Task #1

This blog is being created in conjunction with a Professional Development course in using Web 2.0 technology in Education. As such, many of these first posts will be assignments for the course. This first post is one of them. The task? To write some general introductory thoughts on the topic.

As part of an earlier assignment, I already created a short Writeboard document in response to an article, so here's a link to that: Classroom Whuffie.

As suggested in those paragraphs, it seems to me that one key part of our job as educator is not so much just telling the kids what resources are out there and how they are used. For one thing, those resources change all the time. For another, the kids are mostly going to know about as much about it as we do. The more important thing is to make kids aware of the larger social considerations of the online resources they use. This includes privacy concerns, as well as the broader issue of online reputation.

Kids tend to view anything they do on the internet as either completely anonymous or as some sort of private conversation with limited group of friends. Sometimes these are even true, but kids need to understand how much of what they do is public, or at least accessible by the public. Conversely, if we are going to set up an environment ourselves for students to operate in (like a Wiki for a class), we need to be conscious about who can access it, and how that information is presented to the students.

Students need to think of their online identity as a valuable resource. Something that they can use to create a social network, and gain (or lose) credibility with people. This is often done in a sort of negative way -- through scare tactics. Students are warned that prospective employers or colleges will see that facebook status reading "totally baked" and that photo of them doing jello shots in Cancun, and the student will lose out on big opportunities in life. What struck me about the article was an example of a teacher essentially making it part of the syllabus to try to earn a positive online reputation. This was done in a slightly artificial, carefully tallied (concrete) way, but I think using straightforward concrete goals to lead students to a broader awareness can be very effective.