It’s 2011. If you’re invisible to the world, aren’t you also irrelevant to the world?
I use the Rapportive plugin for Gmail. It’s a pretty powerful little add-on that gives me enhanced profile information for the people that send me e-mail by tapping into Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Skype, Flickr, my Google contacts, and more. For example, if you used Rapportive, here’s what you’d see on the right side of your screen if I e-mailed you.
You can see from my profile that I am richly connected and using a variety of social media tools. There are many ways to intersect with me, professionally and/or personally.
Although it’s happening less frequently every day, I still receive a great number of e-mails from people whose Rapportive profile looks like this:
This doesn’t mean that they lack a Rapportive profile. It means that they have no presence on any social networks. No Facebook, no Twitter, no LinkedIn, no Flickr, no etc. Nothing.
I wonder about these people. They’re not just missing out. They’re missing out. In a world that’s hyperconnected and hypernetworked, these people are off the grid. Whatever ideas they have, whatever service they’re offering, whatever charity for which they’re trying to raise money, whatever product they’re selling – whatever they’re doing is invisible to anyone outside their local geography.
In 2011, it seems to me that these people are largely irrelevant to anyone other than their local community. And though it might be fine for many to make that individual choice, that decision should stem from intention rather than ignorance. I also believe that we should be doing better by our schoolchildren. They may decide to go off the grid when they’re older, but in the meantime we should be doing our damnedest as educators to teach them how to be networked and connected in positive, productive ways because in the future almost all of them will want their products or services or charities or ideas to have some traction.
If this were a review, I’d give Rapportive 4 highlighters for being a solid bit of software that does what it intends quite well.
But I’d give the person above 0 highlighters because I don’t know about her. And neither do you.
I watch principals or superintendents who tweet or blog a lot, and often I wonder what they could be doing in their building instead of that. In the blogosphere or twitterverse, there is a lot of self congratulatory back slapping in the education administration world with people who tweet and blog, but truth be told, the people running really tough schools (i.e. inner city, struggling to make AYP) don’t have time to do it.
What do you think? Are administrators who blog and Tweet self-absorbed and self-indulgent, gorging themselves on the Web and enhancing their own reputations at the potential expense of their school organizations? Is it true that administrators who are running ‘really tough schools’ can’t (or shouldn’t) blog and Tweet?
Any corporation, government agency, worldwide church, school, university, foundation, or other institution that enjoyed the ability to broadcast to the passive masses is going to have to get used to the idea that we now live in a world of conversation, not just dissemination. The information-pushout monopoly died at least 5 years ago. When will organizations adjust to (and design for) the new reality?
What will it take to move schools away from their unidirectional postal service mailings, paper newsletters, Friday folders, parent portal updates, e-mail listservs, and/or grainy public television channels and toward something that’s more multidirectional and interactive?
Why do parents – even digitally-savvy ones – fail to put much pressure on their local schools to use these powerful communication tools?
Are there schools or districts that you feel are doing a good job right now of using social media tools (e.g., Facebook, Twitter, blogs, YouTube) to interact with their relevant audiences (and, if so, do you have any links)?
If you’re like me, you have trouble keeping up with all of the great videos that are out there. I love it when others help me separate the wheat from the chaff.
For my column this month for the School Administrators of Iowa newsletter, I listed a dozen videos that I thought would help spark educators’ thinking about the changes that are occurring around us. None of these are videos that we already have used in the technology leadership training that we’ve done statewide for principals and superintendents.
School leaders and/or educator preparation programs could show these videos to practicing or preservice administrators and teachers, school boards, or community members to maintain a heightened sense of urgency for change. I usually recommend to administrators that, every time they’re face-to-face with a group, they show a video or share something they recently read or learned. They also could, for example, assign one of these videos as ‘homework’ ahead of a meeting. The important thing is to keep sharing how our world is changing and to keep discussing what it means for our educational practice.
When a drunk driver runs over someone, do we blame the car? When an abusive spouse knifes his or her significant other, do we blame the knife? When an arsonist burns down a house, do we blame the match? When a robber shoots a victim, do we blame the gun?
The Internet is not like weapons or illegal drugs, which arguably are inherently dangerous. It’s more like a car or an ice pick: a useful tool that also can be misused, just like any other.
So we can put blame where it should be - squarely on the offender - or we can be stupid about this. We can address the core issue - education and parenting – or we can blame the tool. In each case, I vote for the former. How about you?
… I’ve decided to hang up my blogging hat. I was a fool, and I didn’t anticipate how this kind of thing could happen. As many of our readers and my students know, I’m opinionated and willing to push boundaries. This is what I think is the role of a professor, and blogging allowed me to do it in an informal and diverse manner. But I misunderstood the technology, and the consequences are devastating for me personally.
– Time to go, Todd Henderson, Professor of Law, University of Chicago
If a distinguished law professor at one of the most prestigious universities in the world doesn’t understand “the technology,” that’s probably indicative that most others don’t either.
Yet another reason why we should be educating our students on how to do this social media stuff rather than just blocking it…
