I have had the pleasure of speaking to several educational conferences recently. The challenges our educators face in a highly evolving technical world is daunting.

Not only do today’s educators have the responsibility of providing a basic education to our children, they do so in a world that is rapidly changing. It is sort of like coaching a hockey team in a league where the rules change from game to game. OK, so it is not so different from what NHL coaches face, but teachers are paid a lot less!

Teachers and Parents are being overwhelmed by the changing social structure of youth. Understanding what the changing rules of communications are is critical to helping your kids, or students, make good decisions, and help them when they make bad ones.

Today a kid can have an ongoing dialogue, over several days using every medium except face to face. Text messaging on phones, chat on the computer and email all fold together seamlessly in their minds and lives. We need to understand the subtleties of these tools and realize that conversations are now multithreaded. They take place over time and space and become a living document.

Think back to a conversation you had with someone recently, can you remember it word for word. Of course not, and as we all know we tend to make up parts of the conversation, put words in ours and others mouths. Over time we tend to remember more what we thought the conversation should be about that the actual content covered, especially if there is some sort of disagreement.

Out children’s world is far more literal, they can re-read and re-live a conversation over and over again, because many are completely documented. They only have to scroll up in their chat window to relive the entire conversation. Many kids archive their conversations; re-visit them weeks months or even years later.

In the case where there is hurt, embarrassment or abuse, this means kids can have total recall, and a minor insult can grow into a major one over time. They will have the ability to relive and add far more “between the lines” than was ever intended.

This can only serve to magnify every statement, and add weight to each insult.

The general public is only now beginning to learn the term “cyber-bullying” and understanding of how messaging and chat technology has become a weapon as well as a social tool.

As parents we are turning to the school system to make sense of these new forces in our children’s lives, even though most of the communications take place outside of school time. That is because we all hope someone is minding the store, that someone understands what is going on and is establishing some measure of control, some rules that will make the internet and chat a safer place.

Wrong, educators are struggling just as much as parents. This is not an area where we are able to look to authority to put us on the straight and narrow. We all (adults and caregivers) have a responsibility to get online, and figure it out for ourselves. The only way that is going to happen is if we engage with the technology ourselves. We need to understand it before we can begin to help guide our kids through it.

So take some time this week, set up a that account, play with it a bit, then check out the social networking sites (myspace, facebook, etc) experiment a bit yourself. It is the first steps towards taking ownership of the medium, don’t worry that you are a long way behind, the problem will be around plenty long for you to catch up.