Social Ch@nge

Our European guest writer Sven Haertig checks out a  proposal to teach social media in British schools.  A committed human rights activist based in Warsaw, Sven is the leader of Amnesty International Poland’s international volunteer group. Want to connect with him about non-profits in Europe? You can find him on Facebook where he’s working on Amnesty International Poland’s Page, or Twitter him as @SvenHaertig.

Original Photo: Flickr user eirickso (CC 2.0) license

A new draft curriculum for primary schools in England gives teachers more freedom to decide what’s interesting for their pupils … and brings YouTube and Twitter to schools. The question is: who will be the teacher?

British newspaper The Guardian just had a first look at drafts for an upcoming reform of English primary schools’ curriculum and they’re saying that the proposed curriculum would “mark the biggest change to primary schooling in a decade”. Why? Well, for one thing, it slackens the reins of obligatory subjects to offer teachers greater freedom in what they teach – that’s already a revolution in education. But the real stunner is the introduction of modern media and web-based skills into the curriculum.
British students are to study the use of the internet, in particular social media. When they leave primary school they should – according to the draft – be “familiar with blogging, podcasts, Wikipedia and Twitter as sources of information and forms of communication.” The not-so-secret added value — apart from watching music videos online — is that the kids will also be learning to use social media for networking and research purposes. There’ll also be less entertaining aspects, such as spell checking 101 or learning to use spread sheets to manage budgets.

Entertaining or not, what I wonder is exactly who is going to teach the children how to use Wikis, to build blogs, find interesting podcasts and make the best out of Twitter, Facebook and YouTube? Many teachers are not exactly embracing new educational methods, let alone new technologies. Although half of teachers (in the UK) believe in the merits of such tools, one fifth don’t feel competent to teach children in Web 2.0 applications, while a quarter of them are worried (and rightly so) about kids revealing personal info on social media sites. In the end, only one fifth of teachers use Wikipedia and only five percent YouTube as a resource in their classrooms.

At the other end, children are younger and younger when they start using the internet. And they learn fast and intuitively. When I went to programming classes in tenth grade or so, about half of my fellow students knew twice as much as our teacher about it. (Unfortunately, I wasn’t one of them.) The question is: does this mean that we should just leave social media out of classrooms, because teachers are unable or unwilling to teach them and the kids will learn them anyway themselves?

I’d say no, because what usually will fall short outside of school and in the anonymous sphere of the internet are things like the respect of personal rights, children’s safety, scrutinizing the reliability of information. There’s also a balance to find between using the internet for more than entertainment and for more than mere passive consumption on the one hand and one-way self-expression on the other. So the task I see for teachers is not so much the technical aspects, but some underlying principles for the use of the internet, about which not only children but everybody might still have to learn a bit.
What is your opinion? Will teachers be able to catch up with the internet and social media? Do you know any teachers who embrace new technologies and use them in class? What do teachers need to communicate if they teach their pupils in the use of new media applications?