Collaboration and PR is more critical today than ever and many school leaders need a new lens to look through.

“Schools need to understand that if you don’t control the school’s profile students will.”

Ideally, schools will take control of their online presence by including students in the process of monitoring/editing sites like Wikipedia. We’ve recently run into this issue and I’m thinking of the best strategy to take inclusive control – i.e. teachers, students, parents, etc.

What concerns me are a couple of things:
1) is anybody else keeping an eye on my school? I sure don’t think so…
2) is there any administrative support or direction to be certain schools get put there (say Wikipedia) in the first place? Don’t think so…

What gives me hope is our small example of a school wiki – that will soon replace our tired, very web 1.0, school web page. It has been wide open on wikispaces for over 2 years. Sure we’ve had some vandalism, but there are now enough stakeholders to maintain it and revert when necessary, etc. Biggest (besides me) stakeholders? Parents. They get it. – Mark

(Arbor Heights Elementary School, in Seattle – look us up. Yikes, I better check out Facebook right now…)

If I ask about what should be on their Wikipedia page or about the possibility of establishing a Ning site for their community, they give me very strange looks. When I suggest they should be writing a blog, they think I must be from Mars (or a student who has just gotten around the filter).

Most school administrators don’t really see the web as a valuable communication tool. And they, along with the people in our admin PR office, actually believe they can control the district’s image, even online. We have 5th graders who understand that’s not possible.

This a really interesting post and a real concern.

What actual steps do actually thing schools should be taking to monitor their online “profiles?” At first glance, it sounds like an endless, time-consuming task. How does one make changes on privately controlled online spaces like personal social networking sites, newspaper blog posts, “rate your teacher” sites, etc? Wikipedia seems to be the easy one, here.

And at what point will online profiles be considered factually suspect by most information seekers?

Inquiring minds need to know!

Thanks,

Doug

The issue may be more complicated, though, than in the case of an individual. I can imagine schools coming under criticism for top-down, authoritarian attempts to manipulate their images in a democratic forum. Will a system’s wikipedia-spinning be looked upon more favorably than when corporations try to shape their Wikipedia footprints, or less? I don’t know.

One thing for sure, though, is that you’re right: these sorts of information are growing in importance, and we need to start thinking about what that means.