__ LIPS – Leading in Public Schools

Yes, the spelling is deliberate.  The Fischbowl is a blog maintained by Karl Fisch who is also responsible for the Did You Know/Shift Happens series of presentations.

The blog contains hours of great reading and links.  Readers may be interested to see the comments Karl has made about the role of the internet and online social networks in the election of Barack Obama, and the imperatives this provides in working with those who will be voters in the future.    He makes the following observations:

But a thought occurred to me this morning – all of our current high school students will be eligible to vote in the next presidential election.

Think about that for just a minute. All of our approximately 2,150 students at Arapahoe – most of whom have never voted – will be eligible to vote in the 2012 elections. And all of the other 17.5 million students currently in U.S. high schools will also be eligible to vote in 2012. Which brings us to the money question (or two or three).

What are we doing to prepare these students to be engaged, intelligent, informed, and competent voters in a world that is very, very, very, very different than the one we grew up in?

How are we preparing them to be successful citizens in a publish-then-filter world?

Are we transforming our classrooms to reflect real-time, instantaneous access to factual and political information?

You can visit this blog entry by clicking here

And, for those concerned about the nasties who want to use the online world as a predatory place, you may be interested in this story about the relative safety of online social networking sites.  Writing in the SMH, Brad Stone makes the statement that:

THE internet may not be such a dangerous place for children after all. A taskforce created by 49 US state attorneys general to look into the problem of sexual solicitation of children online has concluded that there really is not a significant problem.