I've been in Nashville since Friday where I spoke yesterday and today as part of the Totally Wired Parent/Educator Tour. For any of you who have read the book, you know this is where I grew up and spent my tumultuous teen years. So in a way it's like coming home, except that none of my close friends from high school or my family or anyone I've kept in touch with lives here anymore. Still, the highways, streets and neighborhoods are completely familiar to me. I was driving down 40 West today listening to Def Leppard on the radio really loud and felt like my 16-year-old self was sitting next to me rocking out with the window down, warm humid air blowing through her hair.

Yesterday I gave two presentations at my old high school (University School of Nashville). Speaking to the faculty, many who were my high school teachers, was surreal. We reminisced. One of my favorite English teachers asked me if I remembered her. How could I forget? English was my favorite subject. I remembered her assigning us Calvino's The Baron in the Trees and then having us write our own constitution for living in the treetops. To them it was Stacy Goodstein from the class of 1989 coming back all grown up. They laughed a little too knowingly when I told them that working for myself was a good thing given my past issues with authority. My college counselor (who is still there) gave me the letter of recommendation she wrote to help me get accepted to college. I was impressed -- she somehow managed to turn my B- average into a selling point!

I was informed that the teens at USN (an independent K-12 school) today have all migrated from MySpace to Facebook. This has definitely been the pattern at most of the independent schools I've spoken at -- is it class stratification or the impression that Facebook is somehow more private and less spammy. Probably a little bit of both. I also sensed a feeling of powerlessness from a couple of the parents about really being able to limit their teenagers' use of technology. I heard the "They're just going to do it anyway" defeated response. Maybe they will. But it seems like if parents take that approach on all things teens will "just do anyway" they're missing out on an opportunity to try to engage with them about the choices they are making. I also sensed some parents feeling like everything is changing too fast and that all of this can't be a good thing. Nothing in excess ever turns out to be a good thing, but I think parents have to accept that technology has become fully integrated into this generation's lives in a way that's hard for us to comprehend...and that the skills they've developed intuitively growing up with the internet will ultimately serve them well when they enter the work world. It's that whole digital native/immigrant issue again.

Today I went to the National School Board Association's Technology + Leadership conference where I joined Doug Levin from Cable In The Classroom to lead a roundtable discussion about MySpace and schools. The conference was at Opryland, which used to be an amusement park (the photo in this post is of the Wabash Cannonball coaster), but was torn down and made into a giant mall. If that wasn't depressing enough, most of the people who attended our discussion were in public school districts that pretty much block all social media at school. We have created such a climate of fear and panic around these issues, that schools just don't want to risk it, widening the gap even more between teachers and the teens they are teaching. I loved it when one of the teachers passionately talked about someone posting party details on MySpace causing hundreds of gate crashers to show up and trash the house. He said even though he isn't supposed to be talking about that stuff (teaching teens what's appropriate to post), he is anyway.

I was also inspired by Dave Master, who attended our session and is the director of the ACME Network, an online mentoring program where professional animators mentor students online. The network sounds like a model learning community where teens interact with teachers and industry professionals learning skills that will help them enter the field of animation. With all the hoopla around stranger danger and fear of teens interacting with adults, I think we forget that in the right context, adult interaction is both necessary and meaningful. You can watch a cool video about ACME here.

Finally, Doug showed me the new initiative Cable In The Classroom launched online (and on air) to help raise awareness not only around internet safety issues but ethics and information literacy as well. It's a snazzy Flash site called Point Smart. Click Safe. I might not have designed a site for parents struggling with technology completely in Flash, but that's just me.

The Totally Wired Parent/Educator Tour is being sponsored by Beinggirl.com.