If you were to read the very first paragraph, you might conclude that the writer was against this growing practice:

WHAT some call opinion, others call interpretive journalism — a label as opaque as the practice. Call it what you will, nothing has generated more reader indignation in the past few weeks than when it has appeared on a news page.

The writer goes on to set up some straw men, only to push beyond them. For me this was the first inkling that there was something afoot in this article… The writer never even took the time to try to refute what are apparently the overwhelming number of complaints about this growing practice of reporters and editors sculpting the news as if it were some sort of a performance piece…

This opinion piece went on to create a trope that presented reporting the news as an opportunity for writers and reporters to ‘stretch’ the boundaries of their craft. To tell you the truth, I didn’t know that reporting the news was all about them…

I immediately started thinking of a comparable situation in a few other industries…service industries. For if the new industry does not provide a service for us the readers and watcher, what is it?

Imagine going to a restaurant, a restaurant which has a menu from which you have ordered for years. Now, in a seemingly random manner, anything you order is replaced with what the waiter wants to eat… and then the manager of the restaurant tells you that this is the way things are, that it has been a growing trend in many restaurants, and that you should just get used to it…

Would you go back to this restaurant?

Ironically enough, this article was posted in the op-ed section of the paper, and this article was merely describing the changes in direction that the news department at the NYT is headed towards… This is almost stupidly ironic in that this article should have been posted in the new pages (since it objectively refers to them), it then describes some news articles which should be in the op-ed page…

I was wondering why the ‘Grey Lady’ has gotten to the point where is seems to be trying to throw away decades of credibility. OF course, this is not anything new in the news game; this would seem to equally apply to most major city newspapers, and much of TV news.

As I slowly get past this idea, I should also mention that this editorial and the cited NYT readers guide are worthwhile pages to use in any high school class in which a teacher could work with students to gain some semblance of understanding how much of a morass the news industry has become…

The term ‘social engineering’ is a companion to many of these historical perspectives on education (especially which regard to the post 60’s). I spent some time yesterday, looking over the web to find some worthwhile links which would add some illumination to this concept, as well as to find some potential examples. Imagine my surprise upon finding so few worthwhile references to this topic!

Other than what would appear to be a pretty superficial Wikipedia reference, I found almost nothing with regard to the concept of directed changes in a society… Even the term ‘social engineering’ seems to have been hijacked to describe an entirely different concept (it seems to represent a particular group of tactics which hackers can use to get access to seemingly secured data…).

If you consider that this term is often a subtext of a great deal of current political debate this lack of background is certainly a curiosity…

In any case, Wikipedia has as a definition:

Social engineering is a discipline in political science that refers to efforts to influence popular attitudes and social behaviors on a large scale, whether by governments or private groups.

This sounds innocuous enough…that is, until you start to consider who is deciding upon which changes to implement in society, as well as the methods this really entails. Especially in the education industry (about as insular as any industry in our society), I worry about how our education system has been changed. Note, I said ‘HOW’, I am agnostic about the actual changes, other than when ‘playing’ with big systems (e.g. the whole education system of the USA)there are always unintended consequences, and all sorts of secondary effects to consider (as well as tertiary and quaternary effects…).

Some, but certainly not all of our current problems in education may relate to unintended consequences to what may have seemed like a good thing to do…several decades ago… These sorts of actions may certainly be well intended (whatever that really means…), but the actions always create secondary results which are problematic. As a few examples, I would just cite that fact that in the last several decades the enrollment of men in colleges (as well as graduation rates, and entrance into graduate programs) has been dropping…why? The plethora of speech codes on many US college campuses is another topic which may have some simple intent, but the actual results are something which only a hardened revolutionary would want…

So, you see the quandary I am in…there is so little salient reference material out there that any worthwhile discussion or debate on some of these huge, and far reaching topics would be mired in interminable delays based upon trying to define terms.

Social engineering (political science) – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_engineering_(political_science)

Political engineering – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_engineering

Private schools condemn ‘social engineering’ – Telegraph

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/educationnews/7318961/Private-schools-condemn-social-engineering.html

The Engineering of Social Control: The Search for the Silver Bullet

http://web.mit.edu/gtmarx/www/bullet.html

Corruption of the Curriculum

http://www.civitas.org.uk/press/prcsCorruption.php

Social Engineering for Global Change

http://www.crossroad.to/articles2/04/teichrib-engineering-social-change.htm

Holology – The Social Engineering Notebook, by Freydis

http://www.holology.com/

CNSNews.com – Welcome to the School of Social Engineering

http://www.cnsnews.com/news/article/55647

Planning and Social Engineering at Home and Abroad

http://www.fff.org/freedom/fd0307b.asp

This is actually a pretty simple activity with which to create a lesson from. Once you have a connection with a teacher that is similarly amenable to this idea, most students will fulfill their parts pretty automatically; this means that most middle school students would be very curious about their counterparts.

I have a list of links which relate to this very simple idea.

How to Connect Your Foreign Language Students with the World | Edutopia

http://www.edutopia.org/global-language-learning-connect-classrooms

Skype Other Classrooms! | The Edublogger

http://theedublogger.com/want-to-connect-with-other-classrooms

50 Awesome Ways to Use Skype in the Classroom | Teaching Degree.org

http://www.teachingdegree.org/2009/06/30/50-awesome-ways-to-use-skype-in-the-classroom

ePals Global Community

http://www.epals.com

E pals Computer Lesson Plan, Thematic Unit, Activity, Worksheet, or Internet Teaching Idea

http://www.lessonplanspage.com/CISSOEPalsAndCulture2.htm

WorldWide Classroom: Pen Pals

http://www.worldwide.edu/travel_planner/pen_pals.html

YouTube – Skype in the Classroom
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3gdOdiyZUys

I have been personally interested in this idea ever since I went to South Korea to teach English (I taught at a couple of schools in Gimje, and at Woosuk University in Samnye South Korea). I had many chances to talk with the local English teachers, and the notion of connecting with native English speaking classes of the same age was one what energized both the teachers as well as every students I had a chance to talk to (I had over 1,000 students per week…, so I talked to a lot of students!).

When I returned to the USA (only a year ago…) I spend the school year working as a substitute teacher in several school districts. I made simple presentations to as many teachers as I could find. I talked to every class I substituted in. The students (to a one) were interested and excited in the prospect of communicating with students in another (read: exotic) culture and country… Sadly enough, the teachers, to a one, dissembled and ran from the potential to have to deal with this (or was it me? Ha!).

As a sort of mordant finale to this little post, I can see through examples like this that teaching seems to be turning into a sort of monoculture of risk-averse personalities. In matters that are much more far reaching than my simple email exchange (where I would be completely out of the loop anyways…), I think that this skews the reality that many students get a chance to see…

This debate has been going on for years, and as with the music recording industries attempts to quash file sharing (MP3’s), it appears to me to be an argument in which school administrators attempting to ‘control’ this emerging societal norm are slowly losing.

In this article Patrick Larkin (Principal of the Burlington High School) had an interesting quote:

When asked about the misuses of technology, such as cheating or spending class time texting or surfing, he replied:

“If they want to cheat, they’re going to cheat,’’ Larkin said, “with technology or anything else.’’ He said he doesn’t see much difference between this and the old scourge of teachers — note passing. “We’ve had no problem with note passing the last few years . . . I wonder why . . . they’re texting!’’ he said.

I found this point to be very clarifying, in that ‘new technology’ is not some monolithically huge change in how we conduct our lives, tech represents merely some new tools which are increasingly important to our lives (for good or ill…).

This apparently newfound perspective is one I would wish would get some more coverage, especially since there seems to be a sort of digital divide going on in most schools. I read quite a number of education related blogs, and almost all of them are created and maintained by only a few parts of the education industries community.

I see posts on some of these blogs trying to proselytize the notion that by merely using some obscure form of new technology, that their students will be able to…create better subtitles in their video projects, or some other breathless paean to the wonders of the new world.

As a portion of the whole education community, these sorts of posts have their rightful place, but (ironically enough), there would seem to be a dearth of contrary opinions (i.e. the opinions of those who are not as web centric in their affiliations). I am still wondering how we can ‘fix’ this lack of input into the larger online community…

I’ve heard that the ancient Egyptians thought that the brain was a useless organ (hence the ‘scrambled eggs’ method of clearing this organ out of the body for mummification, far unlike how the other organs were treated…), the ancient Chinese believed that thought resided in the stomach… I’ve seen these sorts of point in books over and over. The interesting thing about this is that these two points are usually put forth as if it were a quaint, antique notion, and that we all know different.

I’ve never heard of anyone actually taking the next step…

To me, this would seem to be a worthwhile topic for a though experiment. I should preface this by saying that I do ‘sense’ that the location of my thinking is somewhere in my skull. I have considered that since my primary sensory organs seem to focus upon this vague spot, my ‘feeling’ that my thought emanate from this area may only be caused by such things as: my speaking (through bone conduction) resonates in my head (to some small degree…), I hear in stereo, and the area where these sensations seem to focus in between the ears… I imagine you can see the thrust of this argument, that what ‘thinking feels like’ may be completely unrelated to what thinking may actually be, and that I am only rationalizing some deeply ingrained societal attitudes…

This might be true… But this may hold for both of these positions…

There is obviously any number of related questions, such as: if this arbitrary place where we feel cognition occurs is truly arbitrary, then why can’t we change the place where we feel our thoughts emanate? For instance, is it possible through assiduous practice to move the set of one’s thoughts to another part of the body…? If this is possible, then would it be possible to place this arbitrary residence somewhere beyond our physical corpus?

OK, there is another equally obvious question… does this topic have any real importance, is there any aspect of this topic which has some potential utility in our lives… I’m afraid that I don’t even know how to answer that question…

To me, this topic is interesting in the fact that it could change one’s point of view, in a manner similar to how some photographers try to present images of what we think are mundane object in other contexts, if 0only to jar how we perceive things…

Barnes & Noble have a PC/Mac application (Nook study) which allows college students to buy and download class textbooks. This application has the added ability of bookmarking, highlighting passages, and formatting citations for written papers and reports…all free…once you pay for the textbooks… I can presume that these e-textbooks are less expensive than the printed versions (they would have to be!), and as an added bonus to the book publishers, it also effectively kills the used book market.

I have a new app on my iPad (inkling) which looks quite similar in use to the Nook Study app on my NetBook. Both of these applications are platforms for e-textbooks, and offer the similar abilities to bookmark, write marginalia, to share and confer (as social networking) with other students, and to easily render citations (in correct formats) to a paper for almost any class. I am impressed with this idea…but for the fact that e-textbook publishers are not catching up as quickly as they should be.

It was only 2 ½ years ago where I was in a situation (my last semester on campus at college) where having tools like this would have made my life a lot easier. I forgot to mention that the Nook (NetBook app) also allows for adding PDF files (from published peer review articles) into the program. I could have created my senior term papers quite a bit more easily in that I would have been able to focus solely on my ideas instead of the mechanics of adding in citations and creating a bibliography in the correct format.

Taking these new implementations of e-book technologies, I wonder how this will affect college book stores… For instance, Barnes & Noble are advertising that you can get all of your e-textbooks from them (online) for up to 90% of list price (whatever that is…).

Over the last several years, the idea of buying used textbooks on the internet has saved untold amounts of money for impoverished college students, now with the presumption that e-textbooks take off, I wonder how long it will take for some enterprising students to create what would effectively be an e-textbook black market…

This while idea of e-textbooks creates (for me) a number of related questions, such as: how will this idea trickle down into high schools? What will the real advantages and disadvantages be, when compared to traditional paper? For the average student, will this paradigm change be easy or difficult to manage?

And as I start to think further down the road, I wonder what this means with regard to the idea of a textbook… Since these new implementations of textbooks will reside (virtually) right next to the rest of the internet, and all the rest of the media which a student might have access to (on a typical laptop), I wonder if this will slowly dilute the whole idea of a ‘text’ which is the focus of one’s learning…

But getting back to Facebook’s ‘North Korea’ page, called: Uriminzokkiri ( I checked it out…), it looks like it could be the official government page (whatever that means…) but it is filled with a lot of comments which certainly wouldn’t exist in Pyongyang! Even more disturbing is the fact that the North Korea’s Facebook page has over 3,000 friends (after being online only a few days). I’m starting to feel more insecure now…

With my joking aside, there were a few questions which popped into my mind, such as: do other sovereign states have ‘official’ Facebook pages? And if so, how many have these edifices to vanity? I spent a solid five to ten minutes doing some searching (in Facebook) for other ‘national’ sites. I found a number of them, and now I’m even more bewildered.

North Korea has one, but so does South Korea. a number of European and Pacific Rim nations have them. I can see a bit of justification for some of these sites, since it is quite obvious that they are run by some state tourism board, in essence it is only some cheap marketing.

This takes me back to North Korea…why? So far, this site has generated a lot of snickers and is likely prominently displayed on any number of ‘wacky news’ sites. The site itself (as already mentioned) is filled with equal parts political nutcases, and those who want to give vent to some seriously snarky comments.

From some of the news reports about this event is would seem that the North Korea also has a Twitter account and a YouTube channel. There are many levels of pretty intense irony here; maybe Kim Jung Il has gotten the web 2.0 bug.

In any case, unlike most of the comments and news articles I have seen, I find that this topic makes be consider Facebook far more than North Korea as a topic worthy of some re-evaluation. I say this only because of the shallow outrage that this news article engendered. It seemed to be more about the audacity of North Korea, than the bizarreness of a sovereign nation having a personal page on a social networking site.

If I have North Korea as a friend on Facebook, what does that mean?

As you might be able to see from the links below, there are plenty of very good reasons for us to focus upon developing these skills. As with the plagiarism post I put up a few days ago, there is quite a lot of buzz and discussion in the education community on these sorts of issues, which could be better described as a lot of heat and very little light.

There are those who think that a ‘classical curriculum’ will solve our seeming cognition gap. There are those who think that we need to make what we teach more rigorous, that we should be impelling students to take logic classes, or more math classes, or any other apparent ‘quick fix’.

I find this topic correlates to the growing number of articles covering the apparent fact that incoming freshmen are less and less prepared for the intellectual rigors of taking undergraduate classes.

This is looking like middle and high schools across the country (taken in the aggregate) are failing to accomplish what we all assumed they could (i.e. to teach our children).

The education establishment seems to spend most of its time wallowing in victimology or educational psychology as the core with which we can fix out predicament. I find this a bit disingenuous, since on other topics, when pushed, these same spokespeople push many of these same problems back upon the families of the students.

There is a lot of truth in this. This is also quite unfortunate, since it doesn’t allow for easy fixes (such as throwing money at the problem).

In any case, the idea that students should learn how to think is something which I can see as a central focus to many of the shortcomings in our schools. You might note that I didn’t use the terms critical thinking, creative thinking, or problem solving ability. Maybe you could consider this a personal vagary, in that these terms have been so over used, and applied to so many misbegotten initiatives that I merely think that students should learn some of the basics of thinking.

There are some basic directions that this could go (i.e. learning how to think…). For instance, some of the directions which might have some validity would be:

· Take mathematics (logic classes)…sadly a big turn of for most of today’s students

· Use the Socratic method of focused questioning of students. This is more effective in smaller groups.

· Teach classical Rhetoric (it worked in the middle ages, and was part of the Trivium!)

All of these methods require a lot of teacher involvement and direction from the teacher…To be honest, this sounds like a weak link, in that there are profound differences in teachers and their methods. But, luckily, I’ve found another method which might have some real value…thunks .

British author Ian Gilbert has a number of books out which deal with ‘thunks’ (this is his term for ‘questions which make your brain go “ouch”). In essence these questions form what might be seen as Zen Koans for learning how to think. The interesting thing for me is that thunks are about the questions instead of the answers (an idea near to my heart), this means that the answers aren’t so important as the process with which you came to the answer.

Here are a few:

· Is there more future or past?

· If I switch the lights off does the wall change color?

· Can you touch the wind?

· Is a broken down car parked?

· Is there more happiness or sadness in the world?

· Can you feel happy and sad at the same time?

· If we borrow every single book from a library is it still a library?

· If we move the entire school and everything and everybody in it to Africa would it still be the same school?

· Does lined paper weigh more than blank paper?

Some teachers have described these thunks as thought hand grenades… In any case, simply presenting one of these questions to a middle school class would allow the students to try to think through their own answers, without the teacher having to wade into Socratic methods or to have to impel students to learn Rhetorical terms…just try to think.

Thunks

http://www.independentthinking.co.uk/Cool+Stuff/Thunks/default.aspx

Drop GCSEs. We should be teaching our children to think | Peter Hyman | Comment is free | The Observer

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/aug/16/peter-hyman-education-teaching-exams

Do we really only need to teach rhetoric and critical thinking?

http://wordmunger.com/?p=421

Why Teach Thinking? – education system

http://www.education-system.tk/983980-Why-Teach-Thinking.html

How To Teach Thinking, by Jean Edwards – ThinkShop: thinking skills resources

http://www.thinkshop.org/howto-freepage.html

Rethinking thinking / The Christian Science Monitor – CSMonitor.com

http://www.csmonitor.com/2003/1014/p18s01-lehl.html

How To Teach Students Critical Thinking Skills | How To Do Things.com

http://www.howtodothings.com/education/a2923-how-to-teach-students-critical-thinking-skills.html

An Introduction to Critical Thinking

http://www.freeinquiry.com/critical-thinking.html

How Can We Teach Critical Thinking? ERIC Digest.

http://www.ericdigests.org/pre-9218/critical.htm

Amazon.com: Thunk: Books

http://www.amazon.com/s?ie=UTF8&rh=i%3Astripbooks%2Ck%3AThunk&page=1

Ian Gilbert – Authors – Ewelike

http://norr.is/authors/Ian+Gilbert

Letters – How to Restrain Soaring College Costs – NYTimes.com

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/21/opinion/l21college.html?_r=1

Letter – Critical Thinking in Schools – NYTimes.com

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/21/opinion/lweb21schools.html

This is a big problem for me, in that there was little or nothing I received in my formal (K-12) education which had any direct impact upon this ‘most important’ skill. The sad fact is that I have seen a lot of things which relate to me experiences in early education (consider the first link below; Valedictorian Speaks Out Against Schooling in Graduation Speech to see what I mean…).

As a teacher, I need to better understand how I (and most others) learned how to think. From my recent experiences as a teacher, as well as my time as a student, I know that this is not something which is of prime focus in most middle school and high school classes. As a matter of fact, what little I did learn in high school about how to think came from situations outside the parameters of a classroom experience. I did have a number of opportunities to interact with teachers and fellow students on topics which were of interest to all of us (versus being impelled to digest information on subjects which are required topics in classrooms).

I got a chance to talk to social studies teachers about such topics as: 19^th century Russian novels, Jacksonian Democracy, and such themes as : what is important to know in order to be a good citizen, as well as other open ended questions. Through these informal discussions in the hallways during lunch hour I started to see that rhetoric really meant, as well as developing some reasoned perspectives on some of these topics.

I don’t k now how to accomplish this to groups of 35-40 students at a time… I know that there are teachers who seem to accomplish something with these sorts of topics and methods with larger classes of students, but I am sure that they accomplish a lot less than they would like…

Part of me thinks that any real learning (and teaching) upon these more important topics are only effectively accomplished in very small groups. I would imagine that almost every teacher and student would agree with this. To create some sort of colloquium for students and teachers which would be small enough (two to eight people…) also strikes me as being financially impossible, considering how the education system is structured. It’s too bad, since this is about the only idea I can come up with which would have a potential to fix some of the real problems we face in educating the next generation.

So, on to the links… There are so many directions from which criticism of our education system is coming. In the following links you can see what could be described as direct attacks on some of the ‘third rail’ topics in middle and high schools as well as college education (e.g. attacks upon tenure, the traditional college experience, et.al.). I do find it interesting that some of these strident articles come from the political left (the home of teachers unions…) such as Slate.com and the New York Times. Nonetheless, they do cover some areas of the education industry which do need some real scrutiny.

Valedictorian Speaks Out Against Schooling in Graduation Speech
http://www.sott.net/articles/show/212383-Valedictorian-Speaks-Out-Against-Schooling-in-Graduation-Speech

High-School Graduates Unprepared for College Courses
http://slatest.slate.com/id/2264366

Reforming Schools: The Crowd Has Ideas, Too
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/18/opinion/l18school.html?_r=3

The case for getting rid of tenure
http://www.slate.com/id/2263348

Academic Bankruptcy
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/15/opinion/15taylor.html?_r=1

Where to Get the Best Free Education Online
http://lifehacker.com/5615716/where-to-get-the-best-free-education-online

There are, however, a few short comings to using this as a primary computing platform. Typing…

I have the (wireless) Bluetooth keyboard, but I have gotten so used to Microsoft Word as my means of producing typewritten documents that changing over to any of the current Apple offerings really feels like a big step down. Nonetheless, I am going to try to create post (later this week) using only the iPad. I need almost any excuse to force myself to get used to typing with the iPad…

Luckily enough for me (and or you too, although for differing reasons…) I don’t deal with any complex or arcane formatting in this blog. This mean s that other than my mentioning it, you will not be able to distinguish whichever computing platform to create this future post…

Earlier this week I had my first bout with iPad problems. I was in the process of syncing the iPad with my NetBook. In the midst’s of upgrading the iPad OS something must have glitched in that the net result was my iPad turning into a brick. I have a lot of experience with catastrophic OS problems (I have had quite a few Windows machines over the years…), and the experience of seeing a booting computer fail to recognize any operating system still puts a cold twist in the pit of my stomach (i.e. it means that I will be dealing with some real problems and grief soon…).

Imagine my surprise when upon turning on the iPad for the first time after the failed OS upgrade that the iPad merely presented a graphic of connecting (through the interface cable) to iTunes. After connecting the iPad back to the NetBook and having iTunes automatically instantiate, I was presented with a dialog box stating that I merely need to click the restore button (the only button on the screen). This reloaded the latest OS (but wiped my system otherwise). Upon finishing this job, I was then asked whether I wanted to restore my latest backup (from about 25 minutes earlier)…presto. I had all of my data and profile back!

At this point I should state that as a long time Microsoft user, I was elated! Maybe the Apple Fanboi’s have something after all!

This is where I can add a couple of reasonable criticisms of this ‘fix’ to my system. Everything I just stated is true, and as such it still makes me feel quite amazed (if only as a long time Window’s user). BUT, there were still a few (small) snags. You see I had to reload every app I had on my iPad… While this may be reasonably justified and make sense to those who are deeply into apple methods, I found this to be a bit of a surprise (to say the least). Coming off of the recent elation I felt about getting everything back, I suppose that having to go through and re-download every app was a small penance. I would have only wished that I had a screen-shot of every page on my previous iPad installation, if only to ensure that I get every app back. That is my advice to current iPad users (take some screen shots of every page you have).

Screen-shots are actually easy to do, just hold down the button (the button) while also holding down the power button on the ‘top’ of the iPad. You should hear a click (like a camera), and you will have a screen shot in your photo album.

For good or bad, this is (so far) the only advice I have for iPad users…