Shocking Online Behaviour.

I used to make an annual pilgrimage to Oxford University’s Shock of the Old conferences because they were without doubt the most informative and intelligent events on educational technology available anywhere. Attending one of these was the perfect antidote to the BETT experience where attendance at seminars always left me feeling like asking for my (company’s) money back.  Whether it was the Futurelab event on research into computer games which hadn’t even appreciated that it might be worth distinguishing between the genders, or the NATE events that always felt like the usually bearded participants had never quite outgrown their student politics. BETT just doesn’t approach anything like an academic conference in tone or material. I can still smile at the memory of travelling home one night from BETT and overhearing one young, female exhibitor say to another, "What does BETT stand for anyway?"

The Shock gathered the very brightest speakers with the very latest ideas and I was never once disappointed. I recall one in which a clinical psychiatrist discussed how the internet altered normal people’s behaviour and seemed to encourage all kinds of anti-social activity which the participants somehow couldn’t perceive was inappropriate. He talked very convincingly about the cloaking effect of the net and how otherwise healthy individuals would resort to behaviours which their more objective selves would find embarrassing or even immoral.

I can only think it is that effect which drives people who must be otherwise sane employees in schools and other institutions, to pen the kind of vitriolic, irrational, invective which seems to proliferate in the comments sections of almost any educational news items posted online.