SocialTech

Shout out for social networks in education

As some of you know I’m currently working on a project for Childnet International that looks at young people’s use of technology, specifically social network services (SNS).  One of the strands of this work is designed to help educators and carers in making informed decisions about using social network sites. The work will provide an introduction to what are new kinds of sites and practices for many people, outline potential risks and things to keep a look out for, and provide strategies to address these.

The project aims to

•    Look at how children and young people can use the internet safely to change the world for the better;
•    Recognise the huge positive potential young people have and the vital role they have to play in shaping the world; and
•    Celebrates the unprecedented opportunities that web 2.0 affords children and young people - to develop a voice, to collaborate, to organise, to debate, to create, to share, to learn, to develop essential skills, and above all - to participate. 

I’m putting a call out for help with two specific sections of the work:

1.    Examples of SNS currently being used to support education both big and small projects – from setting up your own social network platform to examples of students using flicker to organise a presentation.

2.    Ideas for using SNS to support education – perhaps your school blocks a lot of social network sites but you have some great ideas for how you would like to see students making the most out of these kinds of sites.

You can send your gems over to sns4ed@gmail.com
Please get them to me before the end of August!

Questions (please do add any others to the comments!)

What do you mean by social networking services Josie?

Part of the work of the project will be in addressing the thorny issue of definition. There’s a reasonable indicative list of social network sites over at wikipedia

As well as services like MySpace and Bebo, my definition would include all of those other services that support users to create content (including commentary and criticism) within a networked environment.  & Yes, I am counting virtual worlds and multi-user gaming sites. I’d also throw in social book marking services (like del.icio.us), microblogging services (like Twitter and Jaiku), and of course I’m interested in multimedia sites like Flickr, YouTube and other services that utilise mobile phone functionality.

I’m not focusing on freestanding blogs or wikis – not because these aren’t important, or don't allow people to create networks – but because of the scope of this project and also because I already run the Edublog awards which does a lot to recognise stuff going on using those tools. So if you have a great example of practice, why not enter this years awards?

What age range are you looking at?

I’m focusing on UK school aged children, that is, 11 – 16 year olds. However, if you’ve got a great example of practice with older or younger learners – please do send it in!

Are you only interested in UK based examples?

The work is primarily addressing UK education issues, but I’m happy to take examples and ideas from anywhere!

What will you do with my fantastic contribution?

Some of the entries will be featured on the website. I’ll release all of the ideas and examples as a separate CC licensed download to benefit all of us. I’ll be giving link credit to every contributor who wants it – so please remember to include your name and the site you’d like to link to.

I don’t have any ideas or examples :( What can I do to help?

Let people know about this call! Pass on the word! Huge thanks!

Getting more out of Facebook

OK – I promise to shut up about Facebook for a while after this, I really do belong to many other fine social network sites and following on from Ben and Dave's posts around the upcoming data sharing summit: interoperability and open standards are important kids. Also, the fact that Facebook can do whatever it likes with your data once you’ve put it in there (of course you remembered to read that user agreement, right?) makes it a hard site to recommend for collaborative and developmental work.

But I’ve had a few people ask me about Facebook RSS feeds, and what exactly it is that you can get out. The granularity of Facebook provides a ton of options, but can also make finding your way around permissions sets a bit tricky. It’s worth while spending a bit of time familiarising yourself with who can see what and how – especially as your public updates, posts and notes can theoretically be exported off site and outside the happy protected sphere of your hand picked 'friends'. As usual, it’s just a question of remembering that if it’s not something you’d be happy turning up in a Google search for your name, don’t post it publicly in the first place.

There are 6 feed options altogether: Three types – status updates, notes and posted items, with two choices – all your friends, or an individual (friend or yourself) – if you have permission. Info on all the feed options is here (it doesn’t look like you have to be signed in to read it either)

The feeds at the moment are pretty clunky – for example, if you’d like to export information around a certain topic, you can forget it. Facebook doesn’t use tags to organise data that make it difficult to see how they’re going to refine the export options.

In order to export your status updates to other sites and services, you probably have to check your privacy permissions. Hit privacy, applications and then Notes privacy settings. You’ll need to select “anyone who can see my notes can export them”. Then head back to your profile page, click through to mini-feed see all and select status stories. You should now find a feed option at the bottom of the tab.

Thanks to Michael Pick and Luke Rankin for tips.