In the Lead

“The worse the news, the faster you should tell people.” –James Faloudi

While I agree with the quote above by James Faloudi, I can’t help but think that this was stated before the inception of social media. As an educator who’s experience in the classroom and as an administrator preceded Twitter and Facebook’s inception, I can remember hearing about changes on the forefront of something in the edu-world and thinking, “I’ll believe it when I get the ‘official’ word from that organization.” Of course, “official” meant a hard copy letter or perhaps even an e-mail. If it was an event that occurred in the world, I tuned into one of those all-day news stations to get the latest scoop. Boy, are things different now.

This picture is one that a colleague of mine uses frequently when he facilitates learning with various audiences. I love this image because it really does depict what we as educators deal with on a daily basis now that we are in a world where social media dictates much of what we see, hear, or learn. In essence, we are now subjected to a fire hose of information. Our problem is figuring out how to contain the fire hose to a point where we can filter and discern what is accurate and what is not.  I believe along with this we have to also learn how to not jump to extremes, and keep a cool head when in the midst of learning about a change. (Although I have written about maintaining balance on this blog before, a colleague reminded me of it again when I read a short post on his blog.)

There cannot be a clearer example of this as what I saw occur on December 16, 2010 when an image was leaked from Yahoo showing Delicious slated for a sunset.  If you were monitoring Twitter that day, you would have thought the world was coming to an end right then and there. Some people were immediately very emotional about this apparent “sunset” and started bashing Yahoo. Others went into problem-solving mode and began posting other places people could export and store their bookmarks. The tweets ensued with folks posting places they were storing their bookmarks. Blog posts were written about the topic. Heck, it doesn’t take more than to Google “Delicious Debacle” to see the mountain of content produced on this topic, and the information continues to compile.

What bothers me is what happens with the casual Twitter or other social media user who was on Twitter on the 16^th and then didn’t pay attention to what happened 24 hours later.  Don’t get me wrong, the fire hose of information continued.  However, if folks weren’t paying attention, they missed the response from Yahoo in what seemed like an eternity, yet it was only a day later.  Click here for their response.  Although scary at the time to think you were going to lose your bookmarks, we hadn’t even heard from the company itself before making mass changes. We took tweets, blogs, and Facebook postings as the truth and didn’t look for a response from the originator of the concern.

In thinking about this, I get an unsettling feeling in the pit of my stomach.  Who is teaching our students to maintain balance? Who is teaching them how to sift through the crap and find the truth? Who is teaching them how to post digitally with responsibility and dignity?

Those questions aren’t what REALLY give me the unsettling feeling in my stomach, though. As a leader, I have to think about who is making sure our teachers and principals understand all of this. If I don’t take responsibility as a district-level leader, then how will I know it will take place? Am I alone in my fear here? What do you think?

Images:
Firehose Training by U.S. Department of Defense

Not Yet by Cayusa on Flickr