SocialTech

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

Interesting 09

Really delighted have spoken at Russell Davies's Interesting this year. It's easily one of my favorite conferences - entertaining, educational, creative, unpredictable and inspiring.

My topic was psychological violence in late 1970s/early 1980s girls comics, & here are the notes. Enjoy!

During the 1950s - 1970s children's comics were an important part of the UK cultural landscape, with individual titles typically selling 200,000 - 300,000 copies per week. Following a dip in sales figures in the mid 1970s, a group of predominantly male writers, including UK comic legend Pat Mills, were brought in by IPC to rework content away from catatonic tales of foreign princesses and posh schools, and into the twilight zone, via some evident concerns with environmentalism and interests in paganism.

Girls comics up to 1970s can be pretty much placed on the spectrum of the history of conduct literature, a genre that appeared in print in the UK as early as 1475. Conduct literature promotes and aims to reproduce acceptable moral, domestic and social behaviour, and particularly concerns itself with the souls and reputations of young women and wives. Piety and virtue are typically valued above all other attributes. Modern day equivelants are still popular, and every so often someone will knock out another best seller that instructs insecure women how best to conform in order to get some loser to date them.

We can find lots of examples of prescriptive behaviour tracts thinly disguised as quizzes and not so thinly disguised as articles on what being a proper girl involves in the three titles I'm focusing on: Tammy, Misty, and Jinty.

Make friends with your MIRROR! Is the title of one piece from the 1981 Jinty annual - less of an article and more of a manifesto for self regulation: "Let the mirror be your best friend! It will never lie to you! Don't forget, if you haven't got a double or triple mirror, you can get good views of your back by holding a small mirror and using this to look into the reflection in your long mirror."

Obviously written by someone irretrievably harmed by reading Discipline and Punish while on acid, the annual also contains specific advice on the correct way to sit in a chair, as determined by body shape. The illustration above shows three women who's incorrect chair occupation means that they will never get married. Advice to Di, who enjoys sitting backwards astride a chair despite being otherwise normal, includes "She should really remember that, although she's got a nice shape, leaning forward in close fitting jeans is stretching the point! She'd feel just as dashing, and look less hippy, sitting around the other way, an maybe resting the heel of one shoe on the chair seat while circling her knee with one arm. Try it!"

Mills et al's involvement in late 1970s and early 80s produced some of the most interesting childrens' comic book writing, ever. During this period, the repetitive moral lessons that constituted girls comic book content - the inevitable punishment and comeuppance of vanity, selfishness, and slattern like behaviours, the Cinderella-miraculous ending and reward of sacrifice, hard work, and humility - didn't disappear. The boarding schools, ballet classes and horse fetishism were still there too, although new scenarios involving science fiction and horror settings emerged. Under Mills's stewardship, IPC girls titles wholy perverted the existing tropes by taking them to their hysterical, nightmarish conclusion. The horror, punishment, and suffering of the innocent was totally amplified by the new story lines, for example in the notorious Tammy story Slaves of Orphan Farm, where every week the writers attempted to outdo Gods testing of Job. In The Slave of Form 3b, a domineering student discovers she can hypnotize a weaker classmate into doing her evil bidding. The unsuspecting dupe eventually wins the respect of her school and even a medal for bravery, but not before falling off the roof while hypnotized and becoming crippled. A Life for A Life, a short strip from Jinty's 1978 annual told the story of two London hospital employees - nurse Celia and Doctor Josef, marrying. They had previously met years before when SS Officer Josef had been taking Celia out to shoot her, and Celia sacrificed a chance to escape in order to save Josef (presumably not his real name) after he bungled the job and accidentally shot himself. 

Alan Moore, commenting on that period:

"...Pat Mills and John Wagner had previously spent eleven years working on the British girls comics. They had grown cynical and possibly actually evil during this time. I think it was John who used to write a script called "The Blind Ballerina" and as the title suggested it was about a ballerina who was blind. John would just try to put her in to increasingly worse situations. At the end of each episode you'd have her evil Uncle saying, "Yes, come with me. You're going out on to the stage of the Albert Hall where you're going to give your premier performance" and it's the fast lane of the M1. And she's sort of pirouetting and there's trucks bearing down on her."

The huge success of Tammy, which ran from 1971 to 1984, was partially based on some actual research by IPC magazine into what girls enjoyed reading about. Apparently they liked to be made to cry. Vulnerable amnesiacs who avoided multiple, mysterious attempts on their lives to discover their parents had been killed in some kind of transport 'accident' sent sales figures of up to a quarter of a million a week, along with stories which included:

Alison all Alone - Alison has been kept prisoner by her foster parents for reasons unknown.

Roberta's Rebels - Roberta Russell decides she will do something about her hierarchical school system where the "Serfs" slave to the sporty "Supremos."

The Ice Girl- A girl must keep her ice skating secret from her father, who was crippled in an ice-skating accident.

Sadie in the Sticks - an exploited girl whose only refuge is her talent for making objects with matchsticks

Lights-Out for Lucinda - Lucinda becomes trapped in a district where people still think it is World War II, due to her father drugging them so he may use them as slave labour.

Cora Can't Lose- Cora Street goes on an obsessive binge to win as many sports trophies as she can, in order to win her parents' respect. Danger looms when Cora suffers a head injury which will kill her unless she has an operation, but she is so obsessed with winning trophies that she ignores the warning signs.

Becky Never Saw the Ball - aspiring tennis star Becky Bates is making a comeback after going blind.

Particularly hilariously, and never really explained, was the way Becky had her entire head bandaged.

Jinty, which ran from 1974 to 1981 before being incorporated by Tammy, introduced science fiction, adventure, and horror to the girls comic market.

Battle of the Wills - a girl discovers a scientist with a duplicating machine that enables her to continue with her gymnastics while her double is forced to do ballet.

The Human Zoo - twin girls and their classmates are kidnapped by telepathic aliens to whom humans are mere animals. The treatment the humans receive parallels the treatment meted out to animals on Earth (zoos, circuses, slaughterhouses, bloodsports, vivisection and beasts of burden).

Worlds Apart, written by Pat Mills and drawn by Guy Peeters, was my personal favourite and still a classic of science fiction: six schoolgirls find themselves in a series of strange worlds governed by their main characteristics: greed, love of sport, vanity, delinquency, intellectualism, and fear. Jac Rayner loved it too:

"Worlds Apart, where six girls find themselves trapped in a series of worlds which are distorted versions of their own desires, and can only escape through the death of the girl whose mind they're in… Any story which starts 'The day began like any other. A road tanker carrying highly dangerous chemical waste left a government research establishment' has got to be good, but as we journeyed through the fatty, sporty, vain, criminal, brainy and scared lands, we not only got the girls' staples of peril and adversity (with some handy moral lessons), we got a superb adventure story"

Misty only ran for two years before being cannibalised by Tammy. Focusing on horror and 

mystery, Misty is probably the title that had the most impact on it's readers, and retains a huge fan base. Mistycomic.co.uk, a fan site archive and community hub that's now been officially recognised by current Misty copyright holders Egmont. Classic strips included:

The Four Faces of Eve - Eve Marshall is trying to unravel her true identity, but she seems to be the bits and pieces of four dead women.

Winner Loses All - The lead character has a horse called Satan. She has sold her soul to the devil in order to help her father, who subsequently died anyway.

extra link love:

Pat Mills interviewed by Jenni Scott at Oxfords CAPTION convention

Creating Tammy: A True Story

Some of the story descriptions in this post were taken from Wikipedia - you can see the originals by clicking through the linked title names.

Anonymity & the carnival of the fakesters

Many of my readers have a fairly 'meh' approach to old media - they'll read the Metro if they find it on their bus/tube seat, they may enjoy the weekend deforestation editions as an excuse to lounge at the weekends - they're mostly too connected to actually just chew over their toast & stare into the distance - and fill up their recycling boxes. They'll happily hijack the odd Daily Mail readers poll. They'll follow their favorite tech writers & journalists in Twitter. Mainly they get their news from their network - which means in practice a mix of online newspapers & services, across a range of sites where people may be paid to research, reflect & write, but mostly aren't.

Who do I know that reads the Telegraph? Off the top of my head, no one, although there must be a couple of you who have. New Telegraph tech bloggers Paul Carr & Andrew Keen have been link/troll baiting this week with a couple of posts about the undesirability of online anonymity - Carr's takes massive chunk of Schopenhauer out of  historical, cultural and technological contexts, And Keen's verges on Brass Eye territory so much (110%, in fact) that all that's missing is the poll made up of foxes heads on sticks. It doesn't take a genius to work out that effectively removing internet anonymity, even if that level of authentication was remotely possible, might cause a few more problems for everyone than it solves for a couple of disgruntled tech journalists.

One of (the many) objections to the Ministry of Anonymous but Authenticated Names approach is that one of the best things about the internet has always been the opportunities it provides for play. Mediation through avatar, text, and all the other internet props can obviously be misused, but it also enables a creative exploration of identity, representation, engagement. When I first started hanging out online in the 90s, in the days before meeting up and eventually marrying people you met online was the norm, I just assumed that everyone I met was probably a mustachioed Texan cop or a retired librarian, pretending to be a hot and overly intelligent seventeen year old boy. 

Then blogging took off, and the internet as playground began it's transformation into the internet as factory. The early insistence on transparency has been adopted by nearly everyone who has a professional stake in their online presence, and what has been variously named the link or reputation economy is critically an economy of trust - trusted connections defined within a dominant aesthetic of a particular kind of authenticity.

While I'm not arguing against the numerous benefits of accountability and responsibility, I do also miss the old internet, and I look for trusted connections with people who haven't let the factory rob them of their sense of wonder, and even mischievousness.

It's in this vein I've been on a mini-crusade to support the fakesters in my neighborhood, which at the moment is primarily Twitter. 'Fakester' is a broad term, covering any account pretending to be someone they aren't. They could be pretending to be another living or dead actual person, or a fictional or personally created character, or the incarnation of a place, thing, time, organisation etc. So it includes historical, religious and cultural figures, as well as alternative persona, marketing scams and campaigns, God (well, a bunch of them) and the Mars Phoenix, NASA’s celebratory robotic lander.

Following complaints and a proposed lawsuit Twitter recently began to introduce verified accounts for the Twitterati & the popularly impersonated celeb member, "people who deal with impersonation or identity confusion on a regular basis". However, their Terms of Service only disallow users to impersonate other Twitter users. This doesn't help Kanye West out much, but it does encourage him to sign up to twitter & I bet it gets the Twitter staff a fair few celeb lunches too. 

Personally, I'm not that interested in following celebs via Twitter, although I can understand that there's a lot of (potential) money and (actual) publicity at stake. I'll also be clear that I am obviously not in favor of illegal or malicious impersonation, a topic which I've engaged with quite substantially in terms of my work for the UK government on cyberbullying. I'm keener on those more imaginative misuses of twitter, many of which have educational potential and application, but regardless of that, make life more interesting :)

danah boyd wrote a defence of fakesters way back in 2003 - about a hundred years ago in internet terms. Her early work tracked the presence of fakesters on Friendster, drawing attention to the blurring between the authentic-inauthentic-constructed lines fakester accounts throw non-fakester accounts into, the way that fakester accounts challenged social (network service) norms, and the fact that the fakesters were often the most interesting accounts to connect to. 

So who's faking it on Twitter?

One of the most beloved of the Twitter fakesters has to be @darthvader, self appointed Evil Orphan Annie and geek magnet. Recent #imperialedicts have included "Open more Starbucks" and "Continually raise the price of stamps without warning". 

@MarsPheonix, NASAs account for a mission to land a robotic craft at the North Pole of Mars was so popular that Wired ran an epitaph contest for the lander. 

Many fakester accounts basically just publish the text or quotes of the persona they assume. The ultimate fit-for-purpose example of this has got to be @JennyHolzer, the American conceptual artist who is most celebrated for her public displays of aphorism, perfectly suited to her anonomus Twitter account, where HABITUAL CONTEMPT DOESN'T REFLECT A FINER SENSIBILITY and MONOMANIA IS A PREREQUISITE OF SUCCESS.

Jenny Holzer isn't on Twitter, although if she were I'd like to think she was @fakejennyholzer - shouting SUFFERING IS CAUSED BY ATTACHMENT AND NAIL GUNS and THE CAPS LOCK KEY IS REALLY STUCK ISN'T IT at us. 

One of my favorite fakesters has got to be @palmer_eldritch, a title character from the Philip K. Dick novel. as well as Phil Dick related comment & content, Palmer has recently transformed into a veritable mecanical turk of an auto-bot, selectively re-tweeting related content from around the twitterverse, including "@tanuki0: I've read too much Philip K Dick, I'm starting to doubt the nature of reality." and "@FatherRoderick: Getting ready for Mass. Still very sleepy. Shouldn't have watched that Blade Runner documentary late last night."

Sir Bonar Neville-Kingdom, Data Sharing Czar, aka @sirbonar and his Whitehall musings on the surveillance society pretty much leads the field in fakester political satire. "It seems some hobbyist suffering from Aspergers has done a stunt for the news media in which he appears to clone a British ID Card" and "If only we could achieve total fusion of all possible data, I think we could at last feel secure. I wonder how much data that is?" are amongst his recent musings. You can also catch a video of him addressing Open Tech 09 on Data Sharing here.

I'm a big theory fan, so I follow a bunch of would be swafty-philosopher fakesters, including @zizekspeaks, who purports to be Hegelian philosopher and Lacanian psychoanalisist Slavoj Zizek. "Interested in Deleuze & Twitter? If so, you're probably misreading Deleuze." Is he real or not? Perfectly, for a Lacan follower, it doesn't really matter. 

Personal - Professional - Organisational: three basic online identities

There are three main ways we can characterise most peoples online internet and mobile activity and presence. Let me state up front that these distinctions are purposely blunt, but do act as effective and critical distinctions, especially when talking to people about how and why they can manage their online identities. They're also very indiscreet, leaky categories, although it is of course possible to find examples of people who's online identity is confined to or dominated by a single category. Why are these differences important? Because they provide us with the building blocks to talk about and actively reflect on our online activity. How we represent ourselves, and how we are viewed online, is increasingly a part of daily social and economic life. Critically, for people working within social media or supporting digital literacy, they provide a robust framework within which to talk about key issues: privacy, data ownership/mobility, representation and voice.

The three main categories I use then are personal, professional, and organisational.

Personal use might include using dating sites, having a social network account to connect to friends and family, uploading your family photos to a photo-sharing site. Personal use is most likely to be the category where attention to social network service permissions - who is able to see what - is particularly important to users.

Professional use could include the use of a professional networking site, or the use of a social network, a blog or other website to showcase and record work, develop connections and contribute to national and international professional networks. It includes a public facing CVs, publicly accessible parts of a personal learning environment, or an e-portfolios, conversations across mailing lists or social network services. Typically, these activities are public facing, so the most pertinent issues are typically about voice, representation, reputation and trust,

Organisational use would involve the employee using tools or platforms on behalf of their employer or in the line of their work duties. For example, an employee may run a blog as part of their role, maintain a social networking profile in order to make information accessible to students and parents, deliver assignments using a Virtual Learning Platform or set up a group account for learners on a video sharing site. Organisational use may be public, promotional and conversational, or operate within walled garden environments, or, indeed, a mixture of the two.