When we talk about technology in education, today we are no longer just discussing the best way to use PowerPoint for a classroom discussion or how to convince students to type their papers and conduct online research.
Today the issue of integrating technology into education has taken a much more serious turn. It is no longer just our students’ test scores that are at stake if we do not get ahead of their expertise in the connected world of Web 2.0. Now our students’ safety and social well-being is at stake. As educators we must not only become proficient at integrating technology into our classrooms, we must also become educated about the social networking and other online communities our students are frequenting outside our classrooms. We must then convince local school boards that, instead of shutting down access to these sites that we fear, we have a duty to un-block access at school so that we can get out there to guide and protect our students.
Would any of us let our daughter take a picture of herself with wet tendrils of her hair dangling provocatively across her innocent face made up with smoky black eye shadow, then allow her to submit it to the world’s most circulated newspaper with a caption below welcoming anyone who reads it to stop by her address any hour of the day or night? She’s already doing that electronically with her MySpace profile.
Would we allow our nephew to go to a neighbor’s party of more than 100,000 guests who were all supposed to be teenagers but who included any number of flirtatious 35-year-old women, 50-year-old male executives oddly with nothing better to do than hang out with teenagers, and a 28-year-old ex-con gang recruiter? That’s who could be playing tag with him on Tagged.com.
Would we allow a 14-year-old to bring home unlimited numbers of DVDs featuring porn or solicitations to buy and sell sex? Go out to any of the social networking sites and that’s exactly what is available up until members report the inappropriate content and the overworked site administrators get around to taking them down.
School districts across the globe are scrambling to keep up with blocking the newest social networking sites that pop up online seemingly overnight so as to safeguard our children while at school. Why then, like any other educator who cares about the well-being of our children, would I advocate un-blocking these potentially dangerous sites? Simply put, because when we block our portals, we close our eyes and leave millions of our kids out there alone, vulnerable, and unprotected. We have a duty to un-block access to social networking sites and get in there to help them understand this new connectedness, make informed choices, and lead the transformation toward a greater good.
Imagine if all we did was to not allow students to drink alcohol on campus and we assumed that we’d done enough to keep them safe. Of course, we’ve learned that we need to get out in front and teach them about the physical, emotional, and societal impact of alcohol abuse. We also show them graphic movies about gruesome possibilities of drinking and driving. We form on-campus Students Against Drunk Driving groups as alternatives to the peer pressure and ready availability of alcohol. Likewise, we don’t just create strongly worded rules and consequences for having, using, and selling drugs on campus and sit back believing that we’ve done all that we can to stem drug use among teens. We organize drug awareness programs, teach them about the biology of addiction, and role-play how to handle situations when peers pressure them to join in.
There are federal dollars, state grants, and private funds available for all schools to make sure we do everything we can to help our students understand risks, make good choices, and pick up the pieces if they find themselves in trouble with drugs, alcohol, sex, gangs, harassment, and crime. So why, then, are we not doing more when it comes to the newest life-threatening danger, the dozens of teen and adult online social networks, that our tech-savvy young people whisper about, spend hours on, and don’t ever intend to stop using?
For educators, technology skills are no longer a simple matter of knowing how to pull in interesting videos or images for in-class presentations. Now, at nano-speeds, becoming technologically competent is a matter of competing against compelling negative influences to ensure our children’s safety, well-being, and futures. We’ve got to get out there into cyber space and start showing our young people how to define the nature of this new social interaction instead of letting those who would exploit them for their own agendas determine how the power of the internet will be used.
We need to start podcasting (seewww.epnweb.org/index.php?view_mode=what) lessons and lectures and literature to those MP3 players they’ve got plugged into their ears every moment they can get away with it. We could start text messaging (see http://ferl.becta.org.uk/display.cfm?printable=1&resID=2762) homework reminders to their cell phones we know they are checking every five minutes whether they are allowed to or not.
We ought to allow instant messaging on our classroom computers to encourage absent students to sign in and participate in class from home or from their cell phones. Instant messengers can be left open by teachers on their home computers so students can see that homework help (see www.techlearning.com/db_area/archives/TL/2002/11/inservice.php) is also available each night when they log in to chat with their friends and whoever else is out there.
Yahoo groups (see http://dir.groups.yahoo.com/dir/Schools___Education/K-12) or class MySpaces can be included out in our students’ cyber neighborhoods where we can post class materials, questions and answers, help with assignments, and reminders that there’s more for them to do online than just surf and chat. Class MySpaces can be used to invite students from around the world to meet with our students and participate in productive projects instead of just strangers who comment on their personal spaces about the latest CD or party or worse.
Parents, teachers from other disciplines, and experts out in the “real world” can join in class blogs created by students or teachers to show them that interaction online can be about legitimate subjects any time and anywhere. As limitless as are the possibilities for negative encounters out in Web 2.0 (see www.shambles.net/pages/learning/ict/web2edu/) so too are the opportunities for connecting with the world, ideas, information, and creativity in positive ways if only we will un-block our own imaginations and our school portals and get into the game our students play at every day.
Our interests in creating a presence out in cyber space is not just to guide our young charges away from dangerous or negative influences. We have much more than that to learn and to teach.We can join with them in the new genre of writing text messages and instant messages, show them how they are different in structure, content, and form from formal email and letter writing, and tap into their creativity by inspiring them to connect this new way of communicating with formal or classic modes.
Just what might a text messaging poem (see http://books.guardian.co.uk/games/mobilepoems/0,9405,450649,00.html) poem look like?
What kind of concise and compact story might they be inspired to create that does not exceed the maximum number of characters in a Yahoo message or a Twitter.com entry?
How could they incorporate the dialogue of an audible (see http://messenger.yahoo.com/intl/audibles.php (pre-programmed audio quips) into a narrative to help bring it to life and inspire more creativity? We should also be teaching them how to incorporate that resume that every English or Business class requires them to write into their MySpace or FaceBook profiles to impress scholarship committees, college recruiters, and employers.
We could show them how the videos they love to include on their spaces might help them promote their community service projects and attract financial contributors or volunteers.
We could, however, just continue sitting behind blocked content warnings and let the next generation stumble in the middle of the information highway without so much as warning them to look both ways before crossing into a new digital neighborhood. Or we can get logged in, lead the dialogue and the content, and guide them in building social networks that will benefit their lives and our increasingly interconnected world. If we don’t, the headlines are full of terrifying stories of who might.
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