Tag: Washington Post

Teachers Tweeting for Support and Inspiration

Today’s Washington Post has a nice story about how teachers are using Twitter to connect with each other and get just-in-time training. Here’s an excerpt:

After her first year teaching history in a public high school in the District, Jamie Josephson was exhausted and plagued by self-doubt. Teaching had been more grueling than she ever expected. Law school began to sound appealing.

Then she stumbled onto Twitter. In the vast social network on the Web, she discovered a community of mentors offering inspiration, commiseration and classroom-tested lesson plans.

“Twitter essentially prepared me to go into my second year and not give up,” said Josephson, now in her third year at Woodrow Wilson High in Northwest Washington. “I never would have imagined that it would have been the place to find support.”

Josephson (known to fellow tweeters by her handle, @dontworryteach) is one of a small but growing number of teachers who are delving into the world of hashtags and retweets, using Twitter to improve their craft by reaching beyond the boundaries of their schools to connect with colleagues across the country and around the world.

The story goes on to tell about a now twice-weekly Twitter chat for teachers, #edchat, and the proliferation of chats around various subjects or specialties, including:

Tell teachers you know about these opportunities to get practical help and support through Twitter. And if they need encouragement or training, we’ve got a whole Twitter curriculum here on SMUG, including Twitter 115: 5 Benefits of Twitter Chats.

 

 

Should states ban student-teacher interactions on Facebook?

Yesterday’s Washington Post had an editorial about a misguided trend among state legislatures to ban communication between students and teachers through sites like Facebook and Twitter:

However, in some places, new laws and proposed measures are impeding teacher communication with students outside of school-sanctioned e-mail systems. The most recent practitioner of educational technophobia is Missouri, which last month adopted legislation intended to ban direct communication between teachers and students via Facebook.

The law is so broad it could effectively also bar student-teacher contact via Gmail or other non-school e-mail services. “No teacher shall establish, maintain, or use a nonwork-related Internet site which allows exclusive access with a current or former student,” the law reads.

The Post editorial board makes a good case against laws like this. I agree that these laws seem overly broad. I think are they well-intentioned as ways to prevent inappropriate relationships between students and teachers, but that banning Facebook messages is overkill. Facebook is just another means of communication, a platform more than 10 percent of the people in the world use.

Banning Facebook interactions seems analogous to prohibiting telephone contact between students and teachers. A private Facebook message can be sent even between users who don’t have a friend relationship, just as telephone conversations can happen between anyone via cell or land line. Should there be laws against phone calls too?

What do you think about these laws banning Facebook messaging in the schools?

 

On World Peace, Labor Day and Blocking Facebook

I’m as big an advocate of social media as you’re likely to meet. Still, I think Washington Post columnist Kathleen Parker went a bit overboard in yesterday’s offering, Facebook and social media offer the potential of peace:

Not to be a Pollyanna, but it is striking to realize that peace becomes plausible when barriers to communication are eliminated. More than 500 million people use Facebook alone. Of those, 70 percent are outside the United States. MySpace has 122 million monthly active users, and Twitter reports 145 million registered users.

I actually think Ms. Parker does have a bit of the Pollyanna principle running through her argument. And it’s kind of nice for me to have people like her occupying the “extreme optimism” end of the social media spectrum. It makes me seem more moderate. I agree that building more friendship connections is helpful, but I’m not anticipating a Nobel Peace Prize for Mark Zuckerberg.

While I don’t see social media ending the Middle East conflict, I do see these tools playing a huge role in connecting and strengthening relationships within organizations and among those with common interests.

That leads me to one of Parker’s paragraphs that I thought was particularly illuminating, as it relates to the practice of many companies in blocking access to social media sites from their corporate networks:

Obviously, some countries don’t like these media for the very reasons we do. People talk. Facebook is blocked in Syria and China and until recently was also blocked in Iran, Pakistan and Bangladesh. Where freedom flourishes, so do open channels of communication.

As we celebrate Labor Day in the United States, maybe opening access to social media sites at work wouldn’t rank among the all-time achievements for employee-friendly workplaces. It probably won’t usher in a Millennium of peace, either.

But at least it would make your company more open than China, Syria and Iran.

Does your company block access to Facebook, Twitter and YouTube at work?

Social Media Conferences, Panels and Tweetups

Over the next few weeks I’m going to be traveling for several conferences and presentations relating to social media. Some of these are open for additional registrations; if you can attend, I’d love to meet you. Otherwise, if you see I’m going to be in your area and would like to Tweetup, you know how to reach me.

  • On Monday, April 27, I will be in Philadelphia for a presentation on integrating social media with mass media at the annual meeting of the National Cancer Institute Public Affairs and Marketing Network.
  • Then I head to New York for some meetings on the 28th and for BlogWell on the 29th – (Registration is still open, and if you use the discount code “friendofmayo” when you register, you’ll get a $25 discount.) I got to present at BlogWell in Chicago in January, so I look forward to hearing these case studies. The Blog Council member meeting and unconference is on the 30th, also in New York City.
  • On May 7, I’ll be part of a panel at the National Press Club with Ceci Connolly of the Washington Post, George Strait of the FDA, Robin Foster of HealthDay and Bridget DeSimone of the NewsHour with Jim Lehrer. Right after that, I’ll be heading to Chicago for an afternoon presentation/workshop on social networking, and then on May 8 I will be presenting at the Ragan Corporate Communicators Conference.
  • On May 12, I’ll be in San Francisco to present at the Community 2.0 Conference.

I’ll be tweeting and blogging from all of these, and would love to get to meet SMUGgles (or even just casual readers) either at one of these events or via impromtu Tweetup. (Although I guess it’s not really “impromptu” if I’m giving you more than a week’s notice, is it?)

At any rate, I look forward to these events and the connections I’ll be making.

The Black Magic of Compounded Newspaper Losses

It hasn’t been a good decade for newspapers, but the last month has been especially bad.

It’s not like last year was good. The San Francisco Chronicle‘s ad revenue was down 8 percent last year, and is now about 12 percent below that pace. The Times says the Chronicle is losing about $1 million a week.

In school we learned about “The Magic of Compound Interest.” The magic for newspapers must feel like something straight out of Mordor.

Compounding losses have a way of spiraling. Ad revenue falls, so papers cut back on staff and on the number of pages. The paper is less compelling, so circulation falls. Advertisers won’t pay the high prices for reduced reach, so revenue falls still further.

Add to this the general trend among younger people to not read the newspaper, and on-line alternatives such as eBay, Craigslist and Monster.com that are claiming an ever-larger share of what was formerly a classified advertising monopoly for newspapers, and the situation looks quite bleak.

It’s hard to know which of these trends started first, but Clay Shirky has a good analysis of the monster forces conspiring against the newspaper business in Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing without Organizations. I hope to write a review in the coming days; it’s quite insightful.

It will be difficult for my review to do it justice, though,  and besides, I might not get to it for a while. So you should just go ahead and order it today.

I’ve got a Podcasting curriculum to finish.