Tag: internet

Armchair expertise strikes again

Posted on by Suki

I have to tell you: I am so relieved that my neighbors commenting on our local fire department’s Facebook page are such skilled wildland fire fighters that they know exactly what went wrong with a controlled burn near my town a couple of weeks ago. To think that the burn had been entrusted to people who have studied, trained, and risked their lives for years—people who need to be paid, outfitted, and managed!

Really, if the crowd on social media had been in charge, it would been just fine.

Not.

Have you noticed that Armchair Expertise seems to be at an all-time high? After I used the phrase “armchair traveler” with my students recently, I did research to find out where it came from [here’s the answer]. That was the same day that my neighbors exploded with “advice” for the fire fighters whose controlled burn, meant to mitigate fire risk in the hills nearby, jumped the lines and was briefly the talk of the neighborhood.

Fortunately, the fire fighters did just fine without my neighbors’ help.

I realize that know-it-all advice from people who can’t be bothered to get up and actually help probably started with the cavemen….

You know, Ogg, if you’d used a flint-tipped arrow instead of that spear, you might have brought home more meat for me.

…but lately, it’s become a reflex, enabled by the media people consume and fueled by the ease of social media.

It all started with reality


Photo by Craig Marolf on Unsplash

Reality TV, that is. I truly believe that the rise of Reality TV in the 90s is at the root of a lot of our recent cultural changes. Personally, I never watched it. But I did notice a change in how people seemed to perceive their role in events that didn’t concern them.

Before Reality TV, people tended to get a view of events that excluded them. When you watched the evening TV news, you didn’t expect that your opinion would be addressed. And when you watched a fictional storyline unfold, you had no sense that you, an everyday person, were in there. It was fiction, created for entertainment. News was information, created to inform you.

Reality TV, along with 24-hour cable news, did away with that separation. We were supposed to believe that the Survivors really were fighting for their lives, and that we really could be one of them. We were led to believe that our opinions about the news were of equal importance to the news itself.

Then reality went social

It got worse with the arrival of social media. Suddenly, you didn’t have to take out a piece of paper and write, find a stamp and send, when you wanted to express your opinion. You didn’t actually have to show up at your school board meeting. You didn’t even have to face your real, live neighbors when you could just pretend to be a neighbor on NextDoor.

There was a lot of pushback in the past about the “gatekeepers” who were controlling the media and not allowing real voices in. These days, it feels like we could use a few gatekeepers!

The result: a lack of respect for expertise

Photo by Bermix Studio on Unsplash

Armchair everythings abound in our society. Armchair epidemiologists argue with the people who actually went to school and actually learned how to read data. Armchair legislators hate everything their government does but can’t be bothered to get to work to make change. Armchair psychologists can tell you exactly what’s wrong with you, but apparently haven’t learned the phrase, “physician, heal thyself.”

In many cases, this false expertise is pretty harmless. Yeah, it’s really annoying to hear your buddy who never held a movie camera critiquing a cinematographer’s camera angles, but the only person who looks bad is him.

But it really makes me sad to watch a group of people criticize the fire fighters who are out there—right that moment—busting their asses to protect the people criticizing them. The fire fighters did, indeed, let a controlled burn slip its bounds. “But remember,” I felt like yelling into my computer, “they were doing that burn at risk to their own lives to save your miserable hide!”

And I don’t even want to go into the public vitriol that has led a record number of public health employees to leave their jobs.

Armchairs are for sitting

I don’t think that being the citizen of a democracy should be a spectator sport. Of course, if it turns out that there was negligence on the part of a public employee, that should be exposed. Our democracy secures checks and balances and a free press for just that reason.

But this armchair criticism of every single action of our skilled public employees is doing no favors to our democracy. So many people can’t be bothered to take part in our public discourse without constantly trying to undermine others, as if they think they are contestants on Survivor, hoping to be the last one on the island.

All alone.

With no one else there to put out their fires.

5 things to do TODAY to help your kids settle in to online classes

Posted on by Suki

Yup, it’s the first week of classes just ended at Athena’s Advanced Academy, and it was a wild and wooly one! We have lots of new students, some of whom have never taken online courses besides the Zoom sessions that their teachers whipped up as crisis teaching last spring. This is my eighth year of teaching online, so I guess I’ve learned a few things. Here they are!

Get comfortable before the first day

Online learning environments have lots of similarities, but it’s the differences that will make your child’s first day of class frustrating and less than productive. Log into the system as soon as you can. It’s very likely that there are activities they can do ahead of time.

At Athena’s, we use Moodle classrooms and Blackboard webinar rooms. Each has its quirks and fun nooks and crannies. Our students can log in as soon as they get credentials and play around in our Social Forums.

Iron out technical problems

I can’t tell you how many kids admit that they and their parents knew about technical problems before the first day. Online teachers simply can’t help. So when we have a frustrated kid with a broken mouse or earbuds that only work sometimes, there is nothing we can do.

We also can’t help if you didn’t use our webinar configuration room to set up your child’s system. We really want to help, but we can’t. You are your kid’s tech support. I know you didn’t sign up for this, but just like cleaning dirty diapers, it comes with the fun parts!

Read the instructions

Sorry there are so many. You won’t remember them all. Neither do I! But please ask the teacher only once you’re sure its answer is not easily accessible. “Search” is available on every page of our site.

Special needs? Contact your teacher!

Online teachers can’t read your children’s faces or body language. It’s not the same as IRL classes. If you contact your child’s teacher ahead of time, they might be able to head of issues before they happen. If your child has had problems in classes before, you are doing them no favors by sending them into an online course without warning. Avoid TMI (too much information). Send a simple note alerting the teacher to an issue that the student might have and you might head off problems.

Be positive!

So many of my students are coming in anxious and concerned because of all the negative stuff they’ve been hearing. They think online learning isn’t as good as their IRL classes. They think their parents expect that they won’t do well. They know that people are arguing about education more than ever.

Help your child adjust by putting on a positive face when you talk about their online classes. Grouse to your spouse, gripe to your friend, express frustration to other parents—but convey confidence and an expectation of fun to your student.

Happy first week of classes, everyone!

How do I make sure there are no gaps in my child’s learning?

Posted on by Suki

Give up. There will be gaps.

.

.

.

What, you want me to explain?

The world is too big to learn it all

This is a given. Maybe in the distant past some men of letters believed that they knew all of humanity’s learning. They were wrong. Even then, it was impossible to know and understand it all.

Now, it’s even harder because we know how much we don’t know. It’s easy to feel unlettered if your metric of being educated is “knowing everything.”

Kids today have enormous amounts of knowledge that you didn’t have. Adults watch in awe as a child navigates a new electronic device, finds what they’re looking for in their first web search, and explains the limitless, arcane knowledge they have about a fandom.

Yet adults are worried that their children will graduate from school with these ill-defined “gaps in learning.” Recently the newspapers have teemed with articles about how children who distance-schooled this past semester will be “behind.”

We have the world of knowledge in our pocket

The reality is that what we need to know has changed. We used to commit a certain amount of information to memory because it was simply too arduous to go find that information when we’d need it. That’s no longer true. Kids see no purpose in learning in a 19th century mode when they live in the 21st century world.

It’s true that memorization is a good skill to have, and exercising our memory is like exercising a muscle—it’s good for us. But it’s no longer true that there is one specific body of knowledge that must be memorized. If kids choose to memorize arcane fandom knowledge instead of a 19th century poem, it really doesn’t matter. In either case, when they need information that they didn’t commit to memory they can access it immediately.

“Important” is a cultural designation

Maybe you think that there is a body of information that is important for every person to master. That body of information used to be chosen by certain men in power throughout the ages.

But how would you go about deciding it now? One person’s important knowledge is another person’s irrelevant information.

I actually do think that there is a body of knowledge that every educated person should be familiar with, but frankly, I think that it’s an ever-changing body of knowledge, and it’s too large for any one person to master.

Create lifelong learners

If we take what I’ve written as true:

  • There’s too much information
  • We have immediate access to information
  • There is no set body of knowledge that we can agree on

…what do we do?

I like this quote: “A brain is a river, not a rock!”

Our job as educators has changed. We won’t succeed just by implanting a body of knowledge into our students’ brains. As soon as we do, there will certainly be changes to that body of knowledge and our students will be out of date again.

Our job as educators and parents is to nurture lifelong learners. How do we do that?

Click here to read some thoughts on how to raise a lifelong learner.

Related:

When Online Communities Work

Posted on by Suki

This autumn we got devastating news about our new kitten: she had a previously incurable, almost certainly fatal disease. Our vet couldn’t treat her, but did mention to us that there was an experimental drug.Thus started my first foray into the world of experimental drug procurement.

We noticed something unusual about one of Tabitha’s eyes and took her to the vet. It turned out that we caught her disease right at the beginning, which gave her a fighting chance.

But I didn’t do it alone.

I joined a Facebook group of nearly 15,000 members who were in the same boat. The members, typical of Facebook groups, range from the frantic pet owner asking pretty crazy-sounding questions to seasoned veterans reassuring and supporting newbies.

Usually, a group like this would descend into the chaos that we’re seeing all over Facebook, with fake news, name-calling, and dark conspiracy theories. But this group is a shining example of how the Internet can work to bring us together. What makes this group work?

1. Committed moderators

Americans typically yearn to be fully independent, often believe that groups don’t need leaders, sometimes think that other humans are, in fact, the problem.

But the fact is, well-functioning groups have leaders, and those leaders make decisions. In this group, committed moderators scan each and every post within minutes and respond, if only with a click of the “like” button to confirm.

2. Real participants

The promise of the Internet was that anonymity would free us to pursue truth and fairness. Unfortunately, it’s also freed us to express the ugliest parts of human nature, including lies and bullying.

In this group, when a new participant joins, they are assigned a personal moderator who lives in their vicinity. No anonymity, no chance that participants will feel free to be abusive, dismissive, or ugly. Conspiracy theories are quashed immediately. Participants are encouraged by their moderators to share appropriately.

3. Crossing into IRL

Finally, the best-functioning groups I’ve been part of are like this one, where members acknowledge and support the real humans behind the posts and smiley faces. When my family ran low on medication, one of the group members met me on the street outside of the radio station where I do a show to hand me enough medicine to get through while we wait for our shipment.

No questions asked, no ID needed. She knows who I am; I know who she is. We will have no trouble finding each other IRL. The trust of this stranger that I would repay her was extremely touching.

Our beautiful, healthy kitty at 7 months. Without the group, we would have lost her 3 months ago.

How can we get control of this beast that is the Internet?

I believe that groups like this are a blueprint for how things can and should work. But it will be up to us, the users of the Internet, to make it happen. How?

  • Don’t join anonymous groups unless you really want all that goes with anonymity.
  • If you want to keep a group positive and functional, be prepared to offer your time when needed.
  • Be supportive of the hard (usually unpaid) job that moderators have, and post within a group’s guidelines.
  • Exert political and financial pressure as you can. If we make it clear to companies that we want sites to have moderation and verification of users, it will happen.

Making online interactions real

Posted on by Suki

Last summer, I had a really cool experience. Ready for it?

I talked to the people I work with every day.

Sounds pretty awesome, doesn’t it? Actually, to most people I suppose it would sound unusual that I don’t talk to my coworkers, but that would be because you work IRL. Since my work is all online, it’s a rare treat for me to be able to spend time with my co-workers, people I text and email with almost every day.

It started with serendipity.

Dr. Kirsten Stein, the owner of Athena’s Advanced Academy, where I teach, has been friends with one of the other teachers for longer than Athena’s has existed. And she’s known another one of the teachers since birth (since that teacher is her daughter). When Prof. Becky announced a trip to California, we decided that we’d have our first in-person meeting with as many students and educators as we could muster.

A visit to the beach!

We met first to go tide-pooling, which was extra exciting since one of the teachers is a marine biology specialist. Since I live on the coast, I have been tide-pooling many times. But never with someone who could tell me about the reproductive habits of kelp.

Emma the Animal Lover explains the reproductive habits of kelp.

As soon as Emma the Animal-Lover started talking, I realized something cool was happening. I pulled out my cellphone and asked Emma and Becky to keep talking. We got lots of great video. (Forthcoming!)

Athena’s founder, educators, and students all in one place! What a treat!

A visit to the redwoods!

Then we decamped to my house for dinner. But first, we partook of the wonders of Nisene Marks State Park, which happens to be in my backyard. Professor Becky Riethmeier was out in front here, asking questions about the local flora and fauna. I pulled out as many of the names of plants as I could from the deep recesses of my mind. My kids and I made a homeschooling project of writing a book about the redwoods, but that was a good while ago.

The redwood canopy

It was very cool to walk in a forest I know so well with people who could ask such deep questions. From the crashing waves and wide-open space of the Monterey Bay to the filtered sunshine and dusty stillness of summertime redwoods is pretty much a day complete.

More friends and conversation!

But why stop there? Another Athena’s educator, Dr. Meg Wilson, lives nearby, and she arrived with her daughter and food for the potluck. We were complete!

Here’s where I get to the real theme here: I love our online school, and our online community. But there is nothing that cements it more than a real-life interaction with nature, food, and friendly conversation.

If your kids are learning online, make sure to try to connect that learning to their everyday lives. It’s not like we can always meet with friends who live thousands of miles away, but we can find ways to connect our online life to our real lives, and deepen the meaning of both.

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