Showing posts with label Eliezer Jones. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Eliezer Jones. Show all posts

Wednesday, May 23, 2012

Teach children to be their own Internet filters

"For it's one, two, three strikes...never mind."
I learned may things about many things while a Jim Joseph Fellow at the Lookstein Institute for Jewish  Education in the Diaspora at Bar Ilan University. One of them is to "Listen to Dr. Eliezer Jones." He is usually funny and nearly always right. This past Sunday Orthodox Jews did what the New York Mets couldn't - they filled Citi Field. And they did it to hold a rally against the internet (the rally was advertised on the web, curiously. I dismissed the whole thing when I first heard about it as just another example of an insular part of the of the Jewish people becoming even more insular. Today, my friend Eliezer and a colleague of his from Yeshiva University made me think again. And again. They taught me something (more than one something). Let them tel it as published by the Jewish Telegraphic Agency...

OPINION
NEW YORK (JTA) -- Tens of thousands of Jews filled Citi Field in Queens on Sunday and heard from haredi Orthodox leaders that the Internet should be avoided in the home at all costs and used sparingly at work, and then only with a filter blocking content that could be damaging spiritually.
Debate as you will what some may see as draconian edicts to protect the Jewish community from moral corruption. But at the heart of the matter is a question that should concern us all: How do we keep our children safe on the Internet?

We know that we cannot work around the Internet. Research from the Pew Foundation indicates that 54 percent of children say they go to Google first when they have a question, as opposed to only 26 percent who say they go to a parent and 3 percent to a teacher. Rather we must figure out how parents and teachers can make this important tool work safely and effectively for our kids.

The difficulty is that even the simple solutions are incredibly complicated. Powerful filters can block illicit images and material, but those filters often block out the good with the bad and limit far too much useful information. This solution has been discussed and debated on our own campus concerning Internet access in dormitories.

Some yeshivot have considered avoiding technology altogether and sticking with books and blackboards. But that would leave students without the digital competence required to succeed academically in college and beyond, not to mention that it would rob teachers of increasingly exciting and effective educational tools.
The only real answer is that as parents and teachers, we must instill in our children a strong value system based on Jewish morals and traditions that allows our children to become their own filters when exploring the Internet. That would be far more powerful than any protective software.

The onus is clearly on us because it seems that children will listen to our rules, at least when it comes to the Internet. Only three in 10 young people reported to a Kaiser Foundation survey that they are given clear rules about how much time they may spend using a computer, watching TV or playing video games. The average child with no rules spends more than three hours per day on such media. Those who are given rules spend considerably less time.

Yeshiva high school students said they would be receptive to rules. More than half of those surveyed by researcher Debbie Fox, director of the Aleinu Family Resource Center, a program of the Jewish Family Service of Los Angeles, said that they would welcome more guidance from parents regarding Internet use.
These same students, in fact, said that they would be far stricter with their own future adolescent children regarding responsible Internet use than their parents, and would monitor their children much more closely.

The dangers of the Internet are not limited to challenging content. A 2010 Kaiser Family Foundation study showed that about half of students in grades seven through 12 said they do their homework with media open that do not pertain to their task at hand. In other words, about 50 percent of middle and high school students are doing homework with divided attention. And while some kids may believe that they are being more efficient, multitasking has been proven in adults to cause higher levels of stress and lower levels of efficiency.

While some kids can multitask well, it's up to parents to actively determine if their children work more efficiently while doing so or while focusing on their work without interruption. Parents should collaborate with their children to test whether they are more efficient when not being interrupted or distracted, and then meter their background activity accordingly.

The greatest challenge of all, however, may be making sure that our kids completely separate from the Internet at times.  According to the Pew Foundation, 75 percent of American teens prefer texting to in-person contact with friends. Perhaps it's no coincidence that this generation's empathy levels among adolescents are significantly lower than those of previous generations.

It may seem that adolescents in every generation feel isolated and tuned out at some point or another. But it turns out that their computer habits may be compounding the problem. Parents need to teach children that some of their relationships must include direct face-to-face interaction without the distraction of text messages and cell phone calls.

While some of what occurred at Citi Field this past weekend might seem foreign, we must work to ensure that our students and our children can grow up as highly moral and successful Jewish digital citizens.

(Dr. Eliezer Jones is the educational technology specialist at Yeshiva University's Institute for University-School Partnership. Dr. David Pelcovitz is the Gwendolyn and Joseph Straus chair in psychology and Jewish education at YU's Azrieli Graduate School of Jewish Education and Administration. For more information about safe Internet rules and guidelines, visit www.yuschoolpartnership.org/parentguidedigitalage.)

Sunday, December 26, 2010

"Super..." and "Amazing..." Curricular Projects

This is cross-posted from Caren Levine's blog  jlearn2.0. Caren is one of those people who is always thinking about the intersection of Jewish education and technology. Her digital and analog lenses work in stereo, kind of a unified field theory of Jewish education. She cross-posted it to YU 2.0, an wonderful membership site maintained by my friend and fellow JJF Fellow, Dr. Eliezer Jones.

A question I am often asked is, "Yes, but what are some examples of how these resources are integrated into the curriculum? By real live educators with real live learners!"

Presenting two free ebooks to whet your appetites and tickle your imaginations:

The Super Book of Web Tools for Educators: A comprehensive guide to technology in all k-12 classrooms. Articles include perspectives from administrators and teachers, as well as elementary school, middle school, and high school projects, and projects centered around particular subject matter or tools (ESL, Skype, blogging). Contributors include notable education bloggers Steve Anderson, Richard Byrne, George Couros, Larry Ferlazzo, Silvia Rosenthal Tolisano, and others. Check it out!


But wait, there's more! Be sure to read through Terry Freedman's The Amazing Web 2.0 Projects Book, a compilation that is chock full of practical ideas for the classroom. The many contributors include an international cast of educators such as Terry Freedman, Jackie Gerstein, Julie Lindsay, Sharon Peters, Shelley Terrell, Silvia Tolisana, Jen Wagner, and Reuven Werber, to name drop just a few.

 

Friday, December 24, 2010

Seeing through the eyes of another.
The "Nalaga’at" Center.

Dr. Eliezer Jones is a friend of one of my colleagues on the Jim Joseph Foundation Fellowship at the Lookstein Institute at Bar Ilan university. He has been blogging daily about the Israel trip we just completed this morning. I want to share his posting about our dinner this past Monday because I think the experience and his posting raise the issue of experiential learning. We all do it. Do we do it well? Could we do it better? What are we missing? You can see the rest of his posts on Eliezer Jones's blog. The restaurant/theater is called Na Laga'at which means please touch, because people who are deaf and blind (as their actors are) need to use touch to communicate.)

Another amazing day on the JJF Fellowship Israel retreat. In fact, I feel a bit guilty that I have not been blogging about every aspect of the different days as there have been so many memorable experiences. For example, today we began with a presentation from Rabbi Seth Farber, Ph.D. Rabbi Farber is the founder and director of ITIM, The Jewish Life Information Center which is “dedicated to making Jewish life accessible to all” by fighting for social justice. Then we spent three hours learning together at ALMA Home for Hebrew Culture. ALMA “seeks to acquaint Israelis with the wealth of Jewish heritage” and is a secular Beit Medresh. However, although they are experiences I will never forget, it was how we spent dinner that changed forever the way I view an aspect of the human experience. We had dinner at The "Nalaga’at" Center.

According to their site, “The "Nalaga’at" Center, located at the Jaffa port in Tel Aviv, was founded by the "Nalaga’at" non-profit organization and opened its gates to the public in December 2007. The Center is comprised of the "Nalaga’at" Theater, home to the Deaf-blind Acting Ensemble; CafĂ© Kapish, with its deaf waiters and BlackOut, the pitch-black restaurant with its staff of blind waiters. The "Nalaga’at" Center currently employs some 70 people, most of whom are deaf, blind or deaf-blind.”

The JJF Fellows ate at BlackOut, the pitch-black restaurant served by blind waiters. To describe the level of darkness that exists there is to only to describe it as imagine you were blind, which for most of us is impossible to describe. I have never experienced such darkness. There was no adjusting to the darkness, being able to see edges or small rays of light. It was pitch black and my body was reacting in a way I did not prepare for.


As soon as we were escorted to our table conga line style and, yes, we did make choo choo sounds, I began to get anxious. This is not something I generally get. I was fidgety and talking more than I generally do, which is a lot. I began to notice perfumes, cigarette smoke (there is no smoking in the restaurant) and the aromas of the food as my other senses began searching to connect to something. I began to hear noises that overwhelmed my ability to hear the person across the table from me. My senses were frantic.

When are food came, things calmed down a bit. I ate delicious fish with my hands (although I had a fork and knife I kept bringing an empty fork to my mouth) that was warm but not hot lest I burn myself. There was no coffee or soup for that same reason. We had to pass each other water by touching each others hands. Someone spilled, but neither of us knew who it was. We shared bread. My friend kept putting half eaten bread back in the basket. Not cool. The waitresses had bells around their wrists so that we heard them coming and that they would not bump into each other.

This dinner, in such an intense manner, allowed me to “see” through the eyes of another that I would have never experienced unless I too, G-d forbid, were blind. It was only an hour and a half in the darkness, but I not sure I will see things the same way again. I am grateful for the experience and it enhanced my already strong support for experiential learning. I would recommend any school trip to Israel to incorporate The Nalaga’at Center. For those who do not make it here, there are many ways to learn about differences in others in the classroom through temporary experience (i.e. use a wheel chair in school for a day) that can make a significant impact on the perspectives of the students. Technology can also be of great assistance. Click here for a post about using virtual reality used to assist users in experiencing the positive symptoms of schizophrenia.

ShareThis