“I have to write a persuasive speech when I get home about Facebook,” said Katie to her dad.
“What’s your argument?” I asked.
“That we should ban Facebook from our school.” Replied Katie.
That was the beginning of tonight’s after dinner conversation with my high school aged niece. I’ve mentioned Katie before in this space, so I won’t go into much detail here about how much I respect her perspective. But, tonight’s conversation was interesting. When I asked her why Facebook should be banned, she said that kids should be doing work at school. Even when I suggest that Facebook could be used to connect with other students and collaborate on a project, she said that it was too “distracting” and that kids would not be able to concentrate on their work. When I pushed back on that (I don’t think she respects me as much I do her) suggesting that kids are distracted all the time when they work together, even in the library, she said, “not in our library.”
“Okay, how about working together in the cafeteria,” I spit back.
“We don’t work in the cafeteria, and there aren’t any computers.”
By this point, she wasn’t interested in hearing my next comment that she could use her phone in the cafeteria instead of a computer. So, we were done.
What I found rather fascinating about this conversation wasn’t Katie’s insistence that Facebook wasn’t to be used for learning. Instead, it was her compartmentalization of her spaces. The Library was for quiet work. The cafeteria wasn’t a learning space. Facebook was for home. Social networking tools were for… well, socializing. And school was the only place for learning.
But, Katie wasn’t wrong, she was just sharing with me something she has been taught since her first days as a student. How often do we tell kids to find “a quiet place at home to do your homework.” We break school into content-specific periods and we design our schools to compartmentalize learning from socializing. We don’t mix and match our disciplines to create compelling courses such as Biochemistry, Art History, or Applied Mathematics. We separate our physical and virtual spaces and we rarely mix our ability to connect with our need to meet scholarly expectations.
Katie was doing exactly what we taught her to do… she was compartmentalizing her learning.
Read the original @ TransLeadership
(thanks to Scott McLeod for the link)