I just watched your video which is outstanding but disqualifies itself as EP because you didn’t have children delivering the message (Dan’s metric).

The theme of your video is near and dear to my heart though. Postman, Rozak, Baudrillard, and many other thinkers are spot on when they discuss the absence of ideas, critical thinking, meaning, and so on in our curriculums.

Many years ago, someone compared a pencil to a computer and argued that either could be used to write the Declaration of Independence. But the mere rote memorization of facts won’t produce anything like Shakespeare, Einstein, or a thinker worth talking to.

We have reached a point of immersion in information throughput. What happens in schools is quaint. But people are conditioned to shop 24/7/365. When the Iraq war was launched, Bush advised anxious Americans to go on a shopping spree. Bad schools – here’s a discount coupon – go shop. Shop for doctors, cures, teachers, answers that suit you, grades that reflect your buying power, and so on.

No matter how we reform schools, the likelihood of overcoming the immediate gratification of eternally being #1 and punishing those who are not #1 is a fool’s errand.

Schools cannot succeed at being information overload detox centers. They must adapt to become agents of information overload management strategy.

Learners need to say no, enough, and why should I believe anything that anyone says without proof. Having intelligence in a belligerent society makes for a lonely existence and kids are keenly wired to these feelings.

The neo-Orwellian political season does nothing to ease our concern.

@krasicki–great comments–on fire! I need to spend more time over at your blog.

Here’s some of my eduporn: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D26LWV8WWbo

An idea that I have been promoting for years now is based on the idea that technology has now reached a price point that buying high school students a laptop that they own and are responsible for makes more sense than the school buying and maintaining a mountain of such things.

IMO, giving incoming freshmen a new (say <$500) laptop or netbook and expecting them to use it for their four years of high school eliminates the wild overhead costs and management nightmares any other alternative offers.

At that point the school merely provides wireless for students and admin software of teachers on a closed system.

Welcome to my world.

Concerning support systems, I didn’t see tech support issues addressed in your video (sorry, did I miss it?). Buying a lot of stuff can be great, as long as you have people to take care of it.

This video is one piece of a comprehensive emphasis placed on learning and teaching with tools that our 21st century student’s appreciate. The district has deployed a significant amount of technology over the past two years and we recognize the need to not only spend money but to also have outstanding support systems. The “Time to Listen” video was one resource in a package designed to announce the reorganization of in-district technology staff development and the launching of a blog to share best practice stories.

Honestly it was never our intention to have the video viewed outside the context of the district program. I am however thankful that Scott posted the media. I truly believe the open sharing of ideas, opinions and concerns is productive.

I have to say that I dislike the terminology you’re using. If you’re saying you think the children are being exploited to elicit sympathy for a cause they aren’t promoting that’s just a consumer complaint.

When you used the EP tag I thought you were referring to James Joyce’s definition of pornography as the love of things.

What makes these videos different from the old days is that in the old days Apple, M$, and all the pseudo education software vendors saturated schools with technology to capture home computer market share. Kids had Macs at school and nothing at home – you’re depriving your kid if you don’t buy a machine. Cutsey games were treated like educational epiphanies.

But these days the kids have much more sophisticated stuff at home and bring it to school but the school doesn’t know how to deal with it.

Meanwhile the thought police have passed baby Leroy laws that “protect” (e.g. inoculate) children from ever having to interface with the world while they are at school.

These days a kid might be exposed to just about anything, anywhere, but if it happens at school the sky falls. So it is rare to find a computer on a classroom desk and even more rare to find a teacher who can integrate the third party influence that brings.

So I think what some of the responses are is a misreading of your intent. Many people seem to think that love of the machine is the EP and they’ll insist that a machine is no substitute for hugging a cat or doing homework – they are still thinking that the hardware is the object of desire.

But what I think is subliminal in a few of the videos is a more subtle thing. These kids aren’t concerned about the hardware – that comes and goes. What they are saying in primitive speak (the part they may seem offensive and contrived) is that they think differently about thinking and memorization.

The message might read more obviously put in another way.

The videos should be saying,

Why memorize information as long as I can find and retrieve it?

Why worry about plagiarism if I can locate what is worth saying, take what is already well spoken (does the world need more badly reworded variants of the same ideas?), and mash it up into something that I want to express as a different whole message?

Why test me on information tidbits that anyone and everyone looks up instead of teaching me how to think about information I look up?

If the majority of communication is telepathic, instant, sloppy, and disposable, why beat me up for grammar when I am trying to communicate ideas?

The list could go on but this is the real challenge to education. In oceans of information and communication saturation, how and what do we teach and how and what works best.

The argument that one should ignore the saturation of communication devices, their mediums and influence, and act as if it will go away if one ignores it is antithetical to education no matter who delvers the message.

Dan, you are far more sophisticated and nakedly honest than the vast majority of your profession. The subjects you are tackling will result in occasionally clumsy monologue and dialog but that’s okay. You are shaking the profession up and that’s a good thing – not an easy, polite thing but a really good thing.

These videos use children inauthentically in order to promote an adult’s agenda. These adults are likely well-intentioned but the ends don’t justify marshaling children into an ideological debate between grown-ups.

Look: if you can only compel your thesis by pushing a kid in front of a camera and telling her to act sad, either your thesis is simply false or you need to find another approach on it.

Because children are stakeholders in their education and should be heard but children are used in these videos merely to detail an argument, to accessorize a thesis, and to titillate an audience, which makes these videos pornographic and worthy of my contempt.

Footnote:

Did You Know gets a pass from me for making its case without exploiting kids. Wesch gets a pass because his kids are legal adults who (presumably) could’ve opted out without consequence and because Wesch attempts to tell their story authentically and objectively, using survey results.

Postscript:

I already wrote about this.