Educating Steubenville’s Big Red & American Parents

Image Source: http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/teach-your-children-well-madeline-levine/1110766161

Sunday was a day of reckoning for the community of Steubenville, Ohio and to a larger part American society. The judge in the rape case found the defendants guilty. Most of the evidence against the defendants was based upon social media (words, videos and pictures uploaded to the web).  Some of the most damaging evidence was the defendants own text messages that were read to the court by Joann Gibb’s who works in the state crime lab that retrieved hundreds of text messages from some of the 17 phones seized during the investigation.

I am sad that the lives of two potentially gifted individuals are now a shambles. Hopefully these individuals will receive the help and guidance they need to have success in their future and be a valuable part of society. I also hope the young lady has learned about the dangers of too much alcohol and keeping more control of her situations. I also hope it helps all the parents in the area recognize their responsibility as parents to be parents. To the school I hope it is a wake up call to begin taking action on underage drinking, an excessive focus on sports, and promoting responsibility for actions.

This case has shattered an American community.  It has brought to light many of the problems in today’s society and culture in the entire USA. The role of Indifference, Arrogance, Lack of Responsibility, Misguided Ethics, Entitlement and Ignorance are all evident in the case as Yahoo writer Dan Wetzel states in his article about the conviction:

It’s still hard to say if Mays and Richmond ever grasped the trouble they were in until Sunday.

Mays knew enough to grow concerned. The girl was never sure whether to press charges, but once her parents found out, there would be no doubt. They culled social media for clues and walked into the Steubenville Police Department with a flash drive of evidence.

Just prior to that, Mays became panicked and texted the girl.

“I’m about to get kicked off my football team,” Mays wrote.

“The more you bring up football, the more pissed I get,” the girl wrote back. “Because that’s like all you care about.”

Trent Mays and Ma’lik Richmond were soon arrested after that text exchange. Legendary coach Reno Saccoccia couldn’t help them now. The power of Big Red, their families’ good names, their otherwise clean pasts and strong futures, meant nothing.

A culture of arrogance created a group mindset of debauchery and disrespect, of misplaced manhood and lost morality.

Drunk on their own small-town greatness, they operated unaware of common decency until they went too far, wrote too much, bragged too many times and, finally, on a cold Sunday morning, were hauled out of a small third-floor courtroom as a couple of common criminals.

Their ride to the Scioto Juvenile Correctional Facility was waiting for them out back, two floors down, out in the real world.

Americans at all socioeconomic levels need to recognize that this case is NOT just a sad day for Steubenville. The problem is throughout the USA and needs to be corrected. We as individuals, parents, elected officials, educators and as a society as a whole need to take action and care. The message is clear… Take time with your children. As the old Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young song verse says:

Can you hear and do you care and
Cant you see we must be free to
Teach your children what you believe in.
Make a world that we can live in.

Expectations…You Get What You Expect, So Expect More!

Image Source: http://jahanc.wordpress.com/2012/01/06/the-follow-me-generation/

I was at a meeting this past week to look at the technology plan for our school district. The woman leading the plan development started the session with a 4:18 minute You Tube video slide show titled Social Media Revolution 2012. The video has a load of statistics and information on the impact of social media on the world especially from a marketers perspective. Most of the information displayed is on Facebook, You Tube and Twitter.

What I found interesting about the use of this video to start the 2 hour meeting was that later in the meeting individuals attending (about 25 individuals including Principles, Students, Parents, Teachers, Board of Ed members and the district superintendent) we learn that access to Facebook, You Tube, Twitter and pretty much all social media is blocked for student access in the school if they are using any school device. I had to laugh at this because the desire to ‘control’ access and content by the parents and school seems to very much like China and runs very contrary to what the video was promoting. So why start the meeting with something students don’t have access to in the school?

Seems to me we as parents, educators and BOE members need to stop accepting misuse and start expecting good use of technology and social media by students. How that is done is by simply educating and working with our students to help them understand appropriate behaviour and action on the internet and in life in general. It is not just the schools or the parents that need to do this but it is a partnership built on trust that will allow students to meet expectations and to have the ability to use social media wisely. To me trying to block and censor access and content only breeds discontent, resentment and pent-up emotions that promote rebel without a cause behaviour!

Leaving the meeting I was further amused by the bulletin board across from the district offices. On it was a flyer. “Follow-us on Facebook”. Hummmmmmm

 

 

(Don’t) Put It In Writing

My brother recently went through a bad break-up, and the first thing I did when I heard about it was happily defriend his ex-girlfriend on Facebook. I recommended that he do the same. While there may be some people who remain friends with their exes both in real-life and in social media, my policy has always been more of the cut your losses and run. Rather than run the risk of jealousy or misplaced drama, I prefer to keep things as cordial as possible by keeping them as distant as possible. Of course, there’s another reason for my reluctance to remain friends with exes of any kind on Facebook, and that’s the possibility of social media disasters.

Talk to your child about how to appropriately use social media, and consider how you use it yourself! (Image Credit:http://www.kidonthebus.com/2010/08/your-child-on-facebook.html)

Now, a social media disaster can come in a lot of forms, but for those of us with fewer than 10,000 followers on Twitter and a meager 400 friends on Facebook, most social media disasters come from relationships gone sour. The one thing almost all social media disasters have in common is that somebody puts in writing something that they shouldn’t have been saying in the first place. Offensive or even mildly offensive comments on Facebook or Twitter, whether they are in private messages or available for anyone to read, can become a serious liability. Maybe you’re upset with your girlfriend and so you post a sexist comment on Facebook, which then gets around to not only your cousins and friends, but also to your coworkers and your classmates. The thing is, by putting comments in writing, even if they’re intended as jokes, you’re opening yourself up to problems. You may lose a friend or a job, start a family feud, or even get the police involved (depending on the level of the comment you’ve made). Part of social media is controlling your image, and so you need to be aware of the things you’re putting in writing. Just because you might say something to a friend doesn’t mean you should post it on your Facebook. I pretend that I now have potential future employers reading every post, which helps me weed out what I should and shouldn’t say.

Instead of posting something on Facebook, why not use the site to set up a meeting with some of your friends? Saying something in person is a lot less serious (or verifiable) than saying something in writing…just make sure that nobody’s wearing a wire at your table!

Social Media Mayhem

I joined social media a little bit later than most of my peers, around the time that MySpace was on its way out and Facebook was on its way in. Initially, I resisted. When I started college, however, it quickly became clear that Facebook was a necessity. I don’t use the term lightly, and my assertion is backed up by a recent Pew Survey that found Facebook users have more real-life friends than non-Facebook users. Shortly after I joined Facebook, it seemed like social media exploded. Blogs, Twitter accounts, Pinterest…the list goes on. And on. And on. Obviously it’s almost impossible to totally keep up with all the new trends. At a recent department speaker series on finding jobs after a graduate degree, one presenter said her best piece of advice was to make a LinkedIn account, a Twitter account, and get a significant professional online presence.

Facebook status update: I feel like somebody's WATCHING me. Weird, right? (Image Credit:http://owni.eu/2011/05/12/e-spying-state-sponsored-intrusion/)

 

I cringed. As much as I like using social media for business purposes (after all, I maintain this blog and a Twitter account, which is admittedly not very active as I’m still trying to figure out the appeal), I hate using it for social purposes. And perhaps my fears are becoming more relevant. A friend who was recently interviewing for a position was asked for his Facebook username and PASSWORD, so that his potential employer could log on to his account and check out what kinds of things he was posting, liking, and what kinds of things his friends were posting and liking. This isn’t an isolated incident, either. More and more employers are requesting this information as part of a standard interview process. While in the past social media users were told to keep accounts private, giving a potential employer free access to your account negates any privacy settings.

It’s enough to make anyone who might ever consider getting any kind of a job cringe. So what do you do? It’s no longer enough to tell people to set privacy settings to their maximum, and it may not be realistic to ask people to disconnect from social media entirely. My friend, luckily, got the job without a problem. While I may have started this post out with the intention of giving some solid advice for social media management, I’ve ended more uncertainly than I began. The only rule I now try to follow is the idea that nothing on my social media sites are private, not matter how strictly my privacy settings are set.

How do you manage your social media presence as monitoring becomes more invasive and pervasive?

Password

Creating the perfect password isn’t necessarily easy. In between school, online banking, e-mail, credit cards, student loans, paying bills, and social networking, I easily have over twenty different accounts that require a username and a password. Although it’s embarrassing to admit, my first password attempts were easy. Try “password” easy. As I’ve gotten older and wiser, my password habits have changed. Of course, it may only be fair to admit that my easy password habit was broken mostly by the fact that the majority of websites now place strict requirements on acceptable passwords. 

Some sites simply require that your password be over a certain number of characters. Others, however, require you to include a capital letter, a number, and a symbol. Even if a website doesn’t require a particularly complicated password, it’s still best to choose passwords that aren’t necessarily easy for someone else to guess, which means staying away from obvious and easily-guesed choices. 

The first step to finding the perfect password is realizing that you shouldn’t use the same password for everything. Even though this means that I now have more than five passwords to remember, I’ve come up with a system that works for me. I think of my passwords as puzzles, with different components. Depending on the venue, I place the pieces in a different order, or choose to leave some pieces out. This means that my password is quite adaptable but is also memorable. It also means that when I forget what my password is for a site, I can usually guess it within three or four tries.

As tempting as it may be to leave your password near your computer space, that ultimately defeats the purpose of a password. Keep a list of your passwords written down somewhere secure in your house, just in case. 

For children, it’s also important to emphasize that they shouldn’t be sharing passwords with their friends or staying logged into websites. I’ve seen lots of kids taken advantage of by friends who thought they were being funny, but were really being inappropriate.