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.