Respond to DOPA with Moodle at your church

Lots of buzz in the edublogosphere over DOPA— many people are asking the questions, “What should we do? What should I do personally?”

Writing your Senators is a good idea, and a variety of edubloggers have been working the last few days to create sites and tools to help others take action. This morning after church, talking to David Leard, an associate pastor at our new church in Edmond, I had a thought.

Why don’t we encourage leaders in our own churches and the churches in the neighborhoods where we live to set up Moodle sites (for free, of course, on the existing church server) to serve multiple purposes– but primarily and initially to provide a moderated, safe environment for young and older people to engage in digital social networking?! I suggested this to David, and I think he’s going to consider it– the church staff has already been discussing and planning a bunch of ways to address Internet safety in the approaching fall term.

The Moodle sites page lists a variety of churches around the globe already using Moodle– but I haven’t seen anyone who is deliberately setting up a Moodle site at church for purposes of promoting Internet Safety and safe DSN. I think this idea has great potential to further extend the conversations we need to have and keep having, that many like Madeline Slovenz Brownstone, Cool Cat Teacher, Brian Crosby, and others are saying we must have!

Saveyourspace.org (thanks for the link David) has a long list of DSN and web 2.0 sites that will likely be blocked at school if DOPA passes. I agree with Doug Noon that we’ve got to do more than write about this in the edublogosphere. We’ve got to take to the streets.

We have powerful weapons at our disposal via the technologies we now possess, but the most powerful weapon of all is THE SPOKEN WORD. The conversations we have and can have with others have the most potential to actually change people’s perceptions, and therefore change their behavior. F2F conversation and dialog are some of the big answers we need here, and perhaps if many churches around the United States setup Moodle sites for kids, parents, and other adults in their communities– this will be a very tangible way to get more conversations about safe digital social networking and Internet Safety going.

Consider doing more than just writing to your Senators– take action in your local community to setup Moodle sites at schools and even at churches that can be leveraged to promote authentic learning about many things– but in this case, particularly help digital natives and digital immigrants learn alongside about safe DSN and iSafety.

Technorati Tags: dopa, moodle

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