FALL 2008Drew Smith
Head of School
The summer months are always an opportunity at Friends School to engage with projects that require longer periods of uninterrupted time than we manage to find during the school year. One such project is a website redesign that we hope will render our site easier to navigate, and more able to interact with users who seek specific information about the school. Although this is not our first foray into this kind of project, we do, as a work group, feel more equipped than ever to determine what will and will not work for our web users.
Like most organizations and businesses, now that we have had a website for a number of years, the expectations among many of our constituents for what the site will do have increased. At the heart of those expectations is the idea that communication from the school will improve, through easier access to school personnel via updated web tools, or through better information search on our site, or through new features that create more direct access to our curriculum or programmatic elements. Indeed, we do hope that all of our upgrades do, in fact, improve communication among other things.
We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing to communicate.
—Henry David Thoreau, Civil Disobedience
However, Henry David Thoreau warned me about improved communications when I read Civil Disobedience in high school, and his voice has nagged at me ever since. Will “more and better” necessarily get at the heart of what it means to communicate with our constituents? With our students and families? With each other? I have to admit being encouraged by the sheer connectedness to one another that the web offers; it has most certainly helped make my Civics class more easily global than in past years. But who am I to ignore the caution of Thoreau?
In my own mind, I do not believe that I have fully answered Thoreau in his concern that we ignore true, human communication in favor or technology. But I can find some comfort in the mission of the school. Inspired as it is by George Fox’s call for us to “cheerfully” seek that of God in others, our mission demands of us mindful listening. And I believe an argument can be made that listening carries more weight in communication than speaking.
So when our new website is finally live and online, I feel confident that it will reflect our listening to what the school, and the community it represents, has to tell us. And maybe, if we’ve really done our work, it can represent an exception to Thoreau’s rule that in our haste to construct the latest and greatest website, we have not ignored what we truly need to hear.
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Last modified:
Monday, August 11, 2008 at 10:30 PM
