Ok, Bonnie, you've convinced me (not that I was that hard to convince anyways). I'm a K-12 public school district administrator in Ed-Tech. What am I supposed to do? Roll over and play dead? The current administration was voted in by Americans, people different in their beliefs than you and I. For the most part, most people don't care and moving the boulder of public opinion usually requires a lot of blood and sacrifice. All I see is heartfelt rhetoric, but little else.
Schools need to change, schools ARE changing. Schools weren't such bastions of authoritarianism in years past, but NCLB had made them so. At the very least, NCLB has shown that schools CAN change--they get worse. As an educator, a parent, and someone who votes regularly and has to work hard to make payments, I'm deflated as to what to do next. I feel like the dragonfly caught in amber, doomed to an eternity of observation and a smothering, inflexible environment. I feel like the guy on the island who gets daily missives from a variety of sources saying his island is about to sink beneath the waves, but has no way off the island. The only course is to jump in the water with the sharks. So, ok, I'm convinced. How about some heavy-duty solutions, orchestrated by the Network that results in flash mobs in other countries? How about employing the principles of NetWar to transform education (The Advent of NetWar - http://www.rand.org/pubs/monograph_reports/MR789/index.html). Stop telling me I'm drowning in the miasma of despair and poor policy. Instead, sling a life vest, a rubber raft, a log or two lashed together. Otherwise, unsubscribe me from this list that sings, not of freedom and the unknown, but what is and was. Why the Caged Bird Sings http://www.angelfire.com/on/lummus/Angelou.html I KNOW WHY THE CAGED BIRD SINGS A free bird leaps on the back of the wind and floats downstream till the current ends and dips his wing in the orange suns rays and dares to claim the sky. But a bird that stalks down his narrow cage can seldom see through his bars of rage his wings are clipped and his feet are tied so he opens his throat to sing. The caged bird sings with a fearful trill of things unknown but longed for still and his tune is heard on the distant hill for the caged bird sings of freedom. The free bird thinks of another breeze and the trade winds soft through the sighing trees and the fat worms waiting on a dawn-bright lawn and he names the sky his own. But a caged bird stands on the grave of dreams his shadow shouts on a nightmare scream his wings are clipped and his feet are tied so he opens his throat to sing. The caged bird sings with a fearful trill of things unknown but longed for still and his tune is heard on the distant hill for the caged bird sings of freedom. With appreciation for your thoughts, Miguel Guhlin President, TCEA TEC-SIG Director, Instructional Technology San Antonio, Texas Contact: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Blogs to Read: Around the Corner: http://www.mguhlin.net/blog TechLearning.com: http://www.techlearning.com/blog Texas Leads!: http://texasleads.edublogs.org ----- Original Message ---- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Sunday, July 16, 2006 2:27:41 PM Subject: Re: [DDN] Erate Update In a message dated 7/16/06 2:05:40 PM, [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: > > While I'm totally for the Erate to exist and pay for schools and libraries > to have great service, the real issue isn't increasing the total fund but > getting rid of all of the abuses so that the schools can get more money. --- > > > And finding out what happened to the commitments already paid for by > customers. Example: Ohio... by 2000, everything should be wired with fiber? > -- didn't happen but customers paid for it. > > I was involved in the conception and roll out of the E-rate. As the only person with no money on the council, I fully understood that there was a huge problem in many schools. That the e-rate became a telecom hog, is due to the many restrictions and additions and laws placed on it by the congress in its effort to kill the proposal off. This is a new time and there are new ways to do e-rate. But I don't think anyone is listening. We have a congress which may erase the ETT, the main fund for teachers, and there is a very good article that was written, not by me, but that reflects the problems of the times. Some people in Washington think that there is no digital divide and that all teachers have been given training to create the possibility for use of the technology as media which we have in so many ways in some places. Even within the high income nations, the digital divides exist: between urban and rural areas, the two genders, age groups, and racial groups. This is outlined in a new report, Published Thursday, 6 July, 2006 - 10:08 The Digital Divide Report: ICT Diffusion Index, 2005 (UNCTAD/ITE/IPC/2006/5) http://www.egovmonitor.com/node/6638 Please read this article first A Nation Left Behind in Ed Tech *http://www.eschoolnews.com/news/showStoryts.cfm?ArticleID=6442 * I have been working in ed tech for a long time. I was a teacher who discovered the magic of using media , and so my stance is not political, unless you think only in red and blue. I think chalk and talk and media as technology. In the last two years I have been tossing and turning about what is going on, or not going on in ed tech in the US. I also have been watching and being involved in the work of many countries aspiring to use educational technology. You may have read the UN Task Force Report from the Dublin Meeting. We showcased lots of different uses of technology, from those who were willing to share information in the middle of the summer, and the final book came out to be distributed at WSIS in Tunis. You can see ,on this website, the report of the work that has been done. The publications are there. http://www.unicttaskforce.org/ The publication I assisted , edited with is herehttp://www.unicttaskforce.org/perl/documents.pl?id=1570 for Education – A Multistakeholder Approach Education is the cornerstone of sustainable development. It contributes to building a modern and thriving society and empowers communities and citizens to fully participate in development and prosperity. While the right to education is recognized as fundamental for each citizen, access to it is not guaranteed. In the developing world, the essential building blocks for education systems are suffering from deficiencies, ICT can help respond to these challenges and create the environment that is conducive for effective and quality education systems. While the world vaults forward to achieve the use of technology as media, which to me includes Internet 2, Grid Computing, Teragrid, it seems that we are poised in the US to stay in place by public policy. There are few voices that are in support of the use of technology in schools these days. Our children are surrounded by media and the only use that many want to make of technology is to have testing done. Surely that is a misleading effort. Teaching is not understood by many. The way the Congress did things was to make the application so difficult one almost had to have a lawyer to complete the application. I spent a year traveling around to help those who did not have grant writers and those who did not let the telco's write their plan. No one mentions that the application was initially online , and that was hell for those who had no technology experience. Indeed, I had a dear friend who was terminally ill, who put off his treatment because he was the expert in E-rate , and it was so difficult for others to complete the paperwork. You may remember Chip Daley. That is testimony to how difficult the application became. I am sure that those who never wanted it are smiling as we try to wrest it from the telcos, but they made it something only a lawyer could love. I rest my case. Bonnie Bracey Sutton bbracey at aol com _______________________________________________ DIGITALDIVIDE mailing list DIGITALDIVIDE@mailman.edc.org http://mailman.edc.org/mailman/listinfo/digitaldivide To unsubscribe, send a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word UNSUBSCRIBE in the body of the message. _______________________________________________ DIGITALDIVIDE mailing list DIGITALDIVIDE@mailman.edc.org http://mailman.edc.org/mailman/listinfo/digitaldivide To unsubscribe, send a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word UNSUBSCRIBE in the body of the message.
