Peter Slattery

There is a beaut YouTube vid on my site from a few days ago about learning. The title of this post is taken straight from that. It is a little difficult from the credits at the end to work out exactly who is saying what so you might want to go look for yourself. But the title above comes from Stephen Heppell. And the following comments, which I found really interesting and encouraging, come from Daniel Pink.

‘The coin of the realm is not memorizing the facts that they are going to need to know for the rest of their lives. The coin of the realm will be:

Do you know how to find information?

Do you know how to validate it?

Do you know how to synthesize it?

Do you know how to leverage it?

Do you know how to collaborate with it?

Do you know how to problem solve with it?

That’s the new 21^st century set of literacies and it looks a lot different than the model that most of us were raised under.’

 

There is a lot of discussion about young people and violence and whether things are
worse than they used to be. The following quotes are from an article which appeared in the Sydney Morning Herald 20/10/2010 and was reproduced in ‘YAPRAP’ newsletter June-July 2010. The article is by Don Weatherburn, Director, NSW Bureau of Crime Statistics and Research who has been looking into this, and related issues, for some time.

‘Over the past five years, non-domestic assaults
by youths aged 10 to 17 rose about 4% each
year. But the number of young people committing
assaults with a weapon has not increased.
Research has shown the typical characteristics
of young people involved in assaults on school
grounds: they have low impulse control, live
with only one parent (or neither biological
parent), come from families that have frequent or
constant problems at home and are disciplined
at home in harsh, erratic or inconsistent ways.
Regardless of their background, students are less
likely to get involved in an assault if their school
has a clear anti-bullying policy consistently and
fairly enforced, if it deals swiftly with allegations
of racism and if the classroom experience for
students is stimulating rather than boring.’

The bureau in 2005, produced a report on ‘School violence and its antecedents: interviews with high school students’ which had this to say:

‘The findings contradict the popular assumption that the causes of school violence all lie within the school environment. According to the Bureau, personal and family factors play a key role in shaping the risk of violence on school grounds. Students are more likely to have attacked someone if:

They are male
They live with only one parent or not with their parents at all
Their mother is 35 or younger
Their parent(s) employ(s) punitive disciplinary practices
Their parent(s) poorly supervise them
They have problems with their family
They have problems reading and/or writing
They are impulsive
School factors, however, also play an important role. Students are more likely to have attacked someone if, in their opinion:

They spend a lot of time copying out work from textbooks
Their teachers spend more time keeping control of the class than teaching
The students at their school are racist
Kids who make racist remarks at the school don’t get into trouble with the teachers
Teachers do not intervene to stop bullying when they know about it
They were never formally told the school rules’

Distressing, interesting and worthwhile. And within these comments there seem some pretty clear indicators as to how we should be proceeding.

First we had the footballer guy saying something like…its okay to be gay but better stay in the closet if you play footy. (Gee is there room enough?)  He seems to think there is something unique about being gay which makes being in the showers with straight men (oh my god!) fairly disturbing for the straight men if they knew there was a gay guy also showering. And this is because……??????

And on the other hand a politician has just been ‘outed’ by Channel Seven. He has been going to a gay brothel apparently. Ideas like ‘Public Interest’, ‘Right to know’ pop up. But what has been very heartening is the overwhelming response from people saying: mind your own business.  The Sydney Morning Herald on 24th May said in reference to readers and talk-back radio callers :

‘Most of them seemed adamant that Campbell might be a cabinet minister, but he was just as entitled to a private life, provided it did not compromise his professional responsibilies.‘

I assume the family did not know and clearly this is going to take some work within that family to deal with, and I wish them well with what must be something difficult. It’s also nice to know that most people seem to be on their side and supportive.

I am not going to say that there is nothing more important than the education of our young people. Nup, not gonna say it. But there is this.

ABC Radio National’s ‘Law Report’ of 4th May 2010 offers some interesting stuff. Here (with thanks) are a few quotes from a conversation with Robyn Treyvaud:

Damien Carrick: And I’m just thinking back to my adolescence, I can think of humiliating moments, I don’t necessarily think of things which were there constantly, 24 hours a day for the rest of my life, you know, if that stuff is online.

Robyn Treyvaud: Well that’s the problem with this, is that once you’ve got images and text in a digital format, which you’ve got invisible viewership, plus it’s permanently there and available, or other people may very well have copied and pasted or just sort of archived that data, if you like, then you’re absolutely right, it potentially is there forever and the humiliation of when it happens initially is very great, but we don’t necessarily know what it’s like when people can view it five years, ten years or fifty years from now.

AND…

Robyn Treyvaud: Well again, Damien, this is one of the great challenges we’ve got, because a school has to demonstrate a duty of care, and that can be duty of care in terms of the environment, monitoring behaviours, etc. Now part of the duty of care demonstrated by a school in relation to digital technologies and the internet specifically, is to have a firewall, to have filters, to block inappropriate sites, or to ensure that between the hours of 8.30 and 3.30 students in their school aren’t accessing sites where covert bullying or cyber-bullying can occur, or where sexting-type images can be spread. We get into some issues here, because a lot of this is done via mobile phones, and the school really, they might have a policy that say you’re not to use your mobile phone at school time, but those of us who work in schools know that you can’t enforce it. Then we have the other problem where young people in schools bypass our gatekeeping mechanisms, if you like, without our knowledge, using what are called proxy sites. So the school will see that the student has gone to a proxy site. One example is, say, Sneaky Sue, and you go to a proxy site and you then type in facebook.com, and it will then allow the user to go to Facebook and leave the school’s network. Now that I think leaves schools incredibly vulnerable to duty of care issues, because we don’t know where they are, we don’t know what they’re doing, and we don’t know who they’re with when they hang out in those places when they’re at school.

So to say that we in a school have an ability to monitor where they’re going and what they’re doing, I think is inappropriate because it’s not true.

Thanks to lotsa people for this vid. It pops up various places including Wes Fryer’s site:

I logged onto the Gender Centre Website and There is something very charming and in-ya-face brave about the following course description:

Fight Like A Girl!
The Gender Centre will be holding 3 free self-defence classes run by “Fight Like A Girl Self-Defence School”

Kevin from F.L.A.G. has previously run classes through the Gender Centre and were a huge success. The next classes will be conducted over three Saturdays, May the 15th, 22nd and 29th from 2:30pm until 4:30pm at the Gender Centre. For more information and to book your place please call the Centre on (02) 9569 2366.

And there is this really sensible article ‘It’s Not Rocket Science Policies & Procedures for services working with Transgender clients’ which provides, amongst other things, definitions of terms which may pop up in conversations of transgender and which might be helpful to a young person exploring their sexuality; or to a worker speaking with young people about sexuality and in particular about transgender.

Richard Louv , author of seven books about people, being connected and being in the great outdoors, has some stuff to say about ‘gettin out in the woods.’ In Australia we might say ‘bush’ but same same. In an article in Orion he says:

‘A growing body of scientific evidence identifies strong correlations between experience in the natural world and children’s ability to learn, along with their physical and emotional health. Stress levels, attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder, cognitive functioning—and more—are positively affected by time spent in nature. “In the same way that protecting water and protecting air are strategies for promoting public health,” says Howard Frumkin, director of the National Center for Environmental Health at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, “protecting natural landscapes can be seen as a powerful form of preventive medicine.” In October, researchers at Indiana University School of Medicine, Indiana University–Purdue University at Indianapolis, and the University of Washington reported that greener neighborhoods are associated with slower increases in children’s body mass, regardless of residential density. Such research will be immensely helpful as we rethink our approaches to urban design, education, and health care, in particular our societal response to childhood obesity.’

Sitting with bums on seats-usually hard (seats that is)- and surrounded by our four walls maybe aint the way to go in our schools.

This is kind of good news really isn’t it?

Sports stars are no role models, say scientists

April 21, 2010

‘Researchers at the Universities of Manchester, UK, and Western Sydney, Australia, say their findings – published in Drug and Alcohol Review – rubbish the idea that sports stars act as role models for those who follow sport.

“The perceived drinking habits of sports stars and its relationship to the drinking levels of young people has never been examined empirically, despite these sporting heroes often being touted as influential role models for young people,” said lead researcher Dr Kerry O’Brien, a lecturer in Manchester’s School of Psychological Sciences.

 ”Our research shows that young people, both sporting participants and non-sporting participants, don’t appear to be influenced by the drinking habits of high-profile sportspeople as depicted in the mass media.”

Dr O’Brien and his colleagues, pointing to previous research, suggest that sport and sports stars are much more likely to influence the drinking behaviour of fans when used as marketing tools by the alcohol industry, such as through sponsorship deals.’

Education and our young people continues to be, as it should, a disturbing topic for many of us. The heading for this post does not come from me. It comes from the Edutopia web site. Check out this interview with the notorious Alvin Toffler.

‘Forty years after he and his wife, Heidi, set the world alight with Future Shock, Alvin Toffler remains a tough assessor of our nation’s social and technological prospects. Though he’s best known for his work discussing the myriad ramifications of the digital revolution, he also loves to speak about the education system that is shaping the hearts and minds of America’s future. We met with him near his office in Los Angeles, where the celebrated septuagenarian remains a clear and radical thinker.

Edutopia.org: You’ve been writing about our educational system for decades. What’s the most pressing need in public education right now?
Alvin Toffler: Shut down the public education system.

That’s pretty radical.
I’m roughly quoting Microsoft chairman Bill Gates, who said, “We don’t need to reform the system; we need to replace the system.‘

Go to the source to read more. It’s worthwhile. The final words are these:

‘You’re advocating for fundamental radical changes. Are you an optimist when it comes to public education?
I just feel it’s inevitable that there will have to be change. The only question is whether we’re going to do it starting now, or whether we’re going to wait for catastrophe.’

This I think is important. From Wes Fryer who constantly blogs (I can read his block because I have no filters) about the foolishness of internet filters in all sorts of places including schools. He found himself at a school trying to access Flikr and found himself blocked. He had this to say on 13th April 2010.

‘First of all, the technology director in the school holding our workshop had specifically whitelisted flickr.com the day before, on Monday. Yet today, on Tuesday, the site was mysteriously blocked again. I guess the district’s Internet content filtering could be considered, “highly aggressive.”

Second of all, the webpage title of this “blocked” message was:

busted

The English Wiktionary definitions for “busted” which apply in this case are:

Caught in the act of doing something one shouldn’t do.

and

Caught and arrested for committing a crime.

The normative message from this content filtering page is: You have committed a grevious error. You are in the wrong. You should be ashamed of yourself.

Perhaps we could go even farther. Is part of the message: Accessing websites not approved by our school district’s Internet provider is a big game, and for your last attempt we give you a score of ZERO?! You failed, you’re busted!

Internet content filtering is not game. It’s not funny, and I resent being shown a message which implies I’m a criminal when I’m only trying to visit a website which provides access to millions of educationally valuable, copyright-friendly images for teachers and students to use.

The third comment I’ll make about this “blocked” page is the message at the bottom. The assumption inherent in this offering of “alternative websites” (Google, Yahoo, CNN and Fox News) is that the only reasons a learner at the school would be using the Internet is to either search for information or read the news. These are CONSUMPTIVE activities. This supposedly “helpful” set of links on the block page (which I’m sure is viewed hundreds if not thousands of times over the course of a school year by students as well as teachers) completely misses the point that the Internet can be used, is being used, and SHOULD be used by learners for serious work CREATING and SHARING content on websites which power creative productivity. A mindset persists in schools and many businesses that “real work” on the computer is done only in Microsoft Office, and “the Internet” is used just to “look stuff up” and read the news. This perspective is sorely out of date.’

AND:

‘One of the teachers in our workshop today, when asked the question, “What instructions: guidelines do you give students NOW about getting photos to use in a video project?” responded:

Pictures must come from a legal website. No obscene pictures.

When I asked the teacher how he defined “a legal website,” he said it was a website which students were able to access because the district’s content filter allowed them to view it.

Let’s deconstruct this comment, because the assumptions here are a BIG problem. This teacher assumed that EVERY website which was NOT blocked by the content filter was OK. That somehow, the school’s Internet filter was acting as an all-knowing, uber-grandmother figure, granting permission and giving blessing to any site which was NOT blocked / on a blacklist. I regret to suggest this perception is common. I lament this perception, as well as its normality in schools.

Folks, WE are the filter. Our minds are the filter. Legality and ethics are not defined by the whim’s of an Internet service provider, a tech director who decides to block or unblock websites, or for that matter by a company which decides today “certain applications” are cardinal sins to own and use but tomorrow become authorized in “their online store.”

We make ethical decisions and judgements based on values, not based on the whims of organizations or individuals. I tried to make this point in our workshop today and my discussions with this particular teacher, but I don’t think I made much headway. The perceptions that “if the filter doesn’t block it, it’s OK for the kids to use in a video project” as well as the belief that “it’s not my job to make decisions about right and wrong online, since our content filter does that for us” are both erroneous and depressing at multiple levels.

We’ve got so much work to do when it comes to digital literacy and digital citizenship.’

From the Heatlh Report ABC Radio National . This is both interesting and confirming. And it is the wellbeing stuff that keeps popping up in the same kinds of ideas over and over. This particular study also says that fathers seem to be particularly important in this whole deal. Hmmmm….

Norman Swan: Describe a flourishing person in their mid-50s and then back track to the average parenting that leads to that, or led to that as perceived by the person.

Felicia Huppert: A flourishing person is someone who feels competent in the world, someone who feels that they are developing in a positive way, certainly someone who has good relationships with other people, someone who accepts themselves and has some sort of sense of purpose in life.

And:

Felicia Huppert: In general certainly it was good if the parents were warm towards the child, warm and loving and very positive and gave praise as appropriate and so on. The next thing is that the parents did need to be engaged and really interested in what the child was doing and then the third one was that they had to be not too controlling, not over-protective, not intrusive but rather give the child some sense of trust, some respect, some freedom while at the same time being quite clear about boundaries, about what behaviours were acceptable and what were not.

I think it’s what people these days call authoritative parenting as opposed to authoritarian parenting.