You were warned. With the past month's coverage of teen suicides due to cyber-bullying and the recent release of "The Social Network" I thought I'd take a look at the research on facebook and social networking sites in general and their effects on education and the climate of high school and the classroom. A google search of facebook yields over 10 million results, removing references to the latest movie release only removes an insignificant number of these. You don't really find much on Facebook and education (without specifically searching these terms) so I thought I'd search through the journal databases I thankfully have access to as a university student. Searching Facebook on these journal databases yields a mere 200 results. Narrowing that search to social networking (yes I too thought it was odd that the general category narrows the search on the specific topic) yields only 100. 100 results! 100? Where is the research on facebook and social networking's effects on education? My google research located an article in The Atlantic (http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2010/09/in-defense-of-facebook/63731/ ) citing that there are 500 million people on facebook. To give a reference point, the author also cites that as 1 in every 14 people in the world are on facebook. With such widespread ubiquity, how can researchers ignore the effects this has on teens and on the educational community?
My mom teaches and she recently had to go through training on bullying, etc. and guess what was missing? That's right, any reference to cyber-bullying at all. This is the digital age. Bullying is no longer a problem of Johnny putting Jimmy in a locker or giving him a swirly. Now, Suzy decides she's bored and doesn't like Sally so Suzy, Mary, and Tina don't spread vicious rumors around the school or write Suzy's phone number on the boy's bathroom wall. They post on Facebook and Twitter and Myspace that Suzy's a whore and slept with one (or all) of their boyfriends
No comments:
Post a Comment