The Green Cup

I talked last week about WebTop – the West Virginia Department of Education’s virtual desktop and accompanying tools. One of those tools is WebTop Communities.

WebTop Communities is a closed social network for state education. At the moment it’s inhabited by the employees of the state’s schools systems. But eventually the plan is to include students.

WebTop Communities home page I get when I’m logged in.

WebTop Communities gets compared to MySpace by WVDE staff. I’m a member of MySpace and Facebook. I like Facebook more. MySpace seems a little more cumbersome to me than Facebook.

There are some ways that I think WebTop Communities is like MySpace, some ways it is like Facebook, and some ways it is different from both of them.

WebTop Communities is like both MySpace and Facebook in a number of ways. It includes its own messaging system where you can send other members emails, and it will notify you that you have email waiting. But MySpace sends you an email telling you that someone has sent you an “email” on MySpace, and you then have to login at MySpace to read that message (which I find inconvenient); Facebook and WebTop Communities both send you the text of your message in an email, and you only have to login to the service if you want to reply.

My friends at WebTop Communities.

WebTop Communities, MySpace, and Facebook all three allow you to formalize relationships by “friending” people within the network. But Facebook and MySpace require those relationships to be reciprocal: I friend you, you friend me back (or approve my “friend request”) and then we’re friends. WebTop Communities allows you to display people as “friends” on your page without them listing you as friends on their page (and vice versa). And in that sense it is more like Twitter (which allows you to “follow” people who don’t follow you).

My WebTop Communities profile page.

Unlike MySpace and Facebook (or Twitter for that matter), WebTop does not have a place for personal, status, or “mood” updates. On Facebook there’s a window when you login that asks “What’s on Your Mind?” On MySpace the Status and Mood page asks “What are your doing right now?” And Twitter asks simply “What are you doing?” There is nothing like a “status update” on WebTop Communities. That makes it a little more like LinkedIn – a professional network. Social, but professional…

WebTop Communities is more like Facebook than MySpace in the ease with his smaller groups within the larger social network can be formed. So for example, I have a closed community within WebTop specifically of staff at my school. I moderate the community, decide how visible it is to users who are not members of my community. And I determine who can be a member of the community. MySpace may be able to do this (I’m not absolutely sure), but such pages are legion on Facebook. WebTop Communities makes them very easy to create and use.
Like both Facebook and MySpace, there is a blog tool in WebTop Communities. And recent blogposts show up on the WebTop Communities home page.

My blog page at WebTop Communities.

So I guess my main point is that the community is unique. While its appearance hasn’t changed much in the year since I joined (my first blog post at WebTop was July 23, 2008), I suspect it’s capacity has increased greatly and the ideas for its future have multiplied.

I think WebTop Communities feels more like Facebook. MySpace has always had a problem with spam that is, well, in poor taste. I’ve rarely experienced that on Facebook (which doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen). I hope that WebTop Communities will become more like Facebook in that Facebook has seen a proliferation of applications for users – games, quizzes, etc. I know that the WebTop apps would be educational. But if we’re building a social network to include students in an educational setting, I think such applications would have potential.

Finally, Facebook is growing. MySpace isn’t. I hope that WebTop grows…

All the way back in August I wrote a post with the title “Why Social Networks Are Bad.” I wrote the piece with the full intention of following up with this counterpoint on why social networks are good. Here we are, 96 days later – and I am finally getting around to it. So much for good intentions…

The problems I described in August really fell into two categories. There were problems of abuse. People misuse social networks in ways that hurt students/kids. Teachers think they are in a sheltered environment and behave unprofessionally. And there were problems that had to do with educators coping with change. Why do I have to learn to use blogs and Twitter and Facebook when I can just give the kids pencil and paper and make them write a five point essay…?

The truth is simple. Social networks and digital reality is here to stay. Barring the collapse of civilization and a reversion to life without electricity our students are going to IM and email, blog and Twitter, and sign up for MySpace (or something like it) before they’re really old enough.

We should like that. All of a sudden there are a variety of literacy behaviors out there that students view as recreational and social. We should encourage it. We should participate in it. We should build it into our curriculum.

Students who use online social networks are highly motivated to read and to write. We should learn to cope with the change that entails. And we should find a way to deal with the abuse that arises around social networking. And we should embrace it.

Social network is good for education.

There are dozens of others, but the most well known social networks are MySpace and Facebook.

Wikipedia says that social networks are “online communities of people who share interests and activities, or who are interested in exploring the interests and activities of others. Most social network services are web based and provide a variety of ways for users to interact, such as e-mail and instant messaging services.”

There are a number of reasons that social network web sites present problems. A few of the reasons:

• People create profiles and pages for themselves that are misleading. The simple truth is that when you meet someone on MySpace or Bebo, you don’t really know the simple truth about them. You know what they tell you. They say they’re 28 when in fact they’re 42. They say they’re single when in fact they’re married. They say they went to college when in fact they dropped out of high school. And you can’t tell (unless you know them in some context other than the Internet).
• Social networking websites provide a false sense of security and privacy. You think no one can see the things you say and the pictures you post there outside of a small group of online friends. But there are ways around that. And your “friends” may well show complete strangers what you’ve put online.
• Social networking web sites do give you a way to communicate with increased privacy. It’s one thing to have a relationship through email that might be inappropriate in some way. But the messaging tools of many social networking web sites add a new layer of “discretion” to your communications.

I could go on…

From an education point of view, the second biggest problem that social networking web sites present is that they provide a sheltered environment within which teachers can form less than appropriate relationships with students. I’m not talking about pedophilia, though obviously that makes the news from time to time. It’s just that Twitter and Friendster can blur a teacher’s relationship with a student. Students get confused and think that the fact that a teacher cares about them and is willing to communicate with them through their medium means they’re friends…

That’s only the second biggest problem . The biggest problem that social networking web sites present for education today is more fundamental. The problem is that they exist at all. Social networking web sites are a fact of life – part of the fabric of modern society. They’re an undeniably important relationship and communication tool. And they’re here to stay. That’s a problem because education in America has to learn to cope with them and to incorporate them into the curriculum.

Social Networking web sites can have a lasting impact on a teacher’s professional life. But simply pretending that they don’t exist and avoiding them isn’t the answer. Later this week I’ll look at what social networks have to offer us in education, and we’ll see if we can’t find some good in them.