Teacher education

This came through my Facebook stream a few days ago:

Click on the image to follow the link.

While the video isn’t the real story, in fact it is just an advertizing video for Connections Academy . On this, a slow blogging day, the story is how Connections Academy have used their own YouTube channel (and for that matter their own Facebook account ) to get their message out. Using the social spaces that their potential students are likely to populate (with the obvious exclusions of those how don’t have access due to the digital divide). It also is a space for those who are involved to have a sense of community – I mean let’s face it if you are taking your schooling online you must then have access to a computer and an Internet connection.

And it isn’t just Connections Academy – although they do seem to be one of the more active on my radar screen. And it isn’t just limited to the cyber charter schools, as I’ve seen a number of the supplemental virtual schools using these mediums as well. Who are some of the others? Use the comments to highlight some of the other social media being used by various K-12 online learning programs.

Announcing: The VHSM Newsletter.

The coming year will mark the five year anniversary of Virtual High School Meanderings and, like many bloggers, I have been thinking about the new year and reflecting on what that means for this blog (and more on that latter in the week). Much of this reflection has been through the lens of the tips that Darren provides at ProBlogger Blog Tips .

One tip that he gave a few weeks ago was an entry entitled 6 Reasons Why You Need to Consider Email as a Communication Strategy on Your Blog . In that entry he described the traffic that gets generated every time he sends out an e-mail newsletter. So using the tip Darren provides in his entry, along with the suggestions I found at , I would like to announce:

VHSM Newsletter

Basically, the VHSM Newsletter will be delivered via e-mail using a Google group. It will include links to specific entries on this blog, but also special items that do not appear in the Virtual High School Meanderings blog.

If you are interested in receiving the VHSM Newsletter , please sign up at:

http://groups.google.ca/group/vhsm

Note that the settings on this group allow only the group administrator (i.e., me) to send messages to the group and see who has joined the group. So joining this Google group should only increase your e-mail traffic by one message per month. My goal will be to send this newsletter on the third Monday of each month.

Now all I need is a logo for my newsletter. Any volunteers out there who would like to design something for me?

mrschili
May 4, 2007 at 4:04 pm

Oh, I absolutely believe that genocide – ethinc cleansing, mass murder, barbarism, crusades, whatever you want to call it – existed before the Nazi atrocities. I stand by the point that I made above, however; that we needed a new word to name a new evil. While there were atrocities before the Nazis, no one had made such efficient, sanctioned, organized or mechanized work of it. Technology made much of the work of the Nazis possible – up to and including the horrifyingly efficient disposal of millions of human beings. Even Albert Speer noted, in his closing statement to the Nuremberg panel, that:

Earlier dictators, during their work of leadership, needed highly qualified assistants, even at the lowest level; men who could think and act independently. The totalitarian system in the period of modern technical development can dispense with them; the means of communication alone make it possible to mechanize the lower leadership. As a result of this there arises the new type of the uncritical recipient of orders.

We had only reached the beginning of the development. The nightmare of many a man that one day nations could be dominated by technical means was all but realized in Hitler’s totalitarian system.

Today the danger of being terrorized by technocracy threatens every country in the world. In modern dictatorship this appears to me inevitable. Therefore, the more technical the world becomes, the more necessary is the promotion of individual freedom and the individual’s awareness of himself as a counterbalance.

What I told my class, though, wasn’t that, before 1944, this had never happened before (though it hadn’t, really, in the way that the Nazis perfected it), but that there was no codified word to define such acts. This is true and I said it with confidence.

The term was coined in 1944 by a Polish Jew named Raphael Lemkin. He working as an analyst for the US War Department, researching Nazi atrocities, when he wrote in his book, Axis Rule in Occupied Europe:

“By ‘genocide’ we mean the destruction of a nation or of an ethnic group. This new word, coined by the author to denote an old practice in its modern development (emphasis is mine), is made from the ancient Greek word genos (race, tribe) and the Latin cide (killing)…. Generally speaking, genocide does not necessarily mean the immediate destruction of a nation, except when accomplished by mass killings of all members of a nation. It is intended rather to signify a coordinated plan of different actions aiming at the destruction of essential foundations of the life of national groups, with the aim of annihilating the groups themselves. Genocide is directed against the national group as an entity, and the actions involved are directed against individuals, not in their individual capacity, but as members of the national group” (80).

I am very well aware that there is a great deal of argument over the use of the word, and that those arguments are mostly for political reasons. People in power stop short of using the word to describe things to which it clearly applies because use of the word brings with it certain political and moral responsibilites that those people in power may not be willing to undertake. I do keep up with such things – I am associated with several groups who study and teach issues surrounding the Holocaust and genocide and human rights, and I read and I talk and I think. I very much appreciate your comments, WL, but I feel that your seeming indignation with me is ill-placed.

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