Personal

In october 2009 the queensland department of education put in place a ban on teachers friending their students on social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace, citing increasing inappropriate behaviour by eight teachers in the previous financial year. When I read about this ban I was concerned since as I am looking at IT as my KLA and had considered that since I am online 24/7 it would make sense to open myself up to my students through all means, using the opportunity to help teach them about cybersafety with respect to social networking sites, instant messaging, chat relay etc.

Looking at it from an IT perspective, using these technologies would also allow students to ask questions or make comments about material in a semi-open forum which I could respond to when I have a free moment (which will likely still be faster than the student waiting until class hours to ask me, then having to go find an answer for them and getting back to them) while also taking advantage of various pedagological paradigms such as scafolding, small group learning and peer learning through other students responding to the queries before I get to them, for example.

With this idea in mind I decided to look at what others were thinking about whether or not students and teachers should be friends on social networking sites and what the potential risks, real and percieved, actually were given that the queensland ban came after only eight incidents in one year with no actual physical abuse reported while in the previous 3 years over 30 teachers had been actioned for offline incidents as reported here. The other really interesting thing was that a lot of the articles raised a point that I hadn’t considered initially and that is that it’s not just the students that have to be careful of the teachers, the teachers also have to worry about the potential for inappropriate behaviour by the students towards them and what it could mean in the longer term.

The first point that all of the articles agreed upon was that if a teacher decideds to friend current students on a social networking site there exists a potential for the teacher-student dynamic to shift in the classroom to the student seeing the teacher as more of a friend and treating them as such in front of others rather than maintaining the professional relationship expected in the classroom. This percieved familiarity by the student can come from them seeing details of a more personal nature, such as statsus updates, postings, photos or messages from others on the teachers page which they could then bring up in class as a way of undermining the teacher, seeming to be good friends with them, etc…this situation also has the potential to have other students in the class, who may not be friended or have access to these sites, percieving a bias from the teacher towards the friended students and causing issues in their own way.

Both Cheri Lucas and Blue Skunk make the point that it is realised teachers likely have a need to have a way to interact with students in an out-of-classroom manner that is similar to social networking sites but they are likely not the best methods to use. The reason for this is the distinction that they make between social networking and educational networking sites, pointing out that social networking sites are designed in such a way that thye likely won’t meet all the needs the teacher may have in the way an educational networking site will. They go on to both talk about the fact that a teacher who feels the need to interact with students this way should talk to the IT departments and administrators so as to get the best possible solution that will be secure, provide all the tools the teacher needs in the system and be carefully monitored for appropriateness in a way that social networking can’t be.

In terms of my KLA, all of these blogs raise valid reasons for the ban in queensland (and similar in states in the US and other countries) along with suggestions to help teachers find appropriate solutions to provide all the tools they need in a manner that all students can participate and have their activites and safety monitored but I still feel they are missing the point overall.

Yes, these solutions may work but can have issues such as:

• if they are too secured then it can take away the timeliness that instant messaging or facebook messages provide if the teacher can only log in from a computer at the school for instance
• we’re not using systems our students are already using and leveraging them in a way to make it easy for them to feel comfortable in the use
• we’re not teaching them how to safely use the tools they are currently using and thus opening them up to more potential mishaps

If we are worried about a teacher behaving inappropriatly with a student over these technologies then I would suggest that using tools such as facebook and myspace are more of a deterrant than an enabler. Parents of students are able to request to be friended by a teacher that friends their child for instance, and an abuser is a lot less likely to be inappropriate in a semi-open forum such as facebook where all their friends will see comments from them than they would be in one-to-one communication with the student through something like sms or instant messaging.

In the long-run, I see these bans and guidelines as hampering our ability to teach students with real-world examples and hand-on in the IT KLA and potentially exacerbating the problem rather than finding a real solution to it. I think most people would also take offense at the underlying statement that are implicit in the bans that anyone that wants to do something such as friend a student is doing so for nefarious means…if 8 teachers in the whole of the state is the extent of the recognised issue then tarring everyone with the same brush is not the way to go about things if you want to keep or attract teachers to the profession.

While looking over all the articles that I have previously journaled it appeared that all of them came to the same conclussions and also found the same issues or problems arising across each of the locations or case studies they presented. This summary will try to extrapolate form these journal entries to see what these commonalities are and how they suggest educators avoid or oversome them, as well as which issues can be leveraged to our best advantage.

In their studies, McNeese and Prensky found that videogames helped students develop multiple skillsets such as tactical thinking, physical co-ordination, multi-tasking and parallel processing that would not be as easily, if at all possibly, developed through the use of studying out of a text or by a teacher lecturing at them. Both of these articles also talk about issues that can be harmful to student education but aren’t anything to do with the students, rather the software providers and the teachers themselves and even then, the provider issues still ultimately rest with the teacher.

McNeese points out that the edutainment software being used can be inappropriate due to issues of cultural bias, it can cause discipline problems and it can be created with more of a focus on profit than good pedagological decisions while Prensky delves into the fact that many teachers are “digital immigrants” that are still learning to speak the new language clearly and fluently and it is in Prensky’s comments that we can see that the problems identified by McNeese are only an issue while a teacher doesn’t try to improve their digital vocabulary. If a teacher strives to increase their fluency in technology they should be able to make good, informed decisions on what software has a solid and valuable pedagological basis to be used in support of how they are trying to teach their students and which will be frivolous or pointless activities.

Prensky’s “digital natives and immigrants” theory also points to a way teachers can avoid the issues raised by McNeese, McKenzie, Kirriemuir and McFarlane, that of using technology for it’s own sake as technotainment rather than using it where most appropriate and beneficial. If a teacher is able to speak fluent digital then they should be able to see past the arm-waving and razzle-dazzle of software vendors and be able to speak with them on a coherent level to make informed decisions on what software is the best for their purposes rather than merely relying on the vendors words.

The other point that all the authors make is that a lot of software tries to treat learning as a painful process that should be avoided at all costs, that there isn’t a need to read deeply into documents and that students should suffer through what they need before they are rewarded and that this is not a valid way of teaching. Resnick coins the term “playful learning” to be used rather than “edutainment” as it espouses that the students are playing as they learn, thereby reinforcing the idea that learning is fun to the students. The authors all seem to share the same feelings about using software in education as a means for using interactivity with the students and trying to make sure they are having fun at the main task and the learning is incedental to this fun, but still there. This leads to an understanding that using software that is no different to having them read out of a text book and then do problems, a staple kind of edutainment ICT in younger years, is not beneficial and would be a situation where the technology is being used just so schools can say they use it and thus should be avoided while games such as Sim City should be embraced because the learning students will do (regarding topics such as strategic planning, maths, problem solving, etc) is all incedental to the fun they are having while playing.

As can be seen from this, all of the researchers make clear the point that educators need to ensure they are using technology not for its own sake but as a means of deliverying content in a fashion that students are used to, a way that allows students to best leverage the way they process all information through their daily life. Educators also need to focus on ignoring the way they themselves learnt and instead realise that students now multitask with various ICTs commonly through their day and spend more time interacting with computers and videogames than they spend reading thus the use of videogames, either pure or edutainment, can be a more effective way of getting students interacting with lesson content than teaching them from a text book.

We, as educators, also need to ensure that if and when we use videogames as a learning tool we are doing so as a way to reinforce the learning through a new paradigm and not as a way of rewarding students for putting up with learning…we need, in essence, to use these tools as a way of enhancing the fun inherent in learning in the same way we make take students on a field-trip to get hands on for a geology class etc.

Overall through, what these articles show is that there is a definite use for edutainment ICTs in the classroom and it is up to educators to improve their understanding of them before dismissing them out-of-hand as frivolous or a failure if they don’t produce immeadiate results which is the point that, I believe, Prensky makes in the best fashion…it is up to teachers in the current age to make sure we remove our accents and, at the very least, be able to pass for digital natives.