Tag Archive for ‘internet’ at The Core Knowledge Blog

Tag Archive for 'internet'

This is Your Brain on the Internet…Any Questions?

Published by Robert Pondiscio on June 11, 2008 in Research and Reports. 1 Comment

Nicholas Carr, in the cover story of The Atlantic, worries that the Web has damaged his ability to think:

Over the past few years I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory. My mind isn’t going—so far as I can tell—but it’s changing. I’m not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I’m reading. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I’d spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That’s rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if I’m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle.

Carr’s cover story, “Is Google Making us Stupid?” notes that how we read matters as much as what we read. When you take most of your information from the Web “the ability to to interpret text, to make the rich mental connections that form when we read deeply and without distraction, remains largely disengaged.”

“My mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles,” writes Carr. “Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.”

I need to go back and finish that article now…

Permission Slips Not Required

Published by Robert Pondiscio on June 10, 2008 in Education Practice. 0 Comments

Rising fuel prices, and increasing access to broadband Internet hookups in schools is creating a boom in virtual field trips, notes the Christian Science Monitor.

Another Option for Selective Admissions Schools

Published by Robert Pondiscio on June 5, 2008 in Education Practice and School News. Closed

About 100 students who didn’t get into the selective North Carolina School of Science and Mathematics will still be able to take school courses, but from their homes instead of the Durham campus, the Charlotte Observer reports.

Great idea.

Black Helicopter Parents

Published by Robert Pondiscio on May 4, 2008 in Education Practice and Parents. 0 Comments

Helicopter parent? Why merely hover over your child when technology will let you be a black helicopter parent?

The New York Times looks at computer programs that provide daily, real-time data on kids’ in-school performance, from attendance to test scores. Programs like Edline, ParentConnect, Pinnacle Internet Viewer and PowerSchool are “changing the nature of communication between parents and children, families and teachers,” reports the Times. “Citing studies showing that parental involvement can have a positive effect on a child’s academic performance, educators praise the programs’ capacity to engage parents.”

What did you learn in school today? Forget it. Now you can know before your kid walks in the door.

On school days at 2 p.m., Nicole Dobbins walks into her home office in Alpharetta, Ga., logs on to ParentConnect, and reads updated reports on her three children. Then she rushes up the block to meet the fourth and sixth graders’ buses. But in the thump and tumble of backpacks and the gobbling of snacks, Mrs. Dobbins refrains from the traditional after-school interrogation: Did you cut math class? What did you get on your language arts test?

“Thanks to ParentConnect, she already knows the answers. And her children know she knows. So she cuts to the chase: “Tell me about this grade,” she will say. When her ninth grader gets home at 6 p.m., there may well be ParentConnect printouts on his bedroom desk with poor grades highlighted in yellow by his mother. She will expect an explanation. He will be braced for a punishment. “He knows I’m going to look at ParentConnect every day and we will address it,” Mrs. Dobbins said.

At best, the programs can help kids stay on top of things and act as an early warning system for trouble. At worst, it’s another lever for over-anxious parents to pull. “At an age when teenagers increasingly want to manage their own lives, many parents use these programs to tighten the grip,” notes the Times. “College admission is so devastatingly competitive, parents say, they feel compelled to check online grades frequently. Parents hope to transform even modest dips before a child’s record is irrevocably scarred.”

The Virtual Public School Genie

Published by Robert Pondiscio on February 1, 2008 in Education Practice. 0 Comments

“Half a million American children take classes online,” reports this morning’s New York Times, “with a significant group getting all their schooling from virtual public schools. The rapid growth of these schools has provoked debates in courtrooms and legislatures over money, as the schools compete with local districts for millions in public dollars, and over issues like whether online learning is appropriate for young children.”

This is a big, important story—and trend—that’s only going to get bigger. The Times story looks at Wisconsin, where state lawmakers agreed to allow a dozen online schools to stay open “despite a court ruling against them and the opposition of the teachers union.”

The genie is out of the bottle, and won’t go back in willingly.

Update: “We’ve made great strides in providing education for the world’s children. Much more needs to be done, and technology can provide the tools.” So says Bill Gates in an essay today in Forbes.