At first glance, the association seems obvious. School is all about learning but also about socialising with other human beings (in the sense of trying to make you sociable).
Pastoral care can also be a term generally applied to the practice of looking after the personal and social wellbeing of children under the care of a teacher. It can encompass a wide variety of issues including health, social and moral education, behaviour management and emotional support.
Judging this, about utilising the positive aspects of peer pressure, the power of social media would seem to be greatly beneficial in a school or formal education setting.
Schools in this country, on the other hand, take a different view. They routinely block access, just like big companies, to social media web sites and punish those who try and access their services. The advantages of social media in terms of collaboration is rigidly controlled – and espouses a lot of the negatives. I loathed group homeworks because I knew that I’d end up doing the vast majority of the work because some people you could never depend on (probably because the peer pressure to not do the homework was greater than the pressure to do the homework).
Another negative aspect of social media was the recent suicide of a teenage girl who was harassed on Myspace by the parents of a girl in her school. Again, surprisingly these adults are not being incarcerated for cyberstalking at least.
By bringing social media into the classroom where it can be also viewed by teachers as well as parents, we could hope to get some increased transparency into the lives of our children as they grow and develop into young adults. By relegating it to an after-school pursuit, exercised while the child is at home and the parents may be trying to make dinner or just catch a breath after a days work, it becomes the province of the child alone. Parents and educators need to be embracing it – to use it as a way of spreading awareness and education, to help their wards make friends and at the same time, be on hand for when things turn nasty.
In the most simple terms I wish my kids schools would update their web sites regularly and would it be too much to ask to put together an RSS feed? I’ve done some work in this area for the campaign to improve Colby Park Playground in Four Winds and also with the What’s on Where for Kids web site. Having a school blog with comments open to parents would provide a very effective method of feedback and provides the simplest form of the read/write web, the essence of social media, turning the web into a conversation.