To: Dr Janice Khoo
From: Rytha Lew Chiu Min

Sports and Exercise Sciences
Date: 14 Jul 2011
Subject: Banning of social networks

Dear Dr Khoo,

I am Rytha Lew from class E25P,and I have written this letter to address the banning of social networks. As a student of the School of Sports, Health and Leisure(SHL), I myself am affected by this and I feel that it should be not implemented. Why the need to ban social networks such as facebook or twitter, when it has never affected any students in their work or even their attitudes.

To a student’s point of view, if the banning of social networks were to be implemented, will be a drastic move to all of us. We assume that the reasons that caused you to actually initiate the banning of social networks was because that you feel that it is a distraction to the students, which is your most worrying factor. However, other factors considered would also be the shortening of our attention spans, or weakening of our immune system. This however, only happens to students whom are in active, and I believe that very few of these students would be present, especially as we belong to SHL.

The effects of banning social networks would be drastic, as many students do actually rely on these social networks for communication purposes and also a source of primary information. If students were not allowed into their social networks, they would definitely be enraged and affected. Many of them rely on social networks to communicate and to solve their daily problems in their problem based learning(PBL), which we need to do every day. This will cause us to do worse for our daily problems, and it will cause us to get lower grades. This will cause many students to be affected and they would rather stay at home than to come to school, knowing that they will not do well with the limited resources that we are given.

Social networks such as facebook, twitter, and also msn are great resources for students, and even staff, as it is easier to communicate and also to pass out information. It gives them a platform to speak their minds, and also hear and be heard from different people, such as those from other students in other schools. It opens a platform for everyone from every place to do speak up about the problems which we face during our PBL. I am very sure that many students will agree with me on this, because we all do use social networking for daily purposes.

As students, we are just mere voices within the school. What we can do would be to give suggestions on how the administrative board can work on the implementation of banning social networks. What we can suggest would be that you do not ban our usage of social networking, but deny it’s access during the 3^rd meeting, as it is the most important part of the day. Speed and time is of the essence, and I am sure that the facilitators and staff of our school would agree with me as well. It is much easier to ask a friend whom is in another block within seconds on social networking rather than walking all the way and using up our precious time.

I do hope that you do understand our point of view, and that you do get back to me about the banning of social networks. Please do think twice because this is something of very high importance to all students of the school. Please do contact me back at 113848@myrp.edu.sg.

Yours Faithfully,

Rytha Lew Chiu Min(representing class E25P ’11)

113848

Sports and Exercise Sciences

School of Sports, Health and Leisure