MEDIASHIFT Article

Public Broadcasting System (PBS) tv station KLCS sponsors a blog on new media and how it is changing the world. It is called "MEDIASHIFT: Your Guide to the digital media revolution," and the host is Mark Glaser. On July 14th he wrote a very interesting entry about unschooling - he compares the kind of learning that unschoolers are doing to the kind of learning that is going on all over the internet in, for example, gaming and fan fiction online communities. Here is an excerpt:

"The Harry Potter and anime fan fiction writers, the Civilization players, and the Wondering Minstrels would be surprised to be discussed as “unschoolers.” As far as they are concerned, they aren’t participating in an educational activity at all. They are simply having fun and exploring topics that matter to them. But that’s precisely the point. As we talk about informal learning or “unschooling,” there are no rigid boundaries between school and the rest of what we do with our lives. Learning is driven by passion; we follow our interests where they lead; we engage with others who share those intellectual and recreational pursuits; and in the end, we master complex content. For all of these groups, the web is proving to be a most hospitable environment — a new version of Bertozzi’s “curiosity cabinet” full of rich resources and materials but also a social network that links us with others who are following a similar path. As my father told me years ago, “never let schooling get in the way of your education.”

Read the rest of his post at this url: http://www.pbs.org/mediashift/2006/07/never_let_schooling_get_in_the.html

News sources and resources

Laura is so busy with fun things she forgot this blog was here, and has opened the back door for some others to rev and revive. So I'm dusting off the chairs and turning on the coffeemaker and it's okay if there are few to no customers because it's a big wide internet.

How do you get homeschooling news, if you do, or if you like that sort of thing? I use Yahoo! Alerts, which is why I got to read "Why I'm an Unschooling Mom" by Jan Zeiger, on BellaOnline, a site I'd never even heard of! And from that article there are were other links. Here it is: http://www.bellaonline.com/articles/art44206.asp

If you want to set up Yahoo alerts to your own e-mail, go here: http://alerts.yahoo.com/ (I get them to show me new articles about Sam Rockwell and Russell Crowe, too. You can get snow reports, sports, custom auto mentions...)

What are some other ways and means for gathering news? Any favorite sites, feeds, lists, or tricks? If knowledge is power, let's empower the heck out of anyone who happens by here.

Toilet training

I've just spent the past couple of hours continuing my plumbing education - in an unschooling sort of way, of course. Since both of our toilets decided to quit working at the same time, I didn't have much choice. The neighbors like us just fine, but loaning the use of one's toilet on a regular basis would probably strain even the best of neighborly relationships. Had my dear husband been home, he'd have called a plumber, but how much fun is that?

So, one Home Depot trip for toilet guts, a few hours of slopping around in the tanks while trying to decipher cryptic directions, and about $20 later, we're back in business. I tried my best to spark a plumbing interest in my kids, but alas, it appears that both take after their father when it comes to fixing toilets.

Wikipedia on unschooling

I just had occasion to take a look at what Wikipedia has to say about unschooling. Interesting, but it doesn't seem quite there yet. What would you change?

Wiki technology is really intriguing to me. I think it holds lots of potential for collaborative development of resources for homeschooling.

If you repeat it often enough...

Recently, HSLDA has been claiming that 80% of homeschoolers are evangelical Christians, as they do in this article in Insight Magazine. What a load of bunk. Ian Slatter of HSLDA says,

"It's difficult to get exact numbers, but about 80 percent are evangelical Christians and 20 percent are nonreligious."

So, Ian, say we accept for the moment that 20% of homeschoolers are non-religious. What about all the NON-evangelical Christians, and the Muslims, Buddhists, Baha'is, Jews, Unitarians, Pagans, Hindus, etc. that homeschool. You seem to have forgotten about them when you fabricated your statistics.

Just experimenting

I am LOVING the new blogger! It may take me a while to update my old style template to include the new features I want to use though. So far I've added comments to my posts and put a link list of recent posts in the sidebar - both features I've been wanting.

Really nice article

This one is an overwhelmingly positive piece about homeschoolers in California, with some nice quotes from homeschooled kids, grown-ups, and grown up homeschoolers. It even has a bit of an unschooling bent. Kudos to all those who participated - great job!

Trying to stay calm

I've spent a substantial part of the day today helping my kids learn lines for a play they're performing in. This isn't just a "made for kids" kind of play. It's Agatha Christie's "Ten Little Indians." Now, my kids and most of the other cast members have an astonishing ability to memorize quickly, but the director is really pushing the limits of reasonability. They're only three days away from their dress rehearsal, and he hasn't provided them with the last TWENTY pages of cut script yet, nor has he completed blocking the play. This kind of thing drives me up the wall.

Yes, I know, it will soon be done and gone. The kids will probably remember the good performances better than anything else and look back on the experience fondly. They usually do, even when things end up less than perfect. I'm the one who's disappointed. It's great that the kids are taken seriously enough to give them real parts and an interesting play to work with. But for them to put so much time and effort into something only to have the person in charge leave them hanging - well, there's just hardly any excuse good enough to justify that.

NHEN

I know I already have it in my list of links, but today I was getting together information to answer some homeschooling questions emailed to me, and looking through the NHEN website, I was reminded of all the incredible work homeschoolers across the country have done to put it together. There's really a lot of valuable information collected on it.

For those of you who don't already know, the National Home Education Network is an inclusive national organization that has a great homeschooling website. NHEN will never tell you what to think or how to vote. It helps keep homeschoolers well networked and informed, and helps reporters and legislators understand how diverse the homeschooling community really is.

At the polls

Go take Daryl Cobranchi's POLL about why people homeschool!