Earlier this morning, Gardner Campbell retweeted a thought-provoking comment from Tony Gonzalez referring to a boingboing article about the electronic panopticon that many of our public schools have become. I agree wholeheartedly with Gardner and Tony that I wouldn’t dream of subjecting my own kid to that kind of environment.
Leaving aside the two-tiered system that results when Gardner, Tony, and I (and others like us) opt out of the public system for our children, what worries me is the longer-term pernicious effect on American society that such a system of schools is having. We’ve already seen tremendous erosions in personal liberty and privacy rights over the past 3 or 4 decades as a result of the war on drugs and the war on terror. Thanks to the exclusionary rule, the 4th amendment has been shot so full of exceptions that it’s hardly recognizable, and there have even been calls to eliminate the exclusionary rule, the only enforcement we have for the 4th amendment. The exclusionary rule is bad, but without it, we have no remedy for violations of 4th amendment rights, and a right without a remedy is no right at all.
And therein is the problem with raising generations of children in prison-like schools: the protections of the 4th-amendment are based on the concept of a reasonable expectation of privacy. What happens to those rights when we raise a few generations to accept warrantless searches, metal detectors, suspicionless canine searches, drug testing, constant webcam surveillance, and biometric-scanning to get into an amusement park as normal parts of life? If most people don’t expect to have any privacy, none of us will have any right to privacy.
That’s not a world I want to have a hand in creating.
Tags: constitution, education, Fourth Amendment, school
Earlier, I expressed reservations about UCLA taking down all streaming video in their online courses, but it looks like they’re doing the right thing. They’re going to resume streaming video in their online courses, perhaps as soon as next quarter, which they should.
The Association for Information and Media Equipment (AIME) complains that UCLA is essentially claiming “that they and literally every other university have every right to buy a single copy of a video and stream it to an unlimited number of students forever without permission or compensation to the creator.” Although their statement exaggerates the facts (UCLA is only streaming to the limited number of students who are currently enrolled in an online class), how is that any different from a copy of a video in a library, which can also be viewed by an unlimited number of patrons forever, without permission or compensation?
Good for UCLA for standing up for the fair use rights of its faculty.
Sitting in a Viennese coffee house,
My aunt said to me, “Look at them stirring.
Slowly, unrushed. There’s no hurry at all.”
What was the rush? There was time to stir the cup
“That’s not how people stir coffee at home.
Slosh the spoon around the cup a few times,
And we’re done.There’s no time to stir slowly;
Slurp down the java and get back to work.”
That summer is past, and Nellie’s passed on,
But at coffee time, I still remember
The Austrian stir: take time to enjoy,
Moment by moment, pay attention to now.
Yet try as I might to slow down my stir,
Each cup brings another quick slosh.
Tags: poetry
I don’t know who Aunt Carmen is, but she has a monster sweet tooth, and makes a fine cake quick bread. (That ingredient list looks suspiciously like pound cake . . .)
- 1/2 cup butter
- 1/2 cup sugar
- 2 eggs
- 2 cups flour
- 2 tsp baking powder
- 1/2 cup milk
Cream together butter and sugar, then add eggs one at a time. Mix together flour and baking powder, then mix with butter-sugar-egg mix alternating with milk.
Bake in greased and floured loaf pan or crock at 350F for 1 hour.
Reading Licklider’s Man-Computer Symbiosis, I’m struck by the fact that technological changes are going to force long-needed changes in teaching, assessment, and testing. They may not be here as quickly as Licklider predicted, but they are coming, and coming soon.
The idea that we can make classrooms technology-free zones, and require that mobile devices be not just out of sight but turned off is ludicrous now, and will become more so in light of current developments: with the ever-increasing power of smart phones and the development of opto-electronic contact lens displays, we will essentially have wearable computers. There’s no way we’ll be able to play Wyatt Earp and confiscate technology at the classroom door like so many Colt .45’s at Tombstone city limits.
Even if we wanted to continue to require students to memorize facts and give them back to us unassisted in the form of multiple choice answers filled in on a form, technology will make cheating essentially undetectable and unstoppable. Rather than engage in the fruitless battle against technology (“no contact lenses in class”?; Faraday-caged classrooms?) we need to turn to the real work: engaging with students to prepare them to use the tools at their disposal rather than continue to train them to be 19th century factory workers.
In the face of these coming changes, however, I feel surrounded by resistance. The sign above appeared in both of the classrooms I teach in, and it is a clear indication that someone is doing something horribly wrong. If someone feels compelled to post such signs, the problem is not the students, it is the teacher. My wife has a colleague (teaching in a doctoral program!) who forbids the use of laptops in class, and has even scolded a student for looking something up to contribute to discussion.
What is to be done?
Tags: baylor_nms_s10, learning, Licklider, talking texting, teaching, technology
It’s winter, the summer vegetables are long gone, and you’re tired of spinach and broccoli. What can you do? Here’s a bit of frozen summer vegetables with the added bonus of sausage. Makes plenty of leftovers for lunch. Delicious with corn bread. Based on a recipe from Epicurious.
- 4 Tbs butter
- 1 onion, finely chopped
- 12 oz. andouille, sliced
- 3 cups frozen sweet corn (1 lb.)
- 3 cups frozen baby lima beans (1 lb.)
- 14 oz can diced tomato
- 1/4 cup chopped parsley
- juice of 1 lime
Sautee onions in butter until soft. Add sausage and frozen veggies. Cook until corn and limas are done, 10-15 mins. Add tomatoes, and simmer 5 more mins. Add parsley and lime, then season to taste with salt & pepper.
UCLA is acquiescing to claims by the Association for Information and Media Equipment that streaming video in an online course within a password-protected course management system isn’t fair use. “Professors . . . have had to choose between eliminating the films from their syllabuses or telling their students to either purchase their own copies, rent the titles from a commercial vendor, or check them out of the university’s media lab.” Given the limited number of copies and reduced hours labs are open due to budget cuts, that last choice is becoming less of an option.
It doesn’t sound like UCLA is vigorously defending the fair-use rights of its faculty, either. “We don’t want to litigate an issue that could potentially be resolved outside of the legal system,” said a university spokesman.
Is UCLA considering paying a royalty, and thereby reducing the scope of fair use for others? Fair Use is defined in part by its effect on the market for the copyrighted work. If universities routinely use clips of copyrighted works in a password-protected class, there’s no market to be lost. If universities like UCLA start routinely paying royalties, there is a market, and those institutions that are unwilling or unable to pay lose their fair use protection. If UCLA pays a settlement, who’s next?
Thanks to Jim Groom for the tip.
One aspect of the LMS that I haven’t seen addressed directly is the power of the default to shape course design. Lisa M. Lane has discussed the issue as one that confronts web-novice faculty and suggests ways to ameliorate the default problem.
Although Lane recognizes that the influence of LMS defaults extends beyond web-novice faculty (“Even experienced instructors continue to use Blackboard/WebCT primarily for grade administration, e–mail and presenting static content”), I think the problem is more pervasive than she lets on. The nature of the LMS beast means that even those of us who have been using it for years always remain novices.
Course design should happen before classes start, so any of the work dealing with setting up a course in the LMS happens once a semester, twice or at best three times a year. As a practical matter, someone who teaches a couple of courses online each semester will only set up a course about 4 times in a year. That’s not enough to learn how to work the software, and when you throw in the various updates and new editions of LMS software, even those of us who’ve been teaching online for years never really get to be experts at the software that drives the design of our courses. I re-learn my college’s LMS at the beginning of each semester as I adjust the design of my courses, and even after 6 years, it feels as counter-intuitive as ever. I’ve adopted lots of new technologies over that time, but the LMS is as opaque as it was when I first encountered it.
We faculty have the same problem with the LMS that students do: it’s an unfamiliar technology that we use in limited ways. Outside of class, neither I nor my students ever use it. Once the semester’s over, my students may never use it again.1 We’re forced into using tools that have no value outside the institution, and we never get good at them. I’ve become much more proficient in Wordpress over the past 6 months than I have in LMS over the past 6 years because it has some use outside of class, and because I use it more than twice a year.
1 I may not either: memento mori.
or Debris Risotto: clearing out the last of the week’s leftovers and coming up with a lunch that didn’t require leaving the house.
- 1/2 an onion, finely chopped
- 1 Tbs olive oil
- 3 strips bacon, chopped
- 2 Tbs leftover pork chop sauce
- Splash of white wine
- 2 cups cooked short-grain rice
- 1 cup grated Parmesan cheese
- 1 cup cooked black-eyed peas
Sautee onion and bacon in olive oil until bacon is browned. Add sauce and wine, bring to a boil, then add rice and stir until heated. Add cheese and stir until melted and well-mixed, then stir in peas and continue cooking until heated through (I microwaved the peas to speed up the process).
Not pork chops & applesauce, just pork chops. Some times, you just want a tasty, simple pork chop.
- Thick cut pork loin chops (3/4″ to 1″ thick)
- Kosher salt (or coarse sea alt if you want to be fancy about it)
- olive oil
- White wine
Brine the chops if you have time; otherwise sprinkle both sides with kosher salt and let rest 15 to 20 minutes.
Heat a skillet with a lid over medium-high heat, then add olive oil. Add chops, and leave them until browned, then turn and reduce heat to medium. When the second side starts to brown, add white wine about half way up the chops and cover the skillet. Braise until done to your liking.
Remove the chops to a cutting board and cover with foil. Raise heat to high, and cook wine to a syrup (add any juices that collect on the cutting board as you cook down the sauce).
Slice the chops and top with sauce.
My Twitter Feed
- tidmarshm: I am the master of childhood nutrition: kid's eating scrambled eggs after nothing but cupcakes and strawberry milk all day. Protein FTW!
- tidmarshm: Actually, I know what I did (tripped over toddler while running around park w/ a 5-y-o on my shoulders); just don't know what I injured.
- tidmarshm: Don't know what I did to my shoulder last weekend at the park, but gaming on the wii apparently doesn't help.
- tidmarshm: also--weird keyboard layout; at sign right of space bar & odd arrangement of shift characters.
- tidmarshm: hmmm...web browser on wii all but useless. text nearly illegible & typing w/ wiimote maddening. won't do this much.
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