Journal 10

Don't Feed the Trolls
Using Blogs to Teach Civil Discourse
Karen Work Richardson

The article makes some great visible points in regards to how we communicate via the internet. Karen's message is that we need to teach students to adopt productive conversation instead of meaningless sounds bites. There is an idea that the internet is a different place, where civility is left at home, and people act like it. The question Karen poses is how do we harness the power of the internet and not abuse it?
The article illustrates several paths or guidelines into teaching students to behave with restrain and good manners while communicating via the internet.

Question 1; The article mentions that teachers teach the technological "rules of the road?" How might this help the classroom and the general learning environment for the learners?
The internet is brand new to us all. In life there are dangers, and those dangers are very real online. We as teachers need to teach students to behave properly in social settings. Teach the rules of the internet and the students will know how to better follow the rules... or break them.

Question 2 I found myself reading the last few sentences I wrote and I started to wonder where the line is drawn as a teaching profession. Are we teaching students how to behave? Maybe we are obligated to do this at the younger levels. Maybe all levels. I just worry sometimes about who is giving the advice to these kids when we start teaching them how to behave in all settings. I realize we need to teach the rules, but the rules for behavior never change. One of the biggest questions in education is how to handle the behavior problems. We can teach it out of some. Adding the internet makes it more difficult. There is no answer to this question. Teaching behavior is a long process, which we cannot do on our own.