Gun control debate on social media

The killing of twenty children and six adults in Sandy Hook School, Newtown, Connecticut on Friday has re-ignited the debate on gun control in the USA. The immediacy of social media meant that opinions on the matter were quickly raised. Many voiced their anger and sorrow at the events and encouraging President Obama to act decisively to, in some way, pull the country back from its rather entrenched position of mass gun ownership. Others were equally as quick to defend the 2^nd Amendment which gives Americans the right to bear arms, and some indeed used the tragedy to express a rather distasteful view that gun control laws should be loosened to allow schools to hold guns on site in order to combat similar threats.

The reaction on social media reflected some of the wonderful advantages of digital media but also some of its more depressing features. Genuine and considered debate was allowed to flourish on social media sites but too often it was hidden by the ill-informed bile that seems to dominate such forums. On Google+ Richard Branson added a poster from thirty years ago to his message of condolence. The poster gives some raw statistics about the number of people killed by handguns in one year with 10,728 in the US and 58 in Israel being the next highest figure. The comments made, over 500 in less than 24 hours, give an interesting insight into the quality of debate that can, or possibly can’t, take place on social media sites.

 

Some were quick to be dismissive because of the age of the poster and its rather basic use of statistics, summed up by one comment which read, “LOL at West Germany. Also do these spurious numbers take into account the drastically different population​s between each country? I guess not.” Both criticisms are fair from the perspective of a pedant who has rather missed the point of posting the image, the sentiment being that nothing has changed over this span of time despite the all-too frequent killing of innocent victims in American schools, colleges, hospitals, cinemas, shopping malls etc. Here is an example of another frequently voiced objection to Branson’s view, “Richard, natural disasters kill people, diseases kill people, gravity kills people, and people kill people. Handguns don't kill people.” ‘Guns don’t kill, people do’ has become a bit of a cliché of the pro-gun lobby in the US and strikes me as a rather weak argument, especially when it is extended to the suggestion that if guns are banned then so should cars, alcohol, bears etc. It is only after fairly careful examination of the comments that you come across some rational arguments that don’t just adhere to the simplistic for or against standpoint. For example, “Canada has very lenient gun control laws compared to the US, it's the Culture of the American's that is Killing People. Not the manner in which they do it.”

Social media allows all of us to pass comment, to a large extent, on anything that we want. These comments are immediate and can potentially be read by millions of people. This is the way in which people will increasingly make their point. But there is a danger that the views of bigots will drown out the voices of those who genuinely want to add constructive comments to issues of concern, in the same way that genuinely interesting posts of Facebook are often significantly out-weighed by the mundane. Schools have a duty, more than ever, in the unedited world of social media, to teach children about the skills of interpretation and objectivity so that they can sift through the mass of words, videos and images to find the real gems of considered wisdom and thought which can offer something positive and useful to our world.

Opening channels of communication

A study of policing across 13 European countries has shown that police forces with strong social media presences have better relationships with the citizens that they are policing. The study found that criminal incidents and other related matters were frequent topics of discussion on social media sites, therefore, as project co-ordinator Dr Sebastian Denef, from the Fraunhofer Institute for Applied Information Technology states “the question is not whether the social media are appropriate for police topics, but how the police forces get involved and reap the benefits. If the police is not active, others fill the void.” As social media demands a less formal tone than more traditional forms of communication it immediately attracts a wider audience who therefore perceive an institution such as the police as being more down-to-earth and on their level.

This is a great example of the marketing power of social media, especially for public institutions who might be viewed as rather stuffy and aloof. Schools, like the police, have found it difficult in the past to really connect with people at a level that they all feel comfortable with. As academics we are often guilty, albeit not necessarily intentionally, of over complicating and formalising communications with all stakeholders. Whether it’s the assembly that flies over pupils’ heads or the newsletters and reports that would be more suitable for Hogwarts than your average comprehensive, I have always felt that schools generally miss the point when it comes to effective communication. With social media we now have the perfect excuse to discard the quasi-grammar school approach of previous forms of communication – shred the old school magazine and replace it with up-to-date, pupil-generated blogs and other user content (video and photographs), bin the termly newsletter and instead keep parents informed on a daily basis using social networks. This is how people are increasingly expecting to receive communication and institutions that fail to engage in this forum run the risk of becoming a rather comic portrayal of a by-gone era.

The Pope's on Twitter

I read with interest that the Pope has a Twitter account - @pontifex. It is believed that his first tweet will be on 12 December and he already has over 350,000 followers before tweeting anything. The current Pope has not had the best track record when it comes to communication and the Vatican obvioulsy think that this will be an effective way to reach the masses; they already have a presence on YouTube.

There are not many establishments which are as traditional and conservative as the Roman Catholic Church and surely schools must take the hint, if any were still needed, that social media is now an essential and expected part of modern life.

Pleasant noises coming from the Welsh

I’ve recently come across some very encouraging reports about the uses of social media in Welsh schools. The Education Minister of the Welsh Assembly, Leighton Andrews, commissioned a review of digital classroom teaching in September 2011 which resulted in the publication of The Digital Classroom Teaching Task and Finish Group’s Find It, Make It, Use It,Share It: Learning in Digital Wales in March 2012. The recommendations are eminently sensible as shown in their vision, “that teachers and learners now live in a world where communication and knowledge are routinely digital, ubiquitous and highly interactive, and that the processes of learning and teaching can, and must, take advantage of what digital technologies offer.”

I was very encouraged to read the suggestion to “Use existing tried and tested web-based products and services to disseminate existing and new content.” I strongly believe that we should not be wasting resources on trying to develop bespoke programmes for each individual school. These Virtual Learning Environments (VLEs) are often poorly conceived and exceptionally difficult to maintain in terms of relevance and ever-changing technologies. As a colleague eloquently said to me at the Scottish Learning Festival in September when discussing VLEs, ‘you can put lipstick on a pig, but it’s still a pig’.

 

I was also pleased to read the recommendation to “ensure that learners and teachers have the freedom to access rich learning and teaching resources from anywhere, at any time and from any device.” Politicians and school leaders often like to wax lyrical about the uses of new technologies, but for many I feel this still means shiny ICT suites. New technologies are the emergent mobile devices whether phones or tablets which are already owned by a large majority of students and teachers. We like the idea of being at the forefront of new technology but too many still cringe at the idea of allowing students to use the mobile devices for the purposes of learning – devices that they have on them at all times, not just when an ICT room can be booked out.

The Welsh are not just saying positive things in glossy publications; changes are also taking place in their schools. St Julian’s School in Newport, for example, have announced a refreshing policy change in relation to the use of mobile phones in classrooms and the bold decision to convert their library into a ‘cyber centre’ replete with iPads and plasma screens.

This kind of coordinated approach to facing the challenge of adapting our rather conservative and out-of-date educational institutions is absolutely necessary and I hope that the Welsh Assembly see through their plan and that other government officials might adopt similar initiatives across the rest of the UK and further afield.

Arab-Israeli Conflict on Twitter

In the past Hamas supporters and other anti-Israeli protestors in the Arab world had to rely on the age-old method of expressing their views – i.e. scrawling graffiti on walls. The influx of social media over the last few years has opened up new channels for communicating hostile feelings, on both sides of the conflict.

The Israeli military have been all over Twitter, Youtube, Flickr and other social media sites employing a vast staff to ensure that the war to win over public opinion is as active as any military objective. The Israeli army have been open about their use of social media, as military spokeswoman Lieutenant Colonel Avital Leibovich admitted, “I’m sort of addicted to Twitter, you can say. It’s a great tool to release information without the touch of editors’ hands,” she said. “Militaries are usually closed operations, but we’re doing the opposite.”

Hamas have also been active on social media sites with tweets such as “Our blessed hands will reach your leaders and soldiers wherever they are (You Opened Hell Gates on Yourselves).” Hamas also regularly update their Facebook page which publishes material in multiple languages in a clear attempt to court opinion across the world.

What should our response to all this be? I suppose it is inevitable, in a world where media outlets are now immediate and uncensored that military leaders would seek to exploit this form of mass communication. I can think of many prominent historical figures who would have loved the opportunity to reach millions of people with their message and this is all the more powerful when the message comes as an image or video. The task that faces sites such as Youtube is phenomenal. With 100,000 hours of video being uploaded on a daily basis it is impossible to effectively limit those who seek to use social media for propaganda purposes and the current conflict has already seen the release of videos showing assassinations and the horrifying images of innocent civilian victims.

For educators this gives an opportunity to revisit lessons about censorship and propaganda. It has always been an important aspect of history and politics lessons to encourage a degree of scepticism and questioning of news stories and politically motivated content. This is now all the more important in an age when most children have fairly open access to content that, by its nature, is trying to persuasive and often employs shock tactics to accentuate its point. Schools should be discussing the current conflict in Israel, not just from the perspective of history and current affairs, but as a valuable lesson in how to digest the wealth of information that is fired at us on in the battle for the control of social media.

Are we losing control?

The debacle of the BBC’s Newsnight story this week over false allegations of child abuse has once again raised frequently made calls for more control of the internet. Lord MacAlpine was not named in the Newsnight report but his name spread like wild fire across the internet leading some commentators and politicians to call for stricter measures of censorship and editing on the internet. This is a sentiment shared by many in education who fear the loss of control that inevitably comes with social media sites.

You can understand where these views come from. It is appalling that an innocent man has had his name attached to such serious crimes without any kind of evidence or formal investigation. The internet opens up all sorts of dangers for everybody and schools are right to be cautious of the potential damage that can be caused to reputations and the exposure of children to inappropriate content and the risk of cyberbullying. But to call for more control of the internet strikes me as missing the point, by quite a long way.

Firstly, how would this control come about? The internet and the World Wide Web were created with openness and freedom at their very soul. Governments may wish to have more control over content, but this would not be practical or desirable; regimes that attempt to do this are looked on with disdain in the free world and their extraordinary efforts are likely to be in vain. This is one of the features of the internet, and in particular of social media, that is so revolutionary. Everybody has a voice. This means one has to filter through quite a lot of rubbish to find anything of value, but search engines do this job to an extent and there are many examples of priceless videos, pictures and thoughts that would never have gone public before the emergence of the internet.

We are also in danger of blaming the technology rather than the humans that create these situations. The Newsnight fiasco was caused by some shoddy journalism. The fact that no name was actually said on the programme does not mean that people did not know who was being spoken about. This is a similar issue that affects schools who are encouraged to ban mobile phones or to block websites. This will not stop bullying, pornography or whatever else it is that we are trying to protect our children from but it will certainly restrict the availability of exciting resources and cutting edge technology that young people invariably carry around in their blazer pockets.

By all means lambast the BBC in their clumsy handling of sensitive issues. By all means address bullying as a serious issue in schools. But let us not fall into the misapprehension that the technology that is now very much part of our lives is at fault or to blame for human frailities.

Digital native - overly simplistic and potentially dangerous

Education is largely about meeting the emotional and social needs of young people so that they are well placed to learn (Maslow). Attempting to understand the world in which they live is vital even if generational detachment means that we will never fully be on the same page. So what is that world? Young people have grown up with most of the modern technology that older generations still think of as new. Young people starting school this term were most likely born in the same year that iTunes and Wikipedia were launched and Sega stopped making consoles. It was the year of 9/11, the separation of Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman and the death of one of technology’s greatest fans, Douglas Adams. They were 3 when Facebook began and 6 when the first iPhone was released.

As Adams himself wrote in 2002’s Salmon of Doubt; “Anything that is in the world when you're born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works. Anything that's invented between when you're fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it. Anything invented after you're thirty-five is against the natural order of things.” The digital world of social media and mobile technology is the “normal and ordinary” world of most secondary school-age students and “against the natural order of things” for most educators. This has given rise to the rather convenient labels of digital natives and digital immigrants.

A digital native is defined on Wikipedia as “a person who was born during or after the general introduction of digital technologies and through interacting with digital technology from an early age, has a greater understanding of its concepts.” Like most labels, this is altogether too simplistic. We’ve all seen video or had first-hand experience of small children interacting with tablet computers and mobile phones or bemoaned that way in which teenagers appear to be permanently glued to their Blackberry phones. The logical conclusion that is drawn is that digital natives instinctively know how to use all of the available technologies that have been developed before or during their young lives; that exposure alone is sufficient for efficacy.

This is, of course, nonsense. Young people need guidance and advice in all aspects of their lives, including those aspects which are perhaps new to those who might be educating them. Parents and schools have a responsibility to try and make sense of today’s world and help prepare young people for whatever tomorrow’s world might have in store for them. A digital immigrant, “an individual who was born before the existence of digital technology and adopted it to some extent later in life” (Wikipedia), is still best-placed to instruct and teach the younger generation and should not assume that everyone under a certain age is absolutely clued-up on modern technologies. I teach sixth form students who are ‘afraid’ of using email, who have never heard of Google+ or think that Facebook is for people in their 30s or 40s.

If schools turn a blind eye to the reality of social media and mobile technologies there is a very real risk that young people will learn how to use these exciting tools in an ill-structured and unsafe environment without the wisdom and guidance that educators should exude.

Let's get blogging

Millions of people around the world engage in blog (web log) writing. It has been a dominant feature of the internet since the late 1990s and essentially, at its most simple, gives an opportunity for us to put our thoughts and reflections down in writing. Blogs can also contain other forms of media such as pictures and video and often include interactive elements which facilitate sharing and commenting. Blogging is at the heart of social networking and popular sites such as Facebook and Twitter have fed off this demand to capture and share thoughts and experiences. Blogging suffers from the usual problems of having a saturated market, especially one which is completely open and free of editing, i.e. the quality of blogs can vary from the sublime to the ridiculous.

In terms of education, as Donald Clark has recently written about, blogging has the potential to be of great benefit to both students and educators. Teachers can use blogs to summarise content that has been covered in the lesson; this has value for students who wish to revisit the learning to check understanding, who have missed lessons, or to aid home learning or revision. Geography teacher, Millie Watts, uses a blog for precisely this as well incorporating more sophisticated tools such as live blogging (using Coveritlive) which allows her to conduct revision sessions through a live stream. At The John Warner School we are using Google+ to engage with A Level students. Having trialled other social networking sites in the past Google+ appears to benefit from its relative lack of popularity, students don’t feel like they’re mixing school with social lives, as well as its direct links with Youtube and a generally more professional look and feel.

The opportunity for students to write their own blogs is possibly even more exciting as they are engaging more actively in their own learning. Social networks like Google+ encourage students to interact but their contributions are generally brief and probably not revisited. A student who is encouraged to write a fuller blog of their own will be recording and reflecting on their learning, will be encouraged to collaborate with others and will be able to easily access their blogs at a later date for the purposes of revision. As Donald Clark writes, this is a hugely untapped resource and one which schools should be encouraging and facilitating while not making the assumption that because young people are ‘digital natives’ they already know about and use blogs – they probably don’t.

We have just signed the whole school up for Google accounts which will give all students and staff access to Blogger, one of the many free blogging sites that exist. Let’s get blogging!

Is video the future of education?

Some of the most popular features of social media are the content sharing opportunities that exist on sites such as Flickr and YouTube. The ease with which we can publish and share pictures opens up a whole world of possibilities for the creative teacher. Videos in particular lend themselves exceptionally well to the learning environment, whether that is inside or outside the classroom.

Most schools have now eased up on the maximum security mentality that existed a few years ago and have allowed, at least the teaching staff, to access YouTube. YouTube clips can be used imaginatively in the classroom and are especially effective when used as an opener, to illustrate a complex point or to generate some ‘awe and wonder’. One of YouTube’s biggest drawbacks is its success. 48 hours of video are uploaded onto the website every minute – that’s 8 years of content every day. There is no moderation of quality and therefore searching a topic can result in thousands of videos which greatly vary in standard. Many videos are also not appropriate for the school environment or are not as closely linked to the school syllabus as a teacher may want. YouTube have reacted to this by creating Youtube Education with age and subject appropriate content.

While YouTube caters for a mass audience, other websites have emerged which are primarily aimed at the educational world. Clickview, an Australian company offer schools a library of high quality videos but there are costs involved depending on the type of package you subscribe to. The great majesty of social media is that so much of it is available free of charge and I wonder how many schools will be willing to pay for video libraries when free alternatives exist.

The emergence of free educational video sharing sites is incredibly exciting, especially when the people behind these ventures are working directly with teachers and educational experts to ensure that the content is desirable and the clips succinct and engaging. The Khan Academy, TED Ed, the educational branch of the inspiring TED talks and The Virtual School are all seeking to record real educators delivering real content that can be used in their own teaching as well as being shared with anyone else who can access the material around the world. The Virtual School in particular are motivated by the aim of giving teachers and students in the developing world access to some of the best teachers and ideas from the developed world.

At The John Warner School we are working with The Virtual School to help create some of these inspiring videos. I hope this will be fantastic professional development for the colleagues involved in the creation of video content, but I am also hopeful that the impact of sharing this content will be felt more widely than we could ever have imagined.

Function and dysfunction

Marshall McLuhan observed that "we shape our tools and afterwards our tools shape us." The utopian aims of those who created the internet and the World Wide Web have in many respects been realised and are growing in ever more exciting and diverse ways, yet this positive, functional angle has to be balanced with the more dysfunctional elements that are especially apparent in social media.

In terms of social media in education the dysfunctional elements include all the negative uses that many associate with new technologies. The ease with which uncensored or unedited opinions and information can be accessed by young people, the prevalence of abusive communications in the form of cyber bullying, the conviction that the network is having a detrimental effect on the way in which young people learn through the convenient availability of facts, the destruction of grammar and disinclination of people to read. Many attack social media for its links to atrocities carried out by contemporary villains, from the school bully to London rioters and Islamic terrorists. There is no doubt, like with all forms of communication, that social media has been used effectively by those who wish to harm others. But many fail to acknowledge or simply don’t know the positive function of social media for young people and the revolutionary impact it is likely to have on our lives in the future.

The greatest function of social media is the ability of people to collaborate and enjoy the benefits of collective wisdom. This is being realised in enterprises such as open source software, in the creation of collaborative websites like Wikipedia and through the ability to share photos, ideas, videos and thoughts in an unprecedentedly easy way. This opens so many doors for schools and educators who should be experimenting with these media to ensure young people can optimise the possibilities available through modern technologies and to equip them for their futures in which the collaborative tools of the internet will be a given in all aspects of life.

The internet and the printing press

Clay Shirky also made reference to the common link that is made between the invention of the internet and the invention of the printing press in the 15th century - an interesting topic for me and one in which I will be speaking about at the Bett Conference in the new year.

Shirky explains how the printing press was originally seen as a method of enforcing Catholic intellectual hegemony across Europe, when in fact it allowed the publication and distribution of protestant ideas leading to the Reformation, the Enlightnement and the Scientific Revolution. The ability to share new ideas changes societies.

As Shirky points out, this does not always hapen instantly. The erotic novel Hypnerotomachia Poliphili was published in 1499 - a quick realisation that the masses want to be titilated and entertained, a concept familiar to the digital revolution. But over time the printing press also gave birth to practical and inspirational ideas that changed the world. In 1665 the first scientic journal was published. Titled Philosophical Transactions the journal allowed natural philosophers (later scientists) the opportunity to synchronise their ideas in a form that was necessarily quicker to produce than a book ever could be. This in turn paved the way for the Scientifc Revolution.

Educators are starting to explore ways in which the internet and social media in particular can be used as a useful and even inspirational tool for students rather than becoming fixated with the negative and vacuous content which currently fills so much web space.

When will education 'get' social media?

I have just watched Clay Shirky's TED talk on 'How the internet will (one day) transform government'. Clay Shirky's TED talk

It raised a number of very interesting issues which I think can be easily translated to the uses of social media in education. He starts by citing the fascinating story of how 9 year old Martha Payne's school dinners blog 'Never Seconds' http://neverseconds.blogspot.co.uk/ became so successful and popular that she was told by her Headteacher to stop taking photographs of her school dinners - a decision quickly reversed by the local council following an online uproar. For me, this reflects the general approach that most education authorities and many educators currently have towards social media - i.e they mostly don't get it. The Headteacher of course should have been calling Martha to their office to praise her for showing the initaitive and creativity required to set up an interesting and valid blog rather than trying to silence her.

In my opinion there needs to be a much clearer understanding, or at least a will to develop an understanding, of how social media can be embraced in eduaction. The opportunities for creative learning experiences are vast but largely untapped from a profession which at all levels appears to be fumbling around in the dark, generally advocating the banning of 'dangerous' mobile devices and limiting their experience of social media to a peripheral role tantamount to criticising from the sidelines. Is it not time that educators got hold of the reality of social media and started to explore some of the uses that these tools can offer?