SCHOOL'S OUT--FOREVER?

The coronavirus pandemic has thrust us into the future in some ways whether we like it or not. Forced to stay at home, even those of us who might have been ambivalent about our phones or satellite/cable connections or social media now depend on our technology much more than we had before. We Zoom and Facetime with our families and friends, work at home, meet with our doctors online, devour whatever is on Netflix or Prime Video, order food from whatever app we can on our phones, buy anything and everything from Amazon to deliver to our doors. Resistance is futile.

But the trend that the virus has accelerated at warp speed is education, with classes from kindergarten to college being held online. The problem is, as I’ve heard anecdotally from my just-graduated-from-high-school grandson, his first-grade sister and their mother, and according to the evidence stacking up from school districts around the country, online learning can be challenging in a multitude of ways. Even for kids who are bright and self-motivated, it can be boring. For kids who are struggling, it can be confusing and frustrating. For those without Internet access, computers or workspace at home, it can be impossible. And for teachers who have never learned to teach using the technology, it can be the last straw.

According to an article in the Wall Street Journal, the experiment to educate more than 50 million K-12 students online during lockdown this school year “just didn’t work.” Teachers found the transition away from the classroom difficult, and students found the transition from what they do every day on their phones, tablets and computers for gaming and communication to what they have to do for school to be a lot harder than anyone anticipated.

 

Ugh! So bo-o-o-ring!

Part of it may be the way online classes are structured, though that may vary widely from teacher to teacher, subject to subject, and school system to school system. For example, my six-year-old granddaughter struggled with most subjects online but loved the online math games. She had never succeeded in math in a classroom setting. My grandson was a dedicated classroom student in English and history and was also good at math and science. He started online classes before lockdown as part of a special work/study program to finish his high school degree. He found the classes tedious, the equivalent, he said, of completing electronic worksheets. (I admit most work training courses I’ve had to take online have been similar—and deadly boring.) Few teachers have yet learned to really use the technology to advantage in getting lessons across. Too often they’re just translating their lectures to video, which lack even a human connection.

Many students nationwide complain that teachers give too much work with their online classes. This, apparently, is a function of not understanding fully how long it takes to complete a task on the computer, or maybe just being too enthusiastic about the new technology. It’s clear many assignments don’t take into account the circumstances many students find themselves in—a distracting environment, sharing space and computers, parents that may be working at home (or not home at all, due to work requirements), and the need for individual attention from the teacher, which may or may not be possible.

Some students do well with classes that are recorded for playback at a later time, with teachers available at set times for questions. Other students might never watch the recordings at all. Classes held on platforms like Zoom or Microsoft Teams, with all the students present in a virtual classroom setting have their own problems, according to one eighth-grader from New York City in an opinion piece in the New York Times. Not surprisingly, Veronique Mintz observes, the same teachers that “struggle to manage students in the classroom also struggle online.”

In a suburb of Washington D.C., Fairfax County schools have had problems with two separate online platforms, first the commonly-used college system Blackboard, then, when students flooded that platform with obscene, racist and homophobic messages, the newer Google “suite” of tools, including Chat and Meet. Now students are receiving unwanted personal bullying messages from Chat, presumably authored by their virtual classmates. The school system’s IT staff are outclassed by the bullying students, who, according to Tim Schaad, a Fairfax parent and cybersecurity specialist, “are running circles around administrators.” 

 

A chaotic classroom can happen even online.

That’s a rich people’s problem, of course. Thornier still is the problem of those many students who don’t have access to computers or the Internet at all. A recent story in USAToday relates how one mom saw a teenager sitting on the curb outside a Subway in Starke, Florida with a Chromebook in his lap. She turned her car around to check on him. Turns out he was using the restaurant’s WiFi to do his homework. He had no Internet access at home. The article goes on to detail the lengths to which the Jacksonville, Florida school district has gone to provide computers and mobile hotspots to more than a third of its 110,000 students. Still, over 200 students remain without access.

Here in Madison County, in the mountains of Western North Carolina, funds are not available for such an effort. While we’re still in lockdown, kids can sit outside the library or in the parking lots of schools if they don’t have Internet at home, and some computers have been made available, but not nearly enough. So, like in years far past, the children of Appalachia will be falling further behind the longer we remain in lockdown.

At least they can remain blissfully ignorant of the cruelty their peers can deliver via Google Chat or the Comments section at “school.”

Virtually, Donna

*Information for this post provided from:

"The Results Are In For Remote Learning: It Didn't Work," by Tawnell D. Hobbs and Lee Hawkins, The Wall Street Journal, June 5, 2020. https://www.wsj.com/articles/schools-coronavirus-remote-learning-lockdown-tech-11591375078 

"Why I'm Learning More With Distance Learning Than I Do In School," by Veronique Mintz, The New York Times, May 5, 2020. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/05/opinion/coronavirus-pandemic-distance-learning.html 

"'Mama is tired': After school closures, some families burn out on online classes, others thrive," Emily Bloch, Florida Times-Union/USAToday, May 5, 2020. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/education/2020/05/05/coronavirus-online-classes-school-closures-homeschool-burnout/3055101001/

IF ONLY OUR TECH COULD BE USED FOR GOOD

Here at the beginning of the “winter” television season, as SF favorites THE EXPANSE and COLONY are coming back for another few episodes, I had thought to whine a bit about how nearly impossible it has become to do what I once so enjoyed: review SF shows on television.

With the creative blossoming of SyFy Channel and more than a few innovative programs to talk about (anybody following INCORPORATED?), I could once have had a lot of fun parsing the latest in SF TV. But even professional television critics are finding it impossible to keep up nowadays, between the split seasons of the broadcast networks (fall, winter and summer), an infinite number of cable networks and an uncounted number of offerings from streaming services like Netflix, Hulu and Amazon. There are only so many hours in a day, people! And I do occasionally get up from my couch and write a word or two. Or sleep.

 

Computer, order 4 sheets of transparent aluminum.

 

 

Sorry,that is not available. Would you like to stream PIMP MY RIDE instead?

But as I was concluding that I couldn’t keep up—and so couldn’t be considered a reliable guide to what was “good” on TV—several otherwise trivial news articles merged into one big, fat clue that what was happening on my flat screen was just a sign of something much more insidious. 

The articles were featured in a single recent issue of THE WEEK, a nonpartisan magazine combining news from a variety of sources from around the nation and the world. They were in different sections of the magazine, and seemingly addressed different topics. But as I read, an underlying theme began to emerge. See if you can pick it out.

--In San Diego, a newscaster read a story on the air about a little girl who used her family’s Amazon Echo to order herself a dollhouse, simply by saying, “Alexa, order me a dollhouse.” Echoes in many of the houses of those watching the broadcast promptly ordered dollhouses.

--French cosmetics company L’Oreal has introduced a “smart” hairbrush to the market (for the low, low price of $200 U.S.). The computerized gadget is capable of analyzing not only your brushing technique, but also ambient temperature, humidity and wind conditions, presumably for those whose bathrooms lack, uh, walls or a roof. Of course, once the brilliant thing has detected the flaws in your hair due to your brushing, it can also recommend the appropriate L’Oreal product to fix them.

--That moment of triumph you experience when you finally reach a real, live human at the other end of your customer service call may be short lived when you realize the company you’re dealing with has analyzed your social media presence and chosen a particular representative to “serve” you based on your special characteristics. Think that means you’ll get better service? Oh, honey . . .

If only all this time, money, energy and technological advancement could be used for good.

I just saw HIDDEN FIGURES, the film story of Katherine G. Johnson and her female African-American compatriots at NASA in the early days of the U.S. space program. Like Laurie (see her excellent post here) I was thrilled and inspired by this unknown piece of history, blown away by how these women helped send Alan Shepherd and John Glenn into space with nothing more than a pencil and a slide rule.

What they had—along with their very impressive brains—was a common goal, set by the president and supported by the nation. There was a sense of urgency, despite very real social divisions. 

In those days, we faced a threat from the Russians, who were beating us in the space race. Today, we face global warming, fisheries decline, extinction of species, the threat of pandemic. And on top of all that, now China and Europe are beating us in the space race. Where is our sense of urgency? Where are our common goals?

I can tell you. We’re too busy developing $200 smart hairbrushes that no one needs. And wasting our huge computing power monitoring the personal habits of our citizens so we can sell them the next thing. And imagining, not a new and better world, but so many television shows that no one could possibly watch them all.

Cheers, Donna

It's all made-up tech (although some is more convincing than others)

© Can Stock Photo Inc. / TsuneoMP

Science fiction, as we've discussed many times, is fiction based on science. We often argue on where to draw the line. One example that springs instantly to mind is faster than light travel (FTL). It's a mainstay of space opera, allowing writers to whip you away from your lounge room and onto one exotic planet, or space station, or space ship, after another. The means of transport may well vary, though, ranging from a portal, where you step through from one world to another, warp drives (like Star Trek), hyperdrives (Star Wars), quantum drives and a variety of other made up hardware. The essence of it is that readers will accept the premise if it suits the story.

Then there's gravity. It's a known fact that the human body doesn't take kindly to long periods of low gravity, so most space operas contend with that in a number of ways. The use of centrifugal force to simulate gravity is canon – apart from anything else, it's true. So the space station in 2001: A Space Odyssey is good science. So is the cabin steward, who walks carefully along the aisle of the shuttle in velcro-clad shoes, with her hair tucked away in the weightless conditions. But most of us emulate the movie makers who don't want to deal with weightlessness in their spaceship corridors and use artificial gravity in our spaceships. The purists might not like it, but those of us who grew up on Asimov and Star Wars are fine with that.

Sometimes, though, there's a tendency for readers of science fiction to accept a particular author's version of technology and question another author's interpretation. Take matter transfer, as used in Star Trek (as in 'Beam me up, Scotty'). I, for one, wasn't too impressed with that as something real when I saw it on TV all those years ago. But I've now had to accept it's possible. The same with cloaking devices. We're on the brink of having technology which can hide an object from radar emissions.

Which leads me to spaceship 'shields'. It's generally understood that exposure to cosmic radiation would quickly kill a human. Our atmosphere protects us from harm on the planet's surface, but what we would use for spaceships is unclear. But let's say we have such a shield. The canon is that the shield protects a ship from bombardment, as well as cosmic rays. Can one fire through the shield? Some authors say yes, others say no, and yet others avoid the issue. If the answer is no, then the shields must be dropped to fire at the enemy. Or maybe only a certain amount of the shield needs to be dropped. Jack McDevitt uses that weakness in his book A Talent for War. McDevitt also speculates that the oft-mentioned scanner which can see through a hull and establish who/what is in a ship isn't as simple as other authors suggest. Makes sense to me. If you have to shield your ship from cosmic rays, would that not also shield the ship from external scanning? Linnea Sinclair in Hope's Folly suggests such scanning is possible. Jack McDevitt in Slow Lightning says it's not. Most especially if the ship is alien.

I don't know the answers. Nobody does. All I'm really saying is that in any science fiction story the tech has only to be true to itself in its own universe. If the reader doesn't believe the technology, isn't convinced by the author's argument, then so be it. But that doesn't make the technology wrong, and comparing it to another writer's universe simply shows the reader's own bias.

What do you think? Is there any 'technology' that you simply will not accept in a novel?

A BUMP ON THE ROAD TO THE SHINY TECH FUTURE

Even Kirk and Spock had trouble with Nomad

Today’s report from the real world:  the technological future continues to retreat ahead of us.

Those of you who follow this blog on a regular basis know me as a something of a Luddite, despite my fascination with the mysteries of space travel, the possibility of alternate universes, the vagaries of time and other such wonders.  I still play CD’s, (in fact I can’t seem to part with my vinyl collection); I won’t give up my “dumb” phone; I don’t do Facebook or Twitter; I love watching movies in a dark, cavernous theater.  I even (gasp!) prefer a map to GPS most times.

So you may be surprised to hear that my television system is state-of-the art via DirecTV satellite HDTV hookup with DVR.  I never watch anything in real time, thanks to the DVR, and I could watch any number of movies or shows, thanks to Netflix or DirecTV OnDemand.  This is not to brag, just to provide a background for the next part of the story.  (Also I hate commercials.  Not that anyone likes them, but other people seem to be able to sit through them without wanting to toss something at the screen.  I lost that ability years ago.)

My husband travels overseas frequently for his job, so when DirecTV offered a new service called Nomad that allows customers to download pre-recorded shows from their home systems to their laptops or tablets, we jumped at it.  Netflix or OnDemand doesn’t often have the latest episodes of our favorite shows, or you have to pay to play.  This way, what we’ve already recorded on our DVR would be available for us to take with us anywhere!  Wow!

And, actually, when you think about it, this should be a no-brainer.  The DVR is a computer, right?  Why shouldn’t you be able to download stuff from one computer to another?  So, cool, get the little Nomad thingy, hook it up and we should be good to go!

Well, not so fast, there, pardner!  Apparently these computers need to be able to talk to each other.  Then there is the issue of the router.  And the security software on our mobile devices.  And the fact that the Nomad thingy is brand-new and apparently has bugs they haven’t worked out since very few customers have tried it yet.  And, of course, the DirecTV technicians haven’t all been trained on installing the Nomad device.  And on.  And on.

And you know how these things go.  First you try the install yourself.  All seems correct, but you get an annoying little “error” message on your computer.  You do it all over again, but the message keeps coming up.  Then you call tech support.  They walk you through all the steps you just went through, and the message comes up again.  Twice.  They try numerous things from your end and from their end.  They send you running up and down stairs (because, of course, the Nomad and router are located on one floor, the TV and DVR on another!).  Lights blink on and off on Nomad.  Lights change color on Nomad.  But still the error message keeps coming up on the computer, refusing to allow you to connect with Nomad online.  (At least Nomad does not try to take over the house or drive the cars.  Given Captain Kirk’s unfortunate experience with something of that name, we’ve been lucky so far.)

After at least an hour of this, tech support gives up.  The dreaded words, “we’ll have to send someone out,” leave her lips.  Darkness falls in your heart.  This will cost you.

Things are taken to the next level with the arrival of the technicians the next day.  At least they don’t make you wait from “8:00 until 12:00”, but arrive bright and early at the crack of dawn.  But hopes are dashed by the end of the visit.  The techs are stumped, too.  Nomad has defeated them.

So, currently Nomad sits blinking, happy, but dumb, in a corner of my living room.  The DirecTV folks, to their credit, have called 53 times—to see if we’re okay, to see if the service call worked out, to get more information once they figured out the service call was ineffective, to offer consolation, to avoid a lawsuit, for their robot to talk to Nomad, who knows why they’re calling?  Maybe they think if they keep calling we’ll eventually tell them to go away, and they’ll be off the hook.

The DirecTV folks say they haven’t given up.  They are giving the problem to someone at a “higher level”.  Do they mean The Man Upstairs?  The Great IT Guy in the Sky?  Think I better tell hubby to take a book with him on his next trip.  Jehovah probably has better things to do than to worry about the frivolous technology of his diversion-hungry creations.

Warmest Congratulations to all the GH and RITA Nominees!

This has been such a terrific week for the newest class of RWA’s Golden Heart® and RITA® nominees.  So many of them are our friends and colleagues from last year’s Firebirds class and, of course, our own Sharon Lynn Fisher leads the way with her RITA® nomination for Best First Book.  So excited for you, Sharon, as you gather one more in the many kudos for your excellent work!  And congratulations to all the nominees now headed to Atlanta wearing that shiny GH® or RITA® glow!

Cheers, Donna