Dear committee...

"Thank you very much for your continuing support of the Social Media Committee. We have now had 2 meetings which were very productive, I feel. At the recent meeting on Friday 27 October, we generated, sorted, connected and elaborated our conclusions from the first meeting, and as a result, we have an idea-web with which to move forward. Our ideas came from other schools' policy exemplars; our existing digital citizenship agreement (DCA); and our own reflections and research. These were sorted and connected into themes."

in search of a good thinking routine

 The weekend before our second meeting, as luck would have it, I attended a seminar given at our school by Ron Ritchhart and learned a new Thinking Routine which matched closely the goals our committee had for expressing our thoughts: Generate, Sort, Connect, Elaborate.

Our new Director of Educational Technology, John Mikton, who is responsible for the social media committee, has given me some freedom to organise the activities with him. As the pictures show, we have so far held two meetings in which students, teachers and administrators explored other school's ideas and our own unique situation. By the end of the process, we shall have met six times. The UbD planner with goals and evidence are here.

And here is a summary of the activities:

"In preparation for the third meeting, we all will reflect and research the different types of phrasing in the Policy exemplars from other schools in this folder or in any other examples we find. This will help us to establish the tone and style of the policy we will develop."

We are building up a collection of policies from a variety of schools and other institutions here at Diigo.

"Also, in preparation for the third meeting, a Draft Team sub-committee will meet to review the themes emerging from the idea-web. This team will propose to the full committee a framework for the draft policy which we will discuss on 14 November."

In the UbD template, I have summarised what I would like the participants to have learned by the end of the process.

Explain	the important features of a social media policy
Interpret	everyday behaviours with social media in terms of benefits or concerns
Apply	experiences of personal social media use to recommendations for the community
Perspective	of which behaviours with social media are positive for the school community and which are not
Empathize	with those who struggle with social media (through ignorance, misuse, overuse etc)
Self-knowledge	of personal strategies which emphasise the benefits and minimise the harmful effects of social media use

"As I said in the meeting, I would be interested to meet each committee member to record a short audio or video interview about your learning experience in the committee. I'd like to meet you in your place of work if possible. Please let me know if you have an appropriate moment for this discussion (10 minutes)."

Here are the questions I shall use to establish how the members of the committee have come to understand the process of implementing a social media roadmap.

"Thank you for your support. We have made a lot of progress and benefited very much so far from your variety of knowledge and perspectives. I'm looking forward to achieving our goal together in the coming meetings."

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)

 

What we mean when we talk about privacy

Have you seen this video?



It demonstrates how far we have come in a short time, that these people receiving week-old news remind us of Rip van Winkle.

So we bemoan our loss of privacy. We expect Facebook to allow us to join its network for free and then complain that we don’t like the deal. It’s too late to claim sanctimoniously that “the line between our private lives and the public persona are blurring.” (unnamed author on The Rebel Yell). You don’t have to be on Facebook (no, you don’t). If (like me) you do choose to, don’t claim you weren’t aware that it is a transaction.

“Faustian bargains are by their nature tragic or self-defeating for the person who makes them, because what is surrendered is ultimately far more valuable than what is obtained, whether or not the bargainer appreciates that fact.” (Brittanica.com)

[caption id="attachment_86" align="alignleft" width="167"] SW: Site of antisocial media[/caption]


So that’s easy. Just don’t use Facebook, or refuse friend requests from everyone but the very closest. You can also fix it so that no-one but you can post anything about you on your timeline and if you have been tagged elsewhere it won’t be seen by your friends. The drawbridge to your castle is well and truly up; anything which leaves is scrutinised by vigilant guards. Thankfully, your friends are not quite so cautious about their information, otherwise Facebook would be a much more boring place than it is. You can still check out what is going on in your network including the uncurated serendipities you stumble upon:

“Oh interesting: I didn’t know those two knew each other!”

“That acquaintance is in town; I’ve always wanted to know him better.”

“My son shouldn’t be doing that at parties!”.

“Everybody lurks. Only the blithe let on.” (Elle Hunt in The Guardian)

It does seem a bit unfair, though. The world gets your controlled brand whilst you enjoy their warts and all adventures. Maybe you should refuse to read stuff about other people which you wouldn’t tell about yourself. Presidential candidate’s unguarded comments? No thanks, I wouldn’t like anyone releasing my candid chats. Private emails? Hands off, they were hacked.

When we talk about privacy, it seems, we may be more concerned about our own than other people’s. Surely it works both ways, though. In the real world, when you hide yourself away in your room, you don’t see anyone else. When’s the last time you were offline for a week? A day? Even a  waking hour? Our students may never have experienced a time in their lives when they were unreachable.

[caption id="attachment_87" align="alignright" width="300"] Image licensed under Creative Commons by Brad Higham on Flickr[/caption]

When I think back to pre-email visits to friends, I wonder how we arranged it at all. I’m not saying those days were better, just that something has occurred which has profoundly changed ...er... something. I’m not sure what it is that’s changed, though. My children do not live near to me, but we speak at least once a week and exchange messages pretty much daily. Contrastingly, when I left home, I heard new music only on the radio or from friends; read one physical daily newspaper; learned the lessons my teachers chose to teach me. I regularly communicated only with the handful of people I actually met. I was often alone and had no knowledge of what other people were doing at that time, nor was I following world events minute by minute.

Last year, I went walking across the Belgian Ardennes for seven days. I didn’t go online at all (though, pathetically, I had my phone with me “for emergencies”). On Day 5, when I thought I’d listen to a podcast, I swiftly removed my earbuds again as I found the disembodied voices disturbing in a woodland setting. Since then, although I came home with a restful feeling, I haven’t had another Internet-free day.

For the new generation, the connected environment is the only one they have known. No doubt they find our reminiscences about house phones and encyclopedias quaint. As their educators, though, we must do our best to evaluate the advantages, but also the losses. I relish the permanently online world and its expanded horizons, but wonder whether another species of experience has become endangered, if not extinct.

Sometimes the only way to know what you have is to remove it for a while. I have tried the experiment in my leisure time, but I am curious what effect it would have in a classroom if I were to ask my students and colleagues to work without any technology at all for a time. We could analyse what difference a Screen Free Week (or day?) made to the learning without attaching a value judgement.

Every experience has value and the pre-Internet situation embodied a kind of empowering ignorance (you don’t have to know everything right now, especially about your friends). Furthermore, in experiments where participants were deprived of constant stimuli, “boring activities resulted in increased creativity” (Mann and Cadman). One of our responsibilities as educators is to ensure that through exposure to a variety of experiences our students come to know how they learn and live best. We want them to see technology as an addition to their learning toolkit, not just a new normal.

[caption id="attachment_88" align="aligncenter" width="775"] Image: SW and public domain mashup[/caption]