TechIntersect

I’m certain there are plenty who would disagree with me, but my personal social networking policy is to follow these two rules:

1. Accept any friend requests from students, but never initiate the request.

2. Never say or show anything on Facebook that I wouldn’t want said or shown in class.

I’ve been doing it this way for around a year now and it has worked out well. Before we get too far with this question, let me clarify that I teach college students. I’m not sure if I would have the same opinion if I were a K-12 teacher although I’m inclined to think it also works for teachers of high school students nearing college age. That’s a whole other topic that merits its own discussion another time, and there are many more factors in play for the public school teacher to consider. This is mainly about my opinions on Facebooking with college students, although I’m not sure that my opinion would vary too far from this even for teachers of High School students.

“Net Gen” students can benefit greatly from having responsible social networking modeled for them.

The only college aged kid I’ve ever spoken to about irresponsible drunken-party photo posting so far is someone who posted & tagged my niece at a party. I didn’t know this person, and they didn’t know I was able to see it either so it was a great teachable moment. Basically I told them it’s a bad idea to put compromising photos online, but a really bad idea to identify and index the people in them. I can’t remember if I let the niece in on that conversation now, but looking back I probably should have. I think that “Net Gen” students can benefit greatly from having responsible social networking modeled for them. Being Facebook friends with some of them helps me to confirm this notion. Anyway, I got no replies back from anyone involved in the incident I described and can only hope that I made the point perfectly clear that there is no reasonable expectation of privacy online, even in Facebook.

To me the benefits outweigh the risks because my students can see what is essentially an extension of me, outside of the classroom. It provides an alternate method of contacting and interacting with me. Not only is this good for retention of existing students, but also good for maintaining contact with graduates after they move on to their after-college careers. However, if you’re uncomfortable with what your students might learn about you in this setting, then I’d certainly advise against social networking with students. But right now I’m not overly concerned because of rule #2. I try to monitor my online persona pretty closely which is nothing less than what we ask our students to do.

It seems that a young teacher in Georgia was pressured into resigning her job because of her online activities on Facebook. A parent complained to school administrators about Ashley Payne’s Facebook profile, which included vacation photos of her consuming alcoholic beverages and also contained profanity in some of her status updates.

Here’s the local news coverage:

One of the reasons cited for the pressure to resign was that she worked in a small town. Those of us from small towns know exactly what that is all about, with everyone knowing everyone else’s business– precisely the reason this story is ridiculous to me. If the young lady drinks and cusses, everyone in town probably knew before she publicized it on Facebook. She kept her updates private and had no friend connections with students, so I’m wondering how the information became public in the first place?

I’m keenly interested in the training and professional development of teachers. Would love to hear your thoughts on this case. What mistakes were made by the teacher? The school administration? Facebook? What do you think?

In no particular order here are some of my thoughts:

• Putting anything online that you wouldn’t want to see on the evening news is stupid (And being young and being stupid often go hand in hand).
• The opinion of one parent should never be cause enough for dismissal.
• You ought to know your rights and seek legal counsel before signing anything like a forced resignation.
• You really don’t want to work in an environment where you are not wanted.
• Since when did adults of legal age drinking beer and wine on vacation become a problem in the classroom?

Is there anything else I’m missing here? I would especially love to hear from teachers & school administrators on this.

Thanks to @Holtsman on Twitter for the lead on this story.

In President Obama’s health care speech last night, he compared a public health insurance option to the way public colleges & universities are funded and operated.

I’ve insisted that like any private insurance company, the public insurance option would have to be self-sufficient and rely on the premiums it collects.

…it could provide a good deal for consumers, and would also keep pressure on private insurers to keep their policies affordable and treat their customers better, the same way public colleges and universities provide additional choice and competition to students without in any way inhibiting a vibrant system of private colleges and universities.

This is an interesting notion. Indeed, each year public higher education institutions are moving more and more towards self-sufficiency, with ever diminishing support from governmental sources. We have to pick up the slack through higher tuition rates, research grants, and also stepping up fund-raising efforts- that is through charitable donations.

Unlike with colleges & universities, in the president’s scenario for a public health care plan I don’t really see any potential for income through research grants or charitable donations. Am I missing something or does this leave the public health care option relying solely on premiums? And wouldn’t the public option be for people who can’t already get insurance in the current system (a higher risk demographic)?

What does establishing an unsubsidized public health insurance option that is self-sufficient through premiums accomplish? President Obama suggests that it could avoid

…some of the overhead that gets eaten up at private companies by profits and excessive administrative costs and executive salaries

If you compare public & private institutions of higher learning, you will nearly always find lower salaries and administrative costs at the private institutions, as a matter of their survival. If you don’t believe it, here is an example for which I have some data— Student Information Systems. In 2004, I did a study of the student information systems used by the community colleges in Kansas. There are 19 community colleges in Kansas and they run eight different brands of student information systems. Each school purchases and operates it’s own stand-alone database independently. Now compare this approach to the private Associated Colleges of Central Kansas approach. Six private universities in Kansas, that is six private schools that directly compete with one another, formed a consortium to share a single, centralized student information system that saves about half a million dollars a year for these schools.

Sorry President Obama, I think the public & private college analogy isn’t helpful for making your case. If you think a public health insurance option that receives no government subsidies can be completely self sufficient by insuring the segment of the population that cannot already obtain private insurance, you are out of touch with how the real world works.

Yesterday was the fall kickoff at the K-State at Salina campus. I was pleased to see evidence of our school’s progress in social media. K-State at Salina is now on Twitter and on Facebook. I like to think, although I can’t back it up with any hard evidence, that my own involvement in Web 2.0 tools & talking about it around campus had a little bit to do with our moving forward in this area.

I was particularly impressed with K-State’s new president Kirk Schulz, who dropped by for a few minutes to welcome us back for the fall semester. He blogs. In fact, he blogs about K-State at Salina. We are really pleased to have a leader who acknowledges and values the good work we do in Salina.

President Schulz also tweets on Twitter and is on Facebook, easily making him the most Web 2.0 saavy CEO in the Big 12 Conference. Check out the contact pages for the various Big 12 presidents & chancellors listed below. Some give phone numbers or e-mail addresses, others don’t even give that much, preferring to use the US Postal Service for their correspondence.

Big 12 Leadership Contact Information

Colorado
http://www.colorado.edu/chancellor/

Iowa State
http://www.president.iastate.edu/homepage.shtml

Kansas
http://chancellor.ku.edu/index.shtml

Kansas State
http://www.k-state.edu/president/

Missouri
http://chancellor.missouri.edu/

Nebraska
http://www.unl.edu/ucomm/chancllr/

Baylor
http://www.baylor.edu/president/index.php?id=57010

Oklahoma State
http://president.okstate.edu/index.php/administration

Texas A & M
http://www.tamu.edu/president/contact.html

Texas Tech
http://www.ttu.edu/administration/president/staff.php

Oklahoma
http://www.ou.edu/president/contact.html

Texas
http://www.utexas.edu/president/

Welcome to K-State Kirk Schulz! Your efforts at running a transparent administration are welcome and appreciated. You have set the bar high for university presidents everywhere.

Last year I wrote about how teachers can stay relevant in the classroom by doing non-teaching summer work that is related to what they teach. This summer, I am once again back at Twin Valley, a privately-owned rural telecommunications company, doing the teacher-internship thing. One thing I enjoy about working here is paying attention to and thinking about things I normally don’t think about- here it is the telecommunications industry. (Perhaps I should since I actually teach a networking class.)

I enjoy reading the trade publications that are floating around here. Guess I’ve always been a reader. As a kid, I read everything that wasn’t nailed down, including our set of World Book encyclopedias. Jack Kilby, Kansas native & co-inventor of the microchip had the same habit. Jack Kilby once repurposed a dental instrument into an electronic resistor shaping tool because he’d once read about a unique tool in a dental supply catalog.

Convergence of ideas is a funny thing. I’ve read & written and talked a lot about social media in recent months. I just read the latest edition of Rural Telecom Magazine, and what is the lead story? Social Media: The New Marketing Imperative by Scott Briscoe. It’s a great article that shows even rural telephone companies need to be thinking about the implications of social media.

I can’t stress enough the importance of everyone in business to at least take a look at the trends in social networking & social media. Chances are great that even if you choose not to participate, if you have any customers at all, you will be talked about online. If you are not participating, you are forfeiting a chance to have a say in the discussion about your own company. But as Briscoe points out, it’s not all about the products, it is about being involved in the discussion:

Social media is not a particularly effective means of directly marketing your company’s products and services, and that’s especially true of rural telecommunications providers…

Telcos should be looking to either build or be a significant part of a locality’s online socializing, and you don’t do that by only talking about the new cable being dropped or the new phone services offered. Telcos always have been about more than simply offering services. They have been part of the fabric of the communities they serve—whether it’s sponsoring the local hockey team, covering local high school athletics or sponsoring the community photo contest. This is the spirit in which their foray into social media is most likely to provide maximum gain.

The days of carefully crafted press releases being the only source of information are over. According to Briscoe, it is time to test the waters of social media in your business or get left behind.

It might be tempting to take a wait-and-see approach to social media. One of the problems, however, is that if you’re waiting until you have all the information before jumping in, you’ll always be on the sidelines—the technology simply changes too fast…

Give it a few weeks of study, but then do something. Don’t worry too much about getting it wrong. It will take time to build up any sort of following anyway, and you’ll be learning the whole time. You’ll discover what tactics work and which ones should be scrapped; what takes too much time to do and what is too simple and quick to skip.

This excellent advice has held true since the beginning of online discourse and applies to all industries, telecom or otherwise. Lurk & learn first, then jump in when you feel comfortable contributing. But do jump in, the water’s fine!

And now… The Rest of the Story.

Lawrence KS High School Government teacher Tim Latham was fired after his first year of teaching in the district. A veteran teacher, some speculated that his dismissal was due to his conservative stance on the issues in the classroom; a position not uncommon in red-state Kansas, but unwelcome in against-the-grain liberal thinking Lawrence.

It was a story largely ignored by the main stream media, but covered by bloggers and eventually Fox News picked it up. A Facebook group calling for the reappointment of Mr. Latham exploded from 200 to 2000 members. In an unusual reversal of position, the Lawrence school board has decided to reinstate Mr. Latham.

Wow. It’s not often that people in leadership positions admit to making a mistake. So often we hear about cover-ups, and simple hard-headedness where once a decision has been made we’re gonna stick with it, right or wrong. Well done Lawrence Board of Education. It takes courage to admit a mistake and change your mind after weighing the evidence presented to you.

A Navy buddy of mine shared with me the story of Mr. Latham, a Kansas teacher who was fired from his Lawrence High School teaching job purportedly for pushing his conservative political point of view. Of course conservatives are upset. I guess only Fox News has picked up the story.

As a Kansan, what I find a little interesting is that he was fired for his conservatism in Kansas. This blogger challenges his reader to play an easy parlor game: find Douglas County, the home of Lawrence, in this map of county-by-county 2008 election results. Go ahead, check it out. It won’t take long, I promise. (If you’re unfamiliar with Kansas geography, I’ll give you a hint it’s in the eastern half, not Kansas City)

Well the main-stream media other than Fox News might not pick this up, but it is gaining attention in the social networking world. Facebook has a group on his behalf.

I do find it interesting that the history teacher didn’t show the Obama Inauguration to his class; certainly a historic event regardless of whether or not you supported the candidate.

Some questions: Do you think it is important for a faculty member to “fit in” with others on the faculty and administration? Is the board out of line with his dismissal if the story is as it’s been presented, his politics don’t match the school? (We hardly ever get the entire story) Am I the only one to see irony in where he decided to teach? This is not the first time in history that Lawrence has been a hotbed of dissenting viewpoints. (Sacking of Lawrence, Quantrill’s Raid) Finally, why would anyone want to work in a place where they are not wanted?

Would love to hear some thoughts on this.

Last weekend I had the chance to visit with some corporate-world people whose opinions I value about Snack Bars & Social Media in the workplace. (Ok, they were my siblings.) One is a software engineer for a large food producer, one works for an international hotel chain, and one works for a regional bank. All of them said that their respective employers do not permit any form of social media (blogging, facebook, twitter) on the corporate networks.

None of them saw the value of a company permitting even limited use of the technologies at work. I told them about IBM’s Social Computing Guidelines and that company’s stance on employee participation in social media. The banker told me about an article that said banks shouldn’t use Facebook for marketing, because the audience doesn’t want to be hammered with marketing information all of the time.

No kidding. The traditional marketing approach of shouting at customers is not what Social Media is all about. It is all about conversations, not about one way broadcasting. My banker sister challenged me to describe a way that banks could effectively participate in Facebook and other social media. I asked her what sort of messages banks try to convey in traditional marketing efforts and suggested that new social media could also send these same messages but in a different way.

This week I had the opportunity to sit down to visit with Grant Griffiths, a guy I am continually learning from. He says:

“Social Media Marketing is more proactive. You’re actually doing something on the Internet to try and generate traffic to you and usually it’s in the form of providing information… You really want to become known as the place to go for answers for whatever you are blogging about.

So if you are a banker wanting to use social media for marketing, it makes sense to blog about the financial questions that potential customers might have. If you can offer helpful advice, it becomes a win/win situation. Facebook could be used as a form of blog by posting notes pages about your blogging ideas. Or you could keep a separate blog, then link to it through your Facebook profile.

In any case, a professional who effectively engages in Web 2.0 discussions can represent the corporation in a very positive light, and put a human face on what might otherwise be perceived as a soul-less organization. The corporation who discourages these discussions simply keeps people wondering about what goes on inside and what sort of people work there. These corporations also miss opportunities to respond to complaints and criticisms that are bound to crop up.

For further information Common Craft has an excellent video series that explains several related ideas in an easy to understand format. This video talks about Social Media in general.

Explore the possibilities and embrace the social media. If you don’t, just hope your competition doesn’t either.

This week I started working my summer job at Twin Valley Telecommunications. As a computer technology professor, I believe it is really important for teachers to get real world experience in their subjects to stay relevant in the classroom. It is my second summer of working there, and one of the things that impressed me last year that I had almost forgotten about is the snack bar.

Candy bars, soda pop, bottled waters, cookies, crackers, you name it- they probably have it. It makes a statement about the TVT company culture; they care about their employees and they want to encourage the people to work there to feel right at home.

What if when considering the very cool idea of a snack bar the leaders at TVT thought “We shouldn’t put snacks in the break room because if we do our employees will spend all day there munching on snacks instead of working“? Ridiculous, right? An employee who didn’t “get” that snacks are there to make people feel comfortable and welcome and spent the entire day in the break room gorging themselves on goodies would soon be sent packing.

What is so different about the thinking of a company (or school) who denies access to social media technologies such as Facebook, YouTube, and other popular social media sites for its employees at work? “If we allow our employees access to social media sites, they will spend the entire day doing that instead of working.”

In the book “World Wide Rave: Creating Triggers that Get Millions of People to Spread Your Ideas and Share Your Stories” David Meerman Scott writes that it is simply a matter of trust.

Hold employees to a measurable standard for performance on the job. But don’t try to ban a specific set of social media technologies.

Scott is absolutely correct in noting that companies do not usually try to control other minute-by-minute behaviors such as restroom visits, hallway chats with colleagues, or coffee breaks and it is foolish for them to try to limit or ban participation in social media because it is the single most powerful and cost-effective method of spreading ideas on the planet.

However social media frightens many corporate leaders because it is poorly understood and runs counter to conventional wisdom on how companies share information. Usually corporations are tight-lipped and information comes out in a trickle of well-crafted, professionally designed (read boring) press releases. To many, blogging and other social media represents a risk of embarassment or disclosure of confidential trade knowledge through unsanctioned outlets. However this perspective misses the entire point and potential of social media.

For an example of a company that does “get it” when it comes to social media, check out IBM’s Social Computing Guidelines. IBM is setting an example of innovation with its embrace of employee participation in social media. Instead of stifling them, it is actually encouraging employees to participate in the read/write web and become evangelists for the IBM brand.

This issue is all about trust. Schools don’t trust students or teachers to do the right thing. Companies don’t trust employees. but the problem lies not with the technology, but with with setting expectations and ensuring those expectations are met. When a company blocks access to social media, it is blocking access to its own future growth and when a school blocks access to social media it is blocking access to a student’s future growth.

I guess I can live with a private enterprise putting shackles on if it so chooses, but slowing students understanding unnecessarily is shameful. By blocking access to social media in school, we force students to participate in the read/write web elsewhere, and often without guidance or supervision. When left to their own devices without any guidance, social media for youth often becomes exactly what we fear for them in the first place- a pit of ignorance. If we open the gates at school, and have teachers thoughtfully guiding social media interactions, it can provide unique learning opportunities unlike any other.

I think the Love & Logic philosophy of Jim & Charles Fay has it right: give a kid a job you know they can do and then pray that they mess it up. When this happens we have what is known as a significant learning opportunity. When we ban social media from school, we are stealing from kids an ability to learn about regulating their own activities. Personally, I’d rather have kids learn about the consequences of wasting all of their time on Facebook at school than at their first job.

Last evening I was invited to give a brief presentation to the History of American Education class I am in about Diigo, and how we might use it to collaborate during the rest of the week when we are not in class. I was about two minute into explaining what it does, when the self-described “Type A personality” interrupts me demanding, But why should I care?

I’m getting to that, I say. Not only can you save your bookmarks, your favorite websites, but we can form a group; we can collaborate, we can comment and annotate with highlights & sticky notes on the websites we are viewing as a group! Isn’t that cool?

Unfortunately, the demonstration computer didn’t have an up to date browser that would allow Diigo to function correctly, making it all the more difficult to sell my case. When the sign-up sheet was passed around collecting e-mail addresses of those interested in checking it out, as you can guess, Mr. “Type A” was not among the names. Neither were about half of the rest of the class.

I have written before about how I think Web2.0 should be taught in teacher education programs. Last night’s experience only bolsters my position.

I remember back when the “information superhighway” was just starting to catch on, and there was a big hub-bub about the potential for a “digital divide between the haves and the have-nots”. Wealthy kids could tap into this rich source of information while the poor kids wouldn’t have the means to do so, and there was a big push to wire every classroom in the country.

I believe the digital divide is very real, and the division line is not along economic boundaries. The boundary lies between those with a curious mentality towards technology and those without.

The real digital divide is between mere consumers of content and information, and those who are learning about the collaborative nature of Web 2.0 technology and its amazing content creating power.

Students without a role model at home or at school might be able to cross the digital divide on their own with their own curiousity and some blind luck. I would rather see adults setting the example for them.

When Benjamin Franklin was a young man, he embarked on a daily program of personal improvement. I should like to think that were old Ben alive today, he would be among the curious, teaching himself all he could about becoming a contributor in the digital age. He was all about self-education, which is exactly what every IT expert in the world has discovered is required to remain abreast of developments in the field.

Somehow, we have gotten away from the value of a self-education, in favor of a passive education that is supplied to us by a knowledgeable and well-qualified teacher.

Part of our struggles in the classroom is related to this change in attitude towards learning. How can I engage my students? How can I get them to take ownership of their own learning? Learning is not a passive thing; indeed  in the end all learning must be self-taught.

Mr. Type A from my class, you should care because students need role models of parents and teachers who are themselves traveling a path of life-long learning and discovery. Technology is an ideal area to engage in life-long learning because it is revolutionizing the world, and because you can never learn it all; it simply changes too fast. Not to mention you also run the risk of leaving your students on the wrong side of the digital divide if you don’t.

Edit: This video explains the power of social networking in a way I never could.