Here are the math posts Wildrose education critic Bruce McAllister deleted from his Facebook page

When I shared my blog post on the nuances of the math wars on Wildrose Education Critic Bruce McAllister's Facebook page, he deleted it and blocked me.

I'm not the only one.

Dave Martin is a high school math teacher and he too had his math post deleted from McAllister's Facebook page. Dave has his masters in mathematics and blogs regularly about teaching math.

Why is McAllister and the Wildrose deleting and blocking math teachers comments from his Facebook page?

Of course McAllister and the Wildrose can choose to run their Facebook accounts in any way they like but it is dishonest to then say that they are listening to Albertans.

There are many more Alberta teachers who have written about math education, and you can check out some of those posts here. 

I can't share them with Bruce McAllister because he blocked me, but maybe you could.

The Denial of Social Networking

The idea that a child could be born a digital native makes as much sense as the idea that a child could be born literate.

Like reading and writing skills, digital literacy is something constructed inside children while interacting with their environment. It's not about their DNA -- it's about opportunity and guidance.

Part of the illusion here is that too many people mistakenly think a student's digital comfort level equates to their digital skill level or digital literacy.

Phil McRae with the The Alberta Teachers' Association describes some of the results of a recent Canadian study on technology and teacher-student relationships:

Another common finding was that teachers are often unable to make full use of social media in their teaching practice because firewalls prevent them from accessing services such as Twitter, Skype and YouTube. This is an important finding—if we are to teach students to be critical consumers and thoughtful citizens in a digital age, teachers need to be trusted to make pedagogic decisions on the application of technology.

If a school blocks YouTube, Facebook and Twitter, how are teachers suppose to learn about social networking?

If a school blocks YouTube, Facebook and Twitter, how are teachers suppose to teach students how to use social networking appropriately?

If a school blocks YouTube, Facebook and Twitter, how are teachers suppose to teach students how to NOT use social networking inappropriately?

If we deny students and teachers access to social networking in schools where they can learn together about how to properly navigate Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and Skype in ways that are pro-social and responsible, we shouldn't be surprised when kids grow up to be adults who use social networking in dysfunctional and dangerous ways.

Facebook Guide for Teachers

Teacher's Guide to Using Facebook (Read Fullscreen)

For more on Facebook for teachers, visit EduDemic.

Professional Development & Social Networking

My blog was born on January 6, 2010. Today is June 10, 2010.

In 5 months, my blog has:

• Over 20,000 visits
• Over 11,000 unique visitors
• Over 33,000 page visits

I have to admit I am more than happy to see these kinds of numbers, but I do have a grander purpose for sharing this with you than just boasting.

If you are a progressive educator who advocates for education reform and changes to the traditional model of school, there is a good chance that you may be in the minority in your school. In fact, you may find yourself being the only one...

This can be both challenging and lonely.

I can only imagine the number of teachers who have had their progressive voices shushed or outright silenced. Being an agent of change can be challenging enough, but doing it alone may verge on the impossible.

Often having even one like-minded person to share your thoughts and feelings can help you persevere through opposing adversity, but what if there isn't even one like-minded person to be found?

This is why the Internet and social networking has proven to be so liberating - the world is a big place and there is a good chance that somewhere out there like-minded people exist. Twitter, Facebook, blogging, nings and other forms of social networking provide us with an unprecedented ability to find them... from any where in the world. Time and place are rendered obsolete.

While I would never suggest virtual relationships can or should ever replace our physical ones, we are no longer bound to only our locals. When colleagues in the "real world" no longer provide the like-minded support that we desire, we can look to colleagues in the virtual world.

In the spirit of networking, please consider taking a minute to leave a comment:

• Feel free to remain anonymous
• Why do you visit this blog?
• Where in the world are you from?

Teaching Social Networking: Finger Dipping

In their book Connected: The Surprising Power of Our Social Networks adn How they Shape Our Lives, Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler offer a powerful reason why we owe it to our children to teach them about social networking:

Our connectedness carries with it radical implications for the way we understand the human condition. Social networks have value precisely because they can help us to achieve what we could not achieve on our own. In the next few chapters, we will show how networks influence the spread of joy, the search for sexual partners, the maintenance of health, the functioning of markets and the struggle for democracy. Yet, social-network effects are not always positive. Depression, obesity, sexually transmitted diseases, financial panic, violence, and even suicide also spread. Social networks, it turns out, tend to magnify whatever they are seeded with.

Partly for this reason, social networks are creative. And what these networks create does not belong to any one individual - it is shared by all those in the network. In this way, a social network is like a commonly owned forest: we all stand to benefit from it, but we also must work together to ensure it remains healthy and productive. This means that social networks are fundamentally and distinctively human, and ubiquitous, they should not be taken for granted.

Social network is not some recent discovery that came with the creation of Facebook or Twitter. Social networking is less about technology and more about people. Technologies like Facebook or Twitter are merely the mediums in which our connectedness can be amplified. If Twitter shut down tomorrow, our connectivity would likely not.

It is important to not become distracted by the medium - the technology - and to focus on the network itself- that is the people who are connected. Christakis and Fowler point out an essential truth and that is our networks grow what we seed into them. If we seed racism, hatred and pornography, we will grow racism, hatred and pornography. But if we seed tolerance, understanding and wisdom, we will grow tolerance, understanding and wisdom.

Like a finger being dipped into a pond of water, the ripples that spread through our networks will reflect what we place into them. We must take great care in selecting which fingers we choose to dip.

This is what we must teach our children.

Are iPhones rude?

I was at a teachers' convention recently and I sat in on a session about how technology will affect the teaching profession in the coming years. We talked about web 2.0 and even a little about web 3.0. We discussed Facebook, Twitter, wikis and blogs.

During the session, the presenter asked how many of us were on Twitter right now. About 6 or 7 hands went up in a crowd of say 50. Including mine.

At the end of the session, questions were asked - and one of the questions went like this:

Isn't it rude and offensive for those people to be on their phones while you are trying to present?

The presenter immediately responded that he was not offended because he had an idea what those people were actually doing.

I happened to be one of those people on Twitter while the presenter delivered his presentation. I was actually engaged in a Twitter conversation with one of the teachers in the room. We were talking back and forth about the same topic the presenter had brought up. I had also been using my phone to take notes during the presentation.

The teacher who implied that we iPhone users were being rude is making a gross misassumption born entirely out of ignorance. That teacher doesn't have a iPhone nor do they Twitter. All that teacher saw was me bent over my phone and typing with my thumbs.

Had I had a pencil and scribbler, would I have been any more or less rude?

Learning is a highly social, emotional, cultural and deeply intrapersonal activity. And so there must be opportunities for learners to socialize. The problem is - traditional classroom teachers provide little to no time for students to interact. Especially if the rule of the day is to sit in your desk, in your row, face forward and listen.

What's rude is the number of people who believe that learning is a passive activity where students need to just be receptacles for their teachers' knowledge - and that students need only reproduce that knowledge in order to show their learning. That's rude.