Blurts

Sometimes it is interesting reconsider a prediction after it becomes possible to determine whether the prediction holds or not. Tim Wu was an earlier critic of what he considered the misguided direction of social media. If you read books focused on social media, you may have consumed his Attention Merchants and The Curse of Bigness.

In this podcast/interview from April, 2020, Tim was asked what could change the direction of big tech in increasing the focus on information that appeals to emotional reactions and increases disagreement and radicalization. Tim, from the historical perspective he sometimes takes, proposes that a major crises may offer the event that causes people and companies to re-examine and redirect their behavior. With the polarization around the election of 2020 and the storming of Congress, perhaps we finally have our crisis.

Opening K12 schools is obviously a highly debated and complex political issue. Clearly, the economy is impacted when parents must deal with their children being at home when some parents need to be at a work site and those parents working from home must divide their attention between work, child care, and educational tutoring. The impact of this issue has an equity component as those families with more income can more easily deal with the demands of having their children at home. There is an educational issue with high numbers of students not attending online learning sessions and serious questions about the effectiveness of learning at a distance. There are added issues questioning the health issue with younger children seemingly less likely to be seriously affected by COVID.

This recent NPR article addresses health in ways I had not anticipated. For example, the question of whether children out of school are really less likely to be exposed to the virus. If children are given freedom to leave their homes, the children may be better off in a monitored school setting. The article even noted that there are long-term health problems associated with a poorer quality education assuming I guess that there are permanent consequences to the time in-school learning is not possible.

As I write this post, the Minneapolis/St. Paul suburb of Bloomington had to back away from a recent return of younger students to classroom instruction because the bus drivers responsible for getting these kids to their schools had a spike in COVID.

You have to feel sorry for the administrators and politicians trying to make decisions about in-person education. You have to be sensitive to educators and other school personnel required to return to face to face instruction when an alternative approach to instruction ideal or not is available. As is the case with all adults, any face to face activity raises the probability they will be infected.

Patience. Hopefully, within a month or so vaccines will drastically reduce the dangers of the pandemic.

Podcasting and social media in general allow most of us an opportunity to share and interact. Hence, I am generating this post. I lived most of my adult life in a region of the country that was home to more Native Americans than any other minority. My professional life brought me interaction with those of this heritage that focused on what might be described as “issues”. I was the chair of a department of psychology that had received government support to prepare Native American clinical psychologists. I spent considerable time on reservations in an effort to become better acquainted with the serious problems that must be addressed.

On a different level, Native people were my colleagues, my students, and the friends I played basketball with most noons.

I like reservation radio – usually a public radio FM channel hosted by folks with an accent different from my own, but playing mostly music I enjoyed with a small-town feel. I have discovered the podcast equivalent and it is worth an occasional listen as an opportunity to expand cultural awareness. Here is a link to Breakdances with wolves. Try a few episodes. I think you will learn a few things and also be entertained. I don’t know if “Native contemporary” is a thing, but this is how I would describe the program.

FETC offered a presentation from Julia Martin attempting to identify how the election of President Biden will impact educators and learners. The presenter made her slide deck available as a pdf. It is available below. The second file is the same pdf with my notes – this is a pdf bundle and I would recommend Skim to read this bundle.

I have signed up for the FETC conference that runs from today for the next four days. This conference when face to face was always our favorite. ISTE was too large and too expensive. It was large, but there had become practical challenges just getting into the sessions you wanted to attend. We had to kind of skip every other sessions if we were interested in back to back sessions because room attendance limits made it impossible to walk from room to room and get in.

FETC is free and online. This means there are no longer challenges watching the sessions that interest you. The downside is that the money to run the conference comes from corporate sponsors and the great majority of the sessions are essentially corporate run. The cost/usefulness tradeoff will likely be a personal issue. I encourage you to quickly join and make your own decision here. I need to do the same. I would rather pay say $25 a day and allow the conference the resources to offer a greater variety of content. However, for the cost I can watch a session or two even if I don’t find the approach to be what I would prefer.

I think our present online necessity offers the opportunity rethink many things. I believe online will become more popular perhaps as a way for K12 schools to share access to a few classes that are not practical for individual districts. Learning online is different and it is likely an acquired skill everyone should experience.

Do give FETC a try and for those working during the live sessions take a look at the archived content.