How far do you take political correctness in your clipart?

I had feedback today on a course, that I thought was quite well done, that made me take a step back and get my back up a little as well. During a recent time crunch and with limited resources I put together a course for Accessibility and Customer Service Standards. I found a set of clipart that I thought looked business like enough without being too formal. I work in a health care setting and it is difficult to find (free-cheap) clipart that isn't just doctors and nurses.

Regardless of that, I took this set of clipart and tried to include as many of the images of people facing forward as I could (they were "speaking" to the learners), as many different ethnice backgrounds as I could. I looked for different levels of mobility, and I also included what I thought were different roles. Some of the more interactive pieces included real pictures of people in other roles and situations as well.

The comment that was made was that the only image the person saw of a man in my "slide deck" (not the interaction pieces) was of a man that was a doctor. Some staff may be offended by this because of the stereotype that not all doctors are men. I tried to explain there were other images of men within the course. I also tried to explain that this course was one of six in a set and some of the others within the set did have pictures of women that were physicians.

I wonder where does one draw the line. One can't possibly show every "type" of person in every single course and in fact for this particular courses I had great difficulty in finding pictures of people that have various disabilities that were not just from Special Olympic events.

Any thoughts on how you handle situations like this or try to remain as politically correct as possible would be interesting to hear.

Bye Bye Schools, Hello Learning Centres

Wow this is an interesting idea. One that makes you think could it really work? Would your children learn more in this format.

I found this article by Richard Garner (The Independent), "No more school as council opens 'learning centres'" via David Warlick's post this morning So What Would My Daughter Do?. In an attempt to rebuild their secondary school program Knowsley Council in Merseyside (UK) is going to close all 11 of it's secondary schools. Instead students will be able to access learning centres throughout the week where they will work online at their own speed on programs specific to their learning needs and interests.

"They will be given their day's assignments in groups of 120 in the morning before dispersing to internet cafe-style zones in the learning centres to carry them out", writes Garner.This new program will be focused towards 21,000 youths in secondary education and will be accessible from home as well.

Perhaps if this indeed the way of the future of educating children, as David wonders, have we begun to prepare kids for knowing how to seek out information electronically. Should we be focusing their education more and more on elearning tools, clarifying PLE's, teaching education technology? If so what gets left behind? Dissecting frogs? Do second language courses disappear and become "technology language" courses? As always, something new to ponder and worry about.