Global Policy Memo
Commentary and Counterpoint on World Affairs
Posted by Josh Goodman on December 27, 2009 at 10:19 pm
filed under Uncategorized
Tagged democracy, facebook, political communication, twitter
Nicholas Bramble has an intriguing piece in Slate entitled “Fifth Period Is Facebook: Why schools should stop blocking social network sites.” According to Bramble, a fellow at the Information Society Project at Yale Law School:
Schools have had a nearly unanimous response to Facebook, MySpace, and YouTube: repression and silence. Administrators block access to these sites because they think it’s important to keep classrooms free from the perceived harms associated with social networks—harassment, bullying, exploitative advertising, violence, and sexual imagery.
But this is shortsighted. Educators should stop thinking about how to repress the huge amounts of intellectual and social energy kids devote to social media and start thinking about how to channel that energy away from causing trouble and toward getting more out of their classes.
Bramble suggests a number of ways that schools could incorporate online media into lesson plans:
[A] teacher could assign students the task of filming a scene from The Scarlet Letter in the stairwell, identifying the dynamic of shaming in the novel, and writing about how it might be playing out in their Facebook news feeds. In math class, students could develop statistical models and graphs of the patterns of information flow in their social networks. To understand how advertising works, students from different backgrounds and with different online habits could compare what’s being hawked to them. And for a school journalism project, teams of students could aggregate other students’ narratives from blogs, Facebook, and Twitter and compile a real-time collective analysis of the state of their educational union.
These suggestions sound excellent (at least for students in high school or late middle school), and I would add another assignment that I believe is essential to education’s role in preparing students for life as citizens in a democracy. Political communication and dialogue is increasingly an online affair (witness this blog, millions of others like it, the mobilization of online support for the election of Barack Obama, the Twitter and YouTube revolution currently taking place in Iran, etc.). With the decline of a media landscape where the only voices were a few hegemonic newspapers and television outlets that trended toward a national or local consensus, we have seen the rise of more narrowly defined communities of online political communication, aided by social networks, that trend toward reinforcing partisan points of view. Just as students in the last generation needed to be instructed in the proper art of reading the newspaper, today they also need to be taught how to navigate the blogosphere, online social media outlets, and cable news networks in pursuit of the higher truth.
Bramble cites John Dewey for the dictum that educators should not “substitute the adult for the child, and so weaken intellectual curiosity and alertness, suppress initiative, and deaden interest.” While this is a good point, it is highly abstract and difficult to translate into practice because a line must be drawn before the point of pandering to students’ inclinations at the expense of optimal education. All of these proposals for using social networks in schools represent very particular educational uses for these sites. For the remaining 99% percent of the time that students are in school, these sites will continue to serve primarily as distracting outlets for chitchat, gossip, and other socializing that is wholly irrelevant to any educational purpose — the virtual equivalent of note-passing and talking behind the teacher’s back. For that reason, it is ultimately hard to argue with the decision to ban access to these sites in school – at least outside of “Fifth Period.”
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Nicholas Bramble has an intriguing piece in Slate entitled “Fifth Period Is Facebook: Why schools should stop blocking social network sites…..