SocialTech

Purpos/ed Summit for Instigators

 

Josie Fraser introduces #Purposedpsi

Video: Leon Cych Sound: Steve Boneham

Watch more videos from the day here.

I spent Saturday 30 April in Sheffield, at the Purpos/ed Summit for Investigators, along with 50 delegates from across the UK who had given up their Saturday to take part in a day of discussion and action planning around Purpos/ed.

Huge thanks to Doug Belshaw and Andrew Stuart for organising the whole thing, to Steve Boneham, Mario and Leon Cych for technical support, broadcasting and documenting the day, to Keri Facer for her excellent video contribution, & Fred Garnett for talking about not one but three c-words: community, co-production and citizenship. & not forgetting  everyone who volunteered and ended up speaking in the 3x3 slots. There were also excellent & heated discussion and barcamp sessions.

I was pleased to be asked to help out by chairing the day, and I also had the opportunity to talk about some of my current work and interests, reflecting on some of the contributions to the 500 words campaigne that kick started the process. I only had 10 minutes, but I seem to have managed to get a lot of ums in :) Refs for my talk:

 
Martin Weller - Space - The purpose of education

David White - Education should make us anxious

Graham Attwell - The practice of freedom

Josie Fraser - Purpos/ed

 

 

Purpos/ed

  

The purpose of education is to enable people to understand, navigate, contribute to, challenge and change the world.


To many children and young people, adults seem distinguishable by their finishedness, their completeness. We have ‘grown up’. We have become inflexible, we have ceased to play, to imagine; our appetite for adventure has been diminished, not increased, by our understanding of the world; our wild and even gentle ambitions have been curtailed by the demands of making a living, of ‘the real world’. Instead of growing in confidence and maturity enough to hazard risk, to be wrong, to change our minds, the adult world seems very often to promote an infantile belief in the benefits and possibility of absolute certainty, mastery, fixedness. The assumption of due respect for this completedness is easy to recognise as often framing and establishing authority and providing boundaries within formal education: I am the one who knows, and you are the one who is in the process of knowing, of becoming the possessor of knowledge, of completion.

For me then, a fundamental purpose of education should be to acknowledge the inevitability of change, to celebrate the value of life as a thing in process, and to promote an awareness of other possibilities, other ways of doing things - of discoveries yet to be made and solutions yet to be invented. Change is, of course, not always positive. It can be unwelcome and damaging. It can be extremely difficult to come to terms with. Even positive changes - for example, changes in how people deal with and think about terrible things that have affected them, while they might free us up and make us happier people, or at least allow us to live our lives less painfully, are extremely difficult to go though. But the alternatives to change, if there are any, are entropy, denial and death.

Education should critically ensure children, young people and adults are equipped to be unsettled, to be confronted by difference, to be changed, and to effect change. Education is a conduit to different cultures, different places, different times - to different ways of thinking about things and doing things. Education provides us with an introduction to things unimagined and unencountered. It should provide the critical challenge to examine our beliefs, interpretations and horizons, the ability to reexamining ourselves in new contexts, to develop new interests, to review the ways in which we understand ourselves and our place in the world. The purpose of education should be to expand expectations, not to confine them - to support our learners in understanding the impact they can and do have on their world. We cannot expect education built upon, and educators who model, a fixation with certainty and inflexibility to meet the urgent and ongoing needs of pressing social, economic and political change.

 

e-Safety: The Critical Agenda

I'm delighted to be curating the Digital Safety strand at Learning Without Frontiers, an international festival of learning and technology, taking place in London January 9th-11th. I very much hope to see some of you there, but if you can make it in person or not I hope you'll join in the discussions.

The first session, running from 9.45am - 10.45am on the 11th, is titled e-Safety: The Critical Agenda. The session gives some of the UK's foremost practitioners in the field of e-Safety an opportunity to propose and defend what they think are the most important issues facing e-safety research, policy and practice today.

Chaired by David White (senior manager, TALL, University of Oxford), the panel includes Will Gardner (CEO Childnet International), Sonia Livingstone (Head, Department of Media and Communications LSE) Annika Small, Director Nominet Trust. Each speaker will propose the two issues or topic areas they believe to be amongst the most important current e-safety concerns and defend their priorities. 

Everyone is welcome to join in and contribute to the debate. We'll be taking questions and discussion from 10.15, with comments and questions welcome via Twitter - the conference tag is #lwf11.

We'd also like you to vote! Please let us know what your top three e-safety priorities are - you can also submit your own e-safety priority area.

Voting will close at 11am on the 11th of January so that the results can be announced/posted at the start of the second session.

Here are the panels selections. You can vote from this post under the descriptions, or open the vote selections in a new window by clicking here.

Josie Fraser:

• Address geolocation services

Geolocation services offer many interesting opportunities for learning and interacting.  However, they also raise some serious issues – about personal safety, about privacy, and about just how well we understand and manage service settings. Geolocation services can currently be considered emblematic of the lag between new and emerging technological practices and tools and public and educational policy and practice. Because of the seriousness of their potential misuse, we must prioritise ensuring both independent and service provider information about effectively managing risks is available to children, young people, parents and educators.

• Network responsibility not just personal responsibility

e-Safety is often regarded as an issue of personal responsibility. However, unlike other safety issues, many areas of digital safety and cyberbullying characteristically take place within networks. We should focus on supporting the skills to operate successfully within networks – including taking responsibility for looking out for all members within those networks. This approach requires reviewing how we respect others digital identities and privacy, and how we negotiate issues of consent.

Will Gardner:

• Parents and carers remain a priority 

There has been a lot of work aimed at parents particularly in the UK, including with the UK Council's Zip it, Block it, Flag it campaign, Childnet’s Know IT All for Parents, as well as a range of other initiatives and information, including from service providers. Yet this need is a continual one as parents and carers continue to have a key role.

• Increase the trust and transparency in reporting to service providers.

Research shows that reporting to service providers by young people is currently not high. In the social networking world, where moderation provided by service providers is limited and a reliance is put on the user community to self-moderate, it is vital that the reporting process becomes as transparent as possible.

Sonia Livingstone

• Reaching younger children

The age at which children first go online, and use social media sites and services, is decreasing. This raises new challengers for educators and parents to find appropriate ways to discuss issues such as sexuality, pornography, violence and drugs that, previously we’ve hoped to leave until post-primary school. My research suggests that, although few young children encounter online risks, when they do it is particularly upsetting for them. Additionally, parents and carers will not necessarily be aware when children have encountered upsetting material.  Addressing safety advice to young children therefore raises new and pressing challenges.

• Engaging with already vulnerable children and young people

Research shows that children and young people who are vulnerable or at risk offline are also likely to be more at risk online. While many children will encounter something online that bothers or upsets them, most are reasonably well able to deal with it. However, those who are vulnerable, lacking in social support or facing other difficulties may lack resilience, or even seek to engage in high risk activities.  Already vulnerable children and young people may well be particularly in need of safety advice to address online risks, and may also be one of the hardest to engage groups.

Anikka Small:

• Integrating e-Safety into Digital Literacy

Nationally, we need a greater emphasis on digital literacy and e-safety should be a key part of this - and not considered as a stand alone issue. The digital landscape is changing all the time and young people need to be equipped to cope with - and contribute to - this dynamic environment.

• Engaging young people in e-safety discussions

In order for e-Safety advice to be relevant and remain up-to-date, it is  critical that we ensure young people are involved in the identification, co-design and sharing of digital safety resources and practices.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Many thanks to everyone who took the time to vote and to come along to the session! The vote results are below:

Online Educa Berlin 2010 Keynote: Building Networked Learning Environments

I was delighted to be invited to keynote at Online Educa Berlin 2010 - one of the world’s foremost e-learning events, which this year attracted well over 2000 learning and training professionals from over 100 countries. I was also happy to get to share a platform with the fabulous Larry Johnson, New Media Consortium's inspirational Chief Executive Officer. Many thanks everyone who came along and to all the people who came and talked to me or got in touch after my slot - I was really pleased that my topic struck a chord with so many and connected with work going on across the globe.

Talking about networked learning made me reflect on how much my own practice and thinking benefits from the networks and communities I am part of, and the excellent friendships that have come about as a consequence over the years. I wanted to model the benefits of networked learning and use the platform I was given to share ideas, resources and research. One way of doing that was to add to the #oeb10 conversation by posting my key sources to Twitter. A lot of people requested off-Twitter information so I'm following up by posting thoughts and references here.

Digital Literacy and Learning Communities: Supporting 21st Century Learners

Leicester is a large and thriving city, located in the English East Midlands. It's one of the UKs most ethnically diverse regions, and takes understandable pride in celebrating cultural diversity - regarding it as a strength and a defining characteristic. Leicester is home to a large Asian community, from East Africa, Gujarat, Punjab, Pakistan and Bangladesh, an African-Caribbean community, as well as residents from Eastern Europe, including Poland and Ukraine, and more recently has seen migration from Turkey and from Somalia, Sierra Leone and Cameroon.

I currently live in Leicester and work as ICT Strategy Lead, within Transforming the Learning Environment (TLE). TLE is the Local Authority's integrated approach to education for 0 to 19 year olds. Our focus is to ensure the City's current school building programmes delivers flexible, inclusive learning spaces that support the transformation of education - raising standards, and improving the life chances and wellbeing of all our learners. Critically, we view the physical build programme as a bridge to transformation rather than as an end in itself.

Making change happen

My role is to ensure the investment made in ICT is deployed to support our aspirations for learning, learners and learning communities. My priorities are broad - I'm looking at infrastructure and connectivity, Green ICT, as well as ICT to support teaching and learning, the running of the schools, and to facilitate engagement with communities - immediate communities which include students, staff members, parents, governors and local residents, and wider community networks across the city, country and internationally.

If you take a walk through Leicester centre you won't get the feeling that it is anything but an aspirational, busy and creative city. But many of the city's children and young people live in comparative poverty. I spend a lot of time looking at connectivity and infrastructure these days, and the ways in which young people can access and gain the skills and confidence they need to fully engage in and shape their world. A significant minority of these children and young people don't have the advantages of easy access, or of relatives or carers who are themselves confident and critical users of technology. It's in this context - although there are many other drivers and benefits - that schools have a powerful and essential role to play in supporting and modelling the use of technology. Ensuring the infrastructure is in place is critical - but just making sure connectivity and tools are available doesn't transform education.

One of the first things I think it's key to acknowledge when we're talking about learning landscapes is the reality of the majority of the UK's engagement with technology as a current and everyday practice. Of course, this is true for many other countries as well, but I'm focusing here on what the research indicates is likely to be the daily experience of many people in my city. We need to shift our perspective from one that looks forward to a future where most people are connected via the internet, mobile and gaming to one that recognises that we are there already - and has already begun to reconfigure our social, cultural, political and economic landscape. Many people will be thinking that I'm stating the obvious here but for a lot of people getting to grips with what the reality of this is - how connectivity impacts on people’s lives in immediate and very personal ways - still seems to be a deferrable abstract concept. It isn't. We create digital identities online for our children, often before they are born; we meet our temporary and longer term romantic partners, and break up with our existing partners; we create digital memorials to the dead and try and work out what to do with their online identities and assets once they have gone. Digital spaces are social, economic, political and cultural spaces. They are every day spaces, spaces where people live out the dramas and the minutia of their lives.

 For me, the three most significant features of the current social landscape within post-industrial countries is the increase in connectivity, the mainstreaming of collaborative online practices and the rise of real time and location based activity. And these are not just significant within a techno-social landscape, but to our understanding of mainstream culture. 

For a lot of people, devices are affordable. While we have cheap or free network access in the UK through local libraries, UK online Centres, schools, public wifi provision and internet cafes, personal device ownership and any time access are still salient points. Access shapes how we think about technology, how we use it, and some of the ways in which we are able to relate to other people. It's easy to compare this to how we've used technology historically to augment and develop our relationships - the letter, the telegram, the telephone. However, the internet is characteristically different from these previous technologies. Danah Boyd very usefully defines some of these impacts.

Having a device and a connection to hand supports intimacy within networks, and the ability to take ownership of networks - providing greater opportunity to create one's own networks, for continuity and development. We need to be mindful that a great deal of current research highlights correlations between socio economic status and access. This isn’t the only barrier to access but it’s a critical and significant one. We need to be aware that as social and economic activity increasingly takes place within networked environments, a significant minority of those who aren’t accessing these environments, or not accessing them with the same level of confidence or able to develop and maintain skills and competencies through frequent access, are potentially being further disadvantaged. This is one of the key reasons why our schools have a critical role to play in not just providing access but in modelling the use of technology which supports the development of digital literacy. Just getting people online doesn’t magically solve socio-economic disadvantage. But supporting all of our children and young people’s ability to have meaningful, useful and safe online interactions means that we don’t further disadvantage some of our most vulnerable populations.

The rise and rise of social networking and media services means that what the majority of people do in their daily lives has changed. They are frequently and routinely checking in and communicating with each other. It isn't strange for people to check in to their social networks before getting out of bed in the morning, and to continue to do so throughout the day. That’s what a lot of those people who are walking around looking at their phones rather than the traffic are doing. Updating their status, replying to their messages, answering emails, tending to their virtual sheep on Farmville. The always connected aren't in a majority- we don't have usb head ports yet. But within post-industrial societies the persistently connected are mainstream.

The prevalence of the status update and the concurrent development of geolocation services and practices stand out to me as important and defining chacteristics of our persistently connected culture.

Microblogging’s huge contribution to mainstream culture might be in its recognition that the laborious assembly of digital artefacts to represent ourselves - the elaborate construction of our digital identity which until recently enabled us to identify a whole genre of social networking services as 'profile based', was always going to be of most interest to the person creating the profile. Outside of stalkers, lovers and detectives, most people don't engage with each other primarily via profile construction. It turns out what people most want to know about their friends isn't how they imagine themselves to be, but what it is they are actually getting up to and thinking about. They want to have conversations. And conversations feed conversations.

The prevalence of geolocation raises a lot of questions around privacy and safety and the developing relationship of the digital to the physical. I'm personally very excited about the potential of geolocation for education and the kinds of practice crossing the streams engenders. I'm also wary that these kinds of services - especially when linked to real time updates across media - call for an articulate understanding of and response to the e-safety and identity management issues they raise – and without digital literacy on the national agenda we may miss opportunities and mismanaging risks.

Digital Literacies

Investing the younger generation with mythical powers - the skills, competences and confidences that we recognise need ongoing support, maintenance and development in adults, does none of us any favours. I've commented many times on how assumptions about Digital Natives are unhelpful. Blanket assumptions about young people’s ability to understand technology by osmosis, and the blunt use of the Digital Native metaphor runs the risk of isolating and further disadvantaging already vulnerable young people.

Recent research has clearly underlined the need to address children’s and young people’s use of the internet, mobile and games technologies in the context of digital literacy.

The EU kids online initial findings, reported in October 2010, highlights issues around the increasingly young age that children go on line, and the range of contacts and relationships young people engage in. It’s well worth a read. It’s interesting to see the role digital space plays in a significant percentage of positive identity development and self expression - 50% of the young people surveyed reported ‘feeling more like themselves online’.

Becta’s research report on Web 2.0 Technologies for KS3 and KS4, published in July 2008 is also well worth downloading before the site is taken down on January 31^st.  The report points up young people’s largely pedestrian use of technology, and highlights the role that educators could and should be playing in supporting young peoples engagement as producers, creators, curators rather than primarily as consumers: “Many learners lack technical skills, and lack an awareness of the range of technologies and of when and how they could be used, as well as the digital literacy and critical skills to navigate this space. Teachers should be careful not to overestimate learners’ familiarity and skills in this area. There is a clear role for teachers in developing such skills.”

Digital Literacy is now understood as an essential skill for 21^st century citizens, as the effective use of technology is increasingly critical from social, economic, cultural and political perspectives. This is true in terms of the opportunities digital literacy affords individuals, as well as for cities and larger regions.

There are many definitions of digital literacy. In one of the earliest (2006), Allan Martin defined Digital Literacy as

“…the awareness, attitude and ability of individuals to appropriately use digital tools and facilities to identify, access, manage, integrate, evaluate, analyse and synthesise digital resources, construct new knowledge, create media expressions, and communicate with others in the context of specific life situations, in order to enable constructive social action; and to reflect upon this process.” 

More recently Becta have defined Digital Literacy as 

“…the skills, knowledge and understanding learners need to participate fully and safely in our increasingly digital world. 

It is a combination of:

functional technology skills

critical thinking

collaboration skills and

social awareness” (2010)

The characteristics across many of the available definitions are that digital literacy are that:

• it supports and helps develop traditional literacies – it isn’t about the use of technology for it’s own sake or ICT as an isolated practice
• it's a life long practice – developing and continuing to maintain skills in the context of continual development of technologies and practices
• it's about skills and competencies, and critical reflection on how these skills and competencies are applied
• it's about social engagement – collaboration, communication, and creation within social contexts

I particularly like Bélisle’s identification of three models of Literacy in this context (Bélisle, C. (2006) “Literacy and the Digital Knowledge Revolution” in Martin & Madigan, 2006: 51-67). He defines these as Functional – the functional and practical skills required to function within a community; Socio-cultural – as literacy being meaningful only within a social context, and facilitating access to cultural, economic and political structures; and Transformational – that new ways of seeing and thinking about the world become possible as new cognitive and processing tools come into play. You can find a discussion and application of Bélisle’s models in Martin & Grudziecki, DigEuLit: Concepts and Tools for Digital Literacy Development (PDF)

In terms of Digital Literacy, I’ve come to three main conclusions. Firstly, it is of critical importance not to reduce our perception of and aspirations for digital literacy to skills alone. While skills are important, reducing our aims just to types of skills risks boring everyone to death with short lived, tool specific training which doesn’t address the social and political context of people’s lives or their reasons for engaging with technology. 

Secondly, the discussion about what constitutes digital literacy or digital literacies, should, in symmetry with the subject itself, not be perceived as a problem we aim to solve, or a thing we aim to determine once and for all. I’ve had many interesting discussions about the definition and I still think that the fact people want to talk about it, and that there is currency and recognition internationally in the term, is the really important thing.

Thirdly, just talking about the desirability of a local, national or international digital literacy agenda doesn’t necessarily get things done. At some point, we need to agree actions.

Networked learning environments

Supporting critical and confident engagement with technological environments and tools – prioratising the role of networked learning environments -  is a practical way that we can recognise and meet the challenges of our changed social landscape, attend to the issues around inequality and e-safety, and take advantage of the many opportunities for more effective and engaging learning experiences.

One of my current priorities is to support school communities to participate within, develop, create and manage web and mobile-based communities of practice, or Personal Learning Environments. Again – while I’m recognising the theoretical and practical landscapes we are working in I don’t want to get bogged down within this post with definitions. What I’m interested in is supporting the skills and critical thinking about educational engagement in networked environments, and particularly in how educators and learners can use these to support and transfigure existing practice.

Promoting engagement in networked learning practices both supports the development of digital literacy, and ensures that people can create and engage in networks that are specific to their personal needs. It also ensures that resource is spent most effectively – equipping people and communities with the practical and critical skills to determine their own developmental networks. Engaging in practice which supports and helps build capacity into organisations is a good thing at the best of times; during times of economic uncertainty it becomes a critical stratergy. Online communities can be long running, internationally based, and well established; they can also be lightweight, temporary and small scale. Networks can be flexible and distributed, working across a wide variety of platforms, connected through RSS aggregation or curated as necessary. This approach could include a classroom level community – a student wiki focusing on a specific class or project, for example, as well as a city subject hub blog, or an international network of practitioners focusing on a particular curriculum area or educational issue, using a variety of institution and cloud based platforms.

Some schools, school leaders and educators are doing amazing things. It’s my role to support and promote the great work that’s already going on, and to help equip educators and learners with the tools and practices and confidence that will support them in doing even better. Using online collaborative tool and environments is now a widespread, mainstream personal activity. Supporting or learners and staff to use collaborative digital environments and tools in safe, critical and innovative ways should be on the top of all our digital literacy wish lists and informing local and national policy and practice.

Steve Wheeler wrote a post commenting on both my and Larry's keynotes, in which he finished by noting my persistent optimism. If I am hopeful about the complex challenges we face as educational technologists, it isn't because of Larry, or me, or any of the people who get to headline conferences and give talks. Amazing as many of them are, it's because difficult problems will be solved, if they can be solved, by the communities that face them. The best job that I can do at this point is to try and ensure that all of the members of all our complex and many communities and networks get the opportunity to contribute to the process.

Bonus links:

Becoming a Networked Learner, Scott Leslie April 2010

George Seimens asks "What skills/attributes do learners need in order to learn effectively with networked technologies?" October 2009

 BBC News A million UK children 'lack access to computers' December 2010

Download Josie Fraser Educa presentation (PowerPoint) Nov 2010

Online only services: 1/46th of the cost?

Picture taken at NDI10 - National Digital Inclusion Conference 2010, on 10 March 2010 - prior to the General Election but already post the reassertion of the current political and financial imperative for public services to 'do more with less'. Although there will always be pressure to reduce budgets, the current round of cuts and revisions had already started across some sectors, with rumours of post-Election reorganisation regardless of the outcome. On the 22nd of that month then-Prime Minister Gordon Brown's Digital Economy speech outlined a commitment to widen internet access - outlining a programme to deliver super-fast broadband to the UK, coupled with a shift towards online-centric and online-only service provision that promised to save the nation billions.

Today’s announcement by Martha-Lane Fox, the governments UK Digital Champion, to augment government websites and to provide tax and benefit services online, comes then as no surprise.

Matt Brittin from Google (in the picture above) gave the NDI10 network reception address at the end of day one - which included this slide on the theme of saving money by shifting service provision online. During the day the looming reality of shifting to internet only provision of services was talked about by relatively few of us - me, Ken Eastwood, Jim Eastwood and Stephen Whitehead, who followed up the conversation with this post on Digital Refugees and Digital Citizens.  

I need to make it very clear that I am totally in favour of digital inclusion. I believe that people who are not able to access the internet and use web-based services with confidence are disadvantaged - socially, economically and culturally. I also think we are only just beginning to tap the huge mainstream opportunities that tech offers for participatory democracy, local community development and service co-design - although there are already some amazing examples and projects around.

One of the critical questions for me is - if services are going to be only available online, what processes and resources do we need to ring fence to ensure we aren’t further disadvantaging anyone, particularly those people who are already disadvantaged enough? It seems an obvious enough approach to take, but as this recent White Paper from the Democratic Society shows - How digital engagement can save councils money, recognising and addressing risk is easy to overlook when we focus on the arguments for. We need to recognise the social and economic juncture we've arrived at and focus on the discussions about how. 

We also need to pay attention to the many and hard lessons learnt from the previous tech-dependent ‘economies of scale’ adventures many sectors have enjoyed, so that any shift to online-only provision is budgeted at total cost - including communications, training, support, systems development, potential process change, rather than with figures that only account for web development & service build. It’s very easy to say online services can be better services. The truth is that online services can be as inadequate, frustrating and as poorly designed as face to face services, with an additional layer of problems that need to be solved around different digital confidence levels, language skills, access and navigation. We need proper design, development and implementation processes and a recognition that in the short to medium term these services aren’t necessarily going to represent substantial budget savings.

New chapter

I've been working as a freelance consultant for 3 and a half years now. Working for myself has been a blast - I've had the bumpy patches and the insecurity of not necessarily knowing where my next job might come from - but I've also had the pleasure of meeting, working with and learning from many, many smart, passionate, funny and thoughtful people.

I'm extremely proud of what I've achieved with the support and confidence of my all employers, and grateful for the opportunities they've given me.

The Cyberbullying Guidance I produced for Childnet International on behalf of the Department for Children Schools and Families (now the Department for Education) gave me the opportunity to work and negotiate with all the major Social Network Service and Telecoms providers, children's charities and government agencies, and the countries school employee unions and associations, as well as talk to children across the country about their experiences of technology.

JISC Emerge was a truly creative process, and an exploration of digital identities and communities that I feel extremely lucky to have been a part of, from the initial bid development to my role as Lead Community Architect. The project team, participants and contributors included many of the leading lights working in educational technology in the Further and Higher Education sector in the UK today.

Most recently, my role as critical friend in the JISC Institutional Innovation Support, Synthesis and Benefits Realisation project has meant I've got to work alongside cutting edge Green ICT and Learning Spaces projects.

I've done a huge amount of trouble shooting, policy guidance, social network strategy work and been fortunate enough to be invited to chair, run workshops, speak and deliver keynotes all over and outside of the UK. Standouts for me have to be being awarded Educational Technologist of the Year by my professional body, the Association for Learning Technology, my keynotes in Plymouth, Tipperary, Porto and my trip to Aveiro. 140Conf was a ball, as was Interesting. I even got my first gig as an after dinner speaker this year & am looking forward to my midlife crisis.

So sincere thanks to everyone who has employed me over the last four years - it has been a pleasure to work for all of you. This post would be funnier if I had an hilarious tale of clients from hell but I really don't have anything bad to say about anyone.

Huge thanks have to go to everyone in my network - all the inspirational and encouraging people I've worked alongside formally and informally. There are too many of you to thank here, so I've put together the slide show of some of the amazing people (well, the ones that would let me photograph them) and highlights from the last three years.

I'm delighted to say I've accepted a post with Leicester City Council as ICT Strategy Lead, providing leadership within the Transforming Learning Environment (TLE) division for ICT planning, policy and delivery. It's an amazing opportunity to work with schools and colleges at local level and to make a concrete, positive difference to the education of children and young people in Leicester. People who know me will know about my commitment to the local - for me, meaningful transformation is fundamentally a whole community enterprise - and to a national digital literacy strategy, which I've been banging on about for so long it actually seems on the verge of entering mainstream educational discussion.

I'm really looking forward to the new challenges ahead, and to working within the Local Authority sector at this time of major change. In terms of my consultancy practice, I'll be looking to shift my previous work with schools, colleges and Local Authorities to a partnership rather than consultancy footing, and more on some ideas for that shortly. I'll still be accepting a (very) limited amount of consultancy and I'm always interested in hearing about speaking opportunities. 

Here's to the next chapter! Onwards :)

Jailbrake & Spill, a mobile peer support service

getting late, originally uploaded by Josie Fraser.

I spent last weekend holed up in London at the Young Foundation, working with a stupidly talented group of young people, designers, developers, programmers, policy makers, service designers, youth service experts and anyone else you can imagine needing to pull together together solutions to social issues that involved tech. Jailbrake, the competition/camp we'd all signed up to, focused on supporting young people out of the cycle of re-offending. 

Youth offending isn't an area I've had a great deal to do with, although I have previously (& briefly) worked as a member of AoC's Offender Learning Group. Primarily I was there to contribute in terms of risk management issues, since I've done a lot of work on social technologies and young people, and also to check out how Social Innovation Camp works  - the extremely rapid development process Alice Casey referred to recently as 'hacking stuff together for social justice'.

Between January and March, a call went out for approaches to using mobile and web-based techs to support young people involved in the criminal justice system, with the broad aim of putting the brakes on re-offending. Keeping a young person in custody for a year currently costs around £140,000 in hard cash, with massive additional social costs. 6 ideas made it through this initial round and the people who came up with them were invited along for the weekend. I helped out Common Ground - the team who went on to win the judges vote (congratulations!), but spent most of my time working on & in the end pitching for Steven Whitehead's Phone A Friend idea, later rechristened Spill.

Spill was a small team, but we also benefited from floating support of other people contributing to the the weekend, and particularly from the input and encouragement of the young people - some of whom were working as volunteers on youth advice projects - who took the time to find out about our ideas and tell us exactly what they thought. As well as Stephen Whitehead, our team included Noemi Mas, Ian Bach, Lauren Currie & special thanks have to go to our developers, Ben Nickolls from Ribbit and Glyn Roberts who built our working service prototype in time for us to demo on Sunday afternoon.

Stephen's Spill project idea was to use mobile technology to enable young people who are in trouble for the first time to be supported through and out of the criminal justice system by young adults who have 'been there and done that'. What we came up with over the course of the weekend was not just the technology to support that in a cost effective way, but the whole project cycle development and implementation plan needed to support and run the service effectively. It would be great if Spill were taken up by the youth offending sector, but essentially what we designed is massively transferable: the frame work and infrastructure for a safe, co-produced, mobile phone peer mentoring service. 

In terms of our planning, we had two groups in mind. Callers - 13-18 year olds, who may or may not have access to some professional support services, and need to talk about their situation - this might include questions about the legal processes and what next, their rights & obligation, or just someone to acknowledge anxieties and point them in the right direction.

Our adviser group was made up of young adults coming out of the criminal justice system, perhaps still on probation, not currently in employment, education or training, and wanting to develop skills, experience, confidence and to support young people in ways that they themselves might have benefited from but not had access too.

Our service design solution matched these two groups of young people and used a mobile service to help meet the needs of the first group by developing the skills of the second. We picked mobile because this would enable callers to select when and where they accessed services, using an already familiar, personal technology. Mobile allowed us to negotiate 'on call' periods with our adviser group, and to decentralize service provision - once they were comfortable with the process of handling calls, there would be no need for them to come to a specific office to answer a particular phone at set times. Their own phone would become the hot line. This shift from centralised call centers to a distributed mobile phone network has massive implications and opportunities for the provision of any phone support service, particularly within the voluntary sector, including potential cost savings benefits and greater flexibility for (& potentially availability of) those taking calls.

The process of the call looked like this:

The adviser logs onto the system through the web interface, leaving their phone number and submitting the times which they are available to be on call. This could be done centrally by an administrator but adviser access obviously provides greater flexibility, and the process is very simple/form based.

The caller would text a command (ie CALL ME) to a number. This reduces the caller cost significantly, but for those unable to call out, we set up a prototype web-based interface. Using the web version the caller would simply enter their phone number and hit the submit button.

We also talked about introducing a limited, additional caller command menu, for example in order to request someone previously spoken too, or to specify the preferred gender of the adviser. These are all feasible in terms of the technology, but dependent on adviser availability. So users would be able to make requests, but where these could not be met, would connect them with the best/next available adviser, giving them the opportunity to talk to someone or call back later.

The adviser receives a call to their handset. The call is indicated as a service call, but they don't receive any information regarding the caller, i.e. the callers number, at any point. Answering the call prompts the call back service: The callers phone rings, again, with a service indicator, not with the number of the adviser.

The call-only costs of the service come in at 6p per minute, so you can extrapolate the cost of the service level you'd expect support from that. For our pilot it came in at around £4.7K per year.

Working with current and ex-offenders raised a wide range of risk management issues. Actually, these aren't particularly unique this group, but are the same issues faced by any group wanting to work with young people or provide advice - a need to ensure quality of service; to support caller anonymity; to support people giving advice (what they are expected to provide, support available to them, anonymity); and to ensure there is no inappropriate contact or activity between the caller and adviser. 

We managed these risks in several ways. Since our solution would be likely to be perceived as a high risk approach, the idea was for a localized pilot which would enable us to prove concept and build confidence. The volunteer adviser recruitment process, and the initial adviser training process would both be designed to support the identification and navigation of risks. The co-production approach we envisaged as leading the service design and implementation can be used in the process of defining and addressing risk, although it's effectiveness isn't of course limited to that. Ensuring the service can technically support anonymity is obviously critical to the security of callers and advisers. The project-coordinator, or person with responsibility for training and supporting the advisers, would also need to take responsibility for sampling and reviewing calls, and feeding back on these as part of the adviser development process. Caller feedback would be enabled by mobile and web in case of specific concerns about the service, calls would be archived and retrievable for a specified period of time, and service guidelines would be made available in a readable format to all users.

Again, our template design for service implementation is transferable, and could be adapted to a wide variety of service needs and variables.

So that was my weekend :)

If you're interested in finding out more about the service please get in touch, and find out more about all the projects here.

The big message that I took away from the weekend was this: All of the projects came in at relatively small cost, especially in comparison to the direct and indirect costs of keeping a young person in custody for a year. You could maybe even fund all six projects for that amount. If you only managed to keep one person out of custody, you'd break even, and you'd be significantly improving someones prospects, and the lives of their family. Projects like the ones coming out of Social Innovation Camp are offering real, innovative opportunities for effective social change - if we want to see a difference these are the kind of risks we need to be taking.

Should you friend your students? The short answer is no

Earlier this year I delivered a further cyberbullying guidance document on behalf of Childnet International for the UK Government's Department for Children, Schools and Families. The Guidance follows up (and designed to compliment) cyberbullying guidance, a comprehensive document  that formed part of the Safe To Learn: Embedding anti-bullying work in schools suite of advice. While the initial document was really well received both within the UK & internationally, teachers unions and associations were increasingly being asked to deal with school employee cyberbullying cases - in which the staff member was the person being victimised. I welcomed the opportunity to produce further guidance which would both support employees in term of basic digital literacy information and encourage employers to meet their statutory obligations. The document set out, ambitiously, to encourage policy and procedure be put in place for preventing and dealing with cyberbullying as a whole school community issue - which includes meeting and recognising the specific needs, rights and responsibilities of employees. In no other area of harassment would it be acceptable for an employee to be expected to deal with cases that rose within the work place on their own - yet the reports from school staff included cases where cyberbullying was not taken seriously or understood, and where they had been expected to sort out situations for themselves.

Cyberbullying: Supporting School Staff (PDF) was released in April this year (Google doc version here).  I've been talking about the document a lot recently, and I want to just explore in a little more detail the thinking behind the advice given to school employees regarding friending students in social networking services. The actual text is (with my emphasis):

‘Friending’ refers to the act of giving contacts permission to view information or contact you within web-based services. The terminology will vary from service to service – ‘Friends’ may be called contacts or connections, for example. Most social sites enable you to give different levels of access and set privacy levels on your own content and activity. These functions will vary from service to service but typically include:
•     Information that is only available to the account holder
•     Information that is accessible by contacts on the account
holder’s approved list, and
•     Information that is made publicly available, either within
the service or across the whole of the internet.

‘Friends’ does not necessarily refer in this case to people who are your actual friends, although you may choose to restrict your connections to that. ’Friends’ in this context may also be work colleagues, family members, and people that you have met online.

If you have a social networking account, do not friend pupils or add them to your contact lists. You may be giving them access to personal information and allowing them to contact you inappropriately. They may also be giving you access to their personal information and activities

So the text above outlines three basic levels of permissions granularity that can be found on most sites, gives a definition of friending, and very explicitly says don't friend pupils. This is explicitly prescriptive advice, based on the case studies reviewed during the document negotiations, and an implicit understanding that the school staff accounts referred to are either personal, or contain elements of personal activity (I previously posted on a definition of three basic online identities, characterised as personal, professional, and organisational).

The approach taken then - don't friend pupils - reflects the kind of boundaries between staff and learners that we'd expect to see in offline behavior. You wouldn't expect a teacher to give a school aged pupil their home phone number, show them pictures of their friends or regale them with the weekends social exploits. Obviously friending isn't the only issue here - managing publicly available information so that you are comfortable with what co-workers, learners and employers can access about you is also addressed in the document. The research and anecdotal evidence indicates that we operate within social network services as if we were in a closed, private world. This isn't naive - I think it's a necessary fiction which makes social networking services human spaces. The do not friend advice is there to reinforce the message that private online is typically back of a post-card private, especially if we are within environments where we're not entirely sure who has permission to see what (*cough*Facebook*cough). It also reflects the leakiness of our online identities, the way in which the personal is often hand in hand with the professional.

What the advice isn't trying to do is to put anyone off evaluating social networking services to see if they could support learning & teaching effectively. The advice goes on to state:

If you want to use web-based social networking sites for a class or for the whole school, use a service that doesn’t give contacts access to personal information and updates, or allows collaboration without requiring permissions.

Alternatively ask pupils to create new, work-focused accounts for themselves, and run them as they would an online portfolio or CV.

You can find more information and advice about Social Network Services at www.digizen.org/socialnetworking.

Death and the Social Web

mikebutcher #svc2c #svuk Panel appears to have stumbled on fact that @ajkeen was right: if you're not on social networks you're dead

josiefraser: @ajkeen @mikebutcher Plenty of dead people on twitter, cf @Henry_Fuseli @Edgar_Allan_Poe @JDerridian & million Sigmund Freuds

josiefraser: obscurity maybe even more fatal than death within the social web

My Uncle John died this month, so I had a few more conversations than usual about death, and particularly it's relationship to the social web. Social Networking Services are developing policies and processes relating to the archiving and accessing of people's accounts after they die, and people who have significant digital presence are stating to think about bequest issues - will the sorting out of our online information, artifacts, accounts become an additional job for our relatives or friends, to be approached in the same way as clearing the physical shelves and sorting through documents? And what can explain the rise in popularity of dead celebrity fakesters, some of whom have many more followers than average users?

digital identity after death

an email i received, about death and facebook Ze Frank, September 9 2009

Identity, Memory, Death & the Internet Dave Cormier, September 18th 2009

Grieving Goes Digital NewsOK, May 25 2009

thinking ahead

What happens to your social network accounts when you die? makeuseof.com, November 16 2009

Legacy Locker "The secure way to pass your online accounts to your loved ones"

dead celebrities on Twitter

25 Dead People of Twitter Soulellis Studio, March 1 2009

Dead People Twitter List, Boston.com News

Tweeji "Follow dead people on Twitter"

reusing the stream

OK - so this is my first attempt at selectively re-purposing content from my twitter stream. There are a bunch of export tools, but what I'm interested in is panning the stream to provide content that it's easy to miss within twitter, and difficult to access outside. Haven't decided where this will go yet, so I'd appreciate feedback (feel free to be as critical as you like - is this just pointless?). I'm also not entirely happy with the army of avatars - I've included the originals of people I've retweeted during the time frame I've taken the content from (yesterday) to stop it from being quite so Josie-scary. I'm thinking this might work better in smaller chunks - just a hand full of links or a thread. I've left out a lot from yesterday - a brief discussion with @rliberni about the politics of fruit and vegetable taxonomies, conversations about virtual learning environments and informal learning (although have left some links in), and a chat with daveowhite and @mweller about the dark side of interoperability and my future as a writer of sports stars autobiography titles. The conversations and broader context stuff that makes twitter a fun place to hang out. Maybe all this needs to be is a row of pick of the day links?

josiefraser 'Human flesh search engine' http://u.nu/7z8w3

palmer_eldritch I thought it was about librarians - RT @josiefraser: 'Human flesh search engine' http://u.nu/7z8w3

josiefraser . @palmer_eldritch if we called librarians 'human flesh search engines' most would never get past their own internet filtering software

josiefraser RT @josswinn: Read, comment, discuss. The Future of Universities in a Knowledge Economy http://j.mp/ThQDx #writetoreply 

josiefraser RT @GrahamAttwell: New blog post and video on User Generated content, user generated contexts and learning http://is.gd/4XSe4 

josiefraser Checking out Hyperwords for Firefox http://www.hyperwords.net/

josiefraser Andrew Keen on the simple joys of homophily RT @ajkeen: how Sarah Palin made me love the Internet http://u.nu/9s9w3

josiefraser & fr those of you who haven't installed hyperwords, homophily : http://retwt.me/13RfW

Eingang @josiefraser I thought we already had a term for homophily -- Balkanization?

josiefraser @Eingang Balkanisation useful - emphasises geo, social & political. Homophily more personal/granular? both good terms

Lawrie: @josiefraser good tools for tweeting into and out of Powerpoint here: http://bit.ly/33BYeB 

josiefraser RT @freecloud: Streams of Content, Limited Attention - & Twitterwalls http://bit.ly/2R2cQM (Thoughts on @zephoria 's #w2e paper) 

josiefraser RT @Documentally: "Even if you are a complete psychopath you can earn an A+ in your citizenship exams." Proff Richard Pring #ukyouth

josiefraser RT @markchilds: Hhhmm counted tweets for @allthecheeses and @beatles. Lennon was wrong. the Beatles aren't bigger than cheeses

josiefraser 1st herald of the tech apocalypse: IBM's supercomputer can think like a cat http://blogs.zdnet.com/BTL/?p=27507

adfig The Creator of Wikipedia Turns to Education Videos. http://bit.ly/31BOSw 

josiefraser All the tweets - including souvenir trend spam! RT @manojranaweera: twitter event report - #140conf http://bit.ly/QBv0M 

josiefraser Narcissism: the new shark in social networking pool. With obligatory Greenfield quote RT @amcunningham: http://bit.ly/2XRTR7

socialtechno "The unicorns don’t look realistic enough." Clients From Hell http://bit.ly/431d0Q

markbullen Net Gen Skeptic: Conference Board Study Warns Against Generational Stereotyping: http://bit.ly/4slFaW