For my weekly dose of irony, yesterday our overly-large school district announced that we can now become a fan of the system on Facebook and follow it on Twitter.
Of course that’s unless you are currently in one of our schools.
Where Facebook is almost universally blocked and Twitter is being filtered out by a growing number of middle and high schools.
So, our administrators seem believe it’s important that the institution be a part of two major social networking systems.
But it’s not essential that teachers or students be a part of the conversation.
Par for the course.
While I covered dormitory duty yesterday, most of my colleagues had a faculty meeting. In typical fashion, five or six announcements were made, two of them controversial and difficult. All dissent or discussion was stifled in favor of, “this is the way it will be; you don’t know what’s going on.”
But “we welcome your opinion, and your willingness to contribute to the conversation.”
Something’s gotta give. We too have both accounts at our district but fortunately don’t filter social networking sites. The good news for you is that we’re seeing the mainstream acceptances and hopefully the push comes to shove. See you at NECC.
Tim, thankfully, that isn’t happening in my workplace. There is increasing awareness of how valuable these tools are in sharing ideas and enabling students to build their PLNs…but it’s a tough, gritty kind of progress that happens slowly and over a long time.
Some ideas here…I wish I’d read your post so I could include a quote from you:
http://www.mguhlin.org/2009/05/reaching-for-heart-5-tips-for-school.html
Warm regards,
Miguel
P.S. I truly enjoy reading your blog, Tim. You’re my inspiration when I start faltering on the writing!!