Author: Angelo Fernando

Former copyboy, Scott Pelley’s optimism in the face of ‘bad information’

/ Angelo Fernando / Leave a comment

Last week, Scott Pelley, anchor of CBS News made some timely observations about the news business. Which, we should not forget is indeed a business. Pelley was awarded the Walter Cronkite award for Excellence in Journalism by the Cronkite School at ASU.

Now I regularly watch his broadcast, so I admire his candor  when he observed that:

“Never in our history have we had so much bad information.”

Let that sink in, against the other platitudes we hear that ‘never in our history have we had so much information at our fingertips’ etc. In 2013, Pelley warned that the media was getting the Big Stories wrong, over and over again. How prescient, considering most media misread the 2016 electorate. They are, after all our filters, and when their filters get trapped in the same gunk, we lose our faith in them.

At the ASU event he went further to warn, “We’re in our digital citadels, unchallenged by ideas. Biased reporting closes minds. Journalism is meant to open them.” Pelley, kicked off his career at age 15, as a ‘copyboy’ at a newspaper in Lubbock, Texas. If you’ve never heard of the job of ‘copyboy’ this person was, to put it nicely, a delivery boy who was given a sheet of butcher paper (on which stories were then written), to deliver it to the sub-editors’ desk.

Like Kelley, Cronkite was also optimistic about delivering the truth, alluring to the movie Network, when he said:

“We’ve got to throw open our windows and shout out these truths” 

Just for larks, here’s Walter Cronkite, as he signed off on March 6th, 1981.

Filtering the news for our kids

/ Angelo Fernando / Leave a comment

It gushes out of multiple channels, often without any context.

For young people, especially those under 10 years, what passes for news is almost toxic. Our challenge is to find ways to keep them ‘well informed’ and yet not overwhelmed.

And of course, there’s no wonder app for that. Even the ones that promise to filter the crud (so-called ‘news aggregators‘ like FlowReader, Flipboard etc) are often accomplices when it comes to ‘TMI,’ or To Much Information.

But wait, there was once an filter for this which we have put to pasture. We called it ‘conversations.’ The human 1.0 app that helped us sift through day-to-day details, layering over the minutia with ‘big picture’ ideas, and cross-referencing them with stories.

We re-framed topics too ugly to ponder and yet too important to ignore. Children posed questions, and found answers to them at the dinner table. We didn’t need to fact-check everything on the spot because…. yes, you guessed it: Our conversations were not hijacked by a smart device sitting next to the casserole dish.

So I like to pose the question to you readers: ‘How do you filter the news for your kids? Common Sense Media has a useful guide for different age groups of children.

Whether you’re a teacher of a parent, I like to know. How do you filter the fire hose?

 

What were they thinking? Water cannons used against those defending water rights!

/ Angelo Fernando / Leave a comment

File this under the How Ironic.

Protesters of the Dakota Access Pipeline, trying to draw attention to the tribe’s water rights, were confronted by law enforcement officials using water canons yesterday.

When rubber bullets and tear gas didn’t seem enough, they resorted to H2O.

The pipeline is half a mile from the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation, the sixth-largest reservation in land area in the US. The tribe has said the pipeline threatens ‘their waters and their sacred places.’

The events get more interesting as people like Neil Young, Dave Matthews and others chime in.

The Donald killed a humor column – or two

/ Angelo Fernando / Leave a comment

There’s a great column by Gene Weingarten of the Washington Post magazine section, titled There’s no silver lining to Trump’s win. So here’s my cat.

It is a quick follow-up to make up for a column he wrote in anticipation of Trump losing. Mr. Weingarten explains how he, like so many others in the media got it wrong. It had been written in the form of an obit, celebrating the death of a “Boys-Will-Be-Boys Guy.”

Oddly enough even I made the same mistake. In a column written for a later date.

I asked readers to join me in sending our condolences to the cartoonists of America. They (and the likes of Saturday Night Live) had been given nearly two years of unlimited, unimaginable humor material. From awkward physical gestures at the podia, to content ready-made for speech bubbles.

Weingarten’s replacement column is prefaced by this:

Readers who wish to complain can reach the author through the U.S. Consulate in Amsterdam, where he is seeking asylum.

(Of course, he is kidding.)

My replacement column is about the wall Canada is building on its southern border –financed by us of course.

(And of course, I am ‘serious’.)

Martin Sensmeier visits school as Native American Recognition week kicks off

/ Angelo Fernando / Leave a comment

Last Thursday, we had a visit from Martin Sensmeier, the actor who plays Red Harvest in The Magnificent Seven.

The 31-year old Native from Alaska, spoke to our students about how perseverance in the face of rejection got him where he is. Beside his acting interests, he shared with us his passion for helping youth, and how he has partnered with Nike in support of the N7 Fund.

The Nike Air Native N7 brand was inspired by the wisdom of the ‘Seven Generations’ –how our decisions impact the seventh generation. The fund supports Native American and Aboriginal tribes in health programs.

martin-sensmeier

Good riddance to election noise pollution!

/ Angelo Fernando / Leave a comment

When the party next door becomes too noisy, people sometimes call the cops. But there was very little we could do about the ‘Party’ noise machines we’ve been enduring for the past year or more.

Finally we can reclaim some peace, as the two-party cacophony comes to an end today. (I know what you’re thinking: Yeah right!)

If it was true that Trump’s Twitter account had been wrestled away from him, it won’t be long when he gets back on the air. But at least the media might have other matters to report on. Here’s what I’m dying not to hear about:

  • The word ‘surrogates‘ and any reference to people who echo the party line.
  • Pundits. Those folks to ‘weigh in’ on every gesture or turn of phrase.
  • The phrase ‘social media lit up with…” as a preamble to a political story with no substance.
  • Sloppy, Madison Avenue-like phrases such as ‘Draining the Swamp’ and slogans such as ‘Feeling the Bern.’

Not that vacuous campaign slogans are anything new. In 1944, Thomas Dewey’s slogan was (get ready for this) “Dewey or Die.” And there was the 1980’s slogan “Let’s Make America Great Again” which was recycled (or was it ‘plagiarized’?) this season.

How the Internet is working against us, but no-one seems to care

/ Angelo Fernando / 1 Comment

Plenty of studies, and many critical thinkers have weighed in on how the Internet, once heralded as a gift to society, is not exactly working in our broader interests.

“World Peace” game proves kids can problem solve (without Apps)

/ Angelo Fernando / Leave a comment

A friend sent me a link to this story of a “World Peace Game” played by 4th graders. Sorry it’s not as fancy as MineCraft, or pointless as Pokemon. What I love about John Hunter’s concept is that there is no “win” and that it truly demonstrates how students can learn, sans smart devices.

If you need some background to this, watch John Hunter’s Ted Talk. You’ll be blown away.

One of the best performance reviews a teacher could get is what one of Hunter’s students says: “My brain, when I come back from his class, it feels like ‘jelly’ –it learned sooo much.”

Young web ‘designers’ in 5th and 6th Grade

/ Angelo Fernando / Leave a comment


website2It’s exciting to be able to teach kids what it means to ‘design’ a web site, and see what they come up with.

I’m not talking about the coding part of the site, but the navigation, layout and content. So much has changed since I worked  on web sites and web content ten years ago. Especially with site builders at Wix and Weebly, or even GoDaddy.

So before website3I introduce students to online site builders, I let them play with design components, using PowerPoint. Yes, PowerPoint!

It’s a quick way to build navigation tabs, work on color and fonts, and eventually embed hyperlinks and video.

Here is some of the work of 6th grade, building a site for Space Day, the school event we just concluded.

Likewise the 5th grade is working on a website for Freedom Tower, a project they began in September. website4

Later they would be using Photoshop for image manipulation, and create and edit shapes and buttons etc. Much later, when we move into audio recordings, and podcasts, I may have them return to their web sites and add voice files using Audacity.

But for now they experiment with bevels, shadows, and other effects that enable navigation.

UPDATED:

spaceday2Design is not just for 5th and 6th Grade. To address the Arizona CCRS Standard, S1.C4.PO 1: “Use digital creativity tools to create original works” I let 2nd grade students work with shapes, colors and also contrast and perspective.

Here is one student’s poster for the same event, using Microsoft Word.

 

Is there a ‘Maker’ in you?

/ Angelo Fernando / Leave a comment

Given how we’re being swamped by all things digital, don’t you long for a life with more hands-on experiences? I’ve written about (and visited) ‘Maker Spaces‘ that have been popping up in cities.

If you need inspiration, check out Intel’s ‘America’s Greatest Maker’ series. It will blow your mind to see a movement picking up steam that had young people becoming inventors and ‘makers.’ It is a TV show (similar to ‘The Voice,’ or ‘America’s Got Talent’), and a resource for learning the basics with plenty of how-to videos.  Watch someone who did just that.

“Inventing is really cool, because you don’t need a factory, you don’t have to be a certain age… as long as you have the right tools, and the right people to seek out.”  Shubham Banerjee, Maker

Also worth looking at is a fellow named Paulo De Souza who came up with the idea of equipping ”bees with backpacks” – um, tiny sensors. He has been addressing one of the world’s biggest problems, a diminishing bee population –or ‘colony collapse‘ as scientists call it.

Another great space for the movement is Maker Faire at Makerfaire.com

maker-faireFrom Art, and Arduino, to Fashion and Robotics and everything in-between, this annual festival has been instrumental in getting people to go out into their garages and tool sheds and discover their creativity. Like our ‘STEAM’ activities, but even beyond it, this it’s a fascinating trend!

There was a time when we did repair our own shoes (which lasted almost a decade), and build our own tree-houses (instead of ordering one from Walmart). There is a maker in each one of us, paralyzed by our fixation on apps and shiny new objects.