SocialTech

Twitter for School Staff Professional Development

All school staff benefit from engagement with continuing professional development (CPD) – keeping up to date in their subject and curriculum area, and in teaching approaches and methods. Web and mobile based technologies have changed the landscape for school staff in terms of how they can connect to other educators both locally and across the globe. Personal Learning Networks (PLN), developed and managed by educators, allow school staff to discover, discuss and share relevant ideas, resources and approaches.

Twitter is jam packed with educators from all over the country, and all over the world, who are interested in sharing with and learning from colleagues. I ran two Twitter for Educators CPD sessions in March, designed to support staff in using Twitter in developing their professional networks. The workshops support work around the DigiLit Leicester project sixth framework strand – Technology supported Professional Development, and were designed to help staff improve their confidence and skills in this area.

Two sessions were held at De Montfort University: a beginner workshop, aimed to get staff up and running with Twitter and to introduce the basics and an intermediate workshop, offering essential tips and tools for improving the Twitter experience.

Create your Twitter Presence

Josie Fraser - Twitter Workshop - getting started (March 2014) from Josie Fraser

This session was aimed at absolute beginners and assumed no prior use of Twitter. The workshop began with an introduction to the basics of Twitter; creating a username, choosing an avatar (profile picture) and writing your Twitter bio (160 character biography). Attendees were then supported in setting up their profiles through a ‘desktop tour’ of Twitter, a walkthrough of the sign up process.

For many beginners, the anatomy of a tweet can be the most complicated part of getting to grips with the service. With hashtags, retweets, mentions and more, beginners can easily be overwhelmed. A Twitter basics worksheet (word) was provided for staff, identifying the key conventions used in tweets, to help staff familiarise with these elements. Attendees were also encouraged to work together, tweeting one another, to build up confidence.

Top tips were also shared, focusing on the use of Twitter as an educator, and the implications that has for online behaviour and identity. Issues such as following students, parents or carers and the importance of checking the validity of information before tweeting were covered.

Developing your Personal Learning Networks (PLN) on Twitter

Josie Fraser - Twitter Workshop - build your network (March 2014) from Josie Fraser

The second session was designed for staff who are familiar with Twitter basics and already have profiles. This session focused on engaging with communities on Twitter and tips for growing PLNs. The workshop looked at how to write ‘sweet tweets’ – to share in a way that engages others.

The final section of the workshop focused on tools to aid effective tweeting: URL shorteners, like goo.gl which can track the number of times your link is accessed; mobile  and desk-based clients; and social bookmarking tools, to save and share useful tweets.We also looked at reviewing Twitter profiles (word).

 

Bonus links:

• You can see how the team used Storify to collect and curate tweets from our recent TeachMeet event
• The Teacher's Guide to Twitter - from @Edudemic
• Have you got a great Twitter resource that has been really useful? Recommend it in the comments!

 

Cross-posted from LCC SchoolTech

 

Understanding Open Educational Resources: Information for Schools

I'm happy to announce that  Dr Björn Haßler, Helen Neo, and Janet Blair, who will working with Leicester City Council's DigiLit Leicester project to create guidance for secondary school staff, designed to introduce and promote the use of Open Educational Resources (OER) across city schools.

OER describes teaching, learning, and research resources that are shared by people in the public domain, or released under an open licence which allows others to use and remix them.

There are millions of free to use resources that have been shared globally as Open Education Resources. These resources have been created and openly licenced by and for educators to use – for example  lesson plans, courses, classroom activities, and revision materials.  If school staff don’t know what Open Licences are or how to find OER, they are going to miss out on the benefits of making use of existing, high quality resources. Staff and students in our schools create amazing resources all the time – if they openly licence these they could share them nationally and globally – helping out other educators and learning communities.

The OER project is part of the Council’s DigiLit Leicester initiative, designed to support schools in making the most of the city’s current investment in technology, as part of Leicester’s £340 million pound Building Schools for the Future Programme. The project has identified a gap in support and information for teachers relating to the use and creation of Open Educational Resources. An understanding of OER and open licencing will support schools and staff in sharing and accessing resources, and in developing staff and learner digital literacy skills and knowledge.

The team have previously worked on several initiatives which support the creation and use of use of Open Education Resources by schools across Europe and internationally, including the ORBIT project and the OER4Schools programme, at the Faculty of Education, University of Cambridge.

 

 

Cross-posted from LCC SchoolTech

Notes on the NYC Department of Education Social Media Guidelines

NYC Department of Education (DOE) issued their Social Media Guidelines this week. As someone working to develop digital literacy for school staff and learners at city wide level in the UK, I'm of course very interested in the approach they've chosen to taken.

It's disappointing, although not surprising, to see that the media coverage of the guidelines was predominantly limited to negative framing of the friending issue - one of the least controversial elements of the guidance. That school staff should not friend learners (in particular, connect to learners existing personal accounts) on social media sites, is advice you'll find in the 2009 Cyberbullying: Supporting School Staff that I led on for the UK's Department of Children Schools and Families, on behalf of Childnet International.

Some of questions I asked myself when reading through were:

1. Does this policy help keep learners and staff safe? By that I don't mean, does it prevent them from doing anything that carries risk, but does it support them in recognising risk and managing risk, and responding to harm?

2. Does the policy support NYC staff who are already using social media productively and responsibly with their learners, for their own professional development, and/or for school communication and activity?

There are some great things going on in the NYC public sector - in Government, schools, museums and libraries - in terms of the social and educational use of technologies. And there will be DOE employees already using social media effectively and responsibly with their learners and for their own professional development - how does the guidance support them? My comments on the guidance are limited to how it reads as a stand alone document - there is reference to implementation activity but no detail.

3. Does the policy encourage staff and schools who don't currently use of social technologies to develop the skills and confidence to make critical and effective use of techniques and resources?

I've responded directly to the policy and reproduced it (without permission) here. I'm happy to take the DOE text policy text down if they'd like me to (please just ask); my comments are obviously clearer if you can read them in direct relation to the text. DOE text is in bold throughout, my comments in regular.

A warning for people clicking through - it's a long document.

My summery thoughts (aka 'the short version'):

Although the guidelines open with a positive statement about the potential of educators and schools use of social media to support learners, the content of the policy doesn't really support or develop this opening stance.

The broad approach is to draw a line between two kinds of engagement with social media - 'personal' and 'professional'. These are not defined particularly clearly, and the binary doesn't reflect most peoples - including learners and education employees - actual engagement with and experience of social media.   

This effectively de-legitimises existing practice that doesn't conform to the distinction of 'work/not work', and provides an extremely limited model of how technology might be used.

This post: Personal - Professional - Organisational: three basic online identities is useful in terms of my questions and arguments, but basically - organisational use of social media (what I do on behalf of my employer an in direct relation to my role as an employee) is not the same as professional use of social media (professional development or engagement activities relating to me as a professional, but not as an official employee or in an official capacity).

The guidelines decouple 'personal' and 'professional' use, and defines all 'organisational' activity as 'professional' activity. I'd argue this approach isn't a productive one. The guidelines risk stymieing the development of staff skills and confidence in the use of technology to support learning an learning communities; it doesn't attend to common safeguarding situations; it could potentially derail current effective practice; and I'd also say it oversteps the employee-employer relationship with regard to existing and new effective and responsible use of social media.

Additionally, the centralisation of regulating network activity is always going to be, at best, a very limited approach. There's a basic misunderstanding of the nature of networked activity going on if you think that the most effective way of addressing behaviour and safeguarding issues is not by supporting and prioritising whole community engagement and development. 

While official guidance is usually written by people who have a nuanced view of the complexity of their area, it's issued and often expected to be implemented by people who may have limited experience of the topic being addressed. It's crucial then to ensure any guidance is clear enough to not just end up being used by gatekeepers to discourage potentially positive activity.

Comments on NYC Department of Education Social Media Guidelines

photo credit: by Ed Yourdon, shared under a Creative Commons licence

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.

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. 

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

Being There

Photo credit: Invasion by Henryleelucas

Dave White's recent post, Not 'Natives' or 'Immigrants' but 'Visitors' & 'Resident' slipped by largely without comment, which is a huge shame. It's a must-read post because it does what a lot of people have been trying to do and not managing that well - move us beyond Prensky's seminal dichotomy of Digital Natives and Digital Immigrants.  Prensky's metaphors powerfully explain differences in approach and experience between users who have grown up with technologies (the natives) and older users who find difficulty in accessing new technological cultures and practices (the immigrants) as not just a cultural but a neurobiological one. Prensky's arguments are easy to knock down, particularly if you happen to subscribe to a more fluid account of development. What they haven't been however is easy to replace or move forward from. Dave's work probably succeeds in taking the argument forward precisely because it's user-centric, looking at how users engage with technologies. His research points up the importance of 'being there'; the distinction between users who inhabit a space or place online, and users who don't view themselves as having any kind of non-functional engagement with online environments and tools. Dave calls these visitors and residents (as you may have gathered from his academically typical unwieldy title), and if you haven't gone blind already head over to his post to see the initial sketching out of these roles. These are far more granular distinctions, robust enough to cut across socio-cultural differences, and agile enough to encompass a wide range of behaviors and belonging. my initial thoughts on seeing the post still stand:

"I think this is a big improvement on the native and immigrant dichotomy, I really look forward to seeing how it moves forward.  It seems very possible to be a resident on a specific social networking service or site, but a visitor to other services and in all aspects of web engagement. I think 'being there' is a useful concept to explore, & possibly some strait forward measures of engagement. I also think that peoples conceptions of privacy & being online are worthwhile exploring in terms of their immersion levels. The Pew data from the end of last year suggested that the majority (60%) of internet users aren't worried about how much information is available about them online - I'm suspicious that if true, this is because the people who are worried stay off line/confine themselves to visitor-type behaviour."

UPDATE: Dave's video presentation on visitors & residents

4th ALT-C Edubloggers meetup

UPDATE - venue changed to the OLD BAR - still in the same SU building :)

Really looking forward to our fourth ALT-C Edublogger meetup next week, taking place at Leeds Student Union Old Bar, Tuesday 9th September, 19.30 onwards. The Alt-C evening meal (for those who are attending the conference & have signed up for it) is served in the adjacent Refectory building, and as usual will provide a handy initial meeting point for some of you. Otherwise, head over to the Mine Bar. We may be moving on somewhere else but we'll stay at the Mine Bar until at least 20.30.

We've been lucky enough to have had some great special guests at previous meetups - including James Farmer, Stephen Downes, Barbara Dieu, Christopher D. Sessums and Barbara Ganley. This year's meeting promises to be as jam packed with world-class edubloggers as ever, including Scott Wilson and Graham Attwell. George Siemens will also be in town - he's speaking at ALT-C early Wednesday - and I'm looking forward to meeting up with him for the first time in 3D.

As ever - this is an informal, fun get together. You don't have to dress up and you don't have to be an old school edublogger to come along. Everyone who has an interest in edublogging is welcome. To co-inside with F-ALT, the first ever grass roots fringe event at ALT, which will be tackling a range of cutting edge topics in a fast, dynamic debate framework, we'll be holding the microblogging session on the night. Su White will be facilitating speakers Helen Whitehead, James Clay, Jay Cousins, Andy Powell & maybe me in a kung-fu style roundtable. Good quality heckling and any imaginative audience participation will be entirely welcome.

falt08

Digital Divide slam invite

I'm off to ALT-C next week, along with most of the UKs edtechs and learning technologists. I'll be pretty busy, supporting the 4th annual ALT-C Edublogger meetup, helping host the Emerge reception & live radio broadcast, and contributing to the F-ALT fringe activities.

I'm really excited to be teaming up again with with Frances Bell, Helen Keegan and new girl Christina Costa to be delivering our second ALT-C slam workshop. Last years session explored what web 2.0 meant to participants, and went down really well. This year we're trying to be even more reckless ambitious and inviting old and new friends from all over the world to pitch in to this years slam topic/competition, which is, in keeping with ALT-C's over-arching theme, The Digital Divide.

What we hope to get out of the session is a wide ranging exploration of dimensions of the digital divide: To produce and collect short real-world and digital pieces on what the digital divide means to people, how it can be interpreted, and what it's impacts are. In other words, what does the digital divide mean to you?

Obviously whole we're hoping for a reasonably diverse bunch of participants on the day, there are going to be limits on the heterogeneity of a group of people at an ed tech conference in Leeds on any particular afternoon. So we'd really like to encourage other people to join in. We are looking for participants from all over the world to contribute to building a resource which is interesting, innovative, and engaging topics. We'd like to build a cross cultural snapshot mosaic of what the digital divide can mean and how it's experienced.

The workshop will be running next Wednesday, 10 September 2008 at the University of Leeds, and participants will be creating and performing 'slams' around the digital divide theme - performance pieces which tackle issues in multiple ways. Checkout last years slams for some ideas of this experimental format, and this years wiki for more of an explanation.
   

We'll be capturing and uploading content until midnight GMT on the 10th of September, and then giving everyone a chance to vote for their favorite slam, from those created and performed on the day and those contributed by educators across the globe.

We're producing some sample slams for you to explore, and you can find information about how to upload your own contribution here.

So, interested in experimental, collaborative and distributed research processes? Thinking our session sounds like fun and might end up being a useful resource? Then join in!

1. Come along to our session! This time it's scheduled at a reasonable hour :)

2. Create something for the wiki. You slam could be a picture, a slideshow, a podcast, a 90 second Flickr video - anything. Tell us one thing the digital divide means to you.

3. Already been working on the digital divide? Great! Repurpose something already up or just send us the link if it's already in a fast, accessible format.

4. Checkout the entries once they're up and vote for your favorite.

5. Keep your fingers crossed for us! 

"If you, as an individual or small group, have got something to say about the Digital Divide between now and midnight Wednesday 10 September 2008 check converter, then you can create a slam, publish it here, comment on slam pages.
Then you can vote for your favourite between 11 and 14 September (deadline midnight GMT). We will announce the winners here and by message to members on Monday 15 September. That means that people from around the world can join in, not just those coming to our workshop. You can run your own workshop, or create your own slam, maybe with your friends. More details on how you can participate, just stick to our few simple guidelines."

There will be prizes! Probably not very good ones, but prizes nevertheless.

falt08

Young People and Social Networking Services

I'm delighted to announce that the Young People and Social Networking Services report that I have been working on for Childnet International, with the generous support of Becta, is now available from Childnet's digital literacy and citizenship site, Digizen.

It's a pretty comprehensive report, with the whole shebang available for download under a Creative Commons License on site, or from here:

Download fullReport.pdf

and weighing in at 37 pages. The online version breaks the sections up for your viewing pleasure - so you can just dip in to the sections which are of interest or use to you. The report was written from a UK schools and Further Education perspective, although much of the information will be useful to people working outside of these two contexts.

It isn't a completely introductory level document, but should be useful and informative for people who have a responsibility care towards children and young people - including governors, principals and senior management teams, Safeguarding boards and local authorities - people who are making decisions concerning  educational provision and resourcing.  It will also be very handy for anyone working within the sector and wanting to use internet based services with young people.

What's in the pack?

What are Social Networking Services? looks at where we are in terms of definitions, and  splits services up into six main categories: Profile-based services (eg Bebo, Facebook, MySpace); Content-focused services (eg Flickr, YouTube); White-label networks (although I could have written a book about these); Multi-User Virtual Environments (although some of these aren't necessarily social networks - particularly those designed for younger children); Mobile services; and Microblogging/Presence update services (Social Search engines & Lifestream aps also get a mention as adjunct services). The version that's on the site is the short one. you can download the 9 page PDF on site or from here:

Download social-networking-overview.pdf

Evaluating Social Networking Services comes in two parts: an evaluation chart which has an online version and an easier-for-me-to-read downloadable version:

Download Sns.pdf

That's designed to be printed off big (well, A3). The services which were kind enough to take part are used as examples to help people make their own evaluations of services. Big thanks to everyone at Bebo, Facebook, Yahoo!, MySpace, Ning, Taking It Global and Google who pitched in and gave permissions. There is also a checklist guide that accompanies the chart, designed to walk you through what to look out for when evaluating services for use with young people. This covers a lot of things, including profile privacy, moderation, customisation, security and access issues, data management tools, and interoperability.

Benefits & Opportunities is a section looking at the potential positives for young people  and organisations of using social networking services.

Barriers & Risks looks some of the issues preventing educators from exploring social networking services and some of the e-safety issues involved.

The Ideas and Examples returns to the different kinds of social networking services outlined in the first section and looks at what educators in the UK and around the world are doing. I'd like to continue to develop and expand this section so all  suggestions are welcome - and of course you can always enter your fantastic project for this years International Edublog Awards :)

So that's it! Except to again thank the fantastic advisory board who worked on the project, keeping an eye on how the research was developing and what the final report looked like.