A lesson for Education – the Domino’s Pizza Video
If you haven’t heard the story about Domino’s Pizza and YouTube - here it is…two employees of Domino’s Pizza made a video of themselves doing pretty disgusting things (watch the News Report video for the full story) last year and then posted the video to YouTube.
A company’s worst nightmare…
I think the real lesson here is that technology has made the world smaller, more accessible and thrown the floodgates open to information – real, un-edited, and raw.
Whether we like it or not, this is the world of today, tomorrow and the future. There’s a lesson here for all of us – that the ability to publish and access to information is now the order of the day – and if we don’t learn how to deal with this, we’ll be seriously jeopardizing our relevance.
One of the most critical areas that I believe is falling behind here in the US, is education, and in particular, public schools K-12.
Now, let me preface what I’m about to say with the fact that I know and acknowledge there’s a massive funding problem with schools.
But this isn’t about funding, it’s about attitude.
The general attitude in education has held that the teacher is king, the classroom is a kingdom, and that administrators are the support structure to hold it all together. Anything that upsets the status quo is examined by committee, at length, discussed over great periods of time and then some small nugget may be implemented of the original idea – well diluted and only if palatable to all.
The internet is no different. When the internet was first introduced to schools, the first reaction was to shut it down, keep it out, turn it off, control it – and understandably so. As we can see from our Domino’s Pizza story, bad things can happen online. But the real lesson from this debacle is that the Domino’s Pizza executives really had no idea of the power of the internet, of the power of viral videos and information – or how to manage the fallout. They tried to have the videos banned, then created management videos to respond to the crisis, then had the employees arrested. Bad publicity? Absolutely.
The key here is that they were caught blind-sided. If they had kept up with what was really going on in the world, they would have understood that something like this was possible. After all, YouTube and good/bad video has been around for a long time.
So the internet has developed to the point where anyone can now publish anything to the internet. But the internet also gives us access to the world, to a vast world of teaching, learning and knowledge. And over time, many educators have come to realize this and begun to embrace some of the possibilities.
And so it is with Social Media.
In education, the first reaction to this phenomenal “new” method of communication and social networking is to call it “hype”, to shut it out, to ignore it and to hope it will go away. But the lessons learned from technology are that it doesn’t go away – it evolves, it morphs, it gets stronger and the most important of all – our kids are using it, whether we are or not.
The answer isn’t to ignore it. Social Media is having a huge impact, not only on our children and how they communicate, but in the business world we are preparing them for. As educators, we have a responsibility to educate ourselves , find out the pros and cons, see what might work and what doesn’t work, develop policies and implement standards – and utilize the tools that are available to us.
After all, isn’t that what education is all about?
Technology has given us a vast new set of tools to work with. The internet has made the world smaller. And Social Media is revolutionizing how we communicate. Let’s set an example for the next generation – learning is good, it opens the mind – and leads to great things.
– and he said something that has stuck with me for several days. Someone he once knew told him that (and I’m paraphrasing) – “It’s ok if you get pushed down 7 times, just as long as you get up 8 times.” I think this applies in just about any circumstance regarding change, whether it’s personal, or professional. Change is inevitable, and all change is a learning experience.
