Isn’t this going overboard?

NEWARK, N.J. ? A Roman Catholic high school has ordered its students to remove their online diaries from the Internet, citing a threat from cyberpredators.

Students at Pope John XXIII Regional High School in Sparta appear to be heeding a directive from the principal, the Rev. Kieran McHugh.

McHugh told them in an assembly earlier this month to remove any personal journals they might have or risk suspension.

From School orders students to remove blogs (USA Today).

UPDATE: Apparently there is more to the story.

Posted: October 30th, 2005 under Uncategorized.
Comments: 2

This is definately not how I want to live when I retire… But to each his own.

Barbara St. Hilaire spends about 50 hours a week wielding a machete, dismembering demons and battling a slew of thugs, zombies, and other nasties of the video-gaming world. Having recently nailed a 100% score in Outlaw Golf 2, she’s now focused on mastering the top levels in God of War. It’s a passion that has earned St. Hilaire, 69, the moniker “Old Grandma Hardcore.”

“If you saw her in a grocery store, you would see an old, Midwestern diabetic with thick glasses leaning on a crutch or shopping cart,” says her grandson Timothy St. Hilaire, who launched a blog recounting her gaming exploits — and her colorful expletives. “She’s a polite mother of five and grandmother of 12…but get her in front of a game, and she becomes a monster.”

Attack of the Gaming Grannies (Business Week Online)

Some 19% of gamers are over 50, up 9% in five years, according to Peter D. Hart Research Associates. And 53% of game players expect to be playing as much, or more, 10 years from now.

You’re only on this planet for so long — enjoy it while you can. There will plenty of time to play video games when you get to Heaven and I hear the graphics are absolutely divine on the consoles they have up there.

:-)

Hat Tip to YPulse.

Posted: October 30th, 2005 under Uncategorized.
Comments: none

Of course! Take something which kids are totally gaga over, and turn it into an educational tool. That’s just what Jamestown Elementary is doing by letting the kids share their hard work with other students and their parents with podcasts.

The Washington Post reports, “IPods Fast Becoming New Teacher’s Pet“

The kids go through the traditional cycle of doing their research, putting their reports, poetry and other things together, are graded on that, and then they get to share it with the other students, parents, and… well… the whole wide world really, via the schools podcasts.

Colleges are podcasting lectures for students who miss classes or want to hear them again.

This doesn’t appear to be a new phenomenon (except to me perhaps). A
Google search turns up quite a few elementary and middle schools that are podcasting.

What a great way for kids to showcase and feel proud of their work. What a great way for parents to share what the kids are doing. Now if I can receive the end of year concert via podcast instead of sitting in that sweltering multipurpose room with the other parent-sardines, that would be even better. :-)

Posted: October 30th, 2005 under Uncategorized.
Comments: 1

J.W. ponders whether he is not getting everything out of his statistics class in his post Who needs skills, my TI-83 thinks for me.

Basically, what it boiled down to, is my STA 2023 class is really only teaching me how to pick out which statistic for the calculator to run, and how to interpret the results ? it might be teaching other people, who use 4-function calcualtors, or who don?t know how to do the more advanced stuff, how to calculate some things by hand, but by and large, I?ll have gained very little practical knowledge from this class.

I had a recent experience along these lines myself.

My daughter had me buy her a calculator for her math class a few weeks ago. The homework that she brings home has exercises that instruct, “Use your calculator to…” However, the math is easy enough that she should be able to do in her head.

The other night, she asked me for some help.

“Dad, I don’t get this. Can you explain what I need to do?”

So I had a look at the problem and then started to ask her questions to get her to realize how to visualize the problem in her head. She said to me, “Well, we are supposed to use the calculator to figure it out.”

It became clear to me that the part of the brain that should have been conceptualizing the problem and how to come about the answer had turned off. She was simply trying to figure out how to make the calculator give her the answer and didn’t know where to begin.

So I said, “Let’s put the calculator aside for now. How would you do this problem without it? You’ve got 30 of this and need to distribute them equally to 5 people…” I had to pull her into a problem solving frame of mind. It took a couple of minutes to get back into the right groove, and she solved the problem. Now we pulled the calculator out and we solved the problem using it, but only after she understood what mathmatical operation was required.

I think overzealous application of technology in education does students a disservice. Too much of the focus goes into using the technology, which distracts from the subject matter at hand.

There is the notion that it’s not the destination, but the journey that matters most. When you give people the Internet and Google, where is the journey? I met an educator and counselor back in April and she told me that her students have no idea how to do research and how to use a library and books to get the information they need for their papers. She said the biggest problem is that they become frustrated because it takes too long. They just want to do a search on the net, find the information, and then cut and paste. They don’t want to read books, take notes, formulate the ideas and express them in their own words.

Like… Oh-my-god… that’s so like my parents generation… Eeeew! I don’t have time to actually read a book AND be instant messaging my friends.

Posted: October 26th, 2005 under Uncategorized.
Comments: none

What happens when parents spend too much time on the computer.

Posted: October 23rd, 2005 under Uncategorized.
Comments: none

The Australian reports:

“TELEVISION is poison,” says a modern mother in the vanguard of the backlash against permissive parenting. Banned from watching television, her children are allowed a video on Sundays, but if they are “particularly naughty” they lose this privilege.

“If they’re just a little naughty, then no stories before bed,” she says.

Any clothes they leave on the bedroom floor disappear into a binbag and have to be “earned” back by good behaviour. Any arguments over homework mean loss of computer games; and newspapers and magazines are banned from the house.

These are not the tactics of just another mother at her wit’s end. These are the iron rules imposed by the world’s most successful female pop star, Madonna

Via DadTalk.

Posted: October 20th, 2005 under Uncategorized.
Comments: 6

Are your kids more in the virtual world or the non-virtual world?

As I read Plugged In, but Tuned Out (an article from the Wall Street Journal that Brett at Dadtalk pointed out to me — Thanks Brett!), I don’t see my own kids getting too wrapped up in the virtual, but the potential is certainly there.

One mother I interviewed refers to her son’s bedroom as “the technology cave.” He has a TV, computer, stereo, iPod and cellphone. She won’t allow food in his bedroom because “that forces him out into the open with us.”

I have two kids, still a few years off from their teens. Here is where we stand:

• Cell Phone: Nope.
• iPods: Yes.
• TV: In the living room only
• Video Games: Console at Mom’s House; One child uses a Nintendo DS in my house.
• Computer: One in the living room that they share, with time limits.
• Regular Phone: Not in their rooms (Actually I’m currently using Skype at home, so once again, they’re tied to the computer in the living room.)

No technology cave in my kid’s rooms. I admit: I still struggle to keep them in the non-virtual world, but I succeed most of the time. My younger one would use his Nintendo DS for 8 hours a day if I let him. When I tell him time’s up, he’ll run for the TV next, or maybe the computer, but I usually intercept him. The older one isn’t so much into video games, but she likes TV and shows signs of early online-shopping addiction. She always has something that she plans to buy. I tell her to put it in her wish list for when she has a job.

The article mentions how kids seem to be tuned out of the real-world current events, but it admits that it’s been these way for 100 years. I grew up before the days of personal computers and I wouldn’t have a clue about who was nominated for the Supreme Court either. I’m not going to worry if my kids aren’t loaded up with current events — Politics and world events keeps me too distracted from my work as it is, and I find it often depressing.

I want to be sure the kids are not tuning out family, friends, pets, homework and school. What can I do to make sure that happens? Aside from the harping to get them off of the screens, I try to get them involved in doing things. This weekend, we played Life (the board game). I also got them involved with me doing the laundry. We talked a bit. We went to IKEA together. We saw the new Wallace and Gromit movie. We ate pizza and talked some more. Oh yes, there was a bit of protesting at first at being away from the DS for that long, but I think they enjoyed the time as a family.

They seemed happier having done all that, and I felt like I got extra hugs out of the deal from them. I think the key, if you don’t want the kids to tune out of your world, is not to tune out of theirs. Spend time in a shared world with them, instead of having a separate “parent’s world” and a “kid’s world”.

What’s it like in your family? How do you keep them in the non-virtual world?

Posted: October 18th, 2005 under Uncategorized.
Comments: 2

Cyberbullying is a concept that most parents I speak with aren’t familiar with. However, my cousin, who is a middle school guidance counselor, is very familiar with it. She says it’s running rampant in the local schools.

Is it because parents aren’t aware of what their teens and tweens are doing online? Maybe it’s not getting talked about at the dinner table, but the NY Times has an article about it to get you up to speed.

“Bullying today is less about children hitting each other than it is about children being victimized by a culture of meanness,” said Alane Fagin, executive director of the organization. “Children understand what many adults seem to have forgotten: You don’t have to get hit to get hurt.”

And the Internet is making matters a great deal worse, parents and experts say, because it provides a cloak of anonymity and removes physical size and bravery from the equation. Children as young as 7 or 8, who would never have dared to belittle or confront a classmate face to face, are empowered to be vulgar and vengeful at the keyboard.

Read the whole article.

Posted: October 16th, 2005 under Uncategorized.
Comments: 2

In an article from The New York Times

“Well, books tell you something. Movies show you something. But games let you do something.”

Dan Houser, cofounder of Rockstar Games

I believe he’s trying to say, the medium is more interactive and puts you in control of where you go within the game.

However, taken at face value, he seems to be implying that the games are somehow superior to books and movies.

I’m a big fan of books because I love to learn and inspire my imagination and creativity. I like a good movie because it can be a great entertaining experience and connects with me emotionally, especially when the production and filming is superb. I have to say though, that I find video games to be addictive. When I play them for more than a half an hour to an hour, I find myself a bit burnt out. I don’t feel that they get my imagination going, and they don’t connect with me emotionally and make me feel better, or sad, or inspired. If anything they seem to suck a bit of energy from me; my mind seems tired if I play them for too long

I’d propose that in terms of overall value, going from least value to highest value, it would be video games, then movies, and then books. I’m thinking that video games engage the more rudimentary stimulus-response parts of the brain; movies (at least the good ones) tell stories and show you things. There is more going on in movies, and they affect more intellectual parts of your mind. Books go further by telling you the stories in more detail, and let your imagination exercise. You picture what’s going on and create the scenes in your head. If you’re reading a book to learn something, you’re building your knowledge, you’re empowering yourself with information, and then you’re really preparing youself to do something.

Dan Houser wants to make the point that doing something is better than reading a book or watching a movie. I agree, as long as what we’re doing results in something really positive — a sense of accomplishment. What is accomplished in a hours of gameplay? The next game level? I feel a great sense of accomplishment when reading a book. I get a bigger sense of accomplishment when I take the knowledge that I’ve learned from the book and apply it in the real world somehow. Learning can be addictive to, once you feel the high you get from that feeling of real accomplishment.

To be fair, I think that video games can be fun, but I don’t want my kids thinking that they’re more valuable than books, and I’m not about to let videogames offset the important time set aside for reading and for participating in the real world.

Posted: October 16th, 2005 under Uncategorized.
Comments: none

Yahoo Bans Chat Rooms That Promote Sex With Minors

Oct. 12 (Bloomberg) — Yahoo! Inc. will bar minors from Internet chat rooms and eliminate 70,000 forums under an agreement with officials in New York and Nebraska that aims to protect children and teenagers from sexual predators.

Yahoo, the most-visited Web site, shut down chat rooms with names such as “girls 13 & up for older men,” “8-12 yo girls for older men” and “teen girls for older fat men,” New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer said in a statement.

“This was absolutely horrific stuff,” Spitzer said.

Yahoo needed to come to an agreement with officials in NY to shut them down? I can’t even believe that these were allowed to exist at Yahoo!

Well, I’m at least glad to hear that they’re getting shut down and I hope Yahoo does a better job of monitoring this stuff in the future and preventing it. It’s truly disgusting stuff.

Mom’s and Dad’s really need to know what their kids are doing online, and keep a good relationship with them, with plenty of communication.

Posted: October 13th, 2005 under Uncategorized.
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