2 posts tagged “education”

I believe that it was on New Year's Eve 1999 when a Russian friend made an observation regarding Germans (the details of that night are a bit fuzzy, but I vaguely recall that the world did not come to an end at midnight). The observation stemmed from a flight-delay problem in Berlin or Frankfurt a few weeks earlier, but the friend generalized to the culture as a whole to the effect that Germans would rather that there be no rule than make an exception to a rule. This is a fairly accurate observation in my experience and I do not take it as a disparaging remark. I should qualify my concurrence by noting that this applies in an institutional setting. The reason why this springs to mind is that it's that time of year again when high school seniors (and their parents) complain that they cannot participate in graduation ceremonies because they did not pass one or more of the TAKS (Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills) tests and, thus, cannot receive a diploma. If you are not from Texas, you may be scratching your head over this, but you can search for "commencement" or "graduation" at the sites for any of the major newspapers in the state to find relevant articles (Dallas Morning News, Houston Chronicle, Austin American Statesman, El Paso Times, etc.).

For those of you not from Texas, it works like this. Each year, all students in grades 3 through 11 are tested in Reading and Math. Writing, Science and Social Studies are tested two or three times, but not at each grade level. Testing takes place in April so that results can be returned by early to mid-May. In order to receive a diploma, a senior must have passed all of these tests. Juniors who do not pass one or more of the exit-level tests have four or five additional chances to take and pass the exams before the end of their senior year. This year there are approximately 40,000 seniors in Texas who are ineligible for a diploma because they have not met this requirement. This comes out to something like 15% of the seniors, state-wide. At the local high school it's about half of the senior class, although that number also includes students who have not earned sufficient credits to graduate.

I cannot speak for other states, but in Texas the problem goes back 15 or 20 years to a time when our high schools were handing out diplomas to students who couldn't read or write well enough to fill out an employment application, much less have any chance of success in post-secondary education. So the state adopted a series of standards (currently known as the "Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills" or TEKS, though they have gone by various names over the years, some of which are even repeatable in polite company) which said students must demonstrate particular levels of knowledge and the ability to use certain skills in order to receive a diploma from a publicly funded school. I first encountered this when I went back to get my teaching certificate starting the semester after I had received my bachelor's degree. The College of Education required that I take and pass a basic literacy test before I could enter the program. My initial thought was that if the university had awarded me a degree less than a month earlier and now wanted to make sure that I could read and write, it did not speak well of their confidence in the quality of the education they were providing to their undergraduates. But I digress.

To return to my initial point, something in one of the articles (I believe it was the El Paso Times) struck me as being so outrageous that it could not pass without comment from me. Some parents of seniors who were not being allowed to participate in graduation ceremonies were complaining that they had spent hundreds of dollars on invitations, announcements, caps, gowns, and so forth for a ceremony in which their child could not participate. Remember, this is after their child was given four or five opportunities to meet the graduation requirements, which were known in advance, and failed to do so. Perhaps I was German in a prior life, but my reaction was, "you know, if you had taken the money you spent on all of this and invested it in books or other educational resources a few years back, this might not have been a problem." If you want something, then you have to do what's necessary to make it happen. That's not being a hard-ass; that's life. And if these seniors haven't got that message by this point in time, they certainly are not ready for real life. So why should they be told that they are ready, which is kind of the whole point of the graduation ceremony in the first place.

One of my friends in Second Life calls me "the wandering Fergus" ("the wondering Fergus" might work, too). I'm sure she means it as a joke or as friendly teasing, but it's very close to accurate. I'd like to see everything that I possibly can, while still allowing myself time to socialize and have a good time. It's a tall order and most likely well nigh impossible as the content is growing faster than can be seen by any one person. But, hey! A fella's gotta have goals.

At any rate, while engaged in my wandering a couple of days ago, I stumbled onto a place called "Knowledge Park". You might think of it as being SL's equivalent of a small web portal with teleports to other places in SL that others might find interesting. They're pretty much grouped by interest area. For example, there is a section for sci-fi buffs and another one dealing with astronomy. Although Knowledge Park provides portals to other areas, there is no return teleport, so you'll definitely want to set a landmark so you can revisit. I took the portal to the SL Planetarium and was astounded by what I found at the other end.

The planetarium itself was nice, but a bit disappointing. It's a good start, but would take a great deal of scripting and texturing to bring it up to its full potential. Don't take that wrong. I'm not throwing stones at anyone's efforts. "Those who can, do" and all that. The surprise was in what was right next door to it: the International Spaceflight Museum. The ISM is worth every minute you can spend there, and you can easily spend a few hours. I highly recomment the rocket ride to Near Earth Orbit, just for the fun of it. If you'd rather not bother, there is a simple teleporter to take you there. I did not find a teleport back to the museum from Near Earth Orbit, so you may want to set a landmark before heading off.

Once there, you can explore the solar system, including the planets, their moons and exhibits on some of the major satellite missions to them. New exhibits are under construction and I spent a few minuts chatting with some universtity students who were working on a mock-up of one of the Apollo moon landings.

My first thought upon arrival was, "WOW!" But my second thought was that this would be a wonderful place to bring students for a virtual field trip. Then a couple of other thoughts hit and convinced me that this was not such a hot idea, after all.

First, I teach middle school. I can just imagine the problems with shepherding a group of rambunctious 13-year-olds through an environment where they are pretty much free to go where ever they would like and, let's face it, a major chunk of SL is definitely not for kids. It's possible that the ISM is mirrored in Teen Second Life, but I don't know for sure (minors aren't allowed in SL and adults aren't allowed in TSL - east is east and west is west and ne'er the twain shall meet). The second problem that occurred to me was that the SL client software needs to use a couple of TCP/IP ports that are probably blocked by any school district's firewall. Thirdly, SL itself is typically classified as "entertainment" by most web-filtering software, so you probably wouldn't be able to contact the SL servers even if the necessary ports were open, although it could probably be added to the a white list of approved sites (not likely considering the other content in SL). And lastly, SL is a bandwidth hog. Unless someone can come up with an SL caching proxy of some sort (all clients talk to the proxy - content is transferred over the WAN link once, and then redistributed over LAN links as needed), the sheer volume of data being sent to a 30-seat lab would choke an entire district's WAN lines in a heartbeat.

There are probably work-arounds for all of these problems. Some of them would depend upon the cooperativeness of the IT department, while the bandwidth issue woudl have to be resolved by the good folks at Linden Labs. At any rate, the potential use of this virtual world technology in an educational setting is phenominal. It's just not feasible in my present situation. Bummer.