Ticking Mind Bulletin #8 2011

Over our last few bulletins we have been looking at Web 2.0 tools to use in the class room to support and engage students with writing (for all our previous posts, click here). Our next theme will be to look at tools to help students with critical literacy - particularly towards the media. However, today we are doing something slightly different. We've included with this email a number of news articles that have recently caught our attention because they're all about the use (and abuse) of social media.

The first article comes from that beacon of hard hitting news, MX News. If you've never heard of it, it's the commuter newspaper you can read on the Melbourne train system. The newspaper specialises in quirky human interest stories. The one we liked is about about a public marriage proposal a man made to his girlfriend in a shopping mall in Los Angeles. He was rejected. But that wasn't the only humiliation - it was caught on camera and has now gone 'viral' on Youtube.

The second article we've included is actually a set of two news reports about a fascinating recent twitter controversy Australian super model Megan Gale was involved in. In case you haven't heard (or possible don't care), she's recently been nominated by Who magazine as the world's most beautiful woman for 2011. Anyway, there she was the other week at her local cafe incognito, when she over heard two school girls (who were unwittingly sitting next to the disguised Megan Gale) critically appraising her picture on the front cover of Who. What's interesting is what happens next - Megan Gale begins reporting the whole event on twitter, telling everyone what the girls are doing and asking 'what should I do?' Eventually, she decides to confront the girls. The next article reports the reply the girls made to the media in the form of a fax the next day. 

Both events are interesting examples of the perils of social media. These articles can be used in the classroom as the basis for a discussion: Do people deserve the humiliation that social media can give, or do these examples show that social media has too much power to humiliate people.