Day Light Fisher: Harvard Talk by Mica Pollock on education and information technologies, particularly for ethnically diverse Somerville, MA

OneVillage Approach to education:


Harvard Talk by Mica Pollock on education which engages information technologies, particularly for ethnically diverse (4 main languages) Somerville, MA, adjacent to Cambridge, MA, where Harvard and MIT are located.


http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/interactive/events/luncheon/2010/11/pollock


http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/events/luncheon/2010/11/pollock




And here's the transcript from the back chat of people attending this talk online, and group chatting about it while it was happening:


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hello folks
I like this introduction. High expectations require high support.
And in order to confront discrimination and oppression of all kinds, I agree we need to mobilize all of us to see, recognize, and ally with each other against inequality and abuse.
Anybody else out there?
Agreed, and I'm glad she's speaking at this Berkman Lunch because of the networks that emerge here ...
And her working locally ... this chatzilla can be a little quiet, in my experience ... let's develop a robust back chat at these lunches :)
Thanks, Scott. This is my first time.
I wonder, when she's talking about the spreadsheet, about who gets to see the info regarding privacy concerns. Who decides? Does the student?
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beyond teachers ... ?
Yes, more info beyond number, especially self-reports on how they're feeling and how they're doing.
If we're bringing in tutors, social workers, etc., concerns about confidentiality must be difficult to overcome.
I'm interested in questions of culture or milieu informing learning ... Japan's learning milieu is different from Finland's (which scores highly on international scales) is different from Americans ... information technologies can generate culture and milieu, but communities themselves are the cultures these information technologies engage ...
hello Dan. Or is it Dennis?
yes
hello Sam
Welcome, Dan
thank you Scott!
re: culture. My understanding is that a key component of high-learning student cultures are student cultures in which students are helping and challenging each other to learn via study groups, etc.
dashboard
texting support team
Eportfolio
School-level communication toolkit
citywide
computer infrastructure ...
peers and friends influence learning - agreed - but the schools, cultures, and societies themselves do, as well
These study-groups, for example, have been highly correlated with high achieving asian-american students.
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Ah, she just answered my question regarding who is on the texting support team. She said, "of student's choice."
but I would say Asian Americans (UC Berkeley has a lot of Asian Americans these days) have a culture which is work oriented ... culture again ...
Scott, there's a selection bias there.
work oriented around the 'structure' of the class's expectations ...
Welcome, r2wj
hello scottmacleod
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Banks and others have looked at stigmatized groups and shown how even groups stigmatized in Japan and therefore had low academic achievement there, when are put in a different context with different expectations and social support as immigrants in the US, become high achieving, on average, in the US.
Welcome, arkadyan
Hello Kevin and arkadyan
yea!
I thought she said "open source" but is googlevoice open source?
it appears
that she does not know what she's talking about
I would say yes, sam
How so, r2wj?
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gvoice is proprietary
It sounds like she does know what she's talking about in terms of providing support to all students, maybe not in terms of open source.
that's fair
I'm glad she's raising the privacy and stigmatizing issues.
If 'Open source describes practices in production and development that promote access to the end product's source materials' (Wikipedia) then GoogleVoice isn't

but it is 'free,' and does promote free communication, and Google would probably be open to communicating about how to improve it as a kind of open source technology
And do students add other students to their support team, or is this only a one student - multiple adult team?
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I'm confused about what she said regarding IEP teams. In the schools I've worked in, IEP team members meet with each other. I'm not sure who by law isn't allowed to communicate.
I'm glad she's offering pragmatic information technologies to Somerville students ... and teachers are often the bottle necks because they don't know these technologies that well ... but kids are more facile with IT ...
I'm glad she's addressing the problem of info-glut. It can be difficult for teachers to get too much info as well as too little.
I hope World University & School - like Wikipedia with MIT Open Course Ware - http://worlduniversity.wikia.com/wiki/World_University will make these resources available ... and in all 3000-8000 languages - including the 4 Somerville languages
http://worlduniversity.wikia.com/wiki/Languages
That looks interesting, Scott.
The process of co-creation - sounds central and crucial.
A culture of learning, vis-a-vis Finland - for Somerville residents of all 4 languages?
Code for America at http://codeforamerica.org/ ?
Looks interesting, Sam ... I'll look to add this to http://www.webnographers.org/index.php?title=Papers - a wiki bibliography for virtual ethnography .. with education resources, too.
Mica ... how to teach teachers about information technology most effectively?
And who teaches them?
Blogging while doing, this might seem to help the process of participant observation described by Burawoy in his co-edited book, Ethnography Unbound
How could students teach teachers about information technologies for education?
I like that question, Scott, because I think we learn best when we see ourselves as students AND teachers.
I'll look to add this to http://www.webnographers.org/index.php?title=Books
A teacher's texting team for learning about information technologies ...
seth looks so handsome and beardy
A wiki textbook for Understanding and Improving a Communication Ecosystem in Education ?
I appreciate that she's sharing a very real example of the challenges of texting re emotional support. How are we going to provide real emotional support via text.
:)
How can make assistance empowering?
styles of communication ... which becomes complicated in diverse Somerville
A key statistic regarding dropout rate is that students who say they know at least one adult who cares about them in the school are much less likely to drop out. I could see this as helping with that.
kids and adults connecting in the context of school ... in a variety of ways
including with digital devices, etc.
around ideas and learning reading, writing and arithmetic, enjoyably?
Do all Somerville high school students have cell phones?
Can someone ask Mica that?
Are there ways to get cell phones to those who don't, for pedagogical purposes?
(monies)
Good ? re if already high achieving students might take to this model more readily
How to avoid replicating and reinforcing inequality. I like what she said about building the pilot to address that so that the roll out focuses on students who need it more first.
One group of students who commonly gets ignored (except by military recruiters) are the C-, C, C+, B- students who don't get into trouble.
history ... Hmmm ... Charlie Nesson's Jamaica project (on World University and School's Languages' page) is perhaps an example not close to home in Somerville ...
They don't get in trouble so aren't going to the assistant principals. They're not going to the guidance counselors for college help, typically, and often slip through the cracks.
What about the Jamaica Project?
AT the Ascot High School there, they're developing an approach to learning which integrates information technologies, in conjunction with community support ...
ah, cool.
... a kind of model to come into conversation with this OneVillage Ecology approach?
How to support tired teachers?
more teachers?
Regarding teachers with no time, I think the issue is particularly real depending on teachers' student loads. If the student load is reduced by making classes longer per day, etc., I think this would work better.
the distributed teacher network approach ... smaller classrooms... more connections around learning between teachers, adults and kids
and a U.S. and Massachusetts culture of learning which gives more monies to educators?
Thanks Mica, and Thanks, Scott.
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Thanks, Mica!







(http://scott-macleod.blogspot.com/2010/11/day-light-fisher-harvard-talk-by-mica.html - November 30, 2010)