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Principal’s anti-Facebook plan: Is banning Web sites the fix?

May 4, 2010 By Anne 2 Comments

It was an interesting pair of education news stories to break in a single week: a principal urging his students’ parents to ban their kids’ use of Facebook and the Teacher of the Year being honored for teaching with, among other things, Facebook (see this). In an email to parents, Anthony Orsini, principal of Benjamin Franklin Middle School in Ridgeway, NJ, said that “the main problem is that tweens do not have the resilience to withstand internet name-calling,” CNN reported. He may have a point about child development and the intense dramas of middle school life, but does banning a single Web site or two address the problem (see this for some alternatives and this about The Drama)? “The last straw” for Orsini, CNN says, was Formspring, which he called “a scourge.” Instead of suggesting the banning of it (kids find workarounds, such as Society.me), Orsini should check out a survey of 10,000 middle school students in his own state which found that the vast majority had not bullied their peers, but “a majority were also convinced that their own nonbully status was an exception to the norm,” the their slides for a 2008 talk they gave on this social-norms approach, including school posters illustrating it).

In his blog post on Orsini’s move, social media researcher Ira Socol writes, “Bullying, in my view of the world, is not a ‘kid issue,’ but an adult-created environmental issue. As studies have shown, schools typically make bullying worse, and more acceptable – not the opposite.” Increasingly, experts from psychologists to risk prevention practitioners are saying that the solution has to be a whole-school approach (see “Clicks, cliques & cyberbullying: Whole-school response is key”). Some good things that have come out of the New Jersey story: 1) kids and parents talking about it, thinking out loud together about what’s right for them (this must be true, right?) and 2) the potential for growing public awareness of sites’ terms of service and the potential for growing public discussion about how or whether sites enforce them.

Related links

  • “Let’s not create a cyberbullying panic”, by my ConnectSafely co-director Larry Magid at CNET
  • “Students on bullying: Important study”
  • “Social norming: *So* key to online safety”
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Filed Under: bullying, cyberbullying, Risk & Safety, School & Tech, school policy Tagged With: Anthony Orsini, bullying, cyberbullying, Facebook, Formspring, Ira Socol, social norms, whole-school

Reader Interactions

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  1. Social networking under age 13: Some ed experts’ views | NetFamilyNews.org says:
    May 21, 2010 at 3:56 pm

    […] a UK report finding that a quarter of 8-to-12-year-old British Net users are on Facebook and a US principal calls for a Facebook ban for middle schoolers (see below), I thought you’d appreciate some […]

    Reply
  2. Should Parents Ban Access to Facebook? | Cyberbullying Research Center Blog says:
    May 11, 2010 at 10:16 pm

    […] the way, as Anne points out on her blog, the same week that the New Jersey principal distributed the email encouraging parents to ban […]

    Reply

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Our (DIGITAL) PARENTING BASICS: Safety + Social
NAMLE, the National Association for Media Literacy Education
CASEL.org & the 5 core social-emotional competencies of SEL
Center for Democracy & Technology
Center for Innovative Public Health Research
Childnet International
Committee for Children
Congressional Internet Caucus Academy
ConnectSafely.org
Control Shift: a pivotal book for Internet safety
Crimes Against Children Research Center
Crisis Textline
Cyber Civil Rights Initiative's Revenge Porn Crisis Line
Cyberwise.org
danah boyd's blog and book about networked youth
Disconnected, Carrie James's book on digital ethics
FOSI.org's Good Digital Parenting
The research of Global Kids Online
The Good Project at Harvard's School of Education
If you watch nothing else: "Parenting in a Digital Age" TED Talk by Prof. Sonia Livingstone
The International Bullying Prevention Association
Let Grow Foundation
Making Caring Common
Raising Digital Natives, author Devorah Heitner's site
Renee Hobbs at the Media Education Lab
MediaSmarts.ca
The New Media Literacies
Report of the Aspen Task Force on Learning & the Internet and our guide to Creating Trusted Learning Environments
The Ruler Approach to social-emotional learning (Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence)
Sources of Strength
"Young & Online: Perspectives on life in a digital age" from young people in 26 countries (via UNICEF)
"Youth Safety on a Living Internet": 2010 report of the Online Safety & Technology Working Group (and my post about it)

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