Riemblog

Facebook features newsfeed statuses front and center, encouraging conversational commentary.

Part II: Facebook: “Let’s Talk”

The connectivity of Facebook is its greatest strength. It helps to carry over recently disrupted relationships, like the high school graduating class who are now college freshman, and to re-create social networks decades in hibernation (old 30-, 40-, and 50-somethings — college and high school buddies holding ongoing reunions online). In this sense it is essentially a perpetual e-yearbook.

One seeks out friends to sign it, with the depth of message attendant to such friendship: “What are you up to?” “Have fun at the beach!” “OMG” and “lol” have taken the place of K.I.T. and j/k. Like a yearbook, it relies heavily on photos as a form of community-building. Everyone gets to provide his own yearbook photo in the world of Facebook, and better yet, we all get to watch each other’s slideshows. Save me, somebody.

Worse, that guy you never wanted to sign your yearbook can become your “friend” because of the weird social protocol that inhibits the average person from wanting to continue to reject the reject he spent high school rejecting.

The major forms of social bonding I have found in my brief personal experience with Facebook are:

1)     old friends from high school re-establishing communication

2)     friends announcing what they have recently done or intend to do in the near future

• friends looking for friends to accompany them in their planned activities
• friends letting friends know what kind of person they are by announcing what they do or plan to do
•  friends reacting to what friends do or plan to do in order to let friends know what kind of person they are

3)    friends participating in FB-designed and -produced online surveys and  activities that connect to popular culture and, by extension, express who they are (Five favorite___________’s).

4)    occasional forays into cultural/political discussions that carefully avoid true dissent or careful argument

5)    occasional emotional distress expressed in statuses, directly or indirectly asking for help and sympathy

6)    compulsive sharers, sharing their every meal, drive into the country, or family event. These entries resemble “tweets” and may well be Twitter-generated

The phenomenon of #6 sharers is carried a step further (as hinted at above) with Twitter, which is not a yearbook, but more of a truncated journal written for a public. The egocentric basis and bias of Twitter is, to this observer, its most salient feature. (Which we will explore in our next post, bringing us full circle back to the “Look at me!” world of My Space, We will attempt to demonstrate the establishment of a pattern in terms of initial fluorescence, growth, establishment of market dominance, decline and diminishment of influence both in terms of usage and marketing/business success.) Before looking at Twitter, however, let’s probe a bit more deeply into Faceebook.

There is considerable evidence beyond the merely anecdotal to support my claim about the current ascendancy of Facebook and concomitant decline of MySpace. A number of articles attest to the trends:

Bank On It: Facebook Will Pass MySpace in US Popularity

December 18th, 2008 | by Adam Ostrow

The latest numbers are in from Nielsen Online, and they conclude the obvious: Facebook is downright surging in popularity. The site registered a record 47.5M US-based unique visitors in November, up from 39.9M just one month prior.

Top social network MySpace continued to hover around 60M, with an official count of 59.1M. If you’re looking for a shoe-in bet for your 2009 tech predictions, it’s this: Facebook will surpass MySpace in US traffic at some point next year.

Read the whole thing

And here is an even more current mapping of Facebook’s surging popularity.   

Fortune magazine has a balanced look at the strengths and challenges of the Facebook phenomenon in an article from April 15, 2009, titled “Is Facebook Losing Its Glow? The social networking site is growing — but that also means serious growing pains”  by Jessi Hempel.

And this blogger has some salient up-to-date statistics to confirm Facebook’s ascendancy.

Social Networks: Facebook Takes Over Top Spot, Twitter Climbs, Andy Kazeniac (contact – e-mail) — February 9th, 2009

So the evidence is ample, Facebook has overtaken MySpace as the leader in the social networking sector of the blogosphere. This piece is getting a little long, so we will extend our discussion of Facebook into another entry where we will examine how the structure of the Facebook site and the interactivity of the apps have popularized this next phase of the social networking cycle.

One thing that is largely mysterious to many people regarding the entire field of education — or “the education game” as we pros like to call it — is the field of school funding and finance. This is the first area this series will address, as the allocation and disbursement of funds directly relates to the management structure of schools and districts (our second topic) and school governance (our third topic).

Public school financing is complicated by the fact that it is two-tiered: on one level, heavily regulated and controlled by the state of California, and on the next level distributed down to individual school districts of widely varying size and political clout.  The state’s regulation and control has largely eliminated the inequities characteristic of school funding in the 1970s and previously, when school boards had direct access to local property taxes as the primary source of funding. By passing the control of funding up a level to the state, and by imposing “revenue limits” in order to level the playing field at the outset, in California all districts receive reasonably proportional “pieces of the pie.”

The sticking point (especially in large districts like Los Angeles) is the district then distributes monies to the individual schools, according to its own policies — and individual school funding becomes part of hundreds-of-millions-of-dollars-a-year, elaborate shell game. A breakdown of  all funds follows:

•  Federal = 11%
•  State = 61%
•  Property Tax = 21%
•  Local = 6%
•  Lottery = 1%

For the exact figures in the ‘ 08-’ 09 school year go to http://www.edsource.org/1824.html

Previous to the current “revenue limit era,” inequalities were rife, as districts in more affluent areas raked in money from local property taxes. Now, those monies are distributed throughout the state and local property taxes are limited by proposition 13. Local schools can still generate extra revenue by local fund-raising through PTAs and booster clubs and the like, but these resources do not severely distort the overall system.

Most of the funds go to salaries. Here, districts are in competition, but even the most lucrative teacher salaries are modest by any standard. Although there is an ongoing debate about the comparability of teacher salaries to other professions — an issue complicated by number of days worked per year — there is obvious truth to the old saw: “no one ever became a teacher to get rich.” And districts certainly figure this into their salary schedules.

The next post will detail how real-world budgeting affects real-world schools.

This is the first in what will be an ongoing series of posts on a topic about which I am a verifiable expert: the contemporary practice of secondary education in urban America. As the “About the Riemblogger” section of this blog notes, education is one of my interests. I can’t really help being interested in it: it is what I do for a living. It is my vocation.

For 20 years I have served in various capacities in a comprehensive high school in the Los Angeles Unified School District: Verdugo Hills High School. This school has changed considerably over this period of time, mirroring the socio-political milieu of the city of Los Angeles and reflecting the issues that the city has grappled with and continues to try to work out.

I have seen the district go through several complicated, convoluted reform attempts during this time and I have seen none of them work.

This series of posts will examine the most significant of these reform efforts:

·      School Based Management

·      Standards-based Instruction

·      Accountability

·      Small Learning Communities

I am not a cynic: I love my work–it truly is a vocation to me. I am not burned out: after 20 years I feel more enthusiastic and passionate about my work than I ever have.

But I am realistic. I have seen precious little improvement over the course of my career (although the school I work at has, according to standard measurements, consistently met its growth goals since their establishment).

The dilemma of public education is complex. First, how schools are funded and the model of administration are problematic. Too much money goes to the wrong places and intimidatory, top-down management styles predominate.

Second, curriculum development has not kept up with societal trends, and where it has tried, this has resulted in a diminishment of the subject matter and its treatment rather than an enhancement of the material and the students’ educational experience.

Third, everyone is an expert. This is best exemplified by the recent and spectacular failure of LAUSD’s Admiral-cum-superintendent, David Brewer III. As a teacher, I am perhaps overly sensitive to the amazingly pervasive attitude that since everyone went to school everyone knows how to fix education. I’ve gone to doctors and hospitals all my life but I would not attempt to remove anyone’s spleen. Most people have little understanding of what the problems are, much less how to fix them.

Fourth, the mission of public education in schools has expanded to such an extent that the institution is charged with tasks the accomplishment of which would require a restructuring of society itself. No longer are our schools places where students learn their basic literacy, numeracy, and reasoning skills (as well as social skills). They are now  esteem-building centers wrapped inside of health-care and day-care facilities, built atop food-distribution complexes, annexed to employment development agencies — and the list goes on. No other enterprise is asked to do so much for so many with so little.

Come back to check out how we sort out the problems and to find out how we think the problems can best be solved.