Social Media – What is the school’s responsibility?
Karl Fisch posted an interesting discussion regarding the role of schools in promoting social media use. Consistent with many discussions of this topic in which we have participated, the flow of the issue is something like this:
1. Should we encourage social media use by students?
Yes! – for lots of reasons. Our students are already immersed in social media privately, and will be professionally, so they need to learn to use it effectively and responsibly. These tools are great for promoting project-based learning, collaboration, etc. Engagement! Engagement! Engagement!
2. BUT – if the school provides the tool, assigns the use of the tool, or in some other way encourages its use by students – is the school responsible for the content created, student actions, etc.?
Our friend Bud the Teacher is essentially arguing no – part of the learning responsibility is the freedom of the students to use the tools, etc. Karl is not so sure, concluding…
Transparency and community building by teachers, schools and districts is something I very much support, and I think what St. Vrain is doing is very compelling and very interesting, but I also think it’s uncharted territory and there are some pretty complicated issues involved. This is a really important conversation to have, so I’d love to hear your thoughts on this.
Ditto! We believe the vast majority of customers – today – believe they own the responsibility to monitor and control content and behavior if they have provided, encouraged, or required use of the tools. We may move to a more Scandinavian model eventually – but that certainly seems to be the norm today.
SO – we have some very interesting product development work underway attempting to marry access to tools, encourage collaboration, etc., with easy-to-use-and-enforce integration of existing AUP and filtering policies. We’ll have an actual product to test in January, but for a sneek peak, see my short “talking head” overview of the concept.
We remain very interested in any feedback you may have.
Joel
This entry was posted on Monday, November 16th, 2009 at 5:00 am and is filed under 21st Century Learning, filtering. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.
How can you justify blocking the Wikipedia branch of sites?
Wikipedia is in no way a forum/blog. It is a quick reference online encyclopedia, and contains valuable resources.
Wikipedia is a difficult site for us.
A great resource – but it contains information about lots of topics – some certainly too adult for primary students. Remember – our default filtering policies must be appropriate for K-12 – thus – we will err on the side of caution and “over block” rather than “under block”. However, local school administrators may move wikipedia (or any site) to “local – allow” and allow access to it for all students and staff, only older students, or only staff as they desire. Contact your local school leaders and make the case – as TTC is ultimately just a tool – it is managed by the school based on local policies and attitudes.