Colorado…really?

http://nyti.ms/Ydl1Cw

So I’ve just finished reading through an article in the New York Times about how some colleges are actually making progress to allow students to have firearms…Boulder, CO being one of the areas. Of all the places where bad things have happened, on more than one occasion, with firearms, how is this kind of progress being made? Between Columbine and the much more recent Batman shooting, how is it that those in or anywhere near Boulder should ever be able to carry weapons on campus? All it would take would be one bullied student to start shooting and a shoot-out would occur. Speaking of bullying, telling students they could have a firearm would make bullies feel like they could do whatever they wanted with their protection at their side. The fact that people feel a need to have guns in the first place is sad to me, we’re just putting more weapons out on the market and more in our homes. Guns never end a problem, they just perpetuate or change them.

Social networking the next step in education?

Image

                I think, at least for my first blog, it is important to discuss the reason why I am starting to blog in the first place. I have recently read an article not only on the merits of social networking in the classroom, but for it being the future of electronic learning for our students. Most of the learning our students take part in on the day to day are in more informal settings with only about a fifth of learning taking place in the classroom. Maybe this is one of the reasons the “dreaded” idea of homework was created and is still a large part of what teachers are trying to teach their students. So, if most of students’ learning takes place informally, there has to be more effective ways to harness these generally informal learning opportunities to create useful, informal educational possibilities. After discussing these issues with my peers (a small group of Social Studies Education graduate students), we came to the conclusion that as long as a web-based platform could be limited entirely to being an informal educational tool, on that could be easily accessible whenever, wherever, educational social networking could greatly supplement practices in the classroom and allow for more constantly occurring collaboration not only between students, but between students and their teacher(s). Expanding the relationships and education from the classroom to social networking platforms can not only allow limitless, constructive correspondence, but can help students realize that their education is always in mind and is important to those that educate them, as well as having their personal interests accounted for.