Month: December 2007

Santa violating data privacy laws

Dale

SantaIf Santa stops at your house, you may want to inquire about his privacy policy.  A recent report has raised several serious questions about the data Santa collects on our children.

Santa keeps a list of every child in the world, which he uses to track if they’ve been naughty or nice during the previous year. It’s unclear whether Santa uses data from credit bureaus and other third parties or if he relies exclusively on his own observations.

To date, Santa hasn’t disclosed the privacy safeguards for this data, a possible violation of several laws.

It’s also unknown how long Santa keeps this information. British law says that organizations must not keep data longer than necessary, which would require Santa to destroy the data he collects on December 25, although Pinsent Masons argues that Santa could keep this information for several years to protect against toy-related lawsuits. If the data Santa collects includes health (“I broke my leg this year”) or financial data (“our family can’t afford new toys”), he could be violating U.S. data laws as well.

Of course, Santa has been sneaking in and out of homes for centuries. Even if Mr. Claus is charged, I doubt we could ever apprehend him.

By the way, scientists have been investigating Santa too!

Enjoy the break.  See you in 2008!

21st century skills- show us your best

Dale

Take a trip back in time in the archives of Google News and you can find all sorts of papers, books and headlines with the following themes about education:

  • education needs to be more relevant to life
  • we need to foster more creativity in the classroom
  • we’re failing to teach our students technology skills
  • students aren’t asked to think critically
  • the U.S. will fall behind because of our education
  • student learning needs to be more hands-on

Sound familiar? Talking about the future of education seems like a national pasttime that often predicts gloom and doom scenarios.

The craze for the past five years has been the idea of teaching 21st century skills. Many people have made a career by talking and writing about these new skills. But take a look at them. Is there really anything new here? The Partnership for 21st Century Skills lists media literacy, critical thinking, creativity, collaboration, and civic literacy as just a few 21st century skills that will “…align classroom environments with real world environments.”

But haven’t these skills always been taught in school? The only new thing on the list seems to be global awareness. However, this topic has been misrepresented with nationalistic chatter that tried to scare every teacher and student with images of construction companies in China and India.

I don’t think that we should ever stop stressing the skills that are now being called 21st century skills. I just find it insulting to consider that these skills are new. This is an insult to all the excellent educators who have made the U.S. what it is today.

The fear mongering also needs to stop. We are not going to motivate our students with a laundry list of over-hyped statistics.

The best way to improve education is to improve the teacher in the classroom. Instead of providing examples of what should be done, show us the real thing. Join a professional organization and present lessons that worked in the classroom. Get on a social network (like Twitter or Facebook) and share a successful activity.

Let’s make showing off our finest teachers, and more importantly their work, the real 21st century skill.

Journal via text messaging during field trip

Dale 1 Comment

Last week I took my physics students on a field trip to the Yerkes Observatory and the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory.  This is the forth year I’ve done this trip, and each year I offer the students a variety of assignments to pick from.

This year I added text messaging as one of the assignments.  Students used their cell phone to journal about things they saw while on the trip.

Students send their messages to an account they created at Twitter.com. Twitter is a micro-blog that allows you to post messages (up to 140 characters long) from the web or from your cell phone. The site also allows you to follow other people’s posts; this makes Twitter an impressive networking tool. (Note: there are many teachers exchanging ideas on Twitter; you can find me at: twitter.com/basler.)

Twitter on field trip

I took advantage of the social networking side of Twitter by setting up an account that followed all my students as they posted messages during the trip.  The students who couldn’t go on the trip were able to watch their classmates add messages in real time.

Here is a sample of the messages posted by my students.

You should keep a few things in mind if you plan to use Twitter.

  • Students may incur fees when texting from a cell phone. My assignment wasn’t required; student could pick another assignment if they didn’t wish to send text messages.
  • Twitter is blocked at many schools.  My students had to set up their accounts at home.
  • Make sure your students set up and test the service. I had all my students get things working before the trip.
  • As always, remind your students to not disclose personal information online. For example, all my students used fake names for their username at Twitter.