Social Media in Education

It seems like many of the articles I've been reading lately have been about using social media in education as a way to get students to collaborate, express themselves to a wider audience, communicate in different ways, and a host of other innovative uses. Author Will Richardson in his book Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts and Other Powerful Web Tools for Classrooms has some fantastic suggestions and ideas on how to implement blogs in eduction using a wide range of applications to the classroom. This all sounds very cool to me, and I would love to start using some of these ideas with my students for the next school year.

But I can't, at least not with most of it.

Where I currently live and teach in the People's Republic of China, most social media sites are blocked by  what we expats in China less-than-fondly refer to as the "Great Firewall of China". Twitter and Facebook are always blocked; video sharing sites like You Tube and Vimeo are always blocked. Any URL with the text string"blog" anywhere in the address will always be blocked. Wikispaces is sometimes unavailable. Several of our teachers have tried using Edmoto, but find that it is often blocked. (Why some sites are only blocked some of the time remains a mystery.)

Looking through this list, it seems as if the Chinese are blocking the sites that allow people to write to the Web. The PRC Government (read Communist Party) doesn't want anyone in China to have the ability to post their thoughts or ideas to the Internet. They don't block many news and information sites from outside of China, that is not until one of those sites posts something that they don't like. We first arrived in China in the summer of 2009 during the 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square crackdown; several of the news Websites that I regularly read posted stories about Tiananmen in 1989, and were almost immediately blocked for several weeks. (The ongoing advice in China is that you should avoid talking about the "Three T's" with most Chinese: Tibet, Taiwan, and Tiananmen.)

We can get around all of this stuff by using a Virtual Private Network, or VPN. A VPN essentially connects you to a remote Internet server through an encrypted connection, so your ISP only sees the IP number of your computer, but not where it's connected. So once you're logged into a VPN, you're free to surf anonymously through the VPN provider's Internet connection. I have a VPN that is quite reliable which allows me to use sites like You Tube in my classroom, and to access any other sites I might need or want to view. Many of my students also routinely use VPNs, so they can access all of this information as well. Technically, VPNs are illegal in China, but since they have a hard time proving that you're using one, it's not really enforced. But, since many of my students do not routinely use a VPN, requiring them to acquire one - and the reliable ones have a subscription fee - is not possible.

So while all of these wonderful applications for blogging and using social media sound very promising and innovative to me, I'm just going to have to sit back and wait until China relaxes its Internet policies, which will not be any time soon, or wait to use all these great ideas until after I've left China to teach in another country. Since I am in Switzerland as I write this, I don't feel paranoid about voicing my opinions on the Chinese Internet censorship policies; if I was back in China, I probably wouldn't be posting all of this, VPN or not.