Description:
While Facebook, the world’s most popular Social Networking Site (SNS), has been warmly welcomed by many commentators and practitioners within the educational community, its effects, impacts and implications arguably remain insufficiently understood. Through the provision of an anecdotal and experiential account of the authors’ attempt to introduce Facebook into an existing Peer Assisted Study Sessions (PASS) student peer mentoring program at Victoria University (VU) in Melbourne, this paper aims to explore and thereby explicate some of the issues inevitably arising in relation to the adoption and utilisation of social networking technologies in educational settings. While the authors’ experiences of their own ‘Facebook experiment’ were somewhat ambiguous and ambivalent, this paper is intended to contribute to the ever-expanding body of literature concerned with the use of Facebook in education and to thereby assist in improving educators’ requisite understanding of both the potential positives and pitfalls involved. On the basis of the authors’ experience, it is suggested that careful consideration as well as explicit and iterative articulation and negotiation surrounding issues of staff and student expectations, boundaries and identity management in an online environment comprise the minimum requirements for the successful implementation of social networking into student peer mentoring programs.
Description:
In this paper the author makes a passionate 'plea for discontent', arguing that there is something fundamentally wrong with the overall direction of education policy as it is being applied to schools, and that new ways of re-engaging with it must be found. The author commences by arguing for a proposition, presenting some evidence from some research, and using that as a basis for suggesting a fundamental re-think in the way educational policy operates in relation to schools. In doing this, he underscores the centrality and significance of social capital as the basis for this re-engagement. The underlying question concerns how educational policy making is to be engaged so that it is central to institutional building. With the threat of losing schools as social institutions under the current regime of educational policy, the author argues that new ways of re-engaging educational policy beyond parallel discourses are needed. The underlying proposition is that schools that succeed are ones that have trusting relationships between school systems, teachers, parents and students. Trust between those making educational policy and schools, produces better outcomes for all, and trust is given expression through meaningful partnerships, authentic accountability, and distributed (or enabling) leadership. Social capital is central to any educational policy re-engagement with schools. The underlying argument of this paper is that schools have a social responsibility as places that 'manufacture hope' often in situations of increasing 'despair' and adversity.