The Great Ski

I have written before of the perils of being cross country skier in southern New England, land of the sloppy snow. You wait, you hope, the Nor'easter moves up the coast and 50 miles one way or the other in the storm track means 3 inches of wet concrete or 12 inches of fluff. For some reason over the last week and especially over the weekend the snow gods have been smiling. Ten days ago we got several inches on top of an established solid packed base of 3-4 inches, and then Saturday night we got dumped on w/ 6 inches, and kind of by surprise a late band of snow dumped another 5-6 inches Sunday night - all of it light and fluffy. Twelve inches of pow-dah on top of a solid base, on a three day weekend!

I had some things that needed to get done on Monday AM but a plan began forming in my head for an afternoon ski. I knew that for some reason the snow machines and ATV's had not been out in force in the woods on previous storms and the unexpected snow should continue the trend. A quick check of key locations on the way home from morning chores confirmed it, and the plan was hatched.

There is a combination of woods roads and rail trails that starts near my house and leads to the Goodwin State Forest. It is about a nine mile +/-trip. My darling wife was hooking up w/our buddy Beth to ski at Goodwin and could serve as a safety valve if I needed to bail. Indeed as I skied south, they would ski north helping break and pack trail for the last portion of my ski.

Thus the game was afoot. A ski I really have wanted to try for a while, magically coming together. It proved to be a long slog, pushing through soft unpacked trail for most of it. I am not in the shape I should be in to try such a long ski and my body is barking at me this morning. The north bound skiers proved to be my salvation as the last 3 miles was in their packed ski tracks just as the adventure was becoming a death march. It was hard, but so much fun. Miles of powder, unbroken except for deer tracks. Nobody around in the quiet stillness of the forest unmared except for the shoosh, shoosh, shoosh of the skis, my labored breathing, and the pounding of my heart in my chest.

Internet Free Speech Ruling Favors Burlington School Administrators -- Courant.com

The Hartford Courant is reporting this AM on the latest rulings in a CT "Internet Free Speech" case. Follow the links to the full story which does a good job in outlining the basics of the incident with the student and the school's administration (in contrast to other media reporting which was amazingly inconsistent and IMHO incorrect).

For me the key piece in article was the description of the judges ruling on the motions before him. His point that since a landmark case in 1979, "times have changed significantly" and that "off campus speech can become on campus speech" at "the click of a mouse" is the heart of the matter. The ultimate ruling was that the administration was right in apllying punishment.

If Web 2.0 tools have the power to make a fundamental changes in education as they have made fundamental changes in society, does it also point a dagger at the very political structure of schools? I don't mean to go overboard here but as I have comtemplated what Web 2.0 learning looks like in schools, it is clear that it can look very different than 30 seats and a desk at the front. That classroom structure is a subset of school structure. Much of  what teachers end up doing is crowd management and social engineering.

"Nice quiet line please, others are working"
"Line leader stop at the corner"
"You can get a drink at the fountain but lets make it 1,2,3 that's enough for me"
 "That's the bell, you should be out of the hallway and into your rooms"

Much of school structure is a traditional top dowm management with information and control flowing from administrators, to teachers to students. In so many ways the school is the agent of social norms and cultural transmission. We carry out an important mission of socialization and societal normalization.
I heard a phrase way back in my college days - the massage of culture. There is a lot of what schools do that is the massage of culture, the good and and the bad of it.

The recent election is just one of a series of examples of how to use the Internet and social tools to go "outside the system" to influence the hoi poli directly. Viral videos, twitter storms, and the explosive growth of Facebook for the bayboomer set all point to the growing use of social media to influence, change, exploit and cajole the multitudes to action.

What happens when those techniques are used by students to go outside the systems of their schools? In some ways student unrest and protest has always been possible but never so much as with the tools we have at our disposal today. At some level we cannot stop it, the revolution is all around us, it is here. As we take advantage of the power of the tools and transform our classrooms and champion the roles of social media,  to "disrupt" traditional classrooms and teaching, do we also not lay bare the path for true social disruption for our students?

Some of the administrators in the Burlington school district have moved on, some in part because of the fall out of this incident. Like it or not, for better or worse, Avery Doninger made school change happen with the click of a mouse and teh use of a Web 2.0 tool. The judge is saying that the administrators were within their rights to apply consequences to those actions.

It may be a moot point.

• Internet Free Speech Ruling Favors Burlington School Administrators -- Courant.com - Annotated

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  • But in a ruling on several motions for summary judgment Thursday, U.S. District Judge Mark R. Kravitz rejected Doninger's claims that administrators at Lewis S. Mills High School violated her rights to free speech and equal protection and intentionally inflicted emotional distress when they barred her from serving as class secretary because of an Internet post she wrote at home.
    
    Kravitz's ruling relied in part on the ambiguity over whether schools can regulate students' expression on the Internet. He noted that times have changed significantly since 1979, when a landmark student speech case set boundaries for schools regulating off-campus speech.
    
    

    Related links

    • Doninger Free Speech Case

    Now, he wrote, students can send e-mails to hundreds of classmates at a time or post livejournal.com entries that can be read instantly by students, teachers and administrators.
    
    "Off-campus speech can become on-campus speech with the click of a mouse," Kravitz wrote.
    
    Kravitz cited previous rulings and held that school administrators were entitled to qualified immunity, which shields public officials from lawsuits for damages unless they violate clearly established rights a reasonable official would have known.
    
    Kravitz reasoned that because the nature of student speech rights on the Internet is still evolving, the officials could not reasonably be expected "to predict where the line between on- and off-campus speech will be drawn in this new digital era.

    • This is the key piece in the article. - post by stevesoko

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

im_an_idiot.png (PNG Image, 654x387 pixels)

A  Twitter friend posted a link that made me think of Rick..(not the idiot part)...

http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/im_an_idiot.png