Education

Something for all the educators I know.

"The world has sped up in a lot of ways, and I think education hasn't."

I'm a big proponent of Google Apps for Education. It's collaborative, portable, free, and frees up IT resources for more constructive work. I also advocate 1:1 laptop programs.

That said, Google did not "save" the school. The administrators, teachers, and support staff did. Google provides some great free tools, but simply changing from paper and pencil to MacBook and Google Docs doesn't change learning by itself. Frontline is playing into a common fallacy in education: that technology is the end, rather than the means to an end. Technology has to be fully integrated into curriculum, and curriculum has to become dynamic and innovative in it's exploitation of technology. Teachers have to be trained, students have to be trained, new policies have to be crafted, and IT has to support an enormous increase in network usage and new hardware. Google doesn't do that. This school appears to be improving, but we need to dispel of this technology fallacy in order to properly evaluate schools without getting caught up in shiny new computers.

Another video brought to you by cultural anthropologist Michael Wesch, who previously brought you Information R/evolution and The Machine is Us/ing Us. You may also want to see his talk, An Anthropological Introduction to YouTube.

A great look at how broken the current educational model is.

In the United Kingdom, a graphic public service film depicting the ravages of using cell phones in cars has spread virally on the Internet.

I want to scream when I see people doing this. Especially when I'm on my bike.