Helen Keegan :: Blog
http://fraser.typepad.com/socialtech/2008/10/notes-towards-d.html Anyone who has talked to me for any length of time over the past couple of years will have been hard pressed to have avoided my growing preoccupation with the UK's digital literacy agenda, or rather, lack of one. However, while I've been talking about this a lot, I haven't made many written remarks outside of policy contributions and consultations. Hopefully this brief post will act as a marker of progress rather than just a register of the current limitations of the UK education system.
A lot of progress has been made recently in terms of the e-safety agenda, for example with the publication in March of Dr. Byron's Safer Children in a Digital World, and the approval of all the reports recommendations by the UK Government, and the establishment of the UK Council for Child Internet Safety (UKCCIS) at the end of September this year. Additional moves toward modernising our Duty of Care towards pupils and staff, both providing and signposting support and in building awareness, responsibility and resilience in using technologies, has come in the form of e-safety provision within the QCA'a new curriculum and in the Department for Children, Schools and Families Cyberbullying Guidance that I was fortunate enough to be able to contribute to.
However, while it is a critical area of development and resourcing, e-safety alone is not enough. To regard it as anything except a critical element within a wider digital literacy framework, and to attempt to teach it alongside an antiquated, generally programme-specific ICT education is to short change our learners, and to fail to recognise the technological, social and economic shifts that have take place globally. To not integrate and model good practice in digital literacy has huge social consequences - from potentially disadvantaging individuals and communities in terms of social and economic opportunities, to the society-wide disadvantage we risk by not ensuring that everyone is in a position to make their voice and opinions heard within the law, and to engage technology as a way of bringing about community facilitation of all kinds, social organisation and change.
So what is digital literacy? Currently, it is a discussion that isn't happening, but which needs to be taking place nationally and publicly amongst the major organisational stakeholders (across government, industry, and education), informed by the local conversations of learners, parents, education sector workers, and employers.
Digital literacy then refers to a set of knowledge and competencies
(including social skills and cultural competencies) required by technological, social and economic changes in society. It should covers a range of areas; skills and
understandings that ensure everyone can get the most out of their
engagement with technology. It includes e-safety and wellbeing, but
also includes collaboration and communication skills, rights and
responsibilities, ethical and environmental issues, commercial
practices, privacy and security issues, digital identity and citizenship, along with finding, evaluating
and applying information.
Some of these skills can be highly
complex. However, there are ways of supporting even very young learners
to understand important and relevant concepts, such as keeping oneself
safe and helping others when using technologies. Conceptually, skills and behaviours supported within the framework of digital
literacy should share the same ambitions as those outlined in Every Child Matters -
being healthy, staying safe, enjoying and achieving, making a positive
contribution and achieving economic well being.
These last couple of years have seen the establishment of an evidence base and a public recognition of the huge personal, professional and social impacts of new technologies. What many edtechs have been involved in is describing new social realities, practices and opportunities. What I'd dearly like to see now is a push forward from the work done by Ofcom, Childnet, and Becta (amongst many) in establishing the current state of play and an active engagement in developing new models and frameworks.
http://fraser.typepad.com/socialtech/2008/09/being-there.html 
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."
http://fraser.typepad.com/socialtech/2008/09/alt-c-2008-radi.html 
So this is my round up of some of the highlights of my ALT-C2008, and links to some of the stuff we made & documented. Thanks to ALT for an excellent conference, and to everyone who I was lucky enough to get to hang out with this year. As Steve Wheeler's already noted, it was a excellent one.
A bunch of us delivered F-ALT this year - the first ALT-C fringe, designed to give delegates new spaces and new ways of collaborating and taking forward ideas and topics. The idea was to support activity that fell outside the typical conference format and structure, and allowed for a more creative and inclusive approach. It was a reckless and experimental approach to take, and by and large it worked out really well - it attracted a lot of delegates and demonstrated and started to explore ways in which participants could organise conference space for themselves. There were a variety of sessions - the Learning Objects session failed to attract enough interest to take off while others were very popular - I really enjoyed the EduPunk session, and the Microblogging session which took place during this years Edublogger meetup. I've added a bunch of stuff over at the wiki, I'm pretty much done for now. If you have F-ALT related goodness to share or link to, please do help make the site better. Also, you can check out some of the distributed action over at Twemes (welcome back Twemes! We really missed you!)
The 4th ALT-C Edublogger meetup went down a storm, we had a great time and managed to take over a substantial section of the pub. I've posted the list of attendees and blog links over at the F-ALT site - again, please do edit your entry/add yourself in if you were there.
I co-hosted a live radio show with Graham Attwell at the conference for Emerge - one of the series of Emerging Sounds of the Bazaar shows. It was probably the most fun it's possible to have at a conference (for me anyway, Scott Wilson didn't seem to enjoy his surprise interview quite so much). Cristina Costa did a fantastic job facilitating the live chat room for our international audience and Joe Rosa an equally amazing job with the production. If you missed it, you can recapture the craziness over at Graham's blog.
I also helped run an official conference workshop session, Learning About the Digital Divide, along with Frances Bell, Helen Keegan and Cristina Costa. Our session built the experience of our first slam workshop the year
before, which encouraged participants to create and perform what we are
calling slams (after the style of Poetry Slams http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poetry_slam),
that time around their experience of engaging with web 2.0. Our slam
are really shorthand for a rapid, creative approach to creating a
performance and/or object which engages with, and encourages others to
engage with, an aspect or description of a topic. In this way we're
seeking to do a few things. The approach is designed to support
innovative, conversational and light weight content creation, acting as
a counterpoint and compliment to traditional academic processes and
methods.
You can go view the amazing contributions people created and delivered during the session over at the wiki, and also (until tomorrow night) vote on which is your favorite. My slam - I
http://fraser.typepad.com/socialtech/2008/09/draft-post.html I'm delighted & honoured to have won the Individual Award for 2008 Learning Technologist of the Year (pfd) at last nights ALT-C 2008 Gala dinner. The Award aims to celebrate and reward "excellent practice & outstanding achievement in the learning technology field", and was presented at the ALT conference in Leeds last night by David Cavallo, Chief Learning Architect for OLPC (One Laptop per Child).
Other teams and individuals honored last night:
The Learning Technology Group - Aditya Vadali, Dan Jackson, Georgia Georgiou, Mark Bryson, Mike Cowie, Rich Ranker, Steve Powell, and Tim Ellis from Lancaster University won the team award for "successful provision of an integrated service that has benefited staff and learners across the whole university".
Stuart Hepplestone from Sheffield Hallam University carried off the commendation in the individual category. The Learning Technology Team from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, along with the Technology Directorate from Ufi learndirect both snagged team commendations.
The judges were kind enough to say that I am "responsible for ground-
breaking work in the learning technology domain", including my work with Will Gardner for Childnet International producing cyberbullying guidance on behalf of the DCSF as part of the UK's Safe to Learn suite of guidance; leading Childnet's work on Young People and Social Networking Services funded by Becta; for my work running the Edublog Awards for the last three years; and for my role in the JISC funded Emerge project, supporting and developing a sustainable community of practice around the educational use of new emergent technologies.
As fantastic as it is to be recognised for the award, there are a bunch of people that I need to thank who have worked with me and really deserve some credit for the success of these projects. At the risk of upsetting all the other people I'm also really grateful to, I'd just like to extra-thank some really important people who have made carrying out some tough projects possible, and being a learning technologist a real pleasure:
Stephen Carrick-Davis and Will Gardner of Childnet International; James Farmer, Dave Cormier, Jeff Lebow and Jo Kay - the current Edublog Awards team; and George Roberts, Marion Samler, Graham Attwell, Joe Rosa and Stephen Warburton from the Emerge Team. You are all stars, and if I don't owe you several beers each its only because some of you already own me them.
There are many many other people I'm thankful to and have been lucky enough to work with over the last several years, so a big cheers to you all too - I hope you won't mind me not making this post into a massive list of names. Be aware most people won't bother reading this far anyway :)
http://fraser.typepad.com/socialtech/2008/09/4th-alt-c-edubl.html 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
http://fraser.typepad.com/socialtech/2008/09/digital-divide.html 
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.
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.
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.
http://fraser.typepad.com/socialtech/2008/07/open-source-soc.html This week, a bunch of us from the Emerge project were invited to contribute to the OSS Watch expert workshop on profiling communities. I was asked to present, and as part of my talk looked at the current state of Open Source social networking platforms and tools. I'm hoping to follow up with an evaluation matrix of the platforms, but in the meantime, I'm happy to pass on brief details of the sites and services I looked at. This isn't an exhaustive list by any means - I'm happy to report that there is plenty of choice if you are looking to invest time, energy and resources in using open source tools. This list represents examples of what's currently available & is not an endorsement of any particular product or company :)
Open Source Social Networking Platforms
All in one solutions for community hosting, providing user profiles, tools sets & supporting collaborative activity.
Developed by Barnraiser a Swedish based registered not-for-profit organisation. AROUNDMe is suite of three social tools, designed to help users create their own OpenID-based services and tools for individuals and groups.
Social networking engine Elgg coming soon in two flavors - Classic Elgg and the soon to be released Elgg 1.0. Elgg, developed by the UK-based company Curverider.
One of a suite of tools from Australian based company BoonEx, who offer hosted options. A test platform is available at http://www.boonex.us/
US-based Michael Hartl and Long Nguyen's company, project and product Inoshi. The Insoshi open-source social networking platform grew out of RailsSpace.
Like Insoshi, Lovdbyess is built with ruby on rails, by US-based developer team Less Everything, to provide a free, open source basic social network platform that additional specific functionality can be added to.
E-portfolio social networking software developed for the education community, and including a r??sum?? builder/digital CV. The Mahara project is based in New Zealand, with partner organisations in Japan and the UK.
Open Source Social News
Stand alone and built to work with existing content management platforms, these tools allow users to share content published online, and comment on there own or others contributions.
A Digg clone built over Drupal
Newscloud is an OS Media Platform, designed to support communities around news and discussion. Information about downloading and developing can be found here.
An OS content management system providing an interactive website for users to submit, vote and discuss web-based content.
Open Source Social Bookmarking
Open Source Video Sharing
Open Source Microblogging
Open Source Virtual Worlds
Extension of Sun Microsystems???s open source Project Darkstar and Project Wonderland
A Virtual Worlds Server which can be used for creating and deploying 3D Virtual Environments. Compatible with the Second Life client.
Open Source Lifestreaming
& many more at: http://lifestreamblog.com/create/
Projects to watch/Upcoming
Open Source project creating plug-ins to turn Wordpress Multi-User into a social network platform.
The Open University's project is already picking up fans, and leaning towards OS. Fingers crossed.
adding social elements including profile pages and friending to the popular wiki software
http://fraser.typepad.com/socialtech/2008/06/young-people-an.html 
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.
http://fraser.typepad.com/socialtech/2008/05/gillmor-gang-05.html Usually I'm not big on tapping the A list and I certainly try to avoid boys clubs and bun fights, so I guess this is my makeup post. This weeks episode of the Gillmor Gang audio show was stark introduction to the bitchy, geek world equivalent of the Jerry Springer Show. The metaphors are certainly indicative of the jizz-cookie levels of testosterone that were flying: 'Battle over data ownership' 'the data wars' 'guns blazing'. Which is a shame, since the topic under discussion is an interesting and important one - who owns what data and what they get to do with it.
The last couple of weeks has seen MySpace, Facebook and Google make announcements about their variously not-that-portable data portability initiatives. MySpace announced the Data Availability Project, Facebook announced Facebook Connect, Google announced FriendConnect, and Facebook then announced FriendConnect wouldn't be welcome in the Facebook valley. Commentators have been in general agreement that the new initiatives have more to do with Empire building than with empowering users: instead of services responding to calls that users should be the ones controlling and determining their data, the big web companies have responded with a plethora of widgets, iframes or applications to enact what an an actually distributed presence might look like, maintaining control over who gets to access data and how.
The other key, related issue under discussion recalled Scobles previous Plaxo sponsored data scape of Facebook. Whatever you think about that particular debacle, the wider issue is about what friendship permissions actually mean. During this segment, one of the contestants actually made a comparison between giving his wife 'permission' to go to dinner with someone else and giving someone permission to use data in certain ways. Poor woman.
The issue here is a social as well as technical one. If I friend you, in a particular service, I'm giving you access you my data, and technical issues aside, I'm typically doing so with some unspoken agreement between us in mind. This agreement isn't just a legal one or technical one - it's also an ethical one.
Chris Saad, co-founder and chair at the Data Portability Project, was the only guy on the show who wasn't sucked into the posturing and actually attempted to give thoughtful answers to the questions. He pretty much nailed it when he said: "The user is the only one with a clear rational statement about their own data, and there is no good default setting". Unfortunately, very often in the real world, what appears to be clear and rational to one person is clearly inexplicable and unreasonable to another. Scobles struggle to grasp why his friends might object to him using their data in an entirely different context is a great illustration of this. Overlooking the fact that whatever social contract might exist very clearly in one persons mind, we are in a realm of new practices and global, nonuniform etiquette. Making reference to service terms and conditions and privacy agreements can only help so much in an environment where that majority of service users have never actually read them.
http://fraser.typepad.com/socialtech/2008/05/edtech---mobile.html 
Picture credit: Mom & Mrs Pat Butcher by virgo200745
Grab your floppy hat and sun screen and head out to the bright new day that is the Edubloggers Summer Picnic: Hyde Park 15 June 08. This one's in honor of Instructional Media Analyst Stella Lee who's on loan to us from Athabasca University, Canada, for a week:
It's been a while since we had a proper meetup. So why not come to London's Hyde Park for an afternoon of great company and the finest food and wines known to mankind?*
Sign up now!
And don't forget to help spread the word!
Who?
Anyone working in educational technology, or in formal or informal learning & interested in geeky stuff. This is an ideal day out for for learning technologists, IT people, teachers, librarians, cultural workers, researchers, or people interested in talking about how tech supports learning & learning communities. Relations, friends, loved ones and offspring are all welcome.
Where?
Hyde Park: Meet by the Serpentine Gallery (check back for updates/rainy day alternatives)
When?
2pm - later. There will probably be an early evening pub move. I'd be pretty amazed if there wasn't.
What?
Bring food, drink, footballs, frisbees, blankets... activity ideas welcome - we may have footie & rounders matches depending on the relative fitness of attendees.
*You need to provide these yourself unfortunately
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