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The Telecom Digest for September 16, 2013
Volume 32 : Issue 195 : "text" Format
====== 32 years of TELECOM Digest -- Founded August 21, 1981 ======
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Date: Sun, 15 Sep 2013 01:41:35 -0400
From: Monty Solomon <monty@roscom.com>
To: telecomdigestmoderator.remove-this@and-this-too.telecom-digest.org.
Subject: No Child Left Untableted
Message-ID: <p06240808ce5af8e71ecd@[10.0.1.7]>
No Child Left Untableted
By CARLO ROTELLA
September 12, 2013
Sally Hurd Smith, a veteran teacher, held up her brand-new tablet
computer and shook it as she said, "I don't want this thing to take
over my classroom." It was late June, a month before the first day of
school. In a sixth-grade classroom in Greensboro, N.C., a dozen
middle-school social-studies teachers were getting their second of
three days of training on tablets that had been presented to them as
a transformative educational tool. Every student and teacher in 18 of
Guilford County's 24 middle schools would receive one, 15,450 in all,
to be used for class work, homework, educational games - just about
everything, eventually.
There was, as educators say, a diverse range of learners in the room.
Some were well on the way to mastering the tablet. Ben Porter, for
instance, a third-year teacher who previously worked as an operations
manager for a Cold Stone Creamery franchiser, was already adept at
loading and sharing lesson materials and using the tablet's
classroom-management tools: quick polls, discussions, short-answer
exercises, the function for randomly calling on a student and more.
Other teachers, including a gray-bearded man who described himself as
"technologically retarded," had not progressed much further than
turning it on.
Smith, the most outspoken skeptic among the trainees, was not a
Luddite - she uses her Web site to dispense assignments and readings
to her students - but she worried about what might be lost in trying
to funnel her teaching know-how through the tablet. "I just don't
like the idea of looking at a screen and not at the students," she
said.
A couple of seats over from her, I was thinking the same thing. I
teach college students, not middle schoolers, but I count on being
able to read their faces and look them in the eye, and I would resist
- O.K., freak out - if obliged to engage them through a screen in the
classroom. And as a parent of middle schoolers, I would strenuously
oppose any plan by their school to add so much screen time to my
children's days. The tablets, paid for in part by a $30 million grant
from the federal Department of Education's Race to the Top program,
were created and sold by a company called Amplify, a New York-based
division of Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation, and they struck me as
exemplifying several dubious American habits now ascendant: the
overvaluing of technology and the undervaluing of people; the
displacement of face-to-face interaction by virtual connection; the
recasting of citizenship and inner life as a commodified data
profile; the tendency to turn to the market to address social
problems.
Still, I came to Guilford County, I hoped, motivated by curiosity and
discovery rather than kneejerk repudiation. I try to be on guard
against misrecognizing complex change as simple decline, and I
acknowledge that my tendency to dismiss the tech industry's marketing
might blind me to the Amplify tablet's genuine potential as a
teaching tool - and to major new developments reshaping not just the
nature of schooling but also the world in which my kids are growing
up.
...
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/15/magazine/no-child-left-untableted.html
***** Moderator's Note *****
Some years ago, I was speaking to a statistician at a major
U.S. company - you can guess which one - and she told me that in the
near future, the "typical" applicant to that company would be a
pregnant, Spanish-speaking high-school dropout.
I don't know whether her prediction did, or will, come true, but I
remember asking her how the company would train such an applicant. She
looked at me, calmly, and said "We're going to give them an electronic
comic book".
Bill Horne
Moderator
Moderator's Note Copyright (C) 2013 E.W. Horne. All Rights Reserved.
Date: Sun, 15 Sep 2013 02:28:49 -0400
From: Monty Solomon <monty@roscom.com>
To: telecomdigestmoderator.remove-this@and-this-too.telecom-digest.org.
Subject: On Campus, a Faculty Uprising Over Personal Data
Message-ID: <p0624081ace5b03e8b2fc@[10.0.1.7]>
On Campus, a Faculty Uprising Over Personal Data
By NATASHA SINGER
September 14, 2013
IMPROVING health while holding down health care costs is the kind of
having-your-cake-and-eating-it combination that most people can get
behind. In fact, both ideas are embedded in the Obama
administration's Affordable Care Act. But an uprising among faculty
members at Pennsylvania State University over a new employee wellness
plan is challenging at least some of the methods designed to achieve
those aims.
Penn State administrators quietly introduced the plan, called "Take
Care of Your Health," this summer in the deadest part of the academic
calendar. But that didn't prevent some conscientious objectors from
organizing a protest online and on their campuses, culminating last
week in an emotionally charged faculty senate meeting. The plan, they
argued, is coercive, punitive and invades university employees'
privacy.
The plan requires nonunion employees, like professors and clerical
staff members, to visit their doctors for a checkup, undergo several
biometric tests and submit to an extensive online health risk
questionnaire that asks, among other questions, whether they have
recently had problems with a co-worker, a supervisor or a divorce. If
they don't fill out the form, $100 a month will be deducted from
their pay for noncompliance. Employees who do participate will
receive detailed feedback on how to address their health issues.
At a university where some employees earn less than $50,000 annually,
the faculty members contended that an $1,200 annual surcharge - or
$2,400 with a spouse - for nonparticipation amounted to a strong-arm
tactic. What's more, they argued, the online questionnaire required
them to give intimate information about their medical history,
finances, marital status and job-related stress to an outside
company, WebMD Health Services, a health management firm that
operates separately from the popular consumer site, WebMD.com.
...
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/15/business/on-campus-a-faculty-uprising-over-personal-data.html
***** Moderator's Note *****
The United States is a nation of warriors, and I think our health-care
systems reflect that fact: we spend billions to defeat diseases that
affect children, but have long ignored pandemics (such as cancer) which
decimate the older population, but don't affect those of military age.
Of course, I should have seen this coming: no sooner do we start to
face the fact that we can't afford to be the world's policemen
anymore, then we do an about-face and militarize health care, by
dehumanizing the rank-and-file and by demanding instrusive and
heavy-handed concessions that allow the system to be run by poorly
trained martinets.
I don't know if our health insurance costs as much as an F-15, but the
trend seems clear.
Bill Horne
Moderator
Moderator's NOte Copyright (C) 2013 E. W. Horne. All Rights Reserved.
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