Utilizing Social Networks in the School Setting
Do social networks such as MySpace and Xanga belong in the school setting? Randy Rodgers offers some persuasive arguments for utilizing them in education. To be sure, there are some content hurdles to overcome when allowing these sites into the schools. Many districts–including my own–have simply blocked access to those sites, and perhaps with good reason. My personal experience is that, in MySpace anyway, my page regularly gets hit up by smut-peddling bots, or worse. Regardless of the educational potential, we must first protect students from inappropriate content.
So how can we latch on to the “cool” factor of these network sites to bring learning into the classroom, without also bringing in unwanted material? Kids certainly are gathering information of all kinds through them. They’ve gone beyond e-mail and messaging today. Properly administered, I think there is a potential for a MySpace-type clone to be used in school.
Here’s my idea: Set up a network that school districts sign up for, and that work across the internet, as opposed to just the schools’ local servers. These sites are ONLY allowed from those school’s IP addresses, so as to not allow somebody from the outside to gain access where they don’t belong. Allow students and teachers to set up their profile pages with projects, areas of interest, etc… The sharing of knowledge will come naturally after that.
The potential applications are almost limitless: Topic-specific study groups, term project collaboration, maybe even a video feed for an advanced calculus class for a senior in a remote area.
There are, of course, some potential weak spots for a system like this. There’s no guarantee that term paper “sharing” wouldn’t occur. However, that’s possible in MySpace and Xanga, if kids wanted to do that. Also, the site-only access is a two-edged sword: Kids wouldn’t be able to access work from home.
That said, I think this is an idea that has some merit. Perhaps we may soon see a school setting where traditional classroom content delivery is enhanced and supplemented by inter-school network systems.
Technorati tags: Educational technology, social networks, school safety, online safety
February 4th, 2007 at 3:29 pm
Elgg seems like it would work:
http://elgg.org/
I’ve been thinking about these same things for a while now:
http://www.toddseal.com/rodin/2006/09/bookspace/
You’re right; we need to latch on to this. We risk becoming obsolete when schools remove themselves from the world our students live in. They use cell phones and AIM and MySpace and schools forbid those things. There’s a way to use all of those in order to do our jobs even better than we were doing before, to sell our product (education) to our customers (students).
Elgg is something that schools can install on their own servers and can set up passwords and all kinds of things to restrict who gets access to it and when. It would take a bit of work and expertise (which not every district has, mine included), but it could be done.
July 31st, 2007 at 8:21 pm
I’ve been thinking about this for awhile. My niece, in her first year at college in Iowa, knew her whole dorm before leaving Bellinham, for school. It was an enviable way to become acquainted with roomates and dormmates and made her college transition painless.
However, no matter what I do or say as a school teacher, can’t keep kids off My Space if working on individual computers while at school. Finding this frustrating? Yes! In the “best of all possible worlds” I too see the potential, for positive educational implications. Unfortunately, I don’t live where conditions are optimum and kids won’t succumb to the desire to misuse My Space. I’m afraid I have no other solution at this point but blocking it.