Blogging in the school library

As most people have heard today, a terrible tragedy happened at Virginia Tech University. As of this writing, 33 people are known dead and 17 injured in two separate shooting incidences on campus. The reason that I feel this incident applies to our digital media class is that the university used e-mails, i messaging, and the school’s website to warn the community about the first shooting while the second shooting was occurring. The president of the university even threw out the term “social networking” to describe how they went about informing the university community about the shooting. Leave it to the “professional” administrator to know every “buzz word” out there to pollute the issue. They tried to use the Internet instead of putting up baricades to block off roads going into campus. From the news conference that I watched on my T.V., it appears that they wanted to keep the first shooting an isolated incident and sweep it under the rug, even though the suspect was not in custody. Yikes!!

It’s clear that the campus administration was trying in every way possible to cover their backsides. I can just imagine the meeting that took place to decide how to inform the university community. Their first concern was the image of the university as a “SAFE” place. They didn’t want a mass exodus of students and a loss of tuition. I’m sick to death of administrators referring to the “business model” of education. The only business we have at any level of education is to “EDUCATE” NOT negotiate. Students aren’t our customers–that’s too impersonal. We are not selling them learning. Trying to package learning as a fun package is misleading. Learning is not always fun, having learned is fun. Education should be a pure endeavor without the dollar being the bottom line. Yes, it takes money to provide an educational setting, but in our free society, education should be taken for granted not granted if you pay the most money.

Ah…dear reader, but I digress. If my son or daughter attended that university, I would pull them out quicker than you could say “social networking.” I wouldn’t want my child’s education or his/her life to be based on the “business model” of education. I’d want his safety to be the first concern of one and all within the university administration. And, PLEASE don’t hide behind the buzz word “social networking.” I’m appalled.

My father recently suffered a series of strokes. As I’ve spent hours by his bedside, it’s allowed me to consider a large population of our society that are totally out of the loop. About eight years ago, before my father became unable to use his hands and suffered from dementia, I tried to set him up on a computer and e-mail so that we could easily keep in touch. In the past, Dad was a man who loved ham radio and anything to do with communicating over the airwaves. I remember Sunday mornings as a child, Dad would disappear into his office while the rest of us were getting ready for church, turn up the volume on his ham radio, and spurt out “CQ, CQ, CQ6, this is Lyle, ‘L’ as in Larry, ‘Y’ as in yellow, ‘L’ as is Larry, ‘E’ as in Edgar, over.” The same man in his 70s just couldn’t get the hang of computers or the Internet. I must confess that much of it was probably due to the onset of dementia, but it seems to me that a computer would have been a natural progression from a ham radio. I can picture my father as a younger man, blogging with his ham radio buddies. 

Two years ago, when the government enacted the Medicare Prescription Drug Plan and when the elderly were to find and signup for a plan, I found myself faced with doing the leg work for my father. If he’d had to do it for himself, he would not have had access to the Internet and couldn’t hear well enough to make the phone call to the toll free 800 number that no one answered anyway (I tried it). My only hope was to go to the Internet, guess at some things, type in what I knew and press ENTER. As an aside, Dad pays more for the plan then he gets as a discount. He makes a $29.00 a month payment and get $25.00 reduced from his $350.00 a month presciption bill. I’m not sure if this is by design on the part of the legislature and insurance companies, but I wouldn’t put it past the insurance companies to have lobbied for just that situation. One of my father’s friends tried to stop his payments to the prescription drug plan because he found that he was paying out more than the discount. He started the process of “unregistering” from the program six months ago and to date has not been able to stop the payments to the insurance company. He made the mistake of having the payments taken out of his Social Security check. It is criminal to take advantage of the elderly and the helpless.

I’ve digressed from my original thoughts. I’m not sure that we can fill the gap to bring the majority of the elderly into the computer age. Of course, there are senior citizens that spend all day on the computer. They are probably a bit younger than my father. Check this site out to see how seniors citizens today are breaking the stereotype senior bloggers. I’m sure that there are researchers with huge NSF grants that are studying how to fill the gap. In the mean time, there is a generation of individuals that are being left behind and uninformed.

I teach Internet safety at our school.  Believe it or not, students have not thought much about how their activities on the Internet put them in danger.  I’ll never forget the 7th grade girl who bragged about her “My Space” account.  I asked her what she had on her account.  She listed the following:

• My favorite music
• My favorite stars
• My friends
• Pictures
• Her e-mail address
• Her IM address
• Her blog

To my surprise, she had not secured her “My Space” account.  She told the class that her mother didn’t care what she did on the Internet and knew about her “My Space.” 

After we completed our web safety and security lesson, the girl was very quiet.  Two days later she came up to me and asked to speak to me privately.  She confessed that she had never thought about her safety on “My Space” and had gone home and secured her website.  Now you might be thinking, why hadn’t she heard about it on the news or from her parents.  She told me that her mother worked nights and didn’t watch the news often.  She also told me that her mother didn’t know how to use the computer.  Her mother was unable to attend the parent meetings at our school that presented children’s Internet safety because she worked nights.

 My point is that we assume that teenagers are in the “know.”  In fact, they have to be taught about Internet safety.

So what is my point as it pertains to our Class 3 readings.  Students need direction!  The majority want to be safe and are not going to push the limits.  That’s why providing safe social networking sites is what we as adults must do.  Although many students want the teacher’s approval, most want the approval of their peers first.  Blogging for their peers with some anonymity is freeing from the structure of face-to-face socializing.  No one cares if your short, tall, skinny, plump, or have a scar.  They really see you for who you are on the inside.  It also give those students who don’t speak out and have a voice in class a true “voice” to say what they think and feel.

Further, blogging appeals to the artistic student that we don’t always reach in classes with one dimensional or two dimensional teaching.  These students can use tools for creating pictures and creating sound to enhance their blog.  What a wonderful opportunity for we as teachers to see the true creative individual within the child.

Using the tools and secured blogging sites such as Imbee and Think.com is a start in the right direction.  Allowing the parents to have the ability to monitor their child’s blogs is the “absolute” right thing to do.  However, what do we do in the case of the student above who doesn’t have a computer savvy mom?  We have to act as guardian in absentia.