Second Life and Education

Initially dubious about Second Life, I was excited about the use of a virtual environment used by Northern Beaches Christian School.  All of a sudden it made sense.  The immersion in the virtual world, the art gallery, and in particular the English class.

This is something I would like to pursue, because this is exciting.  From my observation of my own children, these are environments that they love.  It made me think of that pithy, but over used observation about discovering what you love and never having to work another day in your life.  The ultimate in learning through play.  Awesome.  I want to go to NBSC and spend time immersed in their worlds, learning about what they are doing, and working out how I can do it too.

The changing digital world

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Five Examples of shifts and how they impact on us as digital citizens

1. 

Newspaper circulation is down 7 million over the last 25 years.

But in the last 5 years, unique readers of online newspapers are up 30 million.

2.

abc, nbc and cbs get ten million unique visitors every month collectively and have been around collectively for 200 years.

Myspace, Youtube and Facebook get 250 million unique visitors every month, and didn’t exist 9 years ago (the video says 6, but it was made in 2009).

3.

95% of all music downloaded last year wasn’t paid for.

4.

93% of US adults own a mobile phone.

1/3 of them don’t feel safe using it for purchanses.

5.

In February 2008, John McCain raised 11 million dollars for his presidential campaign. 

Barack Obama attended no fundraisers, instead he used social media to raise 55 million dollars in that month.

Copyright Issues

I started thinking about copyright issues, and was interested to read in Dearney and Feather, that intellectual copyright exists both to protect the innovator, but also to encourage innovation.  When it is so easy to access newspapers and music and books and articles, are we going to lose our motivation to create unique works, to think our own thoughts?  When it is so easy to find out what other people think, when there is so much to read that has already been written, will we have time to think deeply enough to create new great things, or are we doomed to intellectual mediocrity now?  I’m thinking (in despair) of works like Fifty Shades of Grey - a badly written piece of fan fiction with a mass audience who are just lapping it up (if I can use the word lapping at this point without it seeming deliberately distasteful).

Policy needs to address issues of copyright, for all media platforms, words, music and photos/pictures.

Initially I was shocked by the claim that 95% of music downloaded wasn’t paid for.  Then I started thinking about how I got my own music in the 80’s – by borrowing and recording my own copy of friends tapes, which may or may not have been originals.  By recording music from the television or the radio.  The biggest difference is probably one of quality of recording.  The illegal mp3 is invariably going to be of higher quality than when you hoped the radio announcer wouldn’t talk too long over the beginning or end of your favourite track.

Digital Literacy

Social media has changed the way the world has until now operated.  The presidential campaign demonstrates that eloquently.  Those who refuse to engage in these technologies simply will not succeed over those who can harness them.  I know people who don’t use social media, who see it as irrelevant, who refuse to engage, some of them are only in their 30’s, and I wonder what will happen to them as the world keeps changing.  I’ve been dragged along in the wake of my husband, who is probably one of the worlds oldest digital natives, having grown up in a university environment with some of the earliest computers. I am constantly out of my depth, because he changes stuff all the time.

Mobile devices are where we are headed, and already the percentage of adults who have a phone is very very high.  I expect that as time goes on, and there are more adults who have grown up in this connected world, the ease with online purchasing will also increase.  It is going to become more and more essential that library websites have mobile versions, because this is how our users will be accessing our sites.

Online Safety

Online behavior will follow you in a way that the mistakes you made in high school don’t.  Helping students to realize that Facebook is not their diary, that online bullying is not acceptable, that posting photos of yourself in compromising situations is not good practice needs to be part of what we do.

There are so many ways you can put yourself online (youtbe, Facebook, MySpace etc), and there is a vulnerability in this.  The Jenkins whitepaper observed that young people often found that in putting content online for their friends, they sometimes attracted unwelcome attention from strangers.

When you can hide your identity, is there less restraint from behaving in an antisocial way?

Content Regulation

We must look at questions of responsibility for use, filters of content which may be inappropriate.  The internet is difficult to police, because of it’s vastness, and because it is an international entity, it allows access to unsavoury content, and whose responsibility is that? 

When there isn’t a set of ethical guidelines that contributors are expected to adhere to, how do we deal with that?

The Participation Gap and Online Privacy

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--> The Participation Gap

I was interested to read in the Jenkins whitepaper about US cities that plan to provide free wifi access to internet.  Free!  The reasoning is, that it will give families, who are at the limit of their financial resources access to connection, because if children in these families aren’t given the same access as their wealthier peers, then they will inevitably fall further behind.
I had an interesting conversation at the end of the term with a deputy at a school on the outskirts of Sydney.   The school is quite isolated (not of course in the same sense as a school in the far west of the state), and they will have to pay for connection to Ethernet cabling to cater for the students.  It will be expensive, but as they are planning to be a Bring Your Own Device school in the future, the correct hardware is essential.  It is not something that can be skimped on.  Other schools have tried to do it cheaply, and the result is that only a handful of students at a time can connect, the network slows to a crawl, and everyone is frustrated.  In my own home the cries of “stop downloading, your hogging all the bandwidth” are frequent, and that’s with only 6 of us, a whole school worth of users trying for access with an inadequate connection is unthinkable.

Access is not the end of the conversation though.  Getting connected has to be inextricably tied to education in the use of the available tools.  In fact, it is even more important.  Which makes sense.  So in our teaching, once our children are connected, they must be equipped to use the available tools.  We must be purposeful in our instruction, because, digital natives or not, these children need more than the device and the connection.  Just as most of them would not learn to read without explicit instruction, so they won’t automatically know how to access creative commons items to embed in their work, or why it is important that they do.


Thoughts on Online Privacy

We seem to be moving towards more transparency online, Facebook is intended to be conducted under your own name, and while there are those who do have multiple accounts, or use a pseudonym, I think they are in the minority.  Pearson says this is a good thing.  That anonymity loosens our restraint, and we are more likely to behave badly, when we think it won’t have a consequence in our real lives.  

I’ve seen that on forums.  There is a pack mentality sometimes, and it can be brutal.  One forum I belong to has 233 000 members.  Of course we won’t all think the same thing about every issue that is discussed.  For me, that’s ok, and if I see something that I don’t necessarily agree with, I won’t dive in and tell the person they are an idiot (I might, and sometimes do think it).  There are those however who call their unkindness honesty - and honesty is a good thing, right?  Hiding behind the screen, I have watched different posters pulverized by others.  And they are real people, vulnerable and deeply wounded by what are essentially attacks on them.  Just because you can’t see the crazies doesn’t make their criticism less hurtful.  I think that if we were forced to use our real names, a lot of this kind of thing would stop, that users would think twice, and not go on the attack. Anonymity confers a degree of false bravado, and opinions can be wielded with less restraint.

On the other hand, there have been so many dire warnings about not giving too much away online, not allowing some predatory type to “find” you in real life, it’s hard to know what the right course of action is.

The issue of facebook and privacy is apparently very important to young people, Raynes-Goldie says it ranks higher than acts of terrorism.  Which seems an extreme kind of comparison, but perhaps Facebook privacy is a more relatable issue, and one more likely to have an impact on them than a potential act of terror.

The relative newness of the technologies, and the social media sites means that as a society we haven’t developed the same kinds of rules of etiquette that constrain other behaviours, we are still finding out where the limits are.  Getting our students to consider these things is important.  Probably as time goes on, the expectations will become more defined, but now, when someone poses a “what do you think?” kind of question online, be it on a forum, a youtube video or a Facebook post, is it rude to say what you think?  Even if you don’t agree? Even if what you think is unfavourable and you can't express your opinion without being offensive?   Can we in text make our meaning clear enough, that we can respectfully disagree without being perceived as unkind? 

I had thought prior to reading the article on teachers befriending students on Facebook that the boundary had been well defined. Looking at NSW DEC policy, the recommendation is no, don’t befriend students.  Reading some of the policy in the article however, I can see how this line blurs, both when the wording becomes unclear, and when schools start adopting Facebook as a method of communication.  

The solution seems to be, while a student is at school, they shouldn’t be on your friend list.  Liking a school page however, is an acceptable compromise.


Pearson, J. (2009). Life as a dog: Personal identity and the internet. Meanjin, 68(2), 67-77. Retrieved from http://search.informit.com.au/fullText;dn=200906244;res=APAFT
Raynes-Goldie, K. (2010). Aliases, creeping, and wall cleaning: Understanding privacy in the age of Facebook, First Monday, 15(1), 4 January. Available http://firstmonday.org/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/2775/2432  
Harris, C. (2010). Friend me?: School policy may address friending students online, School Library Journal, 1 April. Available http://www.schoollibraryjournal.com/article/CA6724235.html
 

Blue Mountains City Library

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Effective Library Website Criteria

1.     Up to date and regular postings.

2.     Easy to navigate

3.     Search bars on every page

4.     Relevant photos

5.     Mobile Friendly

6.     Feedback

7.     Ability to view catalogue and reserve items

8.     Contact information/online librarian service

Most of my criteria were selected after reading the Matthews article which was comprehensive.  I added a few of my own, and left out some of his.  The library website I intend to review is not a children’s library, so I didn’t use anything from Lazaris.  I was interested to note the difference between what works when marketing to children, and how different it is to targeting adults.

 Blue Mountains City Library

This is my local library, there are 6 different locations through the Blue Mountains (Blaxland, Springwood, Lawson, Wentworth Falls, Katoomba and Blackheath).  It is possible to get books from any of the other branches if what you want isn’t at your local branch.

I use the library infrequently.  I have a kindle, and do most of my fiction reading on that.  My children use their school libraries, though we have used the local branch for additional material for projects.  I had fairly low expectations about them using any Web 2.0 tools to be honest, so I was pleasantly surprised by their blog Readers in the mist.  It’s called a book review blog, but also has announcements of events and lots of information about the library, arranged under tabs. 

As far as the above criteria are concerned:

1.  The homepage was updated yesterday.  Other pages have not been touched for some time however, some of them for a couple years.   There are a few comments made, and one has not been responded to at all.  Lots of links to other sites, 12 broken (checked with Website Goodies).

The Facebook link only took me to my own Facebook homepage, and Twitter has not been updated since June. Further exploration, and I discovered that the council have a website, and the library posts on that wall.

Social media presence is definitely an area that needs to be improved.

2.  Both the blog, and the council site are easy to navigate.

3.  Search bars are on every page.

4.  Relevant photos (books and The three Sisters).  There are no attributions for the photos.  After making an electronic pathfinder for ETL501, I did go looking for this, and couldn’t find anything.  I was a little disappointed by this, as I know how simple it is to do the right thing as far as copyright goes.  There are also pictures of book covers, and I am dubious about whether permission has been sought to publish them, remembering the hoops some people jumped through last semester, getting permission to put photos of book jackets on their sites.

5.  The blog is mobile friendly.

6.  Feedback is possible on the blog.  Comments are moderated, and there is a list of what is and is not considered acceptable, all very common sense things like not being abusive or using bad language.

7.  On the council site, the catalogue is available to search, and you can see where the book you want is located, and can request that it is held for you, and at which branch you would like to pick it up. There is no charge for this service.

8.  The contact point is very clear, and has it’s own tab, where all the addresses and phone numbers for each branch are listed.  There is no facility for talking to a librarian online, but during business hours, I know they are happy to talk on the phone and help you, because I’ve rung them before.

Arizona State University

The library minute videos at the ASU website are really engaging.  As a user of these kind of services, I am as a rule unenthusiastic about the time commitment of a ten minute video, but I happily watched ten of those little snippets.  It made me want to be an undergraduate, studying on campus again.  At ASU.  I wonder if the students there know how lucky they are.  Coffee shops, exhibitions, printing from your own laptop, group study rooms available ,wifi, whiteboards (regular and electronic). Such a wonderful variety of really useful stuff.  When I was an undergraduate living on campus, we shared one phone between 50 of us, and it had a cord so we were tethered to the cold under the stairs walk through passage.  We used pens, and paper.  We typed our assignments on type writers.  I even hand wrote some of them.  I feel like such a dinosaur.

But I digress.

The time frame of the one minute library spot is excellent.  I think people are far more likely to engage with them, than a longer piece.


The Four C's – collaboration, conversation, community, content criteria.

In addition to the one minute videos, I looked at the Facebook page and Twitter feed for ASU.

Collaboration 

One of the videos asked for feedback.  ASU want to know what it is their users are interested in.  They want to give them what they want, they’ve already thought of a lot of cool stuff, but it is clear that they are happy to hear about more ideas.    


Conversation  

The Facebook page and Twitter are obviously well tended.
At the top of the Facebook page there is a complaint.  It is from November 3, and I don't know if it has been left there strategically, to show how good they are responding to comments on their page, but that is what it does.  A user complains about the wifi service in the library dropping out.  The librarian responds within four hours.  There is then some back and forth establishing what the issue is, and a promise is given to look into it.  There is follow up a week later.  The page is also updated regularly with special events.
There are also several tweets every day, with reminders of services, opening and closing times, and even reassurance for intimidated patrons. 


Community

Because Facebook and Twitter are regularly updated, there is a sense of community in those pages.    These are librarians who want to build relationships with their community.  The responses are unfailingly professional and polite.  They want to problem solve and serve and engage their community.


Content  

There are regular links on the twitter feed about what is available and what is new or coming up.