Technology in education: a ground-map, part a

For this month's "Monthly Forum" (yes I know I'm late to start), I'd like to get a conversation going about the role of technology in education.

For myself, I'm trying to develop a "ground-map of the province" (if you will allow me an obscure reference to Dewey) of issues related to technology in education. This is part of a project that will result in a chapter on philosophical issues related to technology in education for a forthcoming book to which I've been asked to contribute.

Allow me to do some "thinking out loud" here.

Technology is "the application of science (or knowledge) to solve problems."

Technology is not science itself, which is primarily concerned with the production of knowledge and the sorting out of which knowledge is privileged within the academy, by certain people who call themselves "scientists," or by policy-makers. Science clearly has a role in education because we want to have a public that understands its methods, issues, and major findings, and because we want to know how people learn best so we can design education to be efficient and effective.

When we apply science/knowledge to solve educational problems, we are (often? always?) using technology. On this broad definition of technology, schooling is largely a technological enterprise. Schooling technologies include classrooms, chalkboards, books, podiums, graded classrooms, chair-desk, bells, bell schedules, school buses, school buildings, playgrounds, athletic fields, band rooms, band instruments, colored chalk, the architecture of schools, p.a. systems, teacher certification systems, the ways we "divide" subjects into "disciplines," testing (and other assessment approaches of all kinds), school districting, "catchment" areas, curriculum plans, "standards" statements, and many many other activities/processes/devices/frameworks. On this expanded notion of technology, we can say that "schooling" is the application of technology to make mass education possible, affordable, and effective.

Of course, it's also the application of technology to do things other than "education" as well, such as warehousing kids, but let's leave that aside for the moment.

Like all technologies, each item on the list I just generated can be critiqued from several different perspectives, or using many different criteria. Among such criteria include efficiency, effectiveness, humanity, cost-effectiveness, opportunity costs, ease-of-use, standardizability (are they applied in consistent manner), teachability (can teachers/administrators/students learn to use them), fairness, various aesthetic criteria of beautify and "fit," conformity to public values of all kinds, carbon footprint, etc. etc.

Indeed, I'd say the essential question of educational policy is the question of which criteria to apply to evaluating the technologies of education, because this question is basic to other questions such as what resources should we make available to all schools or all students, or to which students, and why.

But we don't tend to talk about this question as if it were a question about technology. Instead, we limit our explicit discussion of technologies to a subset of those that are applied to schooling. Most commonly, we refer to digital technologies such as computers, networks, software, digital cameras, interactive whiteboards, peripherals, etc.

Other ways to delineate a subset of technologies to be referred to are certain critical perspectives (such as those of Foucault or Michael Apple) which talk about "technologies of control." Surely these perspectives are justified in referring to technologies, just as much as the common person is justified in limiting discussion of technologies to what I've described above as "digital technologies." What's important is realizing that any limitation of the word "technology" to particular types of technologies has both motivations and consequences, which should be examined. Thus, the limitation of the discussion to "digital technologies" tends to take OFF the table many of the other things I've listed, such as bell schedules and P.A. systems, even though THOSE technology are pernicious and omnipresent in schools.

Perhaps the common approach,then, is to limit "technology" to those tools and approaches that are not yet universal (or nearly universal) in their application to schools. "Technology," then, is a euphemism for "things that we're still trying to decide whether we need," or "things that only some schools can currently afford."

I guess what I'm saying is, the question of what we MEAN by "technology" is a political one, that perhaps anteceeds questions about the use of any particular technologies in any particular situation.

Okay, I will come back later to continue.....

Our Friend Charles Murray Opines About the Waste (Waste!) Of the College Going Underclass

Citing E. D. Hirsch as an "indispensible thinker" on literacy, Charles Murray tells us that it really isn't worth it for a kid who (quite by coincidence?) "knows that he enjoys working with his hands" to go to college. As usual, he uses some interesting data to make completely misguided assertions. Note, for example, the following excerpt, where we can solve the "misaligned ambitions" of poor and working-class high school students not by helping them achieve their ambitions, or by working to change the nature of professional culture so they feel more welcomed, but by simply shifting them into vocational tracks where they will make more money and be happier.

One aspect of this phenomenon has been labeled misaligned ambitions, meaning that adolescents have career ambitions that are inconsistent with their educational plans. Data from the Sloan Study of Youth and Social Development conducted during the 1990s indicate that misaligned ambitions characterized more than half of all adolescents. Almost always, the misalignment is in the optimistic direction, as adolescents aspire to be attorneys or physicians without understanding the educational hurdles they must surmount to achieve their goals. They end up at a four-year institution not because that is where they can take the courses they need to meet their career goals, but because college is the place where B.A.s are handed out, and everyone knows that these days you�ve got to have a B.A. Many of them drop out. Of those who entered a four-year college in 1995, only 58 percent had gotten their B.A. five academic years later. Another 14 percent were still enrolled. If we assume that half of that 14 percent eventually get their B.A.s, about a third of all those who entered college hoping for a B.A. leave without one.

If these numbers had been produced in a culture where the B.A. was a nice thing to have but not a big deal, they could be interpreted as the result of young adults deciding that they didn�t really want a B.A. after all. Instead, these numbers were produced by a system in which having a B.A. is a very big deal indeed, and that brings us to the increasingly worrisome role of the B.A. as a source of class division. The United States has always had symbols of class, and the college degree has always been one of them. But through the first half of the 20th century, there were all sorts of respectable reasons a person might not go to college�not enough money to pay for college; needing to work right out of high school to support a wife, parents, or younger siblings; or the commonly held belief that going straight to work was better preparation for a business career than going to college. As long as the percentage of college graduates remained small, it also remained true, and everybody knew it, that the majority of America�s intellectually most able people did not have B.A.s.

Note how the BA becomes a "source" of class division, instead of a result of class division.

Just sending this love note out to all those "intellectually most able" people out there in blog land. Pat yourselves on the back. And send everyone else to be a mechanic.

The Problem of Schooling Isn't About Schools

Interesting article today in the New York Times about efforts to create integrated collections of wrap-around services to support schools. As I've argued earlier on this blog, there is a lot of evidence, perhaps most comprehensively described in Richard Rothstein's Class and Schools and in Jean Anyon's Radical Possibilities that many of the key problems of schools are really not the direct result of the schools.

This is not the old argument partly resulting from the Coleman Report that there is something "wrong" with poor families, although some of what the NYT article notes implies this. Instead a key issue is simply that poor kids don't get the kinds of social and material supports that privileged kids do. These include very basic things like poor nutrition, the fact that poor kids often have little or no access to dental care. And the families of poor kids simply don't provide the kinds of entree to middle-class aspects of culture that privileged families do.

However, while all of this is important, the core argument of the article is still faulty. It assumes that if poor kids learn better, this will give them access to better jobs. But as I've noted earlier, and as Anyon describes (PDF), education does not create jobs. On the margins, this can be quite effective. But as a mass solution, it is unlikely to fundamentally change the situation of people trapped in central city areas without jobs for a range of reasons.

The article talks about Geoffry Canada's work. His Fist, Stick, Knife, Gun struck me as one of the most profound works about the challenges of growing up in the inner city that I have read in a long time, and I look forward to looking at the book by the author of the NYT article on his broader work.

Of course, this all brings me back to the need to generate power to make the changes that the article describes. Simply electing Obama will not make this happen. For two reasons which I describe in a pair of posts at Open Left:

In Obama and the Crucial Difference Between Campaign and Community Organizing I show that Obama is not actually teaching people how to do community organizing to generate power, but instead teaching a particular approach to campaigning. Thus, he is not spreading effective skills for making these changes happen.

In The Crucial Difference Between Electoral Politics and Movement Building I discuss why the effort to elect Obama is little or nothing like a Movement, and how his efforts to centralize the campaign effort (by eliminating independent 527s, for example) actually reduces its resemblance to a movement.

Which brings us back to education. If we really want changes to happen that are likely to work better than all the work we have done for decades to improve inner city schools, then we need to rethink fundamentally what it means to support change around schools and education and the social situation of poverty in the United States. We need to think about how our work can contribute to the empowerment of others, instead of thinking so much about essentially utopian visions of pedagogical change.

As I've noted, we probably won't do this. But we shouldn't expect much to change if we don't.

Football Scholarships And Football Recruiters

Football Scholarships And Football Recruiters

By Roberto Bell

As high school athletes your likelihood of getting college football scholarships is determined as much by being in the right place at the right time as it is by your playing skills. College recruiters at the various universities have hundreds of prospects which each take hours of analysis and research just to find out who is eligible. With Excel Sports, your profile is sent out to all the JR, NCAA, and CIS teams in North America and is available to all recruiting coordinators who have registered. They have access to your profile and football game film through our online football prospects data base. It is extremely important to have your highlight film available. This process cuts the time by 75% for the recruiters. Players entering the freshman years in high school can now have college scouts /recruiters look at them and watch as their athletic careers progress. This allows the colleges or JR programs to see the growth potential you might have. The ability to have your game film seen right beside your picture allows the scouts to see if you have the potential, not just look football combine stats that only tell half the story.

There are over 700 college programs in the Unites States alone. That is too many for you try to contact. In addition, your focus is usually on one or two schools, and if you are not offered football scholarships by these programs, you feel you�re playing days are over. This is not the case at all. There is always an opportunity - it is just finding the right opportunity. Football recruiters from a school you might not have known existed could be interested in you, but if they have never seen you or heard about you, how they will know you even want to continue playing. We can help! We are in constant contact with college coaches from throughout Canada and the U.S. We help you find the right place for you to receive your education and continue playing the game you love. The recruiting process can be one that is confusing and frustrating. We can answer questions and have your best interests at heart as we are not affiliated with any college; we just want what is best for our clients.

As an NCAA, CIS, JR or NAFL player your profile is also sent out to all professional and semi pro teams. It is very important to stay on the radar screen for these teams, especially if you are among the football free agents. If you are not on a list you will NEVER get called. Football pro style personnel and scouts are always scouring lists for the next guy. Injuries happen, guys are not performing, and players need to be called up ASAP. How do they find you? They now have a short list or staged list of guys that they feel can contribute immediately or down the road. In the NFL approximately 34% of this year�s rosters were filled by undrafted free agents. In the CFL every import roster position is filled by a free agent. Did you know, that in the 2007 CFL non import positions were filled by 54 football free agents/undrafted players. You need to be on a list!

We strive to provide only quality articles, so if there is a specific topic related to scholarship that you would like us to cover, please contact us at any time. And again, thank you to those contributing daily to our Football Scholarships Articles.

Worst and Best Teachers in Movies

Worst

Best

Disbelief About Free Will Encourages Cheating

Does moral behavior draw on a belief in free will? (PDF) Two experiments examined whether inducing participants to believe that human behavior is predetermined would encourage cheating. In Experiment 1, participants read excerpts that encouraged a belief in determinism (i.e., behavior as the consequence of environmental and genetic factors) or neutral text. Exposure to the deterministic message increased immoral behavior on a passive cheating task that involved allowing a flawed computer program to reveal answers to mathematical problems that participants should have been solving themselves. Moreover, increased cheating behavior was mediated by decreased belief in free will. In Experiment 2, exposure to deterministic statements led participants to overpay themselves on a cognitive test relative to participants who were exposed to statements endorsing free will as well as participants in numerous control conditions. These findings suggest that the debate over free will has societal, as well as scientific and theoretical, implications.

This maps onto the evidence about the effects of believing that ability can be developed through hard work, or is simply inborn.

Through more than three decades of systematic research, [Dweck] has been figuring out answers to why some people achieve their potential while equally talented others don�t�why some become Muhammad Ali and others Mike Tyson. The key, she found, isn�t ability; it�s whether you look at ability as something inherent that needs to be demonstrated or as something that can be developed.

Reduce College Debt With Scholarships

Reduce College Debt With Scholarships

By Dale Clifton, The Scholarship Doctor

Six scholarship judges were sitting around an oval table. Forms were piled into 50 boxes. Each one had the name of a state. I looked at the boxes and wondered why some of them were overflowing and others had just a few. This was the first round of judging. By the time the contest was over almost 16,000 applications would be examined. Some of the comments were really critical, "Why did this person bother to send in an application? It's so sloppy." "This person put the wrong address on the envelope, even though the correct one is at the top of the application." One had a cassette tape inside. We played it and it was a country song. The applicant was a good musician.

That was twelve years ago, and many people still do not know or realize that College Scholarship Planning could reduce or totally eliminate college financial debt.

One of the first questions I am always asked is, "When should we start looking?" Then some answer their own question with, "I'll bet we're too late already huh?" The ideal time is to start is the 8th grade to freshman year. Good planning starts early, but scholarships are posted monthly, and if you start planning early, you have a chance to win big. Many win the very first time.

If you are a junior or senior in high school, go for it. But remember, your chances to win increase with every completed application. You should start College Scholarship Planning even if there is a chance your child may decide not to go to college. But if the decision is yes, you will have everything in place. And the planning experience is more than filling out a few applications.

Another common concern is assuming your family income is too high to win scholarships. Fact: 80% of all scholarships are need based and income related, but 20% are not. This means millions of dollars are still available. It makes good solid financial sense to make an effort to win scholarship money regardless of income.You should start College Scholarship Planning even if there is a chance your child may decide not to go to college. But if the decision is yes, you will have everything in place. And the planning experience is worth more than filling out a few applications.