March 23

I know I wasn't in class last night, but I thought I'd blog anyway. First of all, I am interested to read your blogs for the sole reason that I am curious as to everyone's interpretation of Baurillard. I briefly read some of his work and the first idea that came to my head was "bold". He comes across as a confident man just based on some of the views he has about society.

Secondly, I'll add some thoughts about a completely unrelated matter. My vice principle gave me a document called, "The Journal of the National Staff Development Council" because he knows I am taking my masters in educational technology. I was reading it between parent conferences last night. What caught me interest was an article about the isolation of fine arts teachers. I thought it might touch on what we discussed in class about how to assess things like art and phys.ed, etc. However, it was an article about collaboration between teachers and the on-line community. It was just about sharing what you do in the classroom. The second article that aroused my attention was about international education. It also just relayed the fact that teacher collaboration and the on-line learning community was essential to have some standards between schools and classrooms. After reading several articles, the same theme seemed to emerge. I wondered if this is huge trend. Is education going to become one huge global on-line learning community where students and teachers share ideas from classroom to classroom, country to country.....and then back to Baurillard and his views on technology's effect on globalization of society.

So, tell me what you discussed last night.....

L

Mar.16 th class thoughts

Wow....lots to talk about (Prof. Hlynka, you missed a good one!!)I finally get what everyone means by our "American Curriculum". Okay, I'll eat my words. However, now I am wondering if that is true in every industry. Is our rapid progress in health care (specifically cancer care) due to American research as well? It seems quite deflating to think about that. So, why aren't Canadians conducting more research? Is it simply a representation of our population? I guess we'll have to get cracking guys!

Secondly, the article/curriculum the Orest gave us was certainly interesting. I can understand the perspective of the church. They are an institution that is grounded in some long standing values, but what I don't understand is why are they opposed to the whole thing? For example, there is a section about violence toward women. I would think the the church would want their children to learn about this. It is an equality issue. On that note....I was baptized and confirmed in a Christian church. I went through Sunday school and confirmation classes. We were taught to accept everyone, not to judge people and most importantly forgive and forget. So, the way I'd look at this curriculum is to accept the content because I was taught to accept people no matter what their preferences are. This leads me to the idea of postmodernism. I heard recently from a colleague (after a lengthy conversation about students of today's society) that the number of people who attend church has dropped significantly (I'm not sure whether that is in Canada, Manitoba or locally in this area). I wonder if it due to postmodernism and all the accepted views of topics today or the lack of time on parents' parts, or a general disregard for religious values. Either way, if people aren't going to church as much, how much weight does the church have in public school education. (keep in mind that I'm not disrespecting the church, just asking a question)

Lastly, I thorougly enjoyed the Science curriculum analysis (it didn't have cubes or anything though....)Just kidding. Great job!

Mar. 2 class thoughts

In case you couldn't notice from my comments in class....the idea of being "Americanized" bugs me. There are so many reasons. First of all, we aren't only Americanized, but Europized? and Asiaized? Many people in Canada own Toyotas, Honda's, buy Ikea furniture, wear designer clothing, etc. In fact, if we looked at the labels of most of the stuff in our life I think it is safe to say that very few of it says "made in Canada". So, we aren't just Americanized, but globalized and I think that it is the nature of the world. It's just getting smaller. Secondly, if people are upset about being taken over by the US, perhaps Canadians should start marketing Canada better. The olympics was a great show of that. I'd say we promoted Canada pretty well, so why not all year, every year. A friend of mine is a film maker. He's won several international awards at film festivals, won grants to make more films, etc. However, if I tell you his name I can guarantee nobody will know him. That is because he doesn't market himself as a film maker. There's never been any articles in papers about him, nor has there been any commercials about him or his films, so why would we expect him to be bigger than a Hollywood film maker who spends a ton of money marketing their work. So maybe Canadians deserve to be taken over (I'm don't honestly believe that, I'm just playing the other side)

The last statement I'd like to make about being Americanized is about curriculum (and that's what I should be commenting about). I'm obviously not knowledgeable enough about how all of this works (hence the reason I'm in school) but are the curriculum documents that we use not made in Canada by Canadian stakeholders (teachers, administrators, consultants, politicians)? And is the curriculum content not based on Canada? I guess what I'm saying is that I don't understand what is Americanized about our curriculum? Can someone help me out with that?