Please note: This article
appeared in the TIE newspaper following an article
by Ivan Rosen. We reprint it here
with permission from the author.
Me thinks Ivan Rosen doth protest too
much (IS heads grapple with anonymous Internet detractors,
TIE February
2008, p 9).
Whilst it is widely recognized
by data gatherers that teachers with an axe to
grind are more
likely to put pen to paper than those who are
content with things at their schools, a sensible
reading of
the reviews on the ISR web site still furnishes
the would be employee (and others) with enough
information
to make more objective enquiries about a school
in which he or she might have an interest.
Rosen seems concerned that a teacher is put off considering
a school because of a plethora of unfavourable reviews.
That, surely, is one of the points of any review -
whether it be for a restaurant, a film or indeed a
poor teacher. Good schools have little to fear from
ISR and its like. After all, are we really interested
in the candidacy of a teacher who bases his or her
decision about overseas teaching entirely on the opinion
of a stranger, especially if that opinion is demonstrably
unbalanced or unsupported by others writing on the
same school?
Rosen’s
is actually one of the more measured critiques of
ISR. Over the past five years I have heard
administrators and school heads questioning the very
right of the site to exist! Yet what ISR provides is
a valued forum for teachers to post anonymous reviews
of schools in which they have had experiences unique
to them. Administrators who question
its right to exist, even if they feel themselves to
be unfairly criticized,
are in effect asserting that their own view of their
school is the only valid one. It
is a view one might expect to read from a totalitarian
government, but
not from an enlightened educator. If this view is widespread
among administrators, it also says much about how far
we have to go in our understanding of user-generated
content on the Web – the Web 2.0 that our students
(and younger teachers) know simply as the cyber world
they grew up using.
As
I glance at today’s newspaper, I see links
to ISR-style reviews pages for local councils, beaches,
real ale pubs, government ombudsmen, farmers’ markets,
the mayor of London and even a church parish (Sunday
Times, March 30th 2008: Section 8, pp12-13). So why
should international schools be exempt? Are we really
so sure that all international schools are beyond criticism?
Perhaps
what is needed is not the closure or compromising
of ISR through lawsuits but
more sites like it. Competition
often forces organizations to raise their game and
ISR’s moderators clearly recognize that they
already fulfill a small but potentially significant
role in the teacher recruitment process – a
role that taken seriously could cause many of
ISR’s detractors to change their minds. With
over 100 million blogs worldwide and increasing numbers
of teachers sending recruiters not paper CVs but interactive
Facebook pages, the likely direction of teacher recruitment
methods is actually one of the clearer aspects of the
future of user-generated web content. ISR can certainly
re-examine its moderation policy, but let us hope that
hysterical calls to close it down meet with stern resistance.
Richard Harrold
Assistant Principal (3-5),
The American School Foundation of Monterrey
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