Wireless Communication and Public School Disconnects

I was listening to National Public Radio talking this morning about how increasingly employees are working from home with advances in the internet, but that in the process they are becoming lonely. Rather than go into work, they host other stay-home internet-using workers in their apartments to work for a day called Jelly. Apparently this is a growing phenomenon in New York, Washington, Chicago, and other big cities.

Meanwhile, two different students from a recent master's class on tech-supported literacy report that their principals will not allow any students to have email accounts. Who knows what havoc they might wreak or what horrors might befall them if they had access to a technology that billions of people across the world have been using for much more than a decade. I think there has always been a disconnect between school and real life learning (remember Mark Twain, "I never let my schooling get in the way of my education."), but I think it's a chasm at present heading toward a cataclysm. While NCLB pushes schools, teachers, and children toward more and more multiple-choice expertise in minutiae and spends billions for testing, most schools I've visited cannot figure out how to budget for more than a single computer in most classrooms.

In the real world, however, choices seems much more complex than multiple choice and we are more and more virtually connected. Yesterday morning, e.g., a doc student and I sat in a coffee shop, sipping a latte and a macchiato. With wireless internet and our two laptops, we held an instant messaging planning session with a colleague in Germany. We designed a research project, explored some free internet resources to support it, set some deadlines, and did it all in greater comfort and without the interruptions of the workplace.