Get Social

I'm not sure if any of you have heard about or followed the Google vs. China censorship stuff that has been in the news since late March. For those of you who haven't, Google shut down its search engine services to China (google.cn) due to the country's strict laws on and enforcement of censorship. Quoted from the New York Times 'Google vs. China' linked article above:

Google’s move represents a powerful rejection of Beijing’s censorship but also a risky ploy in which Google, a global technology powerhouse, will essentially turn its back on the world’s largest Internet market, with nearly 400 million Web users.

“Figuring out how to make good on our promise to stop censoring search on google.cn has been hard,” David Drummond, Google’s chief legal officer, wrote in the blog post. “The Chinese government has been crystal clear throughout our discussions that self-censorship is a nonnegotiable legal requirement."

In last Sunday's New York Times, there was this article, which talked about how Chinese youth spend most of their free and social time on the internet. Quoted from the 'this article' linked above:

Frustrated with media censorship, bland programming on state-run television and limits on the number of foreign films allowed to be shown in China each year, young people are logging onto the Web and downloading alternatives. Homegrown Web sites like Baidu, Tencent and Sina.com have captured millions of Chinese youths obsessed with online games, pirated movies and music, the raising of virtual vegetables, microblogging and instant messaging.

Mr. Li, the Shanghai Maritime University student, says he surfs the Web to find or build his own community. A shy person with no siblings, he now has 300 online buddies, and says he turns to the Web to find what he cannot find anywhere else, particularly on state-run TV, which banned some Korean shows years ago.

After reading both of these articles, I couldn't stop thinking about the unique and positive role that the internet--and the access it provides to various forms of media--is playing in the lives of Chinese youth in the face of their struggles with and against their government's imposed censorship: especially since the past weeks have been spent discussing safety concerns in general and how they apply to popular social media sites like Facebook. But then I also began to think about the above-mentioned student and his sense of community online: I could just picture him sitting in his room at his computer for hours communicating with friends and surfing the internet. In the article, it says that he is an only child and is somewhat shy, though he does has 300 friends online and communicates with them regularly. Looking at this situation realistically though, he is still somewhat disconnected from these friends because even though all this regular socializing and communication is going on, he's still at his desk behind his computer being an isolated and shy only child. Are his online friends the same as his friends at school? Does he have any friends at school since he's busy spending so much of his free time socializing on the internet instead of meeting up with friends at a coffeehouse or club? Clearly I don't know any more details about his life beyond what's mentioned in the article, but it makes me wonder.

Socializing online behind one's computer is quite different from socializing face to face with another person or a group of people. And it's this difference between these two forms of socializing that always raises questions and concerns for me when it comes to singing the praises for social networking. Social networking provides you with instant information and access to your friends, allowing you to message them, comment on the material they have posted to their personal pages, and even allowing you to text chat with them live if they are online at the same time that you are. But even with all this access to different forms of communication thanks to social networking, it can and never will be the same kind of socializing that one experiences in real life. I'm not saying that the purpose of social networking is to replace actual real life socialization, but I think that many times people--including young adults--can become so reliant and consumed with the ease and availability of social networking that they don't make an effort to physically get together and connect or communicate in different ways, such as picking up the phone and actually talking to that person instead of posting a quick "Hey, how ya doing' on their wall. And that's something I always wonder, and I guess worry about, when looking at how much time young adults and adults spend communicating with and relaying on social networking. Like many of the other issues we've discussed concerning media and youth in this class, I think it's important present a balance and complete view of the situation: to not only encourage the use of social networking but to also encourage young adults to get off the computer, grab some friends, go outside, and just all around live!

Educating Parents to Relieve Fears

We have talked quite a bit about how we as librarians can and should help young people to be media literate and media safe. What should our role be? Censor? Guide? Facilitator? Educator? Which are the most important things to teach? What exactly do children and young adults most need to be protected against? There are no clear and easy answers to these questions, but for a general approach, I agree with Chanell (April 14, Always use protection?!) and Katie (April 14, Fear and the Internet) that it is important to consider the potential benefits of media engagement as well as the potential risks, and to not let our fears so overwhelm us that we throw out the baby with the bath water, so to speak, and deny our young people the myriad opportunities for creation, communication and connection available through digital technologies and the Internet.

One way to work towards achieving this balance between safety and encouragement, I think, may be to widen the focus of our efforts a little to include parents as well as young people. As Ruth pointed out, “teens and their parents may be growing farther apart, giving new meaning to the term ‘digital divide’. Parents often do not understand or monitor the online behavior of their children, or underestimate what their children are doing.” (April 14, Should we be concerned?) I think that parents not understanding the technologies their children are using is what creates a great deal of the fear surrounding young peoples’ use of digital and internet technologies.. Ignorance is the most fertile breeding ground for fear that there is. Perhaps in addition to trying to make judgments about how to guide, educate and protect young people ourselves, we should also be striving to empower parents to make those decisions by educating them and giving them the tools they need to understand the practices their children are engaging in.

I noticed that when we broke in to small groups to design programs, at least two, if not all three, groups chose to design programs aimed at adults. In the “real world”, as well, many libraries offer programs intended for parents about topics such as social networking, blogging and texting. This approach is not much different from the advice concerning TV and movies that it seems like I have been hearing for years: you don’t need to forbid your child to watch TV or movies—you need to watch with them and talk with them about what they see. Similarly, being on Facebook and navigating its privacy settings or reading some blogs and noticing how the discourse is furthered or hindered by the nature of the comments will make it easier for parents to teach their children about these topics.

The bottom line is that in most cases, parents have far more influence over their children’s attitudes and activities than teachers or librarians. If they can understand what their children are doing and converse knowledgeably with them about the various digital and online practices they are involved with, they will have a much better chance of helping to keep their children safe, more opportunities to help their children take full advantage of the many benefits of being media literate, and more opportunities to talk with their children about how their beliefs and values apply to these activities.

I am not saying, of course, that we should offer education and guidance to parents instead of offering the same to children and young people. Children can never have too many opportunities to learn. But I do think that educating parents may be just as important as educating children. Educating parents serves two purposes: it creates another resource for children to turn to for guidance and it lessens the fears that parents may have, which in turn will make it easier for them to encourage and support their children’s positive engagement with various digital and internet technologies.

"Haul Videos" -- Shopping porn or just plain boring?

Another article in today's New York Times -- "Tube Tops and Teddy Bears" by Cathy Horyn -- also struck me as relevant to our class. In this short article, Horyn discusses the trend of "haul videos," where young women, mostly in their teens and twenties, show off purchases from recent shopping trips. Because the videos feature young women usually in their bedrooms, some are using the sinister label of "shopping pornography" to suggest something creepily voyeuristic about them. The author of the article, however, argues that those who give them this label haven't really watched them: her experiences after viewing was that they are really quite tedious. Despite how boring they seem to be, these videos get hundreds of thousands of views.

With all our fears of protecting our kids from what is dangerous, violent, sexually provocative, exploitative, etc., sometimes I think we could spend a bit more time helping steer them towards stuff that's not so shallow and boring. In some ways I fear the much more prevalent mind-numbing and relentless consumerism of much of what's in the media as much as the fringe wackos and perverts on the internet. As some of our readings in the last few weeks have suggested, most young people can spot those kind of creeps and avoid them. Can we say the same for how well we've trained them to recognize and be savvy about those who only want to sell them more junk and make them more insecure about their appearance?

Speaking of those tech-aware young folks

In light of recent posts about how young people are perhaps more savvy about the potential pitfalls/privacy issues of online social networking, I thought this article in today's New York Times was relevant: "An Online Alias Keeps Colleges Off Their Trail." The gist of the article, as the title suggests, is that there is a trend among high school students to create aliases for their Facebook profiles, usually starting junior year until they are accepted into college. This move stems from a fear that college admissions officials will check their Facebook pages and that what they find could negatively influences the students' chances for admission. The article also suggests that this fear may or may not be justified, something I have wondered myself. At the high school where I teach, I have heard counselors and outside speakers tell students nightmare tales of admissions officers and potential employers rejecting applicants based on unsavory images and text found on applicants' social networking pages. Not that I don't think it's a good idea to warn students about this, but I have wondered how prevalent this practice was and whether or not these warnings were solely about helping students not undermine their chances for future success. I suspect that part of it is an attempt not only to get students not to publish such unsavory images but to indirectly address the behavior itself, an approach, I think, with questionable efficacy. Now certainly, I agree with the goal of discouraging students from underage drinking and engaging in potentially damaging sexual behavior, but it always struck me as false to focus on the dangers of photographing and publishing this behavior and sidestepping the concerns about the behavior itself. Aren't we more worried that they are doing these things than that a college admissions official will find out that they are? Don't some discussions of "think before you post" tacitly accept that the behavior takes place and emphasize the idea that it's all o.k. as long as it's not made public? How can we have discussions with students about these issues that look at all of this as a whole?

Facebook for Boomers

Thanks to Anna, Shawna and Patrick for their posts on Facebook privacy. Each one of them gave me something different to think about. Anna told me that younger people are more savvy regarding their privacy, which is ironic since we are continually talking about protecting our children. Shawna taught me that I can customize my privacy settings so that even though I’ve friended someone, I don’t have to give them access to my entire life. (Not that much of my life is on Facebook, but more on that later!) Patrick pointed out that knowing how to use new technology does not mean understanding it. Good point.

I’m one of those older folks, older being a totally relative term (my parents are on Facebook too, at age 80), who has only been on Facebook for about 2 years. My sole reason for starting a profile was to be able to see what my grandson was doing. His mom is great about posting almost every day about what they are going to do for the day, what cute, profound statement he made and/or what she found interesting in the news. In order not to be overwhelmed, I did what I suspect many older people do, I just plunged into Facebook, set my privacy settings without thinking about it, and I was off! However, now that this subject came up in our blog, I rechecked my privacy settings and found out I did ok going in blind. The only things I allow everyone into are my search result on Facebook and in search engines, and allowing anyone to add me as a friend or send me a message. All of my posts, IM screen name, birthday, likes and interests, etc. are for friend’s eyes only. I’m considering making searches for me more private but have to think about it. I do want people from my childhood or former jobs to be able to locate me if they look for me.

My main concern with Facebook is not what I post, but what people can see that my friends post. Is that even possible? One of my sons is uber liberal and outspoken. Even though I consider myself liberal, he posts things on Facebook that I really don’t want future employers seeing, not even my friends seeing for that matter! However, he doesn’t post them on my wall, so I think I’m ok. I welcome comments on this topic from the more Facebook-educated of us.

As for my postings, well, I can count on one hand how many posts I have made. I respond to others’ posts but only two or three times have I posted something on my own wall. When I use Facebook, I feel guilty because I use it to peer into the lives of my loved ones although my kids are well aware of my voyeurism and don’t care. I think posting is a mindset that you grow up with. I don’t know too many people my age who post things about their day on a regular basis. It seems to be those 25 and younger who post all the time. Mostly, we “older” folks use it to keep up with family and friends.

Anyway, it’s an interesting topic and amazing technology. I agree with Patrick that we cannot assume that just because someone uses Facebook, and/or are 25 years old or less, that they know what they are doing and are being as private as they like. I too would love to see some classes in social networking privacy and etiquette.

The Supreme Court and Questions about Technology

An interesting article has been making the rounds this week concerning technology and the Supreme Court entitled "Technical difficulties at the Supreme Court." If you have time, you should read the short article, but in summary, it details some of the questions that the Supreme Court justices have been asking during the arguments for the City of Ontario v. Quon case. The officer involved with the case, Sgt. Quon, charges that his messages were searched unconstitutionally. It appears that after Sgt. Quon exceeded his allotted usage limit, the city acquired transcripts from the pager provider and discovered that Quon had used the pager for personal purposes and that some messages were sexually explicit. The questions presented to the Court include:

1. Whether a SWAT team member has a reasonable expectation of privacy in text messages transmitted on his SWAT pager, where the police department has an official no-privacy policy but a non-policymaking lieutenant announced an informal policy of allowing some personal use of the pagers.
2. Whether the Ninth Circuit contravened this Court’s Fourth Amendment precedents and created a circuit conflict by analyzing whether the police department could have used "less intrusive methods" of reviewing text messages transmitted by a SWAT team member on his SWAT pager.
3. Whether individuals who send text messages to a SWAT team member’s SWAT pager have a reasonable expectation that their messages will be free from review by the recipient’s government employer. (source)

These are of course interesting questions with potentially interesting consequences. Nevertheless, what is getting the most attention is the level of technological knowledge, or lack thereof, that people feel the justices are demonstrating. For example, Justice John Roberts, Jr. asked about the difference “between email and a pager” while Justice Anthony Kennedy asked what would happen if a text message was sent to an officer at the same time he was sending one to someone else - “Does it say: ‘Your call is important to us, and we will get back to you?’” Justice Antonin Scalia’s questions -“You mean (the text) doesn’t go right to me?” - seemed to intimate a concern about the role of service providers and the ability to print text messages - “Could Quon print these spicy little conversations and send them to his buddies?”. Even Quon’s lawyer was uncertain about some of the technological aspects of the case as he struggled to answer a question about technology posed by Justice Samual Alito concerning whether or not officers could delete text messages from their pagers in a way that would prevent the city from retrieving them from the wireless carrier later. Initially, the lawyer said that they could but later noted that he “couldn‘t be certain.”

I bring attention to this article not to pick on the justices, but to show that all of us have a bit more to learn about technology. I’m certain that some of us in this class are quite comfortable texting, IMing, BBMing, using Facebook and Twitter, blogging, and perhaps even gaming, yet we’d still have a tough time explaining the ways in which, for example, text messages are routed from one phone to another. I think that that is what came to mind when I first came across this article - both how much I know and how little I know at the same time. It’s amazing how much we don’t realize that we know.

A thread discussing this article was started on a listserv to which I belong which includes mostly Computer Science students and faculty though a few people are from other backgrounds. The comments were actually kind of different. Some of the comments concerned the justices' level of knowledge about technology:

This is really depressing and daunting. It is emblematic of how out of touch our leadership is with technology and its implications. Technology, particular our newer systems of interaction and communication, are evolving so much faster than our legal and political system, and those who are incumbent within.

It is troubling that these justices are going to make key decisions about something they certainly have no deep understanding. It does not bode well for their decisions on other important and timely issues such as net neutrality -- where one's participation in the internet culture fundamentally impacts one's understanding of it.

Another poster thought that the questions posed by the justices were valid:

Some of those seemingly stupid questions might have been asked for legal reasons; i.e. they were really focusing on issues of law and not issues of technology. Did the reporters understand what is going on and report it correctly? In my experience, reporters almost always get important details wrong.

Another poster still thought that anyone could have posed those questions and that perhaps the justices weren't that different from any other person who uses technology casually:

Yea this report is just taking a bunch of quotes out of context and making fun of the justices, and saying they don't use iPhones. Most of the questions I can easily imagine being asked in a rhetorical, investigative way. And why should anyone (besides us CS freaks) know how a TXT message is transmitted between two phones? Younger people certainly have a better feel for how all this stuff works, but we are on the extreme end of the spectrum of understanding it. I guess justices can't be expected to be experts on every topic... their job is to listen to lawyers and expert witnesses and whatnot and decide who they believe (or who they want to believe). In education, don't we say there is no such thing as a "dumb question?"

I provide these quotes to help exemplify the different ways that people responded to this article and also to sort of show that technology and our understanding of technology is anything but straightforward. What do you guys think about all of this?

Facebook Literacy

As I was reading through the article on facebook's policies (which are, by the way, changing again, for those of you concerned--check the staff blog!), I was struck by the fact that, at least as far as facebook is concerned, I feel like kids and young adults are much more aware of the privacy issues contained in the site than many of their parents are.

For those of us who've been coming into adulthood since facebook entered the scene, there has been what seems like hyper-awareness of the propensity for privacy invasion there. Because facebook is designed to network with people you sort-of-know-but-not-necessarily-really, it treads a strange terrain for most of us between sharing and keeping secret. Our organizational affiliations, interests, and contact details are widely publicized, but at the same time, we are hugely aware of who may be looking at our stuff. We were incensed when the site opened up to non-college students, even more when it became apparent that prospective employers and, increasingly, family members were there.

For me, facebook is a tool to keep in quick contact with people from my undergrad, a spare few from high school, and the occasional relative. I have very little of substance on there; a few photos from a family reunion, some from when I was at Oxford, some program pictures from my RA days, basic contact information for myself, and a few quotes. But my family members, all adults who have been very concerned for years about my own online presence, share pieces of information about themselves that I often wonder if they realize are quite as available as they are. My peers and I navigate privacy settings carefully, while those who are newer to the game seem completely unaware of the need to do so.

As someone who's been responsible for hiring and has been required by supervisors to browse facebook profiles in the process (sometimes deceptively!), I am extremely careful about what goes onto my profile in the first place, and especially about who can see what. I don't allow people to post on my wall; I get notifications any time someone replies to anything I post so I can edit if needed; no one is able to see photos in which other people have tagged me until I change settings on each individual photo.

There are a great many situations in which it is incredibly important for kids to be educated on their privacy concerns, and facebook is certainly one of them, but in my mind, the nature of the site and its user base suggest that perhaps we need to be hosting information sessions for adults who are long past their undergrad days to make sure that they have the same information as the rest of us.

Some Scattered Thoughts on Copyright and Privacy

Copyight & Choking Creativity

Lessig’s TED presentation on copyright law certainly resonated with me, and left me with much to think about. While I very much respect where he is coming from, I have several concerns about his proposed solutions.

Corporations not Creators Own Copyrights

First, he argues that artists and creators should allow more freely available content into the marketplace. This makes sense, and I agree that this is necessary for movement toward his vision of a “legal” read-write society. What I question, however, is whether in today’s economy artists and creators are really in control of their work. Often artists sign away their rights (or at least some of their rights) to corporations –agencies, publishers, record labels, etc. While they may still gain profit from their work and have some limited control over how the work is used, it is the corporation that must give permission and make the content freely available. It is the corporation that will sue if copyright infringement occurs, and it is the corporation that has a vested interest in making sure the content is not freely available.

Copyright is Confusing

Lessig alludes to Creative Commons in his presentation, though he doesn’t go into a discussion of it. I strongly support the ideals of Creative Commons. However, I don’t see it as a feasible solution that will end “Copyright abolitionism” that is so rampant among youth (and many others), simply for the fact that it is too confusing. If you are remixing 10 movie clips with a song plus multiple photographs, and perhaps look at 100s of objects to decide which is best for your creation, think how time consuming and limiting it is to try to figure out the allowances and restrictions that are on each individual item. Even with Creative Commons labeling, it can be extremely difficult to discern how and when the item can be used, who to ask for permission, etc. I just don’t see young people taking the time to investigate this for each item.

I agree with Lessig that in this “Age of Prohibitions” youth will continue to be driven (or choose to) live life “against the law” simply because it is too hard and limiting to follow the law, and because the risk of prosecution is relatively low. The lessons of a previous age of Prohibition (remember speakeasys?) showed that in the end it was necessary to reconsider the law because it was impossible to prosecute everyone who has breaking the law, and only the gangsters and bootleggers were profiting. I wonder if digital copyright law might not be a similar case.


Does Participating in Society Today Mean Forgoing Privacy?

I’ve been thinking lately about the ways in which privacy is defined and does or doesn’t exist in today’s society. I have recently received a spate of privacy policy statements in the mail from various credit cards, banks, and businesses that I use the services of. In order to participate with nearly any business or web site, or to have a presence in the online world, etc., etc. we must sign away certain rights to our personal information. Many of us do this without thinking—often feeling that we don’t have a choice. And in many ways, I don’t think we do. How can one really avoid putting their information into the public sphere without becoming a recluse?

Even if you were able to somehow avoid working with any business or organization that had access to personal information, you would still be confronted with the massive amounts of public surveillance that goes on worldwide. I can’t remember ever signing or seeing a privacy policy about how an ATM or convenience store or city street camera can use my image. While generally these images are only released upon a crime being committed, how are images being stored, by who, and for how long? Is there any law saying that the owner of that surveillance tape could not use it to make a profit? If a celebrity sits down in a restaurant with someone who is not their spouse, could that restaurant sell the tape to a gossip outlet like TMZ?

I realize I am stretching things a bit here, but it is an interesting question. How much of our right to privacy do we give up just by leaving our house, whether virtually or physically? How much right to privacy should we expect to have in the public sphere? And will the legacy of our culture in the distant future be the massive amounts of surveillance images that we are leaving behind?

Also wanted to share this link to an intriguing map about surveillance from http://www.privacyinternational.org/. I was going to post a copy of the picture here, but decided in the light of copyright discussions this week, I would just link to it.

Radiohead and More

I have two different thoughts this week in my brain as I read and watched the assigned elements. The first is more simple: Radiohead, the music group, released their latest album in a digital format and allowed fans to pay whatever they wanted for the album.  After a set amount of time, the digital format was closed and the rights to distribution were given to the a record company, but the initial release of the album was done in an entirely new and different way than most people in the music industry.  Additionally, they asked fans to create storyboards for an animated music video and then the paid the best entries to make a one-minute clip.  I thought this was a really fun and legal take on the idea of listen and create process that Larry Lessig discussed. 

Second thought:  I was talking with a friend of mine who is a teacher this week.  Our discussion focused on the use of Facebook by students in here elementary school.  She teaches sixth grade, but had recently learned of students in third grade that had Facebook pages that did not have any security settings attached to them.  When she was exploring the students pages she noticed that there were many other students (as young as first grade) who did not have any privacy settings on their Facebook pages.  In looking through the Facebook terms of use, the Facebook people clearly state that users must be thirteen years of age which these students are clearly not.  Additionally, I asked her what the school has done to protect these students.  She said that they have put on internet safety seminars for parents but only five parents attended.  These are the questions that have been rolling around in my mind since I spoke with this teacher.  1) Since much of this media participation happens in the home setting what role should teachers/schools play in intervening in the situation of the very young and unprotected Facebook users?  2) Are there any additional security means that are possible on the side of the Facebook site that will stop these young children from having pages? 

For me this further motivates my understanding for the need for media literacy education in the classroom from a very early age.  I think that Tracy Mitrano's article had some very practical and useful guidelines for parents in teaching their children about protected internet activity, however I did not see any suggestions for teaching younger children.  I am not sure a young child would fully understand the ideas of only posting what you might "display in physical space."  The role of teachers was not really in the scope of her article outside of a college setting, but I wonder what she would suggest to teachers whose students are avid users without a lot of parental supervision? 

So at the end of this post I am torn by the excitement of students making mash ups and artists and musicians putting their creations out there for people to rework and remake.  And by the fear that young students already have an online presence that is not protected or legal and all their friends are also on the internet sharing personal information.  The only responses in my brain are "Yikes" and "I'm confused."  Any ideas fellow classmates?

Cooking Up a Media Literacy Lesson

The Yippity Yo Cooking Show

While I couldn't bring myself to eat these cookies when she's done (my baby and I cook together, but there is no licking or dropping of spatulas on the floor!) and I hope they don't mind her continuing to do all those things that are "cute" now when she's older, this is a great example of letting kids experiment with media concepts. Production is certainly one of the goals of media literacy education, and I just hope her dad let her see what he was doing on the editing end of things (or if he didn't, that he will involve her more as she grows older)! While their audience for this particular video has become widespread, a kid who makes a video to share with faraway grandparents or friends when they've moved away has the opportunity to create a media product with a specific audience in mind and to see all the behind-the-scenes things that go into media production, whether it be a cooking show or a magazine or a song. What a fantastic way to teach kids about media literacy and give them a sense of ownership that will help them understand future media experiences better!

Lessig’s video, How Creativity is Being Strangled by the Law.

Watching this video, I realized why I love being in graduate school. Lessig brought up points that had never even entered my mind, much less been pondered in there. It is fascinating to have an entirely new view be opened up by someone’s 20 minute video on a subject that I have not thought of previously.

Of course, I’m talking about the TED talk by Larry Lessig, How Creativity is Being Strangled by the Law. A number of questions and thoughts came to me after watching this video and reading this week’s required reading for our class.

My generation’s culture is one of consumerism, generally. Sure, we had artists who rose to fame singing folk music calling for change, or by participating in demonstrations where a few of us rose to the top with new thought on old issues. I don’t mean to downplay the achievements of our generation, but rather, to point out that many of the people my age use the internet to watch and listen. I really don’t think I was taught to create. When I went to school, we were taught to think but not necessarily question, to learn and to recite. When we wrote research papers in high school, I was taught not to plagiarize but I do not recall trying to create new knowledge, just to get the facts right and use proper citations. Knowledge was to be revered, not created.

Young people today use the internet, not only to watch and listen, but to speak and create. Now, the more I see and experiment, the more I realize the full potential of the internet. Knowledge is so easy to come by that we can go beyond acquiring it to trying to make sense of it and maybe create new thought on a given topic. The internet is also a great platform for our views and opinions, not only in written word, but through music and video.

How can I teach my students to create new knowledge when I don’t do it myself? This is a really tough question for me. Is it too late for me to be an effective teacher? Am I over-the-hill in education? I think the answer to this lies in how old I think I am and how old I feel. If I think like someone closer to retirement than starting a career, then yes, I’m done. But, if I am willing to learn new things and try new things, then I can learn all the new technology. I can learn to create and then, can pass that on to the next generation. A key component of this is being willing to admit that I don’t know everything before I teach it and being willing to learn along with my students and from them. Who says I’m close to retirement anyway, if I work until I’m eighty, like my mom did, then I’ve got a good 25 years left!

How can we encourage creativity while still protecting the copyrighted material of artists and scholars? I think this is a very important point. I liked Lessig’s idea of artists’ choosing to loosen the reins on their art and allowing non-commercial use of their material in the creation of a new product but there are drawbacks to that. One glaring problem came to mind while watching the hilarious videos that Lessig showed during his talk of Jesus parading through the streets of a large city singing I Will Survive and George W. and Tony Blair singing a love song to each other. If the original artist is offended by a particular remix of their song on the order of the two listed above, he or she has no recourse. But then again, when I was watching and laughing uproariously, the thought that the original artist had anything to do with that piece never crossed my mind. Therefore, in the interest of hearing the voices of our youth and having a free thinking and speaking society, I think it is important not to legislate these mash-ups and remixes out of existence just so that the original artist and his recording company are not offended. This is a complex issue and still needs to evolve. After all, 8 or 10 years of existence is newborn technology.

How can we encourage our children to be risk-takers while protecting them from predators? This question has been central to me throughout this class. I firmly believe that banning social networking and file sharing from our schools is not the answer. As a mother and a grandmother, as well as an educator, I believe that education is the answer. There is absolutely no way to completely shield our children from predators online or in person – they are all a part of our modern culture. I have always been amazed at people who think if we just don’t talk about it, it will go away, or, if we just ban it, no one will be exposed to it. We have to be willing to have frank conversations about all of these things. When it comes to the internet and copyright issues, it is no different. First of all, whether we like it or not, we have to familiarize ourselves with what is legal and what is not and teach that to our children. If we disagree with the law, then maybe the next lesson is how to protest and fight for repeal of those laws. Secondly, we have to model responsible risk-taking behavior by speaking out on issues within our local government or school district and by getting our students involved in that. Teaching our students the importance of being productive, honest citizens with the tools for creating new knowledge has to be the number one priority in our schools.

Service Learning: An Act of Participatory, Democratic Learning

One of the problems facing public schools is disconnect between the school, student and the surrounding community. Districts are continuing to be underfunded, and many struggle to get referendums passed, and this is largely due to the fact that local residents are unable to see how the school and community are interrelated. Further causing the current education crisis is the disengagement of students as a result of not seeing school as being important to the community they live in. When asked about their disinterest, many adolescents reply that they view the education they are “receiving” as meaningless. With this sort of perception, the high number of students that drop out of school is not surprising. One component of a remedy to this problem is to develop, promote and incorporate curriculum that is participatory and democratic that encourages students to be active in the learning process. Such curriculum can certainly be multifaceted and take on many different forms such as service learning.

Service Learning connects student and community in a process that greatly benefits both. It makes education an active process by engaging students with content and the opportunity to explore and experience the real world. It has been the discussion of much research in the past decade as many K-12 schools and universities have recognized its value and have mandated it within curriculum. Both quantitative and qualitative research suggests that incorporation of service learning programs can enhance the social, emotional and intellectual growth of students.

In Service-Learning: Thinking Outside the Box, for instance, a study regarding an undergraduate course at the University of Glasgow, Susan Deel, proposes that service learning can trigger personal and intellectual transformation. Because students can work/volunteer in places that they have never been part of before (even in their own community), they can be challenged and tested emotionally and socially. These challenges encourage critical reflection, knowingly or unknowingly. As students reflect on their service situations and experiences they are likely to investigate the situation or problem that they are working with, and discover policies, laws and choices that have created the situation. In this process, students are likely to develop opinions and understanding of their communities and others, and certainly likely to begin questioning and exploring—a goal that all educators have for their students.

Kathy Payne and Betty Edwards in their essay, Service Learning Enhanced Education for Young Adults share the same positive sentiments when it comes to cheering service learning. According to Payne and Edwards, “service learning can reinforce learning for middle grade students, launch themselves into the process for independence in a prosocial manner, and develop the competencies and civic skills they need as they move towards adulthood.” For Payne and Edwards, service learning offers the opportunities for adolescence that are at the threshold of adulthood to have new experiences, develop leadership skills and develop an interest in their communities by building passions. In the service learning process, students develop 21st century skills as they work in teams, problem solve and share and experience rich dialogue that crosses generations, genders, races, cultures, and experiences. As this occurs the learning process becomes an exciting, inviting experience for the students. They are not isolated in a classroom of thirty students but are part of the community that they live. Learning becomes relevant!

As a high school student I was fortunate to participate in a service learning program that brought me to places in my community that I never experienced until my service opportunities. Each year, I volunteered in a different setting, and by graduation I worked with children with special needs, academically struggling youth, local homeless and elderly with dementia. During these experience I sometimes worked with other students from my school and other times not. Throughout the year, while completing my service, I participated in discussion with faculty and other classmates to reflect on the experiences. Aside from just discussing how we felt about the situation we were encouraged to research and present information about the issue, problem, organization, etc. that we were working with. In the process we researched policy, laws, debates, etc. Today, I can testify that I was truly lucky to have such an active, engaging learning experience throughout my four years of high school. In retrospect, I could certainly state with confidence that that these experiences helped in developing my appreciation for public service and being aware of laws and policy.

As teachers and librarians we can aid in working to develop service learning programs. We can provide the literature to administration and school districts about the value, as well as provide information to students of opportunities in the communities. Further, we can even serve as a service opportunity, knowing the wonderful impact it will have on our students and patrons!

Fear and the Internet

I have been really interested in the topic of fear as it relates to the internet and media in general. Whether fear is of violence in video games, chatroulette, or creepy cyberstalkers, I was particularly struck by how much of the coverage I found on LexisNexis regarding teens, children, and media used terrifying terms. Many of the headlines included terms like risks, addiction, safety, danger, and violence. There were the occasional stories of the way that technology has allowed teens to do new and great things, but the overall effect I got was the need for protection and limits for addition.

As my earlier post explained, I am not a huge personal internet user. However, throughout this class and with the new media-friendly glasses I am trying on, my first instinct when I hear teens and media is definitely not fear for their safety. Instead, I think that with so much of our society in the U.S. and across the world participating in work, social interactions, and consumer purchasing through internet mediated programming and resources, it is only fair to educate and expose students to effective ways to create and participate in the media filled world around us.

In so many of the articles written, the everyday aspect of many internet and media uses is ignored for the sensationalized dangers of the internet age. For example, my internet use on a daily basis involves visiting the UIUC website to check on my classes, checking my e-mail, reading a few articles at the New York Times site and catching up on an occasional television show on hulu. None of these things causes me any fear and is in fact pretty mundane. (I am even embarrassed to type it because it is so boring.) I am not trying to minimize the real risks and dangers that are present with the internet and other media outlets, however I am just trying to point out the differences between the stories that are prevalent and the realities of many user's experiences.

I am realizing that I am converting to the ideas of this class particularly the idea that media use is already a pervasive part of daily interactions in 2010 and teaching children and teens useful, productive, and playful ways of participation will be of great benefit to them as they navigate their future. An approach that is so concerned with safety will quickly be encountering fear from all sides with little hope for the ways media can positively impact and engage children. From my own experience, if I had ignored all the things I was told to fear as a child, I would never live in the city of Chicago, ride the train to work by myself, read any books that looked at religion in a critical light, or travel out of the country. I understand that there are real safety concerns and issues, but there are also great ways of communication, learning, and interaction with a world that is no longer limited to our physical locations, but can span miles in a single click.

Always use protection?!

The question of fears and concerns surrounding the safety of youth through their interaction and participation with various information and media is one that has been in the back of my mind ever since I started taking classes geared towards working with young adults. Below are a few general questions, in no significant order, that have popped up in my mind when I think about the risks and safety issues surrounding youth and their participation with media, followed by my own thoughts/reflection about these questions.

As a librarian, what role do I play in protecting and keeping youth safe when the very nature of my career is to encourage patrons of all ages to seek any information they please without fear of judgment, impediment, or censorship?

All situational and environmental dependent factors aside, such as what type of library one is working in and whether or not that library has rules and regulations in place concerning the approach to safety for youth, is it really my job as a librarian to keep youth safe when it is my job to provide them with information and encouragement to seek it using various avenues for educational or personal purposes? I mean I’m not saying that I don’t care about the safety of youth, but hypothetically speaking, I can’t be true to the core belief system and goals of librarianship and protect youth from potentially dangerous information or situations at the same time. I can be open and honest about what’s out there and educate young adults on how to be safe and aware, but ultimately I can’t protect them.

And should I want to in the first place?

Education is everywhere and people can and do learn from things and situations both directly and indirectly whether they are fully aware of it or not. There are risks and safety issues involved with everything in life and realistically speaking one can never really be safe from anything. So that realization in mind, how should we feel about the notion of protection? As a librarian, am I doing more harm to the learning opportunities of young adults by trying to protect them or am I simply enticing them with forbidden fruit that they will seek out and taste no matter what if they are motivated to do so? Don’t they get enough protection from their parents and teachers? I’m not saying that librarians are necessarily supposed to be the one’s that young adults come to on the sneak for all the juicy stuff, but in a way I am: we are in the business of serving the organization, preservation, and access of information, not in the business of judging it or impeding it’s flow.

Why can’t and don’t we put more trust in the ability of young adults to protect themselves?

They aren’t as stupid and naïve as they look when it comes to being safe and if they are then it means that their educators--whether that be parents, teachers, librarians, friends, or other people in the community--have failed to educate them and that is the fault and responsibility of their educators not them. I keep thinking about the saying “we learn from our mistakes.” Allowing young adults to freely explore learning through the use of various media without censorship opens up the possibility for both positive and negative opportunities—we shouldn’t always focus on and fear the negative aspects lest they stop us from seeing the positive aspects and potential for learning no matter the outcome.

I keep thinking about my own experience with various forms of media as a young adult both in school and out. We had access to the internet on the few computers that we had in the library, but we were never warned about potential dangers posed by the information found on the internet or taught how to be safe while online. The computers did have firewall protection and we couldn’t access instant messaging services or chat rooms, but other than that we were free to access our personal e-mail accounts and anything else that our hearts desired. I was in high school from 1999-2002, long before social media and sites like YouTube and Chat Roulette, but just because sites like this didn’t exist didn’t mean that the web was any less dangerous or tame.

I convinced my parents, for the sake of my education of course, that we needed a computer and we finally got one when I was a junior complete with dial up internet and housed in my room since I would be the only one interested in using it. After all my homework was done and my parents went to bed, I would join the conversations in random Yahoo chat rooms and just chat. Nobody warned me about the potential dangers of chatting or even said I shouldn’t be chatting in the first place. That being said, nobody warned me that I shouldn’t give out personal information online or agree to meet someone offline who I had been chatting to online. It was all common sense. Not that I’m saying I didn’t benefit from the firewall at school or that I couldn't have benefited from some knowledge about the dangers of the internet and chatting and how to protect myself, but I survived and more importantly learned without protection (this is just my experience and I can't speak for every person or situation).

Some Questions Around Media Concerns

The conversation around the Chatroulette web site (discussed in an early post and comments) and the Daily show’s satirical look at the media’s exaggeration of the web site as a “craze” tied into questions I have had relating to how discussions of fear around media are framed.

I have a particular interest in the debate about violence that surrounds video games. I’m not so much concerned here with the legitimacy of claims about the negative effects of video game violence, but more so interested in how much that debate has framed discussion around video games, to the exclusion of many other discussions.

I don’t dispute the fact that violence is a serious issue. I personally dislike watching violent movies (can’t handle Tarantino) and would definitely prefer not to have youth I work with be violent. However, I’m not quite sure what the long-running debate around video games and violence is supposed to accomplish. If it is conclusively proven that video games cause violence, is the aim to then restrict people from playing these games? To ban the industry from creating violent games? To restrict just young people? Or something else?

Whether or not we researchers, educators, parents come to the conclusion that video game violence is detrimental, video games are already deeply imbedded in our culture – and the video game industry is larger and more pervasive than perhaps even the movie industry in the United States. And it is the most violent video games that are also the top sellers, not necessarily just because they are violent but because they are often the most complex, largest in scope, open-ended and interactive, and generally the best-funded games. So what do we do? What discussions should we be having? And why is the violence debate so often the only discussion the mainstream media seems to be having?

Participatory culture and classroom transformation--easier said than done

Although the video from Dan Brown posted by Anna had its weak points—for example, most of my and my children’s university experience has involved much more than the memorization of facts, and I’m also not convinced that increased access to facts by more people is what drives society forward, his general argument that the nature of institutional education needs to be transformed is one that I have been reading about, thinking about, and agreeing with over the past several weeks.

In Digital Literacies: Social Learning and Classroom Practice, the book I critiqued for my second assignment, editors Victoria Carrington and Muriel Robinson argued passionately that it is not especially useful to view new digital technologies simply as nifty new methods for getting the attention of children so that we can teach them the same old facts; if we want to educate children for media literacy, the very nature of education will have to be transformed from a model in which teachers impart information to students who lack it, to a model in which teachers act more as guides and facilitators and classrooms become communities of co-learners and creators of knowledge. This is a familiar concept to readers of Henry Jenkins's white paper which argues that as digital technology encourages and enables an increasingly participatory culture, the challenge will be to shift the focus of literacy education from one of individual expression to one of community involvement. Ross Todd, in his article “Youth and their Virtual Networked Worlds: Research Findings and Implications for School Libraries”, speaks of the need both to re-conceptualize the school library as a knowledge commons and to shift the goal of instruction from the imparting of information to the development of knowledge.

These scholarly and research backed arguments conform to my own experience as a homeschooling mother. I rarely told my children what they had to learn and I never gave them tests or grades. I was not their chief source of information. They pursued their own interests, learning from books, from TV, from each other, from friends, from other adults, from the internet, and occasionally, even from their father and me. We truly did function as a community of co-learners. I learned along with them. My most important tasks were to facilitate their learning by making resources available to them, to encourage them to think critically about what they learned by asking questions or suggesting additional sources of information, and to help them learn how to accomplish what they wanted to do when they were stuck. All of them have remained enthusiastic and competent learners as they have grown into adulthood.

Having expressed all of this agreement, however, I have to say that I think that transforming how we approach education is a lot easier said than done. My positive experience with homeschooling was dependent upon a household in which there were two parents, there was enough financial security for one parent to be unemployed, and there was one parent who preferred home to career. For many families, public school is the only option.

It may be easy enough to argue persuasively that the nature of education needs to be transformed, but actually achieving those changes is another question altogether. The Jenkins white paper offers a few concrete suggestions for activities that could be used to promote the various competencies that, according to Jenkins, need to be taught, and these are reasonable starting points. But they are still just a beginning step on the road to transformation. Anyone I have ever talked to who has taught in the public schools has spoken of the difficulty of effecting change in the classroom. With more and more emphasis being placed upon test scores, learning standards, complying with various federal and state mandates, and increased “accountability” for teachers and schools, there is precious little room for a teacher to introduce a new way of doing things, and precious little time for a new practice to take root and produce the sort of verifiable positive results that would allow it to be continued.

Transforming how we think about education will take more than persuading teachers of the need for change. In fact, persuading teachers of the need might be the easiest part of promoting change. The greater task will be achieving the social and political change that will need to occur in order for teachers to have more freedom to experiment and try new ways of conducting their classes. I have to admit that this strikes me as a rather daunting obstacle. I would be interested in others’ ideas about what can be done to make it easier and more acceptable for teachers and librarians to transform how education is carried out.

commonsensemedia.org

Commonsensemedia.org is a fascinating web site, there’s so much to look into with reviews and articles about all the various media that young people use or could use but with a parent or educator’s point of view. One feature which I felt was really a smart thing is the things “families can talk about” section of each review featured here. My wife and I frequently will check out a Christian web site provided by Focus on the Family to get movie (and sometimes other media) reviews to see if it’s something we want to see and they provide positive and negative elements as well as other considerations but no specific area that shows how the movie, etc… can be used as a point of conversation between you and your children. (www.pluggedinonline.com) I hope that the people at Focus on the Family might add something like the above to their reviews also.

It was also nice of this site’s creator to have the green, yellow, and red indicators with age appropriateness on each review as well to indicate the level of appropriateness. It was strange then though to see that some of the green ‘go’ and yellow ‘’ labeled sites still came with some pretty strong warnings of inappropriate features especially with web sites. I want to not be an alarmist when it comes to the technologies of web 2.0 but, some of the sites I found here were a bit disconcerting from what the reviews told me and I could understand a little better why some parents are a little gun shy on this topic. I’m glad I’ve taken courses like this and other similar ones as its good to have reminders that there exists a whole plethora of constructive and creative outlets for young people and adults for that matter.

This web site is simply so useful to both public and school librarians alike can use this as a kind of advisory tool to locate web sites to suggest to teens which, they can use to meet their information and entertainment. It could also be a helpful resource to the librarians themselves when doing collection development so they select those media which best meets the patrons of their library. As a school librarian I also liked that they have resources which appear to help you develop an appropriate media policy for your school that’s sensible but, it’s hard to say much beyond that about it as you have to buy the educator’s kit to really learn more.

Lastly, I’ll just comment a little on the resources for parents. This incidentally is something that librarians at either public or school locations can recommend to parents who express concern about their kids using the Internet. There are some really good videos and articles for them to take in and think about with regards to the many media inputs in their children’s lives. It’s great that the developers of the site thought to make this information accessible by age range and topic as obviously, what’s suitable information for one age of the youth spectrum may not be for another. The advice too isn’t preachy and leaves room for the parents to decide, it just gives them points to consider. I think I can best sum up my thoughts on commonsensemedia.org by saying; this is one site I think I will add to my delicious account for future reference-good stuff!

Rheingold and Levine Inspired WebQuest

I thoroughly enjoyed last week's readings, especially the selected articles found in the Civic Life Online book from Rheingold and Levine. I had decided to put together a WebQuest on blogging for our second assignment and was substantially lost on how I was going to organize and present it because I'm not an active blogger whatsoever and making myself blog for this class has been quite the challenge--I'm cut from the same cloth as Katie L--I like to keep a very low/non-existent profile online and admit that I don't participate in anything online ever including blogs, social media, commenting, etc.--so I didn't know how I was ever going to convince young adults why they should start blogging themselves. But after I read the readings for last week, I realized that I could essentially build a WebQuest around Rheingold and Levine's notion of civic engagement through exercising one's public voice via blogging. Hopefully this WebQuest will not only introduce teachers and students to their ideas but actually motivate students to blog by utilizing the suggested activities that Rheingold outlines in his article for blogging. It will probably just die undiscovered in the vast expanses of the internet, but I just thought I would share it with you guys and I welcome any feedback that you might have if you feel so moved to comment ha-ha! (You can link to it below or click on the title to this post).

http://questgarden.com/100/35/6/100409000556/

Chat Roulette

I don't know why, but you'll have to manually put the URL into your browser from the first paragraph of my post if you want to watch the video on Chatroulette. Sorry!

Chat Roulette...the new conversation??

I have a creepy feeling about Chatroulette.com. Of course, it takes me awhile to warm up to any new technology so I am going to try to be objective about this new phenomenon. I get a kick out of being a voyeur as much as the next guy but Chatroulette is too “in your face” for me. For background, watch http://vimeo.com/9669721 informal, funny research on this new use of the web cam.

My gut reaction is that there is something weird about wanting to chat with a stranger who probably has no expertise in anything I’m interested in and whom I will never talk to again and will never meet. I like to meet people that share one of my interests or with whom I can have a relationship. And, of course, there is the pervert factor. Every article I’ve read and news report I’ve seen warns of the sexual implications of this form of entertainment. On Chatroulette one can see masturbation, private body parts, psychos with nooses around their necks, men in bras…need I go on?

Is the right to patronize this site in the same league as the right to read books on sensitive subjects? My opinion is no, it is not. While I am all for freedom of the press and freedom to express your opinions and to talk about the taboo, I think there are some things that do not need to be witnessed. I might join in a conversation about sexual perversion, what is perverse, what the attraction is and why some people like it and others don’t. But it is a whole new ballgame to witness sexually explicit acts. For example, to change the context, it is one thing to read about a grisly murder but it is quite another to witness one.

This is definitely a concern when thought of in the same context as youth. Teens would be the most likely age group to be attracted to this technology. First, some of them have more leisure time than adults and more of their time, leisure or not, is tied to the computer. Secondly, even if a teen is leery of whom they will run into, persuasion of peers will be a big factor. And, most importantly, trying new technology is as familiar as breathing to teens and that, combined with natural curiosity and a sense of daring, might be a dangerous combination.

It’s not that I don’t trust the kids (God, how many times have you heard THAT one!) Seriously though, my concerns are with whom they will start chatting in Chatroulette and what that person will do on camera or ask the kids to do. Older teens have probably seen much more sexually than adults want to recognize but the younger teens and tweens that might get on Chatroulette.com could see things that they are just not ready for. Another concern for me is that the more we see and accept sexual behavior, as well as other outer-limit behavior, the more mainstream it may become, although I think we may have crossed that threshold already.

I would like to say that perhaps there is some educational value in meeting new people from different areas of the world but from what I have read and seen, that is not even possible. Participants move from one to the next partner so quickly, this process is called nexting, that if you are not a beautiful, young girl or naked, you will be nexted faster than you can say hello. This new use of internet technology is purely for entertainment. The point is simply to sit there and see what completely strange thing can be seen. The point is not to chat so much as to be shocked.

To quote Cliff Kuang at Fastcompany.com, “Self-published entertainment has officially moved into territory I can barely comprehend. Parents: One more reason to lock up your daughters.”