The Story about the Baby Sharks

I told a story about the ritual of counting the omer at Shabbat Services for Temple Emanu-El. It is based on a famous one about starfish that I learned as a kid in CRaFTY (the NYC region of NFTY, the Reform Jewish youth movement).

(Full transcript after the jump)

What do we mean by "lifelong learning?"

A piece I wrote for Jewish Federation of North America's "Ideas in Jewish Education and Engagement" blog appeared on November 28. Entitled, "What do we mean by 'lifelong learning,' I describe two of our most successful (and explicable) programs here at Emanu-El and the big ideas about Jewish education that underscore them.

Here's the tl;dr take-aways:

1. Our classes form a microcosm of Jewish community, where diverse opinions can be expressed and, through thoughtful reflection and mutual respect, our students learn to accept one another for who they are and what they believe, and empower one another to grow as individuals.
2. We study ancient wisdom in the context of intergenerational relationships.
3. Our teen leaders are role models, sharing their expertise and modeling their commitment to Jewish life.
4. The teens are proud of their growth as leaders and of the connections they make with the younger kids. Many describe their work as “giving back” to the community 
5. We publicly acknowledge and celebrate students who go “above and beyond” school attendance. 
6. Children play a crucial role in shaping the lives of the rest of their families.
7. For parents, coming to school-based family activities normalizes the experience of participating in synagogue life, making it easier to prioritize it over other ways to spend their time and to consider coming to another activity even without their own children. 

Jewish Education: An Intrinsically Optimistic Endeavor

I wrote the cover story for the April 2013 Temple Emanu-El Bulletin, Volume 85, No. 8. Here is the text of my article:

Jewish education is an intrinsically optimistic endeavor. Our work as Jewish educators is predicated on the faith that we can inspire our students to personal growth. Further, we believe that by studying the past we can successfully prepare our students for an unknown future. Therefore, we act as translators, of a sort: we strive to make the ancient wisdom of our people relevant to contemporary sensibilities.

I believe the most compelling questions of value and meaning have remained largely the same since the days of the Bible. We look to our people’s history for direction as we ask ourselves the same questions that confronted our ancestors, like “What kind of person do I want to become?” and “What kind of world do I hope for myself and for future generations to inhabit?” Our people have struggled with these questions over the centuries, providing us with a legacy of their responses under varying circumstances.

The role of the Reform Jewish educator is not to pass along definitive answers to these questions, but rather to engage our learners in striving together to make meaning of our Jewish inheritance in all of its complexity. Our religious school is a “laboratory” for the Jewish future, providing experiences and opportunities our students cannot find elsewhere in their lives. The classroom is a center for Jewish life, where our students encounter one another’s ways of being Jewish. In accepting one another for who they are and what they believe, our students empower one another to say “I can be myself here and I can figure out who I might want to be.”

Responding to Crisis on the Eighth Night of Chanukah

If, like I, you are finding yourself speechless after using words like “tragedy,” “devastation” and “disaster” so many times this fall, you may find some words to say by looking at the Jewish Education Center of Cleveland's “Responding to Crisis” website.

Some links you might find particularly useful:

How to respond to children and teens in a crisis generated by humans

How children respond to crisis

Many of the quotes in the section “texts from our tradition” speak to me, but I particularly note one that we have been teaching our Sunday 3^rd-5^th graders at Emanu-El: 

Who is mighty?

                            One who conquers his evil impulse. 

            As it is written,

            Those who are slow to anger are better than the mighty,

            And those who rule over their spirit than those who conquer a city. 

                                                                                                                 PirkeAvot 4:1

Finally, many useful links in the resources section, and I sadly note that this one is helpful to know about right now:

Helping your children manage distress in the aftermath of school shootings

This being the final evening of Chanukah, I thank all of you reading this for your dedication and rededication to keeping alive the flames of hope, courage, and faith. At times like these, I am so proud to belong to a tradition that for thousands of years has asserted that every human life is sacred and dared us to strive for a more righteous and more loving society. I know the metaphor of “passing along the torch” is a tired one, but when you are lighting the Shamash so your kid can light her menorah . . .

Thanks to Nachama Skolnik Moskowitz for posting a reminder about this resource to the NATE facebook group.

Jewish Education Is About Living Jewish Values

I wrote the cover story for the Temple Emanu-El Bulletin, Vol. 84, No. 2, October 2011. Here is the text of the article:

In the fall of 2009, Congregation Emanu-El of the City of New York was named one of 24 “innovating congregations” in the New York area because of our dedication to educational transformation. We became a founding member of LOMED (Hebrew for “learning”), a coalition of diverse institutions from New York City, Long Island and Westchester, all committed to developing educational programs that are relevant, engaging and inspirational.

During the past academic year, LOMED provided the resources for us to create a four-minute video about our seventh grade Mitzvah Corps. (View it at www.youtube.com/emanuelnyc.) LOMED also awarded us a grant supporting professional development for our faculty and experimentation with new approaches to learning. We’ve put this funding to good use: After its pilot year, our eighth grade Lirdof Tzedek (“Seeking Justice”) program was identified as a “highly effective model” recommended for replication by other synagogues.

Most important, our work with LOMED has provided a framework to think deeply about the ultimate aims of our school. What is it we hope our children and their families will gain from the Religious School experience? How will it influence our community, both now and in the future? Through LOMED, we defined the purpose of Jewish education at Emanu-El: To support our families in living Jewish values.

Living Jewish values means much more than remembering stories from the Bible or being able to say a prayer in Hebrew. There are far too many examples of people who are knowledgeable and perhaps even religiously observant but who somehow fail to live ethically. For our students, studying a Bible story involves investigating the dilemmas faced by our ancestors and exploring their actions, the virtuous and the shameful, the praiseworthy and the irresponsible. We ask how the decisions they made might serve as examples in our striving to be wise, just and compassionate individuals.

Many ways exist for educators to talk about what we do, and as in any profession, much of it is insider jargon. LOMED provides a language with which we can articulate the goals of the school curriculum clearly and simply. Using the diagram that accompanies this article as a guide, our teachers collaborate to shape meaningful and vital learning experiences.

This diagram is a clever mnemonic device that highlights four dimensions of effective instruction. First, every lesson must engage and inspire the mind of the learner (the “head”). Second, the “hand” is a reminder that every learning experience must both incorporate and lead to action—perhaps a change in behavior or the development of a new skill. Third, we must consider the “hearts” of our learners, for in everything we teach we must ask, “Why should we care?” And finally, the “feet” remind us that effective Jewish education leads us to take a stand on our beliefs as a part of a community.

This “whole person” approach ensures that our Religious School program is responsive to the genuine questions of our learners, that the learning is applicable to daily life, and that our school community is one in which our children will grow into responsible and capable Jewish adults. Each classroom is a laboratory for Jewish living in which the teachers model the thoughtfulness and mutual respect that we seek to promote in our students. The care and concern our teachers have for each child enables our students to support one another and to challenge themselves to grow as individuals, as family members and as part of an ethical Jewish community.

We are fortunate to be the inheritors of ancient wisdom that guides us in living principled lives in complicated times. At Emanu-El, our students become reflective about their actions, passionate about their beliefs and kindhearted toward one another. As we strive to become the best people we can be, proud of our heritage while accepting no dogma blindly, we are prepared to join together with those of all faiths and backgrounds to build a just and virtuous society.

Dawn of the Chimpanzee! (Relax, folks, they're just a metaphor)

Hurray for Eli Valley, and for Makom and Ha'aretz being brave enough to post this comic onto their website, writing:

"More than its blunt critique of Israel, Israeli policy, and Israelis, the cartoon points an accusing finger at all aspects of the Jewish establishment of the United States. Eli Valley is clearly no outsider to the Jewish community. The cartoon jabs at Jewish schools, camps, Israel advocacy programs, and even pokes fun at a sociologist whose work is well-known in the Jewish world. Valley himself is a regular cartoon contributor to The Forward newspaper.

We may disagree with the cartoon's sentiment, but we cannot accuse it of ignorance."

Here's the link to the comic, Dawn of the Chimpanzee!, in its original home on Gawker, where the comments forum is surprisingly thoughtful.

Thanks to Alex Sinclair for the tip-off on this. Voonga...Voonga!!

Why would a nice kid like yourself want to be a Jewish Educator?

I'm not exactly breaking a news story when I share my concerns about the dearth of qualified Jewish educators, from heads of day schools to religious school teachers. Back in 2003, in a report on recruitment and retention for JESNA, Paul Flexner and Sandra Gold wrote:

"...There is a chronic shortage of Jewish educators at every level and in every setting. Schools, camps, and youth programs are constantly seeking staff, ranging from entry-level teachers, counselors, and advisors to the senior personnel necessary to administer institutions and programs. In an open society with few barriers for Jews, not enough young people are choosing to become Jewish educators, and not enough of those who make this choice stay with Jewish education as a lifelong career."

A positive spin on this situation could look as follows: Since there aren't enough qualified Jewish educators to go around, those who ARE qualified are going to be in greater demand. This will result in greater competition among institutions to hire those individuals. Increased competition will drive up salaries and benefit packages for Jewish educators, and those individuals will command greater respect from their colleagues in the clergy and from their lay leaders. As Jewish education becomes a more viable career path, some number of years from now we could expect to see people who otherwise would have gone into other careers instead becoming the new generation of Jewish educational leadership.

In their article in the Fall 2007 issue of Jewish Education News, Richard D. Solomon, Elaine C. Solomon, and Hana Bor observe that there are "many excellent programs designed to train candidates to become skilled Jewish teachers, administrators and leaders," and they list a dozen different academic programs around the country for this purpose. In their analysis, the challenge is to build a career ladder that will attract people into the field in the first place and provide them with step-by-step opportunities to advance in their careers (if you are a teen reading this, this is the real-world version of "leveling up"). They offer the following graphic organizer depicting "a seven stage ladder of career development for Jewish supplementary and day school teachers:"

As part of the Lookstein Center's ongoing series on "creative solutions to educational challenges," the Lookjed list recently posted Richard D. Solomon's expansion of this idea, in which he provides detailed suggestions for how each of the stages in the ladder might be organized. For example, Solomon distinguishes between the madrich/a "student aide" of stage 1, the "student teacher" of stage 2, and the "co-teacher" of stage 3 as follows:

"...The madrich or madricha is an 8th, 9th or 10th grader who is trained to serve as a paid teaching assistant and role model . . . During the 11th grade selected madrichim take course work in Judaics [and] pedagogy . . . These madrichim will be paid additionally to receive this instruction and can earn college credit for successfully completing the course requirements.

". . . At the end of the 11th grade, a select group of madrichim will be invited to become paid student teachers . . . [they] now be observing, reflecting and doing some small group teaching in the classroom of a trained mentor teacher [with the goal of acquiring such skills as lesson planning, managing student behavior, and communicating with parents].

". . . During the second semester of the 12th grade, if deemed successful, the student teacher will be invited to take on the role of a co-teacher . . . at the beginning of the second semester, the co-teacher and the mentor teacher will be engaged in co-planning. co-instructing and co- reflecting upon their learning activities. They may be engaged in team teaching where they alternate instructing the whole class, or they divide the class into small learning groups which each one directs. Upon successful completion of this stage, the co-teacher should receive a teaching certificate from the sponsoring institution . . . indicating that this teacher candidate has meet the requirements to teach specific courses at a supplemental school while attending college."

Clearly, Solomon is advocating here for the kind of systemic change that would require a partnership between schools, central agencies, academic institutions, and funders. Which is, of course, terrific, so kudos to him.

I'd suggest that we throw a few additional ideas into the mix:

• allow for greater fluidity between religious schools, day schools, summer camps, and so on - each providing a valid route by which individuals - especially high school students - can learn the skills necessary to become Jewish educators.
• build our youth programs to give greater leadership responsibility to the teens themselves, empowering them to take ownership for the success and failures of their events and activities.
• look at these rungs as important stages for individuals entering the field at any age: Just because a teacher is a 2nd year rabbinical student doesn't necessarily mean that they are going to be a more competent teacher than an 11th grader. Let's look at this ladder as a potential guide for the training of any new faculty.
  
• think about the additional roles, alongside teaching and mentoring, that could be played by individuals at the higher rungs of this ladder, so that they can hold full-time positions. These could include family education, running youth groups, teaching adult education classes, administrative work.
  
• extend this ladder so that as people become mentor teachers, there are in turn being mentored to become school administrators. To this end, require our school leadership to provide such mentoring as one of their key job responsibilities.

As always, I welcome your feedback and thoughts about any of the ideas presented here.

Pluralism, Diversity, and Jewish Education

I am pleased to report that my article "A New Kind of Diversity: Jewish Education in a Pluralistic Society" appears in the Fall 2007 issue of Jewish Education News.

The issue, on "The 21st Century Jewish Learner and the 21st Century Jewish Educator," features several excellent articles on the impact of technology on Jewish education and community, as well as pieces on Jewish professional networks, teacher training, early childhood and older adult learners, and so on. Enjoy!

Now THIS is how a Wiki should be used!

You may recall that about two months ago, in an entry about JESNA's Lippman Kanfer Institute Wiki, I lamented that "rather than being an interactive or collaborative experience, [this] Wiki is still currently functioning much like any other website." Well, I want to share with you a wiki that I think makes brilliant use of the potential of the technology: flatplanet, the Wikispaces "space of the month" for April 2007.

Flat Planet is:

"...an online collaborative project between students in two religious education classes in Catholic High Schools in Canada and the United Kingdom. The students were given the task of examining environmental issues affecting both Canada and the U.K. and to think about the ethical/moral responsibility of Roman Catholics with regard to the environment..."

So what makes the result so fantastic? Here's just a few of the creative ways the site takes advantage of the potential of the technology to twin classrooms in different parts of the world for collaborative learning:

• clocks on the home page with the current times in Oakville, Canada and London, England)
• students can post photos of themselves so their other group members can see who they are
• project pages, on which the students post text, audio, photos, and videos
• discussion pages, on which students discuss what they are posting and respond to one another's concerns (here is a sample, from the project on animal testing)
  
• a resource page (actually, a blog) on which students can post articles and weblinks they think will be helpful to all the groups

Along with the technology, the site also demonstrates a number of pedagogical techniques that are simply good practice, including a clear rubric for grading the projects.

How far ahead of the crowd is this wiki? Well, for a quick comparison, pay a visit to the (relatively) new blog, "Web 2.0 in the classroom" and try clicking on any of the links (which have impressive names like "21st Century Education"). Despite their great intentions, not a single one has been updated since April (and most consist of a single entry). Presumably, these were created as part of some sort of technology-in-the-classroom training (on March 12th). But I'm just guessing.

So what are we waiting for? For inspiration, here is what Simon O'Carroll (in Canada) and Neil D'Aguiar (in London) - the teachers who set up Flat Planet - had to say about their experience:

"The thing that we like about Wikispaces is the ease of use. It was fairly simple to figure out how to use the Wikispaces editing tools. Within a few minutes we had set up our Flat Planet Wikispaces site and were laying the groundwork for our students to begin their collaboration. I especially like the ability to easily embed things such as video, audio, and other types of media into the wiki."

Want to learn more about Web 2.0 and other new technologies, and their educational applications? Browse through the articles and other resources at the Centre for Learning and Performance Technologies, join the community at Classroom 2.0, spend some time at Suzie Vesper's Educational Software and Web 2.0 Wiki, and of course don't miss Caren Levine's jlearn 2.0. Enjoy!

My favorite quotes: Hannah Arendt

This is from The Crisis in Education (1954):

“Education is the point at which we decide whether we love the world enough to assume responsibility for it and by the same token save it from that ruin which, except for renewal, except for the coming of the new and young, would be inevitable.

“And education, too, is where we decide whether we love our children enough not to expel them from our world and leave them to their own devices, nor to strike from their hands their chance of undertaking something unforeseen by us, but to prepare them in advance for the task of renewing a common world.”

Australian Jewish Punk Rock Cartoon

Melbourne-based band Yidcore has released a bizarre and kinda wonderful cartoon-video for the title track from their new album, "They Tried to Kill Us. They Failed. Let's Eat!" I have to admit I can't entirely understand the lyrics, but then again, I'm pushing 40. In any case, the title of the song says it all.

Check out the Yidcore Myspace page for more song samples, including their speed-metal version of "Od Yavo Shalom." Their homepage features more punk-Jewish goodness, including their recipes for chulent and kugel.

Thanks to the blog "i tempi e le idee" for turning me on to this. Of course, that blog is in Italian, so I have no idea what is being said there, either.

What is "Service Learning?"

Heard the buzzword, but not sure what it means? Having difficulty explaining how service learning is different from community service or volunteering?


Thanks to Lev Metz and Sulam: The Center for Jewish Service Learning, a project of the Bureau of Jewish Education of Greater Los Angeles, here are two links to help you out: A short video by the Corporation for National & Community Service, and a PowerPoint presentation courtesy of NSLC, the National Service Learning Clearinghouse.

Here is a one-sentence definition from this second organization (as part of a longer article):

" Service-learning is a teaching and learning strategy that integrates meaningful community service with instruction and reflection to enrich the learning experience, teach civic responsibility, and strengthen communities."

They offer this example:

"...if school students collect trash out of an urban streambed, they are providing a service to the community as volunteers; a service that is highly valued and important. When school students collect trash from an urban streambed, then analyze what they found and possible sources so they can share the results with residents of the neighborhood along with suggestions for reducing pollution, they are engaging in service-learning. In the service-learning example, the students are providing an important service to the community AND, at the same time, learning about water quality and laboratory analysis, developing an understanding of pollution issues, learning to interpret science issues to the public, and practicing communications skills by speaking to residents. They may also reflect on their personal and career interests in science, the environment, public policy or other related areas. Thus, we see that service-learning combines SERVICE with LEARNING in intentional ways."

Sulam (apparently an acronym for "Sherut la'Am," although I didn't actually see this said explicitly anywhere on the site), provides a searchable database of service opportunities in the greater LA area - you enter the type of volunteering in which you are interested and your availability and the website finds all appropriate matches. Based on the number of hours you complete and whether or not you write a reflective paper, you receive a Spotlight award from the BJE and are eligible for various sorts of public recognition. Perfect if you are looking to do a Bar/Bat Mitzvah "mitzvah project." Another organization, Areyvut, also provides a long list of project ideas, volunteer opportunities and a growing, searchable database of bnai mitzvah project ideas (largely in the NY area).

For those who'd like to get into the subject in a little more depth, a detailed and theoretically grounded approach to service learning (from which the above picture is taken) can be found at the Joint Educational Project of the University of Southern California.

Synagogue Schools and Congregational Agendas

Appearing in the January 2007 issue of Sh'ma, on the topic of Synagogue Organizing, is an article that I authored entitled "Synagogue Schools and Congregational Agendas." In it, I propose that a synagogue's education program may be the ideal place in which congregants can examine, challenge, and impact upon the synagogue's institutional vision. I further claim that this approach to education can revitalize and reinvigorate the function and purpose of the supplementary school and of bar and bat mitzvah:

". . . If we want congregants to see themselves as stakeholders in the success of the institution . . . there must be potential not only for the lives of the learners, but the practices of the synagogue itself, to be transformed through learning.

The [key purpose of the] supplementary school . . . is to transform young people into Jewish adults, able to make decisions informed by Jewish values and to knowledgeably and competently participate in Jewish observances. This can only happen when synagogue schools provide students opportunities to engage in learning that is informed by their lives outside the school. If not, anything they are taught will come across as irrelevant. All too often, though, students discover instead that their ideas have no place in the synagogue and, equally, that synagogue’s norms have no place in their lives once they walk out its doors.

". . . In many congregations, bar and bat mitzvah has become the point at which students end their participation in the school and the synagogue, and often, Jewish life. But what if the bar or bat mitzvah ceremony were reframed as an authentic demonstration of mastery of the skills that the synagogue expects of all its adult participants? Becoming bar or bat mitzvah would then require the young adult to share in the responsibility for the community’s outcomes and practices — not only by attending congregational worship or participating in its social action activities, but also by having a voice in setting its agendas."

Many thanks to Susan Berrin and to Sh'ma for permission to post the article in full. I would be delighted to read and respond to any feedback posted here.

A Good Week for Tikkun Olam

Hot on the heels of their merger with the Shefa Fund last year, on Monday Jewish Funds for Justice (JFSJ) announced that they will merge with Spark: The Partnership for Service. This merger brings together, on the one hand, one of the major players in the movement to make social justice a normative part of the Jewish experience, and on the other, one of the most exciting, innovative, and successful social justice programs - with a particular focus on teen experiences. See, for example, their chart of the "ten elements of high quality Jewish service learning."

Spark runs three main programs, as described succinctly in their press release:

The Baltimore-based Spark was founded in 2000 to inspire a commitment to service as an ongoing part of each person's life and an important expression of Jewish identity. Thousands of students have participated in one of Spark’s three signature programs.

• HeartAction provides intergenerational service to the elderly and the ill.

• LiteracyAction creates ongoing relationships between educationally at-risk elementary school students and volunteers from Jewish groups.
  

• Nitzotz, a four year-old summer program and partnership with BBYO, provides an intensive two week residential Jewish service learning experience for teens from across the country.

On the JFJS blog jspot.org, Mik Moore writes that JFSJ had only recently begun to experiment with service learning trips, and this merger will greatly expand their ability to create such opportunities:

"It is impossible to travel to the Gulf Region, meet with people whose lives remain in turmoil, hear from local organizers, and not be moved to action. Integrate serious Jewish learning into the trip - as we do - and service has the potential to be transformative. Our expectation and intention is that service learning volunteers will become advocates and organizers, perhaps active in congregation-based community organizing through their synagogues."

The press release also quotes Michael Steinhardt, one of the five primary funders of Spark, extolling the benefits of the merger: “We are excited that the merger will enable us to take Spark’s innovative pilot to a larger scale."

This has been a good week for Steinhardt's initiatives -- the JTA reported yesterday that "America’s third wealthiest man" Sheldon Adelson "pledged $25 million to birthrightisrael." This donation will enable the organization to double the number of free trips to Israel that it offers Jewish youth.

The above image, by the way, comes from the Ziv Tzedakah Fund website. In addition to their incredible and ground-breaking work as a collective, they also provide a wide range of educational materials, ranging from a curriculum on mitzvot and tikkun olam to an inspirational educational video featuring Israeli "mitzvah heroes."

So NFTY really IS a cult after all?

I stumbled across this article by Daniel Rose at the Informal Jewish Education page of Infed.org (an amazing resource for informal education and life-long learning - well worth browsing). The article ("the world of the jewish youth movement") describes the differences between a "youth movement" and a "youth club."

Broken down to its most simple elements, a youth movement is an organization that has a strong ideology, and focuses its activities and educational content towards that ideology. Every decision made in the movement, from programming to recruitment policies, publications to catering plans, first and foremost must centre on the ideology of the movement. In contrast to this, a club or organization has the participant at its centre, and their needs are first and foremost, even though there may also be an underlying, implicit agenda that runs the club, such as the development of good citizenship, or providing a Jewish social context for its participants.

[The above figure] describes various organizations and their members, and where their personal ideologies vis-a-vis the movements’/organizations’ ideologies are. Each x represents a member, with the arrow leading from the x, their personal ideology. This suggests that a true movement verges on a cult, and all the negative connotations that go with that. Conversely, an organization where each member tries to lead the organization on their own path, lacks dynamic leadership, growth, and “movement”.

This model, called the pendulum model, suggests that each organization oscillates between these positions, rarely finding themselves at the extremes. Classical Jewish youth movements would find themselves generally towards the right side of the pendulum swing...

OK, I eggagerated a bit in the header. NFTY isn't really a "classical" Jewish youth movement (along the lines of the Zionist movements of the last century, which the paper is really about), and of course the Reform emphasis on autonomy and personal choice somewhat mitigates the emphasis on a common ideology. But my parents certainly thought I was being brainwashed.

Anyway, I think the pendulum model is a helpful way to think about the natural development of Jewish organizations more generally. Founded by ideologically driven individuals seeking to actualize their own visions, over time either the ideology becomes institutionalized or various individuals try to push the organization in different directions. In either case, the organization can quickly become irrelevant - a successful one must manage the polarities of authority and choice. An organization without a unified sense of purpose provides no basis for affiliation, but one that fails to account for the needs of its stakeholders will lose its membership. A good, enduring, organization (like, say, the Jewish people as a whole?) will reflect upon - and rethink itself - in light of the demands of both collective vision AND the individual needs of participants.

But should teachers be scared of the Zune?

Mike Elgan, writing in Computerworld, explains why Microsoft's new Zune mp3-player "scares Apple to the core." Available in the US beginning in mid-November for around $250, the Zune will have a 3 inch screen, an FM tuner, and a variety of other nifty features. Elgan notes that the new player will have a seamless interface with Windows, the Xbox, and Soapbox (their version of YouTube), a screen that can be turned sideways (to landscape) for watching movies, and that Microsoft has deals for video and television content from just around every studio you could name.

The most intriguing part, though, is the Zune's peer-to-peer wireless capabilities, making it possible for users to share songs, photos, and other data with other Zune users within Wi-Fi range. Users will be able to choose a "ZuneTag," which is a unique user name that others will see on a kind of "buddy list" when they connect via Wi-Fi. The device will have a "Community" menu from which users can select an item called "Nearby" to display all Zunes within range.

Elgan writes:

"Tweens, teens and twentysomethings have acquired the habit of feverishly sharing videos and songs. Today, they mostly have to wait until they get home and use their PCs to do so. With the Zune, students will be free to share music, videos and photos right there in class. They'll be able to pass notes to one another. The Zune isn't just a solitary music player. Think of it as a portable, wireless, hardware version of MySpace."

Wait . . . Pass notes to one another? In class?

With NYC schools already banning mobile phones, are schools going to need to become technology-free zones? How should teachers monitor student use of this technology?

And now a word from the Elders of Zion...

The Jewish People Policy Planning Institute (JPPPI) has released its 3rd annual "assessment of the situation and dynamics of the Jewish people," which can be downloaded as a .pdf file here. The report makes a number of policy recommendations, most of which are in-line with the primarily conservative agenda of the organization, such as:

"Once a democratic decision is taken by Israel; its choices should be supported by the vast majority of Jewish People organizations and leaders, whatever their views may have been before that decision."

However, the report also encourages investment in the use of cyberspace for learning and community building and, even more importantly, the support of grassroots initiatives "as a main recommended strategy." They specifically recommend giving financial priority to youth group initiatives, providing training and support to "would-be initiators," and to "take care to respect and encourage the autonomy of grass roots activities." Yippie!

Some of the key points in their 2006 report include:

• Israel is now the largest Jewish community in the world, with a population of 5,309,000. The United States has a population of 5,275,000 (although with the caveat that this does not include "non-Jewish members of Jewish households"); the rest of the world, combined: 2,501,000 Jews (primarily in France, Canada, Russia, the United Kingdom, or Argentina). As Dennis Ross writes:

  "If nothing else, this means that the future of the Jewish people is more clearly linked to the fate of Israel, and Israel’s character, values and security will matter even more to those who live in the Diaspora."

• "As opposed to a previous attitude of generic condemnation of genocide," 2006 saw the beginnings of the "acknowledgement of the Shoah as a major event in European and world history," as demonstrated by (for example) the declaration of an International Day of Holocaust Remembrance by the United Nations, the establishment by most European countries of a European Day of Memory on January 27, and the opening of several "highly visible Shoah Memorials, notably a large one in Berlin."

• 39% of American Jews use the Internet for Jewish purposes (although its not clear how many of these are referring to J-Date).