historical movements in education

This paper was written for CCE 554 (Foundations of Continuing Education) in November 2008.

Confidentiality and mass surveillance

These are preliminary notes based on collaborative research in the Digital Security and Awareness folder at Zotero. This post is not legal advice and is offered for educational purposes only.

James Risen and Laura Poitras report in the New York Times on February 15, 2014: “Andrew M. Perlman, a Suffolk University law professor who specializes in legal ethics and technology issues, said the growth of surveillance was troubling for lawyers. […] “Given the difficulty of finding anything that is 100 percent secure, lawyers are in a difficult spot to ensure that all of the information remains in confidence.”” [1]

In an April 2008 article in the Oregon State Bar Bulletin, T.H. Nelson and Mark J. Fucile write: “As a general proposition, when a lawyer knows or reasonably suspects that communications are being intercepted by the government (whether legally or not), the lawyer needs to take steps such as face-to-face meetings with clients and disabling cell phones or pagers that might otherwise be subject to electronic surveillance or tracking that would allow advance placement of “bugs.” [2]

T.H. Clarke and L.D. Andara, writing for a LexisNexis blog on July 24, 2013 suggest “the client needs to be informed of the risks inherent in all communications, and to give their informed consent to proposed modes of communication having been advised of the potential risks.” [3]

Kurt Opsahl and Trevor Timm, writing at the EFF Deeplinks blog on June 21, 2013, suggest that the risks include: “In sum, if you use encryption they’ll keep your data forever. If you use Tor, they’ll keep your data for at least five years. If an American talks with someone outside the US, they’ll keep your data for five years. If you’re talking to your attorney, you don’t have any sense of privacy.” [4]

Larson and Shane report in the New York Times on September 5, 2013 that the NSA “has circumvented or cracked much of the encryption, or digital scrambling, that guards global commerce and banking systems, protects sensitive data like trade secrets and medical records, and automatically secures the e-mails, Web searches, Internet chats and phone calls of Americans and others around the world, the documents show.” [5]

Timberg and Soltani report in The Washington Post on December 13, 2013 that “[e]ven with strong encryption, the protection exists only from a phone to the cell tower, after which point the communications are decrypted for transmission on a company’s internal data network. Interception is possible on those internal links, as The Washington Post reported last week.” [6]

Dominic Rushe reports in the Guardian on August 14, 2013: “People sending email to any of Google’s 425 million Gmail users have no “reasonable expectation” that their communications are confidential, the internet giant has said in a court filing.” [7]

Ed Pilkington reports in the Guardian on February 2, 2014, per the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), that “the NSA could develop the capability to recreate a reporter’s research, retrace a source’s movements and listen in on past communications,” and according to CPJ internet advocacy coordinator Geoffrey King, “[i]t could soon be possible to uncover sources with such ease as to render meaningless any promise of confidentiality a journalist may attempt to provide.” [8]

According to Mikki Barry on September 10, 2013: “As attorneys, each one of us should be screaming bloody murder about this potential breach of attorney/client privilege at its very core. It’s not that it is “possible” to get our privileged information, our work product through Google Apps, both the “metadata” and the content of our correspondence, etc., it has already happened, and continues to this day. We KNOW our communications have been compromised. The question now is what to do about it.” [9]

Nadia Kayyali writes at the EFF Deeplinks blog on February 22, 2014: “The American Bar Association has responded to these allegations by urging the NSA to clarify its procedures for minimizing exposure of privileged information” and “ABA president James R. Silkenat writes in his letter to NSA Director Keith Alexander: “The attorney client privilege is a bedrock legal principle of our free society.”” [10]

References:

Self-directed learning and brain development

via Kottke, from the New Yorker on November 17, 2008, a critique of the “brain plasticity” research published in the nineteen-nineties,” with emphasis added to highlight the relationship between self-directed learning and brain development:

This research said that, while the infant brain is, in part, the product of genes, that endowment is just the clay; after birth, it is “sculpted” by the child’s experience, the amount of stimulation he receives, above all in the first three years of life. That finding prompted many programs aimed at stimulating babies whose mothers, for whatever reason (often poverty), seemed likely to neglect them. Social workers drove off to homes deemed at risk, to play with the new baby.

But upper-middle-class parents—and marketers interested in them—also read about the brain-plasticity findings, and figured that, if some stimulation is good, more is better. (Hence Baby Einstein.) Later research has provided no support for this. The conclusion, in general, is that the average baby’s environment provides all the stimuli he or she needs.

Marano thinks that the infant-stimulation craze was a scandal. She accepts the idea of brain plasticity, but she believes that the sculpting goes on for many years past infancy and that its primary arena should be self-stimulation, as the child ventures out into the world. While Mother was driving the kid nuts with the eight-hundredth iteration of “This Little Piggy,” she should have been letting him play on his own.

Marano assembles her own arsenal of neurological research, guaranteed to scare the pants off any hovering parent. As children explore their environment by themselves—making decisions, taking chances, coping with any attendant anxiety or frustration—their neurological equipment becomes increasingly sophisticated, Marano says. “Dendrites sprout. Synapses form.” If, on the other hand, children are protected from such trial-and-error learning, their nervous systems “literally shrink.”

“Adult learning theory” in the Kindergarten classroom

From the New York Times on October 8, 2008:

The IBPYP model is based on inquiry, participation in the process of learning, and exploration. It is learner-driven, not-teacher dominated. Teachers act as facilitators in the learning process and children’s questions and interests are at the center of the classroom.

… In the current national climate of testing, we have to make time for creative expression. It is urgent. Children need some constructive form of release.

… Children express their creativity and intelligence in a variety of ways. By allowing students to safely explore beyond their typical boundaries, we are encouraging them to express themselves in unique ways in a positive, safe, non-judgmental environment. Performance and open-ended inquiry help us move beyond traditional models of education. The arts, performance, and inquiry are small steps we take to help our students regain ownership of their learning.

I have not been comfortable making a significant distinction between adults and children when looking at the needs of learners for the purpose of developing an idea of what an online component of a classroom could look like.

I have tended to think of learners in a spectrum, and have found that the factor of a learner’s chronological age has not been particularly useful as a way to make distinctions between learners.  From a developmental standpoint, I know that it is a factor due to the physiological processes that happen as we age.  However, it has seemed clear that some children demonstrate adult learning needs, and some adults have learning needs that resemble the needs associated with children.

In this article, we have principles that I have come to associate with adult education now being applied to children in kindergarten.  Children are being encouraged to be self-directed learners.  The idea that children cannot “own” their education is being challenged.

In our classrooms, inquiry comes alive through performance. This week in our kindergarten we are starting a unit called “We are Peacemakers.” In this unit, the children learn about sharing, cooperation, conflict resolution, expressing feelings, and building community. We start the unit by asking the children what they know about peace and being a peacemaker. We then use their questions and interests to guide the inquiry process.