Author: mtadros

a2k: Kauffman Foundation and NY Law School

mtadros

a2k4 logo
a2k4 logo

Ewing Marion, Kauffman Foundation:

If a2k partners with the human rights movement they have to deal with states as repressive or as supportive players. Objectives might diverge and therefore there is potential for both movements to be together.

Molly Beutz Land, New York Law School

Making argument to why both movements need each other and how they can capitalize on their strengths. Human rights advocates need a2k theories. They have failed to look consistently to access to information for the protection of human rights. There is a connection between human rights knowledge and human rights violations. They have not focused on access to technological infra-structure. There is a historical isolation of those two movements from each other.

A2K is also access to info about health, women’s rights, etc. Those who do not have access to technology of info that is necessary and not just that is available although this is very important. The A2K movement has more difficulty where the barriers to a2k are systemic, especially in regards to intellectual property. There are many reasons why education materials are not available to people around the world – no books, no trucks to move the books, no money to pay for them etc… But we could do more: use the legal framework that the human rights movement has developed. It requires the state to respect the rights of people in their jurisdiction and protect them as well. The state will also create conditions to fulfill that right on their behalf. HR movement recognizes States cannot do all this at once but nontheless States can take immediate steps eg. preventing discrimination etc.

The framework of State accountability is successful in the human rights movement. They were very successful in holding States accountable. We can therefore learn from each other and focusing on mutual strengths can give us new dimensions going forward.

Focus on health information requires the human rights movement to step back and look at it again in terms of access to information, mobile devices that allow doctors to send pics of x-rays etc… women’s rights also is helpful. Access to info is very important in all these cases to protect rights.

We can therefore develop approaches that help each other.

– A2K4 – perespectives on access to knowledge – APC

mtadros

Questions to be discussed in the panel:

  • What is the relevance of A2K and human rights to each other? Which substantive aspects of human rights – for example, health, education, food, freedom of expression, and cultural rights – are implicated by A2K issues and how? Which methodological and institutional approaches hold relevance?
  • Do the A2K and human rights approaches fit together easily or in tension? What unique insights can each offer the other?  What would it mean to theorize A2K as a human right? Is access to knowledge better understood as a negative liberty or a positive entitlement?
  • Is the human rights framework – norms, institutions, and methodologies of advocacy – a useful one for advancing A2K goals? What are the risks, challenges, and opportunities involved in theorizing A2K as a human right? What venues, tools, allies and enemies might be acquired by this framing? [source: http://yaleisp.org/2010/02/a2k4perspectives/]

    • Jeremy Malcolm, Consumers International: A2K is about finding human rights dimensions to legal issues such as communication policies and intellectual properties etc.  A2K is a framework for other human rights issues.

    DSC00286Natasha Primo, Association for Progressive Communications: APC was a network of ISPs and started working with progressive NGOs and mainly in South Africa. Its membership is spreading across the world.

    What do these rights look like in the context of human rights? Access to info is also about access to tools which is access to infrastructure. APC outlined 7 themes: access to all, freed om of expression and association, access to knowledge, shared learning and creation – free and open source software and tech development, privacy, surveillance and encryption, governance of the internet, awareness, protection and realization of rights.

    What is A2K? this evolved and now deals with intellectual rights etc. The right to access to knowledge, the right to freedom of information [national and gvt.], the right to access to publicly-funded information.

    What then is the best strategy? A2K negative liberty or positive entitlement? should we step back from the human rights discourse and begin talking about development? is A2K a new right? interpreting an existing right in an information society contedst; claiming an existing right by pushing a human development agenda?

    APC talks also about linguistic access – ability to impart knowledge in their own language.

    Human rights or human development / human capabilities? There are development activists who claim human rights discourse is not useful – so do we then need to talk about development capabilities approach to social justice – including the rights-based approaches?

    Key principles of human development and the capabilities approach:

    must develop people’s capabilities to lead creative and fulfilling lives. Must allow us to examine the individual’s capacity for exercising choice of what to do and how to be without a context of real or substantive choice, rather than adaptive preferences. Should be the primary goal to economic development.

    10 capabilities and t he international bill of rights.: ability to live life, bodily health, bodily integrity, being treated with dignity, etc.

    Thinking of norms, institutions and methodologies for advocacy. Should we talk about human capabilities rather than human rights? how central is access to knowledge to human capabilities? what is the key challenge: to advocate for a new right or do we look at how realize existing rights and how we turn rights into capabilities? or both?

    – excellent teacher?

    mtadros

    This month The Atlantic published a great in-depth article on what makes a great teacher. Naturally given that I had been thinking about that myself for a long time, I found it very interesting and certainly inspirational in itself. The article followed and interviewed teachers from Teach for America, a nonprofit organization that gives the opportunity to new graduates to teach for two years at a local poor neighbourhood school. The article is largely based on a report they issued on their experience and on what makes a great teacher.

    Only today I was listening to others say they cannot motivate students because students are either motivated or not and there isn’t much you can do. You can guide them, they said, but hard to motivate. I am not totally sure I agree.  I think that  if one inspires a student, one may be able to motivate them as well.

    So what does make an excellent teacher? by excellent, the article in The Atlantic was giving a criteria of getting higher grades than their peers in other classes or other schools for example. While I agree with this criteria, I also think that motivating them in life more than just about grades. In any case, while the article speaks of school-age children, the majority of the criteria applies to all levels of teaching including higher ed.

    One comforting note the article makes is that “effective teaching is neither mysterious nor magical. It is neither a function of  a dynamic personality nor dramatic performance.” This is good to know because it means it is not a ‘genetic’ disorder to be a bad teacher. 🙂  “Great teachers”, one of the ‘great teachers’ said “constantly evaluate what they are doing.” Yes. What a fabulous criteria that is. Constantly evaluating will, for sure, produce different results and make learning a more exciting and dynamic process. That is why teachers who are set in their ways and who refuse to change their method of teaching in any way, are such boring teachers.

    A great teacher listens to the students – but never asks “do you understand” because most of the time, students THINK they understand or shy away from speaking up.  “Great teachers tend to reflect on their performance and adapt accordingly. So people who tend to be self-aware might be a good bet.”  [my emphasis]. Yes indeed. Self-aware and humble. Arrogance, I believe, does not make a teacher see beyond his/her own shadow.

    When asked whether he found his first year on the job hard, one teacher said “I found that the kids were not hard. You paint this picture in your head about how you will teach this lesson, and you can teach the whole lesson and no one gets it.”this is humbleness and an admission of his own failure to engage the students rather than putting the blame squarely on the student.

    Duration of teaching or previous teaching experience do not matter. What does matter are usually the things we overlook. Some success predictors include a history of perseverance. In fact, Teach for America now interviews people and grades them based on their perseverance in the face of challenges they met in their lives. What an interesting criteria! One other very unlikely criteria is that teachers who scored high in ‘life satisfaction‘ and who said they were content with their lives, were 43% more likely to perform well in the classroom. “They may be more adept at engaging their pupils, and their zest and enthusiasm may spread to their students.”  Past performance, ‘especially the kind you can measure is the best predictor of future performance. Recruits who have achieved big, measurable goals in college tend to do so as teachers.”

    Believe it or not, the article quotes from the research that Teach for America made saying that “knowledge matters, but not in every case.” Ivy league grads and women teachers tend to be better teachers, but not always. Other criteria matter must be in the mix. I believe the part of ‘women teachers’ might apply more for regular schools  than for higher ed.

    I think that only a minority of students are just hopeless in terms of motivation. Other factors are at play that may make the learning process unappealing or overwhelming or both. Yet the majority need the motivation and the engagement if given the opportunity. Some students are ‘lost causes’ – no matter what one does.  They just will not cooperate. Some students are just oppositional students who will hate what you do no matter what you do. There isn’t much that can be done about them. Move on. Do not let that hinder you from helping others.

    After all, as educators, our role is to help and guide students towards achieving their goals.

    Looking at all those criteria.. I am wondering if any more can be added. I certainly have my own list that I will post soon.

    – data smog

    mtadros

    An older book from 2007 worth reading:  Data Smog: Surviving the Information Glut by David Shenk, which discusses information overload and the impact of technology on culture. I found the laws of data smog particularly intriguing:

    The Laws of Data Smog

    1. Information, once rare and cherished like caviar, is now plentiful and taken for granted like potatoes.
    2. Silicon circuits evolve much more quickly than human genes.
    3. Computers are neither human nor humane.
    4. Putting a computer in every classroom is like putting an electric power plant in every home.
    5. What they sell is not information technology, but information anxiety.
    6. Too many experts spoil the clarity.
    7. All high-stim roads lead to Times Square.
    8. Birds of a feather flock virtually together.
    9. The electronic town hall allows for speedy communication and bad decisionmaking.
    10. Equifax is watching.
    11. Beware stories that dissolve all complexity.
    12. On the information highway, most roads bypass journalists.
    13. Cyberspace is Republican.

    Not sure I agree with all of them though. Absolute freedom to me is a given.

    But here are his promising remedies:

    Antidote 1: Be Your Own Filter

    The first remedy is simply to identify the clutter and start sweeping it away. Most of us have excess information in our lives, distracting us, pulling us away from our prioritize and from a much-desired tranquility. If we stop just for a moment to look (and listen) around us, we will begin to notice a series of data streams we’d be better off without, including some distractions we pay handsomely for.

    Antidote 2: Be Your Own Editor

    After learning how to filter input, one must shift concern to the equally important task of limiting output. Amidst the data smog, a new kind of social responsibility has emerged — an obligation to be succinct. Just as we’ve had to curtail our toxic emissions in the physical world, the information glut demands that we all be more economical about what we say, write, publish, broadcast, and post online. People who recklessly pump redundant or obfuscatory information into society are the information age equivalents of the miscreants who open their car door at a stop light to dump trash onto the street.

    Antidote 3: Simplify

    Between input and output, there is life itself. How does one live a meaningful life in an ever-more complex and distracting world? One helpful ingredient, I’ve found, is to embrace a new paradigm of simplicity.

    It is often said that we are on the cusp of a whole new age when intelligent machines will take over much of the work we do. I suspect that just the opposite may be true — that we are about to comprehend the true limitations of machines. Once we realize that information technology truly cannot replace human experience, that as it increases the available information it also helps devalue the meaning of each piece of information, we will be on the road to reasserting our dominance over technology.

    Antidote 4: De-nichify

    How to change our electronic Tower of Babel into a modern Agora? The answer is easy, though the solution is not: We need to talk to one another. Recall Bill Bradley’s challenge: “When was the last time you talked about race with someone of a different race? If the answer is never, you’re part of the problem.”

    As we reach across cultural boundaries and pursue interdisciplinary studies, we are pursuing the best kind of education — not just learning how to become more efficient at a specialized task, but how to interact with the rest of humanity. These sorts of pursuits enable us to embrace the joys of education as the best possible antidote to data smog. Education is anti-glut. It is the harnessing of information, organizing it into knowledge and memory. Education also breeds a healthy skepticism, and will help consumers fend off manipulative marketing tactics. Education is the one thing we can’t get overloaded with. The more of it, the better.

    Antidote 5: Don’t Forsake Government; Help Improve It

    Finally, for collective fixes more appropriately enacted on behalf of all society, we must call on that awkward but thoroughly necessary beast, government.

    Yes, government. Federal initiatives are badly needed, mostly because technology policy is too important to be surrendered to chance or to the wealthiest corporations. The cyber-libertarian community has made anti-government rhetoric a fashionable part of the information revolution, mostly in response to a lot of very thoughtless federal legislation. After a particularly stupid law was signed by President Clinton in 1996 — the Communications Decency Act, which aimed to excessively curb speech online — leading cyber thinker John Perry Barlow issued a “Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace,” which rashly proclaimed the Net to be its own world, not a functioning part of conventional society.

    Respectfully, I dissent. The Net is not literally a new world vested with its own sovereignty; it is a new and exciting facet of society, created and subsidized by a democratic government that, for all of its well-publicized bungling and wastefulness, actually works pretty well. Barlow is absolutely correct in describing cyberspace as a very different organism from our physical world. Ultimately, though, the former must fall under the jurisdiction of the latter.

    Find more excerpts here: http://www.rheingold.com/electricminds/html/tom_rheingold_3128.html

    – on education vs teaching

    mtadros

    Non scholae sed vitae discimus

    In a heated discussion with a colleague about one of the classes I occasionally teach, the instructor, who also happens to be the chair of her department, asked me angrily – and rhetorically  “why is it important for  students to learn the history of computers? this is irrelevant.” The class she was talking about is computers 101 where we teach basic computer components and software.  This conversation came at a time when I had been thinking for a few months prior to that, about the difference between education and teaching.  Seneca,  renowned 1st century statesman and philosopher came to mind…  “we do not learn for school, but for life.”  This, in my view, is why we need to teach the history of computers. But more broadly, this sums up what education is about as opposed to teaching.

    Almost all of us have been brought up with the idea of learning and excelling at what we do. We are taught and trained to be motivated,  cut-throat and competitive to meet the ‘demands of the market’. Particularly when teaching disciplines besides the humanities, and more so when teaching programming or math, we as ‘educators’ tend to focus more on the topic at hand and how to make a student the best possible in his/her field. Some even want students to just pass this or that exam, generally multiple choice ones and get it over with.

    This competitive phenomenon is not confined to schools but persists in pop culture too. The focus is always how to be the ‘winner’. Anyone who watches television will see a flood of competition programs that aim at making young people believe that winning is the carte blanche to success.  No matter how immoral, no matter how twisted the means, no matter how many people one tramples upon, the keywords are ‘success’ and ‘winning’. In the end, it is all about the numbers: you won by how much and how much will you make.

    It is my view that there is something fundamentally flawed with this methodology. Is this what education is really about? While winning is a legitimate demand, it is the path to that win or that success that is troublesome to me. Education is about relating life’s experiences to the younger generation.  It is not about this or that software, but about showing that when confronted with choices, one has to always make the moral choice regardless of the consequence. Education is not about showing how a software works or how to differentiate between Perl and Php, nor is it about differentiating between an iambic pentameter and a ballad. Rather, education is about how to differentiate between doing what is right and doing what is wrong, regardless of religion or belief. It is not about making money but about how you are making that money.

    This generation of students has been called, among many other names,  the ‘e-generation’ or the ‘entitlement generation’. Students come to class feeling entitled to privileges that should be earned. It is for this reason that many teachers simply teach; what’s the point in educating anyone if no one will support the teacher in his/her actions? And yet I pity this generation because they are graduating in a very tough world – one where they will be confronted with many choices, both ethical and unethical – a world where they will have to make money in order  to survive a bad economy.  But this makes it even more important to educate rather than teach.

    I am not denying that there are demands of the market and that students need to be taught well in order to compete. But what about the demands of society? whose job is it to educate a generation? who will show this generation that among the demands of society is to give as much as take? that to make a moral choice and lose is more honourable than making an immoral choice and winning? that ‘money is not everything’ – and that this is not a pathetic cliche?

    Whose responsibility is it to educate a generation? and if we want to do it, how do we go about integrating it into the classroom? The following are some suggestions which I had begun implementing – timidly at first for the past couple of years – and then in full force now:

    1. Eliminating multiple choice quizzes. I hate nothing more than those quizzes. They do not show the strengths nor weaknesses of a student, they are dry and they are plain useless. They test only what a student can digest or remember in his/her superficial memory – material that disappears as soon as that quiz is over.
    2. Basing activities in class on team work skills and strengthening collaboration between students. In fact this past semester I have even created a venue for two classes to participate on some issues
    3. Encouraging debate and discussion of real world topics related to the issue at hand – whether it be software use or any other. In fact I think this is why social media and social networking are such a success with the younger generations and we keep hearing how there is peer-to-peer teaching now. Social media allowed younger people to engage in debates and discussions on topics of their interest.
    4. Making a shift from “what the information is” and “how the information is” to “why the information is”. This is achieved through working backwards with the students: showing the end result and how it would impact their lives and then showing the “how to” accomplish that. [I got this particular idea from a student-written paper at MIT]
    5. Making connections: how is what we are studying now connected to a student’s real life? connected to life in general? connected to the past, present and future? In fact I came across a great paper on connections recently and here are some questions about connections that the study suggests:
      “This part reminds me of….
      I felt like…(character) when I….
      If that happened to me I would….
      This book reminds me of…(another text) because….
      I can relate to…(part of text) because one time….
      Something similar happened to me when..”  [http://forpd.ucf.edu/strategies/stratText.html}
      and you could also ask the students some of the questions suggested in that paper.

    There is much more… but for now, any comments would be greatly appreciated.