Educational Secretary Asked Twaddle During Commons Meeting
Educational Secretary Asked Twaddle During Commons Meeting
During a recent meeting of the Commons Educational Committee the educational secretary, Michael Gove, suffered a new fate. He was the first cabinet minister to be quizzed by questions submitted by Twitter. Around 5,000 questions were tweeted some of which were selected by the committee to be presented to Mr Gove. Interestingly some maths games were hidden in the delivery.
A recent review of Twitter revealed that 67 per cent of all Tweets were rubbish. Poorly written, lacking relevance and using substandard grammar they were described by the investigators as Twaddle. Using this as the benchmark somebody had to sift through the 5000 tweets to remove the rubbish. This leaves 1650 questions to be asked of the educational secretary that could be deemed sensible. Further review would have rendered the numbers down to list to the ten questions to be paraded before the educational secretary.
Call me old fashioned but surely the Commons Educational Committee would have the ability to formulate the questions they wanted to ask. If not why were they there? One of the downsides of web 2.0 is the predilection to social networks. This has opened the doors to mass of information from a mass of people; like me. Statistically therefore some of the information and commentary is useful, some just plain garbage. But there is third category; the malicious comment. Panorama, the investigative TV programme shown on BBC on 6th February 2012 highlighted devastating instances of cyber bullying of children by people using Facebook as the vehicle. The reprehensible actions of a body of people regarded as Trolls seem to overload the capacity or inclination of Facebook to deal with reported cyber bullying. The downside of the internet is the freedom of access to anyone who wishes to express a malicious viewpoint. This open access cyber-bullying needs to be rigidly controlled. Maybe the educational secretary’s exposure to the flood of useless questions during his interview with the commons educational committe might have opened his eyes to the problem.
