BlogSafety Community: Predators & cyberbullies: Reality …

  • Quote: “The CJR article continues, ‘Dateline has argued that ‘Predator’ serves a genuine public good, but it could be argued that, in fact, Dateline is doing the public a disservice.’ One significant disservice is the way Dateline presented the numbers. ‘When Attorney General Alberto Gonzales gave a speech about a major initiative to combat the ‘growing problem’ of Internet predators, he cited a statistic that 50,000 such would-be pedophiles were prowling the Net at any given moment and attributed it to Dateline.’ An investigative reporter looked into the figure Attorney General Gonzales used and found Dateline had gotten it from ‘a retired FBI agent who consulted with the show’ and who, when asked, suggested he kind of pulled it out of the air (Dateline has since disowned the figure, CJR adds).”

    Note: Nice deconstruction of the predator myth that is pervading this conversation. And if you want a look behind the whole Dateline hysteria, see the source article in Columbia Journalism Review.

     - post by willrich

Education Week: High-Stakes Testing Is Putting the Nation At Risk

  • Quote: “Because so much depends on how students perform on tests, it should not be surprising that, as one Florida superintendent noted, ‘When a low-performing child walks into a classroom, instead of being seen as a challenge, or an opportunity for improvement, for the first time since I’ve been in education, teachers are seeing [that child] as a liability.’ Shouldn’t we be concerned about a law that turns too many of the country’s most morally admired citizens into morally compromised individuals?”

    Note: Worth the free registration to read this summary of a new book by the authors titled “Collateral Damage: How High-Stakes Testing Corrupts America’s Schools,” published this month by Harvard Education Press. Let’s just say the effects of testing are abusive on a number of different levels.

     - post by willrich

why twitter matters

  • Quote: The big “P” word in technology these days is “participatory.” But I’m increasingly convinced that a more important “P” word is “presence.” In a world where we’re seldom able to spend significant amounts of time with the people we care about (due not only to geographic dispersion, but also the realities of daily work and school commitments), having a mobile, lightweight method for both keeping people updated on what you’re doing and staying aware of what others are doing is powerful. –Liz Lawley

    Note: I agree, though not so much in the minute to minute way that Liz is writing about. (I just started a Twitter account…) But i wonder about the pedagogies of presence. Presence obviously makes us available to learn from those who know we are here (or there). How do we leverage our ability to have a presence in learning terms?

     - post by willrich