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."

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.

   

 

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.

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."

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 <3 Public Libraries is included in the vote list, but please don't vote for it! It's only there because I was really rubbish at getting it up in time and into it's proper place in the sample slam lists. The text I've included with the slides includes my workshop methodology, so do go and browse if you are interested in exploring this kind of format yourself.

Finally, I'm still really happy about winning the Learning Technologist of the Year award. I brought a hard copy of the announcement back for my mum, and she's very pleased too :) If you'd like a flavor of the gala dinner and a peek at the presentation check out James Clay's excellent (& very) short film of the evening. I eat chocolate in it.

Looking forward to next year already. You can see my pictures here and Sam (who always takes the best ones!)'s pictures here.

I'm delighted & honored 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 :)

Really looking forward to our fourth ALT-C Edublogger meetup next week, taking place at Leeds Student Union Mine 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 every - 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.

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. 

AROUNDMe  http://www.barnraiser.org/ -
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.

Elgg  http://elgg.org/
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.

Dolphin 6.1 http://www.boonex.com/products/dolphin/
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/

Insoshi http://portal.insoshi.com/
US-based Michael Hartl and Long Nguyen's company, project and product Inoshi. The Insoshi open-source social networking platform grew out of RailsSpace.

LovdbyLess http://lovdbyless.com/
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.

Mahara http://www.mahara.org/
E-portfolio social networking software developed for the education community, and including a résumé 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.

Drupaligg http://drupaligg.com
A Digg clone built over Drupal

Newscloud http://www.newscloud.com
Newscloud is an OS Media Platform, designed to support communities around news and discussion. Information about downloading and developing can be found here.

Pligg http://www.pligg.com/
An OS content management system providing an interactive website for users to submit, vote and discuss web-based content.

Open Source Social Bookmarking

GetBoo http://www.getboo.com/
Scuttle http://sourceforge.net/projects/scuttle/
Unalog http://unalog.com

Open Source Video Sharing

Plumi http://plumi.org
Showinabox http://showinabox.tv/ For creating WordPress video blogs
FilmForge http://filmforge.koumbit.net/ Video for Drupal

Open Source Microblogging

Identi.ca http://identi.ca/ Open Source federated microblogging
Laconica http://laconi.ca/

Open Source Virtual Worlds

OpenSource Metaverse Project http://metaverse.sourceforge.net/
Croquet http://www.opencroquet.org/
NMC Open Virtual Worlds Project http://www.nmc.org/news/nmc/nmc-launches-open-virtual-worlds-project Extension of Sun Microsystems’s open source Project Darkstar and Project Wonderland

Open Source Lifestreaming

Mugshot http://mugshot.org/main
Sweetcron http://www.sweetcron.com/
SimpleLife http://kierandelaney.net/blog/projects/simplelife/

& many more at: http://lifestreamblog.com/create/

Projects to watch/Upcoming 

Buddy Press http://buddypress.org/ Open Source project creating plug-ins to turn Wordpress Multi-User into a social network platform.

Identi.ca http://identi.ca/ Open Source federated microblogging

SocialLearn http://www.open.ac.uk/blogs/socialearn/index.php The Open University's project is already picking up fans, and leaning towards OS. Fingers crossed.

Wikia’s Social Profile extension for Mediawiki http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:SocialProfile adding social elements including profile pages and friending to the popular wiki software

 

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.