Congress opts for educating students over blocking Web sites and social networks

Congress opts for educating students over blocking Web sites and social networks

Saying that this is a triumph of common sense and local control goes a little too far. It would be common sense NOT to have a bill that addresses this. However, I guess when seen in contrast to many bone-headed bills considered and passed, this one isn't too bad.

Should we really have to legislate teaching students how to best use computers and the networks that connect them? This seems quite obvious to me. Common sense would say that this should be part of every schools role as socializer of youth.

On the other hand, people often point to telephones and say, "do we teach students how to use telephones in responsible ways"? The answer is not really, but until recently students' telephones didn't come into the school. Now, we do teach them (in some ways) about the proper use of telephones. At the very minimum, we teach them that it is not ok to use telephones in class or when it interrupts the educational experience for anyone.

I hate to give teachers even more responsibilities, but this would be easy to insert into any and all computer-based activities that teachers utilize. Just mentioning things in passing like, don't give your contact information to strangers, don't leave your online social networking account open to the public (friends only), don't put anything online that you wouldn't be comfortable with your mother seeing, electronic data is easy to copy and distribute and anything bad you do will likely get back to a person you don't want to see it, and so forth.

If the schools want to take it a step further, have programs dedicated to this. Search for student pages or fish for friend invites and shock them that you so easily entered their space. I don't agree with showing the whole school their embarrassing details, but drop a comment on their page or just mention that you got access in a meeting. This will wake them up. If it doesn't, ask them if it would be ok to give their parents a link...that will probably seal the deal.

We are still in the trial and error stage here. Things change too fast to come up with any solid advice on how to educate students in this area. However, we can't just leave it to the streets. We will end up with a generation of digitally pregnant and drug addicted (metaphorically) citizens.

A National Center for Edtech Research

A National Center for Edtech Research

My greatest hopes for this new Center include providing some focus to a field that seems not to have had much and encouraging researchers to continue lines of research with both large and small studies.

The field hasn't had a lot of focus in resent years. I don't include Web 2.0 as a focus :) There have been some exploratory areas of research that have seen lots of work, including the broad topics of virtual worlds, online interactions, and materials design; however, even within these areas of study, they seems to be little coherence between studies and few substantial studies.

This leads to my next point, which is that a Center for Edtech research should encourage the establishment of lines of research that focus on building incrementally on and replicating previous research. You may say, "researchers already do this, silly!" I would have to respond that they tend not to replicate previous research at all and when it comes to building incrementally on previous research, they most often vary so much from the previous research that they research hardly counts as incremental.

I'm a little vague here, but I think that these two roles will result in our work having more influence in education and throughout the sciences.

No more school as council opens 'learning centres' - Independent Online Edition > News

No more school as council opens 'learning centres'

I think that you will here a lot about this over the next few years. Both success and failure will benefit our understanding of this movement, which I think is gathering steam in academic circles and even political circles.

I personally think that this is an important direction to be researched in education with my gut reaction being that it is the right direction to move in. Of course, I'll check my gut until I see some results :)

Dan