We are not amused: Licensed under Creative Commons by Carl Lender on wikimedia[/caption]Two days ago I watched the film 'Queen Live at the Hammersmith Odeon' from 1975. It took me back to when I was 13 and discovering exciting cultural phenomena. My parents did not agree and pomp-rock was absent from the family playlist in those years. The enjoyment I experienced as a teenager has prevailed, however, despite the domestic disapproval of 40 years ago.
Thirteen year old Greg Hoffman got an iPhone 5 for Christmas in 2012 and the next day his fearful mother, Janell, issued him a contract. There are 18 points to the contract, of which half are rules such as: "It does not go to school with you". There's also some good advice: "See the world happening around you". Janell acted on one of the foremost duties of a parent: to protect her child from the dangers of the world. The iPhone "scared the hell out of me", she admitted. Her reaction was one-sided; there was no negotiation. She wrote up the contract in 20 minutes and presented Greg with a fait accompli. Five years later, it's still on her website, unchanged; you can download the contract and impose it on your own kids.
There are many times when our superior experience of the world entitles us to instruct our children. In issuing her commandments to Greg, Janell ("being bossy is fun") felt she knew what could go wrong and decided the best solution was to be authoritarian. It's an understandable motivation.
Many schools, in advising their students about how to use technology, do the same. They try to manage behaviour by proscription and disapproval. In loco parentis, they have the right, and sometimes the duty, to forbid harmful activities. But like anything else, adults are not qualified to make up rules about technology unless they first take the effort to learn about it.
In 2015 in the 'Status Update' edition of This American Life podcast (first 14 minutes of the episode), Ira Glass talks to Jane, Julia and Ella, teenage girls who spend a lot of their lives using Instagram. The conversation is not judgmental and the girls describe in fascinating detail the specific language and rituals of their culture. It is clear that they have thought intelligently about the pitfalls and benefits. This is not to say that they are not in need of advice and guidance on occasion, but the programme respectfully takes the opportunity to learn about why teenage girls use Instagram rather than condemning them from a position of ignorance.
Schools often do not give their students this degree of consideration. The adults, alarmed by the potential for misuse of mobile devices, and sometimes influenced by anecdote rather than research, devise rules which seek to ban the unpreventable. Their false assumptions are twofold. Firstly, they assume they know what the students are doing; secondly, they assume the students are unaware of the consequences. Children are more sophisticated and reflective than we often give them credit for.
The school where I work is trying to respond rationally to the use of social media. We have a 'Digital Citizen's Agreement' which applies to all members of the community. The agreement considers in general terms "Internet and devices" and addresses "abusive behaviour", but does not offer answers to the questions we have about how, if at all, we should integrate social media into school life (of course, this integration did not wait until we had a policy and has already happened organically).What would a good 'Social Media Policy' look like? Presumably it would have to address many aspects of school: social communication by adults and students; educational uses; marketing of the school; teaching strategies. The policy might discourage or prohibit certain activities, but it would be written from a position of knowledge obtained by research. Crucially, I hope it would embrace how students and teachers actually use social media and it will also look forward to ways in which we can promote positive attitudes to life online and off. This is where we are right now, wondering where to go next.
Last week, at the ECIS Annual Conference, I met fellow Online 7 cohort member Stephen Reiach. We agreed how each of our schools is in need of a robust policy covering social media. We are now discussing how we can make the process of informing a social media policy the focus of our joint Course 2 project. Are any readers of this blog interested in joining us? If so, please leave a comment below.
Please leave a comment even if you are not wanting to work with us!
Dear Steve,
ReplyDeleteThanks for your thoughts on this topic. I remember that phone contract and even printed it out when my eldest daughter got her first iPhone. My wise husband said we should hold off and see how she uses it before we started giving her a bunch of rules. As it turns out, she generally uses her phone in the same way that I do, so there was no need to go through the litany of no-nos with her.
In the same way, I too, find it frustrating that school technology agreements tend to be written from a place of fear, rather than from a place of possibility. I am certainly interested in joining you and Stephen in coming up with a social media policy. Count me in!
Best,
Valerie
Thanks Valerie,
ReplyDeleteThat contract speaks a lot of sense in places, but did not express the trust I hope we can place in our kids (she kept the password!). I don't know what a really good policy would look like yet, but I'm looking forward to finding out!
Dear Steve,
ReplyDeleteI saw Queen this summer in Singapore with Adam Lambert. They did a beautiful job incorporating Freddie Mercury into the concert. You make some concrete points first that adults need to take the time to learn about technology and also that children are a lot more insightful than we give them credit for. In the US I faced the challenge of using Social Media for my class from my district. This exemplifies the irony that we need to learn and model yet we can't even use it for our work. So in the end its the kids that end up teaching us how to navigate but we then put the kabash on their ability to experiment and discover in a place like school where you should be able to make some mistakes. Controlling through fear is an age old idea that eventually breaks down through the resistance of believing and following the status quo. Thanks for the nudge about integrating social media into school. Definitely a must have goal for me.
Thanks Debra. It's true that there are some pitfalls with social media, but schools are neglecting their duty if they just deal with the easy things in life and pretend that education is only about a narrow range of human experience. The difficult part formmany adults is to be humble about not knowing all the answers.
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