geek.teacher

Facebook: the craze that’s sweeping the nation!  I know things are getting nutty when my wife recently signed up for Facebook.  My students seem to talk about MySpace all the time.  I have frequently seen teachers argue that, since the kids are on Facebook, we should be there, too.  Well, I am here to refuse the invitation.  I have been long opposed to personally entering the social networking arena.  I think it shows in that the social networking tools that I do use are pretty much mainly for connecting to other teachers.  While we may joke around quite a bit (at this very moment we are quoting Mel Brooks movies at each other), at the end of the day, I’m building relationships with people I can be useful to and who might be able to help me out.  I honestly didn’t get Twitter until I started using it to connect with other teachers, about a year after I first signed up for it.

I’ve often had a loose kind of feeling as to why I shouldn’t go to Facebook, telling people “In my day, when we wanted to forget people from High School, we could!”  This has been clarified a bit for me in this article by Scott Brown.

I’ve never lost touch with anyone, it seems. What I’ve lost is the right to lose touch.

Well, I absolutely reserve the right to lose touch.  Quite frankly, I take a pretty hardline view on my firends: if we wanted to stay in touch, we would have.  Given the amount of tools already at my disposal to be in contact with people I know, Facebook wouldn’t make much of a difference in my ability to keep in contact with somebody if I really wanted to.

Why do I feel this way?

Unlike my friend Jay, an actual friend that I talk to, I wouldn’t classify myself as a misanthrope.  Rather, I am an introvert.  To be specific, according to the Myers-Briggs, I am an INTJ.  In Caring for Your Introvert, Jonathan Rauch wrote the following:

In its modern sense, the concept goes back to the 1920s and the psychologist Carl Jung. Today it is a mainstay of personality tests, including the widely used Myers-Briggs Type Indicator. Introverts are not necessarily shy. Shy people are anxious or frightened or self-excoriating in social settings; introverts generally are not. Introverts are also not misanthropic, though some of us do go along with Sartre as far as to say “Hell is other people at breakfast.” Rather, introverts are people who find other people tiring.

Discovering this about myself in the past few years has helped to make sense of a lot of things for me.  I quite literally DO get tired by being around other people…not something easy when your job requires you to stand in front of a bunch of people and interact with them for 7 hours a day.  I’ve heard of Facebook as being something like an online party.  To me, the very concept is rather horrifying.  I want to a wedding yesterday and am exhausted.  Do I need any more of that online?  No thanks.  What I need is to sit quietly with my computer, listening to a movie playing behind me.  Fortunately, I have an understanding wife who so far does not seem to get too upset over my long periods of silence.

As a child, my mother was sometimes a bit concerned by how, during the summer, I wouldn’t necessarily spend lots of time with other kids.  Looking back, of course, I realize that I needed the recharge time.  Right now I’m honestly feeling sad for all the little Introverts who can’t escape socialization in every aspect of their increasingly connected lives.

Please keep in mind that I’m not arguing against the very concept of Facebook itself.  I’m just saying it’s not for me.  Like David Truss argues, 

I am not advocating for necessary presence, and I am not advocating for us taking on a burden of responsibility. I am saying that we should have the choice to be there and we should have the choice to interact with students on social networking sites such as Facebook.

School districts should absolutely not tell teachers they’re disallowed from using social networking tools, but at the same time, I hope some of the more die-hard “we need to meet them where they are” types understand that not every tool is for every teacher.  Facebook is most decidedly not for me.  All you other introverts, I hope you’ll continue to join me in being alone.

While I’m at it, maybe I should finally write that post about why I don’t like Plurk.  Take THAT, Social Networking sites!

Last week people were going crazy over a report that Web 2.0 has some real classroom benefits.  Not that I’m discounting any of those benefits, but they seem to me mostly touchy-feely type things, which, while delightful and good (who wouldn’t want more engagement and participation?), still kind of fall short of the more valuable “improves performance.”

So I’m surprised to see the apparent lack of excitement about this study saying that Internet use is good for the brain.  I guess it’s not as sexy since the study was done on old people, but I find it absolutely exciting, and would love to see a similar study done on the young’ns.

Each volunteer underwent a brain scan while performing web searches and book-reading tasks.

Both types of task produced evidence of significant activity in regions of the brain controlling language, reading, memory and visual abilities.

However, the web search task produced significant additional activity in separate areas of the brain which control decision-making and complex reasoning - but only in those who were experienced web users.

The researchers said that, compared to simple reading, the internet’s wealth of choices required people to make decisions about what to click on in order to get the relevant information.

They also get bonus points from me for throwing in a sly comics reference:

Rebecca Wood, chief executive of the Alzheimer’s Research Trust, said: “These fascinating findings add to previous research suggesting that middle-aged and older people can reduce their risk of dementia by taking part in regular mentally stimulating activities.

“Older web users - ’silver surfers’ - are doing precisely this.

*Well, in theory.  I know some pretty dumb internet users, but that’s neither here nor there.

What I saw this morning (complete with wrong e-mail address…guess I need to fix that): 

What I saw 30 minutes after I e-mailed support: 

Thank you, Dreamhost!

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