Leadership
Yesterday’s tragedy in Virginia outlines this dichotomy between school and student life. Students needed access to information and used their laptops to access Facebook, wikipedia, and other user edited sites. The growth of the wikipedia entry about the massacre is amazing. Serious discussion about sources, citations, resources is going on in real time.
Students used their phone to videotape the incident. Journalists from around the world used these websites and video as primary sources. Anyone, anywhere, at anytime can be a journalist, editor, and creator of documents. In almost all high schools today we ban phones, Facebook, editing wikipedia, even though society recognizes these skills as essential. This is how schools are risking irrelevancy.
Have students become the educational leaders? Have they left us behind?
April 18th, 2007 at 5:18 am
I hear, as I’m sure you have, that the Facebook community started for grieving jumped from 70 to 350 in one hour…Web 2.0 time is here. The tools are being used for their intended purposes: to extend and then tighten our relationships. We are created for relationship.