Two reasons for "teaching Facebook" in school

Will outlines a conversation with a superintendent, one of whose parents wanted her child pulled from a classroom where, frankly, some brilliant learning and teaching practice was taking place. The reason?

“Our students don’t need to be a part of a classroom experiment with all this technology stuff. They need to have a real teacher with real textbooks and real tests.”

My immediate thought is that "the real teacher" with "real textbooks" (not up-to-date student-curated wiki ones) that she refers to is increasingly a "fake education", one that does not prepare youngsters for the reality of life when they leave school at 18 years old, or a 4pm.

My killer example has to be that, in learning how to publish responsibly to a textbook wiki with a worldwide audience this teacher's students will not be making the same mistake as Kimberley Swann, pictured above, whose story shows a complete lack of understanding in how the real world actually works, or 'Lindsay', whose Facebook lifestream sums up her media illiteracy in one snap:

If Lindsay or Kimberley had been taught by a real "real teacher", maybe they'd have not only had a conversation at some point about how one uses social networks for both play and work, as part of your public face, they may also have had, subject to the filtering policies in their schools, some hands-on practical sessions in privacy settings and the art of communication on the net.

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Comments

[James Michie]

Great stuff Ewan - could not have said it better myself.

It's the same argument I use when asked "why should my child take a "Mickey Mouse" subject like Media Studies.

Er...your child spends all their free time online! But you don't want them to understand it (the media text) in the same way they understand Dickens or Steinbeck!

Digital literacy and Media literacy is Literacy - this is the language of the 21st century.

I wonder when attitudes will really change?

[Jim Walker]

This blog post will be a resource I can use in the media literacy course I am developing. No better example for teens than to see what happens to other teens.