Online Casting

Banning Social Software etc

Sean Fitzgerald wrote (Monday, 5 June 2006, 03:57 PM)

"Social software such as blogs, wikis, podcasts and social networking tools offer the promise of new and exciting educational applications and could usher in a more student-centred model of learning.

Yet these tools are causing a lot of controversy and face resistance from educational institutions.

In the US social networking tools like MySpace and FaceBook have caused a moral panic over child safety, online predators and cyberbullying as well as online attacks against teachers and other staff.

The response to this has been that many school districts have banned, or are trying to ban, school children from accessing these sites from school.

Some are even banning students from using these services in their own time.

We can expect to see the same types of issues arising here in Australia as more educators and institutions explore the educational value of these tools and as they become more popular with our youth.

Here in Australia many institutions already ban these tools with IT departments citing network security, or administrators claiming that they distract from "serious" educational applications of the Internet.

This raises a number of interesting questions:


Is it inevitable that these tools will start to impact upon education, whether they are formally embraced or not?
What impact will have?
What do you see as the challenges to implementing social software tools in the educational environment?
How can those challenges be overcome?
Do the educational advantages of these tools outweigh the disadvantages?
Is simply banning them the solution? Or should we develop strategies to maximise the educational opportunities while minimising the risks/negatives?
How do we do that?
Is it worth the hassle trying to get them accepted by institutions?
How can we overcome some of the resistance to implementing these tools?
Does there need to be a shift in the way teaching is practiced in order see the relevance of these tools? Is it only then that institutions will be more open to their implementation?
Do students need to take more responsibility for their learning in order for a learning model based on social software to work?
Will more nimble organisations like RTOs be able to adapt faster than larger institutions and start to implement these tools in their educational practice thereby making the larger institutions irrelevant?"

posted by Michael @ 9:09 PM