wrote:
> This is my personal policy as well - I don't send friend requests to
> kids...if they ask I accept. Most don't ask until they graduate and go
> to college, at which point they feel it is "safe" to friend me.
It's worth noting that the reason this particular colleague uses Facebook to
communicate with her students, and probably the reason why so many others do
too, is that in many ways it offers better and easier to use tools than we
can provide in-house.
If she wants to post a sound clip or photos from a recent concert, she can
do it much more easily, and without having to learn HTML, than she would
through the tools that we provide her in-house. If she wants to let a
particular ensemble know that a rehearsal time has changed, not only is that
relatively easy to do using Facebook, but she knows that they're more likely
to check their Facebook messages than their school email accounts. And quite
frankly, if a tool exists out there that *we* don't have to support
in-house, I think we should embrace it, rather than circling the wagons
against change.
Now I know that there are some out there who will cry "Advertising!
Advertising!" and complain that these services are suspect because they're
profit-driven, and merely want to access our students' "eyes." Better, they
would say, that we develop tools in-house that aren't tainted by the goal of
trying to advertise to our students.
To this I bring up the examples of Newsweek, Time, Sports Illustrated, The
New York Times, and many other periodicals we have our libraries subscribe
to for our students. All of these feature advertising, and want just as much
to get access to the eyes of our students and faculty members. What makes
these old media examples any less evil than the new media ones? How much
more would Newsweek cost if it were entirely subscriber supported?
There is also the issue of being careful what you wish for. About ten years
ago, a parent member of our Technology Committee said that we needed to find
a way to get girls more interested in using computers. Not necessarily for
what they considered to be all the "geeky," socially isolated stuff. But,
instead, the way that they naturally interacted with people. When a killer
app of that nature came about, girls would finally embrace using computers.
Well guess what? That killer app is Facebook/MySpace. It did exactly what we
thought we wanted it to, and now that it's here, we want to push the genie
back into the bottle. It ain't gonna happen. *We* have to adapt to the fact
that they're using it in just the ways that that parent predicted. *We* have
to get out there and *use it too*. *We* have to STOP TRYING TO DEFINE ALL
NEW PROBLEMS AS TECHNOLOGICAL ONES, WHEN THEY'RE THE SAME OLD PROBLEMS, JUST
WITH A TECHNOLOGICAL SPIN TO THEM.
Case in point: cell phones. Let's face it folks, they're not going away. You
can try to ban them on campus between the hours of 8.00a and 3.00p, but what
about students with laptops? Surely they have ways of making phone calls
from those? What about PDAs? A few years we were thinking those would be the
next big thing, and trying to get students to buy into using them. What do
you do when little Suzy whips out her Palm Treo in class to do some
calculations? Do you let her use it because it's a PDA, or do you confiscate
it because it's a cell phone? You're worried that with cell phones kids can
call their parents first to give them *their* side of the story before the
Division Head's Office gets through? Couldn't they do that just as easily
with 50c and the pay phone outside the dining hall, or by emailing mom at
work? And what about the big one I always hear about: cheating by texting
answers to each other or taking a picutre of the quiz with the built-in
(albeit crappy) camera? Hey, cheating is cheating, and you don't need a cell
phone to do it. One of these days the orthodontist will give kids the option
to have the cell phone installed right in with their braces, and then
there'll be nothing we can do about it.
In all these cases we cannot afford to be 21st century Luddites. We have to
adapt to the new technologies, learn to use them ourselves, and teach our
students how to use them wisely, rather than banning them. And as much as it
will pain some people to hear this, making mistakes, sometimes even making
dreadful mistakes, is part of the process of learning how to do this.
You can't write a rule for everything.
--
keg
========================================
Keith E Gatling
mailto:keith@gatling.us
http://www.gatling.us/keith
The fact that I'm open-minded doesn't mean that I have to agree with you.
========================================
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