is shaped by educators for educators and the learners they serve, with the help of legal advisors. As an important first step in reclaiming their fair use rights, educators should employ this document to inform their own practices in the classroom and beyond
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MYTH: Fair Use Is Just for Critiques, Commentaries, or Parodies. Truth: Transformativeness, a key value in fair use law, can involve modifying material or putting material in a new context, or both. Fair use applies to a wide variety of purposes, not just critical ones. Using an appropriate excerpt from copyrighted material to illustrate a key idea in the course of teaching is likely to be a fair use, for example. Indeed, the Copyright Act itself makes it clear that educational uses will often be considered fair because they add important pedagogical value to referenced media objects.
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So if work is going to be shared widely, it is good to be able to rely on transformativeness. As the cases show, a transformative new work can be highly commercial in intent and effect and qualify under the fair use doctrine.
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shared by Darren Kuropatwa on 06 Dec 09
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NASSP - Shifting Ground - 14 views
www.principals.org/...sec.asp
filter IWB Admin projectbasedlearning digitalfootprint chrislehmann newliteracy
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Moreover—and perhaps most damning—by blocking and banning many of the tools and Web sites that form the cornerstone of teenagers’ experiences, educators deny themselves access to the conversations that students are having about how to use these tools intelligently, ethically, and well. And given the overwhelming flow of information that students can access using such tools, it is essential that educators become part of those conversations.
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Districts have spent thousands of dollars installing interactive whiteboards—which are a more powerful, more engaging chalkboard. And yes, they are a tool with some very useful functions, and yes, we have them at the Science Leadership Academy in Philadelphia, where I am principal. But let me be clear: interactive whiteboards only enable a teacher-centric style of teaching to be more engaging than it would have been with a traditional chalkboard. Much of the prepackaged educational gaming similarly makes the same mistake.
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I've just never bought into these as a good way to spend money other than perhaps in Kindergarten and Grade 1 where students can interact and engage with text and shapes in front of their peers.
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I disagree with both you and Chris here. If you use an IWB to teach in a teacher centric way then *maybe* it'll be more engaging for students than it was before the IWB but I doubt it; I think kids are smarter than that. Teachers who teach in student centred ways find IWBs amplify not just engagement with the teacher, but with each other and the content they are wrestling with; they learn more deeply because we can bring a more multifaceted perspective to bear on every issue/problem discussed in class. When the full content of the internet can be brought to bear on every classroom discussion (including my twitter and skype networks) we are able to concretely illustrate the interconnectedness of all things. We don't have to tell kids this, they see it as it happens, every day. You might be able to do something like this without an IWB but it would be a little more clunky in execution.
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The single greatest challenge schools face is helping students make sense of the world today. Schools have gone from information scarcity to information overload. This is why classes must be inquiry driven. Merely providing content is not enough, nor is it enough to simply present students with a problem to solve. Schools must create ways for students to come together as a community to ask powerful questions and dare them to bring all of their talents to bear on real-world problems.
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Schools can and must be empowering—what held down the progressive school movements of the past 100 years was not that the ideas were wrong, but rather that it often just took too long to create the authentic examples of learning.
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The idea of community has changed dramatically in the past 10 years, and that idea should be reflected in classrooms.
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But it is not enough for educators to simply be aware of social networking; they have an obligation to teach students the difference between social networking and academic networking
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Educators can help them understand how to paint a digital portrait of themselves online that includes the work they do in school and help them network, both locally and globally, to enrich themselves as students.
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by blocking and banning many of the tools and Web sites that form the cornerstone of teenagers' experiences, educators deny themselves access to the conversations that students are having about how to use these tools intelligently, ethically, and well. And given the overwhelming flow of information that students can access using such tools, it is essential that educators become part of those conversations.
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by blocking and banning many of the tools and Web sites that form the cornerstone of teenagers' experiences, educators deny themselves access to the conversations that students are having about how to use these tools intelligently, ethically, and well. And given the overwhelming flow of information that students can access using such tools, it is essential that educators become part of those conversations.
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shared by Dave Truss on 15 Mar 10
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The ethics of blogging «Ideas and Thoughts from an EdTech - 5 views
ideasandthoughts.org/...the-ethics-of-blogging
blogging mycomments ethics reflection professionalLearning
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I still am not convinced of a better way to personalize your web experience. As an educator, I view them as learning spaces where metacognition is king. That's not the thrust of this post but I wanted to make that clear. ...So the question remains, should he have posted it? Did he break any ethical code? My instinct is to say no to both but I want to throw it out there.
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shared by Deron Durflinger on 03 Nov 11
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Niall Ferguson: How American Civilization Can Avoid Collapse - The Daily Beast - 4 views
www.thedailybeast.com/...zation-can-avoid-collapse.html
History collapse ferguson america US education skills pay vanmeter van meter
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these killer apps were essentially monopolized by Europeans and their cousins who settled in North America and Australasia
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20th century, just a dozen Western empires—-including the United States—controlled 58 percent of the world’s land surface and population, and a staggering 74 percent of the global economy.
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But there is a second, more insidious cause of the “great reconvergence,” which I do deplore—and that is the
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Ask yourself: who’s got the work ethic now? The average South Korean works about 39 percent more hours per week than the average American. The school year in South Korea is 220 days long, compared with 180 days here. And you don’t have to spend too long at any major U.S. university to know which students really drive themselves: the Asians and Asian-Americans
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Yet life expectancy in the U.S. has risen from 70 to 78 in the past 50 years, compared with leaps from 68 to 83 in Japan and from 43 to 73 in China.
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On no fewer than 15 of 16 different issues relating to property rights and governance, the United States fares worse than Hong Kong. Indeed, the U.S. makes the global top 20 in only one area: investor protection
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The latest data on “mathematical literacy” reveal that the gap between the world leaders—the students of Shanghai and Singapore—and their American counterparts is now as big as the gap between U.S. kids and teenagers in Albania and Tunisia.
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Yet statistics from the World Intellectual Property Organization show that already more patents originate in Japan than in the U.S., that South Korea overtook Germany to take third place in 2005, and that China is poised to overtake Germany too
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the United States’ average competitiveness score has fallen from 5.82 to 5.43, one of the steepest declines among developed economies. China’s score, meanwhile, has leapt up from 4.29 to 4.90.
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Perhaps more disturbing is the decline of meaningful competition at home, as the social mobility of the postwar era has given way to an extraordinary social polarization. You don’t have to be an Occupy Wall Street leftist to believe that the American super-rich elite—the 1 percent that collects 20 percent of the income—has become dangerously divorced from the rest of society, especially from the underclass at the bottom of the income distribution.
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Far more than in Europe, most Americans remain instinctively loyal to the killer applications of Western ascendancy, from competition all the way through to the work ethic. They know the country has the right software. They just can’t understand why it’s running so damn slowly.
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What we need to do is to delete the viruses that have crept into our system: the anticompetitive quasi monopolies that blight everything from banking to public education; the politically correct pseudosciences and soft subjects that deflect good students away from hard science; the lobbyists who subvert the rule of law for the sake of the special interests they represent—to say nothing of our crazily dysfunctional system of health care, our overleveraged personal finances, and our newfound unemployment ethic
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If what we are risking is not decline but downright collapse, then the time frame may be even tighter than one election cycle
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Home/IWitness:Video testimonies from Holocaust survivors and witnesses - 0 views
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Students across the country have already started working on their IWitness Challenge project sponsored by the USC Shoah Foundation - The Institute for Visual History and Education, but there's still time for youngsters in your community to enter this free online program geared to all secondary-school students. The deadline to enter the Challenge is Dec. 2, 2013. The winning student, along with their teacher and a family member will be brought to Los Angeles to showcase their work as part of the 20th anniversary activities for the Shoah Foundation, which was founded by director Steven Spielberg in 1994 after making "Schindler's List." Tthe IWitness Challenge (iwitness.usc.edu) connects students with the past in a very personal way that spurs them to take action to improve the future. With access to many of the Shoah Foundation's 52,000 testimonies of survivors, liberators and rescuers, students experience history in a way that hits home. Instead of reading facts from textbooks, students feel the emotions and build relationships with those who lived through seemingly impossible situations. But students do more than watch the testimony. The IWitness Challenge compels them to think, to make smart choices and to create their own project and video from what they've learned. By encouraging teachers and students to create their own lesson plans, IWitness allows them to expand on practically any subject they wish to pursue. From civics, government and history to poetry, art and ethics, educators can tailor lessons appropriate for their classrooms. And by using the embedded editor, participants not only learn valuable searching and editing skills, but also how to make ethical editing decisions that ensure their finished assignments are a fair and accurate reflection of what they've seen. All work is kept safe inside the IWitness site and not accessible to the public. Using IWitness is free, but teachers or homeschool parents must register at iwitness.usc.edu.
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How Pearson Cheats on State Tests | Diane Ravitch's blog - 16 views
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Diane Ravitch calls it. Read her blog post on this major ethical issue. I think we need an independent testing company. Isn't there a conflict of interest here when a company creates textbooks and the test? "I am an 8th grade teacher in Xxxx, NY. On Day 1 of the NYS ELA 8 Exam, I discovered what I believe to be a huge ethical flaw in the State test. The state test included a passage on why leaves change color that is included in the Pearson-generated NYS ELA 8 text. I taught it in my class just last week. In a test with 6 passages and questions to complete in 90 minutes, it was a huge advantage to students fortunate enough to use a Pearson text and not that of a rival publisher. It may very well have an impact on student test scores. This has not yet received any attention in the press. Could you help me bring this to the attention of the public?"
Ethics, Values and Character Education - 0 views
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shared by Jeff Johnson on 17 May 09
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An Inconvenient Truth About Education: Rethinking the Way Things Are | Edutopia - 1 views
www.edutopia.org/nvenient-truth-about-education
Edutopia edutopia.org education crisis fundamental shift thinking learning process
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Watching the Oscar-winning global-warming documentary An Inconvenient Truth, I was struck by the similarities between climate change and education change. These seemingly unrelated crises on our planet and in our schools are, in fact, connected. Both have taken many decades to develop and, at least in the United States, both originated in an industrial economy built on manufacturing. The effects of global warming and school decline are difficult to detect year to year, but over several generations, their impacts accumulate -- and are now converging to limit the future health of our economy and our society. To reverse these declines, similar fundamental shifts in thinking and behavior will be required at the individual, institutional, and societal levels. Consuming less, recycling more, and the ethic of caring for the environment should begin with our youngest children, as modeled by their parents, teachers, and caregivers. It's the same with literacy, curiosity, and a love of learning. Just as green technologies can make energy consumption more efficient, learning technologies can play a key role in modernizing the learning process.
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shared by Vicki Davis on 01 Dec 13
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Inspiring Innovation | An Ethical Island - 0 views
anethicalisland.wordpress.com/...inspiring-innovation
innovation education teaching creativity matters
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Mia MacMeekin at "An Ethical Island" has made a profound infographic "27 Ways to innovate" that you'll want to share and read.I love the quotes and suggestions throughout this graphic which is inspiration, insightful, and very motivational.Why not get each teacher to pick something and come back together and discuss.
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Teaching in Social and Technological Networks « Connectivism - 17 views
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This model works well when we can centralize both the content (curriculum) and the teacher. The model falls apart when we distribute content and extend the activities of the teacher to include multiple educator inputs and peer-driven learning. Simply: social and technological networks subvert the classroom-based role of the teacher.
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the role of the teacher. Given that coherence and lucidity are key to understanding our world, how do educators teach in networks? For educators, control is being replaced with influence. Instead of controlling a classroom, a teacher now influences or shapes a network. The following are roles teacher play in networked learning environments: 1. Amplifying 2. Curating 3. Wayfinding and socially-driven sensemaking 4. Aggregating 5. Filtering 6. Modelling 7. Persistent presence
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An interesting side-note, when you said, …The model falls apart when we distribute content and extend the activities of the teacher to include multiple educator inputs and peer-driven learning. Simply: social and technological networks subvert the classroom-based role of the teacher. It came to mind that what’s really being subverted is not so much the classroom-based role as it is the teacher-controlled learning.
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We’re still early in many of these trends. Many questions remain unanswered about privacy, ethics in networks, and assessment. My view is that change in education needs to be systemic and substantial. Education is concerned with content and conversations. The tools for controlling both content and conversation have shifted from the educator to the learner. We require a system that acknowledges this reality.
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Where is reflection in the learning process? | User Generated Education - 10 views
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In Tough Times, the Humanities Must Justify Their Worth - NYTimes.com - 0 views
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The study of the humanities evolved during the 20th century “to focus almost entirely on personal intellectual development,” said Richard M. Freeland, the Massachusetts commissioner of higher education. “But what we haven’t paid a lot of attention to is how students can put those abilities effectively to use in the world. We’ve created a disjunction between the liberal arts and sciences and our role as citizens and professionals.”Mr. Freeland is part of what he calls a revolutionary movement to close the “chasm in higher education between the liberal arts and sciences and professional programs.” The Association of American Colleges and Universities recently issued a report arguing the humanities should abandon the “old Ivory Tower view of liberal education” and instead emphasize its practical and economic value.
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Derek Bok, a former president of Harvard and the author of several books on higher education, argues, “The humanities has a lot to contribute to the preparation of students for their vocational lives.” He said he was referring not only to writing and analytical skills but also to the type of ethical issues raised by new technology like stem-cell research. But he added: “There’s a lot more to a liberal education than improving the economy. I think that is one of the worst mistakes that policy makers often make — not being able to see beyond that.” Anthony T. Kronman, a professor of law at Yale and the author of “Education’s End: Why Our Colleges and Universities Have Given Up on the Meaning of Life,” goes further. Summing up the benefits of exploring what’s called “a life worth living” in a consumable sound bite is not easy, Mr. Kronman said. But “the need for my older view of the humanities is, if anything, more urgent today,” he added, referring to the widespread indictment of greed, irresponsibility and fraud that led to the financial meltdown. In his view this is the time to re-examine “what we care about and what we value,” a problem the humanities “are extremely well-equipped to address.”
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Why Women Still Can't Have It All - www.theatlantic.com - Readability - 7 views
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Just about all of the women in that room planned to combine careers and family in some way. But almost all assumed and accepted that they would have to make compromises that the men in their lives were far less likely to have to make.
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when many members of the younger generation have stopped listening, on the grounds that glibly repeating “you can have it all” is simply airbrushing reality, it is time to talk.
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I still strongly believe that women can “have it all” (and that men can too). I believe that we can “have it all at the same time.” But not today, not with the way America’s economy and society are currently structured. My experiences over the past three years have forced me to confront a number of uncomfortable facts that need to be widely acknowledged—and quickly changed.
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I had the ability to set my own schedule most of the time. I could be with my kids when I needed to be, and still get the work done.
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the minute I found myself in a job that is typical for the vast majority of working women (and men), working long hours on someone else’s schedule, I could no longer be both the parent and the professional I wanted to be
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having it all was not possible in many types of jobs, including high government office—at least not for very long.
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“Having control over your schedule is the only way that women who want to have a career and a family can make it work.”
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Yet the decision to step down from a position of power—to value family over professional advancement, even for a time—is directly at odds with the prevailing social pressures on career professionals in the United States.
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Think about what this “standard Washington excuse” implies: it is so unthinkable that an official would actually step down to spend time with his or her family that this must be a cover for something else.
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Both were very clear that they did not want that life, but could not figure out how to combine professional success and satisfaction with a real commitment to family.
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many of us are also reinforcing a falsehood: that “having it all” is, more than anything, a function of personal determination.
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there has been very little honest discussion among women of our age about the real barriers and flaws that still exist in the system despite the opportunities we inherited.
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But we have choices about the type and tempo of the work we do. We are the women who could be leading, and who should be equally represented in the leadership ranks.
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women are less happy today than their predecessors were in 1972, both in absolute terms and relative to men.
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The best hope for improving the lot of all women, and for closing what Wolfers and Stevenson call a “new gender gap”—measured by well-being rather than wages—is to close the leadership gap:
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Only when women wield power in sufficient numbers will we create a society that genuinely works for all women. That will be a society that works for everyone.
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We must clear them out of the way to make room for a more honest and productive discussion about real solutions to the problems faced by professional women.
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These women cannot possibly be the standard against which even very talented professional women should measure themselves. Such a standard sets up most women for a sense of failure
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A simple measure is how many women in top positions have children compared with their male colleagues.
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Every male Supreme Court justice has a family. Two of the three female justices are single with no children.
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women hold fewer than 30 percent of the senior foreign-policy positions in each of these institutions.
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“You know what would help the vast majority of women with work/family balance? MAKE SCHOOL SCHEDULES MATCH WORK SCHEDULES.” The present system, she noted, is based on a society that no longer exists—one in which farming was a major occupation and stay-at-home moms were the norm. Yet the system hasn’t changed.
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“Inflexible schedules, unrelenting travel, and constant pressure to be in the office are common features of these jobs.”
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I would hope to see commencement speeches that finger America’s social and business policies, rather than women’s level of ambition, in explaining the dearth of women at the top. But changing these policies requires much more than speeches. It means fighting the mundane battles—every day, every year—in individual workplaces, in legislatures, and in the media.
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assumes that most women will feel as comfortable as men do about being away from their children, as long as their partner is home with them. In my experience, that is simply not the case.
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I do not believe fathers love their children any less than mothers do, but men do seem more likely to choose their job at a cost to their family, while women seem more likely to choose their family at a cost to their job.
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To many men, however, the choice to spend more time with their children, instead of working long hours on issues that affect many lives, seems selfish.
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It is not clear to me that this ethical framework makes sense for society. Why should we want leaders who fall short on personal responsibilities?
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Regardless, it is clear which set of choices society values more today. Workers who put their careers first are typically rewarded; workers who choose their families are overlooked, disbelieved, or accused of unprofessionalism.
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having a supportive mate may well be a necessary condition if women are to have it all, but it is not sufficient
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Ultimately, it is society that must change, coming to value choices to put family ahead of work just as much as those to put work ahead of family. If we really valued those choices, we would value the people who make them; if we valued the people who make them, we would do everything possible to hire and retain them; if we did everything possible to allow them to combine work and family equally over time, then the choices would get a lot easier.
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Given the way our work culture is oriented today, I recommend establishing yourself in your career first but still trying to have kids before you are 35—or else freeze your eggs, whether you are married or not.
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But the truth is, neither sequence is optimal, and both involve trade-offs that men do not have to make.
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You should be able to have a family if you want one—however and whenever your life circumstances allow—and still have the career you desire.
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If more women could strike this balance, more women would reach leadership positions. And if more women were in leadership positions, they could make it easier for more women to stay in the workforce. The rest of this essay details how.
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I have to admit that my assumption that I would stay late made me much less efficient over the course of the day than I might have been, and certainly less so than some of my colleagues, who managed to get the same amount of work done and go home at a decent hour.
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Still, armed with e-mail, instant messaging, phones, and videoconferencing technology, we should be able to move to a culture where the office is a base of operations more than the required locus of work.
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Being able to work from home—in the evening after children are put to bed, or during their sick days or snow days, and at least some of the time on weekends—can be the key, for mothers, to carrying your full load versus letting a team down at crucial moments.
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Changes in default office rules should not advantage parents over other workers; indeed, done right, they can improve relations among co-workers by raising their awareness of each other’s circumstances and instilling a sense of fairness.
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The policy was shaped by the belief that giving women “special treatment” can “backfire if the broader norms shaping the behavior of all employees do not change.”
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Our assumptions are just that: things we believe that are not necessarily so. Yet what we assume has an enormous impact on our perceptions and responses. Fortunately, changing our assumptions is up to us.
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One of the best ways to move social norms in this direction is to choose and celebrate different role models.
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If we didn’t start to learn how to integrate our personal, social, and professional lives, we were about five years away from morphing into the angry woman on the other side of a mahogany desk who questions her staff’s work ethic after standard 12-hour workdays, before heading home to eat moo shoo pork in her lonely apartment.
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Women have contributed to the fetish of the one-dimensional life, albeit by necessity. The pioneer generation of feminists walled off their personal lives from their professional personas to ensure that they could never be discriminated against for a lack of commitment to their work.
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It seems odd to me to list degrees, awards, positions, and interests and not include the dimension of my life that is most important to me—and takes an enormous amount of my time.
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This does not mean that you should insist that your colleagues spend time cooing over pictures of your baby or listening to the prodigious accomplishments of your kindergartner. It does mean that if you are late coming in one week, because it is your turn to drive the kids to school, that you be honest about what you are doing.
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Indeed, the most frequent reaction I get in putting forth these ideas is that when the choice is whether to hire a man who will work whenever and wherever needed, or a woman who needs more flexibility, choosing the man will add more value to the company.
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In 2011, a study on flexibility in the workplace by Ellen Galinsky, Kelly Sakai, and Tyler Wigton of the Families and Work Institute showed that increased flexibility correlates positively with job engagement, job satisfaction, employee retention, and employee health.
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Other scholars have concluded that good family policies attract better talent, which in turn raises productivity, but that the policies themselves have no impact on productivity.
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What is evident, however, is that many firms that recruit and train well-educated professional women are aware that when a woman leaves because of bad work-family balance, they are losing the money and time they invested in her.
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The answer—already being deployed in different corners of the industry—is a combination of alternative fee structures, virtual firms, women-owned firms, and the outsourcing of discrete legal jobs to other jurisdictions.
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Women, and Generation X and Y lawyers more generally, are pushing for these changes on the supply side; clients determined to reduce legal fees and increase flexible service are pulling on the demand side. Slowly, change is happening.
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In trying to address these issues, some firms are finding out that women’s ways of working may just be better ways of working, for employees and clients alike.
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“We believe that connecting play and imagination may be the single most important step in unleashing the new culture of learning.”
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“Genius is nothing more nor less than childhood recovered at will.” Google apparently has taken note.
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the more often people with different perspectives come together, the more likely creative ideas are to emerge. Giving workers the ability to integrate their non-work lives with their work—whether they spend that time mothering or marathoning—will open the door to a much wider range of influences and ideas.
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Men have, of course, become much more involved parents over the past couple of decades, and that, too, suggests broad support for big changes in the way we balance work and family.
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women would do well to frame work-family balance in terms of the broader social and economic issues that affect both women and men.
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Yet I also want a world in which, in Lisa Jackson’s words, “to be a strong woman, you don’t have to give up on the things that define you as a woman.”
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“Empowering yourself,” Jackson said in her speech at Princeton, “doesn’t have to mean rejecting motherhood, or eliminating the nurturing or feminine aspects of who you are.”
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But now is the time to revisit the assumption that women must rush to adapt to the “man’s world” that our mothers and mentors warned us about.
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If women are ever to achieve real equality as leaders, then we have to stop accepting male behavior and male choices as the default and the ideal.
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We must insist on changing social policies and bending career tracks to accommodate our choices, too. We have the power to do it if we decide to, and we have many men standing beside us.
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World Without Walls: Learning Well with Others | Edutopia - 0 views
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We must also expand our ability to think critically about the deluge of information now being produced by millions of amateur authors without traditional editors and researchers as gatekeepers. In fact, we need to rely on trusted members of our personal networks to help sift through the sea of stuff, locating and sharing with us the most relevant, interesting, useful bits. And we have to work together to organize it all, as long-held taxonomies of knowledge give way to a highly personalized information environment.
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What Will suggests here is rising complexity, but for this to succeed we don't need to fight our genetic heritage. Put yourself on the Serengeti plains, a hunter-gatherer searching for food. You are thinking critically about a deluge of data coming through your senses (modern folk discount this idea, but any time in jobs that require observation in the 'wild' (farming comes to mind) will disabuse you rather quickly that the natural world is providing a clear channel.) You are not only relying upon your own 'amateur' abilities but those of your family and extended family to filter the noise of the world to get to the signal. This tribe is the original collaborative model and if we do not try to push too hard against this still controlling 'mean gene' then we will as a matter of course become a nation of collaborative learning tribes.
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Collaboration in these times requires our students to be able to seek out and connect with learning partners, in the process perhaps navigating cultures, time zones, and technologies. It requires that they have a vetting process for those they come into contact with: Who is this person? What are her passions? What are her credentials? What can I learn from her?
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Aye, aye, captain. This is the classic problem of identity and authenticity. Can I trust this person on all the levels that are important for this particular collaboration? A hidden assumption here is that students have a passion themselves to learn something from these learning partners. What will be doing in this collaboration nation to value the ebb and flow of these learners' interests? How will we handle the idiosyncratic needs of the child who one moment wants to be J.K.Rowling and the next Madonna. Or both? What are the unintended consequences of creating an truly collaborative nation? Do we know? Would this be a 'worse' world for the corporations who seek our dollars and our workers? Probably. It might subvert the corporation while at the same moment create a new body of corporate cooperation. Isn't it pretty to think so.
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technical know-how is not enough. We must also be adept at negotiating, planning, and nurturing the conversation with others we may know little about -- not to mention maintaining a healthy balance between our face-to-face and virtual lives (another dance for which kids sorely need coaching).
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All of these skills are technical know how. We differentiate between hard and soft skills when we should be showing how they are all of a piece. I am so far from being an adequate coach on all of these matters it appalls me. I feel like the teacher who is one day ahead of his students and fears any question that skips ahead to chapters I have not read yet.
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The Collaboration Age comes with challenges that often cause concern and fear. How do we manage our digital footprints, or our identities, in a world where we are a Google search away from both partners and predators? What are the ethics of co-creation when the nuances of copyright and intellectual property become grayer each day? When connecting and publishing are so easy, and so much of what we see is amateurish and inane, how do we ensure that what we create with others is of high quality?
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Partners and predators? OK, let's not in any way go down this road. This is the road our mainstream media has trod to our great disadvantage as citizens. These are not co-equal. Human brains are not naturally probablistic computer. We read about a single instance of internet predation and we equate it with all the instances of non-predation. We all have zero tolerance policies against guns in the school, yet our chances of being injured by those guns are fewer than a lightning strike. We cannot ever have this collaborative universe if we insist on a zero probability of predation. That is why, for good and ill, schools will never cross that frontier. It is in our genes. "Better safe than sorry" vs. "Risks may be our safeties in disguise."
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Students are growing networks without us, writing Harry Potter narratives together at FanFiction.net, or trading skateboarding videos on YouTube. At school, we disconnect them not only from the technology but also from their passion and those who share it.
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The complexities of editing information online cannot be sequestered and taught in a six-week unit. This has to be the way we do our work each day.
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The process of collaboration begins with our willingness to share our work and our passions publicly -- a frontier that traditional schools have rarely crossed.
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Look no further than Wikipedia to see the potential; say what you will of its veracity, no one can deny that it represents the incredible potential of working with others online for a common purpose.
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Anyone with a passion for something can connect to others with that same passion -- and begin to co-create and colearn the same way many of our students already do.
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I believe that is what educators must do now. We must engage with these new technologies and their potential to expand our own understanding and methods in this vastly different landscape. We must know for ourselves how to create, grow, and navigate these collaborative spaces in safe, effective, and ethical ways. And we must be able to model those shifts for our students and counsel them effectively when they run across problems with these tools.
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District Business - 0 views
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the possible recording of incoming calls, a serious problem with the district's grade reporting software, and a breach of a computer containing confidential student information that was not reported to the state.
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Some push back in IT is happening such as this case with an IT director who said he was fired for "blowing the whistle" on innappropriate IT behavior such as problems with the grade reporting software and a computer with confidential student information that was breached without reporting it to the state. These sorts of things have both sides. The point that I would take here is to listen to IT directors when they have concerns: just because you don't understand the problem doesn't mean there is a problem, and that ethics must be applied when things are dealt with in IT.
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shared by Vicki Davis on 28 Jan 10
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"Doing real science" on Friendfeed - AJCann - FriendFeed - 10 views
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flatclassroom09-2 - Keynote - 0 views
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Flat Classroom Q2 Session Keynote was from Richard J Roth, Senior Associate Dean for Journalism from Northwestern University in Qatar. The podcast is available on this page. It is about Citizen Journalism. Also included on this page are Citizen Journalims and code of ethics and your guide to citizen journalism available on this page. As you can tell, the focus of this Quarter's Flat Classroom project is citizen journalism.
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