I now see a reason to like twitter

A Daily Mail poll which recorded 93 per cent of respondents as in favour of gypsies ‘jumping the NHS queue’ appears to have been removed from its website.
The vote, which yesterday provoked a Twitter campaign urging people to back the rights of gypsies in access to healthcare, was a huge embarrassment for the right-wing paper.

Anything which embarrasses Richard Littlejohn can't be a bad thing. After all he's been embarrassing the country with his small minded little britain mentality for years.

In his article Richard Littlejohn complained that the ’diversity' industry was taking “sadistic pleasure in persecuting the taxpaying majority”.

Littlejohn complained that “gipsies will be allocated a full 20 minutes with a doctor and allowed to bring their extended family into the waiting room”.
In the article he repeatedly ridiculed travellers who face limited opportunities right across Europe, in work, education and with regard to their health needs.
“One of the most striking aspects of the 'mobile community'” he said “is that they tend not to go anywhere - except flying to Florida on holiday twice a year”.

It pains me to think that there are people out there who agree with this man - but it joys me to see that there are a whole lot more who don't.

I still think microblogging is a flash fad which we won't remember a thing about this time next year - but thanks Twitter.

someone shut him up!

Is there anyone out there who likes hearing their own voice. Stupid question really - I know about fifty teenagers who seem to love nothing more than the sound of their own voices - but you know what I mean. How do you feel when you listen to your own voice mail message, or hear a recording of a speech or reading that you performed? I have a feeling that I am not alone when I say that I hate hearing the nasal mumble that comes from my mouth. It bears no resemblance to the voice in my head. The voice in my head is clear, coherent and free of any accent or blemish. The voice in my head is that of an orator, a confident leader of men... I hate the sound of my voice.

So it is with sad resignation that I report my discovery that it is not just the sound of my spoken voice that makes me cringe - my written voice is just as bad.

On two separate occasions comments I made in this blog have found themselves in the Guardian. Firstly some lines I wrote about Steve Irwin were quoted in their print edition the day after his death back in 2006. Then, a few days ago I became "Fellow 'tweechers' have responded angrily..." and "But one teacher-blogger counters..." in an article written by Jackie Kemp for the education section of their online edition, guardian.co.uk. The article 'Teachers banned from Twitter after indiscreet tweet - Council imposes ban after teacher's comments cause outrage in rural community' was about the teacher being investigated for using twitter during school hours in Scotland. I wrote an entry about it a couple of weeks ago.

As I read my quotes I was struck by a single thought - "I sound like a complete idiot." In my attempt to appear witty and clever I came across as anything but. As I read Kemp's article I felt my face turn red and I had a sudden desire to crawl into a corner and hide.

On the plus side she doesn't identify me (good for two reasons. a. Education chiefs won't track me down and put me in front of Joe McCarthy and the House Committee on Un-Educational Activities. and b. No one would attribute the crazed comments to me... well, until I drew your attention to them anyway) and she corrected my lack of commas - thanks Jackie.

then they came for me; and there was no one left to tweet

I have to thank Mike & Alex for drawing my attention to this article on the BBC website. I hadn't heard about it before and, once you've taken a scan through it you'll understand why I found it a bit unnerving.

To paraphrase viciously, a young teacher in Scotland is being investigated because it was discovered that she had been updating her twitter page with messages, some of which referred to her classes and pupils.

The secondary teacher in Argyll and Bute is understood to have posted up to 38 updates a day on the Twitter site. One said: "Had S3 period 6 for last two years...don't know who least wants to do anything, them or me."

'The fool!' I thought when first I read about her. 'Every teacher knows that you can't publish information about pupils without explicit parental permission. She must be stupid to do that.' Except as I read through some examples of what she had actually written it began to dawn on me that she wasn't actually posting anything more revealing than I have here.

"The thought of having some of my S4 beyond exam time doesn't bear thinking about - for them as well as me I suspect."

In fact I imagine I have occasionally been a lot less anonymous in my musings than she has. She doesn't mention pupils by name, her comments seem fairly generalised and focus more on her than on the pupils she is teaching. So what is her crime? It gets worse for her:

Argyll and Bute Council policy states that teachers may access professional blogs which have educational value but are not allowed to have their own blog. However, the teacher in question has a blog on which she said she had been too busy using Twitter to update it recently.

For those who, like me, have remained immune to the lure of the tweet let me explain. Twitter is just a way to deliver mundane details of your life to many friends at once. Through Twitter you can develop followers who regularly check up on your feed. It's basically a way to make your stalkers feel more involved. I care nothing for Twitter. But blogging...

"Teachers are not allowed to have their own blogs." Um.

So, unlike the teacher in question - I don't tweet (or whatever it is) - I don't really see the appeal. But like the teacher in question, I do have a blog. Like the teacher in question, I occasionally mention anecdotes from my life as a teacher online. Like the teacher in question, I have been known to express dissatisfaction in life. Up to this point I have never been told that I was not allowed to do so. It seems if I were working in Argyll and Bute I would be breaching official guidelines.

And quite honestly that is ridiculous.

Now clearly I haven't read everything that this teacher posted. I'll be first in line to point and make disapproving facial expressions at her if she has been commenting on identifiable pupils. I will shake my head slowly if it turns out she has been bringing her school and its good name into disrepute. But if it's simply the case that she has been uploading her thoughts and feelings in a pointless, if slightly narcissistic webby kind of a way then what is she doing that it so different from all the twitter users in other professions? Exactly how has what she was doing impacted on the educational wellbeing of pupils in the Argyll area? How was it having any impact on anything until someone thought it necessary to bring it to the attention of the press? Absolutely ridiculous.

But it has had an impact on me. And that might be a good thing. It's been a wake up call about the comments I make. I need to take a lot more care when talking about school. I need to put more effort into making my comments more general and less personalised. I need to increase anonymity on many levels.
This annoys me.
When you work in education you soon find that your life revolves around a constrictive regime. You become bound up in targets and paperwork to the point that sometimes you need to poke a hole through which to breathe. We spend so long living by someone's rules that the idea of finding a place of our own where we can express our own expressions, where we can breathe in air that hasn't been passed through a committee process and risk assessment survey first.

Am I worried about what is happening to that teacher in Argyll? Yes. I really am. I would hate to think that other education authorities would feel the need to follow suit. If the situation arose where I was told that I shouldn't keep a blog then TOASNT would be gone quicker than... well, quicker than it went when I accidentally hit the delete button last year. How I hope it doesn't come to that. But from now on, in any effort to avoid names I will no longer mention Dave - he will now be 'the Welsh Castle Sketcher', Mike and Alex will become 'London's Bushmills Residents', Kylie - you are now 'the Sporadic Antipodean', Karen 'Florida's vg Bridget Jones', and Brazen Teacher (as if that isn't anonymous enough) will henceforth become 'Another Teacher at risk of being put under investigation because it seems we can't be trusted to update blogs without passing out sensitive information and ruining the lives of all those around us.'

Council officials were investigating whether she had put sensitive information on public display and whether it was during work hours.

"Council policy states that teachers may access professional blogs which have educational value but are not allowed to have their own blog." Wouldn't you love to live in a place where public workers aren't allowed to express personal opinion? You now have the choice of China or Argyll it seems.