21stcenturyed.com

Last year I sat in the opening keynote at NACOL’s Vitrual School Symposium while NACOL’s President Susan Patrick spoke about the emergence of WiMax in China. This will reportedly provide high-speed Internet access across a 50 kilometer radius (sixty Wimax towers would cover a state the size of Pennsylvania). This will allow China to carry out their plans to dramatically increase their use of online learning to educate their children.
So what this means is that the type of online learning you can provide in areas covered by WiMax would dramatically change. No longer will you need to worry about sticking to static images and text as the primary delivery method for students in largely rural environments. Flash-based interactive instruction is possible. So is streaming video, for that matter. Imagine how streaming video of several students at a time via web cam can close the transactional There is still an infrastructure used by many districts nationwide in the US that uses cable TV and satelite link-ups to provide this now, When this level of video instruction is used, students often have to travel to centers to access it – which is a bit at odds with one of the largest benefits of online education: accessibility.
Wimax could be a piece of the puzzle that leads to true equality in access. Kid in cities like Baltimore already benefit from having high-speed access throughout most of the city. Kids in your town can be next. All of this is possible – as long as bureaucracy and greed do not get in the way of effective and fair deals leading to equalizing access for all citizens.

A week or so ago I posted an audioblog indicating that I was reading through Teaching as a Subversive Activity and would be comparing the state of education today with this book which celebrates its 40th anniversary this year. Here are my thoughts on the Introduction.

Postman and Weingartner explain the driving force behind the book as being related to significant world problems. They write:
“We refer to the beliefs that (a) in general,the survival of our society is threatened by an increasing number of unprecedented and, to date, insoluble problems; and (b) that something can be done to improve the situation.”

Here is the list of problems they list along with my take on the state of those problems today:

Then…
“The number 1 health Problem in the United States is mental illness”
Now…
The data shows that the #1 health problem now is Substance Abuse (http://www.ncjrs.gov/pdffiles1/ojjdp/fs200117.pdf). Of course, you could argue that this is simply a symptom of mental illness.

Read more »

Subscribe Free
Add to my Page