Category Archives: Course 2

I would just like to take a moment to reflect on some of the changes in our lives over the last say 30 years. I was reminded of it this week because a student asked if I could be interviewed for the school paper, for an ongoing feature that is called “My Secret Life”.

My “secret life”, as they put it, is that I wrestled in college on a scholarship. After the intervew the student asked me if I have any photos from my time competing as a wrestler, and I had to admit that I don’t currently have any with me. It has been a long, long time since the world went digital with photographs, and my wrestling career basically happened just before the change.

The ubiquity of digital photography has sort of washed away the memory of how we used to take photos from the modern conscience. But it wasn’t just my wrestling photos. I barely have any photos at all from the time before I was about 25. All of my photos from my first international trip were ruined by water and tossed out remorsefully, including the negatives.

I was hopeful that I might find a picture of myself somewhere on the internet. After all, my picture had been in the newspaper multiple times. No such luck. Nada. Zippo. Zilch. It’s like the whole thing never even happened. Geez.

The best I could find was this link on my high school’s home page, and this mention in my home town newspaper, the LA Times.

Instead, here is a picture of Mitch Clark, who was a teammate of mine who quite literally stole a bunch of my moves, which I of course, had stolen from others before me. Enjoy

From an article by Dr. Chris Stankovich

Through collaboration with James, Rock, Michelle , Ben and Andrew, who are all teachers with me at Taipei American School, we revised and updated the AUP for grades 3-5.  We initially looked at the current TAS AUP policies as well as other published AUPs to get some ideas of how our school compares to what others are doing.

One of our focuses was to align the AUP with our school’s values program and thereby give more structure to the document itself. Additionally, we wanted to simplify and clarify a number of points which we felt needed to better reflect the current landscape of the net.

Additionally, we added a student and parent agreement form in the hope that the AUP would not simply be something that was published on the web, but would have the expectation that all students and parents are fully aware of the expectations for internet usage at TAS.

This photo belongs to Jonno Witts’ photostream

I was pretty excited to get the chance to go to a one-to-one laptop school. In a certain sense, you’ve reached the big time. You’ve finally made it. At some point in the process of getting familiar with the school, I was surprised to learn that we have no actual computer classes. For all intents and purposes there is no computer department.

It’s sort of funny to me how adults are always saying things like “The kids know much better than I do how to work their computer”, but I consistently find that students do not know how to use their computers with much expertise. Certainly in specific areas they know more than I do, but students frequently ask me questions to which the simplest answer is “google it”. At this point I really don’t know what it’s like at other schools, but our students are basically getting no direct instruction at the high school level on how to use their computers or the internet. I suppose the onus is on all of the teachers to carry that load, but this can be a particularly difficult battle when we have new students coming into the school who don’t have a background of using the computers in class.

So many of the concerns that we are dealing with in the Coetail classes are not the responsibility of any given teacher. I’m sure our teachers are doing a reasonable job of helping the students to manage their computers and their online footprints, but one could imagine that it would be very easy to slip through the cracks and not receive good information for how to protect yourself and how to obey legal issues of online content.

As a policy, I wonder how the decision was made to not have computer courses, as well as how well this policy is working for our students.

I found myself in class the other day trying to do an analysis of a physics lab with my students. But knowing that they don’t have a lot of experience thinking about where errors come from in a lab, I was determined to treat lightly. How many times have you read the conclusion of a lab report that says:

“The lab was successful. We learned a lot and had a lot of fun.”

Whaaaaaa?!?

So I decided we would have a discussion as a group about all of the aspects of the lab that could contribute to error. And then on their reports I would allow them to paraphrase some of the things we had talked about in the discussion. I supposed that this would be a good way to slowly build up some of their analysis skills.

As the discussion began, I noticed rather quickly that this activity was harder for a lot of students than I had thought. It requires a good bit of thinking to identify justifiable problems in a lab. But to me, this is exactly the kind of thinking that we most need from our students. I also noticed that there were only a few students who were coming up with answers, and that those students weren’t really my best students. I tried to encourage some of my good students to identify a problem in the lab, but it wasn’t going well.

And then it dawned on me that most of my best students were trapped in that mental state where they were just waiting for me to tell them the right answer. And in a sense they had made the right calculation. I had little choice in the end. But where was the problem solving and risk taking, which was the point of the exercise.

When I told this story to another teacher, he had a good statement about the mentality of many of our students: “Why don’t you just tell me how I am supposed to think, and then I will do a really good job of thinking that way.”

I stopped the discussion at that point to talk to the students about why being an intelligent person is becoming less dependent on just what you know or what you can memorize. And I think many of the students were receptive to that message. In the end I think it was a good moment, and that the point was made appropriately. Several students were nodding knowingly.

As much as I wonder how much we train our students to memorize in their younger years, these students are still in the 9th grade and still have a lot of maturing to do. Perhaps this is all just a part of the educational process, rather than trying to indite the whole system as having the wrong focus. There is without question a minority of students who simply are not currently capable of thinking through the analysis of errors that I would like them attempt. In what ways can I support them to build those critical thinking skills that are so important?

Sometimes I guess I just have to remind myself not to give students the ‘right’ answer. Perhaps the fear of being wrong in front of the whole class was acting to deter students from taking a risk. Next time I will put the students in groups to discuss their ideas together and develop those ideas before then presenting them to the class for further discussion.

Ok, ok. So suppose I am a pirate. How and when did my diabolical life of crime begin?

It all started when we first got the Apple IIc with the old floppy disks that were so easy to copy. My friends and I became masters of copying all of the games we could get our hands on. We even copied the programs for copying programs, which is so meta if you think about it.

It seems this culture of copying came rather naturally after the era of cassette tapes and recording stuff off of the radio. Eventually it moved to VHS and then made its way to mp3, to movies, to just about anything and everything. Of course it was one thing to copy a cheap analog copy off of the radio and play it until the wheels fell of the cassette. It sounded like crap anyway. But with the digitization of information, the ability to make perfect copies has now changed the entire landscape of what we consider to be theft.

I still haven’t completely processed my feelings on piracy, although I have sort of weened myself off most of the blatantly illegal stuff. I even have a legal copies of windows, running on my home computer. That’s a first!

The whole piracy debate sort of reminds me of the immigration problem in the US. Both sides have legitimate claims, and legitimate grievances. How do we attempt to find a fair solution? The illegals come to the US because we want them. We lure them in so that we can exploit them. So that we can benefit from their hard work. We don’t really mind that much if they are illegal because they provide us with something in return.

The same argument applies indirectly to piracy. The authors want us to use their product. Artists want us to hear their music. Windows, for example, could have shut down the illegal versions at any time had they wanted to, but they wanted something else even more. They wanted ubiquity in the market. They wanted people to come to depend on their product, even if it was an illegal copy. They preferred that you had a legal copy, but they would prefer you use an illegal copy of windows rather than try to use something else. That is a core issue here. We have long been led to believe that the free market is at the mercy of the merchant, whose rights must be protected at all costs. And that the buyer just has to accept the whims of the seller. But in reality it’s much more complex, the sellers owe the market just as much, for access to their customers. With the option to copy, some of the balance of power has been restored.

At the same time, we have to admit that artists and authors have put resources into their creations and deserve some protections on their investment. Where is our happy place?

I remember once on a copied version of a program whose name escapes me, the person who had hacked the program inserted a statement whenever you started the program reading something like “Making money off a program you have not paid for is immoral”. And that’s when I found the philosophical place that I have ever since occupied with regards to piracy. I have perhaps rationalized in my mind that this is a fair compromise, but I believe that this is the correct principle to guide our behaviors and our laws.

The truth is that a band that is trying to make a name for itself is only too happy to have people listen to its music for free. Without fans they cease to exist. Of course, without a revenue stream they also cease to exist, and that is where the balance of power lies. I still haven’t quite figured out what novelists will do, however, because reading is an individual experience. Hey, I didn’t say the the concept was perfect.

Being in Asia, the fear of getting caught for copying programs is pretty much nonexistent, and yet I feel a small pang of guilt when I stream a Lakers game or I occasionally watch movies of dubious origin. But when I rent a movie and have to watch 5 minutes of annoying clips on how piracy is wrong, I start wishing I had just downloaded it for free. I wonder whether I will ever truly and completely find redemption.

People always say that the job market is getting more complicated and getting a good job is becoming harder and harder. Despite the obvious difficulty of getting a job during tough economic times, I doubt that the logistics of getting a job are getting more difficult. The expectations are changing, just as jobs themselves are changing, but that just means you have to be prepared to adapt to new situations. The reality of human existence is that our ability to deal with the unexpected is an important skill. The only thing that has really changed is the pace at which things actually change.

The recent stories about employers asking for Facebook passwords has brought some of the implications of these changes into the spotlight.

http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/story/2012-03-20/job-applicants-facebook/53665606/1

When I first read about it I was stunned. How dare a company even ask to look into your personal things. To me it’s no different than asking if they can rifle through your bedroom too see if there’s anything improper there. Do you have something to hide?

What?!?

I’m sorry, but that’s just not how our system works. Getting access to a person’s private conversations and comments is just begging for that information to be used inappropriately and illegally. However, while I would love to tell you that if anybody asked me for my password I would flat out tell them no, I honestly can’t say what I would do if I had no job and the bills were past due and I was faced with this kind of situation. It is heartening to see that some states are moving forward with bills outlawing this outrageous invasion of privacy.

http://jobs.aol.com/articles/2012/04/20/maryland-moves-to-pass-first-facebook-password-protection-bill/

However, a federal ban has recently be voted down, almost exclusively by republicans.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/facebook/9172934/Republicans-reject-legislation-to-protect-Facebook-users-from-snooping-bosses.html

My point in all of this is that is that by having an online body of work, and by having a professional blog such as these courses are promoting, can be an effective way of steering any conversation about passwords not only away from such an invasive and problematic area and towards something that is much more useful and appropriate as a measure of a person’s professionalism and the quality of their work. Rather than simply denying a potential employer access to your private conversations, which I unequivocally insist any interviewee should do, by having an alternative, particularly one which is more suited to what they can expect from you on a professional level, you can much more easily manage the conversation without insulting anyone, while also not abdicating your own right to privacy.