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.

The changing nature of technology has put unprecedented pressure on parents today. The fact that the Internet is such a huge part of our children’s lives creates tremendous challenges for today’s parents. Our children are so very comfortable with the Internet and seem to assimilate any new wrinkle easily and effortlessly. We adults however struggle with the most basic of technical change, we are far behind your children in technical literacy and falling farther behind by the day.

I have spoken a lot recently about the responsibility we have to learn the technology in order to provide some guidance for our children regarding Internet security and safety.

I attended a cyber-safety conference last week in Edmonton, hosted by the Boy’s and Girl’s Club. We had a great collection of speakers who spoke about a wide variety of topics regarding Internet Safety. Even though I have been concentrating on the subject for quite some time there were several OMG moments as I listened to the different opinions.

This week I began my journey into Facebook, one of several major social networking web sites. Social networking sites are places on the internet where we set up shop for the express purpose of socializing, hanging with our friends.  There are many social networking sites to choose from, MySpace is probably the biggest of them all. So many people are signed up to MySpace, if it were a country it would have the world’s 6^th largest population!