SocialTech

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.

ReTweet & other micro-conventions

 

picture credit: kenworker 推友團在世界遺產吳哥窟前示範「銳推」Taiwanese twitterers showing us how to "retweet" in Angkor Wat

Warning: If you haven't used Twitter or other microblogging services before, this post which focuses on citation issues will likely put you off completely. It deals with only one aspect of microblogging activity, albeit an important one, but it is quite possible to lead a happy and healthy life without ever retweeting (RTing) anyone, or being an RTer, ever.

If however you get to the end of this post thinking, blimey Josie, you haven't begun to scratch the surface of this fascinating and vital issue, then why not treat yourself to the even more detailed danah boyd, Scott Golder and Gilad Lotan review paper Tweet, Tweet, Retweet: Conversational Aspects of Retweeting on Twitter.

As anyone who's spent five minutes thinking about publication and referencing styles will have concluded, while format is important, constancy is critical. Twitter and microblogging are still very much environments in process, with Twitter in particular currently having a kickass impact on the social web, from blogging practices to social network service functionality to real time reporting. Like any online community, what is acceptable, in terms of all kinds of behaviors, is negotiated between and within networks of users.

Linkage is emerging as an important currency and network tool amongst microbloggers - especially since Twitter removed users ability to view the posts people in your network direct to people not in your network, aka #fixreplies

so for example, if

@kalamishere posts: @yiannopoulos Singing along yet?

It won't appear in my twitterfeed (the stream of posts I get from the combined posting of everyone I'm following), unless I am also following @yiannopoulos.

Obviously an rss feed, or a twittersearch by name of an individual users twitter feed, like the one in my left hand sidebar, will reproduce all posts regardless. However, unless you are stalking or otherwise have a special interest in a particular user, the likelihood is that you'll never see links to and conversations outside of your network, even though these may be some of the most valuable to you.

The way around this, for people who want to make conversational posts public within Twitter or within Twitter readers is to use any character before the @ symbol, the most elegant probably being a full stop, ie: 

@josiefraser posts: . @menjivar Reviews of Free - take yr pick @Gladwell http://bit.ly/1rUoVn @ajkeen http://bit.ly/jwm7A @gapperblog http://u.nu/4evh

Some Twitter readers have problems converting .@ into links, so you'll notice in my example I leave a space between the full stop and the @, since I can afford the extra character. The value to the network isn't in the recognition - simply the giving of the name - it's in the link - the ability to click straight through to another users twitter stream, quickly review their content and interest, RT their content or add them to your follower list.

However, 140 characters - the limit of an individual post on Twitter, only accommodates so much kudos. What happens when you stumble across a post with more RTers than you can fit? For example:

@flash_ahah posts: RT @mattlingard RT @josiefraser RT @timbuckteeth: Most important issue in e-Learning, final version including all comments: http://bit.ly/14S989

The convention I'm using in this example is to put RT in front of everyone who has retweeted the post so far. This clears up, for example, someone in that chain who may have been addressing themselves to one of the others. For example:

RT @mattlingard @josiefraser RT @timbuckteeth: Most important issue in e-Learning, final version including all comments: http://bit.ly/14S989

could imply that @mattlingard sent the RT to @josiefraser. I'm also using : to indicate the origional poster. Again, there are a lot of different ways to retweet, and I'm not suggesting my preference is any better than any other. But suppose I now want to retweet the whole message: 

RT @flash_ahah RT @mattlingard RT @josiefraser RT @timbuckteeth: Most important issue in e-Learning, final version including all comments: http://bit.ly/14S989

Or - about 20 characters too many. There are four ways around this (probably more - please let me know).

1. Don't RT, just favorite. This will show up in your followers twitter stream, although not yours - i.e. it won't be non-manually exportable but it will be saved to your twitter favorites for later reference. I don't tend to do this, since I'm kind of mean with my favorites.

2. If the same story/link has turned up across several different groups of people you follow,  I tend to give up and just put "lots of people are posting about x today," or words to that effect. I figure once more than ten people have posted the same link, and unless there is a clear origional poster, it's best not to spend too much time worrying about on it.

3. edit content. Sacrifice pithy comments or indications of content for names and links. With cunning use of one of the internets many url shortening services, you could probably credit six or seven people. on the downside, this is going to look like a very boring and inexplicable link, so people probably won't bother clicking on it.

4. Cut out some of the RTers. I posted an intention this morning kickoff a new convention for posts with multiple RTers, roughly based on accepted academic practice, which is to use the et al as a heads up that other people were involved in getting the information to you. Obviously the main difference is that unlike an academic citation, where you can actually go somewhere and find out who the other contributors were, you can't necessarily do that on Twitter so you may well be consigning some people to the black hole of anti-kudos. I suggested that the person that I got the RT heads up was the last person to tweet, and or the person I read the information from. This is important, because although I might be following several people in the RT string, the serendipitous nature of twitter - the large amount of people followed, posts made, combined with ad hoc access (like most people I guess, I tend to dip in and out of my twitter stream) means that even though I might follow one person, I might not necessarily get the information directly from them, but via a third, fourth or fifth party retweet. So my amended RT would look like: 

RT @flash_ahah et al: Most important issue in e-Learning, final version including all comments: http://bit.ly/14S989

Immediately the academics and information professionals in my stream objected to this, and quite rightly so, pointing out that the important person in terms of referencing should be the originator. I broadly agree with this, although it's often not so clear cut, since people bring information into twitter typically without referencing external sources. This means I may well have several independent citations or comments from unconnected sources. However, this isn't supposed to be a hard and fast rule, but a useful convention to fall back on where appropriate.

I put the three most plausible conventions to the vote, along with an open field for other suggestions. You can go vote yourself and check out the current wisdom of this particular crowd, but at time of writing the preference, given some mitigating factors, is clearly

RT @(origional source) via @(my source) or, as I'd interpret it

RT @flash_ahah et al RT @timbuckteeth: Most important issue in e-Learning, final version including all comments: http://bit.ly/14S989

with RT @(origional source) or 

RT @timbuckteeth: Most important issue in e-Learning, final version including all comments: http://bit.ly/14S989

Favored in case of minimalism or if there really wasn't enough room. Not entirely happy with this last one, since it still doesn't indicate multiple posters.

Thanks to @jont @goatgirl74 @encratica @Eingang @sarahhorrigan @RecordedBooks @timdifford @shirleyearley @traceymadden, @paulbrichardson, @MarkRussell, @lyndsayjordan, @amcunningham for taking time to talk about this with me over at Twitter today. & cheers to everyone fr the RTs! 

Facebook, MI6 & basic digital literacy

Despite the neo-con conspiracy theory accusations, despite even the threats of Facebook The Movie (the specter of which I'm absolutely delighted about btw), Facebook continues to go from strength to strength in terms of empire building. According to recently released user & engagement stats, Facebook is currently the equivalent of the worlds fourth largest country, with around 240 million individual accounts. It's reporting a growth surge recently too - adding an incredible 700,000 to 750,000 new users per day.

The latest scandal to hit Facebook - and let's face it, one that isn't going to do their user stats any damage at all, is the tabloid and broadsheet friendly story centering on the British Secret Service, popularly known as MI6. Although MI6 has been recruiting on Facebook since September 2008, apparently their social media strategy hasn't stretched to the kind of employee guidance increasingly seen as critical in other industries. Recently recently appointed intelligence chief, John Sawers, ('C' as he will be codenamed in proper James Bond tradition), takes up his post in November. In the meantime, The Daily Mail are baying for Sawers blood (Daily Mail), following their crack investigation in to Mrs. Sawers completely unprotected Facebook pages.

Way back in October 2007, I asked the 200-ish audience members of the BIMA's Great Facebook debate - predominantly social media and related industry workers - to raise their hands if they felt 100% confident they understood who could see what on their Facebook accounts. About 4 hands went up, and mine wasn't one of them, despite the fact that I'd spent a year working on social networking service privacy settings. Since then, the third party application explosion has continued to muddy already the unfathomable waters of overly granular permissions settings. By January 2008, if came as little surprise to anyone working in the social networking service and privacy space that Facebook was being investigated by the UK's Information Commisioners Office for potential Freedom of Information Act infringements.

Currently, Facebook is rejigging it's operation model, simultaneously moving towards a more open platform and trying to make user permissions more understandable, including jettisoning it's regional networks in favor of sharing information between groups. All this is good news, and I look forward to tracking Facebook's progress. In the meantime, the best advice I can offer anyone is if you are using any service and aren't clear about who can see your content or how the permissions work, act as if the service is completely public. Don't post anything you would mind your mum, boss, colleague or local Daily Mail journo seeing.

The real story in the Sawers fiasco is, once again, is the one that research in the area has consistently pointed up. In general, people do not read terms of service or privacy statements. People like social networking services because of the warm glow of friendly, trusted association (some would say homophily) they submerge themselves in. Security and permissions settings are only as good as people can immediately or at least easily understand, leaving children, young people, vulnerable adults & MI6 potentially at risk.

Within increasingly connected societies, where the online is commonly integrated into our everyday social transactions, we need to be smarter about the implications of how we use services, and ensure that everyone has access to basic information. There was a huge fuss made when an leaked draft of the Rose Review mentioned a service - Twitter - as the kind of platform that digital literacy may support. Although there are obvious limitations in teaching platforms and applications rather than a focus on skills, competencies and understanding (and it only takes a cursory look our current Microsoft heavy curriculum to see the problems of this approach) - what the MI6 debacle demonstrates is the importance of recognising how and why people use services, and equipping them to use the social web in ways that don't compromise personal, or international, security. 

The Information & Privacy Commisioner/Onterio has a recently updated PDF on How to protect your privacy on Facebook.

You can find basic information about online identity management relevant to people in all work places in my recent work on behalf of Childnet International for the UK Government's Department for Children, Schools and Families: Cyberbullying, supporting school staff (PDF) 

If your organisation doesn't have a current employer and employee social web strategy in place, get in touch and I can help you design and implement one. I do special security service rates.

Related posts: ABC of permissions granularity

Digital Literacy Debate

Picture credit CollaboraiveSociability by vaXzine

I've put up a wiki to help organize attendees, resources, schedule and outputs from the Digital Literacy debate that will be taking place online, in Elluminate, on Friday 27 March 2009, at 1pm GMT.

The event arose from conversations on Twitter, around the meaning and definition of digital literacy, and frustration about getting it on the national agenda. I firmly believe that we need to be equipping our learners - whatever age they may be - with the skills to not only take advantage of the information and opportunities offered by technology, but to take an active role in shaping and creating those opportunities - social, educational, political, civic, and economic.

At the end of January 2009 the UK Government published the Digital Britain Interim Report consultation. One look at the official site (more PDF's than you can shake a small wood at) and the accompanying discussion site - basically a blog post and a lot of comments - may be enough to convince many that this is a timely debate.

Fortunately the UK's social media credibility was ably defended by two user-generated projects - Tony Hirst and Joss Winn's Digital Britain Interim Report site, which enabled users to reply paragraph by paragraph to the consultation text, and then the dynamic duos Fake Digital Britain Report, which allowed users to collaboratively write their own, alternative document.

Although the Digital Briton interim report does outline a commitment to actions to "ensure fairness and access, with universal availability and promotion of skills and media literacy", the practical debate tended to focus on and stall over the technical issues of universal internet access and minimum speed (aka the 2Mbps debate).

The purpose of this discussion is to try focus on and move forward on issues surrounding Digital Literacy. The focus of the debate will be the UK education sector, but international attendees and contributors are more than welcome. Recently, Digital Literacy has gained a lot of traction within  academic and educational technology discussion within the UK, and is generally thought of as A Good Thing. However, some important questions have yet to be addressed.

• Is Digital Literacy the right term to be using? What are the alternatives?
• What is Digital Literacy? can we agree a succinct and useful definition? 
• What are the constituent parts of a robust and meaningful Digital Literacy education?
• How is Digital Literacy currently being addressed in the UK, with in the schools, Further Education, Adult, Community, Life Long & Work Based Learning, Higher Education and other learning sectors? 
• How do we support a national discussion about Digital Literacy?

These aren't all the questions that need addressing. Please feel free to add those you think are missing over at the wiki, so that we can draw up the agenda to best reflect the interests of attendees.

If you haven't used Elluminate before, you'll need to download Java and make sure your speakers work with the platform! It's pretty easy, but needs to be taken care of in advance. If you'd like to speak (rather than just listen and use the text chat) you'll also need a microphone. A webcam would be great & will let us see you. Instructions, Java check and download available here: http://www.elluminate.com/support/index.jsp

More very soon. In the meantime, please do head over to the wiki, sign up, and feel free to  add suggestions and resources.

ThoughtFest 09

Last week I was fortunate to be one of the attendees at the fantastic Thought Fest 2009 conference, held at the University of Salford's Think Lab. Organised by organized by Pontydysgu with the support of the JISC Evolve network and the European Mature-IP project, the event attracted top class learning technology researchers and practitioners from across Europe. Potential attendees pitched for place prior to the event, submitting their ideas for outline sessions - Dave White from Oxford University & I formed a digital literacy tag team and were lucky enough to snaffle two of the highly prized places.

About 30 delegates (most of whom are on Twitter) attended the two day event designed to bring together researchers in Technology Enhanced Learning in an open forum to debate the current issues surrounding educational technologies. Within a semi-structured (and pretty mobile) framework that was negotiated by delegates, we particularly focused on theory into practice: how and where research impacts on practice and where practice drives research.

The whole event was excellent, but I'll share some of my highlights.

Our (the red) team came a respectable third in the diabolically evil ViolaQuest, which was masterminded by Nicola Whitton and Rosie Jones, a couple of the UK's leading Alternative Reality Game (ARG) researchers and designers. The game involved unraveling mainly geographic and environmental clues. They also managed to include the Emerge bearded lady meme:

 
Photo credit: Rozberry redteam

There were some great show and discuss sessions, including Maria Perifanou on using Wikiquests in language Learning, Pat Parslow on Digital ID & Kathrin Kaufhold on the Awesome project.

I missed out on Jen Hughes's digital cartoon workshop, taking part instead in the podcasting workshop led by Andreas Auwärter. Dave & I picked the travelogue assignment, and produced a gonzo journalism piece on The Salford Lift Experience, inspired in part by out experience of the Maxwell Building lifts. Unfortunately, half of this masterpiece was lost to the random gods of audio, so the world will never hear Dave's very informative description of the up and down buttons, nor believe there was a student who felt the lift experience in Salford had drastically improved over the last two years, various other lift based interviews or the toilet on the stairwell incident. For those of you who can be bothered, the last part is here:

Listen to The Salford Lift Experience (mp3)

There were some excellent recordings produced on the day, notably a advert for online identity management cleaning services, which I'll link to as soon as they go up.

The award for most awesome presentation has to go however to the SAPO campus team, who will be rolling out the worlds first institution wide supported PLE this September. You can see their presentation slides here. Basically, The University of Aveiro are moving away from the managed learning system model and providing a supported Personal Learning Environment (PLE) service linking in University functionality with member selected and supported web 2.0 distributed activity. Why is this amazing? The global edtech community have been talking about how institutions can engage with learner-centered PLEs for a while now, but Aveiro and the SAPO team are putting it into practice. Campus wide. In September. You can find out more and ask questions over at the Though Fest site.

The problem with the mother

Link love: This post builds on the case study I contributed to the Eduserv workshop on Digital Identities at the British Library today. Everyone's case studies are lodged over at the Pattern Language Network site, along with Yishay's Slidedeck pattern language tutorial on writing a case study. It also moves forward some observations I made in my post Pictures of Children Online a couple of years ago.

From the workshop intro:

"We use the term ‘digital identity’ to refer to the online representation of an individual within a community, as adopted by that individual and projected by others. An individual may have multiple digital identities in multiple communities.
Eduserv have recently funded three projects on digital identity as a result of our 2008 grants call. This workshop will help the projects gather case-studies about the ways in which digital identity is currently manifest in UK higher education.
This event is aimed at people who have an interest in the issues around digital identity in higher education including employers, HR staff, careers guidance staff, standards experts, students and academics.
Prior to the workshop we will be collecting a series of “stories” about digital identity from people attending the event. On the day, we will be working in groups to discuss and add to the series. Following this, we will analyse the stories in order to find reoccurring themes or patterns."

The group I worked with looked at two case studies, my own and Controlling Flickr Contacts, from Margarita Perez Garcia. 

Case Study: other people's identities

Summary:   
This study looks at issues of parental responsibility & identity disavowal
Created 08 Jan 2009 by Josie Fraser
 
Situation:
What was the setting in which this case study occurred?

Like most people working in the field of social media, I have a purposefully easy to find online presence. I belong to multiple social networks, for work, for research, and for experience. The social networks (& I’m using a broad definition here, as outlined in http://www.digizen.org/socialnetworking/ )  I use most frequently are typically those that I can also most easily repurpose and use to maintain a constantly updated pubic presence – Twitter, Fickr, my own blogs, Delicious. Probably more importantly though, they are also the ones that allow me to socialise, discuss, hang out and meet new people. I started using the internet about 12 years ago to socialise, prompted by the physical limitations of being a single mother, of being broke all the time and not having a social or family network. For me the experience of being online was an extremely positive and liberating one, & remains so.

Task:
What was the problem to be solved, or the intended effect?

The primary issue was wanting to protect my son from harm, in the broadest sense, and to act respectfully towards him.

I am used to belonging to self-determined communities of people who I like and respect, who I often know exclusively or primarily online. It might seem like an obvious extension of my friendship and relationship building to share stories and pictures of my son, and to model a sense of my everyday experience – which heavily features the joys and logistics of motherhood -online.

However, there are several reasons why I don’t do this. Firstly, there’s thorny the issue of consent, and how my son negotiates and understands this at different points I his life.

There are also ethical, or just straightforwardly thoughtful, considerations. My mum has a particularly embarrassing picture of me that haunted the whole of my childhood. As an adult, I’m ok with it (no, really). Thankfully my mum was mostly sensitive about my particular loathing of this picture and didn’t get it out at every available opportunity – if she’d have put it online I can imagine I would have been mortified. Maybe not at the time she put it up, but certainly a few years down the line, and especially if anyone from my school had come across it.

There's also the issue of digital presence. Is it up to us to contribute to our children’s digital presence? Would you have liked your parents contributing to what searches of you might return? Perhaps by now I would have loved that embarrassing picture of myself – maybe it would have come to mean something entirely different to me. But at different points in my life it certainly wouldn’t have been at all welcome.

The other obvious issues are internet related child abuse and bullying. I’m very much against a moral-panic approach to using technology, and I also think it’s very important that we evaluate and regard risks appropriately. While the vast majority of child abuse takes place entirely offline, and is typically perpetrated by the victims family or immediate circle, that’s also no reason to dismiss the chances of a child or young person we know coming into contact with someone who could harm them. We take steps to educate them about a range of strategies they can use to look out for themselves in their offline and online dealings. In the same way, we need to model good practice ourselves.

Another reason for ‘protecting’ my son and not talking about being a mother was linked to financial insecurity. My career is on the way to being well established, and I’ve proven that I can manage to raise a child ‘alone’ (I moved closer to my mum and sister, so I have the luxury of a support network now) and so it worries me less that people might judge me and choose not to employ me because of my status as a single mother.

Actions:
What was done to fulfil the task?

Initially, I kept all pictures of my son strictly within private, friends or family only permissions on Flickr. This has changed – I have a couple of pictures of my son as a small child in public. I’m similarly careful about the rest of my young family members too – I posted a picture of my  then 14 year old niece last year only to have it immediately favourited by a complete pervert. I removed the picture from public view, and blocked the pervy guy.

Similarly I don’t really talk about being a mother, although I’ve noticed this changing as my son becomes more independent himself.

Basically, I negated any public online identity that explicitly represented me as a mother for a long time.

Results:
What happened? Was is a success? What contributed to the outcomes?
    
Yes, it worked very well, since I have been consistent and systematic , had clearly defined rules about representing my son which I’ve stuck too. However, my son is getting older, his and my identities are both significantly shifting, and I’m wondering about ‘not having been a mother’. Was it just a handy tactic, or was it a cowardly disavowal of parenthood?  Is ‘being a mother’ in this sense important? For me, or for others?

Lessons Learned:
What did you learn from the experience?

Protecting your children online is actually really easy; watch out for the political speculation.

As we worked through stories to patterns, a very strange thing happened - the role of motherhood disappeared. And this was very clearly another compromise on behalf of the child - in order to demonstrate the meta pattern/problem concerning the protection of the child, we had to make the troublesome issue of the mother go away. The problem of the mother turned out to be that she was the mother. The problem wasn't one that could be solved outside the context of wide spread social and political change. So our title became Others First Managing the tensions between identity & personal responsibility, where identity is enmeshed and shaped by, in this explicit case, the vulnerable other of the child. From this it's possible to extrapolate the pattern on to a broader context - for example, anyone who needs to manage their own or another's online identity or personal safety. If we had more time we could have extended the pattern to look at different kinds of identity management - for example the management of being gay within a homophobic society, the management of responsible friendship etc.

What really struck me today was how the solution to effective protection - that could be interperated as concealment, repression, or confinement to specific circles, mirrors and perpetuates existing social inequalities - making already under represented and less visible groups - namely children and mothers in this case, though I'd argue the same strategy can be applied to a lot of other troublesome identities/bodies - as shadowy in online public spaces as they are off line. 

Random 7

Kind of like high 5, but not. Thank you Mark Hawker for memeing me, & posting the rules (although feeling a bit Déjà vu on this one, wondering if black holes are really just meme collisions):

• Link your original tagger(s), and list these rules on your blog.
• Share seven facts about yourself in the post - some random, some weird.
• Tag seven people at the end of your post by leaving their names and the links to their blogs.
• Let them know they’ve been tagged by leaving a comment on their blogs and/or Twitter.

1. I love comics, esp. Los Bros Hernandez. This is a result of growing up on the fantastic UK girls psychological horror comic Misty, and the mighty booty of my step dads complete collection of Marvel's 1960s output.

2. My parents moved us to North Wales for several years when I was a child to escape the impending nuclear Armageddon.

3. My stepdad had a horrible accident while we were there, trying to fix the TV arial in the middle of a storm. He fell off the roof and lost his memory, but got a cool scar that runs front to back of his chest where lightning shot through.

4. My favorite Bette Davis film is Old Acquaintance

5. Max Ernst, Blondie & The Scarlet Witch were my childhood heros

6. I love working as a social & educational technologist, no matter how many times I have to explain what that might mean to people. I secretly fear the End Of Electricity but I'm always happy being with other people in face to face situations, so probably I could just switch jobs.

7. If I had to get a film directors name tattoed on my arm, I'd go with Jean Vigo

I'm tagging Michelle A. Hoyle, Sarah Horrigan, Rebecca Newton, Graham Attwell, Alfie Dennen, deCabbit, & number 10 Downing Street

Twitter allegiance

In the spirit of passing time at Christmas, and following on from a heated discussion about the meaning and robustness of community in online environments, I invited 100 of my 1,276 current Twitter followers to fill in a quick survey cunningly designed to provide a fairly wonky measure of community allegiance. Of course I welcome critical feedback about the methodology employed, but I had two hours sleep last night and yes, I quickly realised the massive cultural bias implicit in most if not all of the questions.

I love Twitter and I've spent an unhealthy amount of time hanging out there in the last year. It's a great site: friendly, open, sharing - sometimes even a little too sharing, but is it a community? Are online meeting places just a useful ruse to avoid the reality of community corrosion offline? Have social networking services taken the place of Baudrillard's Disneyland schema - are they imaginary communities serving to mask the absence of 'real' communities?

Obviously a handful of poorly conceived questions and a small random sample cannot hope to answer such weighty concerns. Maybe they can tell us something about how friendship and civic responsibility are reconfigured within new networks that run through and across geographic boundaries and levels of social contact. Or maybe not.

I invited 100 people to answer - this number determined by the ease of extrapolating percentages and the limit of free accounts over at PollDaddy. Unfortunately the service stopped working for some reason after 90 respondents so the following figures are taken from that final total.

Everyone spent approximately 6 minutes completing the survey, and those 90 nice people filled out the survey in about 3 hours from my initial call for help. Respondents came from Europe and the US, and from the rest of the unknown world. I'm in the UK and operating on GMT time, and most of the people I have met in 3D as well as on Twitter or online come from the UK, so no surprises that baring those 'there be Dragon' lands who represented the largest constituency of respondents.



Each question asked for a yes, no or maybe response to helping out @josiefraser in a variety of scenarios. All respondents were anonymous, although a bunch disclosed their answers to me over at Twitter.

Question 1: Would you fill out a survey for me?

OK - a pretty self-selecting answer since respondents had already clicked through a link asking them to do so, but given that they had no idea what they were being asked to fill out and only internet promises of 'a very short survey', still gratifying that there were no 'no' answers. I'm pretty easy to please and the survey could have finished there, however I pressed on in the interests of academic rigour.

Question two: Would you do a Google search for me, in response to me wondering about something that was obviously searchable?

This question was designed to find out if the respondants would be wiling to do something that took a more effort and thought than ticking boxes, but not too much more. Quite a high percentage (13.3%) said no. Given the amount of JFGI tweets & general annoyance at time wasting questions that flows through the social media den of iniquity that is Twitter, I wasn't that surprised. Given that I work in Social Media myself, I'd have actually thought the number would be higher. However I will regard the high yes figure (53%) as a sign of the generosity of my Twitter community and not as cynical commentary on my skills.

Question three:  Would you step away from your computer and find out something that was in the same room, but not within reach of your computer chair for me?

The first real test of my respondents mettle! Would they be prepaired to help me out in a way that required actual physical effort?



80% of them would! Pressing forward:

Question four: Would you buy a pint for me?



Less success here than the standing up and looking around for something for me question, but still an impressive 68.9% said yes, they would buy me a pint. A pint of what wasn't specified, but it's still probably fair to assume that some of the 11.1% who wouldn't buy me a pint refused on religious grounds, because they look too young to get served in a pub, or in consideration of my health. 

Question five: Would you lend me a tenner (£10)?



Knowing that my Twitter community isn't made up predominantly of very rich people, 52.2% of people who would lend me money is a huge result. Thanks!

Question six: If my house burnt down, could I come and live with you for a week?



OK - now on to the intimate questions. Would you let me come and live in your personal space on a temporary basis? An amazing 41.6% said yes, with a further 37.1% giving me an encouraging maybe - presumably some of them on the condition that I hadn't just burnt down my own house. This was one of only two questions skipped by anyone, presumably because of the level of moral complexity and lack of context. Interestingly, some people who wouldn't lend me money agreed to let me come stay with them.

Question seven: If I developed a really bad allergy, would you adopt my cats?

This question was designed to test the long term commitment of my Twitter community. Actually, it was probably the most badly designed question here, since it doesn't account for other peoples allergies/aversions to cats, or their own personal and domestic circumstances. Also, I've previously tweeted about the feral cat I now grudgingly look after, who has invaded my house and regularly attacks or intimidates me.

 
 However - this result conclusively proves that 1) there aren't a lot of cat lovers in the Twitterverse and 2) more people pay attention to your tweets than you suspect. 71.1% of respondents were not prepared to save my cats from a possible one way trip to the vet, and a further 11% would think about it.

Question eight: If I needed to stay in the country, and you weren't already married to someone else, would you marry me?

Really digging deep here, and asking people all kinds of ethically engaged questions about someone that they possibly only know off Twitter. There are legal barriers, bureaucratic nightmares, and questions of feeling and delicacy, as Dickens and Austin would put it. Additionally, considering the low figures of respondents currently likely to be living in countries where same sex marriage is legal would probably put some of my respondants off.



Even so - 7.8% of my respondants would marry me if I really needed them to and a staggering 20% were willing to negotiate terms before deciding either way!

 

Question nine: would you donate a kidney to me?

After mentioning beer, I might have had better luck with a less obviously alcohol damage prone organ, but with only two questions to go under the free account restrictions, I had to hit my respondents hard. We've all seen the scenario: If it was in your power to save someone (albeit someone off Twitter) with only serious but usually non-life threatening harm to yourself, would you do it?



Again, one person declined to answer all together, and 51.7% very reasonably turned me down flat. An amazing 48.3% of respondents either would or would consider donating a major organ! Humbled and astonished are the only words to describe how I was feeling by this point. In the UK, only 26% of the population are on the NHS Organ Donor Register, and have signed up to have their organs used to save a life after their death.

Question ten: In the event of a zombie apocalypse, would you throw yourself between me and the oncoming brain-ravenous hoard?

Given the total likelihood of this doing very little except stalling my inevitable demise, or at best, enabling me to reload my shotgun, I was expecting about no people to step forward for this one. However, my Twitter community is obviously far more heroic and selfless than the average street where people have to actually live next door to one another. Even given that a small percentage of the 11.1% who would cushion me from brain loss possibly have never seen a zombie movie, are feeling Moe Szyslak-depressed at the thought of getting the Mama Mia DVD for Christmas, or actually have a bit of a thing for zombies, this is a resounding victory for imaginary communities everywhere.





Happy Christmas & a fantastic New Year to everyone over at Twitter who has made being online in 2008 such a pleasure, and to all good Social Network Service providers everywhere :)