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School Boards Rule, Internet No Longer Dangerous
destinyland writes "Good news. The National School Boards Association, which represents 95,000 school board members, just released a report declaring fears of the internet are overblown. In fact, after surveying 1,277 students, "the researchers found exactly one student who reported they'd actually met a stranger from the internet without their parents' permission. (They described this as "0.08 percent of all students.") The report reminds educators that schools initially banned internet use before they'd realized how educational it was. Now instead they're urging schools to include social networks in their curriculum!"
Apparently the chances of being taught good fundamental math is lower than the chance of meeting IRL a freak that you chatted with on the internet.
Public education -- a series of tubes down the drain.
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
The report reminds educators that schools initially banned internet use before they'd realized how educational it was.
I was unlucky enough to be a teacher for 1.5 years. Pretty much all assignments I gave (home, or just in class) ended up to be copy/pastes of wikipedia or another website. Usually they didn't even bother to format their Word file so that I wouldn't even see it.
Luckily, I had lost faith in the profession already, so I let it slip. If I had to get down hard on them for that, no-one in my classes would have passed. They didn't care, so why would I care....
Blame it on me being a poor teacher... Don't worry, that's exactly what I do, so you won't even offend me.
I heard about a show once that explored this pretty well - kids telling adults what they want to hear.
I didn't see it, but someone was telling me about it. They interviewed these kids about what they would do if they were to find a gun. They said stuff like they would never touch it and they would immediately tell an adult. They then put the kids in a room without adults and with a see thru mirror and left a gun laying around. Their parents were on the other side of the mirror watching them. Of course, the kids picked up the gun and starting playing it.
Kidding aside... Sometimes I look at AP-style written stuff and how most editors spend too much time discouraging the use of too many commas, and it just makes some sentences incomprehensible at first glance.
In a long ass sentence, using commas is like shaking it out at the urinal. Zero is too few, 3 is too many.
If this works like most school actions, it'll be a disaster. The kids will soon be deciding that the Internet isn't cool; it's boring and "hard". They'll drop it and go back to other ways of upsetting the adults.
;-) be boring? But the schools (and some historians) manage to make it so.
If we really want young people to become familiar with the Internet, and learn to use it for their benefit, we should take the approach that works: Ban its use by children (where "child" even includes someone 17 years old). Put all sorts of leaky barriers in the way of their access. That way, the kids will be fascinated by it, and will spend lots of time learning how to use it.
Lots of people have observed that the main effect of most schools is to take various topics and make them boring and uninteresting. Consider a topic like history. How could the story of all the people who came before us (and messed up this world so thoroughly
Or consider music. That's a hard-wired human activity, that can be intensely exciting, right? How can we teach kids to not waste their time learning to make music, and make them content to spend the rest of their lives at a desk job? Right: Give them music lessons.
We should totally ban the use of the Internet in schools. They'll just do to it what they've done to so many other exciting human developments; they'll teach the kids that it's boring and uninteresting, and too hard for anyone but a "nerd" to understand.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
I'm going to set up a proxy server for my kids. It will be like a cat and mouse game. They'll try to gain access to things they shouldn't, and I'll try to stop them. I can't think of a better way to teach my kids about computers and the Internet.
To put it another way: I'm less concerned about them talking to strangers than I am about them not learning valuable skills.
I'm in the hole of the broadband donut.
This was why I set up a class wiki for my students to complete some assignments on.
As long as they completed their work, they were allowed to use the talk features to socialize. Constructive development of tech social skills, and no risk of creepy freaks from the offline world. I controlled registration and since it was a wiki, everything was public.
Which isn't to say, of course, that any of my students weren't ALSO on bebo or myspace or the rest, but given the socio-economic status of the district I teach in, I'm pretty sure that ALL of them weren't, so it was a learning experience for at least some of them and a safe place for all of them.
The better that the kids of today can learn to deal with technology with a level head and asses the risks, the better off they'll be. I'm a proponent of educating rather than insulating.