For the third consecutive year, the Mandel Center for Leadership in the Negev (MCLN) held a study seminar for school principals from Eilat and for the city's education administration, on April 23-24. This study seminar is the joint initiative of Dr. Drori Ganiel (head of the Eilat municipality’s education and social services administration), of the Ministry of Education’s southern region and of MCLN. The seminar is an expression of the close relationship between the leadership of the city of Eilat and the Mandel Center, which began with the Eilat Local Leadership Program that took place at MCLN.
The theme of the seminar this year was transparency in education, and in particular the challenges that educational leaders face with the development of communication platforms in schools and outside them – how online social networks, freedom of information, and cyber bullying and violence affect the parents, the students, the teachers, the local leadership, and the education system as a whole.
Among the speakers at the seminar were:
- Yonatan (Jonny) Zilber, a journalist and expert on digital culture, who spoke about bullying on the web.
- Dr. Smadar Ben Asher, a psychologist and MCLN faculty member, who spoke about privacy as a mechanism for maintaining conflicting social identities. Her main claim is that privacy is a mechanism that enables individuals to move between social identities that aren't consistent one with the other, and that both the individual and the group have an interest in maintaining these separate identities.
- Adv. Jacob Steinberg, director of the Mandel Center for Leadership in the Negev, gave a lecture titled "Transparency and privacy in the education system: a legal perspective", dealing with the tension between the demand for transparency and publicity that has intensified since the internet entered our lives and between the desperate need for privacy.
- Noam Feinholtz, a PhD student in the Noah Mozes Department of Communication and Journalism at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, lectured about cinema as a tool for transmitting educational messages. He also led a practical workshop on transmitting messages in which the participants created a mini lesson-plan about the dangers of the web and cyber bullying, using movie clips.
