Experts Debate the Schools of 2021 [Education]

Happy Labor Day, America! You better not be working! Speaking of work, what will school work be like in 10 years? New York Times, do you have an answer?

What's that? You spoke with a bunch of experts and educators and asked them that very same question? What a wild Labor Day miracle! Let's sample a few of the answers before everyone who's not working today jumps on over to the Times for the full audio clips:

Karen Cator, director of educational technology, United States Department of Education, sees a huge shift taking place when digital media finally usurps tree-killing textbooks and other printed materials. This is good! Books are great, but trees are better. Have you ever seen a book take carbon dioxide from the air and give it back to you as life-granting oxygen? The fuck you have! Case in point.

Larry Cuban, emeritus professor, Stanford University School of Education, basically says everyone should hold their damn horses. Progress is coming, but it's really slow! His buzzkill answer is all about how things will drag on for a while before flying schools and virtual reality classroom headset conference calls with Asian moonbases become the norm.

Eileen Lento, education strategist, Intel, predicts that rural areas will become ripe testbeds for new technologies and experimental approaches to education. Why sully our urban and city folk with tests that could go terribly wrong, right Eileen? Saddle the farm folk with that burden, and let us city slickers zip around Manhattan in our robo taxis. Oh, and she says online classes are going to do something or other a lot more in the future too. I bet it involves Intel chips!

There are a few more educational brainiacs making predictions about schooling over at the NYT beyond these few, so take a look! Just don't work yourself too hard today, ok? [NYT]

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Twitter Debate: Is the Service a Soap Box or a Direct Line of Communication? [Twitter]

An insecure loser who was rejected by a Buddhist society and then used Twitter to stalk and harass its leader with more than 8,000 tweets has inadvertently started one of the more interesting social media debates in recent memory.

Mainly, was what William Lawrence Cassidy did when he sent those thousands of hateful, violent messages to Alyce Zeoli, a Buddhist leader based in Maryland the direct harassment of an individual, or was it a broadcast of protected free speech to an audience of Twitter users? Cassidy's messages began the moment Zeoli's organization discovered he was faking lung cancer and his "reincarnation" status in the Buddhist community. They promptly kicked him out of the group.

How the courts answer that question could be critical, as it represents an unexplored area of "Twitter speech."

As the New York Times notes, defamation suits involving Twitter or Facebook are not new, but in regards to this case prosecutors considered it cyberstalking (i.e., the distinction here is the tweets were directed at Zeoli, and were not about her in a public forum).

The outspoken EFF, no stranger to online debate, has already weighed in with support for Cassidy's right to free speech:

"While not all speech is protected by the First Amendment, the idea that the courts must police every inflammatory word spoken online not only chills freedom of speech but is unsupported by decades of First Amendment jurisprudence."

Regardless of the outcome, we do know for certain that Cassidy has no idea what a haiku is. One of his 8,000 hateful, threatening tweets reads, "Ya like haiku? Here's one for ya. Long limb, sharp saw, hard drop."

Indeed. [New York Times via Boing Boing]

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