Technology & Learning - April 2009 - (Page 26) FEATURESTORY Facebook Faceoff It may be the most volatile question in education today: Do you think there’s a place in schools for social networking? Excerpts from our ongoing forum debate on techlearning.com are below. Log on and tell us what you think. SHUT IT DOWN “ “ Fewer children and young teens should be using these sites, not more. Not enough people are speaking about the many varied reasons why sites like Facebook are not healthy, safe places for our children to hang out. Older, more sophisticated teens and adults are better prepared to understand and deal with the negative aspects of social networks. Younger teens and children are not. One thing that our research at Children Online has demonstrated for years now is that whatever children are doing online this year, next year they will be doing the same thing at a younger age. Just because kids can do something online doesn’t mean that it is appropriate or developmentally healthy for them to do so. —Doug Fodeman, Co-director, ChildrenOnline.org ” I agree that Facebook, MySpace, YouTube, etc. should be blocked at school. The typical student is not able to understand what is appropriate use in a school setting and what is not. If the social networking could be limited to a classroom environment, then I think it’s great, but what about the other classes or downtime for students? They already attempt email, chat, and online games when they “have nothing” to do. So why add to the problem? Corporate America typically does not allow social networks, gaming, shopping, etc. during business hours, because it wants its employees working. Shouldn’t we expect the same from our students? “ Instead of focusing on Facebook and MySpace, which I agree can be dangerous, let’s change the scope of social networking to classify it as “academic networking.” The purpose of this new classification is to provide teachers a safe platform to teach “Netiquette” to their students and also change the focus from social to academic uses. —Forum post —Forum post ” ” 26 | TECH & LEARNING http://www.techlearning.com http://www.ChildrenOnline.org
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