Connecticut
Post posts about what is happening in the State of Connecticut.
Penny wise and Pound Foolish
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Mon, 11/24/2008 - 22:08As I write this, the Connecticut General Assembly is working out ways to address the budget deficit. Currently, they are considering Bill No. 7601- An Act Concerning Deficit Mitigation..
What are the key points of the bill? Cutting three million dollars from the State-wide Energy Efficiency and Outreach budget. Another two million dollars are being cut from the Clean Diesel Buses program and four hundred and fifty thousand dollars from Biofuels. They are also cutting five million dollars from bus operations. In education, they are cutting two million dollars from school safety.
As our economy falters, it seems particularly foolish to cut funding to efforts to reduce our dependence on foreign oil, through promoting mass transportation and use of alternative fuels.
At least the two million dollars for the Bushnell is safe. Too bad I won’t be able to take a bus there to see a musical rendition of ‘Legally Blonde’. It might be more entertaining than the show at the capitol.
Dad, Can You Give Me the Phone? I Want to Take a Picture?
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Mon, 11/24/2008 - 13:59The other day, my seven-year-old daughter asked me, “Dad, can you give me the phone? I want to take a picture.” My only hesitation was whether the cellphone or the digital camera would be best for the pictures she wanted to take. In the end, I handed her the digital camera and she walked around the room taking pictures.
This afternoon, I will go to a meeting at our public school library to add my input into our district’s three-year technology plan. The State Board of Education provides a very useful template to help schools develop their three-year technology plans. I’d encourage everyone to find out about the technology plans in your district, and how you can get involved in helping shape them.
I mention my daughter’s question first because I believe it illustrates quite nicely Marc Prensky’s article Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants. Mr. Prensky’s article was published in October, 2001, the month my daughter was born. Not only does my daughter “represent the first generations to grow up with this new technology”, she is part of a generation where educators have been talking about the difference between digital natives and digital immigrants.
Yet not all educators are thinking about how significantly “the arrival and rapid dissemination of digital technology in the last decades of the 20th century” has changed our children. Many continue to lag behind even first graders when it comes to understanding digital technology.
Perhaps no one understands this better than Julie Amero and the people that have followed her case. Ms. Amero was a substitute teacher in Norwich, CT. Four years ago, her classroom computer started popping up pornography sites. She did not know how to handle it and some of the students saw the pictures. She was charged, and convicted of four felony counts of endangering minors. It became a nationwide cause celebre, as experts around the country weighed in and deplored the travesty of justice. If anything, the liability should be the school districts for not having properly installed anti-spyware software.
On Friday, with her health deteriorating, Ms. Amero agreed to a plea bargain where she would plead guilty to one misdemeanor of disorderly conduct, pay a $100 fine, and lose her teaching license. According to Rick Green’s column, “New London County State's Attorney Michael Regan …remained convinced Amero was guilty and was prepared to again go to trial.” I join with many people who question whether or not State Attorney Regan is fit for office, but that is a whole different issue.
School districts may be tempted to write defensive three-year technology plans to protect themselves, their students, teachers and administrators from fiascoes like the Amero case and I worry that the technology plans in Woodbridge may be too restrictive for numerous reasons.
Yet the template provided by the State Board of Education takes a positive approach to technology. It quotes the Connecticut State Board of Education Position Statement on Educational Technology and Information Literacy, 12/4/04, which says,
Literacy in the 21st century requires more than the ability to read, write and compute. The State Board of Education believes that every student must develop strong technological skills and continually use them in order to function adequately in our 21st century world. Connecticut schools must ensure that technology resources are integrated across the curriculum in PK-12 and become part of the fabric of instruction.
It goes on to quote the Connecticut Association of Public School Superintendents Technology Position Statement, 12/14/01, saying, “technology must be a vital link among the staff, students, parents and the expanded community”.
It seems as if that link, talked about a couple months after my daughter was born and after Mr. Pensky’s great article on digital natives was published, is not yet as vital as it should be in many school districts. Cases like the Amero case, if anything, may have weakened that link.
So, how do we re-establish technology as the “vital link among the staff, students, parents and the expanded community”? Perhaps we start by giving our seven-year-old daughters our cellphones, so they can take some pictures. Perhaps we go beyond that and help them set up their own radio shows online.
My daughter’s interviewing skills still need a lot of work, but if people want to talk about technology and how it could be used to meet the goals of Connecticut State Board of Education and the Connecticut Association of Public School Superintendents, they could call Fiona’s Radio Show Sunday’s at 6:30 PM.
If you have other ideas, join the discussion. Drop me an email. Add a comment here. Set up your own Internet based radio show. Let’s work together the strengthen the technology enabled links within our communities.
Why we need more inept bureaucrats in our schools.
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sun, 11/23/2008 - 13:08Unfortunately, learning how to deal with inept bureaucrats is a lesson in life that too many of us have to face. We spend too much of our time on permahold waiting for the chance to talk with someone who at best does not know how to address the problem we are facing and will provide us with yet another number to wait on hold at. Sometimes we have to face these bureaucrats at offices or at schools and the face to face confrontations can be even more distressing.
We may find ourselves, after such encounters frustrated beyond belief and venting to our friends, in our online journals, or to anyone that will listen, using words that some might find offensive. Yet if our venting is done online and the son of an inept bureaucrat reads it and passes it on to his mother, it is reasonable to expect that the inept bureaucrat will act in a spiteful and petty manner and perhaps even violate our civil rights only to see the whole thing end up in the Federal courts.
What may seem worse is if the inept bureaucrat is part of the education system who in their narcissistic injury ignores the pedagogical imperative. Examples of this from the State of Connecticut may come to mind for some of the regular readers of this blog.
Yet there is something valuable that can be learned from such inept bureaucrats and providing students a chance to learn from them while they are in high school may serve the students well later on in their life.
One student, after experiencing a scenario very similar to the one I described above, decided not to head straight to college, but to spend a year of her life as a volunteer with AmeriCorps. In a recent blog post, she writes about her frustrations as she answers the phonecalls of people who have been trying and trying to get in touch with FEMA, of people in unimaginably helpless situations that “you can just feel the pain, stress, exhaustion, and just sadness in their voices.”
She writes about having “a reputation in the JFO PPI section for being the one always badgering my supervisors or just people who really know what they are doing”. It is this spirit of fighting for what is right that can get a high school student in a lot of trouble, but if they escape, without having their spirit crushed, and having learned lessons of how to deal with inept bureaucrats, the potential for doing good that they hold can be awesome.
So, take a few moments, and read what Avery Doninger wrote about her experiences when she was asked, “this time tomorrow where will we be?” Then, ask yourself, what have you learned from inept bureaucrats. Has your spirit been crushed, or have you learned how to more effectively challenge what is wrong?
The Citizens Election Program
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Fri, 11/21/2008 - 11:49The State Election Enforcement Commission is holding hearings on Citizens Election Program. Their first hearing was held last Wednesday and the next hearing will be held on December 5th. Susan Haigh’s article in the Journal Inquirer, Feedback sought on Conn. campaign finance provides a useful background to the hearings.
As I read the article, I was struck by the list of witnesses at the first hearing. Just about everyone mentioned in the article, it seems, has been involved in electoral politics for some time. How ‘citizen’ oriented were these hearings?
Sure, the focus has been to reduce the impact of special interest money on elections; money that makes it harder for a regular citizen to have a strong voice in the political process, and sure, the hearings were all about the petitioning, fundraising, and reporting aspects of the new program, which is less interesting to the average voter, but I had to wonder where the citizen is in this process.
When my wife ran for State Representative in 2004, we were shocked to find the number of people who did not know who their state representatives were. People even asked Kim if she would have to move to Washington if she were elected. We clearly need some sort of program to get people more involved. Is the Citizens Election Program helping in this area?
These hearings aren’t giving us any indication. What I would be interested in hearing is testimony from people that paid closer attention to the state legislative races because of the program. Did you pay closer attention this time around?
It may have been harder to pay closer attention because the Presidential election got so much attention, yet we clearly received much more information about the candidates running because of the Citizens Election Program.
Was there better coverage of the state legislative races in the local papers? Not only did Presidential election take up much of everyone’s attention, but the difficulties of the local papers may also have prevented them from more in depth coverage of the state legislative races. In spite of all of this, there was some great coverage of the races, and I wonder what we would have seen if it wasn’t for the Citizens Election Program.
The same applies to debates. Here in Woodbridge, there wasn’t a state legislative race debate. We’re new to Woodbridge and I don’t know when there was a state legislative race debate here. Organizations that sponsor such debates have been struggling to get by in recent years. Did the Citizens Election Program result in more debates, or at least help stem a decline in the number of state legislative debates? Again, this is hard to tell.
What would be most interesting would be a survey to find out if voters heading into the polling places felt better informed about the candidates and the issues this time around then they have in previous elections. It would probably be difficult to construct a poll that would accurately gather this information, but it would be great to find out.
So, while people argue about how much the reduction in special interest money in state elections has brought about a more informed and involved voting population, it is worth looking at how the money that was provided also helped involve and inform the voting population.
One final note, my wife, Kim Hynes, is an organizer and lobbyist for Common Cause here in Connecticut, and Common Cause, along with several other groups, continue to work hard to promote citizen involvement in our government through programs like the Citizens Election Program.
The Future of the Newspaper, Part 2
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Thu, 11/20/2008 - 20:57My blog post yesterday about The Future of the Newspaper has received a bunch of comments on blogs in several locations and I felt that it was important to follow up on them.
First, I want to make this clear that this is not intended as a criticism of Steve Collins. Before reading Rick Green’s interview with Steve, I didn’t know who he was. I suspect that while Steve and I may disagree with some of the particulars about what the effect that the closing of the Bristol Press might have, I suspect that we also agree on many aspects about the importance of journalism and what can be done to improve journalism. I especially applaud his work with The Tattoo and encourage people to check out his blog, bristolnews.blogspot.com.
One of the key differences that Steve and I have is about how quickly the vacuum will be filled should the Bristol Press cease operations. Bill Densmore, the director of the New England News Forum (NENF) posed the question about how NENF could “rally j-schools around New England to incubate local online news communities in Bristol and New Britain”.
With Central Connecticut State University (CCSU) in New Britain beginning to offer a major in journalism, there is the potential for a great center right in New Britain.
Meanwhile, David Cohn of Spot Us, has been talking about alternative ways of funding journalism projects. Spot.Us is centered in San Francisco and is an opportunity for direct funding of investigative reporting by the public. They have just completed funding The Return of the Hooverville: Car and Tent Cities on the Rise in San Francisco.
Spot.us is open source, which means that anyone can download it, modify it and run their own version. Geeks can check out the code here. David does not that the code needs further refinement before it is launched in other cities, which he is hoping to be able to do sometime in 2009. Could Spot.Us be used to fund an online replacement to the Bristol Press? Perhaps. Instead of focusing on investigative reports, it could perhaps also be used to fund a beat or other aspects of running a newspaper. Spot.Us might work well in collaboration with a project like the Online Journalism Project which Paul Bass runs.
Yet much of this is focused on how content can be created and the creators can be paid. Another issue is distribution. Steve notes that many of the Bristol Press’ readers are older and may not be online, or if they are online, may be limited in what they can do online. The Pew has found that only about 34% of people 65 or older are online, so Steve’s concern here is important.
However, I suspect that many of the older newspaper readers do have cable television and getting people to produce a public access show reading from an online news source might address a large portion of this issue. Today, in a completely unrelated discussion, I received an email from another person wanting to set up a public access television show in Fairfield County. Beyond that, I view some of this as a digital divide issue. If demise potential demise of a local newspaper could encourage people to address the digital divide, that would be another silver lining to the dark cloud.
Related to all of this are the efforts of the Journal Inquirer to better connect with other media sources online. As a result of this, I now have links to recent stories from the Journal Inquirer on my Connecticut and Politics pages. The two most recent article in my political section show on the Journal Inquirer pages. With that, I’ve been following articles in the Journal Inquirer more closely and found the story about Rell wanting her critics’ e-mails. It is a fascinating story that I would love to see get some legs and some discussion. Perhaps when I get a moment, I’ll write more about this.
Will the Bristol Press get shut down? Will online news rush to fill in the gap? Will people find ways of taking online news beyond the Internet to those that are offline? It’s hard to tell. Yet the way I see it, there are a lot of interesting possibilities and I look forward to seeing how they develop.
