John Pederson shares that the man who took several girls hostage before killing one and commiting suicide, may have found them through MySpace.
If you want to know where Tom Hoffman stands, I think the title of his response says it all. An Axe in the Forehead of Blogging in Schools.
Unfortunately, I think he’s more on the mark than I’d like to admit. Blogging isn’t MySpace. Supervised blogging is miles away from unsupervised MySpace. And yet in the eyes of many people, there’s no real difference.
It all comes down to whether students should be able to post to the internet without somebody approving of it first. Here comes the bucket of ice water though; Students are already and will continue to do it anyway.
The funny thing is, this is nothing new. In fact, it’s a 20 year old issue. The only difference is the level of competency needed to access the information. I was posting to bulletin board systems and chatting it up on DDials in 1986. At that time, nobody really cared, namely because you had to be a hardcore geek in order to access those sites.
However, things are different today. Bands and movies are sending people to MySpace now. YouTube is launching people’s careers. Everybody has access to these sites with little or no technological hurdles to overcome.
So what happens when Beck releases his latest music video on MySpace? Do you really think students won’t be heading over there and checking it out? When a movie like Clerks II promotes that it will include in the closing credits every person who ‘befriends’ its MySpace page, do you think students won’t register so they can follow through?
There’s no discussion needed. Children are going to be on sites like MySpace (so will adults, but we won’t worry about them). The only discussion required is to determine if we’re going to do anything to educate students about interacting in a safe and appropriate manner.
There should not be a single school in the country right now that is deciding whether or not to incoroprate blogging or social networking in their school. The time for that discussion is past. If you’re going to talk about that, you should also open up the discussion about whether or not students should be able smoke on school grounds, and whether we should discourage students from doing drugs. We’re past that. It’s something that has to be done, the only question is how you go about doing it.
So let’s get practical. Let’s assume the decision has been made to dive in head first. Where should they begin?
10/4/2006
While I’m all for (and am implementing) social networking tools for students, we need to recognize that MySpace is not an appropriate environment for education in the use of those tools. Not only are students already beginning to abandon the site for “cooler” pastures, we in the field are recognizing it for what it really is–a Web 2.0 implementation (granted, ingenious) of spam. If we want to train students in social networking, which I agree will be important socially and otherwise to their future, we need to find rounder training wheels in other services and in tools that we implement on campus. Unblocking MySpace only plays to the worst elements of consumerism. Schools should not be a party to the mass-marketing of products to our students, especially without accepted curricala for navigating those shoals.
Wow, I didn’t realize just how awful the title was for that post.
I should have titled it, “Yes, I consider it a reason that we should be teaching instead of blocking” or something along those lines.
My main issue is schools blocking it and thinking that doing so absolves them of responsibility of educating students about interacting on sites like that.
Thanks for making a point of that.
10/4/2006
Thanks for the clarification, Steve. Perhaps the point I like to make, more than anything else, is that it was a tough decision to block MySpace, and was taken very thoughtfully and philosophically. (And, it had nothing to do with Dateline NBC.)
10/19/2006
p
5/9/2007
an you unblocked myspace
wow it makes me so mad about the fact that proxy has just now been blocked on the day of oct,25,07.it makes me furious that i cant get on myspace at school,that was some way to show that school is a good thing.i actualy loved school for myspace because it gives me space to talk to my pinpales and my principles.please if n e one knows how to fix this perposter DO IT
hi
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