I thought we are training our high school students for 21st Century jobs?

Russ Steele

The NUundersground Blog provides local citizen insight into what our high school students are thinking and doing.  Here is a sample by Nell PK, the editor, on Technology not utilized on campus.

I returned to Nevada Union after travelling across California to check out colleges during fall break. After spending time at two UCs, two private universities and a high school in southern California, I began to wonder why NU doesn’t have WiFi access like the majority of college campuses and a rapidly growing number of high schools. At an institution that is supposed to be preparing us for college and the world beyond, why aren’t we learning more about increasingly digital solutions to modern problems?

The average NU student’s access to technology and the web is really sort of pitiful. The school has banned iPods and thereby opportunities for options like educational Podcasts and easy web access; the doctrine on laptops is unclear at best and restrictive at worst; library computers always available for quick access are hopelessly out of date; PCs that are even a generation behind current are only available via reservation and only usable under the watchful eye of a staff member; and the internet filter blocks the vast majority of Web 2.0 socially-created websites like YouTube, reddit, Digg, Blogger and Facebook that could potentially offer exciting new educational opportunities.

Nevada Union is currently operating under a policy established in 1998, eleven years ago. The official line: "students are not to have access to personal emails, videos, MP3 files or chat rooms..." And maybe the search engines that would let them find the sites, my school network experience below.

PK Continues:

Then why the hard line on tech from the administration? According to Jill Sonnenberg, NU librarian and co-chair of the local Intellectual Freedom committee, it stems from technologically-challenged instructors. “Teachers need professional development to feel comfortable using Web 2.0 concepts,” she says, pointing to the removal of a twenty-one hour tech-education mandate for all teachers as one cause of the restrictive attitude. “So much of meeting time is spent on explaining how to work [the school’s information infrastructure] eSchool when it should be put towards discussions of how to integrate these concepts.”

So, the students are smarter than their teachers. I will bet that many students have cellphones with broadband build in, especially those from higher income families.  I was working on a global warming video project with NCTV-11 and we met in the Nevada County Superintendent of Schools, and I tried an admin desk top computers to search Google from an answer to a question. All search engines were blocked on the network school network. 

In 1995, I was one of the founding members of the Nevada County Community Network. One of our missions was to bring the Internet local schools. The NCCN Board thought it was vital for students to have access to the worlds largest collection of human knowledge. True some it not that accurate. The schools should be teaching to know the difference, so when they graduate they have the skill sets to determine the good from the bad. It does not appear to be happening at NU, they are just being shut off from 21st Century tools.

One could make the case that our high schools students are being taught that authorities control all access to all non approved information, and not to expect the freedom to choose, or how to know the difference between the real facts and state controlled propaganda.

PK promises more in a future article. Stay Tuned.