YouTube and electoral politics

Published by in politics, socialnetworking, web 2.0 on November 20th, 2007

I created a personal blog site over at my.barackobama.com this evening and posted some thoughts titled, “The personal value of YouTube in politics.” I’m not only intrigued by the role social media is playing in 21st century U.S. politics, I’m also interested in being involved.

YouTube rocks. I also like the things I hear Senator Obama saying about what needs to change in U.S. politics and in our White House specifically.

Don’t worry, I’m not going to politicize my messages here on “Moving at the Speed of Creativity” beyond what I already share about our need for educational megachange, a focus on digital literacy, a shift away from high stakes accountability, etc. I’m going to use my blog space over on the Obama campaign’s website to share my political views related to foreign policy, health care, and other issues.

I’ll be putting in more than my 2 cents worth on education policy there as well, however. When I do that, I’ll share a reference link here in case you’re interested in following those conversation threads.

Can our voices change the course of education policy in the United States? I’m not sure. I’m certainly willing to give it a try, however.

Words and ideas can be powerful. I don’t think I fully grasp the transformational communication potential represented by social media technologies like blogs and YouTube. Yet.

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On this day..

2 Comments »
  • Fred Delventhal

    This summer I was very excited about the YouTube debates. What a big step forward into the 21st Century finally for the electoral process. That is until I realized that by having them be on YouTube or having candidates with MySpace pages, etc. we are effectively removing students from learning about this process and participating in it at school.

    I’m not a big fan of blanket site filtering that my district and many others subscribe to. I hope that as these lost teachable moments become more apparent that the filtering people might place more of the control back into the teachers hands.

  • http://www.wesfryer.com Wesley Fryer

    Fred: I agree that content filtering in schools for sites like YouTube is a huge obstacle for using these materials for learning. I encourage all schools and school districts to utilize a differentiated content filtering scheme, where teachers have greater access rights on the network to Internet websites including YouTube. This can be done by having “virtual LANs” setup on the network, and when teachers log in to the domain or other authentication database they are assigned greater access rights via the content filter. We have two districts I know of in Oklahoma doing this now, Tulsa Public Schools and Enid Public Schools. All school districts should be doing this, in my view. I wrote more about this last week in the past, “Why your organization needs virtual LANs.” The context of that post was more wireless security, but the functionality of providing differentiated content filter access is possible when your organization has a network architecture that supports VLANs.

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