Two Slashes

If you're a student in Britain, chances are you'll be sending messages like these at some point. (Oh, who am I kidding? They'll all read "@somefriend Wanna hang out?" instead.)

Math, literature, gym, and history.  These are all staples of the education system no matter where you are.  America, Spain, Russia – they cover cover all of these topics at some point.

If you’re of school age and happen to be living in Britain, it sounds like you might be adding a more thorough understanding of computing and the Internet to your curriculum.

TechCrunch is reporting that skills and tools useful in an online/social networking context, a la tweeting, blogging, and podcasting, are to be added to the elementary school curriculum to bring kids up to speed with the Internet their older counterparts are already experts at abusing.

I remember my computing classes back in elementary and middle school (at least, I remember some of them).  There really wasn’t any point to the class, as most of the work assigned was either grunt work or designed to benefit the teacher more than the student.  (Yeah, it happens.)  There’s only so many times you can print greeting cards or type up the same lame one-page story up before you’re an “expert” at using the computers, and as most of these classes, at least the ones in elementary school, were held using near-antique systems (I mean this in terms relative to when I was 10, mind you), they weren’t even relevant when I was attending them.

But while my youth may have been wasted away word-processing tales of dinosaurs and making birthday cards for my teachers, it seems as though somebody’s finally figured out what all that computing time could be used for.  However, I’m not entirely sure that Twitter, Facebook, and other social networking sites are the things to be showing first graders around.  (I’m not entirely sure they’re for older people, either, but that’s a discussion for a different day.)

Let’s think about this for a second.  Companies still add legal disclaimers to their television advertisements telling kids to ask their parents before they go online.  This isn’t just to make sure mommy and daddy sue the company for telling their kid to rack up dial-up charges (heaven forbid they’re still on dial-up), it’s to remove any liability that they might have as far as disturbing and obnoxious people who might appear on the site.  It’s not a possibility that they’ll come into contact with some unsavory character; it’s guaranteed to happen at some point, and with the state of things, almost daily, too.

I also didn’t bother with cell phones until I left for college.  Now, considering little Timmy and Tori over there are probably already text messaging each other hourly, I can see how showing them things like Twitter might seem to be a natural extension of what they’re already doing.  However, factor in that little kids tend to be incapable of discretion, and all it takes is one misplaced “I’m at the park!” for things to get ugly.  (No, I’m not talking about that.  I’m saying that it’ll be extremely easy for mom and pop to pick up on where their offspring has been recently.  Alright, maybe your idea is more valid.  Much more valid.)

Most of the Twitter arguments work with the general blogging case, too.  Unless these schools are intending to be putting up their own copies of Laconi.ca and WPMU for the students to mess around with explore while making sure the general public doesn’t get to cause too much trouble as a result of what’s posted, I have some major issues about letting these kids loose on the web.  (TechCrunch also mentioned podcasting, but I’m not entirely sure that such an endeavor is feasible enough to be worrying about it.)

Yeah...this seems more like an elementary schooler to me.

There is a positive effect to the (micro)blogging idea, and that would be that students would be encouraged to write and proofread their work (well, unless they default to “wrtng lke thyr n a phn”).  Microblogging would also be a great way to train students in how to “trim the fat” from their writing because of the small character limit.  However, I don’t see these as pros that outweigh all of the cons.

In short, I find the cause to be noble, but a school with limited supervision is not the time or place to be letting kids explore their social life, even if it’s a Web 2.0 social life.  So let them deal with their reading, ‘riting, and ‘rithmetic, because that’s all they should be working on at their age anyway.