Posts Tagged ‘Symposium’

How to link anything back to Hogwarts

This week’s symposium left me fondly recalling the hundreds of hours I have spent of my life reading and re-reading the Harry Potter novels. I’ll resist the urge to make some cliched jokes or references to the magical world and cut to the chase – like the many aspects of this universe that I and my fellow Potter lovers accepted in blind faith and without question (there are some great ones here, but what I really want to know is wouldn’t Hermione get sick of Ron after about 5 minutes??), I realised that the whole idea of a “restricted section” in the library is actually a little bizarre in itself.

At Hogwarts, the idea that some magic is too powerful and dark that it would be dangerous for a young and inexperienced wizard to discover it makes enough sense. But is there an equivalent in the muggle-world?

Are there really schools that exist that ban sections of their library from young and inexperienced students, deeming that they are not mature or experienced enough to learn about certain things that exist within the world yet? I can imagine this happening in other countries, or in past dystopian or dictator-led societies that aimed to restrict freedom of thought.

This obviously leads to questions of censorship, the idea that how long we have been alive dictates whether we are legally allowed to read/see/hear certain pieces of media, or other pieces of information or media that the powers that be have decided are better off unseen.

One aspect of this that particularly frustrates me is the censorship of female bodies. Instagram accounts are constantly being reported and deleted for posting images that artistically express the human form, yet violate the platform’s bizarre nudity regulations.

One example that really gets me clenching my fists was when artist Petra Collins posted this image to Instagram:

The image got so many complaints that the social media platform not only took it down, they deleted Collin’s entire account. Something tells me that if it wasn’t for the presence of pubic hair in the shot, nobody would have had any problem with a picture of a young woman in a bikini.

On the other hand, if we search the hashtag #pubes, 24,173 images come up – and about 97% of those are dudes. Why are we supposed to be disgusted and protected from perfectly normal part of the human body on one sex, and turn a blind eye to it on the other?

I never realised the extent to which the media that we have free access to is censored or frowned upon in a society that is in other ways so forward thinking and open minded.

I dream of a world where we all have access to the Restricted Section, and those in control let us make our own minds up with what we choose to expose ourselves to.

Could have gone a lot harder on that feminist rant. #freethenipple

Don’t Need No Education

In light of this week’s Symposium, I figured it made sense to reflect on my own experience of school. While I have little experience of being placed in a class inappropriate to the individual’s level, I do have an experience of a school that came close to 100% fitting my needs and one that did quite the opposite.

I started high school at an all girls school with 250-300 students in each year level, where I was desperately bored, under stimulated and ultimately unhappy for four years. I doubt a single teacher I had over those four years would be able to recognise me now, I passed under the radar so thoroughly. I remember sitting in my Year 10 Parent-Teacher-Student Interviews and being told by two separate teachers that I was not at a high enough level for either VCE Specialist Maths or VCE English Literature, much to the disbelief of my father sitting beside me.

A few weeks later, Year 10 ended and the next year I started Year 11 at a different school. My new school was about half the size, co-ed, with a strong focus on the performing arts and located in the heart of St Kilda (as opposed to private school privilege hotspot Kew, where my old school was located). Within a few weeks, my Maths and English teachers had each asked me why I wasn’t enrolled in the two subjects I had been denied at my old school.

While I know that many people would absolutely thrive within the conditions and opportunities we were presented with at such a large school with the amazing facilities we had access to as with my first school, and I also want to acknowledge how privileged I am to have been able to attend the schools I did, I felt entirely stifled and disillusioned by the learning environment presented to me. I can recognise now that for me to thrive, I need teachers and mentors who take the time to learn my name, who take the time to believe in my ability and to demand me to be better when it is due.

At the heart of all of this, I believe strongly in teaching with an individualised approach, treating each student as a person and assessing their particular needs, rather than looking at the wider cohort. As Adrian said, schools that are currently approaching education in this way are often seen as radical, and yet I can’t express how necessary and beneficial this approach is, for students, for parents, and for schools.

Symposium – Don’t Trust That Internet

The symposium reminded me of two cringey Internet moments.

The first, which I shared with most people I’m sure was the disaster of Kony 2012. I remember psyching myself to even buy a supporter pack (luckily never went through with that one), preparing to ‘cover the night’ and even going so far as to post a Facebook status showing my support (a big deal for me as someone who rarely gives much of my personal opinion on a platform like Facebook, preferring to go nuts with Twitter and WordPress, getting away with anything due to relatively low follower counts).

I was totally devastated when the guy who started the whole Kony thing, the one with the cute blonde kid called Jeffrey or something who was in that arty video they put together, was found naked and urinating in the street a few days later. Alongside the poor guy’s dignity, the entire movement came crashing down around him and exposed as a scam. Instead of becoming the leader of a world movement, he was somebody to be seriously ridiculed, as the majority of the population tried to come to terms with the fact that they had just been scammed, hardcore.

The whole thing reminded me of another occasion of ‘Can we really trust the Internet?’, that played out earlier this year. Among my family (and yes, I write about my family waaay too much), Christopher Pyne is probably not the first person we’d be inviting to our next dinner party.

Without going too far into it, I’m sure you can understand my glee and disbelief back in May when every Twitter or Facebook newsfeed I could lay eyes on was practically screaming out the fact that Christoper Pyne had just called Bill Shorten a c*** within parliament. After checking TheVine.com.au for back up, I rushed home from uni or work or whatever to tell Pyne’s number one anti-supporter, my mother, all about what I’d just read.

She was as gleeful as they come with the news, but after that evening’s 7.30 Report and the following morning’s Age refraining from mentioning the debacle at all, she began questioning me about my sources.

‘The internet’s just faster than TV,’ was the rather pathetic response I grunted back at her comments about the lack of coverage on the 7.30 Report (admitting mistakes to my mother is very far from one of my favourite activities). Somehow, this turned into something of a mini-argument, with my mother arguing for the sake of traditional, reliable media and myself stepping into the ring to defend the manifold benefits of the internet’s instant access.

By the time The Age rolled around with nothing to say on the topic, I had rechecked the Internet and sure enough, the C word had not been chucked around in parliament. Instead, Pyne had reportedly called Shorten a “grub” (what is up with that??), and the footage/sound recording had been altered to make one four letter word sound a lot more like another four lettered word. This had been posted on the Internet and then shared around like wildfire, scamming all of us Internet disciples through even our most trusted blogs. (Am I allowed to suggest that the rapidity with which such a story was shared around might be able to shed light on a nation’s growing mutual opinion of a certain Education Minister?)

Moral of the story: Don’t believe everything you see (on the internet). And stop using Wikipedia to back you up in debates!!

Reflecture (Week 2)

Reflecting on this week’s lecture, my main take away from the content is the concept of beginning, middle and end, and whether it is possible (or even worthwhile) to compare the browsing of the internet with the browsing of print material.

While I am not overly convinced with the usefulness of making such a comparison, I think it is a mistake to relate browsing the internet in its entirety with picking up and finishing a singular book.  The comparison in my mind exists between the internet as a whole, and an imaginary library consisting of every book or item of print material ever published.  I suppose you could go so far as to then compare one webpage to a single book, and compare the idea of browsing through different websites to choosing to read or refer to a certain book based on having enjoyed or found a similar book previously useful. One book leads you to pick up the next, in the same way that one might flick through various webpages on the internet.

In this way, the beginning/middle/end structure can apply to a singular webpage as from when you first open it until you click to exit. While you might not have read or seen everything contained on or within the website, it is not uncommon to have left a book unfinished, or only referenced it for the information you need.

There is no beginning, middle or end to the internet as a whole, just as there is none to the imaginary reading library I was talking about earlier. Each exist as oceans of information, and it is up to the individual to decide where they wish to enter*.

*Couldn’t bring myself to write “dive in”.