Fear Mongering, Social Media & You

I have really been try­ing to pick my bat­tles in school this year. Rather than try­ing in vain to inte­grate every new tech­nol­ogy I find into the cur­ricu­lum of every fac­ulty mem­ber I am try­ing instead to focus on one larger project at a time. So my first project of the year is per­haps the largest, to get my school to relax the inter­net fil­ter­ing sys­tem to the ben­e­fit of all. It has been a bit of a bumpy expe­ri­ence so far, but I think that I am mak­ing headway.

After my ini­tial meet­ing with the Super­in­ten­dent went pretty well, he asked me to come and speak to the entire admin­is­tra­tive team about the issue. This meet­ing was where the dis­cus­sion got bumpy. The meet­ing was going pretty well, I had con­vinced them of the edu­ca­tional value of sites like YouTube, and then the sub­ject of Face­book came up. This is where the con­ver­sa­tion came to a screech­ing halt. The admin­is­tra­tors in the room where adamantly against allow­ing Face­book to be used in school. When I asked what the issue was “that noth­ing seri­ous ever hap­pens on Face­book” (para­phrase), “it is a place to waste time with your friends.” I assured them that thanks to my new PLN if they gave me 24 hours I could give them ten valid edu­ca­tional uses for the service.

Then the con­ver­sa­tion took a turn to where I knew it could go, but hoped it wouldn’t…“Facebook is a dan­ger­ous place where preda­tors stalk kids.” At that point in the meet­ing I just sat and lis­tened. These admin­is­tra­tors are good peo­ple who seem to have legit­i­mate con­cerns for the well being of their stu­dents, not merely a fear of lit­i­ga­tion (although I’m cer­tain that was present). Some of them quoted recent events in the national media like the so-called Face­book Killer, or other sorts of vague reports of kids being abused by sickos.

These fears are road­blocks to the least restric­tive inter­net envi­ron­ment and unless I can craft a thought­ful and log­i­cal argu­ment to rebut it the ser­vice will remain off lim­its here. Are these fears unfounded? Are they par­tially cor­rect? Can I use tech­nol­ogy to make it safer, or is this as I sus­pect a rather mat­ter of culture.