Social networking – a power for good or for evil?
social networking September 29th, 2007
I have had enough of the moral panic engendered by people who see MySpace, Bebo, Facebook and others as the doorway to danger for children. I heard a school leader a few weeks ago say to a school staff “We’ve had some bullying which started online, so tell your students not to use MySpace at all”. Many teachers nodded their heads in shared concern for this creeping social cancer of the 21st Century, others (myself included) were dumbfounded by such naivety… and while we are at it, we’ll get them to stop using mobile phones, and that evil television will need to go too!
This school holidays I will be making my own Facebook site.
Here is my TO DO list for schools and teachers to prepare the way for the positive application of Social Networking in a learning context:
- Teachers – get a Facebook account now! If you don’t know how, ask your kids.
- Use your Facebook account for your own personal life, hobbies, friends and interests. Encourage your friends and family to join and link to your site.
- Use your Facebook account to organise a real world event – like a family picnic, a party or a project.
- Tell your students you have a Facebook site – (of course, there is no need to invite them as friends)
- Investigate with your students the risks of social networking
- Place these risks in the cultural context of your school (mine is a Catholic school, so we would place these issues in a context of peace, dignity, justice and Christian ethics)
- Develop with your students (and your school) an Online Charter – publish this to parents and the commuity
- Invite parents to participate in the development of the Charter
- Have students and parents sign a contract (including parents consent) based on the charter
- Implement a learning project which is values based and uses social networking as the medium for collaboration and publication.
One of my teachers (of whom I am very proud) taught a project where students developed a MySpace site for the Blessed Virgin Mary, as if she were a contemporary young woman. Her characteristics and values had to be expressed through design, content, text and the selection of music, images and ‘friends’. The students, naturally, thought this was very cool!
I’ll keep you posted on the progress of my Facebook site – defnitely a power for good!
September 30th, 2007 at 4:55 pm
Philippa Brook, head of marketing and communications at Sydney’s Macquarie University, says that with more than 70 % of 15 to 34 year olds utilising social networks, they can’t be ignored. Over the years, every new form of communications technology has been touted as the next evil : film, radio T.V. computer games and now social networking utilities. No one has ended up with square eyes from watching T.V. yet ! (Melinda Ayre, Sunday Telegraph September 30).
October 1st, 2007 at 8:50 am
They said the same thing about the horseless carriage! The important thing is that educators respond to the challenge by explicitly teaching the skills and values that can make social networking be a force for good, not evil.
Will you be going Facebook, Adrian?
October 2nd, 2007 at 10:10 pm
One of my favourite films is the Matrix. Education is now at the point of choosing between the blue pill and the red pill: the red pill allows us to continue with the status quo, oblivious to the possibilities of a new reality. The blue pill would see us to leave behind that version of the world which no longer relevant or meaningful. Sadly, so many of the teachers I work with don’t even realise there is a choice to be made. For them, our students are fading into a world they don’t recongise or want to engage with.