I’ll be in an interesting position this year at my school, both personally and for social media planning. After having served as an Associate Principal this past year as part of the Archdiocese of Boston Catholic Schools Office/Catholic Schools Foundation Apprentice Principal Leadership Program (that’s a mouthful), and applying to/interviewing at several other schools for principal jobs, I’ll be staying at my school in a newly created role, name to-be-determined. Over the past year, my school has worked to brainstorm ways in which we can re-brand and set ourselves apart from our competitors. After many meetings with our administrative committee and Board, we have decided to move forward with the concept of experiential learning as our new identity, which will enhance the good things we are already doing as a school while taking strategic advantage of our location (Cambridge, MA) and business/higher education connections. I will be the coordinator of these changes, and so while I won’t be the primary person responsible for social media at our school, I will be working with our staff to engage our constituents and sell our “new” identity.

As I discussed in my social media marketing plan a few weeks ago, a key component of my strategy to improve our social media use will be to form a committee to discuss our goals and challenges. We do have a full-time Communications and Events Director already, who along with a few other staff members such as our Chief Advancement Officer and Admissions Director manages our social media accounts and our marketing strategy more broadly. In my new role, I will be working closely with her and them to incorporate my portion of school administration into our overall vision. Part of my implementation plan will be for us three (plus maybe our Headmaster) to meet as a social media/marketing sub-committee. In preparation for the upcoming school year, I hope to meet with this group starting in August, and lay out a timeline for our objectives to showcase our school’s shift to a different educational model. These will include 1) producing content that reflects these changes, including high-quality videos, graphics w/ program information and statistics, photos of our students and alumni, and appeals to donors; 2) plans for posting to our different accounts (Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter being the big 3); 3) figuring out a good balance of highlighting our current school along with plugging our new programs; and 4) figuring out how best to communicate with potential students and their families, in order to driven increased applications and enrollment. This sub-committee will also be responsible for creating marketing materials that go out as part of our fall admissions cycle, which is key as we hope to roll out our first programmatic changes in 2020-21.

In addition to this working group sub-committee, I also want to form a larger general committee that will bring in a number of different voices from across the school. This will include the sub-committee members along with school admin (Principal, Guidance Director, etc.), key teacher leaders, our International Program Director, our Campus Minister, our Athletic Director, and possibly parents, students, and alumni where appropriate. I envision this committee as a place to brainstorm, gather multiple perspectives (both positive and critical), and think big-picture. It can also act as a check on my/the sub-committee’s work, to ensure that what we’re doing is on track. I hope to convene this larger group in the early fall (10/15 at the latest — beginning of school can be a bit crazy). I want to send out a series of surveys to our constituents throughout the year around our school changes, and this committee would be great to review the data. I also believe that this group, as it will include a cross-section of every facet of the school, can be helpful in shifting our mindset around social media and digital technology use within the school. We will need the entire community to embrace these changes and work to support them in each member’s own way — teachers can showcase their classrooms and lessons, administrators can provide resources for faculty and staff to grow in their tech skills and comfort level, guidance can work with me to identify personalized learning software and higher ed opportunities — so that we can relay our new curriculum and identity to our constituents in a meaningful way.

I’ll certainly be leaning heavily on our Communications Director this year (sorry Tori!), but I’m sure that what I’ve learned throughout the course along with all resources (here’s a succinct favorite I’ve come across) we’ve shared will come in handy as we build this new part of our school.

Throughout this course, we have worked to take stock of the digital technology world we currently inhabit and how we may re-envision our schools in light of those innovations. At the same time, we’ve also been exploring and challenged with future concepts of digital tech — where are trends going, what will day-to-day life look like in x number of years, etc. Kevin Kelly, in his book The Inevitable (2016) as well as in his TNW Conference talk “The Emerging V-Cloud,” makes the case for a not-too-distant transformed world in which most objects and all humans are connected together in a super-web he dubs “the Mesh.” While I personally think it may take us a while to get there, I do agree that some of aspects of it will come soon, or already exist right now. For example, we are all constantly connected by devices — computers, laptops, smart TVs, smartphones, wearables, cars — and it’s easy to see a system in which all of these devices communicate and share data seamlessly with one another. Also, the notion of a hive-mind type of super-intelligence, constructed from the enormous amount of data and interactions occurring via the internet, doesn’t seem far-fetched either. One facet I do see quickly emerging as a regular part of our lives is the integration of digital displays and touchscreens. Even though it reminds me of the movie Minority Report, the world depicted in the Corning video A Day Made of Glass seems more and more inevitable, as digital displays can enhance almost any traditional technology or appliance by making them “smarter.” I think the expense of these technologies will keep them luxuries for a long time, and voice commands will have a greater role than a glass company advertisement would lead you to believe, but a world in which controls, books, signs, and customer service are replaced/enhanced by touchscreens does not seem like science fiction anymore.

If my chief criticism of Kelly’s view is that his timeline is too aggressive, my take on schools is even more so: I feel that the implementation of technological changes in schools will be glacial by comparison, though they will indeed have a profound impact. I agree with his idea that the “Mesh” is just beginning to emerge, and is already being seen in schools: “[i]n this new regime, old cultural forces, such as centralized authority and uniformity, diminish while new cultural forces, such as…sharing, accessing, [and] tracking come to dominate our institutions…. Sharing, though excessive to some now, is just beginning. The switch from ownership to access has barely begun” (Kelly, 2016, p.295). Over the past several years, learning has begun to reside more and more on the internet, with LMSs like Google Classroom, various edtech apps, and old-school research deep in the stacks replaced by online databases and Googling. Online education has taken off as well, providing an enriching, personalized experience for students and allowing schools to expand their offerings at low-costs. However, the switch from traditional classrooms to 1-to-1 device programs and online learning is one thing — transforming schools with re-imagined learning spaces and integrated digital technology is another. Perhaps one day we will reach a point in which digital edtech, such as interactive classroom touchscreens and VR headsets/software, will become the norm and affordable, but we are not at that point right now, particularly within Catholic schools, in which budgets are usually already maxed out. At my school, we are beginning to implement changes funded by our current capital campaign — our first project this summer is a TEAL classroom, followed over the next two years by makeovers to every classroom, including movable Cleartouch boards to replace our aging SmartBoards. Much of the work, though, does not have anything to do with technology. As noted in the NMC/COSN 2017 Horizon Report, the learning surrounding these forward-looking changes will need to be “authentic,” project- and inquiry-based learning, and teachers will have to receive substantial professional development as they transition from traditional pedagogical methods to becoming effective facilitators of student-centered classrooms.

This week, I chose to look at intellectual property and copyright issues – probably not the most exciting ethical issue, but one I found interesting based on our discussions around how the internet is rapidly changing our world. In his book The Inevitable, Kevin Kelly presents his understanding of these changes, and describes several forces that are creating them. Throughout most of Kelly’s forces, one of his underlying concepts is the exponential increase in the sharing of data and information on a scale unfathomable just 20 or 30 years ago. He writes: “as far as I can tell, the impossible things happening now are in every case due to the emergence of a new level of organization that did not exist before. These incredible eruptions are the result of large-scale collaboration, and massive real-time social interacting, which in turn are enabled by omnipresent instant connection between billions of people at a planetary scale” (Kelly, 2016, p.273). This is the world our students live in, and as the oldest of them next school year will have been born in 2002, it is the only world they have ever known. The ubiquitous copying and sharing of data and information will continue to be transformational for us as humans, but raises many questions when it comes to intellectual property and copyrights, digital ethics, and education.

With this idea of sharing of information in mind, I decided to review a court case that had a role in creating the internet we experience today. Religious Technology Center v. Netcom (1995) was a case that pitted the Church of Scientology against Netcom, an internet service provider that hosted internet data on its servers. A user named Dennis Erlich had posted hyperlinks on Usenet newsgroup (kind of like an early message board) to writings by L. Ron Hubbard that were not meant for public release and were only available to high-level members of the church. However, in this lawsuit, the church sued the company, Netcom, saying that they should have know that Erlich was linking to copyrighted material, and therefore were guilty in not taking it down. In his ruling, the judge concluded that this was an unreasonable expectation in both that 1) Netcom should not have to assume that its users were illegally sharing copyrighted information and 2) Netcom’s servers were merely acting as a “conduit” for information to flow, and to screen all hosted information would be an onerous task. In an analysis of the case a year later, Eugene Burcher and Anna Hughes noted that “[t]he preliminary injunction request was also overly broad, having a potentially chilling effect on free speech on…Netcom’s…systems,” assuming that a victory for the church would have required ISPs to screen all content and make a judgement on whether content was within fair use or not. They also recognized the significance of the case: “[b]ecause this is a case of first impression of ISP liability for copyright infringement by one of its subscribers, it will set the standard for the near future on how ISP’s operate; possibly the entire Internet…. [T]he standards set by this opinion will establish the framework for future actions of copyright infringement on the Internet.” In essence, this case freed internet users to share information online however they wanted, with no limits imposed by the ISPs where the information was stored. However, it not mean that sharing of information would not have consequences for individuals, only that they were free to do it.

I very much agree with the court’s decision, as I feel like internet is best left as a democratized system not overseen by central authority or authorities (in this case, the ISPs being required to control information). But just as the analysis I referred to suggests, this does not mean I feel the internet should be the wild west with no rules at all. As Kelly noted in his book, “how we handle rewards for innovation, intellectual property rights and responsibilities, ownership of and access to the copies [of data and information] makes a huge difference to society’s prosperity and happiness. Ubiquitous copying is inevitable, but we have significant choices about its character” (Kelly, 2016, p.256). We collectively need to decide what degree of access is allowable and tenable. Religious Technology Center v. Netcom (1995) did not solve all issues of internet copyright infridgement — since then, there have been debates about peer-to-peer file sharing, DMCA notice scare tactics, and the embedding of social media, to name a few. In schools, this has implications for how we share information, such as on social media, but also on how we teach and model internet use to students. The concepts of not stealing work from content creators (even though Google, etc. make it very easy and tempting) and creating accurate, well-researched work are just as much about digital ethics are they are about providing clear guidelines and lessons to students. Our job should be to train students in digital citizenship while also adjusting to the constantly changing digital ethics that govern the internet and social media.

Burcher, Eugene A. & Anna M. Hughes. (1996). Casenote, Religious Tech. Ctr. v. Netcome On-Line Communications, Inc.: Internet Service Providers: The Knowledge Standard for Contributory Copyright Infringement and The Fair Use Defense. Retrieved from http://www.richmond.edu/jolt/v3i1/burhugh.html.

Ginsburg, Jane. (2006). Secondary Liability for Copyright Infringement in the U.S.: Anticipating the Aprés-Grokster. Columbia Law School. Retrieved from https://web.archive.org/web/20060914165411/http://www.law.columbia.edu/law_school/communications/reports/winter06/facforum1.

Kelly, Kevin. (2016). The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future.

Manishin, Glenn. (2019). How Social Media Continues to Disrupt Internet Copyright Law. Disruptive Competitive Project. Retrieved from http://www.project-disco.org/intellectual-property/011819-how-social-media-continues-to-disrupt-internet-copyright-law/#.XQw_iIhKjIU.

National Public Radio. (n.d.). NPR Ethics Handbook: Accuracy. Retrieved from https://www.npr.org/about-npr/688139552/accuracy#usinginformationfromnonnprsources.

Sieminski, Paul. (2014). Corporations Abusing Copyright Laws Are Ruining the Web for Everyone. Wired. Retrieved from https://www.wired.com/2014/01/internet-companies-care-fair-use/.

Stroud, Matt. (2014). These Six Lawsuits Shaped the Internet. The Verge. Retrieved from https://www.theverge.com/2014/8/19/6044679/the-six-lawsuits-that-shaped-the-internet.

Vinjamuri, David. (2011). Ethics and the Five Deadly Sins of Social Media. Forbes. Retrieved from https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidvinjamuri/2011/11/03/ethics-and-the-5-deadly-sins-of-social-media/#71b2c18b3e1f.

Whyte, Ronald M. (1995). Religious Technology Center v. Netcom On-line Communication Services, Inc., 907 F Supp. 1361 (N.D. Cal 1995). Retrieved from https://www.law.cornell.edu/copyright/cases/907_FSupp_1361.htm.

Over the past several years, my school MHS has done an excellent in building up its advancement and communications staff, as well as envisioning overarching communications goals through its strategic plan that was published in 2016. Increased fundraising, deeper alumni engagement, more effective branding, and a burgeoning capital campaign are among the successes of these changes. Prior to this shift, development efforts were inconsistent, and communication both internal and external was split among various staff members, with little coordination or long-range planning. Even though MHS has been successful as a school for all of these years, we are starting to see signs that we need to be more aggressive as well as creative in our marketing strategies in terms of admissions, which includes rethinking advancement and communications efforts. In particular, the school needs to craft a comprehensive social media marketing plan which would work to enhance the presence and profile of the school to its various constituents.

Our school’s strategic plan, in Operational Vitality Vision Statement #5, highlights communication as a key component. The document calls for a communications plan, the creation of a Standards of Practice guide, and gives the mandate of pursuing innovate communications methods. However, it does not prescribe a plan around social media specifically, which means that, to me, step one towards a social media marketing plan needs to be crafting a plan that fits into the vision statement from above. Much like we have done with other portions of the strategic plan, I would like to bring together key people over summer 2019 as a working group to lay out the plan and decide specific action steps. This group would require certain staff members who would later be in charge of implementation: our Communications & Events Director, Chief Advancement Officer, Admissions Director, and Headmaster (along with myself, name of role TBD). Others, such as our Principal, Vice Principal, Athletic Director, International Program Director, Chief Business Officer, Director of Guidance, and Campus Minister, would be invited to participate, but not required. In addition, other constituent groups will be engaged through focus groups and/or surveys after a general framework is developed, including faculty and staff, the Board, students, parents, coaches, and alumni. As Brent Barnhart said in his article How to Build Your Social Media Marketing Strategy for 2019, “social media planning is a marathon, not a sprint” — if we want to move away from our disjointed and reactive social media usage of the past, we need to have a solid strategic foundation that encompasses the ideas and buy-in of our community.

Once this strategic vision/action step document is complete, I will work with my key group, especially our Communications & Events Director, to lay out a timeline for goals over the 2019-20 school year and beyond. I will also want to establish parameters for what we will consider success for each goal. In the spirit of Finalsite’s Creating Your School’s Social Media Plan: A 10 Step Guide along with its Goal Setting Worksheet, I will want to focus on three specific social media goals — the strategic plan will be more comprehensive, but I want our first year goals to be measurable and attainable. Currently in my head, those goals should increasing be admissions applicants, better engaging current constituents (students, parents, etc.), and increasing alumni engagement and online giving. I also have a harder to measure goal of creating a mindset shift within the school — that we should be more innovative in our approach to communications, and as Successful Catholic School Marketing noted, not throw up our hands after one failure and revert to our old ways. Digital technology and social media rapidly evolve, and we need to try to stay on top of it.

Finalsite’s guide and worksheet (linked above) also provide a great tip of breaking action steps down into tactics. For my school, most of these specifics will be decided later on, as we collaboratively lay out our ideas (also, our Communications & Events Director is very social media savvy, and could easily have her own internal plan already laid out, which we can incorporate into the larger strategic document). Examples of tactics I would like to see would be frequency of postings (perhaps 1-2 per day per website) and the proactive creation of content. Brent Barnhart’s tip #5 (linked above) is to create and curate social media content, a great tactic that we currently take for granted. While we do a good job of remixing content we already have for social media consumption (Kelly, 2016), we do not allocate resources towards creating new content just for our social media platforms. If, as Kelly states, interaction is encouraged in our tech-immersed world by providing content and postings for people to engage, we need to ensure that we provide content that constituents want and will benefit from. A final tactic I will include in the plan will be designing our platforms to be user-friendly. Specifically, as Howard Stribbell from Edutopia lays out, that means mindfully designing our website and our Constant Contact e-blasts to be mobile friendly, to match our branding and style, and to have current, engaging content.

Social media use at my school has been, I imagine, a similar endeavor to what has taken place at other Catholic schools — decentralized and inconsistent, until recently. To the best of my knowledge, my school has owned and operated social media accounts for each of the major websites more or less since their inception/rise in popularity. When I arrived at my school in 2011, we had a Facebook page and used Twitter, and possibly used other tools but sparingly. Each of these accounts was handled by a different person, or persons, and there was no consistency in terms of content, postings, or narrative. Over the past five years, my school has slowly worked (not always with a defined strategy, but because of well-meaning individuals) to establish our accounts, make our online branding consistent across each of them, put in place an AUP (Acceptable Use Policy) for digital technology in the school, and just generally be better about managing our online presence. Our first Chief Advancement Officer (hired in 2015) oversaw these efforts, as did our first Communications Director (hired in 2017) as well as our two most recent Admissions Directors. Today, guided by our strategic plan, we have consistent, quality social media use, utilizing Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, Snapchat, and Constant Contact.

While my school does have a social media strategy laid out as part of our comprehensive strategic plan, specific visions and actions steps for how to achieve that plan have really only been considered starting with our current Communications Director, who was hired this past fall. She is well-versed in social media use and design, and has worked to not only to filter our social media output by gatekeeping and curating (K. Kelly, 2016), but also to study the impact of that work and analyze her strategies based on data (D. Kelly, 2016). This combination of skill, savvy, and a data-driven intellectual approach has thoroughly elevated our social media presence. As was noted in the paper Social Media Marketing in Education, “creating and managing an effective strategy for building community and engaging with customers takes some time, research, and planning—but it is well worth the effort.” Because of this switch in mindset of being reactive (posting only immediate information or haphazardly sharing content from sporting events) to proactively planning use of our accounts, along with the allocation of resources to fund positions dedicated to advancement and communications, we have been successful in what almost amounts to a rebranding of the school.

In terms of developing a social media strategy and implementing best practices, one colleagues’ link to Creating Your School’s Social Media Plan: A 10 Step Guide stuck out. As I noted on Twitter, the article highlighted the concept of proactive thinking and planning, something that doesn’t happen in schools as much as it should. Also on Twitter, I also noted the best practices of my alma mater Holy Cross. Their social media design and engagement on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram is incredibly consistent, and keeps alumni such as myself greatly connected to the school (to the tune of a top 10% giving rate in the nation). Lastly, a thought from the article Successful Catholic School Marketing seemed particularly pertinent to a consideration of best practices in social media marketing. For all of the technological know-how and meticulous planning we can utilize, perhaps the most important component is the personal touch — we are working with real people and students, and our communications need to reflect that.

Digital technology and the internet have quickly transformed the ways in which people communicate and work together. The rate of change over the past 30 years almost seems unbelievable. Computers as workstations, the internet as a novelty, instant messaging, MySpace and Facebook, smart phones, cloud computing — the pace of new innovations almost makes it impossible to envision the tools and realities to come in the near future. With children and teenagers some of earliest adopters of each new platform and tech tool, these shifts have profound implications for education. To an extent, most schools have pushed back on this innovation, either clinging to traditional methods of instruction or being fearful of allowing increased connectivity into the classroom. However, it is clear that this digital world is here to stay, and school leadership must embrace, in order to stay relevant as well as to provide students with the education they’ll need in responsible and critical digital citizenship.

In his video The Power of the Internet, David Weinberger lays out how notions of the future have changed, thanks to the internet. He specifically outlines two ideas: that throughout human history, people have tried to anticipate the needs of future people with their inventions, hoping to have those inventions be useful for as long as possible. The other concept is that possibilities seem endless, until the future gets closer and closer to the present, at which point less possibilities seem like they could be realities. According to Weinberger, by housing an infinite amount of data, the internet has broken these previous tenets down. Now, by publishing and storing all data, but then allowing individuals to filter it later to their specifications through searches and algorithms, that anticipation no longer needs to occur. And all possibilities remain viable possibilities — there is no longer any limit in terms of predicting or anticipating the future.

In organizations, this type of informational disruption has led to what Jon Husband calls the Wirearchy. Instead of a traditional top-down power structure, the wirearchy has connections running between peers at work, within groups, and also connecting to outside sources. Commands no longer need to be sent down from the top leadership, as much of the work flow can happen on its own, without direct supervision. It’s interesting to consider this concept within schools, because it seems like the truth is somewhere in between the two extremes. Yes, most schools have a principal and/or head of school, from whom most directives originate. But there are many other relationships and work flows that exist within schools, especially as learning models transition from predominately lecture-based to active/inquiry-based learning. There are faculty collaborating within their departments, staff split into departments, professional learning communities, peer-to-peer collaboration and observation, direct communication between parents and students, etc.

In some ways, the blending of digital technology into a school structure makes sense, as much of the work flow is decentralized, and can occur utilizing apps and social media, with data shared through the cloud. At my school, most constituents (and certainly all students) have embraced Kelly’s The Inevitable principles of flowing (constant, on-demand flow and use of information), screening (using their multiple devices most of the school day), and accessing (utilizing tools such as Google Classroom, Google Docs, Plus Portals, YouTube, and Quizlet, to name a few. Gartner’s Six Barriers and Schawbel’s 10 Workplace Trends to me ring true in terms of what is actually happening in schools as digital technology and the web are further embraced. Many people within schools are going to resist these rapid changes, but slowly building an accepting culture by promoting initially with early adopters is critical. And rather than removing all staff who don’t comply and bringing in all young, tech-savvy teachers, schools (including mine) are hoping to “upskill and retrain workers”, so that veteran teachers are being given the professional development they need, while retaining continuity and institutional knowledge within the school community.

Though these changes can be daunting for educators, particularly those who spent decades of their career relying on books, chalkboard, and perhaps the occasional transparency projector. While there are calls to re-evaluate the high levels of screen time that students get, in the name of promoting one-to-one real life interaction, many education publications have determined that integrating technology and the internet into the school day is a best practice, provided that teachers have planned it out fully, including behavioral expectations. TechEdvocate says that students will encounter more real-world situations, with the technological know-how navigate those lessons. OECD, in their essay Implications of Digital Technology for Education Policy and Practice, lay out the reasoning for “empowering young people to become full participants in today’s digital space,” in order to build foundational digital skills and to enhance their notion of responsible digital citizenship. However, Doug Johnson in his article Power Up! Helping to Close the Digital Divide, raises concerns about equity in access for students — it can be easy to forget that many students cannot afford to keep up with technology requirements, if they own a device at all. To this end, he pushes to close the “digital divide” by putting in place policies at schools that ensure that all students, regardless of need, will have access to the technology they need to thrive.

Each day, teachers and administrators in every school utilize many digital tools and social media applications. Some are used for official school business, while others are used for classroom teaching. For the majority of these tools, schools use them just as the general public would. Tweets provide quick, immediate information and alerts. Facebook brings groups constituents together and highlights events. Instagram captures snapshot moments of school life. But one tool lags behind in educational use. YouTube is perhaps the most indicative digital tool of a generational divide in social media usage. It is wildly popular with teens, yet its potential is barely tapped into for schools. Though it functions differently than many other social media tools, and has its challenges, YouTube offers a great deal of possibility in connecting schools and delivering content to their various constituents.

YouTube has been around since 2005. During the past 15 years, its popularity has grown exponentially, even though it has the same general purpose of a being a video hosting website. Its platform has shifted over time, with content creator channels and on-demand programming now a major part of YouTube’s draw. Many people young and old watch videos on YouTube on a regular basis. But the usage rate for younger people, especially teens, is staggering. According to Education Week’s article Why Generation Z Learners Prefer YouTube Lessons Over Printed Books, a “Pew Research Center survey in September 2018 found that 85 percent of US teenagers use YouTube,” nearly a third “use the video-sharing platform more often than other social media platforms,” and almost half “spend three or more hours a day on YouTube.” Much like Google, Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, YouTube has become a go-to for a substantial part of the population, and in particular the part of the population that is going to school, making it a key tech tool in education that is often underutilized.

My school could certainly benefit from using YouTube in several areas. In the classroom, many teachers identify quality videos to include in their lessons, and may regularly include channels such as Crash Course, Khan Academy, and TED Talks in their planning. However, as a school we do not encourage or provide support for the use of any specific digital learning tools. But we should! As The Tech Edvocate points out, the combination of YouTube and a learning device or phone is like having “a classroom in your pocket…. The ease of access and flexibility of YouTube is allowing amateur and professional content developers to develop instructional content to a global audience on almost any conceivable topic.” According to Edutopia, YouTube is also a great way to “elevate and energize instruction” as a “powerful tool for teaching and learning” alike.

My school would also benefit from using YouTube in its marketing, admissions, and advancement outreach. Currently, our barely visited channel hosting a meager few videos, much of it content that was produced over the course of several years. but to fully tap into its potential, according to Social Media (2016) author David Kelly, we need to build our brand by being active, customizing our channel, thinking about our content titles, and perhaps most importantly engaging with our audience. YouTube could potentially connect us with eighth graders trying to decide on where to go to high school, donors who are unsure of their commitment, and current constituents who enjoy consistent interaction with their school.

Of course, with any online digital tool, there are potential downsides. YouTube is notorious for being a site full of inaccurate and inappropriate material, difficult to sift through and hard to take seriously. This perception keeps administrators and teachers from fully trusting it, even though students “YouTube” things just as others would “Google” them. It is also something that would have to be heavily managed – as noted above, good YouTube practices require being active and posting a lot of new, varied content that fits the school’s customized branding. And along with all of that content comes the bane of the internet, comment sections, which would need to be monitored and policed.

YouTube fits well into the vision of Kevin Kelly in his book The Inevitable (2016). During the first three chapters, Kelly makes a strong case that the internet has transformed drastically in nature from its early days of static web pages that you visited for information to a dynamic experience in which users engage with one another. He says that by 2050, “the web will more and more resemble a presence you relate to rather than a place – the famous cyberspace of the 1980s – that you journey to” (Kelly, p.25) YouTube fits this ongoing evolution and “fluidity” well. While its interface has remained relatively similar, its content is constantly and rapidly shaped and reshaped by countless interactions happening every day. For schools, this means that YouTube can be conversational with constituents, providing constant interaction around leadership communications, marketing, admissions, teaching, athletics, and more.

Both Thomas Friedman in The World Is Flat and Robert Florida in The World Is Spiky present compelling arguments about the nature of globalization and the world’s economy during the 21st century. While Friedman’s ideas — that various “flatteners” have led to a level playing field for populations and companies around the globe — make sense in a hypothetical way, it is Florida who captures the reality of our global society. The consolidation of people, talent, and resources into a limited number of metropolises has led to a striking divide of the world’s population into groups of haves and have-nots that only seems to become more stratified with each passing day.

Florida’s concept of “spikyness” is a nod to the use of world maps that depict the densities of various attributes of our world population and economy. The maps that he chooses to include — population; peaks, hills, and valleys; light emissions; patents; and scientific citations — all create clear visualizations of the locations of these resources and the absolute lack of them in most areas. In thinking about our current world, Florida’s spikyness holds up. Elite global cities such as Tokyo, London, Hong Kong, and New York drive much of the world’s economy and innovation, as do relatively smaller cities such as Los Angeles, Seoul, and Berlin. This isn’t to say that the population outside of these places isn’t important or impactful, as many areas produce and consume goods, and contribute greatly to the overall economy. But even in just the United States, this consolidation of wealth, education, and power into specific urban areas is clear, and has far reaching consequences for populations who live outside of those bubbles.

The analysis done by Friedman is misguided because it assumes that a democratization of resources through his flatteners mean that all populations have equal access and ability to utilize them. For example, the internet has clearly allowed for an explosion in the amount of knowledge that is available to the entire population, but what good is this knowledge if you do not have the capital or creative capacity to act upon it? This does mean that each of his ideas is incorrect. His 4th flattener is uploading, which has led to a proliferation of communications that are no longer controlled by just large companies or governments. In this way, the world has become flat, and in some ways has also shrunk as a result of our increased digital connections. Florida also makes a key point about Friedman’s work, that flatness has meant that places outside of the peaks can leverage their power to become more developed societies. Many of these places have filled the needs of human services, manufacturing, and farming. However, this also means that those hills and valleys are somewhat at the mercy of the peaks, as the global cities’ needs and demands will determine what they require from their lessen counterparts.

The TED Talk by Nick Bostrom, What Happens When Our Computers Get Smarter Than We Are?, lays out a chilling vision of our not-too-distant future, in which human’s have invented their last invention — supersmart artificial intelligence — and are no longer the premier beings on the planet. Apocalyptic scenarios aside, he lays out a strong argument for mindfully going about the production of AI by including our human values as part of their programming. To him, it’s the only way that AI would not just simply look for the most efficient ways of doing things — collateral (aka human) damage notwithstanding. To a degree, his concept of the eventual dominance of AI mirrors the relationship that our elite global centers have with the rest of the planet. Just like the AI that would be chiefly concerned with performing efficiently, our peak cities hoard resources, wealth, and political capital at the expense of the other parts of the world. They have increasingly become consolidated machines, with perhaps the only solution being bringing in a sense of flatness through more mindful governing values.

Can’t wait to get started and learn from everyone about technology and communication in their schools!