I meant to finish preparing for my first day of classes tomorrow, but something that Shelly Blake-Pock posted about earlier was preying on my mind. (Well, that and all the fun-fun-fun of being at a new school, learning new culture and mores.) He posted about the fear of social media that he was observing in the class he’s teaching (on social media) at Johns Hopkins.

Go read his post. Go on. I can wait. Come back here when you’re done.

There are some kind of sarcastic and, well, crappy comments immediately following the post. And it irks me. It irks me enough that I wrote this:

Whether or not social media is the wave of the future (I use Twitter, but have not lost my sense of its absurdity)… I think it’s important not to lose sight of the big message here: we’ve spent a long time, as a society, fretting about how big and scary (and new) the internet and its encumbrances are. And now we have people joining the teaching ranks who have been educated with this mindset. And they’re scared of the internet. It ain’t a big surprise. Cue South Pacific: you’ve got to be carefully taught…

I, myself, take heart in (and stand behind) something that Gary Stager said a couple of weeks ago during our faculty technology workshops: “Sure, I’ve probably not gotten some jobs because of things I’ve said on the internet. But I’m sure I’ve also gotten jobs because of those things.” I think of the job interview I had a few years ago where I walked into the room to be greeted by a laughing group of administrators who had just finished showing each other this — and then roundly agreed that I was just the sort of person they needed working with them in technology with students.

But there’s another level to all of this that is worth thinking about: educating teachers to educate their students in public exposes the foibles of the students (directly) and of the teacher (at least indirectly, and sometimes directly) to public scrutiny. It’s scary business. It requires some very real confidence in yourself as a person and as a teacher to be able to not know something in public — or to correct a mistake in public.

For many teachers faced with social media, I think this is part of the very real threat that they feel: they are turning their classrooms open to (potentially judgmental) strangers — and ceding centerstage, and ceasing to be the expert, but instead being a learner with their students.

It’s big stuff, and technology is a symptom, and not the disease. In almost every case where we talk about technological issues, what we’re getting at are fundamental questions of pedagogy and philosophy. The technology just exposes some of these more-buried issues.

And, with that, I’m off to finish preparing for my first day of classes tomorrow, where I will point my students to social media (both internal to the school and external), admit that I’m not an expert, and talk about how excited I am to learn with them this year.

And so I am: off to finish preparing for tomorrow.

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  3. Developing an “Expert Plan”