Leave the kid alone

Ruben van Assouw, the only survivor of a plane crash in Libya last week, returned to the Netherlands today.  The fact that his recovery and return was an international news story has left me feeling a bit queasy.  This picture from his hospital bed appeared on the evening news, with sober news anchors reporting daily that he had not yet been told that the rest of his immediate family had been killed in the crash.  Taking cameras into the hospital room of a bruised, unconscious nine-year-old boy seems a step beyond invasive journalism.  


The desire to put a human face to a tragic story is a perfectly understandable impulse.  Pictures of a nine-year-old orphan are much more compelling than saying "Only one person of the 104 people on-board survived."  But the fact that something is more compelling doesn't mean it needs to be reported on.  A plane crash, 100 people dying is a public matter.  But a boy finding out he lost his brother, mother, and father after waking up from a coma is a private tragedy.  We don't have any right to know the details of his life as a private citizen, and more importantly, we have no need to know them.  The fact that he has returned to the Netherlands doesn't change our foreign policy or aviation safety.  The only people it affects are the boy and his family.  Journalists, we know he survived, and we know he's recovering.  That's all we should know.  Please, leave the kid alone.  

By the people, for the people

Getting a free college education without ever leaving your home is becoming a real possibility.

The University of the People started its second semester this spring with 380 students from 81 countries, according to NPR.  The school is free, besides a small fee for final exams and applying to the school.  Right now, its creator, Israeli entrepreneur Shai Reshef is paying for all other costs associated with the school.  Since the school focuses largely on peer-to-peer learning (instructors are available, but are there more as resources than as directors of learning), its expenses are relatively low, although in NPR's story, Reshef said the school will eventually need 15,000 students to become self-sufficient.

This school, if it succeeds, could change the our very idea of what it means to go to college.  But for now, the school still can't provide what most people ultimately want--a degree.  I think it's a great way to gain more knowledge, especially for working people who don't have the time, money, or ability to physically attend class.  I do have to say, though, that I hope this doesn't become the working model for all colleges one day.  College, to me at least, is about much more than the classes, and I think students would miss out on gaining independence from their parents and really meeting new people if they just attended classes online.  We'll have to wait to see what happens to the face of college education in coming years, but no matter what, the University of the People will certainly have an interesting impact on the institution of college.

(Image from flickr.com by rofi)

Recognizing the awesomeness of Model United Nations, and

This week, I got to send two days helping chair committee meetings for Model United Nations, and it occurred to me while I was in this meetings that MUN is one of the greatest collaborative activities available to high school students.  If you're not familiar with the program, it works like this:

1. High schools from around the state (and beyond) choose a particular country to represent, and then here at UNI, we brainstorm issues that are discussed in the real United Nations.  (Some of this year's issues included Gender Roles: Negotiating the Conflicting Roles of Women in Religion and Government Laws and Regulations, Pandemic Influenza, and Combating Misinformation in AIDS treatment.  A full list of this year's topics is available here.  Incidentally, I would dare anyone who thinks high schoolers are unintelligent and apathetic to listen to these students speak and debate on these issues for five minutes.  I'm fairly certain they would think differently afterward.)

2. Members of MUN at each of the schools research the issue and write a position paper explaining and justifying their country's viewpoint on the issue.

3. The high schoolers all come here for two days, break apart into committees and debate and collaborate with other high schoolers they've never met to come up with amendments and resolutions to solve the issues.  They have to use parliamentary procedure, and they don't argue their own viewpoint, they represent their country's view.  The amendments usually read something like "Endorsing the use of sanctions in dealing with hostile nuclear states, and"  (For the record, the "comma and" appears on every single amendment and is a bit of an inside joke among MUN teams, so the title of this blog entry is not actually a typo, but a tribute to MUN.)

Watching these high schools seriously debate these issues is one of the coolest things I've seen in a long time, especially as someone who's going into teaching.  They gain debate skills (especially how to argue for something they might not personally agree with), public speaking skills, collaboration skills (they can't pass amendments without a majority plus one vote), and they gain a much better understanding of an organization that has tremendous power in the real world.  They do get really into it, and it is fantastically exciting to see a junior in high school stand in front of her peers to offer a possible solution to preventing the spread of pandemic influenza and answer difficult questions from her peers. 

This is something I would love to use in my classroom, and I think the Internet makes it possible to take this activity to the next level.  Instead of having people from around the Midwest, you could have students from around the world act as delegates in United Nations through video conferencing or similar technologies. Students could gain an incredible global perspective from doing something like this.    

(Image of the UN Headquarters in New York City from flickr.com by United Nations Photo)

Google Love

I am in love with Google, and this article from the New York Times only makes me love the company more.  I can't imagine going through research projects with using Google, and these handy tips could be quite useful in the classroom.  For example, students can use Google as a spelling aid by searching for their best guess of the word, and Google pops up with suggestions in less than second. Or if students have to convert currencies in a math class, they can just type in something like "300 dollars in pesos," and Google immediately tells them that it's 3,663.76 pesos.  Google even has a built-in calculator; enter "5 + 2" and Google completes the equation.

However, I do wonder if these new, easily accessible tools with make some classroom lessons and units obsolete.  How much spelling do you need to teach when your students can look it up on Google less than a second?  I don't think it's an easy-to-answer question, but I'll be interested to see how much my students memorize, and how much they just look up on Google.    

Singing with strangers

Ten years ago, when I was taking music classes in my middle school, this video would have likely been impossible.



Composer and conductor Eric Whitacre explains how he got started on the virtual choir project and how he coordinated nearly 200 individual videos into one virtual concert here.

A choir of people who have are not in the same space and have never met can still sound beautiful, and I think this has a lot of cool implications for education, especially music classes.  Kids could sing or play instruments with people on the other side of the world.  What a great way to reinforce the idea that music truly is a universal language. 

image from flickr.com by ordinaryfool

The Internet: A Tool for Democracy

I went to a fascinating lecture by Dr. Erik Camayd-Freixas, who served as a federal court interpreter at the May 2008 immigration raid in Postville, today.  After the raid, he wrote an essay about the human rights abuses he witnessed in Postville.  Though Dr. Camayd-Freixas initially shared the essay only with a small circle of family and friends, it quickly spread around the Internet and inspired an editorial in the New York Times.

(Image from flickr.com by pCka)
 


Here Dr. Camayd-Freixas talks to the New York Times about the Postville raid.





Dr. Camayd-Freixas made a comment that really caught my attention during the lecture; he said that his essay never would have gotten any attention if it hadn't gotten out on the Internet.  He went on to say that the Internet is now one of our greatest and most remarkable tools to preserving our democracy.

This really got me thinking--I use the Internet for social networking, for research, and for recreation, but I rarely think about it as a social justice tool.  Doing so could have a whole host of applications in the classroom.  Students could email their representatives about important issues, blog about the injustices they see in their own lives, learn more about the issues that impact their lives and their society. In reflecting on this, I hope I can incorporate ideas of civic engagement and free speech into the technologies my students will use on a daily basis.