Kelly Christopherson :: Blog
http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Socialtech/~3/402179481/being-there. 
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://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Socialtech/~3/302862833/young-people 
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.
 I like to consider myself a liberal-minded person, open to various perspectives and points of view quite different than my own. With this premise in mind, I want to share a situation which I am having great difficulty wrapping my head around. As part of my course on integrating technology into the secondary curriculum, I have students create learning logs as a way of introducing them to weblogs and their many uses. I gave students an opportunity to pick from a number of free, online weblogging applications. Several of my students chose to host their learning logs using Edublogs which seemed at the time to be a reasonable solution. As I was reading through students weblogs I found links embedded in their content that seemed rather odd. For example one student mentioned the word "energy" in her blog entry and I found a pop-up link directing me to Exxon/Mobile. Hmmm? I thought and I read on. This same student also mentioned "college" in her entry wherein a hyperlink associated with the University of Phoenix popped up. I found this rather odd, since the student was currently enrolled here at the University of Florida. I left a comment on her site asking her why she chose these odd links, only to find that when I returned to her content, the links had disappeared. I checked my other student learning logs in Edublogs and found a similar pattern. It then dawned on me that these links were being added to their content without their notice. I quickly dashed a note to Mr. James Farmer, the CEO of Edublogs, asking what was going on here. Were these hyperlinks intentionally being embedded? Was there a disclaimer that users of this free site signed acknowledging that hyperlinks to different advertisements would be embedded in their content? What was going on? I never heard back from Mr. Farmer, so I decided to go see what information I could find about this situation on the Edublogs site. I found a forum discussion where several Edublogs users were concerned about this practice. Here is a sample of what they said: I was updating one of my blogsites this weekend. I noticed that when I changed the theme "ContentLinks" ads started randomly appearing. I cannot have this on my school's blogs. I changed the theme back to "Borderline Chaos" which doesn't appear to have the pop-ups. Is this a feature on all themes now? Is there a way to turn it off? If I become a supporter, would this feature be removed? I also noticed this issue. I'm using the "Blue Moon" theme. I will try changing my theme. If this is a new edublogs policy, there should have been some notice ahead of time. This is unacceptable for a school blog and I am quite offended by having these ads forced uppon us! Edublogs, do you have an answer?? Content Links in the middle of my posts which include unauthorized advertisements is unacceptable. One of the reasons I moved my blog to Edublogs was to avoid ads in my blog, and this is even worse than Adsense found off to the side which people can easily ignore. Please remove these or let us know if they are here to stay, I will move my blog to another more school friendly blog host if thats the case. These comments were made 5 months ago when this new "feature" was turned on. They mostly continue in this vein from a handful of the hundreds of Edublogs users. Mr. Farmer offered this response to the situation within the forum as follows: Apologies for this, it was a bug in our system and should be fixed now, we have been experimenting with (extremely occasional) advertising in order to support Edublogs and you can find more information here: http://edublogs.org/forums/topic.php?id=5303&replies=3
It should be fixed up now.
Cheers, James The link then takes you to another forum post which is dated "8 months ago" which suggests that this feature was in the works longer than Edublogs users were aware: Andrew and I have been giving Edublogs and revenue some serious thought of late.
In particular we've been trying to figure out how we can best support the growth and development of the site - both in numbers of users and in terms of functionality (we've got much bigger plans than the forums up our sleeves).
We're thinking about the costs of servers and of development and support staff.
As you know, we've got Edublogs Campus - but as you may not know, it's actually a really competitively priced product... for the amount of support, development and server space it occupies it doesn't really pay for more than itself.
So, we tried the 'Supporter' route and while we've had some great feedback from a lot of people on this and quite a few of you signed up it's not coming anywhere close to paying the hosting bills at the moment.
For example, our monthly hosting costs are around $3.5K, 'Supporter' is $25 (annually) and we've had about 30 - 40 people sign up for it.
I know that improving it still further will assist... but you can see where I'm getting at.
So, we're considering trying out some adsense, in the same way that wp.com do it.
What this would mean would be that:
- You would never see any ads
- Your students would never see any ads
- Your regular readers would never see any ads
- There wouldn't be any ads in feed readers
- Noone who has bookmarked you or types in your URL would see any ads
- No logged in Edublogs users would ever see any ads
In fact, very few people would see ads at all, but enough search engine visitors might in order to help us cover the bills and continue to grow and develop Edublogs.
And (and this makes us very different to wp.com) if you are an Edublogs Supporter there would never be any ads on your site ever.
And of course no Campus sites would have ads either.
I have to be honest, I was first very opposed to the concept (as you might have guessed!) but something I've figured out over the last few months of talking about it to people online and face to face is that not many people actually care.
I have never, for example, heard of a user saying that they don't want to use wp.com because of their ads, or that they'd choose Edublogs over wp.com based on their ad policy (that I mentioned above).
Also, our idea with this is that we try it out temporarily and if it doesn't work out or upsets people too much - we'll look into other approaches.
But at this time we'd love to hear your thoughts, so please, um, let us hear your thoughts below :)
Cheers, James
While Mr. Farmer offers a cogent explanation for the need for revenue to support free, online hosting of Edublogs, he never says anything about embedding advertisements in user created content. I am not opposed to advertisements on free online applications. However, there is a big difference between placing an advertisement on a free site and placing an advertisement in the user's content. Huge difference. Major fucking difference. By doing such, Edublogs has crossed a line that is highly unethical in terms of having user's unknowingly endorse corporations or advertising content within content they have generated. Again, having a widget or a sidebar filled with advertising content is one thing; embedding advertisements in user generated content is another. The differences are not in the same ball park, not in the same area code, not in the same hemisphere.
What makes matters a tad worse is the defensive posture assumed by Edublogs and "drmike -- Volunteer Support Guru." They seem to be missing the point. Very few users are complaining about adverts. What users are concerned about is the way in which this situation is being managed. Since "drmike" is an anonymous unpaid professional, I suppose... you get what you pay for. You might think with the new advertising revenue being generated by Edublogs, they could afford to hire a less cynical customer relations person.
While I am not a legal scholar, I have requested legal counselors to consider this situation and will be reporting on their findings in the near future. I am not sure how "in-line" advertising in this manner will lead to better service for users, nor are users given any indication of what these services might be.
Overall I am quite perplexed by this situation. My students using Edublogs report feeling violated and that their content is being mis-represented by the hosting service. Myself and my students are clearly okay with advertiser-supported services. What we do not like is having words or brands put in our mouths that we have not chosen to support. Legally, in certain circumstances, this action is close to vilification or libel and it should not be tolerated by any user of any free service unless you have legally agreed to allow the host to do so.
While I am clearly late to this discussion, I am angry at myself for not looking into this before recommending it to my students. There are many free sites used by my class that advertise, but none, zero, zilch, nada, that embed advertisements in the content created by us, the users. And why haven't other free applications done this? I can only guess it was for legal and ethical reasons loosely considered by the Edublogs administration.
More to come...
Image from here and here
As some of you will have noticed, we have given EduSpaces a new skin and added a couple of features, namely; Shouts, Push to Twitter, Incoming Twitter and FriendFeed on all profiles. This combination of features allows users on EduSpaces to continue using the external tools of their choice while still updating their followers on EduSpaces. A few may ask why we have revamped EduSpaces, the answer is simple, this site launched four years ago this month, before Facebook, MySpace, Twitter et al were household names. Yes, it has gone through a couple of rocky patches, however, people kept on using it, so we wanted to show our commitment and say thank you. 
The service will continue to be free to use, however, we are considering putting a couple of links on the frontpage to a few worthwhile educational charities, I hope this is ok. Anyway, thanks to those users who kept supporting the site, we appreciate it.
Has the ability to post by email been removed? I've used it in the past, but not for ages & was trying to test it - and had forgotten what random address I'd set up. I can't find where I entered the details, though, now.
Keywords: posting by email
Posted by Eduspaces Central - Emma Duke-Williams
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 In developing a lesson in Media Literacy Education I ran across a slideshow by Renee Hobbes, a tenured full professor at Temple University School of Communication and Theater in Philadelphia, PA. In her presentation Hobbes provides a useful heuristic for examining different forms of media that I thought would be worth sharing.
The purpose of media literacy education can be defined helping learners of all ages to develop "habits of inquiry and skills of expression" that are needed to foster critical thinking, effective communication, and active citizenry in today's world (1). Under the guise of promoting habits of inquiry, there are three key elements you can base your analysis on: Authors & Audiences, Messages & Meanings, and Representations & Realities. Authors & Audiences
Authorship: Who made this?
Purpose: Why was it made? Who is the target audience?
Economics: Who paid for it?
Impact: Who benefits from this? Why does it matter to me?
Response: What kinds of actions might I take?
Messages & Meanings
Content: What is this about? What values and points of view are expressed? What is omitted?
Techniques: How was this constructed? What tools and techniques were used?
Interpretations: How might different people understand this message? What is my interpretation and what do I learn about myself from my reaction?
Representations & Realities
Representation: How does this message represent its subject?
Context: When was this made? Where or how was it shared?
Credibility: What are the sources of information, ideas or assertions? What criteria do I use to evaluate it? I like how Hobbes questions provide a solid frame from which we may access, analyze, evaluate and communicate media messages.Given the wide range media that surrounds us (e.g., advertising, narrative & documentary film, print & TV news media, music and popular culture), it is critical that educators and learners of all stripes are aware of media's influence and the ways of seeing and habits of mind they promote. Media literacy education is a fun way to play with our understanding of the world, a way to engage and participate with media that invites a host of critical thinking skills that can serve us all well. I am reminded of my first taste of media literacy education in an undergraduate film theory course. Armed with a new grammar of cinema and a recognition of the impact camera angles, sound and light, dialogue, transitions and how they affected the movie's message, I could never look at movie the same way again! Of course this meant I was never invited to watch movies with any non-film theory majors. I couldn't help offering a running commentary on the director's and editor's choices and the impact they were having on our perceptions. (How bleeding obnoxious!) I've since calmed down and can now enjoy films in the company of others without feeling the need to take notes.... If you're up to it, let me know of other media literacy sources you've found helpful. References: (1) Core Principles of Media Literacy Education, AMLA, St. Louis (2007) Image via www.nfb.ca via MFT&L
Keywords: 21st Century Skills, computing, education, heuristic, learning, media education, media literacy, media literacy education, participatory culture, skills, teaching
http://insider.libsyn.com:80/index.php?post_id=399021# Dr. John Riolo, host of The Insider podcast interviews Dr. Mary Gresham about therapy and the economy.
Dr Gresham has degrees in clinical psychology from Tulane, Emory and Georgia State.She has been practicing in Atlanta for 20 years and has special interests in the psychology of women and especially women and money issues. In her practice she has been running a ongoing women's therapy group for 15 years. Visit her website.
http://psychjourney.libsyn.com:80/index.php?post_id=399016# Dr. John Riolo, host of The Insider podcast interviews Dr. Mary Gresham about therapy and the economy.
Dr Gresham has degrees in clinical psychology from Tulane, Emory and Georgia State.She has been practicing in Atlanta for 20 years and has special interests in the psychology of women and especially women and money issues. In her practice she has been running a ongoing women's therapy group for 15 years. Visit her website.
Keywords: authors, books, build a private practice, interviews, law, legal, podcasts, psychologist, psychology, social workers, therapist
http://psychjourney.libsyn.com:80/index.php?post_id=398812# Deborah Harper, President of Psychjourney, interviews Mr. Fred Stoeker and Mrs. Brenda Stoeker about the book The Healing Choice: How To Move Beyond Betrayal written by Brenda Stoeker and Susan Allen and published by by Water Book with an introduction by Fred Stoeker, best-selling author of The Every Man Series.
Brenda Stoeker is a registered nurse, mother
of four, and seasoned marriage teacher with life experience in rebuilding a broken marriage. Together she and her husband, Fred, have counseled hundreds of couples struggling with issues related to sexual brokenness. Visit her website.
Fred Stoeker is a bestselling author of several books, including Every Young Manâs Battle and Tactics, the president of Living True Ministries, and a popular conference speaker who challenges men to become sexually pure, to reconnect in true intimate relationship with their wives, and to train their sons to become godly men. A graduate of Stanford University,
Fred lives in Des Moines, Iowa with his wife, Brenda, and their children.Visit his website.
Keywords: authors, books, build a private practice, interviews, law, legal, podcasts, psychologist, psychology, social workers, therapist
http://psychjourney.libsyn.com:80/index.php?post_id=398697# Deborah Harper, President of Psychjourney, interviews Victoria Zackheim, editor of The Other Woman: Twenty-One Wives, Lovers, and Others Talk Openly About Sex, Deception, Love, and Betrayal published by Grand Central Publishing. Victoria Zackheim is the editor of The Other Woman. A native Californian, she is a writer, freelance book editor, and instructor in the UCLA Writer's Program. She writes and records commentaries for The Mimi Geerges Show (Satellite XM radio and public radio) and is a frequent guest speaker for organizations and academic events.Working with Rosemary Reed Productions, Victoria is the developer and writer of the documentary film Tracing Thalidomide: The Frances Kelsey Story scheduled for a 2009 release. Visit her website.
Keywords: authors, books, build a private practice, interviews, law, legal, podcasts, psychologist, psychology, social workers, therapist
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