Creativity by Sir Ken Robinson

You will enjoy this 20-minute talk by Sir Ken Robinson at the TED Conference in 2007. TED stands for Technology, Entertainment, Design. It started in 1984 as a conference that brings together people from those three worlds. Since then it has become larger and broader.

The annual TED conference brings together the world’s most fascinating thinkers and doers, who are challenged to give the talk of their lives in 18 minutes. The TED website makes the best talks and performances from the conferences available to the public for free. More than 200 talks from the TED archive are currently available. Robinson is an internationally recognized leader in the development of creativity, innovation and human resources. He’s worked with governments in Europe and Asia, international agencies, Fortune 500 companies, and national and state education systems, and cultural organizations that include the Royal Shakespeare Company, Sir Paul McCartney’s Liverpool Institute for Performing Arts, and UNESCO. He also was Professor of Arts Education at the University of Warwick, one of the five leading research universities in the UK, for 12 years.

In this video, a must-see for every parent and teacher, Robinson makes a profoundly moving case for creating an education system that nurtures creativity. Enjoy it and share it with colleagues, principals, teachers, and parents you know.

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A Back-to-School Wakeup Call

I am a major fan of Dr. Michael Wesch, professor of digital ethnography at Kansas State University, best known for his video, The Machine is Using/Us, which went viral on YouTube.
Because I just dropped off my two college students for another year of learning, and because the public school year is about to begin here in New York, I thought I’d provide this gift to you of another Wesch video, which serves to remind us who our students are. The video was made after 200 students collaborated on the topic: “A Vision of Students Today.” Enjoy — it’s an eye-opener.

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The Untested Task of eSchool Teaching

The Washington PostImage via Wikipedia

A good read — Today’s Washington Post article titled “The Odd World of E-School Teachers,”. Among its observations:

“Educators who supplement or replace their day jobs with online teaching for local public schools are discovering that the perks of working at home come with hurdles: grappling with awkward or confusing lines of communication with their pupils; gauging student performance without seeing facial expressions; and struggling to withstand the urge to check e-mails from students during weekends.”

The piece also notes that the number of students enrolled in distance education courses connected with public schools is up 60 percent.

Cautionary Tales for the 21st Century


Two incidents recently took place in Westchester County, NY, schools, where I live, that are pretty universal cautionary tales. Both, naturally, involved students and their use of the Internet.

In the Ardsley School District, located in southern Westchester, a member of the Board of Education recently resigned after vaguely threatening and insulting UStream videos were apparently posted by her son for all the world to see. The postings, and the young man’s apparent history of less-than-stellar behavior, set off a firestorm in the suburb that could have used a referee or at least a public relations spokesperson.

Ardsley Middle School was evacuated in the midst of state testing after several students reported that a website had posted a message titled “the-plot-to-bomb-ardsley.” According to police, the same student responsible for the lovely posting allegedly made threats earlier about the school and a female classmate in a Ustream video.

The police chief called the web posting “innuendo,” but more than 120 parents showed up at a public meeting to protest the initial decision not to remove the student until all the claims had been investigated by police. That was enough to persuade school officials to place the 14-year-old “in an alternative setting” for the rest of the school year.
No charges were filed, and police said there was no overt threat to students’ safety. School officials have not said whether the boy will be allowed back into the school in September, but his mother, the school board member, resigned once the smoke had cleared in the community.

In tony Briarcliff Manor last week, the usual pomp and circumstance of high school commencement took a turn for the bizarre (shades of MTV’s “Jackass”) when a graduateliterally dropped his pants and mooned his fellow grads and onlookers, did a 180 on the stage and mooned the dignitaries assembled there, then accepted his diploma from a shocked high school principal.

The District later took the diploma back, issued a harshly worded statement to the press, then filed charges against the student — disorderly conduct and exposure of a person. And in 10 seconds flat, the video was airing on YouTube. As of this evening, it had been seen 5,700 times.

Both of these incidents emphasize the power — good or bad — of the Internet. Shortly after the Ardsley Middle School was evacuated, I went on Ustream and looked for the video that had allegedly been posted by the offender. It had obviously been taken down, but there was a somewhat disturbing video of the young man, obviously watching something on his computer as the videocamera was running. He was typing, responding, and vaguely laughing. He looked almost like he’d spent years there. He looked like he needed some fresh air and a friend other than his laptop.

The Briarcliff student, on the other hand, looked like a high schooler who’d spent years waiting to stick to the school for which he obviously felt little fondness.

There are no easy answers and there’s no playbook for these incidents. They’re just cautionary tales. All caught on videotape.

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MySpace and the Principal

Mark Walsh over at EdWeek’s School Law Blog reported recently that an Indiana Supreme Court has thrown out a case involving a middle school student who posted a tirade against her principal on none other than the social networking site MySpace. The student was charged with harassment for messages she aimed at Greencastle Middle School Principal Shawn Gobert, after a dispute about body piercings. The student also allegedly set up a fake MySpace “group” that included vulgarities and Gobert’s name in the title.
Before getting to the state supreme court, the case was heard by an Indiana trial court, which found the student delinquent on the harassment charges. But then the state appeals court reversed that decision, ruling that the student was protected by the First Amendment.
In its decision on May 13, the state supreme court ruled in favor of the student, but on the basis that the fake MySpace page had never authorized the principal to be one of its viewers. The court also cited Indiana’s harassment statute, which states that a person breaks the law only when they communicate a message with “the intent to harass, annoy, or alarm another person but with no intent of legitimate communication.”
The student’s postings showed that she clearly wanted to communicate her anger and criticism about the principal’s disciplinary action, the court said, and “merely intended to amuse and gain approval or notoriety from her friends, and/or to generally vent anger for her personal grievances.”
An interesting case that raises all kinds of questions about the First Amendment, the Internet and social networking sites that are still primarily populated by teens.
If you want to read about a fascinating case with similar overtones, check out the New York Magazine’s controversial examination, “Testing Horace Mann,” from its March 30 issue. It’s a disturbing look at the way students used FaceBook, but an even more disturbing examination of the adults involved in the scandal.

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Teens Improve Their Writing When They Blog

This is fascinating to someone who is a writing “semi-purist,” like myself.
The Pew Internet and American Life Project recently explored the link between formal writing and the writing that teens do when they email one another, text each other and write for the Internet. What they found was that blogging is helping teens become more prolific writers. Hurray!
I know this is true of my own son, who maintains his own blog, maintains a Facebook account and yes – writes for the college newspaper. All of that spells one thing – plenty of practice.
The April 24 survey showed that 47 percent of teen bloggers write outside of school several times a week or more, compared to 33 percent of teens who don’t maintain blogs. More than half of both groups, although the number is higher for bloggers, believe that writing is important to their success in life.

Duke University writing professor Bradley Hammer told eSchool News that blog writing can be better than the writing style students learn in school, or SAT-style writing.

“In real ways, blogging and other forms of virtual debate actually foster the very types of intellectual exchange, analysis, and argumentative writing that universities value,” he wrote in an op-ed piece last August.

The full report is available on the Pew Internet site.

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