Random thoughts from AERA
Ed. Research March 26th, 2008
Whew, none of the anti-ed. tech. folks have found my last blog post (yet).
Anyway, my AERA 2008 journey began today. Here are some thoughts:
*Federal grants for educational research: student achievement is the bottom line. If you don’t propose to study anything that can’t be linked to student achievement, don’t bother applying. One prof. who has multiple ED grants even suggested that they don’t expect to find any effects on student achievement from the program they’re investigating, but it’s in the proposal. I guess if you want to be on the gravy train, you’ve got to play by the rules of the game. My only wish is that rather than student achievement, the bottom line was learning. But, I don’t make the rules…maybe someday?
*Cyberbullying: I look forward to reading the papers from this session that I attended. I think it’s really important to frame the issue properly and I suspect there are some good ideas in the papers. I didn’t necessarily hear anything new or exciting in the session, but who can really say anything meaningful in 15 minutes? My take? I think we need to consider whether cyber-bullying is really all that different from what has already been going on forever. I don’t want to imply that “kids will be kids,” but I’m not convinced that cyberbullying is in addition to more traditional forms of bullying. We need to document empirically whether what we know happens in the hallways, on the playgrounds, etc. is still happening or whether it is being replaced by cyberbullying. Also, we need to make sure that educational policymakers at all levels don’t respond by shutting off access to cyberspace. When kids bully each other at the mall, do we close the malls? For lack of a better cliche, let’s not throw the baby out with the bath water.
*Gaming: went to a session chaired by Chris Dede (one of my heroes…I actually introduced myself to Dede and felt a bit like a groupie, but I’m glad I did it). Unfortunately, the work that was being done around the River City Project was way over my head (and the presenter didn’t time his presentation well and had to finish up in warp speed). He was talking about data mining, but pretty much lost me at hello. The other projects under study were interesting, but I didn’t get a sense of the purpose of the researchers. A study of whyville.net seemed interesting, but I didn’t hear anything that blew me away. Regardless, I still remain intrigued by the learning potential within MUVEs, but I just don’t have enough time right now to dig any deeper than my own current surface learning.
*Finally, got to meet fellow blogger Justin Bathon, he of the Edjurist Accord. Good to meet you f-2-f Justin, and I’ll be following your rising star in the Law & Ed. sky.
Off to some receptions tonight (free food, cash bars) and then some fun around NYC with my academic friends/colleagues!
Tags: AERA, cyberbullying, gaming, grants, NYC
Right back at you Jon. Yeah, the Cyberbullying session was on one hand the best presentation I attended at AERA and on the other … ehh? I think there is this idea that seemed pervasive throughout the session that somehow cyberbullying is different from bullying … I just don’t think I buy that either. It is bullying, which just happens to occur online. Like you said, I don’t mean to devalue the seriousness of cyberbullying and certainly as Kevin Brady pointed out the Web opens up new bullying avenues that otherwise might not have existed such as web impersonation, but someone made the point, I can’t remember if it was Kevin or someone else, that the kids don’t consider it cyberbullying. They don’t make a distinction between what happens online and what happens offline. Their online life is intertwined with their offline life and you can’t really separate the two. It’s just their life. So, it seems to me that if there is no actual difference to the kids, then there is something artificial about this distinction between bullying and cyberbullying that the scholarly community seems insistent on making.
My reservations about the distinction between online and offline bullying aside, though, the conversation this presentation started was one of the more valuable ones that I saw, at least from the Law and Ed. SIG presentations. It is almost like cyberbullying is serving as a jumping off point. Whether or not such a thing as cyberbullying even existed, we needed to start having a conversation about becoming technologically literate educational law scholars anyway - and we have needed to do that for a while now. I have sort of begged and pleaded with my colleagues, Jon I am sure this is the same for you, to start learning about the Web 2.0 world that kids inhabit these days. The typical response goes something like … ohh, that’s cool, I will have to check that out sometime. … And then … waiting … waiting … nothing. Right? That’s what happens. But, suddenly with cyberbullying there is a reason. There is a lawsuit. There is a legal issue they can get their heads around. When Kevin Brady stands up there and says the biggest use and avenue of cyberbullying is IMing, I am willing to bet that over 1/2 the audience had no idea whatsoever of what he was talking about. And that is bad, but it is also sort of good. Here are multiple educational law scholars saying this is an important legal issue that we need to be teaching our school administrators. I think that is the kind of mental validation (both from a standpoint of yes this is a legal issue, but also, people in my field are using words I don’t know, I gotta catch up) that could start people down the line of becoming a bit more technologically literate.
So, right, I don’t think we fully have a grasp on how to talk about the “cyber” in cyberbullying yet, but, also, at least we are starting to dive into what the heck “cyber” actually is as a community. I think that is good progress, so I was feeling good after leaving that session. But, I share your concern that there is so much technological illiteracy that fear as developed and this distinction may lead some to just attempt to build the brick wall that was referred to in the presentation.
Hope the receptions were nice. I was sad to miss those.