21st Century Educator

This week has been the week for news stories around the issues of internet filtering. First up, I read this article about the filter that McDonalds is placing on all its wifi access . Not such a big deal. Then I read another article that same day about how the NSW education department here in Australia is going to censor access on all student laptops. This article started to make me laugh…. With quotes like

“Our internet filtering is unbreakable. We have a huge proxy array that does all the filtering. We’ve just brought that in-house and the reason we have done that is we want much tighter control over it,” said Wilson (chief information officer for the NSW education department).

To add to this lunacy it has been estimated that the system will cost an additional 245 million dollars, which is on top of the 195 million for the original laptop plan. Therefore, more money is going to be spent on filtering than will be on “real” learning resource. Not a terribly smart plan in these current economic times!!

Then to cap it all off there was this little corker from the Australian Newspaper - Australia to have a national internet filter seen only in countries like China and Iran. Why on earth would we spend tax payers money on such a system? Besides that, who decides what is appropriate and not appropriate to view? The article suggested that “Compulsory internet censorship for all Australians could ban controversial websites on euthanasia or anorexia.” Of all the things to censor, these two seemed the most “controversial”?

How do we teach young people to discern and become analytical thinkers when bureaucrats think it best to play big brother with the greatest and largest information source available? This I believe is a marvelous example of destructive technology. Learning tools that are used to play big brother instead of educator and learner.

Some may remember the experiment I was running with a colleague and his class a couple of months ago. We were looking at revamping a class with the use of media and social networking. My colleague is an experienced educator who hasn’t had a great deal of time for technology use in his classroom. Back in April this year we had a lengthy conversation about the way I was using media in my classroom as well as social networking. He was intrigued to see how this worked and wanted to know if it could be done in his Study of Religion Class. SOR is a high school subject that is almost like an introduction to philosophy for high school students. They look at some great content from world view and different world religions.

The SOR students were studying a term of work on Ethicial issues in which they normally would learn about 5 key topics and discuss. Prior to this they had already studied theoretical ethics, much of which was to be applied to this study. The project concept was simple… Our aim was for students in groups to engage deeply into one ethical issue and then report back to the class what they discovered. With that aim in mind we set out to create some spaces for the students to express their findings and really engage in the topics. First up, I created a blog for each group where they were to blog and podcast about the issue. Each student was given a piece of stimulus material to help them think of an ethical issue they could report on. Each group then made a decision on the issue they would research and began looking for information. The second element of this was to allow the students to connect not only with each other and their teachers, but “real world experts” who could help them with their research and developing ideas. This was done over their blog, as well as a secure facebook group. The students all joined a facebook group where we could discuss the issues along with invite opinion from academic experts in relevant fields.

The project was a great success…. No that does not mean it all went perfectly according to plan. Some things worked great, some were a complete disaster. The great success was the outcomes (mostly positive) for all those involved. The potential of this project and where it can lead into the future also must be counted as a great success. Students were engaged and once pushed in the right direction achieved some great work. The assessment at the end of the unit didn’t change from the usual in class essay, but did show some great improvement by many students who normally struggle with the course content.

I will try and reflect more on this project as time permits…. However, I would like to leave you with one of the podcasts the students created after choosing the chocolate slave trade. Their stimulus material was Dr Zeus’ Horton here’s a who…. Where the repeated line is “A person is a person no matter how small.”

This podcast was a response to the movie Blood Diamond…

This podcast raised some thoughts around the issues of Genetic Engineering…

For More podcasts have a look at the students blogs…
http://www.ecsitemedia.com/sor (links on that page to each group)