Belize Blog

Most of the teachers who went on the Climate Change study trip to Belize were responsible for journaling at least one day of the trip. You can read our journal-turned-blog and see photos of our trip by visiting http://teachers-belize-2008.blogspot.com/ . I think it's a great example of how to use multimedia to communicate an experience.

Seeing Knowledge Differently

This weekend's Baltimore Sun reprinted an article by Lisa Anderson entitled, "D'oh! We're Stumped in Knowledge Tests." The basic premise of the article is that American youth tends to fare poorly on examinations of memorized fact. For instance, we score terribly on civics and history tests and students simply cannot see the purpose of memorizing a poem. The author does a good job, I feel, of explaining that our students see knowledge differently in that it is something ephemeral, to be "found" and not necessarily "remembered." Anderson explains:

Ironically, Web sites demand that people read, but their information often
is more to be accessed than retained, more to be consumed than assessed and
more to be gulped than savored, unlike a book, a poem or a lengthy
article.

Later, she reminds us that older generations have almost always lamented the laziness of the young compared to themselves. It's true, the younger generation is almost always softer than the ones that came before--unless some hardship serves to shape them differently. Of course that is the case. I just wonder if that complacency toward remembering information makes this generation more likely to repeat the mistakes of the past. It calls to mind the Edmund Burke quote: "Those who don't know history are destined to repeat it." And then there's another one of his famous quotes : “All that's necessary for the forces of evil to win in the world is for enough good men to do nothing.”

Bridging the Digitial Divide

About a week ago, I sat in a classroom in La Democracia, Belize. Although they do have a computer, the school has no Internet access. Our challenge was to figure out how to establish communication channels between our students and theirs. It's a bigger challenge than I thought. Internet access in developing nations apparently skips a generation...by that I mean that they do not run the "wires" and then dial-up from there, or even use cable lines. They use cell-phone tower Broadband to connect to the Internet, skipping the "wired" part entirely. This is cool because they benefit from the years of early technology experimentation we did here in the West. This isn't so cool because wireless broadband can be flaky at best. That, and we need to figure out a way to *pay* for that access, given that the school barely has enough money to pay its teachers.

So, now I'm going to throw a stinky wrench into the hot mess: maybe it's not necessary. Maybe we're moving too quickly and should start with snailmail? Egads! On a technology blog--snail mail? I do worry about the persistent cultural imperialism we as Americans unintentionally commit daily. My husband feels it's a kind of Darwinism, survival of the fittest culture. But then, I wonder how my host family felt, watching cabletv reruns of The Fresh Prince of Bel Air in their modest, cinder block home. They really do think we all live like that here in the States. But, wait. As I write I have come full circle: We don't all live like that. Maybe that's the reason why we need Internet access. If they already have the TV channels telling them we live one way, it's up to us to tell them that we're not so different than they are. Internet access, with VOIP and such can help us to see we have a lot more in common than at first it seems.

Image Credit: http://www.kecsoft.com/images/Global_Digital_Divide1.jpg