Posts Tagged ‘obnoxious’

someone spewed hate speech all over my car.

Dec 5th, 10 / 4 Comments

On Friday morning, I walked outside and found these things written in the snow on my car:

peace symbol and the word 'AIDS' written in the snow on the hood of my car

This was written on the hood of my car: peace symbol and the word 'AIDS'

(backwards) swastika next to the words 'nig nogs are smelly'

written on the hood of my car: (backwards) swastika next to the words 'nig nogs are smelly'

on the rear window and trunk of my car: the phrase "I ♡ penis" below a drawing of a penis

on the rear window and trunk of my car: the phrase "I ♡ penis" below a drawing of a penis

I don’t believe these were random markings from some drunk undergraduate; I believe I was targeted by one or more people living in my neighborhood. Here’s why:

First, I’m gay. Openly gay. Like really obviously openly gay. And I’ve had the experience of walking down my street and seeing a group of young men sitting in lawn chairs, drinking beer, and very obviously watching me with hostility. I’ve had the experience of knowing, just knowing, they were talking about me. I’ve had this experience more than once in my neighborhood. I’m a normal looking human being (unless you consider being an obviously gay lady ‘abnormal’), and I haven’t done anything that could gain me any enemies, so I can only attribute the hostility to the one thing: the decisive evidence that I look like a lady who might be attracted to ladies.

Second, my car was the only one that had any writing on it at all. If the ‘graffiti artists’ wanted a blank slate, there were plenty of cars with snow on them on my street. If they wanted to, they could have marked up three different cars, one with each hateful utterance and symbol! But no. My car was the only one that was touched. There’s nothing on my car that marks it as the possession of a gay person–not a bumper sticker, not a rainbow, nothing. If it’s true that the graffiti has an antigay message, then whoever wrote it had to have prior knowledge that a gay person owned the car.

Third, though there isn’t a clear antigay message in the graffiti, I believe there’s enough evidence in the three photos to point to an antigay motivation. Here’s what I think happened:

ASSHOLE: Hey, this is that gay bitch’s car. Watch this. draws enormous penis on rear window; steps back to admire work. To friends: She’s gonna love that. has really good idea, writes ‘I ♡ penis!’

ASSHOLE’S FRIENDS: Dude!

ASSHOLE: realizes that another thing he knows about gay people is that they have AIDS, writes ‘aids’ on top of car. Looks at friends. I just wrote aids on her car. looks back at car, draws peace symbol to fill up remaining space.

ASSHOLE’S FRIENDS: Oh my god, dude. You’re messed up. laughter.

ASSHOLE: remembers the recent spate of antisemitic attacks in Bloomington, draws swastika on hood. Realizes this is his chance to also say something racist! Lookit this, guys. writes ‘nig nogs are smelly’ on hood. That’ll teach her to stop being all gay in front of me.

I’m pretty sure I’m supposed to feel all intimidated and scared. I’m supposed to be terrified that someone has learned my secret and is announcing to the world that I’m a fag. Ooooooooooooooooo scary!

Here, dude, I’ll just save you the trouble: Yup, I’m a fag. I have lots of friends who are also fags, and they don’t particularly care who knows it. You know why? Because we’re not afraid of ourselves, not anymore. And we want, through our words and actions, to encourage others who haven’t yet come out of the closet to see that it’s okay to be gay and it’s okay for other people to know it.

You know what else? The world’s on my side, asshole. My friends, queer or not, found what you did disgusting and obnoxious and reprehensible. The police took it seriously, filed a full report and added extra patrols in my neighborhood. If your goal was to scare me into silence, your actions had the exact opposite effect.

See you around, kiddo. I’ll be the one shoving my gay all up in your face every time you watch me walk past your house minding my own business. You should maybe thinking about minding yours.

Post to Twitter Tweet This Post

Uncategorized

“be cool, you guys” revisited: on identity theft and ignorant behavior

Sep 2nd, 10 / 5 Comments

Last updated: Tuesday, Sept. 7, 10:05 a.m.: The author of the blog described below has acknowledged that the comments posted using my sister’s online identity were not, in fact, posted by the “real” Laura, and she has removed them from her blog. Obviously, I believe this was the right decision and I’m glad and relieved that the comments have been deleted.


My sister learned today that someone has been using her information to troll other websites. This person has been posting ignorant, hateful things and linking them to Laura’s online identity. She has contacted the owner of one blog in particular, asking to have the comments removed, but the blog’s owner has refused to respond to her requests and has even deleted two different attempts* to post a disavowal of the most offensive comments.

My sister is crushed. I, on the other hand, am deeply pissed.

Because it’s bad enough that someone is evil and mean-spirited enough to slander someone else’s name–if my sister is right in her guess, the guy who’s using her identity is someone who spent a lot of time posting mean and petty comments on her blog, which she deleted until she finally decided to block him.

You hear that? When someone posts offensive material to your blog, you have two really good options: remove the offensive content, or block the commenter.

The owner of the trolled blog did neither. Instead, she took the low road: She tossed out insults, told “laura” to go fuck herself, and used the offensive content to spew even MORE offensive content.

For example:

The blog author, who is a Muslim, wrote about her frustration over American anti-Muslim rhetoric over a proposed masjid near Ground Zero, and as one of her key points explained that Muslims are a tolerant and diverse group, and that masjids

host a very wide cross-section of people. There are old people there, like, really old people who are so conservative and traditional it’d make your head spin. There are people like Mama and Papa Hoomster, nearing retirement age, people with one foot in each country. There are middle-aged folks who were the first real folks born here. There are people my age, young professionals who are more closely tied to America than they ever will be to another country. There are people younger than me, school children. It’s not just a bunch of crusty immigrants who barely speak English talking about the white devil and the imperialist America. There are folks that converted to Islam – Caucasians, African Americans, Asians. People from all walks of life who identify themselves as Muslims and Americans and find the idea that the two are exclusive in any way completely laughable.

Point one made by the author: Muslims are tolerant and willing to embrace diverse peoples. Hold onto that while I identify point two: That she’s tired of people who reinforce “the ‘ignorant American’ stereotype.” She’s tired, she explains, of people repeating the ridiculous argument that building a masjid near Ground Zero means the terrorists have won. She writes:

Give me a fucking break. I’ve seen so many people (that I follow on Twitter), people that I thought were intelligent and well informed, or at least made a semblance of an attempt to be, express this sentiment. And my respect for them plummeted in the face of such a ridiculous, xenophobic remark. Guys, you’re really not helping the ‘ignorant American’ stereotype. You’re really not.

Ok, just to recap: Muslims are tolerant and she’s sick of Americans acting hostile and ignorant. Now let’s take a look at how this author, who abhors intolerance, hostility, and ignorance, responds to the comment posted by the “laura” sockpuppet.

First, some apparently ‘real’ person posted a comment arguing that building a masjid near Ground Zero would be ‘inappropriate.’ The laura sockpuppet wrote this:

And the blog’s author, the one who hates intolerance, ignorance, and hostility, responded with this:

This same blogger, the one who hates intolerance, ignorance, and hostility, has used my sister as a foil multiple times, even once going so far as to suggest Laura and people like her are “retarded.” Talk about intolerance, ignorance, and hostility!

Seriously: be cool, you guys. And if you can’t be cool, then at least be smart enough to realize when you’ve just turned into a caricature of yourself.

We know that trolling, griefing, and sockpuppetry–use of an online identity for the purpose of deception–are the cost of interacting with social media. What we hope is that people who are smart and motivated enough to maintain an active blog are also smart, motivated, and mature enough to address these in a productive way. I’ll tell you what’s not productive: Using a griefer to grief right back–not only allowing but actively contributing to a hostile, ignorant, and intolerant discourse. It’s not productive, it’s not helpful or useful, and it’s certainly not worth the waste of energy and time it takes to read.

It’s not clear to me why this blog’s owner allowed the sockpuppet’s abhorrent comments to remain on her blog but deleted* my sister’s attempts to set the record straight–Laura was only trying to explain that she absolutely did not subscribe to the ideas attributed to her by the griefer. The only thing I can think is that this is someone who doesn’t particularly care about pesky things like truth, decency, and common courtesy.

*Update: Thursday, Sept. 2, 10:48 p.m.: It appears that the two comments that the real Laura posted today were not deleted, as I wrote above, but delayed for moderation. The author of the blog has since published today’s comments, though as of this update the earlier comments, posted by the sockpuppet laura, remain intact. I’ll post another update if and when the previous comments are deleted.

Post to Twitter Tweet This Post

Uncategorized

If you didn’t know cyclists have a legal right to ride in the street, you probably live in Bloomington.

Sep 2nd, 10 / 3 Comments

file under: …and if you think you have some godgiven right to holler at cyclists to ride on the sidewalk, then you might also be an ignorant asshole.

road sign: "share the road."

The city of Bloomington, IN, proudly proclaims itself a “bicycle friendly community,” as designated by the League of American Bicyclists. I have no idea how Bloomington hoodwinked the League of American Bicyclists: This community is anything but friendly to bicyclists.

Example: This evening I was riding my bike home, after dark, with front and rear lights flashing, in the street along with the rest of the vehicular traffic, as I am legally permitted and, arguably, required to do. This evening, as I was riding my bike in complete obeisance of all traffic laws, hugging the edge of the road as I prefer to do in case cars decide to pass me, yet another young man (it’s always young men) yelled out his window as he passed: “Ride on the sidewalk!”

Never mind that it’s actually more dangerous for cyclists to ride on sidewalks than to ride in the street.(See also this and this.) The fact that so many Bloomington residents are so ignorant about bicycle laws that they actually think I’m doing something wrong by riding my bike in the street sort of suggests that it’s probably not enough to rank a community’s bike-friendliness based primarily on the laws protecting cyclists. More important is the general public attitude toward cyclists.

And among the cities I’ve biked in, Bloomington ranks near the top in assholishness toward cyclists. Drivers will honk impatiently. They’ll pass dangerously close, or they’ll swerve recklessly far and swerve dangerously back into their lane, directly in front of the cyclist they just took such pains to avoid. They’ll park in or inches from bike lanes, and they’ll swing their doors open without checking for cyclists first. Pedestrians walk and run in bike lanes. They catcall from sidewalks. They ignore traffic signals and cross directly in front of bicyclists.

Oh, right–and Indiana ranks 10th in the nation in cyclist fatalities.

Bloomington is the most horrible “bicycle friendly community” I’ve ever cycled through.

Post to Twitter Tweet This Post

Uncategorized

Fox News is either stupid or evil. Which is it?

Aug 26th, 10 / 0 Comments

If it wasn’t clear already, I’m with Wyatt Cenac on Team Evil.

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart Mon – Thurs 11p / 10c
The Parent Company Trap
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Tea Party

Post to Twitter Tweet This Post

Uncategorized

turns out Gallagher has become an evil clown.

Jul 8th, 10 / 0 Comments

The Seattle newspaper The Stranger is a free alternative newsweekly, so I suppose that explains the strident anti-conservative tone of a recent piece about the aging comic Gallagher.

The primary target of this piece is Gallagher himself; the author describes Gallagher as “a paranoid, delusional, right-wing religious maniac,” then offers up some pretty convincing evidence:

Gallagher is upset about a lot of things. Young people with their sagging pants (in faintly coded racist terms, he explains that this is why the jails are overcrowded—because “their” baggy pants make it too hard for “them” to run from the cops). Tattoos: “That ink goes through to your soul—if you read your Bible, your body is a sacred temple, YOU DIPSHIT.” People naming their girl-children Sam and Toni instead of acceptable names like Evelyn and Betty: “Just give her some little lesbian tendencies!” Guantánamo Bay: “We weren’t even allowed to torture all the way. We had to half-torture—that’s nothin’ compared to what Saddam and his two sons OOFAY and GOOFAY did.” Lesbians: “There’s two types—the ugly ones and the pretty ones.” (Um, like all people?) Obama again: “If Obama was really black, he’d act like a black guy and get a white wife.” Michael Vick: “Poor Michael Vick.” Women’s lib: “These women told you they wanna be equal—they DON’T.” Trans people: “People like Cher’s daughter—figure that out. She wants a penis, but she has a big belly. If you can’t see your dick, you don’t get one.” The Rice Krispies elves: “All three of those guys are gay. Look at ‘em!” The Mexicans: “Look around—see any Mexicans? Nope. They’ll be here later for the cleanup.” The French: “They ruin our language with their faggy words.

Holy crap. With hate speech like that, Gallagher deserves as much disgusted critique as writer Lindy West can dish out. But she doesn’t stop there; the audience, she explains, are “rabid, frothing conservative dickwads” who lap up Gallagher’s racist, xenophobic rant. Okay, so the question becomes: Is West responding in kind? Is she unloading hate speech on the group she dislikes in a similar way to Gallagher’s anti-gay, anti-liberal “act”?

First, I want to make clear that while all hate speech is abominable, hate speech that targets marginalized groups is more abominable than hate speech that targets dominant groups. Why? Because of power and inertia. Marginalized groups–the LGBTQ community, for example–in lots of ways exist at the mercy of dominant groups–in this case, the heteronormative community. “Should we give them the right to marry?” “Should we pass laws to protect them against anti-gay violence?” “Should we let them claim each other on their tax returns?” It’s taken for granted that American society needs to decide what rights to “grant” gays. The alternative would be to assume that the LGBTQ community already has the same rights as everyone else, and laws that violate those rights need to be struck down.

Power. Inertia.

So calling a language “faggy,” advocating “girly” names to avoid giving daughters “lesbian tendencies,” finishing up an act by, as West describes it, smashing a plate of fruit cocktail and an Asian vegetable mix and announcing “This is the China people and queers!!!”–way more abominable than calling Gallagher’s appreciative audience “rabid, frothing conservative dickwads.” It’s an audience, as Gallagher himself points out, filled with white people, and the risk of getting beaten, killed, or legislated against for being a conservative white person is fairly low relative to the risk that goes along with being gay, African American, Mexican, or any of the other ethnic and cultural minorities against whom Gallagher is stirring up the pot of hatred.

Which makes West’s response understandable but still not quite okay. I say this as someone who absolutely adored this article, who is aghast that hate speech like this attracts any audience whatsoever, and who has the same impulse to rage against anyone who would even chuckle at Gallagher’s diatribe (which, by the way, doesn’t even seem particularly funny).

Anyway, you should read the whole article, which is fairly short and extremely well crafted, then let me know what you think.

Post to Twitter Tweet This Post

Uncategorized

message to twitter community: be cool, you guys.

Jul 6th, 10 / 2 Comments

I’ve noticed an increase in meanness and vituperation lately among the people I follow on twitter. I’m not completely sure why this is–certainly it’s due in part to the steady increase in the number of people I follow, but I also suspect the tenor of twitter has changed as it has increased in general popularity and ease of use.

The behavior I’m talking about breaks down into two loose categories:

Personal attacks. Twitter is not a tool that affords deep, substantive conversation, but it turns out 140 characters is just about the perfect length for slinging fallacies back and forth. And people leverage this affordance to build up a catalog of fallacies that would have made your high school logic teacher proud:

  • ad hominems (“stop being such a dickhead, @twitteruser. anyone who paid attention past 3rd grade knows Glenn Beck is a p.o.s.”)
  • poisoning the well (“where’s the intelligent debate about affirmative action? God knows we can’t ask the feminists to weigh in–all they do is bitch.”)
  • spotlight fallacy (“gay people seem incapable of arguing for gay marriage without eventually getting hysterical & irrational. http://bit.ly/buSY0y“)
  • hasty generalizations (“law students are more ignorant about the law than any group I know.” )

Bigotry. I don’t know exactly why people feel comfortable making disgusting generalizations about entire groups of people on twitter. I just know it happens an awful lot. Most typically it appears to come from members of some dominant group complaining about ethnic, political, or cultural minorities (though I’m also willing to consider the possibility that I only think this is true because it pisses me off so much more than when it comes from someone who’s part of a minority group).

I’m tired of it. I want twitter to be the space of coolness that it used to be for me. This is not, though certain lawyers may disagree, a desire for a “happysphere”; this is a desire to surround myself with the most civil discourse possible, in the highest possible number of communities I frequent.

Srsly: be cool, you guys. Try being exactly as nice on twitter as you would be in person. That way, when the twitter community makes decisions about which users to follow, they can decide what level of kindness or pettiness they’re willing to put up with, on twitter just as in real life.

Being both a witness to and target of meanness and pettiness has made me reflect on my own behavior, too. I will grant that I have been known to vituperate, from time to time, on twitter and in other social networking spaces (primarily in the form of so-called “vaguebooking”). I’m sorry, and I’m going to try to do better, so that you can fill up your life with as much intelligent, civil discourse as you want to fill it with. I ask that you do the same for me.

Post to Twitter Tweet This Post

Uncategorized

(self-)sabotaged by my email program

May 19th, 10 / 2 Comments
file under: goddammit, everything’s ruined.

I discovered yesterday that my email program’s settings were misconfigured, leading to this result: A subset of the email messages I’ve been sending out were never received by the intended recipient. They were never received by anyone at all. Worse, the emails that I know I sent simply no longer exist anywhere in my email archives, even though I double-archive everything through multiple email accounts.

I don’t know how to even begin to deal with this mess.

Because god knows how these dropped emails have shaped my personal and professional relationships. How many people think I’ve ignored them completely, because they never received the email response to their single request? How many people think of me as basically dependable, except for the handful of times that they were waiting for something that never came? How many people think of me as the kind of friend who usually responds to email?

And this doesn’t even touch on how my misconfigured email program has undermined my work at crafting my email identity. Like most people, I make decisions regularly about when and how to send email based on how I hope to be perceived by others. This is an important aspect of building a professional identity these days, and if you don’t spend time thinking about how your email use colors your colleagues’ perceptions of you, you damn well better start thinking about it.

So that’s down the toilet for me too. I had to reconfigure my settings, which meant that every email I was holding in my inbox as part of my ongoing to-do list has also been sent to the archives. Which means that the hundreds of smaller things I’ve been saving to follow up on when the time’s right–those have disappeared on me as well.

I can hear you techno-skeptics now: That’s what happens when you rely too much on technology. That’s where blind faith leads you. That’s why nothing beats good old face to face communication.

Which would be fine, if digital communications tools hadn’t led to an explosion in sheer numbers of personal and professional relationships that need maintaining. There’s simply no way to keep up with those relationships without tools like email. I’ve had days characterized by dozens of email conversations maintained over hundreds of emails. Say what you will about the “richness” of in-person communications as compared to email conversations, but there are times when rich conversations are unnecessary. There are times when shit just needs to get done.

And email can be a fantastic tool for getting shit done, especially when the tool is working as we’ve come to expect it to work. When emails get dropped, though, the tool turns into the exact opposite of a shit-getting-done tool. It becomes a tool that complicates things exponentially.

For me, the lesson here is not that I need to rely less on digital communication tools, and it’s not that I need to approach these tools with a consistent attitude of skepticism. The lesson is that effective use of digital communication tools must be supported with a critical computational literacy approach to those tools.

Because I’m the one who misconfigured my email program in the first place. I trusted the program to autoformat itself instead of using the manual setup feature. Then, when it first became clear several weeks ago that some of my emails were not being received, I assumed the fault lay with others’ programs. I even wondered if someone was hacking into their email accounts, because I trusted my email program.

Even now, I think but am not positive that I’ve resolved the issue. There are a couple of reasons for this. The first is that I’ve never spent a lot of time learning about the language of these sorts of things. IMAP, POP, SMTP–none of those letter groupings mean very much to me (though they certainly mean more to me now than they did before I spent a day repairing my broken email program). But the email programs we use don’t really bother trying to explain those terms to us. They figure it’s information we don’t need to know, since we can trust the programs to know how to set themselves up.

Trusting auto-configuration is one of our biggest mistakes.  I can’t do much to repair the damage I did to myself by allowing auto-configure to misconfigure my email program, but I can commit to never again allowing auto-configure tools to override me. From here on out, I’m committing to always choosing the manual setup option for every new tool or program I use–not because I believe this will lead to smooth sailing from here on out (it won’t), but because I need to learn how to manage the tools I use in order to maintain control over how, when, where, and why I use these tools to interact with others.

Twenty-six years ago, Apple told us it would help us stand up against an Orwellian future. Somehow, in the intervening years, Apple stopped being the solution and started being part of the problem. In fact, if we’ve learned anything at all, it’s that no major technology-based corporation exists to help us think more critically about the tools we use. This is why it’s up to us to make smart decisions. It’s up to us to be the chainsaw–or, if you wish, the flying hammer–we wish to see in the world.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OYecfV3ubP8&hl=en_US&fs=1&rel=0]

Post to Twitter Tweet This Post

Uncategorized

an infographic that gets up in the fast food industry’s grill

Apr 13th, 10 / 1 Comment

If you don’t know how disgusting fast food restaurants are, the infographic below will explain. If you do know how disgusting fast food restaurants are, the infographic below is a good reminder.

I’m interested in checking out the veracity of the information below and I’ve designed a short, anonymous survey to start this. Would you mind taking a few minutes to answer seven short questions?

Click here to take my fast food habits survey.

Everything You Need to Know About Fast Food
Via: Online Schools
(reposted at Lean Mean Roomie Machine)

Now will you take my survey? It’s short (only 7 questions) and easy. Click here to take the survey.

Post to Twitter Tweet This Post

Uncategorized

devising a model for technology in education: my version of writer’s block

Feb 2nd, 10 / 0 Comments



I believe the following principles to hold true:

  • Human goals are mediated by, and thenceforth only achieved through, the widespread adoption and use of new technologies.*
  • Human purposes for adopting and making use of new technologies are often highly individualized (though nearly always aligned with an affinity group, even if that group is not explicitly named and even if that group is not comprised of other members of the learning community).
  • While no educational researcher is qualified to articulate achievable goals for another human, the researcher is ethically obligated to support learners in articulating, and achieving, ethical educational goals.
  • The efficacy and success of new technologies can be measured through multiple lenses, among which only one is the achievement of mainstream educational goals as articulated and assessed through traditional, often standardized, measurement tools.
If you (a) know me, (b) follow me on Twitter or a similar social network, or (c) read my blog, you know that being at a loss for something to say just doesn’t happen to me. (On the one hand, this makes me perfectly suited to social media, blogging, and academia; on the other hand, it means I’ll mouth off about the social revolution in nearly any social situation.)

But for weeks now, I’ve been trying to devise a model to represent the role of computational technologies in education. And for weeks, I’ve been failing miserably. Here’s the closest I’ve come:

As you can see, this model is incomplete. I was in the middle of drawing an arrow from that word “technology” to something else when I realized that this model would never, ever do. So I tried to approach modelling from other perspectives. I tried backing my way in, by thinking of technologies metaphorically; I’ve tried presenting technology integration in the form of a decision tree. Which is fine, except that these don’t really work as models.

And I have to come up with a model. I do. Though I don’t often mention this, I’m not actually only a blogger. In real life, I’m a graduate student in Indiana University’s Learning Sciences Program. Because I believe in the value of public intellectual discourse, I’ve chosen to present as much of my coursework as possible on my blog or through other public, persistent and searchable communications platforms.

I will, at some future point, discuss the challenges and benefits of living up to this decision. For now, you guys, I just need to come up with a goddam model that I can live with.

I tried thinking of technologies as sleeping policemen; or, in other words, as objects that mediate our thoughts and actions and that have both intended and unintended consequences. This was a reaction to a set of readings including a chunk of Bonnie Nardi’s and Vicki O’Day’s 1999 book, Information Ecology: Using Technology with Heart; a Burbules & Callister piece from the same year, “The Risky Promises and Promising Risks of New Information Technologies for Education”; and Stahl & Hesse’s 2009 piece, “Practice perspectives in CSCL.” The theme of these writings was: We need to problematize dominant narratives about the role of technologies in education. Burbules & Callister categorize these narratives as follows:

  • computer as panacea (“New technologies will solve everything!”)
  • computer as [neutral] tool (“Technologies have no purpose built into them, and can be used for good or evil!”)
  • computer as [nonneutral] tool (the authors call this “(a) slightly more sophisticated variant” on the “computer as tool perspective”)
  • balanced approach to computer technologies (neither panacea nor tool, but resources with intended and unintended social consequences)

Nardi & O’Day, who basically agree with the categories identified above, argue for the more nuanced approach that they believe emerges when we think of technologies as ecologies, a term which they explain is

intended to evoke an image of biological ecologies with their complex dynamics and diverse species and opportunistic niches for growth. Our purpose in using the ecology metaphor is to foster thought and discussion, to stimulate conversations for action…. [T]he ecology metaphor provides a distinctive, powerful set of organizing properties around which to have conversations. The ecological metaphor suggests several key properties of many environments
in which technology is used.

Which is all fine and dandy, except the argument that precedes and follows the above quote is so tainted by mistrust and despair over the effects of new technologies that it’s hard to imagine that even Nardi and O’Day themselves can believe they’ve presented a balanced analysis. Reading their description of techno-ecologies is kind of like reading a book about prairie dog ecologies prefaced by a sentence like “Jesus Christ I hate those freaking prairie dogs.”

So the description of technologies as sleeping policemen was an effort to step back and describe, with as much detachment as possible for an admitted technorevolutionary like me, the role of technologies in mediating human activity.

But the metaphor doesn’t really have much by way of practical use. What am I going to do, take that model into the classroom and say, well, here’s why your kids aren’t using blogs–as you can see (::points to picture of speed bump::), kids are just driving around the speed bump instead of slowing down….?

This became clear as I jumped into a consideration of so-called “intelligent tutors,” which I described briefly in a previous post. Or, well, the speed bump metaphor might work, but only if we can come up with some agreed-upon end point and also set agreed-upon rules like speed limits and driving routes. But the problem is that even though we might think we all agree on the goals of education, there’s actually tons of discord, both spoken and unspoken. We can’t even all agree that what’s sitting in the middle of that road is actually a speedbump and not, for example, a stop sign. Or a launch ramp.

The Cognitive Tutors described by Kenneth Koedinger and Albert Corbett are a nice example of this. Researchers who embrace these types of learning too
ls see them as gateways to content mastery. But if you believe, as I do, that the content students are required to master is too often slanted in favor of members of dominant groups and against the typically underprivileged, underserved, and underheard members of our society, then Cognitive Tutors start to look less like gateways and more like gatekeepers. Even the tutoring tools that lead to demonstrable gains on standard assessments, well…ya gotta believe in the tests in order to believe in the gains, right?

So I’m back to this:

A “model,” explains Wikipedia,

is a simplified abstract view of the complex reality. A scientific model represents empirical objects, phenomena, and physical processes in a logical way. Attempts to formalize the principles of the empirical sciences, use an interpretation to model reality, in the same way logicians axiomatize the principles of logic. The aim of these attempts is to construct a formal system for which reality is the only interpretation. The world is an interpretation (or model) of these sciences, only insofar as these sciences are true….

Modelling refers to the process of generating a model as a conceptual representation of some phenomenon. Typically a model will refer only to some aspects of the phenomenon in question, and two models of the same phenomenon may be essentially different, that is in which the difference is more than just a simple renaming. This may be due to differing requirements of the model’s end users or to conceptual or aesthetic differences by the modellers and decisions made during the modelling process. Aesthetic considerations that may influence the structure of a model might be the modeller’s preference for a reduced ontology, preferences regarding probabilistic models vis-a-vis deterministic ones, discrete vs continuous time etc. For this reason users of a model need to understand the model’s original purpose and the assumptions of its validity.

I’m back at the original, simple, incomplete model because I’m not ready to stand in defense of any truth claims that a more complete model might make. Even this incomplete version, though, helps me to start articulating the characteristics of any model representing the role of computational technologies in education. I believe the following principles to hold true:

  • Human goals are mediated by, and thenceforth only achieved through, the widespread adoption and use of new technologies.
  • Human purposes for adopting and making use of new technologies are often highly individualized (though nearly always aligned with an affinity group, even if that group is not explicitly named and even if that group is not comprised of other members of the learning community).
  • While no educational researcher is qualified to articulate achievable goals for another human, the researcher is ethically obligated to support learners in articulating, and achieving, ethical educational goals.
  • The efficacy and success of new technologies can be measured through multiple lenses, among which only one is the achievement of mainstream educational goals as articulated and assessed through traditional, often standardized, measurement tools.

Ok, so what do you think?

*Note: I’m kinda rethinking this one. It reads a little too deterministic to me now, a mere hour or so after I wrote it.

Post to Twitter Tweet This Post

Uncategorized