Crossing the finishing line

[caption id="attachment_283" align="alignright" width="434"] Too good to be true?[/caption]

"Guys! You're the BEST band I've discovered this year!"

Last week, I received this email which momentarily got my heart beating faster. You see, when I lived in Zambia, some friends and I played music together. We recorded a performance at someone’s party and, in the spirit of the times, I put one of the songs (“See the world as the camels do”) up on social media. On myspace. Well, it was 2004; there was no Twitter and Facebook was still confined to Harvard.

‘Stardom beckons!’, I inform our drummer, Antos. But of course, fame and fortune is not the end of this story. I wasn’t taken in; I’m pretty sure if you did grab the bait, you’d soon get to pay Caroline some money to be promoted on her website. If Caroline even exists.

Between CoETaIL and my involvement in our school’s committee, I’ve spent a lot of time recently thinking about social media. How, once you post something, it sticks around and could come back to haunt you. How there are people out there who will prey on your unsuspecting nature. How it can add spice to life.

In other words, to get the most out of social media, you need to be smart about it. Our school has kept it mostly at arm’s length, but we are aware that we must take more seriously our role of educating all of the community about its relationship with social media.

So, when I was invited to join, I asked if I might use the social media committee’s journey as my final CoETaIL project. The learners would be the members of the committee (teachers, students and school leaders).





The project appealed to me because the learning goal is authentic: we actually do need the policy. Our success would be a real-world achievement. SPOILER ALERT: we haven’t got there yet.

One of the features of a goal which is not pre-determined is that you don’t know exactly what it will take to achieve it. Our six week project was not sufficient to ‘achieve a school-wide social media policy’, nor ‘a review process for the guidelines’. So we missed goals #1 and #4, but I believe that we are doing quite well on the other two goals.



But don’t just take my word for it. As you will see in the video, several members of our thoughtful and diligent committee communicated their thoughts. That has allowed me to look at what they may have learned.

On the principle of ‘show don’t tell’ I decided my story could be related without a voiceover. This seems to be in line with the idea of simplicity encapsulated in Presentation Zen. Moreover, as the media are all my own, I haven’t availed myself of Creative Commons. Belatedly, I have made a CC licence for the music:

Attention Deficit by DJ Gearbox is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License. Based on a work at https://soundcloud.com/dj-gearb/sets/attention-deficit.

[youtube]https://youtu.be/8fa1kLQroLo[/youtube]

If you can't see the video, you may have to click in the address bar.

WHAT HAS THE COMMITTEE DONE SO FAR?

“... a foundational understanding of what [the school] could do ... a wide range of people involved... including students, which is fantastic. We brainstormed in a variety of ways to eventually come up with our unique model for social media guidelines” David

WHAT WOULD YOU LIKE THE COMMITTEE TO ACHIEVE?

“A document we can work with as a school community ... find a way, once we have the document, to promote it, educate...” Katy

“If it’s not shared by the community, then what is it worth?” Lauren

“... you want a policy that allows you to continue to use social media and doesn’t scare people away from using it.” Gemma

There was no pre-testing of understanding, only afterwards, so I can’t know that their insights resulted from the activities we did. But I do have access to other evidence of learning: my own. I have been, in fact, an action-researcher, both participating and reporting.

It has been a very interesting experience, most notably because the course that we have steered has been determined, meeting by meeting, by the outcome of the previous one. We came up with some excellent ideas, such as relating social media guidelines to the DQ digital intelligences model. Most recently, however, with our eye on the available time, we have resolved to break down our goals into more manageable pieces. Thus, we are now responding to the most pressing need for, as one teacher plaintively informed a committee member,

“a piece of paper in my classroom that just tells me what to do”

In our discussions, we have cast our net much wider, which has provided many interesting ideas, but now we know what we must do in the short term. At our next meeting, which will be the final one of this round, we will consolidate the ideas and form of the requested practical ‘piece of paper’ and the process to implement it.

I have learned that I should have given the committee a clearer remit from the start, but I did not appreciate early on that we would have to limit our scope to produce promptly something tangible. I have also learned that our intensive 30 minute meetings, based around Thinking Routines, are an effective way to make progress, but I know that any repeated format suffers eventually from diminishing returns, so I think we should soon pause and consider a variety of ways we could go about our work.

I hope people who want to know what we did will watch the film and leave a comment.

So, of course, I am not going to get famous. But far from being dismayed by someone using my many-years-old relics on MySpace in a blatant attempt to exploit my ambition, I celebrate how social media allow us to preserve and propagate our creations. I believe, with common sense and education, we can learn to use them to our great benefit.

Social media are changing who we are

"Our body is physiologically rewarding us for talking about ourselves online" Moffit and Brown, ASAPScience video (below)

[youtube]https://youtu.be/HffWFd_6bJ0[/youtube]

It is clear from the research behind this video, that using social media not only changes what we do, but also who we biologically are. Most people in one study regularly experienced Phantom Vibration Syndrome. Being online all the time can have serious consequences. How long before smartphones get statutory health warnings?

I have been talking this week with two CoETaIL colleagues about the guidelines for using social media which our schools need but don't yet have. Our project was structured around four face-to-face skype calls over 12 days during which we evolved a process; set ourselves homework; tweaked our plans; and got to know each other. I have met Stephen briefly before in real life, but I've never met Valerie. It is appropriate that a social medium has been one of the crucial elements in our project.

"We would like to collaborate in a process to gather information and ideas to help each of our schools arrive at some guidelines for teacher and student use of social media." (Valerie, Stephen and Steve)

Our process is woven from a few strands:

1. We each conducted an investigation in our school, wishing to know how their different cultures would influence the process of drawing up social media guidelines. I received 99 responses to my survey (see right). The anonymous findings are collated in a document. We then read each other's summaries, commented and asked questions. It's not only a document but a rich conversation.


2. Early in the project we read "How to create social media guidelines for your school" (Anderson). It gave us a starting point for our fruitful discussion and suggested a possible process we have elaborated into our roadmap to social media guidelines which reflects the common understanding collaboration has led us to. We intend to present the document at each of our schools as a proposal for a way forward. It is embedded on my CoETaIL projects page.


3. Research into the solutions which other institutions, both educational and secular, have drawn up to support their individual circumstances. This included a pertinent exchange with John Mikton.


4. Frequent back and forth between us; not only the skype conversation, but also dozens of emails.

When that is all done, and this blogpost is finished, I will have completed CoETaIL Course 2. It has been a rewarding experience, not least the current collaboration with colleagues who, although we work in different countries, are nevertheless similarly faced with teachers and students in need of guidance about social media. As I concluded in a blogpost I wrote elsewhere, collaboration can be really difficult. We all bring our ideas to the table which enrich the project, but we must equally abandon some of them. The reward is a more complete product than any individual could have made. That has definitely been the case with Stephen, Valerie and me - and it was painless too.

During Course 2, I have been immersed in ideas about what perpetual connection to the Internet might mean:

• What will we do if the platforms to which we entrust so many of the stories of our lives do not live forever?


• How do we properly advise our children about social media when, if we are honest, we do not know many of the answers ourselves?


• What is the incentive to play fair about copyright when the chances of being caught are minimal?


• Is it wise of us to accept, however knowingly, the Faustian bargain of Facebook?


• What will be the long term effect of the digital contrail we are constantly leaving behind us?

These were the questions posed by my five blogposts during the course. I am certain that we do not definitively know the answer to any of them.

I greatly admire the performance artist Marina Abramović. You may have seen the film in which she sat in the MoMA in New York and met thousands of members of the public in silence, one-to-one, staring into their eyes, day after day. It's amazing to see.

She has a very clear view of the ways that we live our lives and how we can make changes which expose the assumptions we had taken to be facts. Speaking on the Note to Self podcast, she recommended:

"switch off your telephone... take a chair next to the window... and do absolutely nothing... What happens to all that energy that you have? You start thinking about the things you never have time to think about... you get into this state of peacefulness... three hours of your life" (Marina Abramović)

Is that really so extreme? I don't think so. We often spend three hours on activities a Martian would find strange. Sometimes, you can learn about the ubiquitous only when it is removed for a while.

So, following a couple of months in which I have spent a lot of productive time on CoETaIL, thinking about familiar things in new ways; learning to write regularly; making new friends, I have decided to call time on my life on the Internet. I don't know what it will be like, but my plan is to be completely off the grid for at least two weeks. I hope that, by cutting loose temporarily, I will gain an insight into what it means to be continually connected for the rest of the year.

"Christmas is supposed to be fun and you want to lash yourself on the back?" (my son on hearing my plans)

"We have to trust this gut feeling that we are completely f****d up with technology" (Marina Abramović in Huffington Post)

 

Digital contrails

[caption id="attachment_78" align="alignright" width="299"] SW: freely modified from Pixabay images[/caption]

Last week I overheard a conversation between some students. They were discussing one of my colleagues. A student had found his Facebook profile, and via someone else who had tagged him in a photo, they had got to some pictures of a visit to a strip club. The teacher hadn't visited the club himself, but the association had been made in the students' minds. And they were telling their friends. Teachers are sometimes dismissive of their search skills, but do not underestimate students' tenacity when they are motivated.

Like many of my colleagues, I believe that schools are well-placed to help students to make the most of the digital world. Do we have the answers? No. The best we can do is to jump in and learn along with them.

So I had a look at my Facebook profile as the public sees it (it's only three clicks away) and apparently I changed my settings a year ago because that's when the visible posts dry up. Before that, anyone who is checking up on me will see that I had just met old friends in Barcelona (and someone mentioned alcohol in the comments); I was recommending a lot of movies and books (many with challenging content); and talking about my favourite music (some really unfashionable artists). Interesting to me, but boring to almost anyone else. But should I be so relaxed or must I worry that "someone could always dig it up and use it against you" lifehacker.com?

When we talk about our 'digital footprint', this is one of the fears we have: that we inadvertently reveal information which can harm us either by our own carelessness or by the oversharing of other people in our network. If you followed me around all day in the real world and caught snatches of my conversations with all of the people I meet, you would learn things about me I hadn't intended you to find out. Along that road lies paranoia, and one solution is to have little or no public online presence at all. But that's not for me. I would rather you saw me as a rounded (even fallible) human with diverse (sometimes messy) interests than a carefully curated brand.

[caption id="attachment_79" align="alignleft" width="491"] Firefox and Linux user from Greece. They didn't ask permission, they just took it.[/caption]

Your deliberate online presence is something you are in control of. But there is a much more pernicious element to the data-set that has been generated about you that makes me think not of a footprint but of the contrail left by an aircraft. You may think you've come to this blogpost anonymously, but the server has recorded when you came, where you are in the world, what browser and computer you're using, which webpage you last visited (yes! none of their business, I know, but it's all there in the server log and accessible to the owners of the site). Those widgets that count visitors know all those things about you because your treacherous devices have told them.

"Every time you "like" something, share something, tag yourself in a photo, or click on an article on Facebook, the site collects data on you ... They also track what device you used to log on, what other app you came from, other sites you've visited, and much more." Manoush Zomorodi, Note to Self podcast

Facebook does not make it too hard to confirm that they are reliant on our data. Explaining their cookies policy, we read that cookies help Facebook to serve ads; measure how often we click on them; and gain insights into our behaviour. I learned from Note to Self that I could see what Facebook has inferred are my preferences. Most of it was accurate, though I learned that they had identified interests in alabaster and anarchism. I keenly await that targeted ad.

But Facebook's knowledge about me is tiny compared with Big Brother Google. Again, it is easy to understand why Google is interested in my data. At myactivity.google.com, I see that today, on a number of devices, in 3 different countries, I accessed 170 pages which covered this blogpost, the news, some maps and the usual aimless surfing. You'd know a lot about me if you had access to that information every day. Furthermore, have you ever been to your Google Timeline? There is a calendar and I can relive any day in the last few years including a map of where I went that day and the photos I took. Here is their almost accurate world map of my recent years on earth (they logged my 2 US roadtrips but missed the Asian trip (thanks, China!)).

[caption id="attachment_76" align="aligncenter" width="525"] Where Google thinks I've been in the last few years - mostly correct[/caption]

In his Theory of Everything podcast, Benjamen Walker observed that an ad which was "following me around on the Internet", stopped once he visited the shop and tried out the product. The thing is, it is easy to be paranoid when every day, like a jet-plane, we emit a billowing cloud of data which reveals our locations, our interests and our secrets. It is worth the while of organisations with astronomical means to recombine these scattered particles into the story of our journey though, sadly, most of their impressive effort only goes into making a bit more cash.

If we let our justifiable qualms force us into hiding behind Privacy Settings or into holding our tongue for fear of being too public, then we are the poorer for that. If we only communicate our fears to the students instead of our enthusiasm for the potential of humankind's great invention, then we fail as teachers. Whether we like it or not, our students do not have a choice about engaging in the online world, so we must make sure that we use the battery of skills we have as educators to show them how to leave a footprint that enriches their lives.

"That's kinda crazy. They don't know they gonna die one day and that stuff's still gonna be on the Internet? I wanna make something I gonna be proud of" rapper Danny Brown on the All Songs Considered podcast (at 21m 50s).