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Teaching Students to Face Digital Criticism

I had a great conversation with a blogging ‘colleague’ of mine the other day about the complexities of online communication. The conversation started after we both were confused/concerned about comments made or posts written about us or things we had written – we started direct messaging on twitter to see how best to interpret the situations and get outside opinion on whether the references were actually negative or not. Now, this completely brought me back to middle school where my friends and I would sit around and dissect conversations and notes to figure out if a friend was mad at us or if a boy actually liked us………interesting that otherwise-confident adults would be brought to the same thing because of a blog post or comment, isn’t it? The conclusion we came to is this: blogging puts you out there for the world and you have to be tough enough to handle it.

The first time someone wrote something less than glowing about me I instantly overanalyzed it and took it way too personally – I’ve learned to have a bit more perspective and I’m a lot more willing to either stand behind my words no matter what (if I truly believe) or admit my mistake quickly if I’ve presented a situation in a incorrect way. Taylor and I agreed that blogging has made us more confident writers (and people), although I still do tend to take negative feedback rather personally – possibly need to work on the skin-thickening some more :-) The great thing about opening up our worlds to comments is that we’re able to hear other sides of an issue and gain perspective – when people link to a blog post of mine and rant about why I’m wrong, it’s eye-opening to see how differently someone else thinks about the same issue (and links are always good, right?) and it’s great to be able to chime in on the comments on THEIR post to tell my side.

Here’s why this worries me as an educator and parent:

If two adults resorted to dissecting supposed insults/criticisms, how are our students dealing with this? The blogging world (mainly outside of the edtech arena) resorts to such infantile mud-slinging and that’s in the ADULT arena – are our kids prepared for dealing with this at a much younger age on social networking sites, blogging, etc? How do we teach our students/kids to put themselves out there in the online community and be able to handle the negative comments? There are many resources available on cyberbullying and the like, but not so much on how to handle ‘constructive’ or intellectual criticism. Thoughts?

And I just need to add this because it brings up everything I was struggling with at the beginning of my blogging journey – a member of my network was just asked to resign from his teaching job because of his personal blog. Head on over and learn more about his situation – it’s exactly what we ALL worry (or should worry) about.

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