Posts Tagged ‘Target’
July 11, 2008
I’m finally making my way through a report that’s been sitting on my desk for months, Bridging the Digital Divide: Creating opportunities for marginalised young people to get connected, available from VicHealth. What’s interesting about the report is that its findings in terms of ICT usage by marginalised young people largely support those of reports into other demographics. That is to say, marginalised young people (p. 2):
- Are confident in their ICT skills
- Use Instant Messaging, email and social networking services to communicate, and to maintain and build relationships
- Create profiles on social networking sites such as Bebo and Hi5
- Are aware of the potential dangers online and have ways of dealing with unwanted contact
Furthermore, in a finding that surprised the reports’ authors, the study showed that ICT plays a larger role in the lives of marginalised young people than previously thought. This surprise reflects a common assumption that I frequently come across when talking to both school and university teachers: that is, that ‘a good number’ of students have poor access to technology, or that a similar number are still on dial-up. Here are some results for the marginalised demographic:
- 97% of participants in the study had access to the Internet: 44% at home, 30% in a library, 18% at school and 10% each from an Internet cafe or at work (p. 19).
- 49% had broadband access, and 13% were on dial-up. 5% used wireless (p. 19).
- Over half of participants accessed the Internet at least a few times a week (p. 40)
- The young people involved in the study felt they had ICT skills of a high standard (p. 40)
This study reflects what Green and Hannon point out in Their Space: Education for a Digital Generation, that is tbat the new digital divide is more about access to knowledge, than it is about access to hardware (p. 17, pp 59-60). It’s knowing how to use these emerging technologies to best effect (in work and school and life) that’s going to be important from now on.
Tags:Digital divide, Digital literacy, Reports and studies, Target, Young people
Posted in Digital literacy, Target | 1 Comment »
July 10, 2008
What are the factors most likely to lead to unwanted contact on the Internet? Well, according to data presented by Amanda Lenhart, a senior research specialist at the Pew Internet and American Life Project, it’s posting a photo online.
Speaking as part of an online safety panel at the 2008 National Educational Computing Conference in San Antonio, Lenhart outlined the factors most likely to predict contact from someone you don’t know:
- Posting a photo online.
- Having a profile online.
- Being female.
- Using the Internet to flirt.
Lenhart pointed out that the ‘being female’ finding may be due to differences between how boys and girls interpret scary contact — but that was inconclusive. Interestingly, Lenhart stated that no other factors significantly predicted contact: displaying your first name and last name, naming your school, naming your city … none of these things appreciably increased the chance of unsolicited contact. Lenhart pointed out the risks in these areas were way more likely to be to reputation than to gaining the attention of Internet predators.
Anastasia Goodstein, author of Totally Wired, was also part of the panel and she similarly had some balanced, informative comments to make on the whole cybersafety issue. You can view a video article on the panel’s discussion via the E-School News website.
Tags:Target
Posted in Cybersafety and cyberbullying, Target | Leave a Comment »
July 8, 2008
As a companion to my previous post, here are some of Digizen’s barriers and risks to harnessing social networking in education.
- Educators’ confidence and experience. As Digizen point out, teachers’ professional development is not always keeping up with new technologies, especially those adopted by younger people (p. 22).
- Negative views of social networking (p. 22). To this, I would add ‘uninformed’ views of social networking.
- Blocking and filtering of Internet sites, which makes it hard for teachers to use the net for educational purposes (p. 22).
- Digital media literacy policy. Although the Digizen report is UK-based, there are similar patterns here in Australia, as mthe teaching of media literacy varies from school to school. Digizen points in particular to the need for a nation-wide agenda for teaching principles of good online citizenship, technology use, social participationcopyright, and data management (p. 23).
- Lack of risk evaluation and management tools that can be applied to social networking and other Internet services (p. 23).
- Misunderstanding the nature of the social networking environment, wherein students think their online profiles and information is not publicly available when, in fact, it might be (p. 23).
The main thing here, IMHO, is that educators get educated themselves about the risks of social networking services. But before we can assess the risks, we educators need to actually know what social networking is. In my experience of working with teachers across sectors, there is a lot of confusion about what a MySpace or Facebook or Flickr or whatever site is. The best way to find out is to jump into those spaces and play around. Once we’ve done that, we’re in a much better position to form a balanced opinion on how these things work and what the risks and benefits are. Me, I’m an anthropologist by training and there’s nothing like a good bit of old-fashioned fieldwork, even if your field site is a Web site!
The full Digizen report on young people and social networking services is also available for download (pdf, 1.2 MB).
Tags:Reports and studies, Social networking, Target
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July 8, 2008
Digizen.org is a terrific Childnet International website promoting good digital citizenship for young people. The site focuses on social networking and cyberbullying and has produced some excellent, balanced materials on both topics that educators and parents will find accessible and no-nonsense. In fact, if you want a primer on what social networking is, Digizen give a very clear overview on their What are social networking services? page. Or you can just go and visit some social networking sites yourself and do some fieldwork …
Digizen has released a research report on young people and social networking services and one section, in particular, outlines the benefits and opportunities of social networking for learners. According to Digizen, social networking (p. 14):
- Helps young people develop a voice and build trust: it’s good for cultivating debating, discussion and personal skills.
- Encourages content creation, management and distribution, which supports creativity and encourages discussion about content ownership, data mangement and licensing options.
- Teachs collaboration, teamwork, listening and compromising skills by encouraging users to work, think, and act together.
- Promotes exploration and discovery by helping young people develop and deepen their interests as well as finding like-minded individuals with the same interests.
- Builds independence and resilience as young people learn to manage risk, judge and evaluate situations and deal with potential hostility online.
- Fosters real-world skills such as being able to adapt quickly to new technologies, as well as building literacy, interpretive and contextualisation skills.
The same report also points to the opportunities that social networking provides for education (pp 15-16):
- Developing of e-portfolios
- Enhancing literacy and communication skills
- Collaboration and group work
- Learning about data protection and copyright issues
- Learning about self-representation and presentation
- Learning about e-safety
- Producing public showcases for work, events or organisations
- Forming communities of practice
- Organising and scheduling work (time mangement)
- Being where the learners are
It’s obvious that social networking provides a huge opening for learning in the online world … but, like everything, it comes with risks that need to be manged. I’ll describe those risks as identified by Digizen in my next post, but, for now, if you want to check out how teachers have been using social networking in class, visit the report’s ideas and examples page for some inspiration — or let me know your own experiences with social networking and education.
The full report is also available for download (pdf, 1.2 MB).
Tags:Reports and studies, Resources, Social networking, Target
Posted in Social networking, Target | 1 Comment »
April 28, 2008
In the wake of the ‘Order for Closure’ fiasco that was visited upon Al Upton’s poor Mini-Legends, I’ve been doing some reading of the cybersafety research, trying to get some perspective on schools’ and parents’ cyberfears. The Creating and Connecting (pdf) report, put out in 2007 by the National School Boards Association in the US, makes several significant points in relation to students, social networking, and school responses:
- School policies and fears are out of whack with students’ and parents’ experiences of problems such as cyberbullying, cyberstalking and unwelcome encounters. Only a minority of students reported having had any kind of negative experience with social networking the previous three months, and even fewer parents reported that their children had had such experiences over the previous six months (p. 5)
- The problems encountered by young people online were the same as those encountered in any other media or in everyday life, namely inappropriate pictures and language (p. 5-6). Personally directed incidents were relatively rare, although of serious concern (p. 6).
- The majority of students are engaging in safe online behaviour, says the research (p. 6). This is also backed up by the Pew Internet Project’s Digital Footprints report, which shows that younger users of online sites are more to restrict access to their profiles and to withhold ‘hard’ information about themselves than are older users (pp. 21-22).
- In a pronounced example of schools’ misunderstanding of young people’s online behaviour and their attendant cybersafety awareness, the report demonstrates that fully 52% of school district leaders believed that “students providing personal information online has been a ‘significant problem’ in their schools”; and yet only 3% of students claimed to have ever handed over to strangers any personal information, including things such as their email address, IM details or chat name (p. 6).
Reports such as this one show that the same ‘stranger danger’ messages that we’ve always used with our kids also work online, and that children haven’t all of a sudden lost their ability to identify dodgy types, just because things are on the Web these days. Policies that prevent student access to the internet are reactive, arbitrary, unimaginative, and primarily about legal bottom-covering, rather than the realities of online life. Education is the key, and it seems to be working amongst parents and their children. Schools need to learn from that.
Tags:Being social, Cybersafety and cyberbullying, Education politics, Legal issues, Net Gen, Reports and studies, Social networking, Target, Use of media, Web Two Wowsers, Young people
Posted in Being social, Education politics, Net Gen, Target | Leave a Comment »
April 28, 2008
This is my new favourite report, even though it was published last year. I like it because the authors, Hannah Green and Celia Hannon, have solid opinions — informed by their own research — on how schools must engage with the learning needs of the Net Generation.
Green and Hannon insist that we must stop focusing so heavily on the hardware and instead start responding to the users: in other words, we need to build on what we know is already working with students, and we need to “develop strategies to bridge formal and informal learning” (p. 17), the latter of which is characterised in this context by self-motivation, ownership, purpose, and peer-to-peer learning (pp. 46-47). For Green and Hannon, it’s all about relationships and networks and not about PCs, which leads them to demand that we identify access to knowledge rather than access to hardware as characterising the new digital divide (p. 17, 59-60).
That’s the guts of what they’re saying, anyway. Here are some of the more specific points they make.
- The Net Gen use new media for strengthening existing relationships, rather than for creating new networks (p. 10). (The Never ending friending research found the same.)
- They are capable of self-regulation when kept well-informed about risks (p. 10)
- Debates around moral panic and technological determinism contrast with how Net Gen view and use technologies (p. 15).
- These technologies are used to facilitate already recognisable social interactions — nothing particularly new or crazy (p. 16).
- The internet provides a forum for creativity and expression — just as decorating your bedroom was an expression of the same for previous generations (p. 19). The difference is that the creations of the Net Gen are being shared with a worldwide audience (p. 19).
- There needs to be a focus on ‘soft skills’ rather than specific areas of knowledge (pp. 22-23). We need to be able to teach students initiative, intelligence, creativity, problem-solving … and we should lay off promoting the “false disctinction” (p. 24) between knowledge and skills.
- We must stop trying to figure out how children should be learning from technology; instead, we should seek to learn from their existing practices (p. 25). We need to tap into the students themselves as a resource, rather than thinking about what new resources can be added (pp 25-26).
- Young people are often concerned about the “unmanageable scale” of the Web and they find it difficult to evaluate and prioritise their search results (p. 68).
And here are some interesting stats:
- Few seem to value soft skills. Young people rank creativity fairly low: only eighth most important skill for the future (p. 27).
- Only 50% of parents selected ‘classroom lessons’ as the most important method of learning for their child (p. 30).
Tags:Being social, Digital divide, Learning environments, Net Gen, Reports and studies, Target, Use of media, Young people
Posted in Being social, Net Gen, Target, Technology | Leave a Comment »
April 25, 2008
In a recent Demos report out of the UK (Their Space: Education for a digital generation), Hannah Green and Celia Hannon identify a number of ICT myths held by the moral panickers and by the followers of the digital faith. Here they are.
Moral panic myths
- The internet is dangerous for children. The Demos research showed that most children are aware of stranger danger on the internet and are quite capable of self-regulating (p. 32). This is consistent with the findings of other reports such as that put out by the NSBA (pdf, 1MB).
- Junk culture is poisoning young people and taking over their lives. Green and Hannon basically point out what an oooooold argument this is: youth culture always challenges the orthodoxy, they write, and they further point out that where once TV was the target, now the blame is spread across a wider spectrum of media (p. 34).
- No learning happens and digital technologies are a waste of time. On the contrary, students are deploying a broad range of skills when using ICTs, which, the authors argue, often gives students the confidence to succeed in other, more formal contexts (pp. 35-36). Indeed, Green and Hannon demonstrate that children are often more able to identify educationally beneficial computer games than are adults (p. 36-37).
There is an epidemic of internet plagiarism in schools. Plagiarism should not be conflated with new ways of accessing information, say Green and Hannon (p. 38), and we need to teach students the higher-order thinking skills of critique, interpretation, assessment and evaluation.- Young people are disengaged and disconnected. This is just flat-out wrong. Many students are using ICTs to engage with cultural and political issues and many also seek mentoring via their connections (p. 39).
- We’re seeing the rise of a generation of passive consumers. Not true. Students are taking part in media communities, gaming communities, networking communities, you name it, and often there is a large element of production, communication and creativity going on with what Net Gen are doing online (p. 40-41). Hardly passive.
Digital faith myths
- All gaming is good. There are different orders of digital activity in gaming, say Green and Hannon, and we need to be aware of that — just as many children are themselves, and not all activites are equal (p. 42).
- All children are cyberkids. Here, we have to be careful not to talk about a certain set of behaviours demonstrated by those with high access and motivation with a whole generation. Green and Hannon found that there was a gap between ‘everyday communicators’ and the ‘digital pioneers’ (p. 42-43).
Tags:Culture, Digital literacy, ICTs, Net Gen, Reports and studies, Social issues, Target, Young people
Posted in Digital literacy, Gaming, Net Gen, Target, Technology | Leave a Comment »
March 21, 2008
As a follow-up to an earlier post on the 2008 Horizon Report, here’s what The Horizon Project Advisory Board identify as the main challenges facing higher ed over the next five years (p. 5):
- Need for innovation and leadership, at all levels, due to shifts in scholarship, research, creative expression and learning: “Experimentation must be encouraged and supported by policy”
- Increasing expectation that services and content will be delivered to mobile and personal devices
- Collaborative learning means having to develop new forms of interaction and assessment
- Need for instruction in how to create meaningful content with Web 2.0 tools, as well as instruction in visual, information and technological literacy. In particular, this asks us how are we going to develop curricula and assessments that apply to competencies in communication in blogs, digital videos, wikis, photo essays and the like?
These challenges are very similar to those identified in the 2007 Horizon Report, so it’s clear that we’re seeing a significant pattern emerge in terms of what’s needed in higher ed in the near future. Let’s hope we’re up to being creative and sensible in our responses to these issues as we meet them.
Tags:Educational leadership, Educause, Futures, Reports and studies, Target, Technology, Trends
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March 14, 2008
Social operating systems (SOSs) are identified by Educause in their Horizon Report 2008 as one of the key emerging technologies in education. Unlike social networking systems (such as Bebo, Facebook and MySpace), which contain uncontextualised information about users, and then only the connections we have explicitly told them about, Social Operating Systems will be able to take all the data that we have generated on the Web, aggregate it through an API (Application Programming Interface), and provide accurate information about the strength, depth and endurance of our connections.
How? you ask. Well, it’s going to be thanks to our friend Mr Web 3.0 and how he interprets the social graph we are creating with every click of a mouse. Here’s how the Horizon Report describes the social graph:
… the network of relationships a person has, independent of any given networking system or address book; the people one actually knows, is related to, or works with. At the same time, credible information about your social graph is embedded all over the web: in the carbon-copy fields of your emails; in attendee lists from conferences you attend; in tagged Flickr photos of you with people you know; in your comments on their blog posts and in jointly authored papers and presentations published online. (p. 26)
As Google says (and that’s their picture, below), if you take away the documents, you’re left with the connections between people.
SOSs will solve the headache of multiple log-ins and having to re-enter your data in each new social networking site you join, because the system will focus on you and not on the website you are joining. Tim Berners-Lee (who’s gotta know a thing or two) points to the example of booking a plane flight: what interests me is the flight, not the travel company’s website. An SOS will be able to integrate all the information about that flight from various sources and present me with what I need to know. It will be the event/situation/me that will be uppermost, not the websites or the devices or infrastructure that support the SOS.
How all of this relates to education, will be explored in a later post.
Tags:Educause, Futures, Semantic web, Social networking, SOSs, Target, Technology, Trends, Web 3.0
Posted in Futures, Target, Technology, Web 3.0 | Leave a Comment »
March 14, 2008
Each year, I hang out for Educause to release its Horizon Report, which identifies key emerging technologies, their likely impacts on education, and their Time To Adoption (TTA). The focus is on higher education, but there’s always something in the report for all educators. Here’s this year’s list:
- Grassroots video: newsclips, tutorials, information videos. This is a great class fieldwork tool for data collection. Also, videopapers and videoprojects around a topic encourage students to research, develop and present ideas in visual form. (p. 11). TTA = 1 year or less.
- Collaboration webs: collaborating on group documents, holding online meetings, swapping info and data. Virtual collaborative workspaces can be used for a course or study group, as well as personal portfolios (blog posts, photos, shared videos) (p. 14). Some courses at Arkansas State University are using Facebook instead of the campus LMS. YAY!!!!! TTA = 1 year or less.
- Mobile broadband: mobile access to internet content and software. Students collecting fieldwork data an take notes and photos and send them straight to a course blog for feedback (p. 18). TTA = 2-3 years.
- Data mashups: using combinations of data from different sources (e.g., Flickr, Facebook, Twitter) and bringing them together in Open APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) to create new understandings of data relationships and how we think about the world (p. 21). TTA = 2-3 years.
- Collective intelligence: which emerges from large groups of people coming together to create collective knowledge stores (cf Wikipedia and Freebase). These provide opportunities for self-study and practice in the construction of knowledge (p. 23), as well as learning from experts already working in the field. TTA = 4-5 years.
- Social operating systems: these will organise around people rather than content. SOSs will show how deep our relationships are, as well as being able to measure trust and credibility. There are huge implications here for collaboration, research and professional portfolios (pp 26 – 28). TTA = 4-5 years.
Numbers 1 – 5 didn’t really surprise me, but I doubt I would have come up with such a coherent list on my own 
What’s going on with social operating systems, however, blew me away, not least because they point to the emergence of Web 3.0, the semantic web. It also nicely dove-tails with some research I’m currently doing on ‘digital footprints’ in preparation for the Canberra keynote I’ll be giving at the 2008 edna and me workshop tour. So, more on social operating systems in future posts.
Tags:Educause, Futures, Horizon Report, LMSs, Semantic web, Social operating systems, Target, Technology, Trends, Web 3.0
Posted in Futures, LMSs, Target, Technology, Web 3.0 | 2 Comments »
