There’s a saying that the music is not in the piano and, in the same way, the learning is not in the device.
One could add, “Bullying is not in the software, app or device”.
Social Media in and of itself is not “Harmful”. Bullying is harmful, the medium is not. The medium does make it easier to be a bully.
Social Media is not under the control of schools or parents and there are at least a dozen social apps doing the same thing for any one app currently the rage, or a school is considering banning.
Blocking the media is an impossible task.
A progrom of abstinence against any one app, software or device will only make it more sought after. Over the years, abstinence has not worked well with alcohol or teen sex.
Blaming the media will not help. It’s like calling pencils “harmful” because anonymous notes can be written with them.
“In fact, pencils don’t natively identify the user when students use them to communicate (many times without the teacher’s knowledge). The user has to decide to write their name on a note for the user to be identified.”
Sounds ridiculous, but it’s a sentence from a school system’s memo about why a certain social media should be banned, with the word pencil inserted.
Back in the day, nobody blamed the pencil, or the bathroom wall for that matter.
Jargon like “Cyber-Bullying” and “Digital Learning” is made up by marketing people selling something. Like many people selling added security, scare tactics work best.
Imagine what type of pencil school systems would have to buy if pencils were held to the same standards as collaborative technology. A pencil that identifies the user, keeps a draft of every draft the student writes and keeps a draft and identifies the student and what they wrote on any other student’s paper he or she might write on. What, about $45K per writing utensil?
Just a thought, so the way we speak about this subject going forward makes sense.
It’s a matter of not bullying in any medium.
