Should Schools Block Social Networking Sites?

Over the past five years, the response of most school administrators to social networking sites– YouTube, Facebook, MySpace, etc.– is simply to restrict access on campus.  In a recent piece in Slate, Nicholas Bramble argues it’s time to open access to these sites. Rather than worry about the potential, and often times very serious, concerns teachers and site administrators usually have with this technology,  Bramble argues schools need to tap “the huge amounts of intellectual and social energy kids devote to social media” and channel it toward promoting learning.

According to Bramble,

“Researchers have already enumerated the benefits that kids can get from traditional media. Watching Sesame Street or Blue’s Clues improves children’s problem-solving skills and school readiness. Teaching students how to use word-processing software, Web-design programs, and video-production tools is a proven way of refocusing at-risk teens on school, and, eventually, getting them jobs. Social networks can also pull in students who are otherwise disengaged, because they draw on kids’ often intense interest in finding new ways to communicate with one another.”

Putting aside the potential pitfalls of utilizing social networking tools in a traditional school setting (i.e., privacy issues, inappropriate student behavior, etc.), how can educators effectively do it? Here’s Bramble’s suggestion,

“For starters, students could talk about what they’re doing on Facebook and company, map out the ways they’re making connections with one another, and share videos and software they’ve created. Once the conversation gets going, teachers could figure out whether some kids were being left out and find ways to increase those students’ media literacy and bring them into the fold. Teachers can manage the project by selecting the best content and conversations, and incorporating it into other parts of the curriculum. If a student created an entry on Wikipedia for a local band or sports team, other students could work on revising the entry and building it into a larger local history project. The audience for school projects need no longer be one hurried teacher.”

Some of Bramble’s ideas sound good, but his suggestion that teachers should set aside valuable instructional time so students can discuss how they are using applications like Facebook to connect with one another seems very simplistic, to say the least. Simply having kids share the content they created over the weekend, for instance, is certainly not effective in terms of  improving student achievement. If social networking technology is going to be used successfully in the classroom, it must be implemented in a systematic way, in a way that directly and clearly supports academic learning. It’s nice to use social media technology as a way to link curriculum to student prior knowledge at the beginning of a lesson, let’s say, or as a discussion starter or wrap up to a lesson, but this sort of approach is only marginally beneficial. Considering the potential pitfalls, most teachers are left wondering, “Is using this technology really worth the hassle?”

Bramble also argues teachers should take advantage of our students’ desire to produce things using this technology. Why not have them use it to do something productive? Bramble suggests schools have students

” produce a school-sanctioned video[s]—the re-enactment of a literary or historical scene, for example. This isn’t as simple as a teacher saying, “Why don’t you write a poem about your frustration, rap it on video, and put it on YouTube?” Instead, a teacher could assign students the task of filming a scene from The Scarlet Letter in the stairwell, identifying the dynamic of shaming in the novel, and writing about how it might be playing out in their Facebook news feeds. In math class, students could develop statistical models and graphs of the patterns of information flow in their social networks. To understand how advertising works, students from different backgrounds and with different online habits could compare what’s being hawked to them. And for a school journalism project, teams of students could aggregate other students’ narratives from blogs, Facebook, and Twitter and compile a real-time collective analysis of the state of their educational union.”

This sort of approach makes sense. As I noted in a recent post, having students actually “do” something with their learning is a very effective way to utilize social media technology in the classroom. In other words, social media technology provides an easy way to enable students to actually demonstrate their learning. The “doing” part is the last phase of what Curtis Bonk refers to as a learning wheel– read, reflect, display, and do.

Social networking technology certainly has a place in schools. The hard part is finding truly beneficial applications that promote student learning or foster positive communication between members of the school community.

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