Social Media

Loved the Clay Shirky video. His comment about ‘We’re all in this together’ is so accurate. In general terms civilization has moved from insolated individuals and small groups to facilitated access by anyone to anyone else on the globe. It is wonderfully exciting. Any person with access can produce content, interact with another person clear across the world and exchange ideas, share information, collaborate with others. Shirky talkes about the Internet providing native support for groups and individuals at the same time which is world changing. One of the best examples of the ‘revolution’ was the China earthquake.

We as participants in the global community no longer have barriers of time or area or space with which to contend. Facebook and other sites enable us a individuals to connect with others with whom we’ve lost track, ‘meet’ other people, contact groups with shared interests. The same access of course applies to anyone who is a learner, including us as adults. Information shallow and deep, reliable and questionable is availble any time. We can be learners 24/7 and interact with others who are learning when we are.

One interesting side note is the potential issues for entities, public and private of inappropriate content being posted, who is responsible for checking it, and who has access to remove it. Currently our district is constructing social media policy as we have adopted social media type software for classroom websites. Last week I received an e-mail from the district lawyers about not allowing staff to use third party software/sites. My response was that we are WAAAYYY past that time and writing policy forbidding actions that we cannot possibly control or enforce is not good practice. Not being China, we cannot control what staff do on the Internet in their off time, or what they access at school outside the parameters of what we filter. That genie is long out of the bottle.