@tombarrett: Have signed up for TweetMeet Nottingham on 6th December! (http://bit.ly/yvO2)
Tag Archive for ‘student council’ at dougbelshaw.com

Tag Archive for 'student council'

I am Spart-arthus!

Published
by
Doug Belshaw
on 12 July 2008
in Education
.

Welcome! If you're new here, you may want to sign up for email updates or subscribe to the RSS feed for all my posts. Alternatively, browse or subscribe by category (look to your right). Thanks for visiting!

OK, so I’m not really ‘Arthus Erea‘ the poster boy of the Student 2.0 ‘movement’. I considered pretenting to be though. :-p Apparently he’s going to launch a new blog as ‘a teacher’:

Here’s 3 reasons I don’t think 14 15 (whoops!) year-olds have a full part to play in the edublogosphere:

  1. They haven’t had much life experience. In the same way that you wouldn’t appoint a newly-qualified teacher to run a school, teenagers haven’t got the experience to make fully informed comments on education. They only see one side of the picture.
  2. The transparency that we almost demand in the edublogosphere - even the simple ‘what’s your name and where do you come from’ - cannot be provided by these youngsters due to child protection issues. The edublogosphere therefore just becomes another anonymous forum to them.
  3. They tend to be ships without a rudder, speeding off in one direction and then another. Yes, they need interactions with more mature people to give them this ‘rudder’, but I would argue that they learn by imitation. The best place for this is offline - especially given point 2!

It’s not up to me who you follow on Twitter or whose blogs you read, but I see teenagers as having the same role in the edublogosphere as student councils do in schools. That is informing professionals.

Finally, I just find it all a bit unhealthy that we treat a 14 year-old as a fully paid-up member of adult discussions. It’s a bit like me interacting with students on Facebook, MySpace or Bebo. As a teacher, I just don’t do it.

I’d love to hear some proper justifications of why I should that aren’t platitudes or crowd-pleasing posturing… ;-)