I spent the last 2 Tuesday evenings at the Institute of Contemporary Art taking a workshop about blogging and podcasting. I’ve been blogging for quite a while and have begun podcasting, so not much of that was super new to me, but it was a great oppotunity to see the new Digital Studio, get a free tour of the permanent collection, and swap ideas with the educators there.

Getting OUT OF the classroom is SO important! Just being in a new space and speaking with teachers in other schools, I was reinvigorated with an enthusiasm for what I am doing already, and motivated to keep pushing along with new stuff. It gets me jazzed, what can I say, when I meet other people as fired up about all these things as I am! Plus, there’s always somebody doing something different or new, and is best of all willing to share the tool or the trick or the technique. No one can be a “know-it-all” when it comes to emerging technologies in the classroom, cuz its always changing. Its more like a collective intelligence that keeps on growing, feeding off itself to get bigger and better.  ( Oh that’s the web! ) It can also be overwhelming and even discouraging when you do see what other educators have done already - you think, man, why aren’t I doing that?! or whoa, HOW did they do that?!

One of those A-ha’s for me was, after the tour, realizing the importance of getting the students out there too (not just me next time!). Making connections between the history of art and the contemporary tools we are using is powerful - don’t just learn Flash to make a ball bounce up and down, animate to express an emotion you have or to explore issues of identity! We get so caught up in the ”coolness” of the medium, that we often miss the message.  

What also struck me is the importance our guide placed not only on the message but on the process the artist went through to get to the end product. Artists had essays, videos, sketchbooks, and quoted reflections on the entire experience of making the artwork. Presenting it in a public forum was the culmination of their experience. Our students get so caught up in making IT, that often the reflection on the process and the celebration of the final presentation gets forgotten about.

I hope to get back to incorporating the entire experience into a project - from planning, to producing, presenting, and reflecting - for my students, and building more meaning overall into each exercise.

At the BATEC Summit on Friday at Microsoft, one of the discussions that came up in the Web Development workshop I facilitated, was about the meaning of “Web 2.0″. I think this video best sums it up :

WE are Web 2.0. The machine is US.

We are deceieved by the media into perceiving “beauty” as having certain characteristics - bright eyes, thin face, light skin…And although we live in reality - we have pores, fly-aways, and yellow teeth - we seem to accept the messages the media send to us, and even consume and strive to be whatever it is they deceive us into buying or becoming. How much are we, as a society obsessed with pop culture, to blame for feeding into the perception? Who in fact changes the perception? It is a vicious cycle, but I believe the media has been in control…until the world wide web afforded us a public platform on which we, too, can influence mass perception through our OWN media. We can produce and broadcast our own messages through video, music and more on services like YouTube, GarageBand, and Blogger - and people are listening! So when will the “media” listen to us? Or are we now becoming the “media”?

The truth about this media :
It was made to promote “real beauty” by the Dove Self-esteem Fund.
“Fasel” actually means “fake”, and the makeup is a fake line.
It took 10 hours to make her up, including the Photoshopping.
She is not a super model.

I showed this video to my Media Seminar class and we discussed when it was OK for advertisers to “deceive” consumers through the use of technology, and when it was not. We talked about the messages these ads send to us, and what the effects are on our perception of ourselves and our world. Why should the media define what is cool, what is sexy, what is desirable, and what is beautiful? One girl felt models SHOULD look perfect - “that’s what they are supposed to be!” But when asked if this definition of beauty was her own or in fact the result of the influence of what she had been sold or told, she was flustered. No one likes to think they have no control over their own decision making and opinon, and I am not preaching that we are brainwashed by advertisements! But our choices and our values are influenced by what society accepts and promotes is the norm, or, what is more impressive - the ideal.

So when will WE become the media and make our own messages? I believe we already are. And I challenged my students to get their own messages out there with and through the technology they already know or will know in my class - through blogging, podcasting, video, web design, and digital art.

A nice transition into the PSA project, dontcha think?

Ugh. I am still very disturbed by this report on NBC’s Dateline Wednesday night : http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/12503802/

NBC news correspondent Chris Hansen and the group Perverted Justice set up its fourth sting operation to expose online sexual predators, this time in middle America – Ohio. I had not seen the 3 previous reports which uncovered sexual predators in the New York, Los Angeles, and Washington, D.C. areas. Over the course of all 4 stings, over 90 men were confronted.

A Perverted Justice consultant, or Peej, posed online as a 13 year old girl interested in having sex. “She” was quickly taken up on her offer, some men driving as much as 2 hours in the middle of the night to meet her. When they’d arrive at her house, staked out by the County Sheriff’s department and recorded by hidden cameras, they were confronted by Chris Hansen from Dateline.

The predators ranged from the ages of 21 to 44. They were truck drivers, firemen, engineers and school teachers - not your typical “dirty old men.” And every one of them denied that they intended to have sex with the 13 year-old, despite their graphic & detailed chat logs, which Hansen would read back to them (boy, did they squirm!). Many of the men had actually seen Dateline’s previous reports, and yet this did not discourage them from acting out the same deviant and illegal behavior.

So what’s illegal about it if they didn’t actually DO anything physically to the underage girl? Is there a crime if there is no victim? Ohio’s importuning law comes into question, specifically “an adult accused of soliciting sex from a minor using a telecommunications device like a computer.” Is an undercover cop posing as a 13 year old to capture online predators as illegal as an undercover cop posing as a drug dealer to arrest buyers?

I teach a unit on online safety to my freshman, and we discuss the risks and benefits of the internet. I feel VERY strongly that this is an essential unit. I show NetSmartz’s videos and assign the downloadable activities to the class. It is apparent by our class discussions that it is a subject the kids are aware of and understand (don’t give out personal information online, don’t meet anyone in person alone that you met online), but do they actually practice these safety tips? Teens are curious and carefree online, and most likely take risks in chat rooms with strangers because of their naïve assumption of anonymity and protection online. And yet even with a tight-lipped profile, savvy online predators can get the information they want out of their victims.

It’s one thing if these guys are living out their disgusting fantasies online and leaving it there. But the danger lies in not knowing whether and WHEN they will take it to the next level of meeting the teen in person, like the pervs on Dateline did. Luckily, Perverted Justice intercepted them. But they do not intercept them all. And what Dateline exposed is that they ARE out there in cyberspace, they could be anyone, and there are too many of them.

I do not believe that parents can completely control their child’s behavior online, although methods such as limited and monitored internet time, filters and content blocks can help and keep improving. But teens are computer savvy and they will find a way to get what they want. I see it every day at school. If the internet is disabled, they plug in a jump drive with their videos on it. If certain applications are blocked, they figure out how to rename or move files to make it work. When parents are watching, they’ll have one desktop running, and when they are not, they’ll pull up the other desktop running in the background.

And teens take risks both off and on line. They are developmentally unable to foresee the consequences of their decisions or understand the severity of their irresponsible actions.

So what is the solution? It is both education of the teen AND the parent. ( Check out the “what your child would expect” tour! CREEPY!! ) It is stricter laws against the online solicitation of minors. And it is groups like Perverted Justice continuing to intercept, embarrass, and incarcerate these predators. One question that remains, however, is what is being done to rehabilitate these men? What is the follow-up?

You gotta check out Perverted Justice.com : They not only post every conviction, but if the police choose not to participate in the sting, Perverted Justice posts the predators information, chat logs, and photo on their site! Peejs cannot arrest the predators. They have to get the cooperation of the police agency in the area they are monitoring. So many agencies do not have internet task forces, or the law itself to enforce.

Related links :
Dateline NBC : To catch a predator
Perverted-Justice
NetSmartz.org

I am sitting in my graduate level UMASS-Boston Adolescence class now and on my laptop, trying desperately to maintain the “very low” connection I picked up from some location called “cupcake.” At the beginning of class, the professor was unable to get the light of the overhead projector on. He remarked to me, “This must be what you experience in the Boston Public Schools.”

In most BPS schools, yes, it would be. But at TechBoston Academy, the model for future public schools, I am lucky enough to have access to more modern tools to teach with. At TBA, we work in a wireless, networked environment where everyone, including students, has their own laptop. I use an LCD projector which connects my laptop to a SMART board. When I lecture, I make animated, colorful, creative power point presentations, and I use the SMART board to annotate my slides on the projection. I can save my notes and drawings onto a networked drive which students can access. I maintain a web site where I post the assignments, daily agenda, handouts, and resources. I incorporate offline and online activities into my lectures.

After unplugging and plugging the projector back in, the professor realized he had not turned the projector light switch on. Hooray! He could continue his 3 hour black and white text on transparency lecture in the yellow light of the classroom!And yet I complain that our school does not do enough with and through technology?

If TBA is indeed the model for future schools, then the model needs to be replicated sooner rather than later. And surprisingly, it looks like it needs to be implemented in some college and university classrooms! We don’t have it ALL figured out, but I am proud and confident enough to say that we are definitely leading the way.

What IS certain is that my students are lucky to be at TBA! They would be MISERABLE in a class like this!

(so I couldn’t post this to my blog at the time that I wrote it because the connection was so low, so does this count as “blogging” or am I just “posting” it? [Insert the obvious “gratuitous nerd alert” comment here]

I am currently enrolled in a Human Development course called “Adolescence”, and yes, you guessed it!, we’re studying the precious period in all of our lives know to many as “puberty.” In reality, puberty is only one short phase of an extremely long and confusing transition from childhood to adulthood. (”Confusing” does not always mean it was a negative experience - you may remember a quite enjoyable adolescence! In fact, although we typically think of adolescence as a tumultuous time, studies show that it is not that traumatic a transition for most people) . There are indeed physical changes, (which may have occurred at later ages for some of us (ahem!), but there are also cognitive changes and social transitions which vary based on culture, environment, religion, society and heredity. The passage into adulthood in contemporary society is in fact quite cloudy, with no clear-cut age and/or ritual at which adolescence is finally over with. Think about it : society allows us to drive at 16, see R movies at 17, vote at 18, and drink at 21 - all “adult” priveleges. Why not give it to us all at once at ONE age, so we’d know, at ___ years old, we are officially adults?

The question in the text book (Steinberg, Adolescence) jumps out at me from the page :
“When did you become (or when will you) an adult?”