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The Journal has a detailed article about some of the things you can do to get your administrations to buy-in to the concepts and benefits of social networking. Here’s some highlights:

So just to get started, you’ll need to find ways to broach the subject without scaring off stakeholders. That means focusing on the form of social media right for your school; tying a social media program into learning objectives; and finding the right ways to break the ice with administrators, IT/technology directors, and other teachers.

Identifying the social tools that fit with your school’s goals and objectives can go a long way to smoothing the adoption curve. Start with what the students will learn using the tools without identifying the focus on learning the tools themselves.

Just as businesses looking to implement social media solutions need to tie their programs to core  business objectives, classroom teachers, curriculum planners, and administrators looking to implement some type of social media solution need to tie their program to a learning objective. Is there a specific expected schoolwide learning objective that you’re trying to meet? Remember, you can’t effectively tie a social media program to a technology-based learning objective.The goal of a social media program is in simple terms to foster and enhance communication between people and to socialize learning; the technology skills needed by students and staff to execute a program of this nature need already to be in place, and if they’re not, then technology objectives (Netiquette, e-mail literacy, search literacy, basic multimedia literacy, password creation, keyboarding, mousing) need to be completed first.

I couldn’t agree with this more. Before you put the time, effort, and “political capital” into an educational network solution (much more palatable than social network) make sure the people who will be using it have the prerequisite skills necessary to make it work.

David Warlick was kind enough to tweet the following from a conference he was attending:

Deneen Frazier just said that the one and only measure of a community’s health is dropout rate.

Through an interesting set of 140 character miscommunications with some other followers of David it turns out that this is referring to an actual physical community. The misunderstanding came from me thinking it was referring to a “virtual” community. Here’s why:

The concept of a virtual community follows many of the norms and standards we assign to physical or “real life” communities. There are acceptable behaviors, methods of participation and contribution, as well as interactions with other members. However when the community starts to fail the member from the standpoint of the member “getting something out of” the community they often “drop out” and unsubscribe.

Now when we compare that to our educational system there are numerous parallels. When the student feels the system is failing them, they don’t see opportunities, or the real world is preventing/enticing them to leave school they “unsubscribe” from the school. The question is…how are they making that determination? What are the factors leading them to the decision to leave the community?

I pose we as educators look more closely at the interactions students have with virtual communities as an opportunity to understand their drivers in what keeps them in a community and what prompts them to “drop out.”

Techdirt: Is An Online Study Group Cheating?

Vincent Clement writes in to let us know that that a student at Ryerson University in Toronto is facing expulsion for setting up an online study group for his chemistry class using Facebook. The school is saying it wasn’t so much a study group as it was a place for 146 students to cheat and share answers (though, it’s only blaming the student who ran the group). Students at the university are reasonably up in arms over the matter, as they don’t see how it’s any different than a traditional study group. Of course, the whole thing seems a little bit silly. As we discussed almost exactly a year ago, people working together to collaborate is an important skill in the real world, and what some people consider “cheating” these days seems a lot like the type of collaboration that kids are quite used to doing online, and which should serve them well later in life.

We can view this quite easily.  The school doesn’t have a clue.  I look for this action to be retracted rather quickly.  If not, then anyone who knows chemistry should join his study group and give these guys a hand.

Question number 7 on the survey was:  Should the “edcational network” be publically accessible or a “walled garden?”

Here are the results:

• 30.8% of the respondents said there should be public access
• 15.4% of the respondents said they should be a “walled garden”
• 53.8% of the respondents said there should be public access with limits

There’s clearly an overwhelming sentiment towards the need for public access to the educational network.  This raises a number of issues:

• Can you protect the students?
• How do you control users if your educational network is hosted on your own network?
• Should it be hosted externally?
• Who makes the decisions regarding access?
• What are the policies surrounding liability if there is an incident?

While the response is demonstrative of a desire for real world interaction, those educators advocating this need to make sure they are part of the implementation planning process.

Toward A Definition of 21st-Century Literacies

Literacy has always been a collection of cultural and communicative practices shared among members of particular groups. As society and technology change, so does literacy. Because technology has increased the intensity and complexity of literate environments, the twenty-first century demands that a literate person possess a wide range of abilities and competencies, many literacies. These literacies—from reading online newspapers to participating in virtual classrooms—are multiple, dynamic, and malleable. As in the past, they are inextricably linked with particular histories, life possibilities and social trajectories of individuals and groups. Twenty-first century readers and writers need to• Develop proficiency with the tools of technology

• Build relationships with others to pose and solve problems collaboratively and
cross-culturally

• Design and share information for global communities to meet a variety of
purposes

• Manage, analyze and synthesize multiple streams of simultaneous
information

• Create, critique, analyze, and evaluate multi-media texts

• Attend to the ethical responsibilities required by these complex environments

While I’m a big fan of these kinds of explanations I think we can drill this down to a much more digestable level:

• Work with others
• Share what you know
• Learn to manage your sources
• Read critically
• Do no evil

Thoughts?