SITE Blog

Here is a problem along the edges of the digital divide that most people are unaware of the perspective from Native American Tribes.

Given the fact that many Native American tribes have some land and some have casinos, people think that they live in the lap of luxury. There are a few tribes who have learned to create a business model to change the future of their children. But we have an interesting set of problems that the President has to address. For those not familiar with the cultures, here is a virtual tour if
The Four Directions project works to use technology as a catalyst for change in the schools. Recently students, teachers, community members and Four Directions personnel worked together to create a demonstration project with the National Museum of the American Indian.

Source: The 4Directions community of learners consists of 19 Bureau of Indian Affairs schools partnered with 11 private and public universities and organizations. Through technology, the community has been able to transcend geographic barriers and collaborate across the nation. Teachers and students use the Internet and World Wide Web to communicate and collaborate with 4D partners and other schools. 4Directions schools use technology to share in the diversity of various cultures and to ensure that the voices of Native people are heard in the emerging information age.
Source: http://www.4directions.org/community/index.html

I have spent time with Karen Buller, and earlier with Misty Brave, who are proponents of better education for Native American students. Karen was working with the FCC. Here is the website she created when there was funding. Most of the funding for the digital divide evaporated during the Bush administration as the nation was told that there is no, was no digital divide. Now that we can talk about it again, there is a digital divide, a technology divide, a cultural divide, an information divide and a fluency of use of new media divide.

Misty Brave is from the Pine Ridge Reservation and she and I had a debate when I first met her. We were Christa McAuliffe educators for diversity, from the NEA, NFIE.I was talking about the poverty in urban cities. She opened my eyes to the situation on the Pine Ridge Reservation and to the cultures of Native Americans in general. I have never lived 40 miles from a grocery store without a car. I have never lived where the chapter houses, as in Navajo lands are where people communicate emergencies from.

*( Cell phones have changed that a little, broadband is not available everywhere either.

Karen Buller Elliott and I worked together, but she was the funder and the person with the ideas. We tried to work from Santa Fe, and I often rode shotgun with her to learn, to experience and to see the disconnect between the Native American schools .. I learned the systems of communication and the difficulty in some places, … She shared programs did outreach and training, and projects she worked for several years together until the funding declined.
This is her website http://www.niti.org/

and some developed curriculum.

http://www.niti.org/html/cultural_curriculum.html

Four Directions Project and Work with Native Americans

Dr. Resta is a friend and heserved as director of the Four Directions project (1995 –2001) at the University of Texas at Austin. Funded by the U.S. Department of Education, this national project involved 19 rural Indian schools across the country and explored the use of new telecommunications and multimedia technologies to enhance the quality of education in schools in remote areas. The project received the 1997 Award for Outstanding and Innovative Use of Technology from Government Executive Magazine and the Government Executive Leadership Institute. He served as Chair of The Smithsonian Institution Off-Site Technology Committee. As senior consultant, he developed the Smithsonian Institution National Museum of the American Indian Off-Site Technology Planning Document for the extension of the museum’s collections, archives, and information resources to Indian communities and the general public through technology. He is also currently working with the Navajo Nation in projects to use telecommunications to enhance educational and economic development on the reservation.

Four Directions:An Indigenous Model of Education

The Learning Technology (LTC) has been a leader in exploring the ways that technology can enhance learning opportunities for students in rural isolated projects. Schools in Native American communities, like schools everywhere, are incorporating technology into the curriculum as fast as budgets allow. Will this technology, which brings the world into the classroom and opens the classroom to the world, be the final means of acculturalization for Native American students, or will it provide a way to preserve, enrich and tell others of their unique heritage?

The Learning Technology Center explored the ways technology can be used in Native American schools can use technology to develop culturally responsive curriculum in the Four Directions Project. From 1995 to 2001, through a grant funded by a U.S. Department of Education, the Learning Technology Center with other partners helped 19 Native American schools in ten states overcome their remoteness and preserve their cultural traditions by providing training in the use of computer and telecommunications technology and its integration throughout school curricula. Other partners in the Four Directions project included the University of New Mexico, the University of Kansas and Haskell Indian Nations University, the Heard Museum and the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian.

Dr. Paul E. Resta helped the schools plan and create collaborative learning environments. Schools were equipped with Teachnet, collaborative communications software which provides email, conferencing and bulletin board capabilities.

Graduate level courses in curriculum design were provided for Four Directions teachers via the World Wide Web and Teachnet. Approximately 120 teachers took these classes, many of them multiple times.

Native students were trained in digital photography, virtual reality imaging and other multimedia techniques in order to create cultural “virtual museums.” The first virtual museum project created a Virtual Tour of the National Museum of the American Indian, as seen through the eyes of Native American children. The project was one of fifty finalists in the Global Junior Challenge, an Internet media contest hosted by the city of Rome, Italy. Four Directions has promoted school-museum partnerships for virtual museum projects, and by May 2001, ten Four Directions schools will have engaged in virtual museum projects with nine museums and two university archeology departments.

Dr. Loriene Roy helped the schools develop oral history projects for the schools and brought library expertise to the team. She began a family reading project, “If I Can Read, I Can Do Anything,” with Four Directions schools which has received its own with funding from the American Library Association and the Tocker Foundation. She has used TeachNet to conduct live chats between students in the Four Directions schools on reading and story-telling. The “scary story” chats at Halloween have garnered lively participation from students of all ages.

An Electronic Mentoring database was established that paired volunteer Native American mentors with specific schools or students and facilitated their communication.

The LTC team participated in two Access Native American Net Days. In April 1998, 28 schools of the Navajo Reservation in Arizona, the Pueblos of New Mexico, the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota and the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Reservation in Mississippi were connected to the Internet and provided with new computers. Team members were on hand to provide technical support at Red Water School on the Choctaw Reservation in Mississippi and at Jemez Pueblo, New Mexico. The second Native American Net Day, in September 1999, celebrated the wiring of the remaining Four Directions schools and many more Bureau of Indian Affairs schools.

The Four Directions partners worked hard to provide technology and curriculum training for the teacher participants at the annual Summer Institutes conducted at Haskell Indian Nations University in Lawrence, Kansas. But during the last year of the project, three Four Directions schools conducted their own summer institutes, and the Pueblo of Laguna won an Intel grant to create a technology training center for American Indian schools. These changes mark the success of Four Directions in the dissemination of the Indigenous Model of Education. Another mark of success for the project is a database of culturally responsive lessons on the Four Directions web site. These lessons were devised by the Four Directions teachers at the Summer Institutes and on-site workshops.

The LTC will continue its work with Indian schools and other schools in rural isolated areas to continue to explore the ways technology can help bridge the digital divide.

Four Directions Project

http://www.4directions.org/

The newest program.. If I can Read, I can Do Anything

http://sentra.ischool.utexas.edu/~ifican/index.php

If I Can Read, I Can Do Anything is teaming up with readergirlz, GuysLitWire, and YALSA for Operation Teen Book Drop 2010. They will help coordinate the delivery of thousands of new books to teens on reservation schools on April 15, 2010.

The goal is to encourage native children and community members to read for pleasure
To Provide Indian communities with opportunities to engage in and communicate about reading

To Promote Library use at tribal schools

To Help Improve Tribal school library collections

To Support…Tribal school librarians!

Internet to the Hogan

http://ucsdnews.ucsd.edu/newsrel/science/hogan07.asp

There is another program that I have a little knowledge about, which is the Internet to the Hogan Program. Supercomputer experts from UC San Diego will help end the “digital divide” for many in the Navajo Nation in the Southwest.

Navajos in the American Southwest, many of whom have never had access to a personal telephone, will soon make a significant leap into the Internet Age, thanks in part to resources and expertise provided by the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) at UC San Diego.

The Navajos, who refer to themselves as the “Dine” (dee-nay), celebrated “An Internet to the Hogan and Dine Grid Event” at Navajo Technical College in Crownpoint, New Mexico. Highlights of the event include their official acceptance of a “Little Fe” mini-supercomputer from the TeraGrid – the world’s largest supercomputing network – and a demonstration of advanced radio technology.

This is the article that made me think about sharing with you some initiatives.Many more initiatives and projects need funding to reach the children.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/global/2010/jan/11/native-americans-reservations-poverty-obama

The US president has pledged to improve the lives of Native Americans. But he
faces huge challenges, such as those on Pine Ridge Indian reservation where
unemployment is more than 80%, the average wage is ?4,400 ? and life expectancy
is 50

Chris McGreal
Monday January 11 2010
The Guardian

Indian country begins where the serene prairie of Custer county gives way to the
formidable rock spires marking out South Dakota’s rugged Badlands. The road runs
straight until the indistinguishable, clapboard American homesteads fade from
view and the path climbs into a landscape sharpened by an eternity of wind and
water. At this time of year, the temperature slides to tens of degrees below
freezing and a relentless gale sets the snow dancing on the road, a whirligig of
white blotting out the black of the asphalt.

The first marker that this may be a part of the United States but is also apart
from it, virtually invisible to most Americans, comes as the road descends on to
the plains of the Pine Ridge Indian reservation. Here, an abandoned,
half-wrecked mobile home, daubed with the name of a Sioux rebel who led the last
armed showdown between the tribe and US authorities nearly four decades ago,
stands as a monument to defiance and despair.

The signal from South Dakota’s Christian radio fades as an agitated caller
elaborates on her belief that God created global warming as a taste of the fires
of hell awaiting humanity. After a time the reservation’s own station struggles
through.

The tribe’s president, Theresa Two Bulls, is on air lamenting the death of a
schoolboy, Joshua Kills Enemy, who hanged himself the day before. His funeral
will be the second of the week, coming days after a 14-year-old girl took her
own life in the same way. They are not the first.

Two Bulls wonders how it can be that the Oglala Sioux tribe’s children are
killing themselves. “We must hug our children, we must tell them we love them. A
lot of these youth do not get a hug a day. They are never told that they’re
loved. We need to start being parents and grandparents to them,” she says.

Two days later, Two Bulls declares a “suicide state of emergency” in response to
the deaths of the children and a spate of attempts by others to kill themselves,
such as Delia Big Boy, who was 15 when she put a rope around her neck and came
close to taking her own life. “It had a lot to do with my parents and alcohol
abuse and what they say to you. The things they say make you think they don’t
love you,” says the high school student, who is now 17. “I hear the same thing
from my friends. There’s a sense of hopelessness on the reservation. There’s
just not a sense of belonging. There’s not a sense of a future. There’s
alcoholism. The parents drink. A lot of the children drink.”

In declaring the state of emergency, Two Bulls says that the deaths of the
children are a symptom of a wider crisis that has taken hold of generations of
Oglala Sioux, and this is certainly true. More than 100 people, mostly adults,
tried or succeeded in taking their own lives on Pine Ridge reservation last
year.

“This is about how defeated our people feel. There’s hopelessness out there,”
Two Bulls tells me later. “People across the United States don’t realise we
could be identified as the third world. Our living conditions, what we have to
live with, what we have to make do with. People think we are living high off the
hog on welfare and casinos. I’ve asked them ? US congressional people, US
secretaries of these departments who deal with us ? come out to our reservation,
see firsthand how we live, why we live that way. Find out why our children are
killing themselves. Learn who we are.”

Pine Ridge is among the US’s largest Indian reservations ? much smaller than the
vast plains of the midwest that the Sioux once roamed but still bigger than
England’s largest county ? and also among its poorest. No one is sure how many
people live on its 2.2m acres, but the tribe estimates about 45,000.

Conditions on the reservation are tough. More than 80% unemployment. A desperate
shortage of housing ? on average, more than 15 people live in each home and
others get by in cars and trailers. More than one-third of homes lacking running
water or electricity. An infant mortality rate at three times the US national
average. And a dependency on alcohol and a diet so poor that half the population
over the age of 40 is diabetic.

The Oglala Sioux’s per capita income is around $7,000 (?4,400) a year, less than
one-sixth of the national average and on a par with Bulgaria. The residents of
Wounded Knee, scene of the notorious 1890 massacre of Sioux women and children
and of the 1973 standoff with the FBI, are typically living on less than half of
that. Young people have almost no hope of work unless they sign up to fight in
Afghanistan. The few with jobs are almost all employed by the tribal authorities
or the federal government. It is not uncommon to hear people quietly speak of
the guilt they feel for having a job. Those who don’t survive on pitifully small
welfare cheques. It all adds up to a life expectancy on Pine Ridge of about only
50 years.

The myth of prosperity

This is not how most Americans see the reservations. The Great Sioux Nation and
the region it once ranged across are fixed in the popular imagination by the
legends of Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse, of Custer’s last stand at the Battle of
Little Bighorn, and Wounded Knee. It’s a history the Oglala Sioux constantly
assert to remind themselves of past greatness and what they believe they are
owed.

But the modern perception among many Americans is also of tribes growing rich on
casinos and Native Americans living well from treaties that require the US
government to provide subsidised housing, free healthcare and regular welfare
cheques.

Close to a million people live on the US’s 310 Native American reservations
(exact figures are hard to pin down because the census is considered widely
inaccurate on many of them). Some tribes have done well from a boom in casinos
on the reservations, such as the Seminoles in Florida who made enough money from
high-stakes bingo to pay close to $1bn to buy the Hard Rock Cafe and hotel
empire. Other tribes have made a more modest but comfortable income from
gambling, but the key for almost all of them was to be close enough to major
cities to keep the slot machines busy and the card tables full. Others pull in
an income from tourism and minerals. Affirmative action programmes have opened
university doors and jobs in the cities to the Navajo, Cherokee and other
tribes. But the leaders of many of the country’s 564 recognised tribes speak of
communities in crisis and they are pressing President Obama to make good on
promises to turn their lives around.

Obama faces a challenge meeting that commitment, in the midst of a deep economic
crisis. But he has responded by appointing Native Americans to some key
positions, assigning billions of dollars of additional spending to health,
education and policing and, recently, by calling the first of what he promises
will be an annual White House summit with Indian tribal leaders. At it he
acknowledged that the reservations face a struggle born of a history of broken
treaties, neglect and discrimination.

“Few have been more marginalised and ignored by Washington for as long as Native
Americans, our first Americans. You were told your lands, your religion, your
cultures, your languages were not yours to keep,” he said. “I know what it means
to feel ignored and forgotten, and what it means to struggle.”

The Sioux’s treaties with the US government in the second half of the 19th
century were similar to those of other tribes in that they were frequently
broken as an expanding America sought more land for railways, mining and
farming, and battered Native Americans into ceding ever more territory in return
for promises of financial support. Defeated and dispossessed, the Sioux signed
treaties that committed Washington to providing housing, education and health
care.

But the tribe’s leaders today view the treaties as a trap ? promising much but
providing just enough to create a culture of dependency and despair. “The
government wanted us to feel defeated and we played right in to their hands,”
says Two Bulls. “We were taught to feel defeated. Look how they brought welfare
and our people lived on welfare and some of our people don’t even know how to
work. They’re used to just staying at home all day, watching TV and drinking and
taking drugs. That’s the state the government wanted us to be in and we’re in
it.”

Poverty and overcrowding

It is a state Adelle Brown Bull has spent her life resisting, not always with
success. The 69-year-old great-grandmother is still in the same tribal-owned
house she raised her eight children in, and some of them never moved out. Today
the two-bedroomed home is stuffed with grandchildren and great-grandchildren.
She sits at her kitchen table, the green wall behind her dotted with photographs
of the generations of babies. Some of the pictures are so old they are in black
and white.

Among those living with Brown Bull are a daughter and her three children who are
all in their 20s. Two of the granddaughters have several children of their own,
one of them a baby. There’s another grandchild, nine-year-old Michael, who Brown
Bull is raising after his mother in effect abandoned him when he was 10 months
old. The numbers fluctuate but there is anywhere between eight and 15 people
sleeping in the house at any one time.

None of the occupants has a job. Brown Bull gets a pension of $538 (?337) a
month, plus $323 (?202) for caring for Michael. The other mothers in the house
get welfare cheques of a few hundred dollars a month. “We just manage,” Brown
Bull says, laughing.

The house shows its age and the wear and tear of so many residents. The tribal
housing authority has just replaced the window frames because they were letting
so much wind in. But it is almost impossible to heat the house, a common problem
on the reservation where residents typically nail plastic over the outside of
their windows in the winter as insulation.

Brown Bull’s house was built in the wake of President John F Kennedy’s pledge to
include Native American reservations in the US public housing programme. That
led to a boom in construction through the 60s and 70s, when many of Pine Ridge’s
homes were put up. But in the 80s, Ronald Reagan shifted public housing policy
dramatically away from new construction.

These days, Pine Ridge relies on a $10m-a-year housing grant from Congress that
is only enough to pay for the most basic maintenance ? such as combating the
poisonous black mould that infects many of the houses ? and the construction of
about 40 new homes each year. Which is far from enough.

“When you get two or three families living in a house, it affects the whole way
of life here ? education, health,” says Paul Iron Cloud, a former Pine Ridge
president and now head of its housing authority. “Our people have a tendency to
take people in, maybe their relatives who don’t have no place to go. So they all
share that house.”

Last year, the federal government offered to fulfil part of its treaty
obligations by selling the tribe old houses from an airforce base, no longer
considered fit for service personnel, at a dollar each. The Pine Ridge
authorities agreed but when the houses arrived they were charged $25,000 for the
removal costs of each one ? and then discovered the buildings were badly
battered, with walls torn off and windows smashed in. The houses sit in a yard
to this day, giving the impression of having been torn up by their roots.

Two Bulls regards overcrowded, bad housing as an important part of the
explanation for the loss of self-worth. Brown Bull sees it in her own family.
Among the baby pictures on the wall are photographs of two grandchildren serving
in the military. “That one’s signed on for a few more years,” says Brown Bull,
pointing to a young woman in a smart army uniform. “She’s in Afghanistan now.
She says she might as well stay in the military because there’s nothing for her
here. No job. The only place she can live is with me. I have another grandson in
the army in Afghanistan. He says the same thing.”

Most of this goes unnoticed in the rest of America. “Some of them still think we
live in teepees,” says Alison Yellow Hair, a former shipyard worker wrapped up
in a thick coat inside her freezing caravan. “Since we own the land they think
we’re rich and we shouldn’t have to be working. We should be living high off the
hog. I got a lot of that down there at the shipyards. You’re Indian, aren’t you?
Yeah. Don’t you get a cheque every week? Jeez, if I got a cheque every week I
wouldn’t be down here busting my ass for a pay cheque or trying to keep up with
my health insurance payments.”

Now she is back in Pine Ridge, Yellow Hair and her husband, Walter, do get a
cheque from the tribe’s general assistance fund ? $117 (?73) between them each
week. They live in a small caravan cocooned behind a pile of cardboard boxes and
plastic trunks stuffed with clothes and furniture that cannot fit in to the
cramped home, plastic sheeting protecting it all against the snow. Inside, there
is little more than a few cooking utensils, a tiny heater that stays off most of
the time and a large pile of blankets and duvets that they wrap themselves in to
keep warm after the sun goes down and the temperature sinks to -35C (-30F) with
the wind chill. There’s no running water and no electricity. “The heater runs on
kerosene,” says Walter. “Two gallons costs $25. We can use that in two days if
we leave it on.”

Walter used to work as a janitor until the tribal authorities laid off staff
five years ago. He hasn’t found a job since. Alison built ships in Oregon. “I
did 10 years in the shipyards before I came home and I’ve been home about 10
years. Haven’t really been able to get a steady job since I moved back. Can’t
make my money like I used to. Got hurt on the job while I was at the shipyards.
I was leaning back on a catwalk because a boilermaker went off to get some more
welding rods and the safety guy that was supposed to take care of us stepped on
me and pinned my arm. His weight was 250lb and he pushed my arm down on that
metal catwalk and it messed up my arm and shoulder ever since.”

There are jobs to be had but they are mostly working for the tribe in one form
or another. One of the largest employers is the tribal-owned Prairie Wind Casino
alongside the road between Pine Ridge town and the huge tourist draw of Mount
Rushmore. The casino was built in an attempt to replicate the small fortunes
made by other tribes but it is a sad affair, too isolated to make real money. On
a cold winter night there is no one at the card tables and most of those playing
the slots come from the reservation.

The curse of alcohol

The streets of Pine Ridge, the town that carries the same name as the
reservation, are dead at night. Aside from a Pizza Hut and a recently opened
Subway sandwich bar, there is not much open as dusk falls.

What street life there is occurs in Whiteclay, a few steps across the
reservation’s border with neighbouring Nebraska. Whiteclay has a couple of dozen
registered residents but no school, church or community centre. There’s only one
street, the main road due south. And there is only one type of business along
the 50 metres that makes up the town: alcohol.

A bar and three liquor stores, all rotting, dilapidated buildings, sell more
than 4m cans and bottles of cheap beer and rough, powerful malt liquor each
year. Almost all of it is to people from Pine Ridge, where alcohol has long been
banned.

A woman stands almost motionless a few steps from the door to State Line Liquor,
rocking back and forth as if straining to make that last lunge toward the store.
She is badly underdressed for the biting cold and snow, yet seemingly
impervious. Her face is bloated, her eyes unfocused. A few metres away two men
have passed out in the street. Other Sioux step past to load their pick-up
trucks with Hurricane, a powerful malt liquor glorified in gangsta rap songs
that alcohol-dependence groups in major American cities have tried to curb
because of the social devastation it has caused among minority communities.

Heading back across the state border, a large round sign greets arrivals:
“Alcohol is not allowed on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation.” Possession is an
arrestable office, as is intoxication. But the Pine Ridge police captain, Ron
Duke, concedes the law has done little to deter the problem. “At one point we
thought about putting up a border there, making people stop at that border to
check ‘em. But we have all these outlying roads and trails that people use and
we’d probably be defeating our own purpose. We don’t want to be like the Mexican
border where we have to put a fence up all around,” he says.

Duke is bitter at what he sees as the cynicism of the store owners. “See how
rundown that place is? But the people who own those bars are millionaires. We
made them millionaires, the people here. Yet they treat us that way,” he says.
“I’ve been in law enforcement for 25 years. People I used to take to jail, their
kids and now their grandkids, I’m dealing with them. I’d say a majority of the
problems we’re having right now, 90% of it is because of alcohol. We don’t
really have an economy where people have the opportunity to get a job. People
have to live off a welfare grant or whatever’s available for them. That really
makes it tough on our people. Then they turn to alcohol, they turn to violence.”

Brown Bull sees the effects in her street. “Every other house is a bootlegger.
You can watch them and see who goes to where. One day I was opening my curtain
in the bedroom and I heard some boys laughing. There was three boys, 10 to 12
years old, standing right next door. They had a big old bottle going around. I
thought, my goodness, these little boys shouldn’t be drinking. They shouldn’t be
selling to these boys. I didn’t like that at all. If you go down the road, in
the back between the houses, there’s so much broken bottles back there,” she
says.

In theory, possession of alcohol is severely punished. The law allows prison
sentences of six months to a year for keeping or selling beer. But it’s more
common for those arrested to be held overnight and fined $25 court costs ? a
fraction of the money they make from selling beer.

That might be about to change. Like much of the rest of America, the Oglala
Sioux have decided that the way to deal with crime is to spend scarce resources
on bigger prisons. The reservation authorities have built a new 280-cell jail to
replace the old prison that crammed up to 200 inmates in to 25 cells. It’s
likely that many of the young will end up there. Rampant alcoholism has created
a raft of problems, but none more serious than the alienation of the tribe’s
young people. Hundreds have retreated in to gangs modelled on the black and
Latino ones of Los Angeles and Chicago, with names such as the Nomads and Indian
Mafia. The gangs are part of a surge in violent crime.

“Parents and grandparents are afraid of their own kids,” says Duke. “They’re
taking their money for drugs and alcohol. Parents can’t control their own
children. They attack their own relatives for money.”

Others, of course, find release by taking their own lives. Delia Big Boy only
survived because she was discovered in time. “They found me and I got sent to
the hospital,” she says, her voice breaking. “When I did that, my Auntie, she
came and talked to me and she invited me in to her home. I’ve been living with
her since. That changed a lot.” These days Big Boy counsels other young people
as part of the Sweetgrass network which encourages children in despair to call
or send text messages. “I get calls all the time from friends and others.
Usually it’s because of the way their parents treat them. They don’t feel loved.
Our parents are not always good parents on this reservation,” she says. “I tell
them to focus on their big dreams about college and the military. I want to go
to university to study chemistry.”

Rash of suicides

The 14 year-old girl, Mariah Montileaux, who was buried ? in her traditional
dance dress ? just days before 16-year-old Joshua Kills Enemy, had made no
secret of her plans to kill herself. “The mother knew this girl was attempting
to commit suicide,” says Duke. “Everybody knew yet nobody knew what to do with
her, how to help her. Whether or not anybody could have helped her, that’s what
she wanted to do. She made it known: I’m going to kill myself.”

After Kills Enemy’s death, the Pine Ridge high school principal, Robert Cook,
surveyed students and concluded that one in five of the 370 pupils were at risk.
Nine were immediately taken to the Indian Health Service because of what Cook
described as “impending suicide”.

Duke’s men are frequently the ones to cut the victims down. “The hardest ones
are the kids. The deaths are disturbing but so are the funerals,” he says. “At
the funerals you see the glamorised attention they get. They’ve got their names
written all over the windows in honour of this kid because he took his life.
Kids see that. Kids want attention. This is how they’re going to get attention.
I’ve heard them say: when I go, I hope that’s how they honour me.”

In fact, Native Americans teenagers are more likely to kill themselves than any
other minority group. Some statistics show the rate at three times the national
average. But those figures shield the fact that self-harm is most likely to
occur on poorer reservations, such as Pine Ridge and neighbouring Rosebud; here
rates are far higher.

The tribal government is attempting to entice businesses to the reservation,
including a wind farm. One local entrepreneur is building an increasingly
successful business shipping buffalo and cranberry health bars around the
country. But Two Bulls and other Oglala Sioux leaders know that it will take the
kind of money that only the federal government can provide to begin to turn the
situation around: their hopes are pinned on Obama, who has told them: “You will
not be forgotten as long as I’m in this White House.”

Two Bulls believes him. “It’s just like we’re being held down and my message
every time I go to Washington DC is we are a government, a nation, right in your
backyard, and you should be treating us like that but you’re not,” she says.
“But this administration is different. They’re listening. I got the sense of
understanding from these people.”

Iron Cloud, the former reservation president, says he too believes Obama but
intends to ensure he doesn’t forget his promise. “What I feel is kinda like a
light at the end of the tunnel where the Obama administration is looking at some
new beginnings for the minorities and the poor people to have some jobs and give
more money to education. Just taking care of our people in a better way than
they have been.

“Obama understands, but then there’s Congress. If we can get enough of our
tribal leaders ? and I’m talking 500 tribes coming together and flooding the
halls of Congress ? and just say to them that it’s time to take a good look at
Indian tribes. We were the first Americans ? and I know it’d have an impact.”

Chris McGreal is the Guardian’s Washington correspondent.

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There is a large and vocal support of Michelle Rhee in the press. I beg to differ and to offer an opinion and some research that the reporters, and her friends have not examined to think about her policies.No one speaks for many who have worked in urban, or rural or
difficult education for years without any support, funding or publicity. Maybe some of these people should attend the Think Tanks on Scholarship to tell their truths or at least question the soothsayers.

I am a citizen of Washington DC. I have taught in a school in my neighborhood in South west. No, I am not one of her victims. I taught in Arlington, Virginia for years, I taught in DODDS schools in Baumholder, GDE, and I have taught using technology in every state in the US but Montana, and North Dakota. I am not unaware of the plight of the Native American students, nor the Hispanic students. I am the digital equity chair of two educational organizations and we study these ideas and talk about them for our members, this essay however, reflects my own views.

Empowerment and Enterprise Zones

I taught in an initiative for the White House that crossed the country in areas of need and especially in urban areas. I have friends wo have invited me to Mississippi to teach and it was a wonderful experience, I have worked in 22 countries in educational technology during WSIS and for the GAID. The work in developing nations is not much different that the problem of the places without broadband. The key to successful education is teacher professional development of a quality nature.

My Beef, The Canonization of Ms . Rhee as the only Educational Leader

The Wall Street Journal recently wondered out loud why Michelle Rhee is not supported by the President.

Heavens forbid such a thing should happen!

Ms. Rhee is a business entrepreneur. She has worked her way into the think tanks of the rich and famous along with Mayor Bloomberg. She had a very brief teaching experience in Baltimore. She admits that in her short time of teaching that she was not very good.

Her plan works well economically, dump the older teachers, close and consolidate the schools and save the mayor money. Oh and get rid of the Union influence. This has been brought before the think tanks of the US. You know, the ones that most of us cannot afford. They cost anywhere from $4,000 to $10,000.
Regular people are not able to attend these thought police programs.

The programs bring her out as a provocative speaker. She is their rock star.
Her project is Teach for America. The ideas of the project are not bad. That students go to the best schools and then dedicate their time to schools in need is not a bad one.

There is some conflict for the jobs within the grasp of those who finish in the
Minority Serving Colleges and Universities, but that is a minor blip. Teach for America is less expensive than hiring the recent graduates of the colleges and universities in the regions and who may have very dedicated students who are hoping to be the base of broadening engagement for America as well.
The economic base works. If you are not one of the older teachers or one of the minority teachers seeking to work in your own area.

Achievements? Depends on What you Read!! Who Do you Believe?

ONLY ONE CONCLUSION can be drawn from national tests showing D.C. public schools outpacing many of their big-city peers in bettering students’ math skills: The reforms being undertaken by Chancellor Michelle A. Rhee are working. But even as the District celebrates the loss of its dubious status as one of the nation’s worst school systems, the sobering reality is there is still a long way to go before it can boast about its public education system.

New findings released Tuesday by the U.S. Education Department showed the District making dramatic gains in fourth- and eighth-grade math on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). Of the big cities studied, the District was the only one to post gains of more than five points in both grades; only two other big cities have ever done that, with the last having done so in 2005. D.C. now ranks 11th out of 18 urban school systems at the fourth-grade level, and 13th out of 18 at the eighth-grade level.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wpdyn/content/article/2009/12/09/AR2009120903940.html

Red flags regarding Michelle Rhee

Regarding the Dec. 10 editorial “Doing the math in D.C.”:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wpdyn/content/article/2009/12/13/AR2009121302446.html

As a former D.C. public schoolteacher, I find it perplexing that The Post’s editorial board continues to participate in Chancellor Michelle A. Rhee’s cult-of-personality campaign despite a body of evidence, some reported in these very pages, that much of what has been accomplished is an illusion.

Ms. Rhee has gone as far as to comment that previous test gains were the result of picking “low-hanging fruit.” Moreover, the recent internal and external investigations into cheating and the changes in the number of students who can be given alternative assessments are indicative of an administration that is scrambling to educate itself in the realities of the classroom.

Chancellor Rhee says, “Students [defied] naysayers who told me two years ago that the school district of D.C. was a lost war for the prosperity of children’s minds.”

The low Hanging Fruit..? The work done by Clifford Janey!!

This from the Washington Post

http://voices.washingtonpost.com/dc/2009/12/janey_says_footprint_still_fre.html

When Chancellor Michelle A. Rhee met with reporters last week to tout the District’s improved math scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) , she did it with a nod to her predecessor, Clifford Janey. It was under Janey, who was dismissed by Mayor Adrian M. Fenty after Fenty took control of the public school system in 2007, that the six year rise in NAEP scores began.

In Janey’s view, the shout-out wasn’t necessary.

“The Janey footprint is there and it needs no excavation to be seen,” he said in a phone interview last week from his office in Newark, N.J., where he has served as superintendent of schools since mid-2008. “Those in-the-know, know. I don’t need affirmation to know we made some incredible acts of transformation in Washington D.C. over a short period of time that is evidenced now much more publicly through the NAEP.”

Janey said that one of his first tasks after he came to the District in 2004 was to find a new standardized test to replace the Stanford 9, which he said lacked rigor.

“The first thing I did in he first month of my tenure was organize a group of teachers, administrators and community advocates and members of the business community,” Janey said. “I tasked them to research the very best content standards and curriculum frameworks at the state level and to see who was making faster improvement on the NAEP.”

Permission?

What Michelle Rhee is good at is holding NCLB, as the mantra for her doctrine of what should happen in schools. We DC citizens are crippled by the lack of an active voice on the hill that matters, and in DC by a lack of interest in school policies as to what the community wants. You have only to read Bill Turque’s columns to see the difficulty.

Hidden problems are the moving around of school populations , not that gang territories should be the map of the way schools are designated for closure.

There have always been members of the minority populations who have given their all to upraise their race, culture and minority group. There have always been those who stood in harms way to make a difference. There have also been those who have not had a Harvard, or Brown education, nothing from the Ivy League, but they have soldiered on working with students who have been in the direst need. The implications of the press are that none of us have ever made a difference and that we have been weighed in the balance and found wanting.

Ms Rhee holds the doctrine of No Child Left Behind as her mantra for chance.
The National Academy, National Research Council, Washington DC neither Republican, or Democratic in nature examined the assessment practices of NCLB , both negative and positive and found them wanting. The testing specialists are called pyschometricians. You can find all of their presentations on this home page and reach your own conclusions.

The goal to reach all children was a great one. But there were problems that exceed the positive impact of reaching out to every child. The system is broken
Education needs change in many ways. As we use the participatory cultures in technology we are aware that there is a digital, a content , an information and a technology divide.

Here is where educators are now, we share formal and informal learning practices using participatory cultures that foster and motivate student development of the skills needed to achieve in a new media learning environment that will lead toward workforce readiness for the 21st Century. .

We feature broadening engagement in the use of emerging technologies with referential case studies, research and books, as well as videos from the George Lucas Educational Foundation, the National Academy of Sciences and provide examples of how digital media empower youth, and encourages self-directed learning, unfolds in three stages of progressively greater immersion and learning: what they label as “hanging out,” “messing around,” and “geeking out.”

Finally, we connect the dots to STEM and the computational sciences with games, and virtual learning initiatives that go from data to discovery and scientific learning that identifies and nurtures pools of potential STEM talent ?

Since No Child Left Behind was created testing has taken over our schools. Not just the testing for the program , the state tests, the interim tests, the practice tests, the grade level tests, and the school focus tests. Even in the best of teaching situations, testing has become out of control. Think AYP. Thinking about it is one thing individualizing it for a school a difficult problem.One has only to look at the matrix of the tests that have been created in Washington DC to see that testing has become teaching. The board said that innovation had been strangled in our schools and offered new ways or working.

People who should be brought forward with new ideas in education, are people like Dr, Chris Dede,Dr. Shirley Malcom, Dr. Norm Augustine, Dr. Paul Resta, Dr. Robert Panoff. But maybe they are not “sexy” enough. Maybe the Barbie doll syndrome even fits in education. Maybe you have to be “cute” to get a voice.
Maybe reporters don’t do their homework even through contacts with their own networks?

Food for Thought

Best Practices workshop last Thursday and Friday, December 10-11. The videos are now posted, and the links appear on the attached agenda. As a reminder, here is the link to the project site with power points.

http://www7.nationalacademies.org/bota/B

est_Practices_Homepage.html Please feel free to share these links with anyone you think might be interested.
Best Practices for State Assessment Systems: Improving Assessment while Revisiting Standards
www7.nationalacademies.org
Board on Testing and Assessment The National Academies 500 5th Street, NW – 11th Floor Washington, D.C. 20001 Tel: 202-334-2353 Fax: 202-334-1294 E-mail: bota1@nas.edu

So we are on another journey to find a solution. State Standards are the New Movement.

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December 7, 2009— The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and its
partners are launching Computer Science Education Week (CSEdWeek) to
uncover and remedy the inadequacy of the nation’s computer science
education system at the K-12 level. While 5 of the top 10 fastest
growing jobs are in computing-related fields, the percent of schools
with rigorous high school computing courses fell from 40 percent to 27
percent from 2005 to 2009. The last 60 years witnessed an
extraordinary burst of innovation and talent that have produced a
nation where most can scarcely remember life without computers. Yet
this innovation-based society is at risk if students are not learning
fundamental computing knowledge in our nation’s schools.

“CSEdWeek is a new national movement to raise awareness of the
significance of computer science in our daily lives and our economy,”
said John White, CEO of ACM. “We need to make a concrete connection in
people’s minds between that reality and the need to focus on computing
knowledge in K-12 classrooms. The conversation about computer science
education speaks directly to the issues of innovation, competitiveness,
and a healthy future.”

Watch John White’s introduction to CSEdWeek on the official YouTube
channel: http://www.youtube.com/CSEdWeek

Computer Science Education Week, December 6-12, 2009, recognizes that
computing:
Touches everyone’s daily lives and plays a critical role in society
Drives innovation and economic growth
Provides rewarding job opportunities
Prepares students with the knowledge and skills they need for the
21st
century

Why is Computer Science Education Important?
It exposes students to critical thinking
It is essential for success in the digital age
Too few students are exposed to opportunities presented by computer
science

Educators, parents, policymakers, professionals and students are
invited to become part of this important effort by utilizing the
valuable resources on this web site.
Computer Science Education Week is a joint effort led by ACM with the
cooperation and deep involvement of the Computer Science Teachers
Association, the Computing Research Association, the National Center
for Women & Information Technology, the Anita Borg Institute, the
National Science Foundation, Google, Inc., Intel, and Microsoft. The
U.S. House of Representatives passed the resolution creating CSEdWeek,
which was introduced by Congressmen Vernon Ehlers (R-MI) and Jared
Polis (D-CO).

Computer Science Education Week (CSEdWeek), December 6-12, recognizes
the critical role of computing in society and the need to expose more
students to the opportunities Computer Science presents.

The week was designated in honor of Grace Murray Hoppers’ Birthday on
December 9th. While living in Arlington, we students had the priviledge
of meeting Grace Hopper.

H. Res. 558

In the House of Representatives, U. S.,

Enacted on October 20, 2009.

Whereas computing technology has become an integral part of culture
and is transforming how people interact with each other and the world
around them;
Whereas computer science is transforming industry, creating new
fields
of commerce, driving innovation in all fields of science, and
bolstering productivity in established economic sectors;
Whereas the field of computer science underpins the information
technology sector of our economy, which is a significant contributor to
United States economic output;
Whereas the information technology sector is uniquely positioned to
help with economic recovery through the research and development of new
innovations;

Whereas National Computer Science Education Week can inform
students,
teachers, parents, and the general public about the crucial role that
computer science plays in transforming our society and how computer
science enables innovation in all science, technology, engineering, and
mathematics disciplines and creates economic opportunities;
Whereas providing students the chance to participate in
high-quality
computer science activities, including through science scholarships,
exposes them to the rich opportunities the field offers and provides
critical thinking skills that will serve them throughout their lives;
Whereas all students deserve a thorough preparation in science,
technology, engineering, and mathematics education, including access to
the qualified teachers, technology, and age-appropriate curriculum
needed to learn computer science at the elementary and secondary levels
of education;
Whereas these subjects provide the critical foundation to master
the
skills demanded by our 21st century workforce;
Whereas computer science education has challenges to address,
including distinguishing computer science from technology literacy and
providing adequate professional development for computer science
teachers;
Whereas the field of computer science has significant equity
barriers
to address, including attracting more participation by females and
underrepresented minorities to all levels and branches;
Whereas Grace Murray Hopper, one of the first females in the field
of
computer science, engineered new programming languages and pioneered
standards for computer systems which laid the foundation for many
advancements in computer science; and
Whereas the week of December 7, in honor of Grace Hopper’s
birthday,
is designated as “National Computer Science Education Week”: Now,
therefore, be it

Resolved, That the House of Representatives—
(1) supports the designation of National Computer Science Education
Week;
(2) encourages schools, teachers, researchers, universities, and
policymakers to identify mechanisms for teachers to receive cutting
edge professional development to provide sustainable learning
experiences in computer science at all educational levels and encourage
students to be exposed to computer science concepts;

(3) encourages opportunities, including through existing programs, for
females and underrepresented minorities in computer science; and

(4) supports research in computer science to address what would
motivate increased participation in this

resources
http://www.csedweek.org/CSEDWeek

Comments(1)

Dialing Up the Digital Divide

Maybe those connected really don’t care about us!!

One of the following stories of the digital divide is a story of of the suburbs near Washington. I live in Washington DC, my family lives in Fairfax and I travel all over the US in my work to see and understand the various aspects of the DIgital Divide. I am passionate about the work because I am an accidental technology pioneer and I am a woman, and a teacher.

In the discussion of the digital divide opinions like mine are often dismissed.Many teachers have been overlooked in the quest for the meaningful use of technology. Lots of men want to cut to the chase and leapfrog over the teachers. I find that insulting. It is also short sighted in that teachers do indeed touch the future.

Is there still a Digital Divide?

Sure there is. As long as technology advances there will be a digital divide. We can at least talk about it again,this is a new administration. We have been asked by the FCC, the Dept of Education and other groups to give voice to our frustration and angst with the uses of technology. Of course the problem is that those who need to talk to us the most about the digital divide may not be connected.

I am a Digital Pioneer, and I helped to write the documents that helped the US to think of how we might use the Internet. The NIIAC KickStart Initiative was the first major effort by the private sector to identify the importance of integrating technology into the classrooms and to develop an initiative to make it happen. Then, in February of 1996, President Clinton issued his technology literacy challenge, at which time he challenged leaders from across the country to work together to connect all schools to the Internet by the year 2000. It did not happen.

As part of his challenge, President Clinton identified four critical elements — these have become known as the “four pillars.” These are:
Connections — Ensuring that all schools are connected to the Internet
Hardware — Ensuring that schools have adequate hardware for instructional use
Content — Ensuring that appropriate content exists for teachers to integrate into their curricula
Professional Development — Ensuring that teachers are equipped with the necessary skills to integrate the technology into the curriculum.

That was two administrations ago and a whole decade of student have grown up since then. I understand the plight of many teachers who have had little or no real training to be fluid users of media in their work. I also know that there are teachers who are not ready for the depth of knowledge that students can reach with the tiniest of fingers, on the Internet. It is true that many students do not know how to judge the information they attain as to accuracy. But that is only a small part of the story. First you need to be connected in meaningful ways.

Wiki, Blog? Twitter? Second Life , White Board.. Or?Ed Tech Pedagogy?

My story is variable. I work in Outreach to the use of Educational technology. I am an accidental pioneer in the use of technology, because a child had a need. I am always racing to learn the newest application, to finesse the uses of technology and sometimes I am behind in my learning. I am a minority who fell into the use of technology at the National Geographic for a summer and then later with the NASA educational portals and projects, and other prominent partnerships. I am a Christa McAuliffe Educator. I don’t believe in just vendored solutions to the problem of the digital divide. There are products that make a difference but the real difference has to be in changing the way in which we teach.

I like this paragraph too, in a recent Bob Herbert Opinion in the New York Times.

Bob says, ” For me, the greatest national security crisis in the United
States is the crisis in education. We are turning out new generations
of Americans who are whizzes at video games and may be capable of
tweeting 24 hours a day but are nowhere near ready to cope with the
great challenges of the 21st century.”

“An American kid drops out of high school at an average rate of one
every 26 seconds. In some large urban districts, only half of the
students ever graduate. Of the kids who manage to get through high
school, only about a third are ready to move on to a four-year college.”

“It’s no secret that American youngsters are doing poorly in school at
a time when intellectual achievement in an increasingly globalized
world is more important than ever. International tests have shown
American kids to be falling well behind their peers in many other
industrialized countries, and that will only get worse if radical
education reforms on a large scale are not put in place soon.”

Reality? Reality!

So students have some familiarity with the use of media, but what about
subject content? What about the deep divide in knowledge networks and
access to learning resources. We know that many students, and families
do not have access to broadband, or quality resources based on a lack
of the first problem which is the tool.

They have neither regular access to the Internet at home, limited in some places but not a steady way to use the resources on the Internet. I call these the digitally deficit. They don’t have time to really, explore, examine, evaluate and embed the use of the Internet in their work. They cannot
learn the sophisticated uses of the resources that are available.

Or they don’t have a reliable tool, neither a phone, a Netbook, a PC. They have no easy access to what a lot of people take for granted. Cable is onetype of media they may have some access to and or limited games.

Contrasts/ Maybe They Don’t Really Care about us!!!

I went last month to the Supercomputing Conference in Portland where we talked about the future and saw wonderful things in Supercomputing, to a rural tribal area in Oregon where I only could do dialup, and it was much too slow for my work. I was busy all day at the conference and had no clue that in a few days I would be basically unconnected for days. My hosts did not have broadband it was also not available to me in the community without driving long distances in the dark over treacherous roads.

You probably don’t know the disconnect in rural areas, and I am very sure that you would be surprised about the disconnect in tribal areas of the US.

Recently a group of tribes went to the FCC.

Among the key policy recommendations in the NPM New Media Study are that the Federal government needs to:

Implement a new and robust strategic initiative targeting Tribal communications development.

Create a Tribal Broadband Plan within the National Broadband Plan.

Create new means of effectuating consultation and coordination with Tribal governments.

Undertake Universal Service Fund Reform to recognize the unique characteristic of both Tribal Lands and Tribal cultures.
Increase access to spectrum and remove barriers to use of spectrum by Tribal Entities.

Undertake greater federal funding and education, and the creation of a new federal program mechanism to support further connectivity and adoption within Native Nations

Support future additional research and analysis.

Beyond Tribes!!

I have a dear friend who lives near Olympia That was where I went next.. She only uses dialup once a week. Her eyes were wide in wonder as I snapped pictures with my IPhone. The GPS was new to her too. She did have limited channels of television on Comcast. She would have loved the FoodNetwork. I was able to show her how to pull recipes from the web.
She is not a minority, nor poor. She just was not into the technology of today. We do email together. I never knew that she had limited technology resources. This was In rural Washington State.

What No Connections?

No broadband was available to me until I checked into a posh hotel. I curled up at the fireplace and attacked the mountains of email that had waited for me. In the rural place I did have an IPhone, but checking my vast correspondence with the IPhone was a task I could not accomplish. I work a lot with developing nations. Perhaps we have many places in the US that also qualify as places of need.

My other tools worked just fine.I could find and locate the places I wanted to drive to by satellite. Most of the time my cell phone worked.

Who Tells the Stories of the Digitally Deficit?

In my work I carry a DVD from the George Lucas Education Foundation in my purse to tell the story of the DIgital Natives.

http://www.edutopia.org/digital-generation.

I don’t think many people are telling the stories of those who are digitally deficit.I admire the work of the Department of Education in outreach, but many of the people they need to talk to are unaware of the best uses of technology. You can just check into the school system in the District of Columbia to see what I mean, if you wanted to test my theory. Even, however in Virginia, once you drop below Richmond, Virginia teachers tell me that they cannot access most of the sites i want them to use in workshops. It is a fact.

. There is also a group that does not have a clue as to what they are missing who do not do the participatory culture, or much beyond a possible cell phone, and or video games. They would never quality to write a story for the various foundations because they are not equipped to use the new tools of media that are a part of the application, except perhaps in a guided experience at school or in a learning place where technology is used. What would happen if the NTIA and or other groups had a way of letting people tell their digitally deficit story?

There are digital natives, digital immigrants, and the digitally
deficit, as well as digital pioneers. When you are cruising on the net,
poking in the cloud, using your 2.0 applications you may forget that
there are people who cannot, on a regular basis access the content you
can on the net.

According to the Pew Charitable Trust,

http://www.pewinternet.org/~/media//Files/Reports/2009/Home-Broadband-Adoption-2009.pdf

Home broadband adoption stood at 63% of adult Americans as of April
2009,up from 55% in May, 2008.
The latest findings of the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American
Life Project mark a departure from the stagnation in home high-speed
adoption rates that had prevailed from December, 2007 through December,
2008. During that period, Project surveys found that home broadband
penetration remained in a narrow range between 54% and 57%.

According to the report the greatest growth in broadband adoption in
the past year has taken place among population subgroups which have
below average usage rates. Among them:

Senior citizens: Broadband usage among adults ages 65 or older grew
from 19% in
May, 2008 to 30% in April, 2009.

Low-income Americans: Two groups of low-income Americans saw strong
broadband growth from 2008 to 2009.
Respondents living in households whose annual household income is
$20,000 or
less, saw broadband adoption grow from 25% in 2008 to 35% in 2009.
Respondents living in households whose annual incomes are between
$20,000
and $30,000 annually experienced a growth in broadband penetration from
42%
to 53%.

The important clue here is respondents. If you don’t have access you
can’t respond to the query, and give a voice to your frustration. Maybe
you don’t have frustration because you don’t know what you are missing.
Maybe you don’t care!!

Digital divide narrows, but gap remains for many

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/12/05/AR2009120501746.html

By Annie Gowen
Saturday, December 5, 2009 1:41 PM

Julija Pivoriunaite’s heart sinks when one of her teachers at Glasgow
Middle School announces that the class must go online to do a homework
assignment. It happens almost every school day.

Julija’s mind whirls with the complicated — and stressful — options
available to get her assignments done, as her family has no reliable
Internet service at home. The 11-year-old could work after school in
her Fairfax County school’s computer lab, but she said it’s only open
two days a week. The library has free computers, but students can only
work for a limited time if it’s busy. Finding rides is tough.

“I see my friends do their work, and I struggle to get the access I
need. It makes me sad,” said Julija, 11, a hoodie-wearing blond whose
fluent English betrays little hint that she came here from Lithuania
just a few years ago. She keeps asking her parents for high-speed
Internet and the answer is always the same: Soon, soon, but money’s
tight.

The digital divide has narrowed dramatically in the last ten years.
Roughly two-thirds of American households now report using the Internet
at home, according to the U.S. Census. In the affluent Washington
suburbs, the numbers are even higher; more than 90 percent of Fairfax
households with children have home computers, according to a recent
survey by the school system.

But even in Fairfax, the digital divide lives on in the study carrels
of Woodrow Wilson library. Most afternoons, the Falls Church library is
crowded with students from low-income or immigrant families using
computers. While they live in one of the richest counties in the
nation, these students recount skipping lunch to work at school labs or
trudging up to 45 minutes to the library after the school day is over.

Such effort is necessary because students are doing more and more of
their work online — reading textbooks, watching podcasts, posting on
discussion boards and creating PowerPoint presentations. The most
searched-for term in the D.C. area this year was “fcps blackboard”
according to Google. That’s the county’s 24-hour online system where
teachers post homework assignments and study guides, children ask
questions or participate in discussion groups, and parents monitor
classwork and grades.

University of Southern California professor Henry Jenkins calls this
new phase of the digital divide the “participation gap” — the huge
chasm between students who have 24-7 access to the Internet at home
versus those struggling to do their work in public spaces. Those with
home access have a big advantage because they’ll have ample time to
develop social networking, research and other skills necessary to
succeed later on, Jenkins said.

Without a computer, “There’s a kind of a wall, a barrier to the world,”
explained Ying Wu, 18, a senior at J.E.B. Stuart High School.

She earned a 4.2 G.P.A. in the school’s International Baccalaureate
program despite the fact that she did not have a computer at home until
recently. She says she got really good at coping skills like writing
her papers out longhand then typing them out “so fast” at school. She
filched her sister’s library card so she could get more than her
allotted time at the library. It’s another complicated calculus – card
holders can only work in two 30 minute increments if others are
waiting, for a total of 60 minutes a day.

She remembers looking longingly at a classmate’s elaborate PowerPoint
project on eco-friendly medical technology, trimmed with pictures of
doctors and solar panels, that she would never have had time to do. She
worked at a Borders book store this summer so she could buy herself a
$700 Dell laptop.

“This is the most expensive thing I have,” Wu said, rubbing it
lovingly. “It’s the whole point of my world.”

Administrators said they work to accommodate students like these by
opening school libraries and computers labs before and after school and
at lunch. The district has 103,000 computers, about 90 percent of them
available for student use.

But the effort is complicated because many lower-income students take
the bus home right after school to care for younger siblings or work
jobs to support their families.

“We are limited unfortunately because of the situation of many of our
students,” said Pamela Jones, the principal at J.E.B. Stuart, where 40
percent of students hail from other countries and more than half are
eligible for free and reduced lunches, a key indicator of poverty.
“It’s hard for them.”

This year the school instituted a 40-minute study period called “Raider
Time” built into the school day aimed at those who can’t stay after
school.

Students said their instructors showed varying degrees of sympathy for
their plight.

“They don’t want to hear excuses,” said Daritza Perla, 16, a junior at
Edison High School. She was cited for being tardy earlier this year
after she got held up at the school library trying to print an
assignment out. “Most of my teachers are pretty understanding, but they
would prefer to have it on time.”

Her mother, Maria, 49, said in Spanish that she and her husband, an
auto mechanic, would love to buy Daritza a computer, but can’t afford
it. She worries that she misses important news from school by not
having email and wishes her daughter was home more instead of
constantly at the library.

“It gives me sadness and frustration,” she said. “I would prefer she be
here.”

Librarians at Woodrow Wilson crafted an excuse note for 15-year-old
Juan Henriquez after he lost a eight-page paper on the Bill of Rights
because his session on the computer timed out before he’d saved his
work.

“I felt mad,” Juan recalled recently. “I didn’t know what I was going
to do.”

Librarians often find themselves stepping out of their traditional
roles to become part counselors, part social workers to the students.

“Even in one of the richest counties in the country, there are pockets
…where people don’t have access to modern technology,” said Mohammed
Esslami, the Woodrow Wilson branch manager. Fairfax has the
second-highest median income in the country, second only to neighboring
Loudoun County.

Juan, the son of Salvadoran immigrants, said he prefers working at the
library because if he stays after to work in the school lab he gets too
hungry. He usually takes the bus home and eats a quick dinner of beans,
chicken and rice his mother has left him before heading out to study.

He lives in one of the many low-slung brick apartment complexes in the
Culmore neighborhood just off Route 7 in Fairfax. From there, it’s a
short walk to Best Buy, where he often goes to look at the shiny
laptops for sale. He wishes he had one. But he insisted he doesn’t envy
his classmates who do.

“I don’t feel jealous for nobody,” he said.

A minute later he sees a reporter whip out a small BlackBerry. His eyes
widened.

“Do you have WiFi on that?” he asked.

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Thank you to everyone who sent in a proposal for Ethics and Game Design: Volume Two.

The proposals were originally due today. Since many of you are still
recuperating from airplane delays, the swine flu, and holiday
shopping, I decided to postpone the deadline one week to Monday,
December 7th, 2009.

Thanks!
Karen
___

I am excited to announce that “Ethics and Game Design: Teaching Values
through Play” will be coming out in February 2010.

The book features the following authors:

Henry Jenkins
Chris Swain
Miguel Sicart
Brenda Brathwaite
John Sharp
Colleen Macklin
Erin Hoffman
John Nordlinger
& many more!

Wish you could have contributed? You still can, because Volume 2 is
coming out in late 2010/early 2011. I invite you all to contribute to the book,
which will provide a diverse and comprehensive compendium of case
studies, theoretical frameworks, and empirical research in the
emerging field of ethics development through games and play. Your
proposal would be due on or before December 7, 2009 (a brief two to
three-page synopsis will suffice), with accepted proposals notified by
December 23, 2009. The full chapter is due by February 15, 2010.

For more detail on what we’re looking for, you can see the full call
below or check out the call for Volume One here:

http://www.columbia.edu/~kls2108/callforchapters.htm

And, please join the Ethics and Game Design Facebook Group at:

http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=39391086363&ref=ts

Thanks!
Karen Schrier

____________

CALL FOR CHAPTER PROPOSALS
Proposal Submission Deadline: December 7, 2009
Full Chapter Submission Deadline: February 15, 2010
Designing Games for Ethics: Models, Techniques and Frameworks

A book edited by
Karen Schrier, Columbia University, USA, and Dr. David Gibson,
University of Vermont, USA

To be published by IGI Global:

http://www.igi-global.com/requests/details.asp?ID=735

Introduction
Ethics is the practice of enacting moral judgment to achieve a better
life—the process of making choices according to one’s own conception
of how to be a good person. Games and simulations can be rich
playgrounds for the practice of these ethical choices, as they offer
the ability to iterate and reflect on multiple possibilities and
consequences. As such, educators and researchers are beginning to
consider the use of games in supporting ethical reasoning and
character development. Moreover, games have been and continue to be
the subject of conversations, controversies, and deliberations about
ethics. Game developers, publishers, and the public often differ in
opinion about the choices made in the creation, distribution, and
promotion of a game, bringing up larger questions about the role of
entertainment, art, and business in our society. The potential for
games to foster ethical thinking and discourse—and not whether games
are inherently good or bad—will be the thrust of this timely book.

Objective of the Book
Designing Games for Ethics will provide a diverse and comprehensive
compendium of case studies, theoretical frameworks, and empirical
research in the emerging field of ethics, values, games, and play.
This book will take a cross-disciplinary approach, inviting research,
critiques, and perspectives from computer science, education,
philosophy, law, media studies, management, cognitive science,
psychology, and art history. It investigates the following questions:
How do we better design and use games to foster ethical thinking and
discourse? What are the theories and methodologies that will help us
understand, model, and assess ethical thinking in and around games?
How do we use games in classrooms and informal educational settings to
support moral development? A major goal of this collection is to bring
together the diverse and growing community of voices and begin to
define the field, identify its primary challenges and questions, and
establish the current state of the discipline. Such a rigorous
foundation for the study of ethics will help to appropriately inform
future games, policies, standards, curricula, products, and the like.

Target Audience
The target audience is very diverse, ranging from practitioners of
game development to journalists, to philosophers and educators.
Researchers and students studying game design, media and games will
find this an essential text for understanding how to better design,
teach, and study the current generation of learners. Educators will
use this to further their understanding of the potentials and limits
of games, and how to creatively incorporate emerging technology into
their curricula, standards, and policies. Game developers and
publishers can use this text to further their designs, to help refine
their choices and practices, and to better think through the
implications of their decisions. Journalists, cultural critics, and
reviewers can use this publication to consider alternate ways to view
games and the nature of their controversies. Finally, this text will
attract members of diverse academic, development, and consumer
communities to interact, share and discuss findings, frameworks and
theories.

Recommended topics include, but are not limited to, the following:
• Definition of the field of ethics and games
• Evaluation and formulation of relevant theoretical frameworks
• Methods for assessing ethics in games
• Criteria for studying ethics and games
• Historical and contemporary context of ethics and games
• Case studies (from researchers, educators and practitioners)
• Ethics and literacy
• Ethics and ethics games in the classroom
• Educational opportunities and limits for teaching values through play
• Ethics and standards in game development
• Ethics and the promotion of games
• Communities of play and ethics
• Issues of race, sex, violence and gender in games
• Ethics and transmedia storytelling
• Future implications and the ethical citizen

Submission Procedure
Researchers and practitioners are invited to submit on or before
December7, 2009, a 2-3 page chapter proposal clearly explaining the
mission and concerns of his or her proposed chapter. Authors of
accepted proposals will be notified by December 23, 2009 about the
status of their proposals and sent chapter guidelines. Full chapters
are expected to be submitted by February 15, 2010. All submitted
chapters will be reviewed on a double-blind review basis. Further
information on this publication can be found at:

http://www.columbia.edu/~kls2108/callforchapters.htm.

Publisher
This book is scheduled to be published by IGI Global (formerly Idea
Group Inc.), publisher of the “Information Science Reference”
(formerly Idea Group Reference), “Medical Information Science
Reference,” “Business Science Reference,” and “Engineering Science
Reference” imprints. For additional information regarding the
publisher, please visit www.igi-global.com. This publication is
anticipated to be released in late 2010.

Important Dates
December 7, 2009: Proposal Submission Deadline
December 23, 2009: Notification of Acceptance
February 15, 2010: Full Chapter Submission
March 22, 2010: Review Results Returned
April 15, 2010: Revised Chapter Submission
May 15, 2010: Final Chapter Submission

Inquiries and submissions can be forwarded electronically (Word document) to:

Karen Schrier
Columbia University, USA
E-mail: kschrier@alum.mit.edu

http://www.columbia.edu/~kls2108/callforchapters.htm

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