Happy Christmas to All

It is difficult to get things written these days. The fog of pain meds, a lack of stamina, writing from bed, which has never been my comfort zone. But I did want to say a "Happy Christmas to All" to all of you in this corner of the Blogosphere. I think, every day, how lucky I am to live in these times, when simple tools like blogs and Twitter, email and list-serves, Skype and Google Chat, can bring so many of us together, in such vital ways.



I think about all I learn from blogs and Twitter everyday. All the tools I discover, strategies I find, resources I can add to my toolbelt, and I feel like we have arrived at someplace profoundly new in human education.

Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus

And then I think how many are left out of this new world. Just as Dickens' described the horribly uneven acquisition of weath in Industrial Revolution England when he wrote A Christmas Carol in 1843, so today we might describe a situation where those most in need of the empowerment that these new learning modes bring, are most likely to be denied access.

Harry Harrison's Classic Monologue

I meet students every day who languish in the back of 19th Century classrooms, while something as simple as the right mobile phone could allow them to join any number of remarkable, interactive, learning communities. I meet students every day who sit frustrated because their teachers and schools refuse to provide them with reasonable access to information. I meet students every day who attend schools which refuse to teach the essential skills of contemporary communications these kids will need to survive. And on many days, I get angry.



But today I am not angry. Today I am hopeful. Today I look out and see all of you working incredibly hard to change these facts. And I see all of you experimenting, collaborating, sharing, trying. And I see us at a moment where the technology and the intention of Universal Design have come together.

So, Happy Christmas to All. Thanks to all of you for all that you do.

- Ira Socol

Bringing the "Back Channel" Forward

Whenever you "teach," there is a "back channel." It has always existed in every classroom, every lecture hall, every on-line learning environment.

It includes, "Hey, what did she say?" "This sucks." "I don't understand." "That's stupid, why doesn't he answer the question?" "Do you know how to do this?" "When is that paper due?" even, "C'mon, come to the party with me tonight."

In other words, students are talking, or passing notes, or rolling their eyes at each other as you talk, or asking for answers, or help, or complaining, or wondering, or wishing you'd get to stuff that somehow connected the topic to their interests.

I really began to appreciate the value and potential of this back channel a couple of summers ago taking an International Education course. Every time some claim was made Google searches exploded across the room, followed by emails: "That's not true." "Go this link." "The UN says this..." And after that burst of activity someone would interrupt the class with a new data set or collection of opinions.

Powerful, powerful stuff.

So I wondered, could I create a dedicated Twitter-like stream that would make this back channel public? Bring it from the back to the front? No, not just me, many of us have wondered the same thing - including Google, who has built Google Moderator to do something very similar if you are in a school using Google Apps for Education (which will be my next post).

The idea was to allow this stream to run in parallel with the primary classroom experience. Make it quite public. Almost - but-not-quite - central. And in my case, to make it incredibly easy, do-able without registrations or log-ins.

So on Tuesday I tried this in my undergraduate class. I used Today'sMeet which is the creation of my son - so this is very cool. I set up an extra laptop and a second digital projector, aimed at a wall alongside the big screen, and I posted the link.

The first few posts were simple. "Hi" "Hello" "What's This?" But within fifteen minutes it had accelerated wildly. There were "tweets" (if you will) about the stuff in the class, and questions, and doubts, and worries. There were "procedurals" - "where's the sign in sheet?" "Is the due date still...?" There were requests, "I wish he'd talk about..." There were concerns, "This is distracting me" "More than Facebook?" "About the same" By the time the class session had ended, over 200 comments in all.

Every few minutes I looked up at the screen and checked the conversation, and typically I adjusted the discussion, or picked up on a question being asked there, or commented on an answer or a comment. In a big class it gave me real access to far more students than I can possibly get by watching for raised hands. And it let me - and the class - hear from many who never raise their hands. Honestly, I could even judge, much more clearly than usual, what was connecting and what was missing. As an instructor - I loved it.

OK, yes, I know this is a highly controversial idea. On Classroom 2.0 one teacher, not an anti-technology one, says of an experiment like this: "Kids today are fritzy enough without trying to listen and do several other things at the same time. To me this is the consummate use of technology to no real benefit and it plays right into the scatteredness of many kids today. It allows students to talk throughout the entire presentation. I just don't get it. I may not be articulate enough to explain myself but I just keep thinking of Leno's comment to Hugh Grant after Grant's dalliance with a lady of the night...."What were you thinking?"'

But on another blog, another teacher references using another "chat room" technology: "It also demonstrates the power of the backchannel. I personally believe that the backchannel is the greatest unharnessed resource that we as educators have available to us. It does not threaten me nor bother me that you learned as much if not more from the backchannel the other night -- in fact, it makes me feel great that I facilitated the connection." So, as in everything else, there's a range of teacher response.

But what I watched was student response. In the room Today'sMeet began to overwhelm Facebook and Email use in the room. The distraction technology became engagement technology, just as using polleverywhere switches mobile phones from distraction tool to engagement tool. And we all learned more using this than we would have without using it.

And that's not even touching on the ways this kind of technology supports the shy user, the user with speech issues, the user having trouble with the English Language, the user who'd rather be able to think through and even edit a statement or question before asking it.

Today'sMeet is free, requires no registration or log-in. Just create a room and point your students to it. To see an example - our conversation on Google Apps - look here.

- Ira Socol

New Media, New Democracy: Power to the Unempowered

On Tuesday morning I went to vote in Holland, Michigan. There the first person I met at the polls was checking picture identification under Michigan's new "suppress the vote" law.

But I saw a problem. The poll worker was checking the addresses on the IDs. This is not allowed. The ID is only to prove identity. And there might be many reasons why a person's ID might have an address different from their voting address. This is especially true in a voting precinct that includes many lower-income rental housing units.

So I said to this poll worker: "You are not supposed to be doing that." And I explained why. The response? "You should call the City Clerk." I wanted to just say, "Wrong again, pick up your phone and call, this should not be the voter's responsibility." And I might have muttered it. But I voted, then I went home. Then I called the City Clerk (who agreed that I was right, but didn't quite see much urgency), then I Twittered-The-Vote.

"#votereport 49423 Holland, MI ward 1 precinct 2 telling voters they must vote by affidavit if address on ID doesn't match reg address. Wrong" I Tweeted.

Then I got in my car and headed toward campus. Fifteen minutes later, as I was putting fuel in the car, an email arrived on my Blackberry. It was from a reporter at The Wall Street Journal, which - I need to make clear - seemed mighty unexpected. "Saw your vote report," the email said, "Please call me."

And then I was driving and discussing elections and technology with a writer at one of the world's premier newspapers (I'll admit that no matter how much I disagree with their political views).

And this morning, his report is in The Wall Street Journal.

This is incredible. An obscure voter in an obscure corner of the United States now can make a problem with democracy massively public in a heartbeat. That changes the power structure. That changes our ideas of control of media. In fact - as the power of SMS in many budding democracies has shown - as the power of Barack Obama's new media efforts have shown - that changes lives in huge ways.

And that changes what our students must learn regarding communication.

I've said here before that if you are a traditionally empowered person: wealthy, white, Protestant, English-speaking, "Traditionally-abled," understanding the power of these new media technologies may not be that essential. But if you are the kind of student we typically discuss on this site, the ability to leverage these new technologies will often make the difference between life success and life disaster. This is true at critical moments - elections, confrontations with police, battles for rights in education. And it is true in everyday life - communicating with teachers, employers, and their peers.

If you are not teaching these technologies, you are damaging your students' opportunities for success. Because if you are not teaching the tools of power, you are condemning your students to powerlessness.

- Ira Socol

Culture and comprehension

Americans report sport scores in the wrong way. If a person from almost any other nation looks at the score of an American game in progress they will assume that the visiting team is the home team and will be wrong in their assumptions regarding the stadium and city they are seeing. I have seen this create difficulties and misconceptions. It's a tiny thing but it begins to explain the enormous problems faced by educators who refuse to embrace the idea of differentiated instruction and instruction based in, or at least accepting of, the culture of the individual learner.

Ever watch the faces of confused learners - or a confused audience? Ever notice that, at first, all of their cognitive effort is being expended on jamming that square peg into that round hole? Maybe you are more familiar with what happens next - they give up, seek distraction, or check out.

A few months ago I threw a statement out to a list-serve of international students during a debate on precision and language in academic discourse. I had been arguing for writing which might best be understood by multiple audiences, and others had been arguing for the perfect precision of subject-specific and audience-specific academic language. So I said, "That lad's got the sliotar just exploding off the hurley."

I said that this statement was absolutely precise. Just about anyone in Ireland - or many New York neighborhoods - would understand immediately, and that the precision "was important," that a sliotar is not a baseball or a lacrosse ball and a hurley is not a tennis racquet or a lacrosse stick. But, I wondered, if I had a room of students, half well versed in Gaelic games and half not, that if it would not be a good idea to make the information reasonably available to both groups, and maybe to the subset of students who know nothing of sports at all.

Because, if we don't do that, some students become unfairly privileged, some will waste much of the cognitive effort we want them to use on "the learning" simply trying to handle our language, and others will give up.

How technology can help

So what if - almost effortlessly - you could solve this? What if fans could choose to see their football scores either on USA Today - home teams listed last (the American tradition that comes from baseball's structure of innings) - or on Guardian.com - home teams listed first? What if any student in the sliotar discussion could instantly type sliotar into Wikipedia and link to "Hurling" and quickly access enough information to understand my sentance? What if a student could even hear "sliotar" being pronounced during the radio broadcast of a match? What if students trying to figure this out could dig through their choice of information sources, such as the GAA site, or a YouTube glimpse of the sport?



Or what if students, faced with the question of "what is normal?" had a quick chance to look at global newspaper websites to determine whether most people followed the "home team first" or "home team last" principle?

Cognitive load, and engagement

The role of the technologies - as used above - is twofold. First, it becomes a seamless accommodation, allowing learners with "lesser" levels of access to the curriculum to rapidly "catch up." Don't know those Hurling terms? Not sure which team is home? You can, if you are brave enough, stop the class and ask, but with contemporary technologies you can find it out yourself, and you can make those connections in the way that best serves your own needs. Second, it offers personal engagement, allowing the student to interact with the information in a personally-directed way as the group interaction runs in parallel.

This not some distraction via multi-tasking. This is human learning. It can only be seen as a distraction if you perceive education as a one-way transmission system. It can only be understood as "multi-tasking" (in some bad way) if you think that, while driving, one should only be looking continually straight ahead out through the windshield. (Of course we all know teachers and drivers who do believe these things.)

If, on the other hand, you understand that learning is something which occurs individually, and that it happens best when new data can be linked effectively with the learner's own brain, and if you understand (or admit) that outside of school the human brain handles a flood of different inputs on a continuous basis (we can be both cold and hungry, we can know both that we are walking toward home and that the billboard up ahead has changed, we can understand both that it is about to rain and consider the range of places of shelter up ahead which we can run to and still be concerned with finding the right present for that girl's birthday), you will immediately see the advantages of using technology to expand how students interact with incoming information.

Universalizing

This is not about "disability," at least not if you define "disability" as narrowly as schools define "learning." "Disability" in school terms is a line in the sand which separates the "normal" from the "pathological."

Eyeglasses are fine in any classroom, and books are rarely set in 4 point type, because up to a certain point schools understand that not everyone sees perfectly. But if you are one step out of that "normal" range then schools call you "disabled" and getting help gets much harder. You need not be able to 'speedread' in school, but below a certain rate and you are off to the 'resource room.' You need not be from a wealthy family, but if your parents have not given you the proper white, middle-class social skills, you will be unwelcome in most classrooms.

But I can disable anyone, anytime. I can talk about things which they have no background knowledge of, and act as if they should know. I can put them in a place where they do not understand the language. I can schedule class on the 20th floor and turn off the elevator. I can whisper rather than speak in a normal voice. I could apply British spelling rules (and grade spelling) with American students or apply American spelling rules (and grade spelling) with British students. I could offer a required course only from 2:00 am to 3:30 am, or I could require all students to stand up through the whole class, or class could be held out on the street in a neighborhood that might make every middle class student feel completely uncomfortable. I could even, socratically, refuse to allow books or written notes and demand memory only.

Does that sound ridiculous to you? Maybe, but none of those are any more ridiculous than the typical rules of the classroom feel to any of us who are "different" in dozens of different ways. Your rules mess with our cognitive processes by forcing us to waste energy catching up physically, or culturally, or in terms of communications systems.

Let's go back to the start. Americans report sports scores in a reverse format from the rest of the world. We can either stress out all American sports fans by forcing them to change (or we could, I suppose, force everyone else to change under threat of Bush invasion or Clintonian "obliteration"), or we can explain the difference and allow each group to see these scores their own way via flexible technology. We can expect every student to understand what we are talking about as if they were clones of the teacher, or we can stop and condescendingly explain every thing in our own way (or spoon feed it if we think the student is disabled), or we can use and teach the technologies of differentiated instruction in ways which build engagement and independence.

- Ira Socol

great blog comment of the week: On Inside Higher Ed - On Texts, Tech and Teens: "Come to think of it, what is so wrong with emoticons in writing? In a way, they are simply invented punctuation marks. In another way, they are visual additions to writing. Writing (in the Western world)has had many visual additions through the ages, such as ornate capitals in medieval manuscripts, modern typefaces (which convey meaning!) and poems that take a certain shape. I don’t use them because I think they are hokey, but maybe that’s because my vocabulary of emoticons is limited." - Grocheio, Asst VP Planning and Institutional Effectiveness at Shorter College. What a great statement! Are emoticons more or less annoying than e.e. cummings lack of upper case letters? I think of Robert Ferlinghetti's poem Fortune (actually "7" from A Coney Island of the Mind) - one of the first modern American poems I discovered, and think of how the arrangement of words on the page added meaning beyond the words alone. Aren't emoticons the same thing?

great blog post of the day: Technoshock of the Digital Immigrant at Paragraph City. I think it's a wonderful parallel tale of what I have told above - just more coherently written.

The Drool Room by Ira David Socol, a novel in stories that has - as at least one focus - life within "Special Education in America" - is now available from the River Foyle Press through lulu.com

US $16.00 on Amazon

US $16.00 direct via lulu.com

Look Inside This Book

Cognitive Change

"Here’s what I think: learning styles may exist (although the studies that show that they do are generally specious), but they’re largely useless in determining how to teach specific material well. You teach according to the material, not according to theoretical learning styles." - "Michael" commenting at Paragraph City.

"Michael" is a university professor who is very angry with me, who feels "sorry for me," because, well, I'm struggling with his reasons. He says that I "create totalizing narratives in which you are the hero and everyone who disagrees with you, even slightly, is the villain," and he thinks that I fail to show the proper deference to distinguished scholars and faculty. Perhaps he also thinks that I am asking him to change his way of doing things - a way that he likely feels is 'effective teaching.' Perhaps he also thinks that I am accusing him of not really upholding a democratic vision of education.

As I said, it is hard to tell. He is an anonymous commenter. But who he is does not matter, what he is saying - a not unfamiliar sentiment among those who call themselves 'teachers' - does matter. It matters a great deal.

“…effective education is always jeopardy either in the culture at large or with constituencies more dedicated to maintaining a status quo than to fostering flexibility.” – Jerome Bruner in The Culture of Education.

Last night I listened to a podcast of an interview with Harvard's Chris Dede, who studies technology and cognition and who has extensively investigated the differences in cognition between the neo-millennials (people brought up learning with online and other digital tools) and their teachers, and I thought of "Michael"'s assertion about teaching: "You teach according to the material, not according to theoretical learning styles."

Think about this. Really consider it for a moment. According to "Michael" it is only the content which determines pedagogy. You would teach the Romantic Poets in the exact same way no matter who was in your classroom. You would teach Chemistry in the exact same way no matter who was in your classroom. You would teach reading in the exact same way no matter who was in your classroom.

Sounds ridiculous? Yes, but... In schools all across the United States standardized curricula make "Michael"'s very assumption. Michael Bloomberg, the "Education Mayor" of New York City firmly believes in this philosophy. So do many, many reading researchers I have read, all of whom wish to sell a single system that will be applied to all children.

Students, and their learning styles, learning differences, cultural differences must be bent to the norms of the teacher and the school. Schools and teachers need not bend to the differences of their students. Bending that way is 'indulgent" to "lazy, whining" students overflowing with a sense of "entitlement." (all terms from comments on Inside Higher Ed, see post below)

So how is that working for us? What's the end-result of assuming that all of our students learn the same way? that the delivery should be determined by the content, not the learner?

Well, in the US barely more than a third of its students can ever achieve "proficiency" in anything. The US high school drop out rate may actually be close to 50%. US college completion rates are brutally low. And perhaps all those failures explain why this "great democracy" now "has less than 5 percent of the world’s population but almost a quarter of its prisoners." (The New York Times, 23 April 2008). Maybe, just maybe, teachers like "Michael" are leaving a few too many students behind.

Last fall I wrote a paper on cognition and technology after noticing that so many of the texts on the topic seemed to avoid the question of culture. Here's part of what I said:

"In the field of education, and particularly U.S. education, cognition is treated as a science which transcends the impact of culture on the human brain. ... In this view this science seems to adhere closely to the generalized attitude in education that cultural dynamics are less important than other influences on learning – that a classroom can be essentially the same type of architectural construct no matter what continent – that educators may be trained in the United States for service in Kenya, Trinidad, or Malaysia – that a student in a French-speaking neighborhood in Brooklyn, New York should be following the same general curricular schedule as a student in the monoculture of Zeeland, Michigan, or a student in the wealthy walled communities of Boca Raton, Florida.

"In the fields of anthropology and psychology there is a differing stream of thought. "People in different cultures have strikingly different construals of the self, of others, and of the interdependence of these," Hazel Rose Markus and Shinobu Kitayama wrote in 1991. "These construals can influence, and in many cases determine, the very nature of individual experience, including cognition, emotion, and motivation."1

"What might this all mean for cognition in education? How do we look at the ways these different "construals" control what occurs in the classroom? At how they impact what occurs in every formalized learning environment? Or, indeed, how they effect what different parts of increasingly diverse cultures "know"? This is vital not simply because of racial, ethnic, religious, and lingual diversity, but because in periods of rapid change – such as this moment in time, different generations can become separate cultures, seeing the world in such significantly different ways that the very acts of cognition may no longer be mutually understandable. In schools, where one generation is "educated" by another, a communications gap of this sort can make almost everything impossible."2

It is this gap which I see in schools and universities today. Teachers like "Michael" are operating under one cognitive framework, and they are teaching to those students who are either trained in that framework through parental training or those who may be particularly gifted in complex code-shifting, but they are not teaching that mass of neo-millennials whose cognitive processes have been more clearly shaped by the emerging culture. And, of course, they are not teaching to that mass of students whose differing cultures or genetics might also mean that the cognitive process works differently.

The kind of straight-line thinking basic to Anglo-American education assumptions - that "undistracted," "single-focus," "book-based," "sit in the room," style is one way of learning. But, as I have said in my posts below, it is an educational style dependent on the proper Protestant training of young children, on certain attention capabilities, on certain literacy and listening capabilities, which are present in fewer and fewer students as the population changes and as technology allows a return to a more natural information flow - learning as a less linear, less structured, more random, and more community-based activity than it has been in "the book era," the past four hundred years.

The advantage of accepting that different students learn in different ways, that the teacher must accommodate the student and not the reverse, and that the student and not the content should be starting point for pedagogy, is the chance to see if US education (or British education to a somewhat lesser degree) can reach beyond the one-third success rate. Can reach out to students who are different culturally, genetically, attitudinally, and generationally from those who run the schools and the classrooms.

Perhaps my requests for this change are a "totalizing narrative" which casts educators such as "Michael" as villains unfairly. But at some point I think all those in education must stop and look at the impact of their own choices on our society.

- Ira Socol

1 Markus, H.R. and Kitayama, S. Culture and the Self. Implications for Cognition, Emotion, and Motivation Psychological Review. American Psychological Association. 1991, Vol. 98, No. 2, p.224
2 Socol, I. Irreconcilable Authority: Cognitive Theory, Culture, and Technology in the Twenty-First Century Classroom. Unpublished (as yet) Michigan State University paper. 2007.

The Drool Room by Ira David Socol, a novel in stories that has - as at least one focus - life within "Special Education in America" - is now available from the River Foyle Press through lulu.com

US $16.00 on Amazon

US $16.00 direct via lulu.com

Look Inside This Book

Technology and Equity

Dr. Lance Nelson, Chair of the Department of Theology and Religious Studies at University of San Diego, says on Inside Higher Ed, "A classroom is for human interaction; if one wants an on-line education, why not do it completely on-line?" (actually, he said, "why not do it completely on-line>" - but I will assume that's a missed key and an unused spellchecker and not a "greater than" sign).

An anonymous "gianstefano," responding to same story of the University of Chicago Law School shutting off internet access in their classrooms, says, "I feel compelled to ask the following question: what is wrong with having to listen to a boring professor or a boring lecture? Plenty of us had to do that when we were students. A lecture may not have provided us with instant gratification, but we were taught to respect the professor no matter how boring his/her lectures were. To my way of thinking, you turn off your cell phone when you go into class, and you should turn off your computer as well. This is a lesson in civility, for starters."

So, I've tried to deal with computers and disability in the classroom, and the notion of what Universal Design for Learning means, the changing nature of cognition in this century, and the potential use of mobile phones in the classroom, even why we bother to continue to pay teachers, but now I really need to talk about equity in education - and whether educators want to restrict access to education to the elite, or whether they are interested in expanding the idea.

Let me begin with my phone, which measures 10.7 cm (4.2 inches) long by 4.8 cm (1.9 inches) wide by 1.25 cm (0.5 inch) deep, and weighs 96 grams (3.4 ounces) [conversions thanks to Google search]. It cost me something less than $150 (US). Thus, it is substantially less expensive than a laptop computer loaded with (even student-priced) Microsoft Office software. It is substantially smaller and lighter than a laptop as well. And, with this single device I no longer need (a) a phone, (b) a camera, (c) a calculator, (d) a GPS system, or (e) an alarm clock.

But with this tool, and my internet connection, I can take notes in Google Docs (or build spreadsheets). I can look up things I need to know. I can even avail myself of the one spellcheck system which really supports dyslexics, English-language-learners, or anyone with significant spelling difficulties (ghotit.com). I can scan printed text in, and have it converted to text. I can listen to podcasts. I have access to a few million on-line books, and perhaps a billion on-line journal articles. I need not buy extra methods of storing data since I can back everything up to my Gmail account - and thus need not waste time or money acquiring either paper notebooks or flash drives - or searching for, or remembering to bring, or carrying - those items. I can also convert speech to text and text to speech.

In the words of Alan November, this phone is one magnificent "learning container." And it is my container. A container which supports my learning strengths and difficulties. A container that I can afford which serves me well.

Should I get to use it in my education?

Dean Saul Levmore of the University of Chicago Law School says no. He wants me to do things his way (though he may balk at buying me alternative devices). Apparently Dr. Nelson and Dr. Bernstein of Kingsborough Community College say no as well. Many, many faculty members at all levels of education join them. Just as an undergraduate prof of mine prohibited baseball caps in class. A number of us wore the caps to keep the classroom's flickering fluorescent lights out of our eyes, but this prof saw them first, as some kind of affront to dignity and polite society, and second, as "a way to cheat." "You will put your quiz answers on the brim of the hat," he told us. None of us had thought of that, but I suppose we could have done it, though I was left trying to figure out what kind of vision one might need to read notes stored that way.

I probably can not change their minds. As I have said here before, education is pretty much run by those who have succeeded in education the "traditional" way. They have neither the requisite empathy for real change which extends opportunity, nor the motivation. But perhaps I can work on those outside the system now, and perhaps I can make the voices of those demanding change a bit louder so that eventually they will be loud enough to truly be heard.

This matters because it is not simply a question of disability (see post below), or economic equity re: disability (the wealthier your family is the more likely you are to receive effective accommodations in K-12 American education, on US college admissions tests, and in college itself), or simply economic or social equity (rich white kids come with all sorts of built-in supports beginning with parents who read to them and ending with working far fewer hours while in higher education, thus needing to multitask less). This matters because allowing true media and tool choice in education is the first essential step toward bringing those traditionally left out of educational opportunity in. Students who learn to use the learning containers, the learning tools, the learning supports which are both reasonably available to them and which work best for them have a much better chance to break through all those other barriers - disability, difference, poverty, quality of primary and secondary education, level of parental education - and have a shot at succeeding.

Let me go back to Alan November, here discussing his own child: "[I]t is safe to say that Dan is not totally engaged at school. He is not self-directed or globally connected. For instance, he isn't allowed to download any of the amazing academic podcasts available to help him learn, from "Grammar Girl" to "Berkeley Physics." He is not connected via Skype to students in England when he is studying the American Revolution, for example,which might create an authentic debate that could be turned into a podcast for the world to hear."

"He cannot post the official notes that day so those who subscribe to his teacher's math blog via an RSS feed can read what's going on in his class. His assignments do not automatically turn into communities of discussion where students help each other at any time of the day. His school has successfully blocked the cool containers Dan uses at home from "contaminating" any rigorous academic content. It is an irony that in too many schools, educators label these effective learning tools as hindrances to teaching."

Now, the learning styles that Mr. November are describing are not necessarily for everyone, but denying students access to these tools is not just wrong educationally, it is discriminatory and elitist and ensures that education is nothing but a means of social reproduction. Those that have will continue to have. Those that don't, well, they'll be left behind.

After all, our society requires school for almost every path to even limited success. Just try and take the bar exam or the med boards or become a teacher without having attended a school. The old arguments about faculty being "king in their classroom," or, "if you don't like it, don't come to school," betray a willingness to keep educational success to the few, so that competition for the best jobs is as limited as possible. This doesn't mean that I advocate abandoning all rules and all forms of respect - instead it means that I believe that educational structures must change to adapt to new realities - realities of population change, of differing expectations, of differing modes of cognition - or education, which has traditionally not quite worked for three-quarters of the population as it is - will be even less effective.

Rod Bell, Adjunct Professor at College of DuPage, says on the Inside Higher Ed debate that IT (or ICT) is "disruptive," and he means this not necessarily in a bad way. Last year's CAL Conference (Computer Assisted Learning) in Dublin was entitled, "Development, Disruption, and Debate" for important reasons. Dr. Bell says, "[T]he question is not whether information technologies (IT) disrupt the lecture model—of course they do, especially if IT is a means of further extending education to the population. The question is whether professors and educational institutions can exploit IT to the general benefit of society."

I often think the question comes down to whether you think there is potential value in the disruption, or whether you think that the current systems - or the systems of the 1950s - work - or worked - so well that nothing need be changed. In my anecdotal experience the answer to that often (though hardly necessarily) comes from whether those old systems have made you a winner or a loser.

Most of the educational systems I have experienced have tried very hard to make me a loser. Where I have succeeded best are the places where the traditions were most disrupted. Neil Postman designed schools, colleges without grades, and universities willing to embrace alternatives to even the most required courses. Thus, I vote for finding out what disruption can do for us - for all of us.

- Ira Socol

Afternote - I'll present the alternate attitude, from one of my favorite professors, who just blogged on this question: "On a more personal note, I have loved that my students bring laptops to my classes. This despite the knowing that they are playing Scraboulous and/or checking email some of the time. But I can’t really complain about this since I doodled (and otherwise goofed-off) during class hours through my extended stint as a student (from middle school, that is about as far back as I can remember, to grad school). In fact I have gotten in trouble about my doodling even after becoming a professor.

"What I have found though is that having students with their laptops with wireless internet access, enriches my classes in ways I could not have imagined. More often than not, I find students conducting Google searches, tracking down articles, nailing down obscure facts, in ways that directly connect to what is being discussed in class. My students often share what they have found with me and the other class-participants.

"I see no reason to be threatened by this, in fact I believe that this enhances student engagement with the ideas, and that is always a good thing.

"The fact of the matter is that students can goof off even when there is no technology (as I did and continue to do so at meetings) when the topics being discussed appear irrelevant and/or boring. This just raises the bar for us as instructors, pushing us to try harder to make our classes interesting, challenging and engaging."

The Drool Room by Ira David Socol, a novel in stories that has - as at least one focus - life within "Special Education in America" - is now available from the River Foyle Press through lulu.com

US $16.00 on Amazon

US $16.00 direct via lulu.com

Look Inside This Book

Hardware every school should have on hand...

I believe that every school needs an assortment of keyboards and 'pointers' (mice) if they are to actually teach 'keyboarding' and/or computer use to students. You probably don't need more than one or two of any particular choice - certainly not until student needs/preferences become known - but you need to have these options on hand wherever computers are in use. Not having them is the same as not having accessible entries and rest rooms.

There are the classics that should always be on hand, BigKeys, Dvorak, One-Handed, various ergonomics, but there are a few new items which seem important to have on hand if your school is not going to deny reasonable access to a range of students. (By the way, shifting to Dvorak simply requires changing Windows or Apple control panel settings and a bit of ingenuity, you don't really need to buy anything.)

One keyboard solution is using the ABC layout. This becomes more and more logical as students train early in life on devices (such as phones) with ABC patterning, after all, there is no logic to the QWERTY system, only ancient history.

The "new standard" ABC keyboard is one option in either 'classic' black and white or the more unique green and purple look.

If you are outside the US the 'Easy as ABC' Keyboard is a more traditional looking solution.

Keyboarding, if taught, must first include keyboard choice. This is not just for those with special needs because it is probably true that more people are injured each year by their keyboards than any other single piece of employment-related equipment (carpal tunnel, anyone?). And keyboard flexibility is an essential part of our current/future economy. I type on a regular-looking keyboard. I also type on my mobile. I type on the on-screen keyboards on handheld devices. I type in various countries using, of course, the keyboards of those countries.

I have to admit that I often laugh when travelling with trained touch typists. Being a "one-fingerer" myself phone keys don't bother me, WindowsMobile ABC arrangements don't bother me, nor does a keyboard in France or Germany. My friends who succeeded in learning "typing" are, however, completely thrown. "The keys aren't in the same places!" they shout. "No they are not," I reply, adding that, "finally, I win."

Remember that size - surely with keyboards - also matters. Small hands need smaller keyboard reaches. And of course left-handers need attention as well. If not acquiring truly left-handed keyboards at least make sure that you can place the numeric keypad on the left side for the student who needs that.

Your students need mouse choices as well:

One of the best discoveries I've made is the 3M Renaissance Mouse, which seems to offer positive mouse control in some extreme of examples of dexterity limitations. It even comes in two sizes.

Others include the Hover-Stop Mouse which simplifies control to movement alone. The Big Track - great for the young and those without fine motor control. And yes, the foot-mouse. There are hundreds of other choices, pick a few, and let students consider which is best for their own needs.

Don't forget the basic option of the trackball, which is just much more intuitive for many kids, and much less stressful for many workers. The Trackman Wheel remains one of the most comfortable of these, but visit any office supply store, and think of the possibilities.

A decade ago (or more), when I first began working in assistive technology at Grand Valley State University, we put a "one-of-each" box in each campus building with computer labs. There was a BigKeys keyboard with a removable keyguard, a Dvorak keyboard, a numeric keypad with larger keys, four or five different "mice." Headsets for speech recognition and text-to-speech. And we set up a check-out system. Trade your student ID for the device you wanted - no "special permissions" needed. Back then, in the era of PS2 connections it was a pain in the arse. You had to restart each time you switched one of these devices, and we needed special "dual keyboard adapters" if two people with differing needs wanted to work on the same machine. Now, USB links make this simple, and very easy, and every one of these options costs far less now than the price back in the last century.

So is your school equipped with these options? If it is not, it is not accessible, and access to information and communication is not equal.

- Ira Socol

The Drool Room by Ira David Socol, a novel in stories that has - as at least one focus - life within "Special Education in America" - is now available from the River Foyle Press through lulu.com

US $16.00 on Amazon

US $16.00 direct via lulu.com

Look Inside This Book

Reading Inclusion

A few more important reading assignments (in part thanks to Steve Lee at fullmeasure). Remember, you don't need to buy a lot of books to stay on top of the assistive technology, universal design, and ed tech fields. Free documents are everywhere, written by the world's leading experts. Download them, read them, share them.

First, three essential publications from Futurelab:

Designing Educational Technologies for Social Justice

One Action Research example cited in this report: "The residents of a housing estate in Lambeth, south London, designed their own computer literacy course, alongside academics from the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) and tutors from adult education services. The Penceil project (How People Encounter E-illiteracy) started from the belief that people’s information technology (IT) needs have, for too long, been defined from above: by government; by IT suppliers; by training providers; by exam boards; and so on. The basic questions of how people experience any lack of skills in their daily lives had not been asked: what barriers does this present to them, and what they want to do with the skills they learn? This was an action research project, so it not only tried to understand the issues but worked with residents to design and implement programmes to meet their needs. The Penceil project used digital technologies to widen access to learning, and a personalized approach, developing a course based around the needs of the estate’s residents. For further information and research reports, see penceil.lse.ac.uk."

E-inclusion: Learning Difficulties and Digital Technologies

On the need to bring technology together with the social model of disability: "…the shift in perspective to engage with a social model of learning difficulties encourages an engagement with improving and diversifying the contexts (social, material and cultural) in which all children can be enabled to learn. As has been suggested (Daniels 2000), the challenge is to go beyond the rhetoric and achieve real change. As such, the social model is particularly relevant to our consideration of how digital technologies might be used to enable e-inclusion."

and Handhelds: Learning with Handheld Technologies

On mobile learning in a Special Needs School: "In languages, the teacher distributed a piece of text, via Bluetooth, to the class; students corrected the text, recorded their speaking of it and then ‘beamed’ it back to the teacher. Having listened to the recording and looked at the corrected text, the teacher would beam back a final version, or send back a comment on that piece of work."

And if you still have time...

An article from the Guardian on the "universal" use of the ASUS mini-book computers in schools in Middlesborough and Sittingbourne. "Kipling says the mini laptops "offer a comprehensive solution that other mobile devices cannot compete with. We love [its] size and are impressed with the possibilities it offers. The potential for assessment for learning is great, and already we have teachers gaining instant access to learners' responses through blogging and other miniBook capabilities".

'"It enables teachers and pupils to access internet and other ICT resources traditionally available only in our ICT suites. It effectively gives us access to another six ICT suites that are attached to the learners."

"The machines are used most in subjects such as maths, English, science, geography and history." Alternates to the ASUS mini-book are suggested at the end of the piece, including the soon-to-be-available Elonex One.

and then two sites of the kind we need many more of:
Action Research - real teachers evaluating real solutions with real students, and sharing that information openly so others can learn.

Of course the Becta Test-Bed Evaluation site has many examples of this. I have sent many pre-service teachers to this site to get them to start to see the range of possibilities. Ireland's Learning from Laptops Initiative is trying to get a similar thing going with "classroom results" reviews of software. You can also download their Engaging Learners book.

- Ira Socol

Meanwhile, an upstate New York middle school has decided to eliminate all distinctions between school and prison. Faced with a student population no longer quite white enough ("enrollment has gone from overwhelmingly white and working class to 35 percent black and Hispanic in recent years") Cheektowaga Central Middle School principal Brian Bridges began a program which now excludes "more than a quarter of the 580 at the school as of last week ... from all aspects of extracurricular life" and hands out detentions for, apparently, almost anything. "'A child who only has detention to look forward to at the end of the day is less likely to come to school," said Laura Rogers, a school psychologist in Harvard, Mass. and the co-author of Fires in the Middle School Bathroom," in the New York Times article. Well, duh... but then, we don't really want all these kids staying in school, do we? In the end they'll just hold down the district's No Child Left Behind test scores. Better to get them to quit right now.

The Drool Room by Ira David Socol, a novel in stories that has - as at least one focus - life within "Special Education in America" - is now available from the River Foyle Press through lulu.com

US $16.00 on Amazon

US $16.00 direct via lulu.com

Look Inside This Book

Reading Assignments

"I'll lever let technology change the way I teach," is a statement I hear all the time from university professors and secondary teachers. I think that they think this makes them sound principled. But I think they sound ridiculous. After all, we know they would teach differently if they did not have books, chalkboards, chairs, a roof over the classroom, calculators (or sliderules), or science lab equipment, or even pens and paper. They teach the way they do because of the technologies they choose to use. But let's take their statement and run with it.

"I'll never let technology change the way I practice medicine." "I'll never let technology change the way I build your house." "I'll never let technology change the way I travel."

We are humans. We define ourselves by our tools. We live in the information age just as surely as the Trojan War was fought in the Bronze Age. So I am not so sure, for example, that our ways of comprehending science have changed dramatically over the past 2,500 years, but I am certain that our technologies for exploration have changed tremendously.

Thus, we need to know the technologies that our students use today, and will use tomorrow, and we must adjust what we, as educators, do to those realities, and train our students in effective tool use. Thus, there are important new works out that you should probably be reading. The good news is, they are quite readable, and they are free and easily downloadable.

First is the 2008 Horizon Report, which has over the years proven to be one of the best predictors of the potential of educational technology.

A few quotes:

"The growing use of Web 2.0 and social networking— combined with collective intelligence and mass amateurization—is gradually but inexorably changing the practice of scholarship. The proliferation of tools that enable co-creation, mashups, remixes, and instant self-publication is remaking the traditional model of academic publication and has growing implications for tenure and merit systems. Web 2.0 and social networking tools are increasingly being adopted for educational use. In the sciences especially, amateur scholars are juxtaposing data into “data mashups” and creating sophisticated visual representations that add to the body of knowledge in compelling ways. Taken together, the increased use of these technologies indicates a steady change in the way scholarship is undertaken and perceived."

"The fact that many students already own and carry mobiles remains a key factor in their potential for education. Added to that is the tremendous pace of innovation in this sector, where intense competition is driving continual advancements. The feature sets of the most recent high-end phones have moved these devices into an entirely new class. Just as we have seen with cell phone cameras, as innovation continues, prices for established features will drop considerably. Over the time frame of this adoption horizon, it is expected that mobile broadband, full-featured Internet, touch-screen interfaces, remotely upgradeable software, and high-quality displays will become as common as cameras are today."

"The gap between students’ perception of technology and that of faculty continues to widen. Students and faculty continue to view and experience technology very differently. Students have embraced social technologies like Facebook and many similar platforms in unprecedented numbers, yet these technologies remain a mystery to many on campuses. Webware tools with clear potential for education are meeting the same reception: faculty are often either unaware of tools like Google Docs and Swivel, or have difficulty integrating them into educational processes. Serving to expand this gap is the withering pace of emerging technology, and even old technology hands often tire at the thought of learning yet another new way of working. At the same time, student expectations are important, and successful learning-focused organizations have long known they ignore these expectations at their peril."

Also now out: Becta's Emerging Technologies for Learning (No. 3).

To quote:

"Students expect cross-platform access to content, the ability to download and upload material, and the integration of digital media in their learning tasks. They ask that course content, class notes, lectures and syllabi be searchable with common tools such as Google and available 24x7. Students also suggest that a wide array of courses should be available online, providing greater flexibility than traditional class schedules and that lectures be available as video-on-demand."

"The ways institutions communicate with students today, mostly in text, are described by students as ‘flat’. Students suggest more visual options. They see opportunities to use multimedia to enrich services as well as courses. For example, students suggest that information in a degree audit would be more understandable with a graphic interface rather than lines of text. They advocate maps pinpointing open parking spaces or open computers in the library. Students also suggest that institutions might do more to foster a sense of community among students. Remembering that our current generation of learners does not limit the definition of communication to face-to-face interaction, suggestions include integrating social technologies in institution websites, allowing students to share photos, using social bookmarking, and blogging."

"In sum, cloud computing is fundamentally changing the way in which we use the internet in our daily lives. Thomas Vander Wal, Principal and Senior Consultant for Infocloud Solutions, describes the shift in use as going from the “I go get web” (people accessing static and information in proprietary formats created by others on a desktop computer) to the “come to me web” (people creating, finding, using/re-using, sharing and storing information in open formats across multiple devices in different locations). Consequently, whereas the focus used to be on the technology, it has now shifted to the person, demoting the technology to a serving role and following the user wherever he or she goes."

Previous editions:
Emerging Technologies for Learning #2
Emerging Technologies for Learning #1

Also, just a reminder of of one of the best documents of this type. Norbert Pachler's (the University of London) Mobile Learning: Towards a Research Agenda. That is important reading.

Plus: Building a course in and around Wikipedia - teaching content and information literacy and writing skills all in one semester from Jon Murray. A wonderful piece discovered through the bizarre debate on Wikipedia on Inside Higher Ed (also see below). (Who knew that a party filled with encyclopedia editors would be more cut-throat than a a night of drinking at Rasputin's house?)

- Ira Socol

Entertaining tech conversations: I always think that using a few tools of discourse analysis we can really entertain ourselves when we watch tech arguments break out in higher education. Notice the incredible anger in these conversations on Inside Higher Education on Wikipedia and student text messaging in class and on university classroom technology on the Chronicle of Higher Education. Then ask yourself - is any of this about learning? or is it all about power? Anyway - I always learn from these exchanges, both from those I agree with and those I debate. So encourage people to join these types of exchanges. I do believe they deal in important conflicts which will help lead us to new forms of understanding - and educational action. And especially - cheers to Landrum Kelly! (if that is this Landrum Kelly). Thanks for the challenge!

The Drool Room by Ira David Socol, a novel in stories that has - as at least one focus - life within "Special Education in America" - is now available from the River Foyle Press through lulu.com

US $16.00 on Amazon

US $16.00 direct via lulu.com

Look Inside This Book

Free Speech Recognition

Yes, right now your students can have free high quality speech recognition working for them.

Consider, without paying for Dragon - or before deciding to pay for Dragon, or without struggling with all the problems of Microsoft Vista - or while waiting for the eventual "Service Pack 2" which will make Vista stable, usable, and much less annoying, or without waiting for MacSpeech Dictate to finally appear, your students who struggle with the physical acts of writing or keyboarding can be doing their own writing and doing it (probably) for free.

You just have to let them have their mobile phone in the school, and you have to let them use it.

I re-discovered Jott via Karen Janowski's EdTech Solutions blog. I had heard of it, played with a very early version, then forgotten, until thankfully - through the wonders of social networking - Karen commented here, I went back to look at her site, and - voila!

Jott works very simply.
1. You sign up with Jott.
2. You register your mobile phone number and email with Jott.
3. You add other contacts into Jott - your teacher, your parents, your boss.
4. You call Jott.
5. You say "Send to me," or "Send to x."
6. You speak.
7. Jott writes it down for you.
8. Jott stores what you've written in folders you create on their website. ("Homework Assignments," or "My Second Novel.")
9. Jott emails the text to you or to whoever you wanted it sent to, or texts it to another phone.

A lifespan solution. And a real solution to myriad problems in school, from dexterity issues to dysgraphia to attention-spectrum issues to memory problems. And... yes, a high-tech solution which requires the school - in most cases - to spend absolutely nothing and requires none of that "precious" tech support time either (If a student did not have a phone a school could buy a mobile and minutes for far less than a computer and Dragon Naturally Speaking and a "strong enough for school" headset, etc, etc.).

Like most great Universal Design solutions Jott was not designed for people with "disabilities," nor is its impact limited to that group. Hands-free writing in your car just became easy, for example. So a student using this technology is not "marked" by their obvious accommodation - an important issue for children and adolescents, if not all of us.

I'd encourage you to read Karen's blog entry on this for a great list of real-school solutions, using Jott.

And consider all the other ways your students' mobiles can support them, especially if tied in with a Google Calendar at least partially shared with the teacher (with text-message reminders), and with the ScanR website which converts a 2 megapixel camera phone into a scanner capable of producing accessible text.

So I signed up. It is free. And I put Jott's number both into my phone ["call Jott"] and into my free calling circle. And now that is free. And now I'm ready to write, no matter how awful my handwriting is (and it is completely illegible), or how slow my one-fingered keyboarding is, or even if I am driving to campus.

- Ira Socol

The Drool Room by Ira David Socol, a novel in stories that has - as at least one focus - life within "Special Education in America" - is now available from the River Foyle Press through lulu.com

US $16.00 on Amazon

US $16.00 direct via lulu.com

Look Inside This Book

Inability to 'Google'

Back in May 2006 I wrote an opinion piece for Inside Higher Ed on "high tech cheaters." Part of my target was journalism prof Richard Craig at San Jose State University, profiled in The New York Times as part of a battle against internet cheating - in Dr. Craig's case cheating on spelling tests. I suggested that Dr. Craig's time - and surely his students' time - would be better spent on lessons in how to use spell-checkers and how to use those internet search tools which he, and others in the article, considered ways of cheating.

I even pointed out that just a few days after running their (quarterly) anti-educational technology article, The New York Times ran a front page piece that was entirely false. Two weeks later they admitted as much, and this paragraph stood out:

"And the suggestion that an Airbus A380 with stand-up seats "could conceivably fit in 853 passengers" should have also raised questions. Just four weeks earlier, an [article in The New York Times] edited by Ms. Messinger had made clear that an A380 filled with regular coach seats was capable of carrying 853 passengers."


In other words, if the Times reporters had simply 'Googled' their own object of interest, or just searched their own newspaper website, they would have been spared a great deal of embarrassment.

Fast forward to today. I have no idea if Dr. Craig is still giving spelling tests to university journalism majors or if he has realized what century he teaches in and is focusing on more important issues. But The New York Times still seems woefully unable to teach it's staff about the basic use of search tools and data analysis necessary not just to 21st Century journalism, but simply 21st Century citizenship and 21st Century consumerism.


One week after the Times's Michiko Kakutani wrote a fawning review of one more claim to victimhood ('the contemporary American memoir' - "memoir" and Ms. Kakutani's name share 237 articles according to a search of the paper's website - she must like this form) - in this case "Margaret Jones's" supposed recording of her life on the 'ghetto' streets of South Central Los Angeles, Love and Consequences. And a few fewer days after Times' editors piled on with a ridiculous Home and Garden visit with "Ms. Jones," the story broke that the book and the life described and reported, were entirely fictional. "Ms. Jones" is really Margaret Seltzer, a rich white girl from the L.A. suburbs who attended an exclusive "Day School." Who gave her up? Turns out it was her sister.

The 'newspaper of record' couldn't figure that out before running not one, but two, stories?

This is not just a question of ethics. There are close ties between the book's editor (from Pearson, one of the world's largest publishers - especially of those 'authoritative' textbooks teachers and professors so rely on) and The Times's book review staff. No surprise there, Manhattan is a small island and "[book editor] McGrath, whom the paper identified as the daughter of former New York Times book review editor and current writer-at-large Charles McGrath," these things are common. Plus, neither the book's editor nor the book's publisher had any incentive to fact check... as everyone from James Frey (still in the top 1,000 on Amazon) to Dave Eggers to their publishers knows, memoirs far outsell literary fiction in the US... more likely to be published, reviewed in the Times, stocked on the shelves at Barnes&Noble if the hook is your great American surviving against the odds backstory rather than the fact that you write well.

But given the current trend for faked memoir - just this week the "running with wolves" holocaust memoir was debunked - don't you think 'journalists' would take a moment and perform those simple high-tech tasks called "search" to decide if something were true? I, after all, have now 'Googled' 27 things just to get to this point in this blog.

Neither is this just a case of American capitalist re-writing. "'American dream' memoir exposed as fake," said The Times of London. We do know that it is important to those protecting the brutal economic system of the United States to get these Horatio Alger stories continuously into print - the anyone can rise up and achieve myth is essential to US Republican Party politics.

But given the current debates in the United States about following a path toward a 'European' conception of democracy or continuing with Reaganesque-McKinley capitalism, you'd guess even The New York Times would be a bit more interested in the 'truths' they promote.

Those ethics and political issues are one thing - but I suspect a bigger problem. We do not teach search and evaluation in our schools. We do not teach digital research and we do not teach people to use digital tools.

Oh yes, these 'reporters' know how to call people. I'll bet Michiko Kakutani even knows how to use a mobile phone. And they know how to look things up in print. I'm sure Mimi Read, who did the Times's puff piece on Jones/Seltzer's home, can pull books off the shelf at the library. There are even reporters at The New York Times who can go outside and interview people. I have seen them do this with my own eyes.

But they do not know how to do the real work - the real time-crunch - can't get anyone on the phone - the people on the street aren't necessarily telling you the truth - kind of fact-checking that is both absolutely necessary in today's 'information age' - it is absolutely possible with a decent skill set. These skills, though, are not taught in high schools, or universities. Surely not to the English-major types who review books, rarely to even journalism majors. And so they are not ingrained, they are not automatic.

And they do not know how to analyze either. Brought up in educational institutions still locked into antique concepts of cognitive authority, Ms. Kakutani believes the reputable publisher (even without the familial connection). Patrick Wilson in 1983 discussed the forms cognitive authority took and noted that (as quoted by Soo Young Rieh), "cognitive authority can be associated with a publisher: a publishing house, a single journal, publication sponsorship, and published reviews, all can acquire this authority. [Another] consideration is found in document type. For example, a standard dictionary has authority in its own right; people do not concern themselves about the names of compilers in reference books."

Wilson's final component is, "the recognition of a text’s contents as plausible or implausible and bestows or withholds authority accordingly," but this is impossible for most contemporary reporters who live lives so far removed from their grittier subjects that Ms. Kakutani probably has less ability to judge the authenticity of a work like Love and Consequences than I have the ability to judge the scientific authenticity of Jim Lovell's Lost Moon.

So these Times reporters can either rely on their old forms of authority - which fail them again and again, from the Airbus A-380 with the standing seats to the run-up to the Iraq War to this memoir nonsense - or they can rely on the newer forms of authority, the preponderance of evidence raised by a great web search. The very fact, for example, that the intersection Ms. Seltzer says she wrote much of her memoir at does not exist (see Google Maps) would have - to a prudent, educated reporter willing to invest 30 seconds - raised the first of many red flags.

But think about this: I hear about teachers and professors all the time who would happily accept a citation from The New York Times ("it's in ink!") but would reject online citations which might prove the Times untrue.

And this: The student in your life need not be an aspiring journalist for this to matter greatly. How will a person know who is telling the truth if they do not know how to rapidly hunt for and evaluate information? If you are buying a car, can you tell the difference between the web information from General Motors, Road&Track, and Consumer Reports? If you are deciding who to vote for can you discover what is accurate? Can you hunt up reliable information on a prospective employer? Or a prospective date? Can you even intelligently investigate and compare various colleges in meaningful ways? Can you look behind the news in ways which help you understand the world? Can you collect and sort a variety of opinions? Do you ever even look beyond the first page of Google results, or know what kinds of search words to add in to get to the information you need?

These are essential life skills. And if the schools you are involved in are not actively teaching these skills, they are failing - no matter what their test scores suggest.

At the end of Ms. Kakutani's review of Love and Consequences she writes - referring to "Ms. Jones," "One of her friends in prison writes her that “so few of us will ever get the chance to see what it’s like outside L.A.,” that she should “be our eyes.” That Ms. Jones has done, and with this remarkable book she has also borne witness to the life in the ’hood that she escaped, conveying not just the terrible violence and hatred of that world, but also the love and friendship that sustained her on those mean streets."

But that turns out not to be what is remarkable. What is remarkable is that this pinnacle of American journalism still does not understand how information moves in this century. What is remarkable is that this review lays bare all the faults of 'the old system' of information processing - that reliance on trusted friends, on credentialed sources, on that 'network' of people from Ms. McGrath to Scooter Libby who have made fools of The New York Times recently.

So next time a teacher tells you that you can't quote Wikipedia or a blog ask about that textbook on the desk - chances are it comes from the same publishing empire which told you that "Ms. Jones" wrote a memoir.

That might make the text book every bit as authoritative as The New York Times - which - it must be pointed out - rarely corrects itself instantly the way Wikipedia does.

- Ira Socol

The Drool Room by Ira David Socol, a novel in stories that has - as at least one focus - life within "Special Education in America" - is now available from the River Foyle Press through lulu.com

US $16.00 on Amazon

US $16.00 direct via lulu.com

Look Inside This Book