We received word this week that we are approved for two more pilots. The districts are in Iowa and include a high school and a junior high. These will be full school implementations for us and we are very excited. There will be teacher training and a set of guidelines for how to use some of the more advanced (for schools) features of our product offering. Both the pilots and the training course content represent major milestones for our young company.
I found the discussion with school administrators before the pilot agreement to be interesting in that there was a lot more concern over the impact on teacher time that what they called peer-to-peer communications among students would have. They felt that in the past, tools where students could post about other students cause a lot of work. The district personnel asked questions about how our product dealt with these issues. I feel we have a good overall set of features for dealing with abuse in this area. The conversation did get me thinking about how we might be able to address cyber-bullying in a more straight-forward manner so I am into writing more functional specs now.
Also, I was reminded of what I have read that within social networks there is the ability, like in real life, to just leave a clique or group and either join another or form another. Thus, bullying, while distasteful, is somewhat more easily addressed by an individual in an on-line environment. However, there is the potential for greater abuse as well. We did a review of our terms of service after the discussion with our Iowa partners because the issue of the mother being convicted of violating MySpace’s terms of service for creating a false persona on line. Of course, our product has taken steps to reduce that possibility, but we have to make certain our terms of service our up to date in this area. Thankfully, they are up to date.
I have often wondered whether the concern over all of this is warranted or not. According to the Iowa schools, they saw a lot of incidents of teasing and threatening messages in the past when they allowed what they call peer to peer messaging. I did not get the details of whether these messages caused any expulsions or not.
In our pilot in California, we have not had the issue so far and only saw incidents of profanity where the students attempted to “beat” our controls for profanity. But, there are many possible explanations for why this could be different. One possible explanation is that simply the times have changed. The use of social networks is much more prevalent and the newness of being able to use an electronic form for “threats” has worn off. But, I think the saying “kids will be kids” still applies and we have to have a product that has the capabilities to deal with reality.
