Virtual school or virtual insanity*?

By Claire Gibson

Following Tom’s last post on ‘Whatever…’, and the debate that generated, I felt the need to put my fifty pence-worth in re the issue of bullying and technology.

An enterprising couple have come up with the idea of a virtual school, where pupils log on at 9.00am and chat to their classmates in the ‘school hall’, before starting lessons at 9.30am and finishing at 2.00pm.  I’m not going to allude (not much anyway) to the strangeness of these hours and compare them to my own school days, or even pay much attention to the four-day week...  No, the really disturbing thing for me is the complete lack of social or emotional effort required from the pupils.

One of the school’s founders, Ms Jayran, states that the school could be an alternative for pupils who have been bullied and need their confidence rebuilding. 

Now, I don’t know many people who haven’t at some point in their lives had an experience of bullying, and I’m also not of the camp that suggests bullying is ‘just part of life’, and in fact some sort of character-building rite of passage...  However, what I absolutely do not believe in is removing a child from this sort of situation and ‘rebuilding his/her confidence’ by offering a sterile and isolated alternative such as this, which appears to be more of a hiding place than a practical solution to the difficulties he or she has faced. The article claims also that the proposed introduction of microphones and webcams was resisted, because the students prefer to work just via the anonymity of text. 

Surely all this does is provide a cotton wool bubble, in which children grow up in seclusion - protected from bullying, but also strangers to the stimulating, if sometimes anxious, experience of growing up in a school environment.  How about never knowing the security of being able to say something stupid in a group of mates and laugh at yourself, without assuming that you’re being ridiculed or ‘bullied’?  It may sound extreme, but it’s perfectly plausible if emotional interaction is allowed to drop by the wayside.  Personally, I find it incredibly sad.

As for Ms Jayran’s comment that the school ‘puts [the children] in charge’ - well frankly, that’s just scary.

*Claire would like to point out that this title in no way condones the music of Jamiroquai

Comments

[Stephen Waddington]

There are some great points there, Claire. Technology is great at cutting out some of the mundane in life but we have to remember that nothing can beat social interaction with real people. Communicating via chatrooms is all well and good but meeting someone, with their body language and paralanguage continuously communicating can never reproduced online. Bullying is horrible and whilst technology can remove it, there will always be limitations to what technology can provide for us and we should be careful of what we have to give up.

Virtual worlds should be used as a means of enjoyment - and maybe as a marketing tool for certain PR firms :) - not as a replacement for human interaction.

[Christian]

I'd agree with you there, Claire. Also, whilst a lot of bullying does occur in the playground etc, there's probably an equal amount of it going on in the adult world - it's just that we're slightly better equipped to handle it. I'd certainly agree that virtual worlds can't really build your confidence - you do need real life for that.

I think .Net magazine has a Big Question coming up on this kind of issue and it's certainly an interesting one.

- Btw, a director of Ranier, poking fun at Text100, on the JK blog? Small world, PR.