There is some hope for peace, and it may begin with just a handful of individuals. Palestinian youths (encouraged by grassroots groups) visiting Israel's official Holocaust memorial are deeply moved by what they see. They return to their communities with a new openness toward seeing their neighbors across the border as human. "If we say that the Holocaust happened, if we accept it, then we accept that Israelis are human just like us and I think that here is the twist: we do not want to consider Jews as humans because of all the suffering that we go through we cannot believe that human beings can do such a thing."
In an interview available online, Charles Leadbeater spoke about the use of new online apps, devices and social networks as a site for social activism. Here are some excerpts/quotes of importance for the teaching community:
"One of the joys of the Internet is finding and reading something you think is wonderful that you'd never have found without it."
"...You have to hope that in 10 years, when digital technology is all-pervasive and meets both the huge need in the developing world and a body of social entrepreneurs, we will witness some flowering of social innovation to, for instance, provide education in new ways, to mobilize people to critical action in new ways, or allow poor people access to markets."
"It's all about access... Ten-year-olds are alike wherever you go: they just gobble this stuff up. I went to a school in a village three hours outside Sao Paulo, Brazil, 20 kilometers down a mud track. The parents of half of the kids in the school were illiterate, but watched the kids make videos for YouTube. It's waiting to explode, but if it arrives pre-packaged or tied up or fenced off, then you won't get that."
"You can go online now, and find really thoughtful, in-depth, considered, well-informed communities around virtually any issue. If it's your issue, there are now new ways of mobilizing knowledge that weren't there before. There are real bodies of significant knowledge on the Web that are valuable that we haven't done nearly enough with."
From the surveillance entertainment of Big Brother to closed-circuit TV and celebrity magazines, the boundaries of what is regarded as appropriate to put in the public domain are shifting dramatically, but nothing is challenging our notion of privacy more than social networking, with 26 million of us using Facebook to share the minutiae of our lives every month in the UK alone.
Facebook has proved irresistible to many because we are lured into joining by friends and family. Browsing, comparing and nosing is instinctive, impulsive and reflects our tendencies offline, our “social graph,” as Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg likes to call it.
The rapid pace of development by technology companies often throws up new cultural and ethical challenges. Google’s Street View has frequently been challenged by privacy campaigners who question whether the logistical and commercial benefits of making every property in every street visible on the Web are worth the sacrifice of the individual’s right to privacy.
Lord Richard Allan is a former Liberal Democrat lawmaker and Facebook’s European policy director.“The internet is here to stay as a ubiquitous way for every individual citizen to capture and share information,” Allan said. “The challenge is how you manage that increasing flow of information and that’s where Facebook is at the bleeding edge, allowing people to navigate that world. Expressions of concern and criticisms are really of that direction of travel, rather than any particular product, like Facebook.”
Allan thinks it is an exaggeration to characterize privacy as a natural state of man, citing societies before mass transport where a large community would know every intimate detail of each other’s lives.
The modern sense of privacy came much later, with modern transport and cities.“Notably with new technology, you end up with a utopian viewpoint and a dystopian viewpoint, but a lot of things those dystopians feared did not come true,” he said.
“To say you’re ‘living in Facebook rather than the real world’ is a complete misreading of what’s happening. The reason it is so compelling is because it is so connected to the real world. With every wave of technology, we need to get used to it.”
Christian Payne — who describes himself as a “social technologist” — abandoned a career as a photographer in early 2008 when he had a “car crash epiphany.”Within minutes of tweeting a video of his crashed Land Rover, he had an offer of help from a local crane operator, his AA membership number sent to him and a call from British Telecom asking for the serial number of the telegraph pole he had crashed into. He worries that spirit of helpfulness will dilute as social media becomes more commercialized, and its users more skeptical.
"This is a seminal moment where we’re seeing new thinking and new practice starting to emerge around the issue of privacy,” said Stephen Balkam, chief executive of the Family Online Safety Institute and a member of Facebook’s safety advisory board.
"The battle lines are being drawn between generations. Facebook is headed by someone who hasn’t hit 30, but has very different perceptions and assumptions about what is private and what is not. We need to recognize that with social networking, geolocation and digital technology, the privacy bar is being reset."
Part of Facebook’s success has been to demand people’s real identities. In that way, it represents the maturation of the Internet, where the previous norm had been a wisecrack pseudonym and a world of “trolling,” where faceless, nameless commenters could easily post abusive messages and attack each other.
Balkam recently suggested Facebook recruit a philosopher to help interpret some of the demanding and unprecedented ethical and sociological challenges it faces.“No company in the world has ever attracted 500 million users and they are having to come to terms, at lightning speed, with what is good and what is abhorrent behavior. Aristotle and Plato struggled with that — and the average age at Facebook is 28,” Balkam said.
A month after the experience, here are my final “wrap-up” thoughts on the summer camp program for the boys and girls of the tribe. What were the benefits of the program?
The program encouraged the children toward a greater belief in themselves and their ability to learn. Certainly I saw willingness among at least a few of the children to take risk and speak English to me and before their classmates. In one instance a young boy was filled with the pride of being asked to serve as translator, a communications go-between for his classmate and me.
The entire experience should instill them with self-pride, for there was no teacher to rebuke them for factual mistakes, and no competition for high scores and teacher satisfaction. Their own skills were encouraged and respected, as can be seen from the video items in the previous posting of this topic. Nobody discouraged them from creativity with admonishments about “wasted time that would be better spent studying.”
The children also learned new computer skills, as “Teacher Phil” taught them to use the Microsoft video editing software for the creation of home-made video products. They now have a knowledge that can be put to use, a first step perhaps, in the making of video materials that may benefit the full community. I’m thinking of children advancing down a path toward video documentation and activism.
Finally, these children had an opportunity to see that people from outside of the circles of family and community are able to take an interest in them, to care about them. They saw their summer camp teachers as new friends, but friends who would be taking to the road and leaving them behind.
And that is the most painful aspect of this camp. We come in from the outside, we stay for a very few short days, and then we are gone. We move on. Do the children feel abandoned? Do they fear being forgotten?
I close here with another question. Did these children perform so well in this summer camp project because they were already a solid group of friends, or did they become friends because of the camp? And what was their relationship with the many children of the community who did not join in the program? What were their relationships with the other children of their school? Did they engage so actively and proudly with learning in their regular classrooms?
The summer camp is now over, or at least our contribution to it is ended. The third and final day of my participation began with a walk about the village. The area has some seemingly solid middle class families, but I also saw evidence of decay suggestive of cultural decline and economic hardship.
Conversation with my colleague opened my eyes to the possible link between cultural loss and social decline. Our talk centered around the Amis Tribe and their annual harvest festival celebrations. My colleague Ya-ling said the yearly event requires the older generations to train the younger generations to ensure full and proper participation in the ceremonies. This advances transmission of not only traditional knowledge, but a sense of pride as well. It also encourages communal cohesion.
I did not see very much communal cohesion or intergenerational cooperation in my morning stroll. Visible, however, were signs of government and other organizational attempts to help the community: an "accident awareness center" whose primary purpose is to encourage people to live safer lives by avoiding alcohol, for example; a community activity center that teaches dance and crafts; a Presbyterian church center for the elderly that gives them a safe place to gather and ward off loneliness; a health center whose posters against alcohol, drugs, HIV/AIDS make their purpose pretty obvious.
Of these, the Presbyterian church operation was most impressive and the most distressing: the former because of their very important and seemingly effective outreach to the elderly, the latter because, I was told, far too many seniors live alone and this church center is their only opportunity for conversation or assistance. I was wondering whether the youth of the town could work with or aid the older residents. Perhaps the children can be provided video cameras and asked to document the lives of the town's older generations?
The rest of the morning was spent shopping at Carrefour in preparation for the afternoon's "pizza toast" activity, which would turn out to be my only responsibility. The activity actually worked quite well. I was worried about chaos arising from students not listening to instructions and heading aimlessly into mess. That is certainly my experience of leading college students in food preparation activities! To my surprise, however, the children listened intently to my instructions and lined up in an orderly fashion. My instructions were "doubled" as I used one of the older boys to repeat to the entire group what I had said, and then he and I both made our pizzas: select bread; choose meat and vegetable toppings; pick a cheese; add tomato sauce; place into toaster oven (with assistance from an adult). I used the vegetables as a double vocabulary lesson, having the children shout out the names of the vegetables in English and Truku languages. When we let the children loose they lined up well, and made their pizzas with a minumum of mess. I was impressed.
While I was slicing and dicing the meats and vegetables for the activity, I was able to hear the students in the classroom behind me as they practiced and performed their English-language role plays under the guidance of my colleague Professor Olivia Chang and doctoral student Amay. I could hear the wild applause of the students and occasionally the role play dialogs spoken loudly and in unison, such as "Thank you for your attention." I was sorry to have to miss the fun, as the children certainly sounded enthusiastic and cute. If only university students could feel the same youthful and uninhibited excitement about speaking English in front of their classmates.
After the pizza toast was consumed out in the front courtyard, everybody reassembled in the main classroom for the final part of the camp: student dancing. While the fun was pretty much dominated by a couple of the more eager Michael Jackson enthusiasts, a good number of children had an opportunity to show off their physical dexterity as they spun, twisted, and twirled before leaping, kicking, and throwing themselves onto the floor to finish their routines off with a bit of breakdancing. While they obviously practiced long and hard, most impressive was the choreography that went into the performances. The children planned their movements and chose appropriate props, from chairs to neckties, to bring a set of relatively stylized movements into full-piece dance routines.
I must confess to being a bit uncomfortable seeing children on the cusp of puberty performing highly sexualized movements learned from MTV: hip swinging, chest thrusting, crotch grapping. I applaud Teacher Tien for not commenting on this from her vantage point as an elderly woman, a teacher, and a devout Christian. Rather, she noticed the children's control of their own bodies, recognized the source is not the children's own growing sexual awareness but their respect for their pop idols as available on YouTube, and called for distraction from the obvioius by asking the audience to applaud and cheer the performers.
The dancing and speeches ended the camp, but we left behind a good deal of work undone. The children did not complete their video products, and were told to finish these and submit them to us in Ilan by September 15. Our alumni and we will select a winning video, and that person will recieve a DVD player for his family home. The other unfinished work was a picture of "the animal that is most meaningful to me," an activity inspired by the viewing of The Whale Rider. Professor Chang Ya-ling will oversee the September submissions and decide how to best reward those who complete their assignment.
When time came to say goodbye there was a general sadness at departure. Unexpectedly we all ended up piling into one car and heading off together. This may have been a somewhat shocking departure, and one boy responded with tears and by hiding in a corner to pet one of the family cats. The other children, even the older teens, did what children will do when departure time arrives: they clung to their favorite teachers, asked them to stay a little longer, and expressed hopes for meeting again in faraway Taipei or somewhat nearer Ilan. They playfully mobbed the car in a final expression of sadness at our departure.
And then we were gone, but I suspect we'll be back.
