Exploring the experiences of adolescent students attending a virtual school

In the past 20 years distance education has evolved rapidly. The accessibility to online learning or virtual schools has become a viable option for many students. Virtual schools offer students instructional flexibility regarding time, place, and pace. Improvements in distance education fostered rapid growth of online learning. The number of online learners grew nearly ten-fold from 2001 to 2015 (Clark, 2001; Watson et al., 2015). However, Watson (2016) estimated only 10% of online learners represented full-time virtual school students. Although face-to-face instruction is preferred by most K-12 learners, some learners argued their needs were best met by virtual schools (Green, 2013; Kenyon, 2007; Nehr, 2009; Pleau, 2012; Rice, 2006). Little is known about the lived experiences of public virtual school students. The obscure nature of virtual schools may be related to the private home-based settings and having significantly fewer enrollments compared to supplemental online programs and traditional schools. The purpose of this study was to explore the personal meanings and motivational aspects of being an adolescent middle school student in a particular virtual school. Two phenomenological methods were administered. First, the Descriptive Phenomenological Method in Psychology (Giorgi, 2009) revealed 10 commons essences of being a virtual student in a particular virtual school. Three descriptive themes related to (1) the mutual needs of family members, (2) teacher-directed learning with parental assistance, and (3) selective socialization. The descriptive study led to personal meanings expressed in psychological terms. Secondly, Interpretive Phenomenological Analysis (Smith et al., 2012) was administered to interpret satisfactions and dissatisfactions of the five adolescent virtual student participants. A single theme emerged from the interpretive study relating to student freedoms, guided choices and a sense of self-control. Self determination theory was applied to 10 randomly selected experiences to provide further insight into the motivation of each participant. The support for autonomy, competence, and relatedness was identified along with the students’ levels of self-regulation. The detailed and rich descriptions of lived experiences and self-regulation capabilities were expected to improve the readers understanding of virtual school preference for a small number of adolescent students and their parents

Culture Organism or Techno-Feudalism: How Growing Addictions and Artificial Intelligence Shape Contemporary Society

The book describes our tech driven society as the Culture Organism, while the most significant social challenge is repression of the individual by corrupt social agents. This is connected to the appearance of light and mild addictions, discovered through quantitative inquiry, which is put into a wider context, identifying the outcomes as social polarizations, appearance of echo chambers, spread of misinformation and fake news, rise of populist leaders and decreased democratic capacity. Theories of anomie, alienation and mass society are presented as a basis for research. The nature of media is examined in the context of addiction intensity, leading to the conclusion that new media, such as smartphones, are more addictive than the older media. This may be because new media have more reality-mimicking features. The study concludes that AI recommender algorithms are the most powerful social force and a new mass media, as they decide which content to expose billions of people across the globe on an individual level. That is why AI recommender algorithms may be considered a public good

Preparing for the Inevitable: Sensemaking in Parent-Child Discussions of Death

Death is something everyone will eventually encounter, yet American society has a tendency to avoid or deny death in everyday life and language. Death makes people uncomfortable, and many view it as a topic too complex for children to understand. Children, however, witness big and little deaths in their lives: of pets, relatives, plants, and favorite fairy tale characters. When a child experiences a death, he or she may have questions for parents or other trusted adults which our current avoidance-geared society does not prepare adults for. Children exist in a specific cultural context, and learn rules and expectations of society from an early age. How society views a subject like death will influence how it is talked about, experienced, and learned. Parents and families serve as the primary means of socialization for young children and hold a position of expertise within the parent-child dynamic. Both socio-cultural and personal beliefs about death will influence how a parent approaches death education with his or her child. Through examination of the sensemaking and sensegiving accounts of parent participants, this study sought to understand what the process is like for parents who are discussing the subject of death with their children, what goals and concerns parents have, what information a parent privileges as important within the social and historical context of the conversation, and what resources he or she accesses, if any, to assist with communication. By framing the participants\u27 experiences as making sense of a social environment after an interruption, this study was able to investigate the processes of sensemaking and sensegiving in an interpersonal context between parent and child, the roles of Weick\u27s (1995) characteristics of sensemaking, implicit and explicit messages relayed to children about death, and the influence of social scripts on both processes. Twelve semi-structured, in-depth interviews were conducted to gather accounts in context of parents who had previously discussed death with their children. Interviews were analyzed based on a modified constructivist grounded theory approach (Charmaz, 2006). The study was designed to remain as close to the relayed experience of the participants as possible with hope that information from the participants\u27 experiences will be useful for both academics and parents as a future resource for preparing for parent-child communication about death