The Purpose of Education?

I've been catching up on reading the edublogs in my newsreader, which has led to an interesting juxtaposition of articles for me.

The first is Wolin, Democracy and The Math Wars by Michael Paul Goldenberg. I found the following quote Michael gives from Wolin's book resonates very strongly with me:

"The new education is severely functional, proto-professional, and priority-conscious in an economic sense. It is also notable for the conspicuous place given to achieving social discipline through education.
It is as though social planners, both public and private, had suddenly realized that education forms a system in which persons of an impressionable age are “stuff” that can be molded to the desired social form..."

While Wolin is talking about the US in particular, this is consistent with what is also an emerging trend here in Australia, where governments readily tout education as an economic mechanism, but discussion of education as a means for personal discovery and development is thin on the ground.

Craig Emerson, the Federal Minister for Small Business , has made his view very clear:
"Market democrats harness the power of the market for the public good," he said. "They dedicate themselves to remedying social disadvantage out of prosperity by giving every child the opportunity of a quality education through excellence in teaching and high-quality school facilities." [as quoted by Ross Gittins in the Sydney Morning Herald]

I agree with Gittins' response: "the primary cause of inequality of opportunity isn't education, it's inheritance - of brains, social status, social skills and money." [link]

Hard on the heels of reading Goldenberg's article, I came upon this offering from Tom Hoffman.

After reading through William Deresiewicz's article and then visiting the Teach For America website, I found myself wondering if I was missing something, if perhaps I had failed to fully appreciate the full extent of the socio-economic impact of education.

But after re-reading all of the articles again, and taking some time to reflect on them, my response to all of it is as follows:

• My own view of education, while it allows for the idea that improved levels of education may lead to opportunities for students to improve their socio-economic status, is grounded in the idea that the student be given the opportunity for self-actualisation. Consequently, I object to views of education that seek to reduce education to little more than a social or economic mechanism. This sort of utilitarianism devalues education as a whole - it dismisses as unimportant subjects like Visual Arts and Music in the first instance, but ultimately devalues all subjects by narrowing the curriculum to fit the desires of business and industry.

• William Deresiewicz's "holes" are not in his education - or more specifically, not in his schooling. His attitudes, his self-professed inability to talk to people not like him and false self-worth are the products of the social environment he grew up in, not his education. (What does the fact that he now wants to point the blame at his schooling rather than his social upbringing say?)

• Programs like TFA are actually doing good things, but there is a real risk that governments, bent on driving their particular socio-economic (read myopic) views of education, may hijack their agendas.

But that's only my view things, which no doubt someone will regard as the by-product of my 1970s/80s education and Gen-X mindset. Or possibly my working-class upbringing or maybe the fact that I now teach in a non-denominational non-government school.

Whatever. I just wish there was a way to keep politicians at arm's length from education.

The Plausibility Trap

Words intrigue me. I love learning about language, and it seems I'm not alone - websites and mailing list about words abound.

Unfortunately, so does a lot of rubbish about the origins of certain words and phrases.

An enquiry to the World Wide Words website asked about the word denigrate:

“A recent film, The Great Debaters, suggests that denigrate is an offensive term for African-Americans because it means “to make black”. The Denzel Washington character says that the word has racist undertones because of this. What do you think?”

Thankfully, World Wide Word's Michael Quinion pours cold water on the notion, but the plausibility of the idea worries me. It appears in a highly acclaimed movie - how long before someone claims to be offended by someone else using the term 'denigrate', simply because they've seen the movie and picked up on this faulty idea?

It's not quite up to the level of the feminist who objected to the term "mandate", but it's not that far from it.

Stumbling into Nausea

One of my favourite things is StumbleUpon. Today it led to me to this site. It'll make you think again about your next visit to a so-called "family restaurant". (At least, it ought to make you rethink what you order.)

And the #1 worst food bothered me for a whole different reason - as an Aussie, I cringe at the thought that Americans might think that here in Oz we would actually eat "cheese fries". We don't even use the word "fries" here. And we certainly don't have "ranch sauce" (or 'ranch' anything else). I don't know where the Outback Steakhouse is, and I don't really care to find out.

Excuse me now, it's almost dinner time and I have to throw a couple of roo steaks on the barbie.

Web + Mathematics -- Take 2

At the end of 2006, I posted a rant about the sorry state of working with Mathematics in the browser. That post elicited some good feedback, but I was still dissatisfied with the overall situation. I still am, to some extent. Microsoft still couldn't bring themselves to add support for MathML in IE7 (along with a host of other things) - at least MathPlayer is still there to paper over the gaping hole. Apple's Safari browser is into version 3 and still struggling with MathML. It's not encouraging.

But there are good things happening. Peter Jipsen of Chapman University has developed a javascript approach to entering equations in a simple syntax (well, simpler than LaTeX, at least, and nowhere near as verbose as MathML itself) and rendering it on-screen with Presentation MathML. It's called AsciiMath. And it works! Not only that, adding it to Moodle proved to be simplicity itself.

There are a few caveats. (Isn't there always?) Because you are using Presentation MathML, you need the MathML fonts installed on your computer. And if you use IE, you need MathPlayer (or a real browser, but let's not go there.) If you use Safari... sorry, try Camino or Flock.

But it's a big step in the right direction. Especially if you are using a VLE like Moodle, since it means that students can enter their own mathematical equations and expressions without needing to resort to other software for its creation and/or editing.

Being able to type in `x^2 +(3x)/5 =0` and getting a good-looking equation on-screen is exactly the level at which students (and teachers) need this to work - a simple, effective way of entering their equations resulting in immediate and effective presentation.

Peter Jipsen - you're a legend.

Big Brother Down Under?

A couple of edubloggers in my aggregator have commented on the recent announcement by the new Rudd government about its intentions to require all ISPs in Oz to filter the Internet for homes and schools, blocking pornography and "inappropriate" material. The announcement clearly states that the scheme is "opt-out" rather than "opt-in", as it was promoted in the recent election campaign. The reaction in various quarters has predictably been "censorship". I think censorship is a secondary issue here.

The Telecommunications Minister Stephen Conroy says he makes no apology for making the scheme mandatory. (Having heard Conroy speak on previous occasions, this is hardly surprising - I wonder if he actually knows how to apologise.)

My feelings about this announcement have shifted as I've thought through the likely scenarios. My initial reaction was that it's a positive move that will protect young children - as a father, things that will help to protect my kids tend to get a thumbs up.

As an educator, my initial thoughts were much the same. Then I started thinking about the implementation and implications.

What sort of filtering will be used? As a teacher at a school with filtering systems in place, I know full well that even the most recent versions of filtering are far from perfect. Word filters catch words, but not pictures on webpages that don't have those words. Black-lists will always be playing catch-up to the websites that you want blocked. White-lists? They also are always in catch-up mode, and in the meanwhile stifle legitimate exploration of the web. It seems a reasonable assumption that while the ISPs may do their best to conform with the government's policy, they won't catch everything.

So what happens when something gets through all this filtering, and little Johnny goes home and says, "Guess what Billy saw on the computer today at school?"

Right now, if that happened, the parents would take it up with the school; the school would check that its filtering was working, and point to the line in their policy that says that they make every effort to block inappropriate material but due to the nature of the Internet cannot guarantee..., etc., and that's probably where it would end in most cases.

But once the new policy starts being enforced, schools have a new defence: the ISP should have blocked it before it got to us; if it got past their filters... .

When the ISP takes the line "we make every effort to block inappropriate material but due to the nature of the Internet cannot guarantee..., etc.", will that be accepted? Will the ISP be fined under the new legislation? Will the parents and/or the school be able to seek damages in court?

If ISPs will be required only to do "their best" to provide clean feed (i.e. demonstrate that they have filters in place which are regularly updated), the end result is no different from what schools and parents are getting from their own filtering software now - except for one important detail - the consumers (schools and parents) will be paying for this filtering on an ongoing basis.

On the other hand, if ISPs must provide clean feed, they will be vulnerable to prosecution, which will leave the smaller ISPs more exposed than the industry big guns, in the long run resulting in the smaller ISPs bowing out or being subsumed by their larger competition. And consumers will still end up paying for filtering.

The other thing that concerns me is that some parents who have been uncertain or lax about buying filtering software will now think "okay, it's taken care of for me, so I don't need to worry about what my kid is doing on the Internet." No filtering is perfect, and there is no substitute for parental supervision. But this policy may delude some parents into thinking that the Internet just got safer.

Australians already pay too much for mediocre web access - now they will pay even more, and for filtering that in all likelihood will be no improvement over what they can buy (for less). This policy stinks of one-upmanship on the Coalition's offer of giving family free Internet filters for their home computers.

Big Brother? More like Fagin, if you ask me.

Janus

It seems that the New Year had beguiled a few blogger of renown to make some predictions for 2008.
Tim Bray, in his ongoing blog, actually has 4 predictions for 2008. The one that caught my eye (mainly because of the comments) was 2008 Prediction 2: Windows Looks Bad. Tim provides his own summary:

The strain due to the fact that most business desktops are locked into the Microsoft platform, at a time when both the Apple and GNU/Linux alternatives are qualitatively safer, better, and cheaper to operate, will start to become impossible to ignore.

The comments that followed were quite revealing. While many agreed with Tim's sentiments about how Windows compares to Mac OS X or Linux, a couple of comments stood out:

"wrong, wrong, wrong. Why is it that so many IT guys act as if migrating to Linux is such a simple experience that every novice user should/could do it? The average non-IT Windows user runs it because (a) it comes pre-installed (b) their favorite (pronounced "the one their friends or the sales guy recommended") app "x" was readily available, and (c) it closely matches that computer at work so that the daily mind shift is minimal.

Until inroads are made in all 3 of these areas, the market penetration for home users will continue to be minimal." [link]

and:

"... the people I meet in my part of the world are in quite different position. Architects, designers, photographers, sound engineers, movie makers, ... (Btw., what is the term which describes all the above professions? Are those "content creators"?) simply don't have the tools to run under any free OS. There is no Autocad, nor AllPlan. No Rhinoceros, no AliasStudio. No Indesign, Photoshop (no, GIMP, doesn't count), Freehand (no, Inkscape doesn't count), Quark, Flash, Acrobat (not Reader). FontLab. Avid. Combustion. ProTools. Vegas. Capture One. And Lightroom... To sum it up, Windows may look bad but its applications look superb." [link]

though that last comment contrasts interestingly with an earlier one:

"...everything else you mentioned had to do with brain-dead applications from some of the worst companies: Adobe, Sun, and Symantec.

And I guarantee you that if we all start moving to Linux or OSX, these companies will start souring those OS's with their shoddy, annoying, anti-user software just as bad and people will keep buying it.

I'll give you that the OSX user experience, over all, is much better than XP, but without all the extraneous apps from Adobe, et al, XP isn't quite so bad. The real problem is app and driver vendors." [link]

Personally, I doubt that there will be much of a shift in 2008, but I don't think that's exactly what Tim was getting at. The point is that business, becoming dissatisfied with Windows (epecially Vista), will be looking even more closely at the viability of alternatives. The issue of lock-in is very real, especially as one commentator noted,

"...doesn't Office 2007 on Mac not support VBA? ... That is an instant dealbreaker for editors who use Word and heavy Excel users. AFAIK, investment/finance people live by their macros." [link]

Following some of the links from the comments led to interesting reading. Mark Pilgrim, in an entry titled 2008 is the year of Linux on the desktop, had this to say:

"So yeah, my parents switched to Linux because — among other reasons — it was easier to use with their iPod. That’s how badly Apple has lost the plot."

Far be it from me that I should criticise someone of Mark Pilgrim's stature, but I'm not sure who's really lost the plot here.

Stephen Downes took an entirely different tack, looking back at the predictions made a year ago for 2007. [link] It's a timely reminder of the perils of playing Nostradamus. Those who did best, for the most part, made broad predictions rather than specifics (though there was one notable exception).

My prediction for 2009 - we will look back at the prediction made for 2008 and wonder what we were thinking.

The Good, the Bad and the Ugly – A GTD episode

About eighteen months ago, I came across a website called 43 Folders, which in turn introduced me to Getting Things Done, which is the title of a book by David Allen, but more importantly it's a work management system, and eighteen months ago, GTD could not have come at a better time – I was up to my ears in work, and struggling to cope.

One thing that I changed was how I was using my PDA (a Palm Tungsten T5). But here I ran into a problem – the T5 works nicely with Palm Desktop, but not much else. My personal choices re software didn't really help – while I like the Mac platform, I don't really care that much for Apple's applications, so I use Thunderbird rather than Mail, and Firefox instead of Safari. As for iCal, I find its tendency to overlap translucent panels a visual eyesore, so I left it well alone.

Of course, this meant that I could not take advantage of the integration that Apple had built between iCal and Mail.

Fast forward six months, and now my Mac-centric workplace has a centralised calendar solution that most of my colleagues subscribe to through iCal. (I'm still resisting iCal, of course, and using Sunbird.)

It comes as a rude shock a little later on to find that iCal can't handle the volume of data being delivered from the calendar. The solution - scale back the data being delivered from the calendar. (Those of you who are shaking your heads at this – yeah, I know, but it wasn't my decision.)

Meanwhile, I'm still trying to improve my work practices, and I've started using Quicksilver instead of the dock and tags rather than nested folders. I've also found GTDTiddlyWiki (by Jeremy Ruston), and using it to manage my projects. Small tasks, however, still live on
my T5. The separation is a bit clunky, but I'm living with it.

But I'm now noticing more GTD-related software appearing. "Kinkless GTD", a set of applescripts for OmniOutliner Pro, iGTD. Time to look into this more closely.

iGTD at first glance doesn't seem to be offering much more than GTDTiddlyWiki. But the devil is in the details, as they say, and there are a couple of key details here - iGTD interacts with two other apps that completely change the ballgame.

The first app in question is Apple's iSync. Naturally, iSync doesn't want to know about Sunbird, but it is tight with iCal, so items in iGTD get synced with iCal. Nice.

The second app is QuickSilver - I can hotkey into QS, switch to text mode, then drop my text into iGTD's inbox, and I'm done and back onto whatever I was working on. Apart from the actual text for the entry, only 7 keystrokes are required.

As nice as this is, the real key to making this work (for me, at least) is getting iSync to talk to my T5. This particular step proved to be the most annoying - what looked like it should work quite easily just wouldn't. I had to dive into Apple's online support forums to find the answer to a very unhelpful message, to wit, that either I had not properly installed Palm's HotSync Manager or I had never run it - wrong on both counts. (It was in fact a permissions problem, but nothing in iSync or its Help files pointed in this direction.)

Having gotten iSync and the T5 to finally talk to each other, I now have a single system (at least in terms of the digital stuff - the paper war on my desk is another matter) that works well.

And yet I'm now looking at an early version of Things, and I like what I see. If Cultured Code add support for QuickSilver and synchronisation that I can make work with my PDA, I may well switch.

So, to sum up: iGTD + iSync + Quicksilver is good; iSync's flightiness with Palm devices and the effort required to find the solution is bad; iCal remains ugly.