(iverson's) currentbuzz

Interesting side note: “Generation Y” generally gets slapped with the label of being impatient when it comes to page load times, but did you know that mobile web users over the age of 45 are actually the most impatient of all? The folks at Equation Research tell us this is so.

via Cheat Sheet: Everything you wanted to know about web performance but were afraid to ask — Web Performance Today.

All about the Fifth Cycle of Technology – in a short lecture.

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• What futurists are saying about, well … the future (nationalpost.com)

‘meta-reading’. It’s not about individual brands. They are fully aware of all the back-stories of all the stories they’re getting,” he says.

It’s a ‘degree of sophistication,’ he said, ‘which reads the interests behind the news as an integral part of the news’.

“This is something I had to learn. They’re constantly reading two things: what the information is, and who’s saying it – and it’s completely part of the story. Just as when I was doing history A-Level [you were taught to ask] ‘which is the source, who’s the source, why are they saying it?’”

“They get it. I think they are learning it as they are consuming it.”

via ‘Meta-reading’: the generational differences in consuming news | Journalism.co.uk Editors’ Blog.

And what’s especially sad is that adult authority figures such as teachers and parents often miss such devastating acts of reputational violence because they’re so subtle and often occur “in context”—that is, they’re less conspicuous than the physical altercations of boys.

via The “Bitch” Evolved: Why Girls Are So Cruel to Each Other: Scientific American.

This is one of the main problems in education in the US today. The failure, inadvertent, or deliberate, of adults to engage with youth in their social lives. There is so much of this “I want them to like me” and such, that we abdicate our responsibilty to youth. They just need to be made to analyze what they are doing — that is, if they are conniving, make sure they can own it verbally, or else they aren’t sure they are conniving. Youth don’t always have meta-cognition down pat.

Then they need to be explicitly informed that mean behaviors are not right. Now, that doesn’t mean they won’t act mean, but they need to be called out in front of their group, so that the group attitude toward mean behavior gets recalibrated to include the adult perspective.

I’ve observed over and over again, teacher who act like they don’t see this kind of behavior and it makes the group’s social ethos begin to resemble what occurs in “Lord of the Flies.”

Soccer moms are perpetrators of this when they are car-pooling. The children start being mean or discussing some reputational violence, and the parent is on the phone or just ignores what the youth are saying, as if their world was apart from the adult world. Instead, the parent ought to intervene in the discussion, not by commanding the kids to be nicer, but by asking questions about what they think and what the effects of what they are doing will be. Your own kid may cringe when you talk directly to their friends, but if you treat them with respect but be truthful, you will find they come to like the interaction.

With 4th graders in an inner-city school I used this kind of approach to create a cohesive supportive group, at least in the classroom. Certainly at night, the kids went with their own gangs and whatever, but in my class, the mean factor was way down.

Asking questions, not telling is the way to do this. Don’t ignore it or think it will go away on its own. In the end, kids would rather be in an environment where it isn’t like “Lord of Flies” and controlled by fear and violence.

“A Japanese University is giving away iPhones to its students to use the phones’ GPS functionality to catch students who skip classes. The University claims students currently fake attendance by having other students answer for them during rollcall, they also said that while this can be abused by giving other students the phone, they are much less likely to do this due to the personal information, such as email, a phone generally contains.”

via Slashdot | University Gives Away iPhones To Curb Truancy.

RTFL this is a wonderful way to draw students into a system that isn’t serving their needs. Don’t examine the 18th century structure of schooling. Give ‘em an iPhone.

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• Japanese university tracking students via free iPhones (tuaw.com)
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• Japanese university to track attendance with iPhone (macworld.com)