Read/Write Web Dog and Pony Show

Last night my wife arranged for about 20 of our friends to come to the local computer club to get a two-hour overview of the Read/Write Web and some of the more interesting tools out there. The weather was awful, and only about eight showed up, but the reaction was pretty much unanimous.

Mercy.

The reason we did this was because we knew they didn’t know much about what was going on “out there”. There was a board member from a local district, a few local businessmen, a brother in-law, and a couple of teens in the “audience.” We created and published an agenda/list beforehand using Writely, which I’m starting to like more and more. (Who needs Word?) And the pace was pretty fast and furious. Just a couple of observations:

The board member immediately brought up safety concerns when I started in about blogs, and I told her that we were in the midst of quite a debate regarding the banning of blogs and teaching ethical, safe use. One of the teens from a high school up the road reported that his school now bans all Blogger, MySpace, Xanga, etc. sites. “Anything that has a URL with more than one name in it (i.e. girlygirl2.blogspot.com) is basically gone,” he said. Whoa. In response, one of the local tech gurus related an analogy he’d heard about this a while ago:

“You know, this is like swimming. We can hire all the lifeguards we want, build big walls around the pool, hang life jackets and those long poles within easy reach, but the absolute best way to make sure your kid doesn’t drown is to teach him how to swim.”

Amen to that.

Toward the end when things were wrapping up, one of the other teenagers, a girl, came up to me and said “I have a My Space site and it’s not half as bad as IM. As long as you don’t tell your whole name and don’t give out too much information, I think it’s perfectly safe. “I asked her “How is IM worse?” I was really struck by her answer. “Well, you just have to be more careful when you’re talking face to face.” I looked at her quizically. “What do you mean face to face? Aren’t we talking face to face right now?” “No, you know what I mean,” she said. “When you get into conversations with people who you don’t know, it’s a lot harder to tell whether or not they’re good or bad.”

Hmmm…

Comments

Nate Lowell says

November 17, 2005 at 11:28 am

And adults wonder why kids don’t respect ’em …

I’m getting really, really tired of the mindset that says “I’ll protect these kids if it kills ’em!”

We see it in the “Abstinence Only” curricula…

We see it in the walls around the schools …

We see it in the blinders on their minds …

When will we actually have the moral fortitude to stand up say enough is enough?
Jay Pfaffman says

November 18, 2005 at 11:41 am

I think it’s a framing problem. I’m not one of those people with a strict definition of blogging. It’s web publishing. It’s giving kids a n audience. Heck, they can even publish 5 paragraph essays. (I have no idea why 5 paragraph essays are important, but they seem to be.) We’ve been publishing stuff on the web for a long time. Apparently the NETS standards even cover web publishing.

It’s really hard for a Normal Person to publish stuff on the web. It takes hours of time and special software like Dreamweaver (or NVU) and some FTP client and a web server. And it’s still hard. Putting stuff on the web with blog software is really easy. Proof? Millions of people are doing it. Without training.

Just don’t call it blogging.

(And for some reason, clicking on my name above links to Nate’s profile. My blog is here.)