First from hearing from Colin Webb:

today we’ll address policy, copyright, email/IM, voicemail, cell phones, Internet, social networking

There are lots of legal ramifications to these digital devices in our schools
- we want to give you some important things to consider

Importance of Policy: who’s got your back?
- we tend to not get very excited about policy

3 lessons today:
1- policy = protection
- some people view policy as stifling to creativity
- it allows protection for us to do our job, we look for things which we need protection for
- once you have policy in place, please follow it (you’ll make everyone happier)
- it will eliminate some of your liability
- if we have a policy but ignore it in certain cases, that is worst-case for a lawsuit

Copyright
- All’s Fair in Educational Copying? Really?
- fair use was crafted long before electronic media
- citing section 107 of copyright law
- “lifting part of works for a limited context”

“the crux of copyright law application: deprivation of profit and loss of control”

examples: pirated movies, audio, software
- public performance
- commercial use

example: high school talent show when you’ve charged admission
- if you commit that to DVD and sell them for $15 each, then you’ve publicly performed my song without my permission for that royalty

loss of control examples
- cartoons used for advocacy (people who are re-purposing something that the original author disagrees with)
- substantial alteration of content (fine line for definition of ‘parody’)
- you don’t know where that fine line often

2002 TEACH Act was an improvement on fair use
- specifically focused on distance learning

2005: DMCA prohibits circumvention of electronic copy protection

You can play a movie relevant to your curriculum, you can’t play a movie for entertainment
- you can make an archival copy, you can’t distribute copies

“Disney is notorious for defending their copyrights and they will sue your district.”

Copyright: Transformative Argument
- “as long as the work is transformed, it is fair use”
- determined on a case-by-case basis, no clear-cut rule
- this argument has been made and both successfully and unsuccessfully

‘At the ISTE conference several years ago, I heard a presenter say this means educators and students can do whatever you want, it will be sorted out in court if it is challenged’
- that is bad advice

MY COMMENT: I ASKED COLIN WHO THE PRESENTER AT ISTE WAS WHO SAID THIS. HE SAID IT WAS SOMEONE FROM ANOTHER SCHOOL DISTRICT. I WANT TO FOLLOW UP ON WHO THAT PERSON WAS SPECIFICALLY. THESE ARE THE KIND OF ‘STORIES’ ABOUT COPYRIGHT WHICH NEED TO BE VALIDATED AND CITED SPECIFICALLY.

“I call taking someone else’s work and transforming it plagiarism”
- err on the side of caution

This just in!
- 18 Jan 2012: Supreme Court ruled (6-2) on Material in public domain is not in “territory that works may never exit”

Case: International Copyright. Congress has power to move works in PD back to protected (1994)
- HG Wells, Igor Stravinsky

Now hearing from Glen Hammonds:

Records: Nothing lasts forever? Don’t bet on it!
- Freedom of Information Act
- Oklahoma Open Records Act

Governmental tort claim act protects people when they are doing things in the scope of their employment, this applies for school teachers

1 Definition of a record, for Open Records Act
- 51 O.S. 2011, 24A.3

‘Record’ means all documents, including, but not limited to, any book, paper, photograph, microfilm, data files created by or used with computer software, computer tape, disk, record, second recording, film recording, video record or other material regardless of physical form…

First point: don’t be afraid of an open records request you receive as a school employee, these are common and will continue

Every document in a school is not a public record, but we need to look at this definition

MY COMMENT: THE LONG URL ON THIS SCREEN IS A PERFECT PLACE TO SHARE/USE A URL SHORTENER AS WELL… URL IS FAR TOO LONG TO TYPE…

The problem with emails, corporate America finds it very easy to archive everything (all that goes out or comes in)
- in schools, we don’t have to do that

Search fees: when are they allowable?
- “if the reuest is solely for commercial purpose, or would clearly cause excessive disruption of the essential functions of the public body”
- this doesn’t mean you can’t charge for the document, it means there can’t be a ‘search fee’ to go find something

law says you get reasonable time to respond to requests, good idea is to talk directly to requesters and find out exactly what they want / are looking for (their request may be broader than they need)

If you have a superintendent who conducts much of his business with board members with his personal email account, then his email records are definitionally open records
- this is not a question of access, it is a question of whether someone files an open records request

Citing law on “school-business electronic communications on privately owned electronic devices”

Penalties for Open Record Act violation
- violation is misdemeanor, up to 1 year in jail, visiting days are usually on Thursdays
- I don’t encourage you to take the ‘asking forgiveness’ path as people sometimes encourage in education

Question from the audience: What is my responsibility as a district tech director if someone seeking an open record request for a teacher’s personal email account if they conduct business with it
- indivdiuals can

Question from an audience participant who says “We’ve chosen not to archive email in our district. Is that OK?”
- answer: There is an attorney general opinion that says schools should follow state law, you need to follow law and your policy
- there can be policies for keeping emails for 30 days, you need to determine what policy you’ll have in place
- there are requirements for keeping financial records for a long time
- there is not an exact answer about how long you must keep a document (depends on what the document is, plus your local policy)

Email privacy / IM privacy

There is no right to privacy on school district on email systems
- school district owns the system, the employee does not

For me (Colin Webb) as a tech director, for me to retrieve an email from an employee’s account the superintendent must sign off on that request (campus principals can’t, our policy specifies it must be escalated to the level of the superintendent)

multiple subjects: try to separate them because of discovery
- an open records investigation can bring up unrelated issues

Acceptable Use Policy

Ramifications

I tell my teachers NOT to vent with email: “speaking into the air” does not create a public record

Say it with me: “Protect Your Password”
- don’t give others your password

I FOUND THESE ARTICLES AFTER GLEN REFERENCED SOME RECENT NEWS IN OKLAHOMA REGARDING SCHOOL PASSWORD ISSUES:

“Tulsa Public Schools starts search for new athletic director” (27 Jan 2011)

During an interview with a school district attorney, Spring and assistant athletic directors Latricia Pruitt and Jon Wheeler reportedly disclosed that they had accessed Murphy’s e-mails – not her business account – “using a password they had located within Ms. Murphy’s vacated office.” Pruitt was suspended but has since been reinstated. After termination proceedings had started against Wheeler, he agreed last week to resign in exchange for being paid the remainder of his annual salary and benefits. Murphy was initially reinstated, but was terminated in December after she failed to report to new assignments she was given in August and September.

“Tulsa Schools, suspended assistant AD Wheeler make resignation agreement” (18 Jan 2012)

During an interview with a school district attorney, Spring, Pruitt and Wheeler reportedly disclosed that they had accessed Murphy’s personal emails – not her business account – “using a password they had located within Ms. Murphy’s vacated office.”

Always and Forever (email can be forever)

Private Accounts
- can be a problem when people forward their Facebook to district email

Voice Mail
- it creates a record
- you need a policy about this

Recording law in Oklahoma: as long as 1 party knows things are being recorded, you can legally record
- had a recent example where a parent recorded an administrator “unloading” on them, that made News0 later

Cell Phones: who pays? who owns?
- IRS no longer requires individuals to pay a percentage of cell phone costs if you use a cell phone partly for personal use
- regardless of who owns the account and who pays, it is still subject to open records if you create a text, IM, anything else
- you are creating a digital track’

Be aware of geo-tagging of images, those include information about where you were when you took the photo

Filtering policy
- tell your friends not to email you inappropriate messages and images (NSF = not safe for work)
- beware of political emails during election cycle

Social networking sites
- we’ll take more about this tomorrow

There is some consequence for having social media interactions between students and schools

Layshock V Hermitage School District 2007-2012
- student create fake MySpace page of principal, Court rules school could not discipline student. (SC declined)

Doniger V Niehoff 2008-2011:
- Student Avery …

2 cases of teachers
- Mount Dora, Florida: Teacher of the year suspended for anti-gay marriage posts on personal Facebook page, re-instated 4 days later
- Barrow County, GA: Ashley Payne fired for posting picture of herself holding a beer on Facebook when she was vacationing in Germany (school fired her for setting a bad example by drinking)

Can You Do That? Legal Issues in Tech Administration #otaem12 originally appeared on Moving at the Speed of Creativity on February 7, 2012.

A Ponca City mother is outraged. She says her son has been accessing pornography….on a laptop that was issued by the school….and she says school officials are partly to blame. “I was angry, I was really angry at first,” Judy Ferguson said. Judy found her teenage son watching pornography on his school laptop. “When I caught it I took the computer and turned it back in to the school,” Ferguson said.

Life is about choices, and students face a multitude of digital choices when they get online or connected with any device including a laptop, a phone, or other communication tool. This is one reason Oklahoma schools sending laptops home with students not only have parents sign an acceptable use agreement (AUP) addressing SHARED responsibility between parents, students and school officials for student use of technology equipment, they also hold parent training / information sessions when this specific issue is addressed. I’m not sure if Ponca City mother Judy Ferguson signed a form like that and attended an informational session about shared responsibility for student behavior on laptops, but she should have.

In the initial years of the Texas Immersion Pilot Project (TxTIP), I heard multiple stories from school officials about issues and incidents involving student access of pornography and inappropriate material. Any school employee involved in a 1:1 program knows this is an issue which must be addressed. The strange twist to this Ponca City Schools story was that school officials reportedly issued a laptop to the same student who previously got in trouble for accessing pornography right after Christmas break. Again according to the News4 article:

The Tech Director [of Ponca City Schools] said the software the school uses tracks every key stroke and they could see the student attempting to get into x-rated areas but their records show he was never able to access it. Ferguson became even more upset when the school gave her 9th grader another laptop after she requested he complete his assignments another way. School administrators admit that was a mistake. “When they came back from Christmas break inadvertently he was issued another laptop when that was discovered that second laptop was taken away,” Dr. David Pennington, Superintendent of Schools.

I’m wondering how school officials “inadvertently issued a laptop?” (I’m also wondering if they run key loggers on all school computers…) It would be great to see a school response with more information, background, and quotations on this than La’tasha Givins (the KFOR-TV reporter) provided for this article. It is reasonable to conclude the mother of the student saw her child accessing pornography at home: It is highly doubtful she would raise these embarrassing charges regarding her own son otherwise. Understanding this, the technology director’s response which denies inappropriate content was EVER accessed by the student on a school laptop seems unreasonable. Perhaps this was a misquote?

Responsibility for teen behavior when it comes to life online as well as offline lies primarily with the STUDENT. Yes, parents as well as educators share responsibility for guiding and supervising student actions. Ultimately, however, in our society we hold individuals responsible for their behavior rather than institutions. It would have been helpful (from a community education perspective) if reporter La’tasha Givins had provided some of this context. I’m not sure if school officials provided this or not.

When a high student chooses to have sex and gets pregnant, does the local TV affiliate run a segment blaming school officials? Hopefully not.

One takeaway from this article (and others like it which paint 1:1 laptop programs as evil / not worthwhile) is the importance of school officials “telling the story” of positive 1:1 learning impacts early, consistently, and through multiple media channels. In most school districts today, we have barely started to leverage the power of social media to ‘tell our story’ and communicate with parents as well as others in the community about the great things happening in our buildings each day. An example of why this is important is the result for a Google keyword search for “Ponca City laptop” today. Guess what link is the “non-promoted” search result #1?

A second takeaway is the importance of school officials using consistent language with students, parents, members of the community, and media when it comes to laptop learning. We must emphasize “digital citizenship” and the responsibilities which we share to help students learn to make good choices.

Should Ponca City School officials have been more careful to not issue Judy Ferguson’ son another laptop computer after the Christmas holiday, since his mom had specifically asked that he NOT work on a laptop to complete his assignments? Probably. (I say that conditionally since I’m sure there is ‘more to this story.’)

Should KOFR reporter La’tasha Givins have ignored the fact that Judy Ferguson’ son CHOSE to find and look at pornography on a laptop of any kind? Absolutely not. Too many people in our society want to ‘pass the buck’ when it comes to responsibility, and the primary people responsible for these “inappropriate content access actions” were the STUDENT and the PARENT.

Yes, teachers and school officials share responsibility for helping students learn and learn to make good choices. We don’t “pass the buck” entirely to parents and students for everything which happens during school and in some cases, even for things which happen after school. Schools DO bear some responsibility for helping inform and support “good choices with laptops” when they send them home with students. Ultimately, however, “the buck should stop” with the student and the parent when it comes to inappropriate website access at home.

I hope La’tasha Givins will investigate these issues further and write a follow-up article which provides more context for this situation and the people as well as organizations who are involved.

Technorati Tags: city, laptop, ponca, ethics, responsibility, parent

Don’t Blame School Officials if Your Child Chooses to Look at Porn on His Laptop originally appeared on Moving at the Speed of Creativity on February 4, 2012.

The definition of sexual abuse is broader than many people realize, it’s not just physical touching/abuse. The definition used in this series is: “Any tricked, forced, manipulated, or coerced sexual activity for the pleasure of the abuser. This can be physical, verbal or visual.”

Conservative studies show sexual abuse is at epidemic levels today
- there are 60 million sexual abuse survivors in the U.S. today
- we have 300 million people in the U.S. so that means 1 in 5 people alive today in our country are sexual abuse survivors
- 1 in 3 females are predicted to be sexual abuse victims before the age of 18
- 1 in 6 males are predicted to be sexual abuse victims before the age of 18
- 66% of sexual abuse victims won’t talk about it until they are adults
- this cuts across all economic, ethic, and racial lines

Less than 10% of sexual abusers will ever enter the criminal justice system
- so 90% of those who want to harm our children are not in the justice system for us to find them with a background check (we still do background checks in our organizations, but background checks alone are insufficient protection)

MY COMMENT: THIS REMINDS ME OF THE ‘DEFENSE IN DEPTH’ STRATEGY WHICH IS EMPLOYED FOR COMPUTER NETWORK SECURITY

Almost 90% of children are victimized by someone the child knows and is taught is “safe”
- “stranger danger” has its value, but is not sufficient awareness

It’s a myth that sexual abusers have a clear, identifiable visual profile
- many are educated, married, have jobs, look like productive members of society
- it’s also a myth that all sexual abusers are men: some are also females
- 85% of convicted sexual abusers are men, 15% are women (some point out cases against women are more difficult to prosecute, so that may contribute to these skewed numbers)
- there is NO VISUAL PROFILE to rely on

Children are not just victimized by adults, peer to peer sexual abuse is high and rising
- children are not only learning about sexual behaviors from adults, they are also learning from it through the Internet

The “abuser triangle” is used by counselors to treat sexual offenders, and it has 3 elements:
1- deviant sexual desire (adults who prefer children as sexual partners)
2- faulty thinking (ability to justify and rationalize deviant desire)
3- access (the offender having access to children)

Molesters intentionally groom both children and “gatekeepers”
- gatekeepers are the people who stand in the way of molesters to gain access to the child
- “molesters are looking for trusted time alone with a child they are grooming”

“edge of the herd” concept: the children most at risk for grooming by a molester / sexual predator / abuser:
- are often on the fringe, in need
- looking for someone to follow or trust
- from a broken family
- from a single parent home
- involved in alcohol or drugs
- interested in pornography

Every case the MinistrySafe law practice has handled involving boys and male sexual predators has involved the use of pornography during the grooming process
- predators use nudity and sexual touch for “barrier testing and erosion” with children
- often use sexual discussions and joking, playful touch and ‘accidental nudity”
- magazines and movies depicting nudity and sex

Keeping victims silent through secrecy, shame & embarrassment, and threats (subtle or direct) are also a critical part of the grooming process

Many people who have been sexually abused or assaulted report feeling some sense of guilt or responsibility for what happened to them, molesters use this psychology against victims

#1 reason kids don’t tell: No one will believe you
- often this is true, because of the way molesters groom the gatekeepers

Common grooming behaviors
- gift giving: single adult to single child
- kid-magnet activities (things children are attracted to)
- repeated time alone with the same child (unsupervised or not easily overseen)
- touchy with children, pushing physical boundaries
- sometimes using playful but inappropriate touch
- breaking the rules: providing alcohol, tobacco and/or pornography (can be other rules you have setup for your organization)

Peer abusers tend to be more opportunistic (they don’t create their own schedule and drive their own cars)
- this should be distinguished from natural sexual curiosity, and we do this by looking at power relationships between the peers involved
- power can be due to age, size, economic resources, social connections (popularity), or differing abilities

Children with different kids of disabilities are particularly at risk for peer abuse

risks are highest any place where clothes come off (swimming/bathing) and any place that is less easily seen

To reduce risks, we should always report any grooming behaviors we observe
- adequate supervisors for all activities are key (use programmatic ratios)
- avoid unmonitored, 1 on 1 interaction

MY COMMENT: THIS IS THE ‘TWO DEEP LEADERSHIP’ CONCEPT FROM SCOUTING / YOUTH PROTECTION PROGRAM

avoid individual gift giving, always better for the gift to come from a group rather than a single individual adult giving to a single individual child

Short term impacts of sexual abuse on children:
- poor self esteem
- shame/guilt
- anxiety / nervousness
- fears / phobias
- loss of trust
- disinterested in person or activity previously enjoyed (we need to ask questions to find out what has changed)
- anger
- self-mutilation
- bedwetting
- nightmares
- rebellion
- running away

Long term impacts:
- depression
- suicidal thoughts or acts
- substance abuse including self-medicating behaviors
- molesting other children (not a 1 to 1 scenario, some victims- especially boys who do not receive any kind of treatment
- drop in grades
- promiscuity / seductive behavior
- STDs
- excessive modesty or affection seeing behaviors
- prostitution (95% of prostitutes on the street were sexually abused as children)

If a child reports abuse:
- listen and respond calmly (don’t respond emotionally)
- be sensitive to vague and partial disclosures (children often test you with part of the story to see if you respond with anger or disbelief)
- it is ok to ask for more questions that simply ask for more information: “Do you to tell me more?”
- don’t ask shaming questions: What were you wearing? What were you doing in that location? These questions can make the child feel they were responsible for the abuse rather than the adult and clam up.
- report this to a supervisor immediately
- NO SECRETS

If the child asks you if you will keep it a secret, you need to respond with something like: “There are some things I can’t keep a secret: if someone is being abused, being hurt, etc.)

statutes by law vary, but generally all states not only require reporting of physical abuse but also emotional abuse and neglect. Many require reporting of “suspicion” of abuse and neglect. Entities we report to, how long we have to report, and what information we have to report varies. Generally we don’t have to investigate, but we do have to report.

Google “Child abuse reporting” for your state (example: Oklahoma Department of Human Services, Child Protective Services)

www.childwelfare.gov also has resources

We need to always create cultures of communication in our programs
- we need to open up lines of communication for policy violations that cause us discomfort also… not to create a witchhunt, but to create a culture where a supervisor can identify “red flag” information when grooming and barrier testing is taking place.

MY CLOSING THOUGHT: THIS IS OUTSTANDING TRAINING, IT’S EXCELLENT IT’S AVAILABLE ONLINE AND THERE’S A QUIZ FOR PEOPLE TO TAKE BEFORE RECEIVING A COMPLETION CERTIFICATE.

http://ministrysafe.com

Technorati Tags: online, training, video, ministry, safe, ministrysafe, youth, protection, sexual, predator, abuser, pedophile, suspicion, neglect, physical, emotion, emotional

MinistrySafe Online Video Training for Youth Protection from Sexual Abuse originally appeared on Moving at the Speed of Creativity on January 27, 2012.

In today’s webinar for eTechOhio, I argued that every classroom needs three digital spaces for sharing: a “home base” site (wiki), a newspaper (blog), and a “digital locker.” That digital locker is the space for sharing confidential information like student grades, taking quizzes and tests, etc. It’s NOT the space for creating and sharing digital curriculum. Those activities need to be done on the OPEN WEB, outside logins and passwords. Curriculum for the Technology 4 Teachers class I taught at UCO last spring is an example. Jim Askew’s amazing high school chemistry curriculum for students in Crescent, Oklahoma, is another. There are more examples, but there need to be MANY, MANY more. This kind of open curriculum sharing on the web needs to become the NORM, not the exception.

The 2008 Creative Commons video, “A Shared Culture,” makes a compelling case for why sharing content on the open web is so important. The contexts here go beyond education, but the education space specifically is vital for open sharing. This is an ethic we each need to embrace and advocate for. Take a few minutes and watch this video, then pass it on.

Hat tip to Maria Henderson for sharing the term “home base” in this context in a presentation in White Oak, Texas, this summer.

For more related to this topic, see my presentation resources for “The Road to Blended Learning.” Also don’t miss Dean Shareski’s opening keynote for the 2010 K-12 Online Conference, “Sharing: The Moral Imperative.”

Technorati Tags: blog, classroom, edtech, moodle, technology, wiki, needs, webct, blackboard

Making the Case for Sharing Curriculum Openly Online [video] originally appeared on Moving at the Speed of Creativity on September 20, 2011.

eSchoolNews’ August 17, 2011 article, “ACLU sues Missouri school district over internet filtering,” provides details about a new lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union against the Camdenton R-III School District in central Missouri. The lawsuit is part of the ACLU’s “Don’t Filter Me” campaign. Camdenton Schools are accused in the lawsuit of prejudicially blocking students’ access to educational websites about gay, lesbian, and transgender issues, while providing access to anti-LGBT sites.

According to the ACLU’s August 15th press release:

The lawsuit argues it is discriminatory and unreasonable to require students to ask for permission every time they want to access a new LGBT website when students can freely access anti-LGBT websites.

The press release also reveals Camdenton Schools is using the URL Blacklist for content filtering. According to the ACLU, URL Blacklist:

…has a viewpoint-discriminatory category called “sexuality,” which blocks all LGBT-related information, including hundreds of materials that are not sexually explicit. The filter does, however, allow students to view anti-LGBT sites.

The April 11, 2011 article from the ACLU, “ACLU “Don’t Filter Me” Initiative Finds Schools In Four More States Unconstitutionally Censoring LGBT Websites,” provides more details about which LGBT-related websites are blocked and permitted in some U.S. school districts. The article links to the “Don’t Filter Me: Students, Check Your School’s Web Filter!” page. This campaign asks students at school to check for access to the following five LGBT websites:

1. Day of Silence: http://dayofsilence.org
2. It Gets Better Project: http://itgetsbetter.org/
3. The Trevor Project: http://thetrevorproject.org/
4. GSA Network: http://gsanetwork.org/
5. Gay, Lesbian, Straight Education Network: http://glsen.org/

The campaign also asks students to check if the following “anti-LGBT, ‘pray away the gay’ websites” are accessible or blocked:

1. National Association for Research & Therapy of Homosexuality: http://narth.com/
2. People Can Change: http://peoplecanchange.com/
3. Parents and Friends of Ex-Gays & Gays: http://pfox.org/

The following video provides an explanation, targeted at students, for how they can help in the “Don’t Filter Me” campaign.

As far as I know, this lawsuit by the ACLU against a school district for over blocking Internet websites is the first of its kind. The Children’s Internet Protection Act (CIPA) requires schools and libraries in the United States receiving federal Erate funding have a policy for blocking offensive Internet content and enforce that policy. Schools locally define filtering policies, however. According to the ACLU’s press release:

“School districts cannot use filtering software that discriminates against websites based on their viewpoint,” said Joshua Block, staff attorney with the ACLU LGBT Project. “This filter was designed to block more than just adult content and is not viewpoint-neutral. There are many other filtering systems available that do not arbitrarily group websites like PFLAG in the same category as adult-oriented websites.”

It is very important for school officials to understand the laws in the United States related to Internet content filtering as well as the importance of not “over blocking” web content. As I’ve written and noted previously, some of our U.S. schools filter Internet content more severely than China. This is a big problem, and should be addressed for a variety of reasons. I started the projects “Balanced Content Filtering in Schools” and “Unmasking the Digital Truth” to help address these issues. I also included an appendix in my July 2011 eBook, “Playing with Media: simple ideas for powerful sharing” on “Balanced Content Filtering in Schools.” The issues here go beyond LGBT website access. In the United States, we ideologically support free expression and the marketplace of ideas. We recognize the need to censor certain kinds of content on the Internet in our schools and libraries, through the CIPA law, but that mandated censorship is still LIMITED. It will be interesting to follow this case and see how this develops. Hopefully one outcome will be more balanced approaches toward content filtering in Camdenton Schools and elsewhere.

For more background about this ACLU campaign, see the March 2011 article in the Yale Herald, “Yale Law goes online for LGBT rights.”

Technorati Tags:
content, education, filter, filtering, lawsuit, leadership, school, aclu

ACLU Sues Missouri School District for Overblocking Internet Websites originally appeared on Moving at the Speed of Creativity on August 20, 2011.

photo © 2005 Olaf Gradin | more info (via: Wylio)

See the posts, “Gilbert Gottfried Apologizes for Offensive Japan Tweets” and “Why You Should Have Sympathy for Gilbert Gottfried” for more background. Gilbert is (officially) @realgilbert on Twitter. Before you decide to visit his site, have sympathy for him, or discuss this with students, be advised Gilbert uses profanity and makes frequent sexual references on Twitter. That may be standard fare in a stand up comedy club, but it’s certainly not appropriate content for “normal” classroom discussions.

While I don’t recommend any educators show a live feed of Gilbert’s Twitter account to students in class, this certainly IS a situation worth studying and discussing. Like other cases, it highlights the very REAL consequences rash words can have, shared on Twitter or elsewhere. It also brings up issues about professionalism and image, for individuals as well as organizations. Like it or not (and since he was apparently pulling in a six figure income for his work, I’d say he liked it) Gilbert was officially representing Aflac. When you publicly represent another organization, you should keep that in mind whenever making comments in public… And that DOES include on Twitter. Unfortunately, I’m not writing this as someone who has a perfect track record when it comes to public remarks an employer finds offensive. All of us have the opportunity to be global publishers today thanks to social media, so the importance of this conversation topic is greater than ever.

Should you discuss this incident involving Gilbert Gottfried with students, parents, co-workers and others you know? Probably, depending on ages and contexts, of course. Certainly it’s not great Gilbert uses profanity and sexual references in public, and as educators we don’t want to hold him up as a model “digital citizen” for students to emulate. At the same time, however, it is silly for us in schools to pretend that many students are not encountering language like Gilbert’s every week and having to make decisions about the words THEY choose to share both in face-to-face as well as online situations. Words are powerful and can have big consequences. Gilbert’s situation dramatizes that clearly.

We need to talk more about issues and individuals like this in the mainstream media which may make us feel a bit uncomfortable for several reasons. At the very least, it can benefit us to be better informed when the situation comes up in a conversation, either during or outside of class. Saying “I’m not going to talk to my high school students about this because Gilbert uses profanity on Twitter” is a lot like people in a Christian church declaring, “We are not going to discuss Lady Gaga and her music with students because we disagree with her gnostic worldview.” Students ARE being influenced by multiple channels of information every day, and as adults we need to both be aware of the content/messages in those channels and find opportunities to have conversations about them with young people… Particularly when the stakes are high. When it comes to digital citizenship and online reputation management, I’d say the stakes are high. Gilbert Gottfried’s story the past week lends support to this contention.

Hat tip to NPR for covering this story in their weekly (awesome) technology podcast.

What discussion questions might be good to use with students for this “teachable moment” lesson on digital citizenship? What’s your take on the Gottfried story?

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Digital Citizenship Lesson from Gilbert Gottfried: The (former) Voice of the Aflac Duck originally appeared on Moving at the Speed of Creativity on March 24, 2011.

iTunes now has a terms of service agreement that is 55 pages long. Dennis Yang created a word cloud with Wordle of the iTunes TOS in October of 2010.

Here is another recent example of a SEVENTEEN section agreement customers must certify they’ve read and agree to, in order to create a user account on Disney.com and purchase park tickets online.

I know “this is the way legal agreements work” now, but it seems ethically objectionable to me that as a consumer, I’m periodically forced to click a button which says, “I’ve completely read this agreement and agree to its terms.” How many people actually read, or have EVER completely read, the 55 page iTunes TOS agreement or Disney 17 section TOS agreement who are NOT lawyers? I’m betting very few. Yet “normal” in our current legal era has evolved to mean most consumers regularly LIE in clicking a box and virtually “accepting” terms which the corporation has the right to change at any time. These seems wrong at a basic level.

I’m a fan of simple things which work. Why can’t corporations like Apple and Disney use a TOS similar to the following, short version? This is simple, in plain terms, and seems to lay out the facts of the corporate / consumer relationship in a much more concise way.

In case you can’t view Flickr images in your location, here’s the text from this fictitious TOS:

You, as the customer and consumer, basically have no rights. We, as the corporation
employing lawyers to write clever documents like this, reserve all the rights for
ourselves. This means you have to agree to whatever terms we dictate if you want
to use our products and services, and we can change them whenever we want. You
are the slave, we are the master. This formalizes our relationship. Thanks so much
for taking the time to read and comply.

In many cases, the only option we have as consumers if we don’t like TOS agreements like this is to choose NOT to be a customer / consumer of that particular corporation. That’s not an option I want to choose, however. In the case of Disney’s online tickets, I found it IS possible to NOT join their online community to purchase tickets. It’s not possible to opt out of Apple’s iTunes TOS agreement, however, if you want to continue using iTunes.

I’m unhappy with this kind of “you have no rights, click here to lie and indicate you’ve read and understand our exhaustive legal-ease document” situation. I don’t have a solution to this situation, however, so I guess this post is essentially a gripe. I’m sure some readers will say, “Abandon Apple!” or “Abandon Disney!” but I’m not willing to do that. This isn’t a problem unique to either of these corporations, we see ridiculously long TOS agreements elsewhere too. I wish there was a way for me to remain a happy customer but not be subjected to such legalese and forced virtual lying. This reminds me of Philip Howard’s 1996 book, “The Death of Common Sense: How Law is Suffocating America.” I’m glad to live in a society which is more litigious than corrupt (at least compared to some other countries where I’ve lived) but I wish we could do more to restore balance and sanity to legal situations like these which have become everyday occurrences for large numbers of people.

Technorati Tags:
apple, itunes, legal, tos, terms, service, agreement, disney, lawyer, legalese

Terms of Service Agreements Users Don’t Read originally appeared on Moving at the Speed of Creativity on March 16, 2011.

Book recommendation: Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses by Richard Arum

Critical moment for me in my own teaching
- 7 years ago I was interviewing for a job at K-State
- as part of interview process, had to address a large classroom of students
- question was: can this person handle teaching a class of students this large?

I’ve been wrestling with this question for 7 years
- students passive and quiet in a lecturehall
- students at an American Idol concert

It’s not just about this generation
- the key thing students are involved in: meaning-seeking
- that is true for all of us
- we live in a society in which meaning and identity are not givens
- our society is filled with almost limitless choice
- this means we have to find out own identities

If you pay attention to the questions students ask, you can really get a window into what they are learning

References to video: “A Vision of Students Today”

There is literally something in the air
- digital artifacts of about 2 billion people are literally floating all around the room

We know we are headed to this world of ubiquitous connections and communication, but our educational systems are not built for this
- most elearning courses have been built on old models

I suggest we move from getting our students to be knowledgeable to being knowledge-ABLE
- find, sort, analyze, criticize, and ultimately CREATE new knowledge
- that is the only solution for our students to thrive in this new environment

Knowledge-ability is stepping beyond 2 buzz words
- steps beyond “critical thinking” (it’s important, but we must go beyond it)
- beyond “information literacy” (again, we must take a step beyond both)

Knowledge-ability

A lot is at stake, and I want to paint a picture of this by showing you the disruption that a new medium can have in the society of Papua New Guinea
- by metaphor, we’ll consider what changes are behind the curtain now in our society

Culture shock is a total loss of self
- we think of identity as an internal thing, but it is actually reflected back from others
- when you are around people who have no reference point for who you are, it’s like you become a baby again… you have to recreate yourself
- it struck me how different it is to grow up in a world which is unmediated
- I started focusing on what it is to grow up and create an identity in their world and ours

New media came to them in the form of books from the state government
- census, law books, maps
- a lot of the people in the village didn’t have names, they knew everyone they saw (mother, sister, friend, etc.) and they were more focused on relationships than names
- they started mapping out their villages on paper, and tried to create them in the real world

the book in a way rewrote the culture

The people who become empowered are the people who controlled the new medium
- the elders were powerful with oral history, but that becomes dis-empowered next to the power of writing and the power of the book
- people would look back at the changes which happened and say they didn’t like what happened
- they got trapped in the beauty of the writing, the goal of making their villages fit into these neat and clean rows
- the

Medi are not just tools or means of communication, they mediate realtionshipos: who can say things, how it’s said, how it’s stored, who can access it, etc.
- every medium has its own biases
- they mediate the relationships in our societies
- media changes, which changes relationships, which changs our society

look at televisions: suddenly we’re all facing the the television
- the remapping of the American dining room

Neil Postman’s analysis: a culture is made up of conversations between people
- in the past they were designed for the few for the consumption of the many, made entertaining, 30 seconds of interruptions

Think of the MTV moment:
- I was very much a part of the MTV generation
- interesting to see what pepe were saying about my generation: short attention spans, materialistic, want to be entertained…

“in the midst of a fabulous array of historically unprecedented and utterly mind-boggling stimuli..whatever.” (Thomas de Zengotita)

A brief history of “Whatever”
- pre-1960s: had about six meanings “Whatever. That’s what I meant.”
- late 60s: “I don’t care. Whatever” (could use the world as a standalone statement, you could use it for your identity to say you can stand apart from the system/society)
- this version has stayed with us to the present day
- 1990s: MTV Generation: the indifferent “Meh”
– Simpsons picked up on this
- Late 90s to present: “Whatever. I’ll do what I want.” (first version: Valley Girl wave)

Idea in the past: you have to be on TV to have a voice, to be significant

American Idol: It’s easy to understand why so many people want to be on the show
- there are so many people who think they ARE the next American Idol
- cultural movement of boomers moving into 70s, onslaught of self-help books and self-esteem movement
- benefactors of the self-esteem movement

We’ve never had higher self esteem than we do now in our country
- 1960s 10-12% of people would say they are a significant person
- now that statistic is around 90%
- that is a big sign of cultural shifts

Book: “Generation Me: Why Today’s Young Americans Are More Confident, Assertive, Entitled–and More Miserable Than Ever Before” by Jean M. Twenge

new books now on quarter life crisis”
- people feel like they should be really important by the time they are 25

this is the search for identity and recognition, in a society where those things are not givens
- our environment today whey we can search for and find our identity, it is so different

Video from Dove commercial: Onslaught – “Talk to your daughter before the beauty industry does”

TV is still the dominant media today
- critical thinking is a real life skill we need to develop

Amidst new social media environment, people want to focus on information literacy

My video I tried to create about this a few years ago: A quick history of text – The Machine is Us/ing Us (Final Version)

Think how eBay has transformed
- eBay
- Zilok for renting, not selling
- Swaptree (now Swap) – can register everything in your house you might want to swap with people, and you pay shipping

The Internet is the long, slow death of the middle-man
- 10% of loans in the next decate will be person to person, with sites like Prosper

Devices like Square to let you accept credit cards

New media shaping governance
- governance now is almost entirely based in paper
- Do Tank: Democracy Design Workshop (use new technologies

Summary of today: “a ubiquitous, context-aware, semantic, social network, of things, people and information”

processor in an umbrella that costs 51¢ today, did cost $4000

real-world objects becoming hyperlinked
- QR codes, RFID

Compare:

weforum.org

we-forum.org

Traditional media literacy: watch your sources, be aware people can be tricking you

example of faked video from Queen of England
- you’re seeing a really interesting harnessing of new media to make a strong statement
- our students should be able to do this to be actively media literate in today’s society
- created by the “Yes Men” – they try to hijack identities of large corporations and then correct them

They got on the BBC and took over the Dow Ethics website, BBC announced “Dow accepts full responsibility:
- Dow stock dropped $2 billion on that news
- this demonstrates the power of working the media

Maxine Greene: the social imagination
- moving from information literacy to media fluency
- navigating and moving to Digital Citizenship (Gardner Campell)

Examples: a hero from our mediated culture
- Free Hugs Campaign
- it’s ridiculously easy to start a global social movement
- then you get spoofs ($2 for Deluxe Hugs)
- a lot of spoofs, commentary and talking back gets very serious

Interesting remix of Dove Commercial: Dove Onslaught(er)

This is a critical moment in our history: these tools can be used for more freedom, or they CAN be used for more control

MY THOUGHT: JUST LOOK AT CONTENT FILTERING IN SCHOOLS

can lead to participation and engagement
- also can be tools for rampant distraction

I think Neil Postman would write a book called, “Still Amusing ourselves to death”

We can no longer blame big media for our problems
- this new media environment is what WE MAKE of it

Now showing “What These Walls Say…” (A Vision of Students Today)

Ultimately these walls (of our educational institutions) say: Obey the authority
- see post: Sending The Wrong Message

Story of Jeffery Ahmed (?)
- inspired by Greg Mortenson
- quits Notre Dame and moves to Bangladesh
- starts nonprofit, tons of YouTube videos, engages for global donations

Videos remixed via OpSound- global collaboration
- this music is an example of the best scenario of what we can do with our new media environment

Eric Whitaker: composer

Tufts university role in Ushahidi
- rescues in Haiti
- OpenStreetMaps created by thousands of volunteers
- quotation from Clark Craig, US Marine Corps about people being saved every day

3 part solution
1- engage real problems with our students (ones we don’t know the solution to – so we have to learn with our students
3- Harnessing and leveraging these tools not because our students think they are cool

our students are not as literate as you think they are, esp when it comes to educating themselves and changing the world with these things
- they are good at entertaining themselves

I hope a new definition of “Whatever” will emerge: I care and let’s do whatever it takes to effect change.

Technorati Tags:
change, conference, edmond, media, michael, mwesch, oklahoma, social, uco, wesch, youtube, heartlandconf11, heartland

Michael Wesch Keynote at 2011 Heartland eLearning Conference #heartlandconf11 originally appeared on Moving at the Speed of Creativity on March 8, 2011.

The following is an example of an article I wanted to read this past week, but I didn’t because I was unwilling to pay $25 (a ridiculously high fee) to read it.

The Journal of Virtual Worlds Research is an example of an open-access, peer-reviewed journal which does NOT have a paywall of any type. Anyone can view published articles there for free. We need ALL our academic journals to embrace this paradigm of free, electronic publication. Perhaps we need a campaign with website badges which professors can utilize to evangelize this perspective on publishing?

Hat tip to John Lester of Reaction Grid for sharing the Journal of Virtual Worlds Research in last week’s Seedlings show and podcast!

Technorati Tags:
paywall, publish, journal, academic, publishing, pay, money

Academic journals should not have paywalls- Support Open Access Publishing! originally appeared on Moving at the Speed of Creativity on February 25, 2011.

Surviving Dachau, Liberating Mauthausen from Wesley Fryer on Vimeo.

I have cross-posted this video to the Celebrate Texas Voices learning community, as both Mark and Eva were Texans at the time this presentation was shared six years ago.

I helped facilitate this videoconference in 2005 when I was still working as the director of distance learning for the College of Education at Texas Tech. At the time, I published the audio recording of this presentation to our college podcast channel. I had forgotten this video version existed, however, until I stumbled across it yesterday in an old box of computer CDs, DVDs, floppy disks and DV tapes. I was able to extract the video from the DVD using RipIt and compress it for web upload using Handbrake.

In my March 2006 post, “Value of life, forgiveness, the Holocaust,” I reflected on the experience of hearing Eva and Mark share about their experiences and the lessons which they want to pass on to a new generation of people. This was the final presentation they shared of this powerful program, and that makes it all-the-more special to be able to digitally preserve it online. It’s amazing to think in 2005, when Eva and Mark shared these memories, YouTube did not exist. (Nor did Vimeo.)

Take some time and listen to the messages Eva and Mark share in this video, and share it with your students. At times there was some pixelation in the videoconference recording, but it eventually clears up. There are some sync issues with the audio and video as well at times, but the message from the audio recording is still clear. Eva reminds us all: WE MUST REJECT HATE IN ALL ITS FORMS. The grace to love and forgive in the face of such evil is incredible to imagine.

My life is richer because I was influenced and touched by Eva and Mark six years ago during this presentation about their experiences in Europe in the mid 1940s. I hope you are touched by their message as well. They are both heroes.

Technorati Tags:
love, ttu, video, vimeo, dachau, germany, hungary, mauthausen, concentration, camp, liberator, veteran, soldier, grace, forgiveness, witness, survivor

Surviving Dachau, Liberating Mauthausen originally appeared on Moving at the Speed of Creativity on February 24, 2011.

This three minute video provides an overview.

I’m thinking The Generation Project would be a great way for Storychasers (and others who believe in the importance of the Storychasers’ mission) to provide scholarships to students to attend a “Storychaser’s Summer Camp” event they might not otherwise be able afford.

The need to provide greater educational equity is a HUGE need and something that’s on my mind frequently. It’s great to provide opportunities for kids to take one-on-one training classes at the Apple Store after their parents purchase a new Mac laptop for them… But what about all the kids whose parents are NOT buying them technology tools and providing experiences like these? Teachers are often in a great position to make recommendations about motivated, deserving students who have a passion but lack the means to further develop it. In cases like these, The Generation Project could help in a big way.

Check it out!

photo © 2007 marco antonio torres | more info (via: Wylio)

Technorati Tags:
education, kids, open, philanthropy, giving, donation, poor, poverty, empower, door, opportunity

Fund the Dreams of Students Through The Generation Project originally appeared on Moving at the Speed of Creativity on February 23, 2011.

In the sometimes profanity-laced blog, which has since been taken down, Munroe writes, “My students are out of control. They are rude, disengaged, lazy whiners. They curse, discuss drugs, talk back, argue for grades, complain about everything, fancy themselves entitled to whatever they desire, and are just generally annoying.”

In her live interview yesterday for Good Morning America on ABC, Natalie claimed she never expected her blog would be available for “mass-consumption” and she never imagined others would see it besides her friend who initially encouraged her to start blogging about teaching. She also claimed the statements she made on the blog, like “There’s no other way to say this. I hate your kid” were ‘caricatures’ and not about specific children. Natalie is a parent herself with one child currently, and is expecting the birth of her second child soon. She didn’t have a very cogent response to Robin Roberts’ question, “How would reading those things make you feel as a parent?”

Steve Rovner, Natalie’s attorney, stated in the interview:

There’s no Internet policy at her school district. She was free to write and she was free to express herself; it was like a personal diary. She didn’t do anything wrong – some people don’t like what they have to write, but she’s being censored for what she wrote. Until the school district decides what to do with her, her life is in limbo.

The video on ABC News which auto-played following this one about Natalie Munroe was, “Teacher Suspended for Locking Student in Cage.” As a professional educator, it’s more than a little depressing to see mainstream media outlets focusing on these outlier, worst examples of teacher professionalism. In an era when the profession of teaching itself is under assault from various fronts, I believe it’s incumbent upon us as professional educators to take a more proactive role in telling the GOOD stories of learning and positive impact which are happening in our schools every day. That’s part of my motivation to continue facilitating Storychaser projects. Mainstream media loves a scandal, but we shouldn’t allow scandals like these to color and define public perceptions about education, about teachers, and about our profession.

Teaching IS hard work, and the students as well a situations in which many teachers work ARE challenging beyond the imagination of many others in different settings. Unfortunately, the hateful and profane ways in which Natalie Munroe chose to express her frustrations about her students were not constructive. We DO need to assist, rather than attack, teachers in our classrooms who face not only academic challenges but also the frequently overwhelming challenges of generational poverty. The frustrated, anguished voice of Natalie is not an anomaly in many of our schools. Her choice to verbally lash out directly against students, however, is not defensible.

Natalie Munroe, like many younger students who we often hear berated in the media for their lack of thoughtful judgement and responsible choices, made a bad decision to post her private thoughts on a PUBLIC blog about her students, her school leaders and her teaching situation. Did she have a right to share those things under the 1st amendment of the US Constitution? Yes she did. Will her decision to share those ideas publicly have negative consequences for her as an educational professional, and possibly more broadly for the education profession as citizens around the country shake their heads and say things like, “There’s just another example of why our schools are broke and teachers are bad?” Sadly, I think this answer is likely to be YES.

Karen Montgomery and I spent an hour and a half in January sharing ideas with educators in Amarillo, Texas, about the need for social media guidelines in schools. Our slides are available as a public Google presentation.

If we work together with others in our communities, “good” CAN come from conversations over the Natalie Munroe blogging situation. One example is included in the Montgomery Media article previously cited, about Springfield (Montco) schools in Pennsylvania.

“To be honest, we can’t say, ‘Don’t be on Facebook,’” Springfield Township School District Technology Director Kristin Swanson said Wednesday. “What we’re trying to communicate with teachers is what they do affects their image as an educator.” Swanson has been working with a group of teachers since December to revise the district’s employee technology acceptable use policy to address social media. The revised wording, which Swanson plans to present to the school board’s next policy committee meeting, includes the following: “The School District encourages teachers to hone their digital presence. Teachers must model appropriate and creative digital citizenship as they navigate ever-changing digital landscapes. Experimentation, evaluation, and synthesis in these environments are expected … Make an online presence for yourself using social media that showcases your teaching craft,” the proposed revision continues. “You can do this in many ways. Be creative and be aware that your image on social media affects your school career whether you use it for personal or professional reasons.” “We don’t want to hold teachers back, but at the same time we want them to be responsible and they have echoed back with nothing but responsible behavior,” Swanson said.

These words from Kristin Swanson are reasoned, balanced, and wise. Hopefully ideas like HERS can be amplified over the din of anger fomented by the irresponsible blogging of Natalie Munroe. Karen and I created the Facebook Group, “Social Media Guidelines for Educators” for the explicit purpose of sharing best-practice examples and ideas like these.

As a final note, old posts on Natalie Munroe’s blog have been taken down, and a lone post from February 12, 2011, remains public. The site is natalieshandbasket.blogspot.com. As of this writing, at least one cached version of an older blog post is still available via Google’s caching feature. Cached versions include her post from Thursday, January 21, 2010, titled, “If You Don’t Have Anything Nice to Say…”

That blog post does NOT reflect the perspective, attitude, and disposition of an adult who should be an educator in the classroom of any school in the world. The words are hateful and profane. The comments there, which include some from Munroe’s former students, reflect the anger and hurt which her virtual words wrought.

Never forget how powerful words can be. Like many people today (including myself at times) Natalie Munroe did not appear to “think carefully before she posted.” This should serve as a warning to us all, regardless of our age or context.

Instead of lamenting the advent of blogging and social media, Central Bucks School District leaders and parents should instead THANK Blogger.com and the transparency it affords in situations like these. It’s unfortunate the case of Natalie Munroe has become a national conversation, but it’s wonderful her attitudes and self-professed beliefs about the children (at least some of them) entrusted to her care have been digitally and publicly archived for all to see. This type of documentation is not always available when the professionalism of educators and other public servants is called into question. Hopefully district officials will be able to constructively utilize it to take appropriate action, and Natalie can find a new career in which she’ll be able to discover joy as well as personal fulfillment. Education and classroom teaching was apparently not her calling.

Technorati Tags:
blog, blogging, ethics, teacher, teaching, natalie, monroe, pennsylvania, legal, lawsuit

Teacher Blog Controversy in Pennsylvania Points to Need for Social Media Guidelines originally appeared on Moving at the Speed of Creativity on February 17, 2011.

…430,000 person factory that manufactures around 50% of all the personal communications devices used in America.

photo © 2010 Robert Scoble | more info (via: Wylio)

After reading Devin Coldewey’s post on TechCruch, “Our Great Sin,” I watched all of the video clips included in the recent posts, “Exposed: Apple’s Terrible Sin in China” and “Why Journalists Aren’t Reporting the Real Story about Apple and Foxconn.” As Mike acknowledges in the videos, however, it’s not fair to single Apple out on the topic of manufacturing ethics. He states NO consumer electronics used in the United States today, which are manufactured in China, are created under humane and ethical working conditions. This is a statement which should get our attention, and definitely gets mine. If you watch any of the following five clips, watch this first one.

Mike Daisey argues we need to raise awareness of these issues today so nonprofit advocacy groups can begin petitioning companies (like Apple) to make changes in their contracted factories. This reminds me of Upton Sinclair and his 1906 clarion call for reforms in the meatpacking industry in “The Jungle.” Daisey is calling for a similar movement today in the technology arena.

As I showed the third video embedded above to my 13 year old son tonight, I explained part of my take: Corporations today have far too much power. I think the work of groups like The Sunlight Foundation and individuals like Larry Lessig is critical to move the agenda of reducing corporate influence in our society forward. See my post from February 2008, “The Corporation documentary: A big eye opener” for more on this.

I’m not ready to lead the charge at this point to insist our tech companies take action to humanize working conditions in China, but I certainly stand ready to join others who are. When those advocacy groups and opportunities present themselves (and I’m sure they will) please let me know, and I’ll be sure to pass along the info. We SHOULD use the communication tools at our fingertips (as well as our other resources and skills) to make the world a more humane and gentle place. I found it very interesting Daisey, Keene, and Coldewey used the word “sin” in their interviews and posts. That’s a word which has fallen out of mainstream fashion, but remains not only appropriate but also needed for dialog about ethics and morality in our “modern” age.

In his opinion piece tonight, Coldwewey is very pessimistic about change. He writes:

So will we change our culture? It’s more likely that the current situation will only get worse, the way it’s been getting worse for decades. Globalization reduces our grip on the way things are run, with predictable results — but the alternative is, of course, higher prices. You do the math.

I beg to differ. Would readers of Sinclair in 1907 have said the same thing? “We can’t change the world, it’s too big. It will cost too much money. The companies won’t change.” Would they have been right? Yes and no. Changes were made, but “eternal vigilance” is not only the “price of liberty,” it’s also the price of a just society. We have moral obligations to work for a more just society at the micro and macro levels. William Wilberforce didn’t resign himself to accept slavery as “the way it’s always been, the way it has to be.” Neither should we when it comes to the inhumane treatment of workers in tech factories in China. Giving up isn’t an option.

One important thing we SHOULD do is support the causes of free expression and press freedom in China. If we look at the influential factors which led to industrial age changes in working conditions, child protection laws, etc. in the United States and other Western nations, the vital roles of free expression and press freedom are clear. What organizations are promoting these ideals today in China? I’m not sure, but one straightforward action step would be to identify those groups and support their work financially. If you have suggestions, please share them.

Daisey’s documentary monologue he created after his visit to Shenzhen is “The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs.” It’s showing at the Berkeley Rep Theater through February 27th, but hopefully it will be digitally distributed as a film in the near future. Somehow I doubt it will be available as a rental on iTunes.

A three minute tailer by Daisey about his documentary monologue is available on YouTube.

For more about Larry Lessig’s campaign to reduce the influence of money on US politics (and therefore the power / influence of corporations on our society) see this 7.5 minute video from October 2007.

Technorati Tags:
apple, digital, iphone, technology, shenzhen, china, sin, manufacturing, ethics

Do You Know? The Ethics of Technology Sweatshops originally appeared on Moving at the Speed of Creativity on February 1, 2011.

The fascinating and troublesome thing about the valley [the space where online strangers meet via social networking platforms] is that the rules of engagement there are not clearly defined, and it’s likely that they will stay undefined. Some of us talk about our relationships online; some allude to them indirectly; some keep them behind a cone of silence. [Jeff] Jarvis was so eager to blog about his cancer diagnosis that he felt almost restricted when he had to wait for his son to return from camp so he didn’t find out via a tweet that his dad was sick… In our house, we have built a set of improvised rules about how much of family life to make public; I tweet or blog little anecdotes about the kids, but don’t mention them by name. We never post pictures of them, except to our inner circle of friends on Facebook. When they’re old enough for their own Facebook account, we’ll let them decide for themselves how public they want to be with their lives.

I don’t have the definitive answers on this topic, but I certainly have questions. It wasn’t that long ago that we NEVER published any photographs of our kids and family on the public web: All of them were “locked” up on my Mobile Me (then .Mac) website on pages which required a password to access. I emailed out updates to a list of friends and family, with a password they could use to see not only photos but also family videos. Over time, my disclosure of our family’s activities via media has undergone significant changes. Today, I publish most of our personal, family photos to Flickr and occasionally to Facebook. I can point to a specific moment in time when my personal behaviors about sharing family photos changed: It was the “Getting a New Haircut” VoiceThread digital story which I published about our then 3 year old, Rachel. I published that for the first time on August 15, 2007. Since then (at my encouragement and with my support) my kids have gone on to publish a series of cooking videos on YouTube and elsewhere, start their own “iCarly style” webshow, go on Twitter, start a 365 photo project, and present with me at technology conferences at least a few times a year.

One of the questions which Steven Johnson inspires me to ask, after reading his article, is the title of this post: Is it right for me (as a parent) to decide to make my children famous?

Now, “famous” is a relative word. What does it mean to be famous? I continue to be honored and humbled by the fact that lots of people read my blog and follow me on Twitter, but there is a difference between being “famous” on mainstream media and being digitally connected to a lot of people. I’m not a celebrity and neither are my children, and judging by what I’ve heard about “celebrity” (and the limitations it imposes upon your life) I’d say that’s a great thing. However, I’m very aware of the fact that any of us are just a breath away from mainstream media attention. The close-to-home example of 12 year old Greyson Chance provides a case in point. It’s a remarkable and unique situation, to be sure, but still one that happened last year in our hometown. What are the responsibilities of parents in our digital age when it comes to sharing images and/or video and potentially placing members of our families into the spotlight of media attention… Whether that attention is limited to the social media arena or “crosses-over” into the realm of mainstream media? There is not a class on this at our local community college or our church. The “rules” aren’t written. We’re figuring this out as we go along. And I’d like to get it right. I don’t want to mess up. These are important questions and issues, because these are our/my kids and our/my family. I could mess up a lot of things, but I don’t want to mess up on things that could dramatically affect their lives.

This world of “living online” can be crazy. Who would have thought the parent who posted the viral YouTube video “David After Dentist” would quit his job and rake in over $150,000 since January 2009? That father now has a website (www.davidafterdentist.com) and you can read his story on the site’s “about” page. Are many parents likely to have a YouTube ad revenue windfall come their way because of sharing online media about their kids? No, probably not. But are many parents even thinking or considering what online fame could mean for their family or their child / children? Probably not nearly long enough. (I wrote a bit more about this in April 2010.)

Among other things I shared with educators in Amarillo today, I asked them to write down the statement, “Do not share anything online when you are emotional.” There are so many stories today of people who overshare when they shouldn’t… When they are angry, frustrated, tired, inebriated, or simply not acting thoughtfully. The digital world is increasingly perilous for the impulsive.

photo © 2007 Victor Bezrukov | more info (via: Wylio)

What lines should we be drawing as parents when we choose to share (or not share) images and media of our own children online? Even sharing images on Facebook to a “relatively” small number of “friends” can result in widespread sharing and distribution of a media image.

Just when I question whether or not it’s wise to share and amplify the ideas and work of my own children online, I’m reminded (mainly thanks to Bob Sprankle) of the amazing work of students showcased at TEDxRedmond. It’s amazing to see and hear about what these young people are doing and have done to make the world a better place. Many of them are using social media to assist in that process. I want my own children to learn these lessons, and to have the best opportunities possible to “be all they can be” in this digitally connected world. I don’t want them to be hurt, I don’t want them to be exploited, but I also don’t think hiding them from the spotlight of online recognition is the best path forward.

This is messy and complicated. I don’t have the answers. I certainly do, however, have a lot of questions.

Technorati Tags:
facebook, parent, children, kids, public, privacy, responsible, responsibility

Is it right to decide to make your children famous? originally appeared on Moving at the Speed of Creativity on January 17, 2011.

1. Jessi Slaughter (Jessica Leonhardt) (Aug 2010)
2. Willow Smith and her song/video, Whip My Hair (Oct 2010)
3. Greyson Chance and his Lady Gaga song remix (May 2010)
4. Sarah and her response video to President Obama (Sep 2009)

See our session wiki page for more links and background information about each of these situations. Of these, Willow Smith’s is the video I learned about most recently thanks to a participant (Erica I think) in my #cmtc10 workshop, “Share Your Ideas: Platforms for Publishing.” According to the 9 Sep 2010 MTV article, “Jay-Z Signs ‘Superstar’ Willow Smith To Roc Nation:”

Just two days after Willow Smith’s kid-friendly club banger “Whip My Hair” leaked online, Jay-Z and his petite protégé called in to “On-Air With Ryan Seacrest” to confirm that he had signed her to his Roc Nation label. Describing Willow’s debut as “a hit,” Jay-Z said on Thursday morning (September 9) that he first heard the track before he knew it had been recorded by a 9-year-old. “I was like, ‘Man, that record’s a smash.’ And then [Roc Nation partner] Jay Brown said, ‘She’s 9,’ and I was like, ‘Whoa!’ And [then] he was like, ‘She’s Will and Jada’s daughter,’ and I was like, ‘Whoa!’ and it just went from there.”

After being online a little more than a month, Willow’s video currently has over 22.1 million views on YouTube.

For more background about Willow’s rise to stardom boosted (in part) by YouTube visibility, see Ryan Seacrest’s 8.5 minute interview with Willow from September, “Jay-Z Compares Willow Smith to Young Michael Jackson.”

Are students, teachers, parents, and administrators having regular conversations about digital citizenship at your school? It’s certainly rare for a video to go viral on YouTube, but the fact is anyone today with access to a video-capable cell phone and an Internet-connected computer can be global media publisher. The level of professional quality in the four videos highlighted in our session yesterday varied widely, and the circumstances are unique in each case, but there are important lessons to learn from all four. One important thing everyone should know about, related to cyberbullying and YouTube publication, is video flagging on Youtube. This was highlighted by both Sarah’s experiences and the Jessica Leonhardt videos.

Yesterday as Sarah and I drove up to Farmington, Maine, in our rental car, we were amazed to hear BOTH Willow Smith and Greyson Chance sing their latest songs on Radio Disney. After just discussing their YouTube-powered rises to fame, that seemed like a big coincidence.

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YouTube video by Willow Smith goes viral, leads to recording contract #cmtc10 originally appeared on Moving at the Speed of Creativity on December 2, 2010.

Are you prepared for the digital citizen in your classroom? Many of our students are tech savvy and comfortable using a multitude of tools, but are they using them appropriately? Do students recognize the responsibility that comes with using technology? What kind of Digital Footprint do they leave behind? Join Alice to hear how one Maine Learning Technology (MLTI) school is working on appropriate technology use. Alice has participated in the one-to-one laptop (MLTI) Initiative for the past 5 years and brings many “lessons learned” to NH educators.

Webkins allow students to form relationships online
- kids have to login
- it is very obvious for them to know what to do after they login

We see kids move on from Lego to Club Penguin, eventually move to Facebook
- they are often pretty saavy user

Stat 2 years ago: “A quarter of 8-12 year olds have a social networking profile on Facebook, Bebo, or MySpace despite the sites having minimum age limit of 13.”

“The Children’s Media Literacy audit revealed….”

Many kids see their online and face to face worlds as interconnected

Pew 2 years ago: “Teens continue to be avid users of social networking websites, as of Sept 2009, 73% of online American teens ages 12 to 17 used an online social network website, a statistic that has continued to climb upwards from 55% in November 2006 and 65% in February 2008.”

“While more than 4 in 5 (82%) online teens ages 14-17 use online social networks, just a bit more than half of online teens ages 12-13 say they use the sites.”

danah boyd in “Impact of the Internet on Society | Antisocial Social Networking – disorder of the future generation?”

Social media has created an interesting rupture in the landscape. Youth turn to it to reclaim unstructured social encounters, to create a public space that allows them to simply hang out with their friends, peers, and cohort. The flirting, gossiping, and joking around that takes place is not proof that social media is useless, but proof that it’s extremely valuable. Without other spaces in which to gather, youth have developed their own. They want to be social, but we also need them to develop social skills. What’s fascinating is that they’re learning to do so in a mediated landscape, developing norms that will persist through adulthood. It’s not like all social encounters between adults are face-to-face; learning how to interpret a Facebook post is a great skill to have when entering an email-centric corporation.

Facebook would be the 5th largest country in the world if it was a country

World map of social networks

Gary’s Social Media Count (Oct 2010)
- available as a 99¢ iPad app now from iTunes

Our district goals are focused on student engagement and learning, not about technology
- we do much more project-based and inquiry-based assignments
- we have more assignments where the student chooses the tool

Example job: Social Media Director for IBM in Jericho, NY
- we have a student who graduated from our school, who is the social media director for “Teen Vogue” in New York

We do know kids will be collaborating globally, creating content with people living in other countries
- students need to understand how to

Our definition of digital citizenship: The first time a person signs up for an email account, signs up for an online account, purchases something online, or participates in some kind of digital activity that person is a digital citizen

Showing “Digital Dossier” video

This video is from John Palfrey’s group at the Harvard Law School

Born digital: understanding the first generation of digital natives By John Palfrey, Urs Gasser

What does the word “citizen” mean in your school?

We’ve realized we need to partner with parents
- we are doing a lot more parent education than we ever have before
- we run a Facebook class for parents, we share this presentation with parents, we meet in small groups and discuss it
- parents WANT help

I think of Maria Knee’s students Skyping with students in Australia as kindergardeners, 9 year olds can create VoiceThreads

Digital literacy is essential to be a citizen

- must have the skill and knowledge to interact safely with digital and electronic tools and media

Vicki Davis: Digital Citizenship has the student in the center, around: Literacy, Safety, Learning Strategies, and Etiquette

We are struggling the most now with pushing out student work: My collaborative inquiry project right now is around how are we going to organize, distribute and archive student work digitally online?

My seniors realize they need to figure out how they can stand out in the crowd
- it’s not enough to have just had a laptop
- they are focusing on learning, all the things they have done with and as a result of the technology access they’ve enjoyed

If Twitter or Facebook are too overwhelming at first, try Classroom 2.0 first

Alec Couros: Are You a Networked Teacher?

You need to have a very robust network. 2 years ago we had a disaster, and everyone stopped using most Internet tools. We’ve rebuilt our infrastructure

Our tech dept: 3 integrators, 1 webmaster, 1 repair manager
- no tech director
- we meet weekly as a team of 5
- we meet monthly with our superintendent

Our superintendent is very clear about what our roles

We took our core values, and focus on these in our conversations about digital citizenship: Honesty, citizenship, trustworthiness, responsibility, respect, integrity

We have a lot of visitors to our school, the students are teh tour guides
- they (students) do the rollout each September of the laptops
- the Student Senate is the group re-writing the laptop guidelines (old ones say “no videos,” but of course that is ridiculous now because all watch YouTube)
- games and cell phones are the big issues, students are wrestling with this now and how they will present this to faculty to change some of the rules

I always tell parents: We wouldn’t hand the keys to the car to our kids and tell them to go drive without a lot of advance conversations and preparation – The same should go for technology as digital citizens

Recommended Resources:

Digital Citizenship Resources from Common Sense Media

Net Cetera Chatting with Kids about Being Online: English Guidebook

Technorati Tags:
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Digital Citizenship for our Schools @alicebarr #cmtc10 originally appeared on Moving at the Speed of Creativity on December 2, 2010.

This podcast is an interview with Ruslana Westerlund, the creator of the ELL Bill of Rights (ellbillofrights.com) and the keynote speaker at the “Co-teaching and Collaboration Conference” in St Paul, Minnesota on 12 Nov 2010, at the School Community of Excellence. Ruslana is an educator originally from Ukraine, and has worked for years with English Language Learners. She is focused on educating teachers as well as students about the rights they have in the United States as ELLs. Her website is “a place where students, teachers, community members, or anyone else passionate about equity and advocacy for English learners can choose tools that send the message of empowerment.  The tools you will find here will help you empower and advocate for your English Learners.   These tools are great conversation starters.  Engage with your community in courageous conversations!  Wear a t-shirt!  Start talking!  Serve as a “spokesperson for the welfare of all learners in a multicultural context.” In addition to sharing our interview in this podcast, I also share a poem and story which Ruslana sent to me and asked I include in this recording. Many of our classrooms are more diverse than ever, and the information about which Ruslana is passionate to share is critical for us all to understand. In becoming more aware of ELL rights and effective strategies to help second language learners, we can all become better educators for all our students.

Show Notes:

1. The ELL Bill of Rights by Ruslana Westerlund
2. Facebook: Educators of English Learners EELLike
3. On Twitter: @EllBillofRights
4. My text notes from Ruslana’s 12 Nov 2010 keynote: “English learners in the digital age: natives, immigrants or outsiders”

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Podcast364: The ELL Bill of Rights – An Interview with Ruslana Westerlund @EllBillofRights originally appeared on Moving at the Speed of Creativity on November 29, 2010.

This video was created by Horizon Productions in Durham, North Carolina. Hat tip to educators in Grand View Public Schools, Oklahoma, for sharing this video on their “Tips for a Healthy Laptop and Responsible Care and Handling” webpage.

Technorati Tags:
1to1, care, laptop, spoof, video, youtube, csi, lenovo, thinkpad

Take care of your laptop! (TPI: ThinkPad Investigation) originally appeared on Moving at the Speed of Creativity on November 23, 2010.

See my post and text notes from this GREAT session by Andrew, “The Power of Deep Structure” for more on his shared ideas.

Technorati Tags:
creativity, cwf2010, facebook, privacy

Privacy Implications of your Social Graph on Facebook #cwf2010 originally appeared on Moving at the Speed of Creativity on November 17, 2010.

The campaign included large billboard-sized signs and photographs, set up to encourage people to question their perceptions and ideas about birth and abortion.

An area for students to write comments was provided, along with a voting table.

If you’re interested in seeing the entire display, you can see additional images in this Flickr set. I will warn you, however, the images are (as the sign indicated) very graphic. I’m pretty sure this educational campaign caused more than a few students as well as passers-by to question their own ideas about abortion and the beginning of life. It will be interesting to see if “Planned Parenthood” stages some kind of campaign on campus this semester in response. Some of the messages left by students on the “free speech board” indicated they were very upset by this display being on campus, and the graphic nature of the photographs included.

Technorati Tags:
denton, texas, university, unt, abortion, justice, life, prolife, prochoice, choice, planned, parenthood, controversial

Controversial Anti-Abortion Education Campaign at UNT originally appeared on Moving at the Speed of Creativity on November 13, 2010.

This may be the most important post you’ll read on my blog from a personal, digital security standpoint. If you use ANY website today which requires a login but does NOT use a “persistent https” secure connection thereafter, you’re at MAJOR risk of having your account(s) hacked if you use open, wifi hotspots in coffee shops or other locations. Yes, this means Facebook, at least for now until they FINALLY deploy persistent https. This danger is real, this is not a “Chicken Little” story, and in this post I’ll explain why. The bottom line for me is, I’m now using a commercial VPN service (Astrill) whenever I’m connecting my laptop on any type of network (a wired hotel connection or a public wifi connection) other than one I own at my house, or via my 3G AT&T network connection. I want to thank James Deaton (@jed on Twitter) for alerting me to this risk demonstration (Firesheep) at OpenBeta5 last week in Oklahoma City.

For a more in-depth, geeker explanation of the problem which Firesheep exploits and dramatically demonstrates, read Glenn Fleishman’s October 28, 2010, article for BoingBoing, “Liar, Liar, Sheep on Fire.” I’ll begin with a visual illustration. After installing the free FireFox extension FireSheep this evening at a local coffee shop, I was immediately able to gain access to the Facebook accounts, WordPress blog administrative dashboards, and other SUPPOSEDLY private, secure profiles of the following web users on different sites:

I am not a hacker, I’d classify myself as a “medio picante” geek… So how did I do this? The reason is Firesheep: A simple, easily installed FireFox extension which allows ANYONE to gain this kind of access on a shared Internet connection…. Not just black hats, white hats, or script kiddies. MANY websites, including Facebook today, do NOT use a “persistent https” connection after users login. This means the browser address changes to “https” and creates a secure “tunnel” during the login process, but thereafter users’ browsers return to a “http” unsecure connection while a “browser cookie” is set to maintain the login. When using a common router, as users do in most coffee shops and other locations where open, unsecured wireless connectivity is provided, those browser cookies are essentially “shouted out loud” for anyone to read / hear / copy / use. Eric Butler, a freelance web application and software developer in Seattle, Washington, released FireSheep on October 24, 2010, at the Toorcon12 conference in San Diego as a free, open source plug-in for the FireFox browser to demonstrate this security vulnerability and its seriousness. Eric got my attention, and he should get yours too.

I’ve read and heard about the dangers of open wifi connections for years, but until seeing FireSheep in action myself, I wasn’t a believer. Now I am. When I was in Shanghai, China, in September 2010, I utilized Astrill to bypass the Chinese content filters and gain access to sites like Twitter, Diigo, Google Sites, and other web destinations I regularly use for my work as an educational consultant. I’ve read about how hackers (and even script kiddies) can use software programs like Ethereal and “Winsock Packet Editor” to view userids and passwords sent “in the clear” over http connections. I didn’t realize the process could be so easy and straightforward as Firesheep makes it, however. The release of Firesheep onto the world stage means something very important for all of us: We should NOT assume our Internet “sessions” (website logins) are secure or private when we are using most public / shared wifi or wired Internet connections.

Glenn Fleishman includes a variety of suggestions in his article on Firesheep for what “we” should do to protect ourselves from this acknowledged and pervasive web vulnerability. I’ll highlight a few of these.

SUGGESTION #1: AVOID LOGINS ON UNSECURE NETWORKS

His first suggestion is one we all should implement immediately: “Engage in no unsecured Web logins when working on an untrusted network, public or otherwise.” This means we should log OUT of all websites for which we’ve “saved our passwords” in all the web browsers we use or have open on our computers, when we’re on an unsecured network connection, and NOT login to them unless we use a VPN.

Translated into plainer language, this means: Don’t use Facebook EVER at a coffee shop, unless you’re taking geeky precautions. (Using a VPN.)

SUGGESTION #2: USE HTTPS EVERYWHERE WITH FIREFOX

HTTPS Everywhere is another free plugin for FireFox, but it’s designed to keep you more secure online. For websites which permit https / secure connections, the plugin FORCES the website to use those https “tunnels” so your web traffic stays secure and confidential. I prefer using the Google Chrome browser over FireFox in most cases, so this suggestion isn’t one that will help me a great deal. I have installed it on my FireFox browser, however, so it will be an option for me if I forget or don’t renew my VPN.

SUGGESTION #3: USE A VPN SERVICE

A VPN is a “virtual private network,” and VPN connections are used frequently by business travelers to connect back to their home / small business / corporate office to securely access web applications. At one time, people who wanted to use a VPN connection had to purchase and configure hardware to which they connected their laptop(s) when away from the office. Today, however, a variety of commercial options are available which provide VPN services on a monthly or annual basis. I had very good experiences with Astrill in September when I was in China, connecting via my laptop, iPhone, and iPad, so I decided to activate a three month plan with them today for $20. I figure I’ll give this a try, and if something better comes along I’ll switch in three months.

Astrill does NOT require users to download anything on an iPhone or iPad to use the service. Instead, you simply configure your VPN connection with the server address and login credentials for your account.  On a laptop computer, however, Astrill provides a downloadable client application which you use to connect to the service when you want VPN tunneling.

CONCLUSIONS

I wrote the post “Wireless and hotel Internet security” back in December 2005, after listening to a Security Now podcast about hacking, packet sniffers and VPNs. I didn’t take the inconvenient steps at the time, or until today, of actually paying for and using a VPN connection on unsecured network connections. After seeing Firesheep in action before my eyes tonight, however, I’m a believer and am changing my web surfing ways on unsecured networks. I’d encourage you to do the same, and share this information with others.

Even though web services like GMail DO use persistent https connections, once you are logged into Google their “cookie” is set in your browser and allows other Google web services which do NOT (currently) use https to be accessed by others using methods like Firesheep. My best advice is: When you’re on an unsecured network, assume you’re being packet sniffed. It’s simply too easy for people to do it now, and the costs to your online digital footprint as well as relationships (face-to-face as well as virtual) could be very high if someone chooses to hack your cookies.

If you choose to give Astrill a try, please use this link which includes my “affiliate” code. It won’t make a difference in terms of your costs, but my account will receive some credit… and I’ll consider that a “thank you” for this very important security “heads up.”

Posted via email from wesley fryer’s posterous

Firesheep should get your ATTENTION: Open Public Wifi Dangers are REAL originally appeared on Moving at the Speed of Creativity on November 1, 2010.

Tonight we’re going to talk about parenting and generational differences, based on several books and some Internet resources I found

Book: “The Trophy Kids Grow Up” by Ron Alsop discusses four generations in the workplace (page 5)
- Traditionalists: born 1925 – 1945
- Baby Boomers: 1946 – 1964
- Gen Xers: 1965 – 1979
- Millennials: 1981 – 2001

each group is defined by different key historical events and (generally) have different traits

Historical events:
- Traditionalists: Great Depression, Pearl Harbor, WWII, Korean War, Cold War era, Cuban missile crisis
- Baby Boomers: Vietnam War, assassinations of JFK, RFK and MLK Jr, moon landing, Kent STate killings, Watergate
- Gen Xers: AIDS epidemic, Challenger disaster, Berlin Wall falls, OKC bombing, Clinton / Lewinsky scandal
- Millennials: Columbine shootings, 9-11, Enron scandal, wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, Katrina

General traits are different for generations too:
- Traditionalists: patriotic, dependable, conformist, respects authority, rigid, socially and financially conservative, solid work ethic
- Baby Boomers: workaholic, idealistic, competitive, loyal, materialistic, seeks personal fulfillment, values titles and the corner office
- Gen Xers: self-reliant, adaptable, cynical, distrusts authority, resourceful, entrepreneurial, tech saavy
- Millennials: entitled, optimistic, civic minded, close parental involvement, values work-life balance, impatient, multitasking, team oriented

This is not about “my generation is better than that generation”
- Millennial generation does seem (to me) lots software than prior generations
- they’ve had it easier, convenience, etc.

Things like family breakups toughen up individuals, but in general later generations have had things easier

Origins of Gen X: (WikiPedia)

The term Generation X was coined by the Magnum photographer Robert Capa in the early 1950s. He would use it later as a title for a photo-essay about young men and women growing up immediately after the Second World War. The project first appeared in “Picture Post” (UK) and “Holiday” (USA) in 1953. Describing his intention, Capa said ‘We named this unknown generation, The Generation X, and even in our first enthusiasm we realised that we had something far bigger than our talents and pockets could cope with’.[7] Author John Ulrich explains that, “Since then, “Generation X” has always signified a group of young people, seemingly without identity, who face an uncertain, ill-defined (and perhaps hostile) future. Subsequent appearances of the term in the mid-1960s and mid-1970s narrowed the referent for “Generation X” from Capa’s global generation to specific sets of primarily white, male, working class British youth sub-cultures, from the spiffy mods and their rivals the rockers, to the more overtly negationist punk subculture.”

List of Generations from WikiPedia

Some refer to Gen Y’s as the “Peter Pan generation” (those who have never grown up, from broken homes: Some say they “want to get it right” and may take more time to evaluate situation before jumping into certain life decisions
- reference: WikiPedia Gen Y

Defining success:
1000 teens said:
- only about 1/3 that making money is the most important thing in life / defining success

Bad news:
- at least 2 million teens had at least 1 alcoholic drink per week

Illegal drug use is declining overall, but twice the number in this generation use hallucinogens at least twice per month

Parents have always worried, in all generations

4 guidelines Roberts offers for balanced lives:
1- Moderation in most things (TV, video games, possessions and junk food)
2- Focus on high probability issues
3- Don’t interfere with normal development (let kids ride bikes, swim, climb on the monkey bars, etc. let teens go out with friends, get a driver’s license)
4- Know your child (if your child tends to be defiant or a bully, maybe violent video games are a bad idea)

Amber Alerts have made us much more aware of child kidnapping issues

There are also “Silver Alerts” now for seniors

Ideas from “Parenting the Millennial Generation” by Dave Verhaagen

Television has undergone a huge transition
- fathers are portrayed in many as idiots, instead of being portrayed with respect
- much less respect for authority showed in sit-coms

It’s not must important to be “fair,” it’s important to parent each child differently based on what they need
- trust your instincts with parenting

work on co-parenting well, conferring with each other

keep short accounts: let past failures and shortcomings go

Focus on the positive traits and aspects of each child

MY THOUGHT: AFTER VISITING CHINA SEVERAL TIMES NOW, I’VE REALIZED THAT THE GENERATIONAL DYNAMICS THERE ARE DIFFERENT FOR MULTIPLE REASONS, BUT AN IMPORTANT ONE IS THE ONE CHILD POLICY. THIS HAS MADE A BIG DIFFERENCE ON EXPECTATIONS AND PRESSURE PLACED ON INDIVIDUALS. I DON’T HAVE A FULL UNDERSTANDING OF THE PSYCHOLOGY AND CULTURAL PRESSURES AT PLAY IN THIS, BUT I DEFINITELY RECOGNIZE THE GENERATIONAL DYNAMICS IN CHINA ARE VERY DIFFERENT THAN THEY ARE HERE IN THE U.S.

photo credit: BuckDaddy

Technorati Tags:
book, family, parent, parenting, generation, generational, differences

Generational Differences and Parenting originally appeared on Moving at the Speed of Creativity on October 27, 2010.

If you are a teacher in the United States and your curriculum includes historic documents like the US Declaration of Independence, you can and should connect at least an introduction to Charter 8 as well as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in lessons this year. If you teach social studies, politics and government ANYWHERE on our planet, you should share about Liu Xiaobo and Charter 8 with your students.

John Parker’s article, “Why Liu Xiaobo’s Nobel Peace Prize Matters‘” provides excellent insights why. He writes:

It is fair to say that wider awareness of Charter 08 within China will, just by itself, seriously threaten CCP rule in the long term, even if there are no visible changes in the short term. The Charter’s preamble (translated by Human Rights Watch in China) contains a ringing endorsement of universal human rights:

‘Having experienced a prolonged period of human rights disasters and challenging and tortuous struggles, the awakening Chinese citizens are becoming increasingly aware that freedom, equality, and human rights are universal values shared by all humankind, and that democracy, republicanism, and constitutional government make up the basic institutional framework of modern politics. A “modernization” bereft of these universal values and this basic political framework is a disastrous process that deprives people of their rights, rots away their humanity, and destroys their dignity. Where is China headed in the 21st century? Will it continue with this “modernization” under authoritarian rule, or will it endorse universal values, join the mainstream civilization, and build a democratic form of government? This is an unavoidable decision.’

Considering that Charter 08 verges on being a revolutionary manifesto, it is remarkable that its original authors, including Liu, signed the document with their real names, and were joined in doing so by hundreds of supporters, including many well-known dissidents. Even more remarkably, as the document has circulated around China since December 2008, many thousands of Chinese people, from all walks of life, have added their signatures. Since only a miniscule fraction of China’s population could have seen the Charter before Liu’s Nobel award, this certainly shows that there is genuine support for democracy in China.

Kudos to the Nobel Prize committee for recognizing and amplifying the work of Liu as well as other Chinese government reform advocates. Thankfully, the information landscape has changed fundamentally since the days of the Cultural Revolution in China.

There are many things as human beings we simply must know. Knowledge about our fundamental rights is on that list.

China matters, the people of China matter, and human rights matter. Go forth and have conversations with others you know (including students!) about Charter 8 and Liu Xiaobo!

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

China, Democracy, Charter 8 and Liu Xiaobo originally appeared on Moving at the Speed of Creativity on October 13, 2010.

Our exam is actually a “quiz” in Moodle, and I let the students know all the questions in advance to study. All the questions were short answer, except one. After creating the quiz, I set it to be open during our class period today.

I set the quiz to display just one question at a time, and to “shuffle” the questions so each student would get the questions in a random order. This minimizes the chances a student would be typing an answer to the same question as their neighbor.

I also turned on two security settings, so students wouldn’t start the quiz early (during class) and so only students in our lab could take the quiz. By requiring a password, which I provided to students right before they started the test, no one could begin early. I put the first two numbers of the IP addresses of our lab computers into the security settings to limit the computers which could take the test. This was really overkill and not necessary, but I wanted to give it a try. Basically it made sure the computer taking the test was on campus and not off campus.

The last, and probably most important thing I did during our quiz, was turn on our “Faronics Insight” lab monitoring software on the instructor computer and project small versions of everyone’s screen at the front of the room.

I explained that in 1:1 computing settings, it is handy to have this kind of capability so everyone can see at a glance that they are accountable for their screen. It’s easy to see if someone is on Facebook or has switched screens to something other than our Moodle quiz. The software permits more sophisticated locking of individual workstations, but that could have been overkill as well for our setting today. In addition to providing this quickly visible, public way of providing some accountability for computer screen activity during our quiz, I also wanted to show my students how this kind of software monitoring program can be used in class. Insight is similar in function to Apple Remote Desktop for Mac computers. Back in 2002-2003, I wrote an article for TCEA’s TechEdge magazine titled “Computer Lab Management Software” in which I reviewed several of the lab management software programs available at the time. Software tools like this can be very handy, both in K-12 as well as university settings.

Technorati Tags:
moodle, quiz, settings, exam, proctor

First Proctored Quiz with Moodle originally appeared on Moving at the Speed of Creativity on October 11, 2010.

Recommended Reading:
The Optimistic Child by Martin Seligman
Primal Leadership: Learning to Lead with Emotional Intelligence
Emotional Intelligence by Daniel Goleman
Building Emotional Intelligence by Linda Lantieri
Love and Logic by Cline, MD and Jim Fay

Term refers to a set of skills that help you manage yourself and maintain healthy relationships with others

Intelligence has been measured for 100 years by an IQ test
- invented around 1900 by Benet

Last 20 years has been lots of research on what that elusive quality is that helps people be successful in life

Sometimes someone seems to have so much going but still have lots of problems, ESP with relationships

1995 Daniel Goleman got together all the research he could find on emotional intelligence and put it into his book
- book was a catalyst for researchers

Most fortune 500 CEOs are tripped up by emotional intelligence issues, not business acumen

Delayed gratification is a important emotional intelligence skill
- study of kindergarteners who were asked to wait and not eat a marshmallow

Setting limits and not giving in is important for parenting

In parenting think what we are really aiming for?
- begin with the end in mind

respect, relationship skills, boundaries, choosing positive consequences, and empathy

Question to discuss: How do you develop these skills at home?

ABCs of Emotional Intelligence
Active listening
Aggressiveness
Assertiveness
Attunement
Body language
Concentration
Confidence
Conflict resolution
Cooling down period
Cooperation
Curiosity
Decision making
Delay of gratification
Distracting
Emotional hijacking
Emotional literacy
Empathy
Empowerment
Eye contact
Feedback
Friendship
Gut feeling
Impulse control
Interpersonal skills
Intrapersonal skills
Leadership
Metamood
Mood-lifters
Motivation
Nonverbal communication
Optimism
Organizational savvy
People skills
Problem solving
Relatedness
Relaxation techniques
Resilience
Self-control
Self-discipline
Self-management
Self-soothing
Self-talk
Setting limits
Sensitivity to criticism
Social competence
Stress
Toxic emotions
Working memory

By LL Marotta PhD 2007

Wonderful courtesy skill of attunement: asking “is this a good time?”

Kids feel everything we feel as adults, but often hundreds of times more intensely

Meta-mood is thinking about your own thinking (meta-cognition)

Everyone has a tape going through their mind all the time
- you need to be self aware and know your rational mind can redirect yourself

Great to talk to kids about self-talk at an early age

Biggest difference between children and adults: children don’t have perspective

Management is often looking at a situation and picking your best option

Working memory means learning from your mistakes
- responding with empathy but still letting others experience consequences of their behavior helps them learn from mistakes

Stress scale can help us put things in perspective
1-5 daily stresses, little things that always happen but we forget the next day
6-8 stresses take some time to solve
9-10 are devastating

Sometimes it can be very helpful to help develop this perspective
- some people view everything as a 10 on this scale

There is a good news scale too
1-5 daily pleasures
6-8 long lasting joy
9-10 best thing that ever happened

Doing the “High / Low” game at dinner is good
- what was your high today, and your low
- elaborate, everyone participates

Modeling these behaviors of managing stresses is SO important

There are about 10,000 schools worldwide integrating emotional intelligence learning into the curriculum

Helping your child learning to sooth themselves is a very important skill
- recovering from a tantrum, a friendship tangle

Kids need to see how YOU do this

Teaching kids how to breathe to relax is very important
Find a spot you are looking at,focus on that spot and hold up your arm and one of your legs

Key here is the body is able to redirect the mind
- you want to use your body to relax your mind

Teach children the mind can calm the body, the body can calm the mind

Relax the body and focus the mind
- lots of exercises to practice this

Always best to talk about a skill when they do not need it!

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Emotional Intelligence by Phyllis Van Hemert originally appeared on Moving at the Speed of Creativity on October 6, 2010.

Have you taken away access to digital technology as a consequence for your own children’s misbehavior? Have you friended your own children or younger relatives on social networking sites like Facebook? Have you spoken up when you’ve observed inappropriate comments or photos, or remained silent?

These issues and ideas would be great ones to raise with parents in discussions about Internet safety and digital citizenship.

HT to my mom for sharing this article on her Posterous blog.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Digital Grounding and loss of Facebook Privileges originally appeared on Moving at the Speed of Creativity on September 26, 2010.

I really like the balanced and practical ways these Google employees approach Internet safety with their own families. It’s wonderful for Google to share these kinds of video vignettes, I think they provide a good way to frame a balanced discussion with parents focused on Internet safety and digital citizenship issues.

I audio recorded our session and will post it soon, with all referenced resources, on the Eyes Right blog. Although some links are a bit out of date, I also shared my older PBworks / Teach Digital Internet Safety wiki site.

For a recent student-focused presentation on Internet Safety and Digital Citizenship, check out the following SlideShare Slidecast from September 12th in Alva, Oklahoma.

Technorati Tags:
church, edmond, ethics, family, google, internet, isafety, oklahoma, safety, video, youtube

Google UK Employees talk about Family Internet Safety originally appeared on Moving at the Speed of Creativity on September 22, 2010.

The following is a SlideShare Slidecast (audio recording synchronized to presentation slides) for my first presentation of the day on “Internet Safety and Digital Citizenship” Friday to high school students in Alva. The recording is 43 minutes long. I apologize I did NOT remove the silence/quiet during the playback of the “Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets” video clip, but you CAN skip over that slide during Slideshare playback.

For a list of topics I recommend addressing in presentations like this for parents as well as students, see my August 20th post, “Internet Safety and Digital Citizenship Presentations for Students, Parents and Teachers.” I’d welcome any feedback, suggestions, or ideas related to this presentation you might have. These conversations are VERY important to have with students on an ongoing basis, and since 2008 have been required in United States schools receiving eRate funding.

The fourth video I shared in this presentation was linked on the excellent website thatsnotcool.com. The video is a two minute public service announcement (PSA) for the Ad Council in the United States on “Digital Privacy” by the three girls on YouTube’s Whateverhollywood channel. They make some important points on these topics, and hopefully got the attention of students in Alva on Friday.

If you would like more information about my presentations on Internet Safety or other topics, please check out the “speaking” page of my blog.

Technorati Tags:
digital, education, facebook, footprint, internet, oklahoma, online, parents, safety, sexting, students, erate, alva, tagging

Internet Safety and Digital Citizenship in Alva, Oklahoma (SlideShare Slidecast) originally appeared on Moving at the Speed of Creativity on September 12, 2010.

Be Fair.
Be Accurate.
Be Clear.

Those are succinct directives not only for students formally enrolled in journalism classes, but also for storychasers.

This year, Carol mentioned several other resources focusing on journalism, media literacy and critical thinking which I want to both remember and pass along. First among these is the Center for News Literacy from Stony Brook University. News literacy is about:

Critical thinking. Citizenship. The importance of the press. These are some of the tenets of The Center for News Literacy at Stony Brook University’s School of Journalism. Faculty members train the next generation of news consumers to think critically about what they read, watch, and hear.

The Center for News Literacy at Stony Brook University is committed to teaching students how to use critical thinking skills to judge the reliability and credibility of news reports and news sources. It is the only such center in the United States.

This 7.5 minute video summarizes the focus of news literacy:

Another outstanding resource Carol shared with me is Poynter’s News University. NewsU is:

… one of the world’s most innovative online journalism training programs ever created. From multimedia techniques to writing and reporting, we’ve got more than 150 free and low-cost courses. As the e-learning project of The Poynter Institute, NewsU extends Poynter’s mission as a school for journalists, future journalists and teachers of journalism.

Begun in 2005 with generous support from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, Poynter’s News University currently has more than 150,000 registered users, including 15 percent from outside North America.

The Poynter Institute is dedicated to teaching and inspiring journalists and media leaders. It promotes excellence and integrity in the practice of craft and in the practical leadership of successful businesses. It stands for a journalism that informs citizens and enlightens public discourse. It carries forward Nelson Poynter’s belief in the value of independent journalism.

The upcoming “Video Storytelling Workshop: 2010 Edition” online broadcast on September 24th is an example of the types of learning opportunities NewsU provides regularly. Although this workshop has an associated fee, many of the online professional development offerings of NewsU are free.

As you work with students this year, even if you are not an official “journalism teacher,” I encourage you to remember these three keys to ethical as well as high quality journalism: Fairness, Accuracy, and Clarity. Check out both the Center for News Literacy and News University as resources you as well as your students can tap to improve your writing projects and communication skills. We all need to not only be more critical CONSUMERS of the news, but increasingly more critical PUBLISHERS of the news as we interact on social media platforms. With increased power comes increased responsibility, and we need to help our students understand these roles in our classes NOW.

photo credit: the Italian voice

Technorati Tags:
development, journalism, literacy, news, oklahoma, pd, professional, resources, workshop

News Literacy and the Basics of Journalism: Be Fair, Accurate and Clear originally appeared on Moving at the Speed of Creativity on September 7, 2010.

If you’re a teacher in Canyon ISD, Texas, and haven’t selected an eBook to read yet to complete part 1 of your “homework assignment” from last week, Henry’s ebook is a great option!

If you’re not following Henry Jenkins on Twitter and subscribed to his blog, “Confessions of an Aca-Fan“, remedy those lapses immediately. His latest post, “How New Media is Transforming Storytelling: A New Video Series” can (by itself) provide you with LOTS of outstanding content to share and discuss with both students and peers. I’m eager to watch each of the videos in that series, and share them with our Storychasers communities.

Storytelling Part 1: Change of Storytelling from ith storytelling on Vimeo.

Technorati Tags:
culture, ebook, education, media, storytelling, participatory, henry, jenkins

Free eBook: Henry Jenkins on Participatory Culture and Media Education originally appeared on Moving at the Speed of Creativity on August 24, 2010.

If we, as a society, lose our voice completely, and corporations start doing all the talking, then we’ll be utterly lost. To some degree, this has already happened. Our ability to envision a future collectively has already been severely compromised.

Yet another reason to become a storychaser.

H/T to @creativetallis for sharing these links via their Thomas Tallis School blog.

Great list of recommended films and other resources on media overexposure, btw, on the AdFreeBlog FAQ. For more of my thoughts on related topics, check out the following posts:

1. The Corporation documentary: A big eye opener (Feb 2008)
2. The Tyranny of Oil, The Danger of Unregulated Markets, Power, and Populism (April 2009)
3. Fair Elections Now: Why we must change campaign finance in the United States (January 2010)

Technorati Tags:
blog, share, voice, matters, corporate, anti-corporate

Your unique, non-corporate voice MATTERS originally appeared on Moving at the Speed of Creativity on August 24, 2010.

Any lessons to learn here? Probably.

First, viral media examples like this provide great “flash in the pan” opportunities to not only give individuals moments of mainstream media press attention and fame, but also products and websites. Have you ever heard of the open source program Paul’s Stretch? Me either. But now we have. That’s the program Pittsinger reportedly used to create his Bieber remix. Had you heard of SoundCloud before? The site touts itself as a place “to move music.” According to the site’s “tour” page:

SoundCloud lets you move music fast & easy. The platform takes the daily hassle out of receiving, sending & distributing music for artists, record labels & other music professionals.

This incident certainly provides some great, free marketing for SoundCloud.

Although this situation involves an audio / music file instead of a video, it reminds me in several ways of the Greyson Chance / Lady Gaga / Paparatzi / Ellen remix situation from last spring. For more background, see my 14 May 2010 post, “From a church talent show to the Ellen DeGeneres Show: YouTube fame for an Edmond 6th grader” and 26 May 2010 post, “YouTube can change your life: Just ask Greyson Chance.”

In both Greyson’s situation and Nick Pittsinger’s, they rose meteorically to fame (although probably more “passing fame” in the case of Pittsinger) thanks in part to the fact they remixed a song which was already well known in the mainstream press as well as society as a whole. Media outlets appear to be hungry for these kinds of stories, which offer a “breakout” opportunity for individuals who have here-to-fore never been in the nationwide or worldwide press spotlight. If Pittsinger or Chance had NOT chosen to remix an already well-known and well-googled song title, it’s doubtful their original creations (no matter how talented or unusual they might have been) would have risen so quickly to the attention of so many. I’m sure I’m not the only person noticing this trend. My prediction: We’ll continue to see more mainstream artist remixes in the months ahead, given the success of these two individuals (and others I’m sure) in getting the fleeting attention of millions of eyeballs (and ear drums) in our attention economy.

Another lesson to glean here is that ANYONE is just a few clicks away from the mainstream media spotlight. Looking at Nick Pittsinger’s twitter stream. It does not sound like he expected his Bieber “ambient remix” to garner such attention. Good thing it doesn’t appear Nick uses profanity in his tweets.

If he did, those “digital mis-steps” would be visible by an interested, global audience, and would reflect negatively on him as well as his family, school, place of business, etc. That would detract from the POSITIVE aspects of this story which I’m sure he’d rather emphasize, and could contribute to him becoming another example of “social media use by young people gone bad.” On that subject, if you are not familiar with the Jessi Slaughter situation from this past July, take a few minutes to review it. Kudos to Nick Pittsinger for NOT becoming (at least up to this point) a poster-boy for poor choices with social media. Quite the opposite: He is demonstrating the powerful amplification potential available via social media, and perhaps he’ll find a way to NOT (in his words) “just be a one-day meme kind of deal…” This makes Nick’s situation a good case study for conversations with students and others about Internet safety and digital citizenship.

Can we consider Nick Pittsinger’s remix of Justin Bieber’s song a TRUE remix? Although simply slowing a song down doesn’t sound like much of a remix, it probably qualifies according to the definition of “remix” on today’s English WikiPedia:

A remix is an alternative version of a song, made from an original version. This term is also used for any alterations of media other than song (film, literature etc.)

This situation provides a great opportunity to discuss copyright, fair use, the FCC’s ruling last month in favor of noncommercial uses of copyrighted materials for remixed media, etc. For links to great resources touching on these issues, see the “Copyright and Fair Use Resources” included on the Storychaser’s project wiki.

The last comment I have about this situation concerning Nick Pittsinger and Justin Bieber’s song is: Why all the Bieber hate? I’m not sure I understand it. There’s lots of music I don’t care for, but I’m don’t make it a point to HATE that music, the artists who create it, etc. Perhaps the prevalence of Bieber hate reflects latent anger many people have and want to express, and Bieber is simply a household name (for many kids today, especially) who can become a target of that hatred.

I’ll never forget Holocaust survivor Eva Hance’s message from March 2006: We must reject hate in all its forms. Whenever I encounter words of hate, on YouTube or elsewhere, I’m reminded of Eva’s words.

You may not like Justin Bieber or his music. Those opinions are not valid justifications for hate, however. Thankfully, Nick Pittsinger’s remix of Bieber does not appear to have been motivated by any malicious intentions.

While Nick has YOUR attention, you might take a moment to check out his Halo Nova music project, also on SoundCloud. Nick describes himself on that site by writing:

I’m 20 years old. I’ve been producing for about a year and a half. I love bass. This is just one of my projects!

Kudos to Nick for being a creative media publisher! We need more students to follow in his footsteps, using social media in both constructive and creative ways.

Technorati Tags:
chance, copyright, grayson, learning, media, remix, viral, bieber, justin, song, nick, pittsinger, soundcloud, slow, down

Remix Viral Media to Create Viral Media originally appeared on Moving at the Speed of Creativity on August 24, 2010.

photo credit: cotaro70s

Using video clips, case studies from recent situations in the mainstream press involving social media, and discussion prompts, these interactive sessions focus on helping students as well as adults make good decisions with digital media while keeping communication channels open. Sessions are available geared toward primary age students (grades K-2), upper elementary (grades 3-5), secondary students, teacher groups, and parent groups. Some of the topics addressed include:

1. Facebook: Why should we have boundaries for sharing information on Facebook and what are my boundaries? Should I, my sibling or my child get a Facebook account before age 13?
2. Digital Ethics: What responsibilities go along with the use of cell phones and computers to share media as well as textual information?
3. Password Security: Why is it important to safeguard my login credentials?
4. Digital Footprints: How are people using websites like Google, Pipl.com, and other sites to search for information about prospective employees, and how can my digital footprints affect my future after high school?
5. Commenting Responsibly: How can comments left on YouTube, Facebook, and other sites affect my life today and tomorrow? Are my words powerful? Do my comments matter? How can I moderate comments others leave on my websites?
6. Cyberbullying: How can and should I respond if I witness cyberbullying, or am a victim?
7. Power in my Pocket: How can I constructively use my cell phone and online accounts to promote good in the world, instead of hurting others or myself?
8. Stranger Danger: Why is it RARELY a good idea to meet someone in person I only met online, especially when I’m a minor? (Many parents have met partners or spouses on sites like eHarmony, so it can be misleading to tell students “NEVER meet someone F2F you’ve met online.) How can you tell if someone you meet online REALLY is who they say they are, and if they are “safe?” Who should you talk to when you are faced with a situation online that makes you uncomfortable?
9. Texting While Driving: Why is texting while driving in the car VERY dangerous, and what can be done to encourage others to NOT do it?
10. Sexting (secondary and adults only): How can cell phone photo sharing have a devastating impact on my life or the lives of others? What can and should I do about this if it happens?

The following topics are specifically for parents and teachers attending sessions, which can be offered as “coffee chat” sessions during the school day (advertised via PTA groups) or after school / in the evening:

1. Open Communication Channels: How can we help our students and children develop perceptions of responsibility and accountability for their actions online as well as the face-to-face world? What tools and strategies are effective in promoting open communication about digital media use?
2. Balanced Filtering: What are the benefits and what is the rationale for adopting a balanced content filtering approach at school and at home? How can we utilize a layered “defense in depth” approach when it comes to content filtering and online accountability which can help keep students safe as well as prepare them to make responsible, independent decisions when they are online?
3. Professional and Personal Boundaries: Should I “friend” students on Facebook? How can I use Facebook groups to limit the things I share with students or others who I have friended? What kinds of “social media guidelines” are important for me and others in our school community to follow as we use social media tools with mobile phones as well as computers?
4. Screens Everywhere: What kinds of guidelines make sense for home Internet use, now that many people access the Internet on mobile devices like cell phones, iPods, and handheld game players? What free Internet filtering solutions for home Internet networks are available? What kinds of limits or boundaries are parents using to address safety, health, and media overexposure concerns for kids?
5. Friending Your Child: Should I “friend” my son or daughter on Facebook? What should I do if they don’t want me to “friend” them? How can I be a responsible parent and help my child live within behavior boundaries, but not invite rebellion or online behaviors my child keeps secret from me?

If you are interested in exploring the possibility of having me present sessions on Internet Safety and Digital Citizenship for your students and/or parent and teacher groups, please visit my “speaking” page and contact Karen Montgomery. With E-Rate requiring schools to address Internet safety issues with students, I’ve been receiving more requests from schools about presentations on these topics so I thought I’d share this information. My “Video for PD” page includes numerous video examples focused on “Cyberbullying Prevention, Internet Safety, and Safe Online Social Networking.” I’ll continue to update and add to that list in upcoming months.

I haven’t updated resources on my PBworks wiki page, “Proactive Approaches to Address Cyberbullying and Digital Social Networking” in awhile, since I’ve moved to a Google Site for my presentation/workshop resources. Many of the resources listed there are still relevant and good to use when speaking with others about these topics, however. The same goes for my older wiki resource page, “Internet Safety and Social Networking for Parents.”

Technorati Tags:
block, cell, cellphone, citizen, citizenship, comment, communication, digital, ethics, facebook, filter, filtering, friend, internet, ipod, mobile, parent, parenting, phone, safety, school, students, video, youtube, responsible, videos, friending

Internet Safety and Digital Citizenship Presentations for Students, Parents and Teachers originally appeared on Moving at the Speed of Creativity on August 20, 2010.

The YouTube version above of this clip may be taken down at some point. The following ABC News website posts from July 22nd provide insights into the escalating series of events which led to this extreme and distressing situation:

1. Viral Cyberbullying: Who’s to Blame for Jessi Slaughter’s Online Infamy
2. ‘Jessi Slaughter’ Says Death Threats Won’t Stop Her From Posting Videos on the Internet
3. Jessi Slaughter’s Cyber Bullying Nightmare
4. Jessi Slaughter Breaks Down, Father Steps In

The most thorough summary of this incident I’ve encountered to date is published on Know Your Meme. The site describes itself as “Documenting Internet phenomena: viral videos, image macros, catchphrases, web celebs and more.” According to the site’s page about Jessi:

Jessica Leonhardt, also known as Jessi Slaughter and formerly as KerliGirl13 on YouTube, is an 11 year old girl and fan of the band Blood on the Dance Floor whose attention-seeking online behaviors caused her to become the target of a 4chan raid, resulting in a rage-fueled and ill-advised retort from her father that became the subject of masses of image macros and videos.

Here are a few reflections this situation with some possible “lessons learned” we can share with our students, children and grandchildren.

KIDS MOST AT RISK FACE-TO-FACE ARE MOST AT RISK ONLINE
This statement is a frequently shared refrain in many presentations today regarding cyberbullying and online safety: Research demonstrates (as do case studies like this one) that the children most “at risk” for a variety of reasons in face-to-face settings are most at risk when they go online. These children are more likely to make poor choices with bad consequences for themselves. It’s clear after watching only a few videos related to this situation that Jessica Leonhardt had and has some significant issues with anger. It’s also apparent that at least one of her parents (her father) was unaware of the need to protect his child by stopping her voluntary publication of angry videos which led to this hateful backlash by an online community of trolls.

Was this situation preventable? No one can answer that with certainty. What we CAN say with certainty is that the opportunity and capability to “publish at will” online via YouTube and other internet-based media channels is available to many, many children and students today regardless of geography or their home situation. As caring adults, it’s important for us to reach out to students who are “at risk” for a variety of reasons and work to connect them with supportive peers as well as adults who help them resolve their issues constructively. It’s tragic to see a situation like Jessica’s played out on the global stage, particularly when it appears the situation was self-invited (to a large degree) by Jessica’s actions as well as the actions / inactions of her parent(s).

VIRAL VIDEO SITUATIONS CAN QUICKLY SPIRAL OUT OF ANYONE’S DIRECT CONTROL
Jessica’s YouTube account, KerliGirl13, has been deleted. I’d guess because a police investigation is ongoing, the account details have been archived and turned over to authorities. One of my first thoughts after seeing some of these videos was, “Why didn’t her parent delete her account immediately as soon as this trouble started?” At this point, and doubtless this point was reached at a recent date shortly after the situation “exploded” online as well as in the mainstream media, MANY different YouTube users helped this situation spiral out of control by downloading their own versions of Jessica’s videos and re-uploading them to their own accounts. I saw and experienced how quickly this happens with regularity in Novemeber 2009 when my own daughter’s YouTube video response to President Obama went viral for a short time. Other people posted duplicates of her video to YouTube, in an attempt to capitalize on the viral interest on the video and topic and in some cases share advertising images/links with the global YouTube audience. As her parent who published this video, I had to formally submit several “takedown requests” to YouTube to stop this unauthorized “republication” of video, and thankfully what we experienced was NOT at the scale of this Jessi Slaughter case.

For more background on that situation with Sarah and her YouTube video about our President’s speech to US students in November 2009, see my post “Lucrative rewards of viral videos encourage parents to put their children on YouTube” from April 2010. The links are near the bottom of that post.

WORDS ARE POWERFUL, EVEN FROM AN 11 YEAR OLD
The words we say face-to-face and online can be powerful and can have lasting impact on others. The old saying, “Sticks and stones can break your bones but words can never hurt me” is a LIE. Words can hurt, and sadly they often do. People can be malicious and hateful, and this is particularly true online when a perception of anonymity and non-accountability exists. Sadly, Jessica Leonhardt has learned this critical lesson in a very difficult way. When you threaten to put a “glock” in someone’s mouth and “turn their brains into mushy” and put that video online, there are no guarantees but chances are high SOMEONE else is going to listen and hear your message. When you post content like this to a “tabloid [website] consisting of self-submitted stories” like Stickam, things can get ugly fast.

Words are powerful. We should use words with care. We need to help people of all ages understand the power of words, and the responsibilities we have as citizens in our face-to-face communities as well as online communities. These are conversations about citizenship, digital citizenship, ethics and respect. These are conversations we need to have in our homes, in our schools, in our churches, and in other contexts where we have opportunities to dialog and reflect about behavior.

THERE ARE GOOD REASONS FOR KIDS UNDER 13 TO NOT BE PUBLISHING INDEPENDENTLY TO YOUTUBE
According to the website “Unmasking the Digital Truth,” in the United States the “Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act” (COPPA) restricts the online collection of personal information by persons or entities under U.S. jurisdiction from children under 13 years of age. This means without parent permission, children under the age of 13 cannot obtain accounts on websites like YouTube. There are good reasons for this. Younger people often do not have the maturity and decision-making skills to wisely use websites like this which permit self-publication. We shouldn’t just criticize young children on this front, however, many older students as well as adults make very poor choices on a variety of interactive websites as well.

My personal opinion is children under age 13 should NOT be permitted to independently publish video online, without a parent’s watchful supervision, in any circumstance. I do not fault website owners for this lamentable situation involving Jessica Leonhardt. It’s OUR responsibility, as parents and responsible adults, to communicate and provide accountability which can prevent situations like this from spiraling out of control. Giving a young child access and permission (either tacit or explicit) to publish anything s/he wants with video to a global audience is irresponsible. Jessica’s parents have provided a case-study example for why this is true.

PARENT SUPERVISION OF ONLINE ACTIVITIES SOMETIMES ISN’T ENOUGH
Just saying, “It’s the parent’s responsibility to talk about digital citizenship” isn’t sufficient in our society today. Again, this situation provides a case in point. Jessica’s father made some bad choices. It was not constructive to record a video and publish it to YouTube shouting at and threatening the people online who were responding to his daughter’s provocations. It wasn’t right for other people to respond hatefully with comments, send death threats, publish Jessica’s real name and address online, order pizza’s to be delivered to her house as a means to harass her family, etc. Lots of bad choices on the part of many people characterize this situation. Just as multiple people made bad choices which contributed to these unfortunate exchanges, multiple people MIGHT have intervened at some point to prevent or ameliorate the damage which eventually took place. It takes a village to raise kids, and we all need to do what we can to discuss “digital citizenship” with people young and old in our spheres of influence.

WE NEED TO DISCUSS AND PRACTICE DIGITAL CITIZENSHIP
It’s not enough to talk about digital citizenship, we need to PRACTICE it together. The same thing goes for learning how to swim safely: A lesson at the chalkboard or whiteboard about safe swimming is not going to help others develop and refine their skills.

photo credit: edenpictures

People wanting to learn how to swim have to get in the water, and other experienced adults need to help supervise as well as facilitate the swimming instruction which takes place in the pool, lake, river or ocean.

This analogy applies to interactive, online environments. We need to discuss and facilitate student publication of text as well as media in online spaces, and PRACTICE this publication process together. We need to discuss the opportunities as well as pitfalls. Should you discuss the Jessi Slaughter YouTube case with pre-teens and/or teens in your classroom and home? Definitely. It’s often possible to find a silver lining or positive outcome to mistakes and even tragedies. Perhaps in this situation, we can constructively use the story of Jessi Slaughter, her dad and online cyberbullies to help others make BETTER choices and have MORE CONVERSATIONS about digital citizenship. Our takeaway should NOT be, “We’re keeping everyone in our school / home / community off the Internet.” That’s already the unfortunate conclusion and even POLICY of many school districts as well as parents when faced with mainstream media documentaries about Internet-using sexual predators. The world is STILL a dangerous place, and can often be a hostile, malicious environment. In this world, it’s our responsibility to prepare students to not just safely survive – but thrive. As Dr Kevin Leman asks parents, “Is your home a cage or a nest?” We need to ask the same question about our classrooms and our schools. Hopefully we’re providing supportive nests for our children and students, where they will learn to fly and one day safely leave the nest. It’s a scary prospect, but one we all must face. Digital citizenship needs to be not only something we TALK about, but something we DO together on a regular basis.

photo credit: NomadicLass

Hat tip to Alec Couros for sharing a link about this situation via Twitter.

Technorati Tags:
bully, bullying, citizenship, digital, networking, social, youtube, jessi, slaughter, cyberbullying

Jessi Slaughter (Jessica Leonhardt) on YouTube: A Case Study on Digital Citizenship originally appeared on Moving at the Speed of Creativity on August 6, 2010.

photo credit: Mixtribe

According to the English Wiktionary, one definition of “obsfucate” is:

To deliberately make more confusing in order to conceal the truth.

The etemology of “obsfucate” is from the Latin word obfuscare, from ob- + fuscare (“darken”). The “dark ages” was the era in European history following the fall of the Roman Empire, described in Wikipedia as the “period of intellectual darkness between the extinguishing of the light of Rome, and the Renaissance or rebirth from the 14th century onwards.” The Enlightenment should continue today as digital communication technologies fundamentally change the access we enjoy to information, and our abilities to share information ourselves. The advance of enlightened thinking relies principally on our abilities and willingness to think critically however, as well as the access we enjoy to varied sources of information and opinion.

Critical thinking and problem solving are not a new skills, even though they are often included in frameworks for “21st century skills” like those espoused by The Partnership for 21st Century Skills. Corporations as well as groups of individuals have intentionally shared falsehoods and obsfucating “research” findings for many years before Internet technologies arrived on the information scene. As an example, Richard Littlemore writes in his article “Manufacturing Doubt” in this NewScientist series:

You can’t beat doubt as a corporate strategy– especially if your product is life-threatening when used as directed. These days we don’t have to speculate as to whether industries have manufactured doubt. They have admitted it too many times. In 1972, Tobacco Institute vice-president Fred Panzer outlined his industry’s ‘brilliantly executed’ defence strategy. A key tactic was ‘creating doubt about the health charge [that tobacco use increased chances of getting cancer] without actually denying it’ while ‘encouraging objective scientific research.’… Where tobacco led the way, coal and chemicals followed. And, of course, the fossil fuel industry has been working overtime– and with shocking success– creating doubt about climate change.

While groups like “Big Tobacco” have conducted organized campaigns to obsfucate societal perceptions about medical risks for years preceding the Internet information revolution, digital communication technologies are now used to rapidly repeat and therefore disseminate false messages which can gain cultural currency through repetition. In many cases, thanks to the indexing schemes of search engines like Google, these messages can also gain acceptance in the digital info-sphere much sooner than they might have in earlier eras of history. In his NewScientist article “Giving Life to a Lie,” Jim Giles details the history of a falsely attributed quotation to John Houghton. Houghton was falsely quoted as saying, “Unless we announce disasters no one will listen,” and this quotation has been used repeatedly since its initial publication in November 2006 by those seeking to debunk climate change. Giles explains how an “informational cascade” online today can rapidly cause quotations or ideas to gain popular currency much faster than they could in the past. Giles writes:

The process [of informational cascade] is amplified by the ‘echo chamber’ of the internet, which has made it easier than ever to encounter and generate falsehoods. It also makes it easier to start them. Propagators are often aware of what they are doing, according to [Cass] Sustein. Some act out of self-interest, such as the desire for money or fame. Others are defending an ideology or faith. Some are simply malicious.

Giles explains how repetition of messages can lead to the “illusion of truth.”

‘Hearing something 10 times does not mean there there are 10 different pieces of information,’ says [David] Hirshleifer. ‘But the more you hear something the more likely you are to believe it is true.’ And so it is with denial: if everybody appears to be saying that climate science is corrupt, or that the MMR vaccine causes autism, it takes on the appears of fact.

Although it is not mentioned in this article series on “deniers,” I was reminded of the common perception today that all interactive chat environments on the Internet are evil and can only be used for nefarious purposes. I think dynamics similar to those identified by Littlemore and Giles are at play with these discussions of “Internet Safety.” After hearing multiple references to “predator danger” news specials, a common perception has been reinforced in many U.S. communities that the interactive Internet overall is a dangerous place which should be avoided by young people. While there are increasingly popular online destinations like Webkins, Club Penguin, etc. which might logically help to refute this perception, when it comes to many school-based discussions of Internet safety it’s clear the fear message and perception continues to predominate. Too often, even as adults, we FAIL to critically analyze and validate messages we hear in the media and within our environment. It’s not just students who need encouragement to be critical thinkers: We do as adults as well.

On the topic of safe chat environments for students at school, I recommend you check out the relatively new site Classchats.com. The Seedlings interviewed teacher Cherrie MacInnes about the website and its genesis in their June 3, 2010 webcast. Getting involved in an interactive class project using a site like Classchats may be one of the best ways we can individually help overcome overblown perceptions about the dangers of interactive digital technologies.

Few technology topics seem to bring the need for a focus on critical thinking to the forefront as much as WikiPedia. Like many other school districts in the United States, the public district where my two youngest children now attend elementary school simply bans WikiPedia use outright by students rather than talking about its value and the importance of validating information. When school leaders ban an important and relevant information resource like WikiPedia instead of helping learners of all ages understand how to use it effectively, they do an educational disservice to the entire community. We should not only be using WikiPedia regularly in our schools and homes, we should also be talking about the process through which we validate and trust information. Banning WikiPedia outright because it can (and often does) include erroneous information ducks vital conversations which we need to be having regularly as expert and novice learners. As teachers, we hopefully never tell our students to only use a single source for their research projects, and take everything that source says or has written at face value without any verification or corroboration. In practice, however, I find there is remarkably little QUESTIONING about sources, perspectives, and bias in many classrooms conducting research projects. This needs to change.

It’s certainly easier to teach in an environment where facts are not contested and conclusions are not disputed. The real world outside of classrooms, however, is filled with situations which have ill-defined outcomes. Decisions must be made based on limited and imperfect information, and critical thinking is essential.

photo credit: mia3mom

How can we encourage more critical thinking inside and outside our classrooms? Discussions of and practice with the scientific method, utilization of frameworks like The Big 6, and simply adopting an inquiry-based approach to learning are all ways to encourage more critical analysis. Conversations with students during and about their process of creating a knowledge product should include lots of open ended questions which challenge students’ thinking.

This mode of teaching is certainly “messier” than traditional, teacher-directed instruction, but this is exactly the sort of dialog we need to prepare students to be engaged and educated citizens in the 21st century. Our need for critical thinking is greater today than ever before. Are you living in an echo chamber? Are your students? We need to find ways to regularly step outside our bubbles of normalcy and question both our assumptions and our sources of information. This inquiry-based process should allow us to act as true “sceptics” guided by a scientific way of thinking rather than “deniers” driven primarily by ideologies or other biases. Our digitally connected learning landscape makes this need even more apparent than it was a decade ago, last year, or last week.

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Critical thinking is more important than ever amidst Internet-based denier propaganda originally appeared on Moving at the Speed of Creativity on July 5, 2010.

photo credit: jc.westbrook

It’s important to be aware copyright / intellectual property issues are relevant when it comes to importing copyrighted audiobooks. While I’ve never heard of someone getting in trouble for importing an audiobook they purchased on CD into digital format with iTunes, the propriety of encoding / importing / ripping audiobooks which you check out of the library is potentially more contentious. Again, I’ve never read or heard of someone getting in trouble for this, but if we read the fine print (of an agreement your local library probably has on file somewhere) I’d bet it says something about digital copies of audiobooks not being authorized by the publisher / copyright holder. If you do import AAC or mp3 versions of library audiobooks to listen to on your own mobile audio player, and especially if you do this with your own children or students, consider DELETING the imported audiobook after you finish listening to it. Technically speaking, in most cases for copyrighted audiobooks, by checking one out of the library you have obtained a limited license to listen to it. You haven’t purchased it or obtained a license to keep your own copy of it forever, listening to it as long as you want. Situations like this are tricky because it’s so EASY to make digital copies. These are good conversations to have with your students as well as your own children.

Just because it’s EASY to do, it’s not necessarily LEGAL.

Overdrive is one company used by some libraries for digital audiobook downloads, and the following paragraph about copyright from Overdrive confirms my recommendations above:

For Content downloaded from a library service, at the end of the lending period, your license to the Content terminates, and you may no longer use or access the Content. At the end of the lending period, you are required to delete and/or destroy any and all copies of the Content. In the event OverDrive, the library or other rights holders determines you are violating permitted uses of the Content, we reserve the right to suspend or terminate your ability to use or access an OverDrive service or the Content.

This guidance on copyrighted materials can apply equally to audiobooks you checkout from a library on CD and then convert to a digital format yourself. Your “use license” for those materials is limited, not unlimited, so you should delete those files after you finish listening to them.

From a legal perspective, it is my understanding that the terms of the DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) prohibit ANY conversion of copyrighted materials to another format. This means if you buy an audiobook on CD or a movie on DVD, in the United States it’s technically illegal to use a program like iTunes (for audio) or Handbrake (for video) to convert those media files into other formats friendly for use on an iOS device or other portable media player. The reason these provisions of the DMCA are present can be traced back to who wrote and lobbied Congress for the DMCA: Big corporate music labels, Hollywood publishers and other media conglomerates. In their ideal world (which legally exists now in the United States) all consumers (educators, students, or other people) are required to PAY for NEW digital versions of intellectual property, EVEN when the same consumer has ALREADY paid for one version. We may not agree with this, but that’s how the law reads now in the United States.

If your organization is looking to convert older VHS or cassette tape media into digital formats, make sure you consult a lawyer about these issues before proceeding with a digitization project. In some cases if you maintain physical ownership of the original media files and restrict digital distribution of encoded media to the same quantity/quantities (only one user can simultaneously view a digitized copy of a copyrighted media file when only one copy is owned / licensed) then your lawyer may deem those limitations adequate to constitute a viable defense if your digitization initiative is ever challenged legally. If you ask media companies and publishers about this, however, I’m betting their answer will be to purchase NEW digital licenses for all your content.

Have you or your organization had experiences with media content digitization? Do you have recommendations for others embarking on or contemplating similar initiatives?

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Copyright and licensing considerations when importing library audiobooks originally appeared on Moving at the Speed of Creativity on June 27, 2010.

LimeWire uses the gnutella network and also the BitTorrent protocol. A free software version and a purchasable “enhanced” version are available. The software is developed by Lime Wire LLC, which is a subsidiary of Lime Group. BitTorrent support is provided by libtorrent.

Earlier this month, the RIAA filed legal documents asking for the shutdown of Limewire, and last week eight music companies filed a joint lawsuit against Limewire accusing the company of “massive copyright infringement.” Despite these legal battles, Limewire continues to be an extremely popular P2P program and is probably a software name teens are as a familiar with these days as Microsoft Office.

Since our family moved to Oklahoma four years ago and I started working with K12 schools here, I’ve encountered Limewire in several educational contexts. While I was still working for AT&T, I was surprised to learn about one of our schools whose director of technology had actually created custom firewall port rules for himself to use Limewire. While P2P programs can be used for licit filesharing, the vast majority of usage of these programs is illegitimate / illegal. Whether you are a technology director, a classroom teacher, a librarian, a principal or a student in a K-12 school, I’d find it difficult to accept any argument which could be put forward for the legitimate and legal need to use a P2P program like Limewire at school. Using P2P programs like this can not only be illegal (depending on the files which are shared or downloaded) but it can also be a BIG security risk from a malware perspective. (Lots of malware gets distributed as P2P files.) Unfortunately, the technology director in that school has not been the only Oklahoma educator I’ve encountered who openly uses Limewire at school.

In our Celebrate Oklahoma Voices workshops on digital storytelling, we spend time discussing copyright, intellectual property issues, Creative Commons and fair use. We do NOT have a discussion of P2P programs like Limewire in our curriculum, but after several conversations in workshops this spring and summer I’m thinking we should. This is a photograph I took recently of Limewire running on an Oklahoma teacher’s classroom computer, where it was being used by the teacher’s child to download music. (Note the “date” this photo is shown as being taken is this evening when I edited this image, NOT the actual date when I took this photo – which I do not wish to publicly disclose.)

I asked the teacher after we left the room and her child if she knew what the program “Limewire” was and what it was used for, and she said she did not. I explained it was used to share files, and often to download illegal copies of music and movies. I encouraged her to have a conversation with her child about the use of that software.

Unfortunately, I have not only talked with Oklahoma classroom teachers who have used (or permitted the use of) Limewire in their classroom, but also Oklahoma principals. One principal who participated in our COV workshop in the past had mentioned that s/he (I won’t disclose the gender of this individual) “could just download that song from Limewire” to use in their project. We explicitly address copyright and intellectual property issues in our workshop to encourage both understanding and respect for U.S. law, so a comment like this FROM A CAMPUS ADMINISTRATOR was and is really troubling.

All of these situations raise tough and delicate issues. These uses of Limewire on public school networks are almost certainly illegal and out-of-bounds from a propriety standpoint. As a workshop facilitator and guest in school districts, however, it places me in a difficult situation to report these alleged illegal and unethical acts. That is particularly true when the person who admits to using the P2P program is a campus administrator.

I’m going to suggest to our Storychasers leadership team that we include a specific discussion of P2P file sharing programs, including Limewire, as part of our phase 1 workshop agenda / curriculum. These situations highlight the importance of discussing intellectual property issues in professional development workshops with teachers. They also, however, raise “whistleblower” issues that I’m dealing with more frequently these days. Everyone likes to be praised publicly, but no one likes to be criticized. I am frequently having to censor what I write and share on my blog because of the waves of negative feedback I’m certain allegations of wrongful behavior or unprofessional conduct would have on me personally and the organizations which I represent professionally. These are very important ethical issues, and I am not convinced I’ve handled all of them in the best way I could in the past. Perhaps we should have a way of documenting and reporting these situations as workshop facilitators for Storychasers, and then leave it up to our organization to take the situations up with respective district administrators? (Since I’m the executive director of Storychasers that doesn’t put me out of the decision-making hotseat, but at least it would establish a procedure I can follow along with others when we encounter issues like these.)

Have you run into situations like this at your own school, at other schools, or when leading professional development workshops? If you become aware of a teacher, librarian, technology director, technician, or campus principal using a P2P program like Limewire, how do you handle it? If you’re not in that person’s “chain of command” and/or are employed by the district, does that make the way you handle the situation any different?

photo credit: adria.richards

It would be nice if it was possible to be the bearer of criticism and avoid being shot as the messenger of bad news, but unfortunately that is not always the case in many organizations– including public schools.

Technorati Tags:
copyright, download, education, ethics, movies, music, school, schools, limewire, whiste, blower, whisteblower, riaa

Limewire in the classroom and the principal’s office originally appeared on Moving at the Speed of Creativity on June 20, 2010.

This is a remix of videos and images from several places, including the Ad Council’s “Out Of Your Hands” video. (60 seconds – embedding unfortunately disabled.) I think the Hoover, AL version is more powerful and thought provoking because of the way it sets up the scenario. You might recognize some of the kids on the couch in one of the closing images.

H/T to Jeff Richardson for sharing this video. Read Jeff’s post, “Educating Our Community in Digital Citizenship” for more background. He’s looking for other examples of similar parent education programs focused on digital citizenship.

Later this summer, Storychasers will be announcing a new 12 week Internet Safety / Digital Citizenship curriculum program for schools. This targets schools required to teach students about Internet safety as part of their E-Rate compliance. I’m glad to see Jeff and other leaders in his school system taking the approach of focusing on “digital citizenship” and not simply “Internet safety.” There’s a lot more to discuss here in addition to the typical “don’t do that” sort of lectures we see in popular online safety programs like iSafe. I much prefer the approach of groups like Common Sense Media, which offers a wealth of resources for educators, parents and students on topics including Internet Safety as well as Digital Citizenship. For more background about Common Sense Media, check out the great Seedlings webcast from April 15th with Emily Hunt of Common Sense. If you don’t already, I highly recommend subscribing to Common Sense’s YouTube channel. It’s full of tech tips for parents as well as movie reviews. Their 1.5 minute video, “Sexting: Time 2 Talk. Whats Sextings Real Message?” includes the most important Internet safety / digital citizenship strategy: Regular, open conversations between parents and kids. We’ve got to keep talking.

Although I’m not updating it weekly at this point, I am continuing to maintain the “Digital Dialog” learning community which I started on Ning several years ago, as a Buddypress-powered learning community hosted a subdomain of my blog. You’re welcome to join in conversations there about these issues!

For more related links, check out my social bookmarks for digital citizenship and Internet safety.

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Digital Citizenship video resources from Hoover, Alabama Schools and Common Sense Media originally appeared on Moving at the Speed of Creativity on June 7, 2010.

Others argue that there has been a ratcheting up of meanness—that the changes in technology have made us nastier and more cynical. “It’s like a blood sport,” says Mr. Fink, who runs a crisis-management firm in Los Angeles. “It feels like everyone has their cellphone out, ready to take a photo that will hurt someone else.”

It’s as if all of us now have our own printing presses and our own television studios, and we can use them for good or for evil. The problem is that too many of us succumb to the anonymity of the Web, says Parry Aftab, a cyber-security attorney based in Irvington, N.Y. “We’re braver when we type. We don’t have to look someone in their eyes. It’s easier to be vicious, to cross the line between funny and cruel.”

photo credit: trix0r

Are you encouraging the students with whom you work to use their cell phones, laptops, and other interactive technologies for good instead of evil? We need to empower digital witnesses to constructively share their voices and those of others on the global stage. As Jeffrey notes, television and YouTube are full of “bad examples” when it comes to to digital media use.

Helping students become aware of their digital footprint and the impact that can have on their lives as well as others’ lives is just the first step. Jeffrey writes:

At Indiana University, my daughter is taking a course titled “The Principles of Public Relations.” On the first day of class, the instructor, Lanier Holt, surprised his 104 students by telling them he had conducted a “scouting report” by Googling each of their names and checking out any photos of them he could access on Facebook.

Many of the students still seemed to have an untarnished Web presence. But more than a few were the subject of embarrassing postings—their own and other people’s. Mr. Holt found photos of his students with marijuana pipes or posing half-naked. He came upon photos in which students had shaved off an eyebrow of someone who had passed out from drinking.

Mr. Holt warns his students that future employers are Googling them, and that unseemly images of them “tagged” on some other person’s Facebook page could come back to haunt them. The most proactive step they can take is to assume everything they do may end up as part of the public record.

The solution is NOT to simply stay off the web. I don’t think the solution should end with simply maintaining your own digital footprint, either. Deep web search tools like Pipl (referenced by Joyce Valenza in her K12Online09 keynote, “The Wizard of Apps“) can help us better monitor our footprint, but not constructively shape it. “The solution,” if there is one, lies in defining ourselves as positive and constructive contributors to the social media conversations taking place all around us.

Words and images are powerful, and they can shape our perceptions along with the perceptions of others in lasting ways. Many of us today DO have “our own printing presses and our own television studios” in our pockets. We need more storychasers modeling the ethical and constructive uses of digital media in our schools and communities. All our schools need the student journalism class publishing content on an interactive, moderated website which can serve as a sand box for respectful social networking in the community. Where are the leaders in your community, sounding this clarion call for digital citizenship? “The T-Bird Times: The Northfield Middle School Newspaper / Multimedia Club” is one of the best examples I’ve seen to date of this idea in action. I heard Kevin Jarrett share about it at NECC last year in Washington DC.

Last summer I had an opportunity to share some thoughts at the Oklahoma RTNDF Multimedia Workshop. As the day kicked off, Carol (who was leading us, I didn’t record her last name at the time) shared a summary of the three most important rules for journalists to follow. Whether or not we are formally enrolled in journalism classes, teaching journalism, or employed as journalists, I think we can benefit from keeping these in mind as we use social media. Carol suggested we all remember to:

1. Be accurate
2. Be fair
3. Be clear

What kind of resources and support would you want if you were to start (or encourage others to start) a student Storychasers “club” at your school? This could be a club activity where students learned to use flash-based camcorders, digital cameras, audio recorders, and blogs to constructively document and share their views and perspectives on school and the community. Students could accept “assignments” and work to create multimedia online reports about them, at times working collaboratively with students in other locations. I’d like to build that kind of interactive community through Storychasers, borrowing some of the ideas from CNN’s iReporter community.

There’s little doubt it’s a challenge to not simply survive but thrive in this “age of humiliation.” We need proactive, rather than simply reactionary responses, to help all the learners in our communities become constructive storychasers.

Cross-posted to the Storychasers blog.

Technorati Tags:
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We need more constructive and positive Storychasers in The Age of Humiliation originally appeared on Moving at the Speed of Creativity on May 5, 2010.

Sometimes people will transparently share their inappropriate intentions for wanting to join your learning community when they fill out their profile, as an individual did in the example above. More often, however, people who are NOT really interested in the “educational networking” purpose of your network will simply skip questions, and may choose all possible role options in the profile questions. These are “red flags” for people to keep OUT of your network.

photo credit: tiffa130

Sometimes membership applications fall into a “grey zone” when you are not exactly sure if the person is legitimately interested in participating constructively in the community. In these cases, we generally approve the request for membership and then monitor the person’s contributions. Alternatively or in addition, since we ask for an email address we can also email the person and ask follow up questions. That is generally more time than an administrator wants to commit to moderating membership, however, so monitoring the community and intervening if something inappropriate is said or posted is our general procedure.

To setup new member moderation, administrators in the Ning can click MANAGE – PRIVACY and then select a checkbox to moderate membership applications.

Once membership is moderated, a message in the right sidebar of your site will appear (for administrators only) whenever new membership applications have been received.

Moderating a learning community like this might sound like a scary prospect fraught with danger, but it has been a very positive and rewarding experience for us. Key to that outcome is the fact that we have membership applications moderated, and several questions (including some open ended questions) required before anyone can submit the form to join the community.

It’s critical to “guard the gates” of our learning communities to keep spammers and others with malicious intent out.

photo credit: bortescristian

If someone DOES get “inside” who has malicious intentions, there are several administrative options which can be taken. If someone has posted something clearly “beyond the pale” or through their behavior demonstrates they are NOT in the right place as a member of your community, administrators can kick them out entirely. This deletes all past posts and comments they’ve made, deletes their profile, and prevents them from joining the community again with the same email address. In the past, Ning called this process for administrators “banning” users. Now the language is “Suspend for Spam” or “Suspend from Network.” These options can be made (by your designated administrators only) by viewing an individual’s profile page:

These “suspension” options also can be chosen by choosing MANAGE – MEMBERS:

Keep in mind Ning profiles / logins can be used on multiple sites, so if you “Suspend for Spam” I suspect Ning overlords receive notification that the account should be watched as a potential spammer account which should be suspended more globally.

If a member of the learning community has made a mistake or said something inappropriate, but does not appear to be a spammer or someone who has committed a “learning network felony” justifying suspension / banning, one of our administrators generally messages the person and asks them to change or remove the offending content. Sometimes we’ll (as administrators) directly remove it, but in these cases it’s often best to let the person make the change themselves. These situations personify the idea that we need “digital sand boxes” for learners to practice digital citizenship and responsible social networking. Our learning community is moderated and accountable, which are two key ingredients for a safe as well as constructive learning network.

photo credit: Grant Barrett

Like many others, I’m very interested in the policy changes which Ning is expected to announce May 5th for free and educational networks. We’ve been paying to remove advertisements and use a custom domain on our Celebrate Oklahoma Voices Ning for several years, and I expect we’ll continue to do so. Hopefully Ning administrators will continue to make educational networking on their site financially reasonable for teachers, librarians and schools. There are a LOT of important lessons we all need to learn and practice as digital citizens, and Ning networks administrated as learning communities can be great places for that learning to take place.

Cross posted to the Storychasers blog.

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Always moderate membership in educational networking sites originally appeared on Moving at the Speed of Creativity on April 27, 2010.

Blog reader “JJ” wrote:

I am an avid reader of your blog, I follow you on Twitter, and I appreciate your contribution to my personal awareness of educational issues. However, there is one issue that I believe you are lacking in understanding. I try hard not to take your statements about IT Directors personally, but you continually throw us under the bus with regard to content filtering. In many schools in our state the “IT Director or Technology Coordinator” is the only technology staff person for the entire district. My job includes every aspect of networking, hardware, software, staff training, e-rate (which is monumental), online state testing (mega-monumental), and tech support for computers, Smart Boards, projectors, sound equipment, and any other equipment purchased by the district. I have hundreds of computers and network equipment at 5 different sites all over town. I work 60-70 hours a week and still can’t ever get it all done. Most of the time I just run to the hottest fire and the rest of the problems have to wait…sometimes for weeks. This situation is fairly common in our state. Most of us are not interested in having control; we just try to survive.

My ISP provides the content filtering service, but I manage my own filter. I would love to open it up more, but I have to comply with directives from e-rate and my administration, and the limitations of my network. When parents, teachers, or even students report inappropriate sites being accessed, I am usually instructed to block them. I blocked Flickr for a period of time because the students were using the site to find photos involving nudity and other inappropriate content, and we had parents who were outraged. I have been directed to block YouTube, Facebook and MySpace because of the potential for inappropriate content and activity. I did not make that decision myself, but I happen to agree. YouTube has great content but also has content that is totally unacceptable. Until we can find a way to selectively filter the content the site will remain blocked. Our current filter uses category blocking. I realize this also blocks valuable social networking sites that have valid educational uses. The ISP staff works with me to create exceptions for these when teachers need changes made. It’s not perfect, but we don’t get the ideal situation very often in public schools.

I also have to ensure that our network remains functional. We have 4 T-1’s and we are constantly pushing our bandwidth to the max. We are currently administering state mandated online tests. It doesn’t much matter whether I agree with that whole process (I don’t), it is not optional. In order to conserve bandwidth, I have blocked a few areas such as internet radio and video streaming. This was not a censorship decision, but a necessity. Again, in an ideal world we would have adequate bandwidth for any and all educational endeavors.

I do not just randomly block categories or websites. In addition to adult content, I have such categories blocked as online auctions, illegal activity, and personals/online dating. I also have web-mail blocked except for our school mail. This is simply because I don’t have the time to clean up the infected computers due to phishing scams, malware, and viruses. No anti-virus protection will prevent all of these threats. I work had to ensure that our teachers and students have access to tools, sites, and applications they need. It is sometimes impossible to perfectly balance those needs with the realities of our infrastructure. I understand that balance is the key, but sometimes it is not easy or even possible to achieve. So instead of blaming us IT folks for standing in the way of progressive education, perhaps you need to understand the bigger picture. We are not just randomly making decisions to control users on our network.

I agree that students need to be taught digital citizenship and given opportunities to collaborate and create in online social environments. I want my school to be progressive and overcome challenges involved with balancing their experiences. But as the IT Director, I am a very small piece of that puzzle. You sometimes give me far to much credit and power that I don’t deserve or possess.

This was my response:

JJ: This rant was not an attack on all IT directors. While I certainly can point to specific cases in specific districts where the IT director is a HUGE impediment to the cause of digital citizenship and acquisition of the ISTE NETS (that is the case in some large as well as small school districts) I totally agree that it is unfair to lay all of this at the feet of the IT Director. Bottom line, this is about leadership and administrative vision. Yes, IT directors have a responsibility and an obligation (I’d argue) to help inform their administration about risks and about “balance” when it comes to content filtering. That said, however, schools are hierarchical bureaucracies and like all other staff the IT Director works for the superintendent, who works for the school board, who works for the public. So the buck REALLY stops with the top leaders in school districts.

We all have important roles to play, and the role of an IT Director is undoubtedly a vital one. I definitely acknowledge there are a myriad of legal mandates with which schools (and IT departments specifically) must comply. In many cases, however, FUD (fear, uncertainty and doubt) overrule reason and logical thinking. I’ve taught in school districts and worked in school districts where the threat of lawsuits led administrators to do things that could be rightly judged by outsiders as irrational and against the developmental needs of children. Removing all playground equipment from all elementary schools because of a lawsuit threat from a parent is one non-technical example that comes to mind. There are LOTS of factors here. But let’s bring it back to technology and content filtering.

Your job as the IT director is not and should not be construed by parents, your administration, or your community as “guaranteeing the safety of all students on the Internet at all times.” I recognize that is a common perception, but it is a FALSE one. It is one we need to work together to address and change. If you read through the materials currently available on the Unmasking the Digital Truth project, you’ll see that schools have a GREAT deal of latitude in how they choose to enforce content filtering.

Do you have to block webmail and YouTube? No you don’t. You can choose to, but you don’t have to by legal mandate. If students or adults on your network are searching for objectionable content, that’s not your fault as the IT director any more than it would be a teacher’s fault if a student brought a Playboy magazine to school. I believe we need more accountable networks and communities in our schools to address these issues. Many people today assume falsely that content filters can keep our students on task and keep them away entirely from online content we consider objectionable. They can’t. We need to acknowledge this and adopt MUCH more balanced filtering rules in our schools than we have at present in MANY places.

Praise God we live in a relatively free society. (I won’t digress into a diatribe about The Patriot Act here.) I’ve lived in Mexico, and I’ve visited mainland China twice, Hong Kong once. We believe in freedom of expression and in freedom more generally. The enforced rules of content filtering in many of our schools do not, in my view, reflect our values as citizens of the United States or as citizens of a free society. My September 2007 post, “Content filtering in Communist China versus an Oklahoma school” highlighted some of these contrasts. We should NOT block all video sharing sites, all sites permitting social networking, all wiki sites, and all blogs in our schools. Yet sadly, that is EXACTLY what many of our schools in Oklahoma specifically do now. This is wrong, and I believe we all have a responsibility to help fix this situation.

I acknowledge this is a complicated problem, and no– I do not ascribe to you as a technology director the powers of God. You are in a vitally important role, and I cannot put myself in your shoes to feel how difficult it must be at times to be caught between angry parents and your school administration. These are not easy issues, and I’m not trying to paint over this with a brush which would oversimplify things that have developed because of complex interactions.

I do want to say THANKS for your service and commitment to our kids as well as educators. Educators are SO often not thanked enough, and the work you do makes a difference for many. Please understand I am NOT attacking you personally. I am trying to uncover and bring to further light a BIG problem which we need to fix together. I don’t have all the answers to this, but I am committed to working with others (like you) to find them.

Thank you for your response, and taking the time to share your views. I am listening and paying attention. Only by working with all our educational constituents can we hope to find workable solutions to issues like these.

How would you respond to JJ’s comments?

photo credit: CarbonNYC

Technorati Tags:
content, filter, filtering, oklahoma, parent, protect, school, technology, director, safe, safety, liability, concern, superintendent

Criticism of School District Content Filtering Policies is not a personal attack on ALL tech directors originally appeared on Moving at the Speed of Creativity on April 23, 2010.

Fiore’s app will be in the store shortly. That was a mistake. However, we do believe we have a moral responsibility to keep porn off the iPhone. Folks who want porn can buy an Android phone.

I need to emphasize the above “quotation” is an ALLEGED quotation from Steve Jobs. TechCruch writer Siegler includes email header/IP information which supports the legitimacy / authenticity of the email, but it remains officially unconfirmed. (I also fixed a typo in the quotation, changing “and” to “an” at the end.)

What IS confirmed today in multiple contexts is that Apple continues to “gatekeep” the approval of applications which are in the official Apple App Store. This is controversial, but overall I think it’s a good idea. Here’s why.

Organizations and individuals who assert a “moral responsibility” today are naturally contentious. We live in a world in which some press for an elimination of all boundaries, and a removal of all limits. In a civilized and moral society, we need boundaries and limits. This is true at a societal level and at an individual level. See my January 2009 post, “Iran, Sovereignty, Colonialism and the Values of the West” for more background on this. When people in the Arab world look at the United States as “the great satan,” they are (at least to a degree) viewing “The West” as villainous and evil because of a perceived LACK of all moral boundaries. Frank Viviano’s article “Saudi Arabia: Kingdom on Edge” for National Geographic in October 2003 highlights this in much greater detail than I’ll do in this post today.

I am glad Apple is doing two things with respect to application censorship, gatekeeping, and parental controls:

1. There are applications which Apple is simply not approving to be in the official App store, because of its apparent moral stance against things like pornography.
2. Apple has provided some parental control / content restriction options for iPhones, iPod Touches and iPads which permit users to have SOME control over applications which can be purchased / downloaded. (All apps in the App Store can still be VIEWED, however, regardless of the parental control settings which are enabled. I’ll explain this in detail below.)

I certainly wouldn’t want the official Apple App Store to become a sewer of pornographic content. From a corporate profit standpoint, I’m sure that scenario would not sit well with stockholders because it wouldn’t be positively received by many consumers. It’s reasonable to speculate there are both moral and financial reasons for Apple to continue gatekeeping apps. That said, I think it’s also great Apple is gatekeeping because of the large-scale experimental comparision shaping up between the Apple App Store and the Google Android Store / Android Market. Google is apparently NOT gatekeeping apps in the same way Apple is. What will be the result? Will Google provide tools and mechanisms to keep potentially objectionable apps hidden from eyes which either do not want to see, or whose parents/guardians/teachers do not want them to see and use, those applications? Time will tell. An important experiment involving digital ethics is underway, and the results are (and will be) visible for everyone to judge independently.

Organizations and corporations, like individuals, SHOULD be permitted to define their own limits and boundaries. This is called FREEDOM. Freedom is a good thing. Freedom has up sides and down sides, but on the whole I think we should support the right of entities to determine and enforce limits / boundaries.

With this philosophic perspective in mind, I’d like to next examine what “parental controls” on the iPhone, iPod Touch, and iPad currently enable users to do or not do in terms of limits. This is a topic I’ve been wanting to write about since Spring Break, when my 12 year old son commented in a podcast I published here that he’d seen some “weird” apps in the Apple App Store. We had a follow-up conversation in which he shared with me what he meant by “weird,” and I think these findings should be of interest to any parent or educator who has children and/or students using iPod Touches or other Apple devices. All of the screenshots I’ll be using below in this post are aggregated in a Flickr Set. These were taken on my iPhone on April 10, 2010, running the iPhone 3.1.2 firmware.

By default, an iPhone / iPod Touch / iPad does NOT have “parental controls” or “restrictions” enabled. This means “anything goes.”

Step one to using parental controls is clicking SETTINGS, GENERAL, RESTRICTIONS, and clicking ON. Restrictions can then be selected by application (for the default Apple-provided apps) and by CONTENT, using available rating systems. The screenshots below show default values for NO restrictions, when restrictions have simply been turned ON but none selected individually.

It is important for parents and educators to realize that although Apple has not (and apparently is not going to) allow pornographic applications into the official App Store, there ARE applications which have sexual themes in the store. Some of these can be found in the GAMES category, as you can see from the following screenshot taken of the “top free games” tab in the App Store on April 10th. (Note the same screen shows the popular “Words with Friends” game – this is one game my wife enjoys playing on her iPhone. Ironic juxtaposition here.)

Sexually-themed apps are also available currently in the “entertainment” category of the Apple App store:

In experimenting with parental controls / content restrictions for the iPhone / iPod Touch, the BIGGEST SURPRISE to me was that even after restrictions are selected, applications OUTSIDE the approved content categories REMAIN VISIBLE on the iPhone / iPod Touch. They simply can’t be purchased / downloaded. The apps are still there, however, INCLUDING app reviews. Some examples are below.

For this experiment, I chose to ALLOW iPhone / iPod Touch applications rated “12+” and below. Apps rated “17+” (adult/mature) were therefore “restricted.”

I chose a similar setting for movies, permitting those rated “PG-13″ and lower. “R” and “NC-17″ movies were therefore restricted:

The screenshot below was taken AFTER parental controls were enabled on an iPhone. Note an app rated “17+” is still VISIBLE:

Because parental controls / content restrictions are enabled for this app’s content rating, however, the buttons to purchase (free) and download these app are greyed out / not available:

Hopefully in a future firmware release, Apple will update its parental controls / content restrictions system so these applications are NOT VISIBLE AT ALL in the store. If an Apple application is restricted / blocked on an iPhone or iPod Touch, that icon is removed from the device entirely and not available. The same should hold true for apps in the store which do NOT meet selected content authorization guidelines.

Since these “non-authorized” applications are still VISIBLE on an iPhone or iPod Touch even when content restrictions have been enabled, it is important to realize the APPLICATION REVIEWS are also visible. The content in these reviews can (at times) certainly fall into the categories, “objectionable” and “disruptive to student learning in the classroom.”

In summary, I think Apple is not only within their legal rights to gatekeep / restrict applications which are approved for the iPhone / iPod Touch / iPad platforms, they are also rightly taking the moral high ground. I am glad Apple provides some parental control / content restriction options for these devices, but as noted above I think there are important issues which still need to be improved / addressed.

The larger issues of open content and accessibility are certainly connected to this conversation, and I am an advocate for both. It will be interesting and instructive to watch how the Google Android Store / Android Market addresses these issues, including parental controls / content restrictions. Ultimately we DO have a responsibility to prepare our children and our students “to be the filter” when it comes to content in the world. That said, it’s also reasonable to have limits and controls over what they see when they browse an application category like, “top free games.”

It’s also important (I contend) to maintain basic levels of content filtering on home Internet networks as well as at school / in the library. See the OpenDNS for Households page for more information and tutorials about one way to configure FREE home network content filtering. I’ve addressed this in the following past posts:

1. The Value of OpenDNS (free) content filtering at home (March 2008)
2. Reflections on home content filtering and OpenDNS after a year of use (January 2009)
3. Setting up a basic content filter for free at granddaddy’s house (May 2009)
4. Successful New Home Router Configuration for Videoconferencing, Dynamic DNS and OpenDNS Content Filtering (June 2009)

Lots of important issues have been raised here. What are your thoughts, and where do you stand in these debates?

Technorati Tags:
apple, content, digital, ethics, google, ipad, iphone, ipod, store, touch, android, censor, censorship, restrict, guidelines, parental, protect

iPhone / iPod Touch Parental Controls, Digital Ethics, Open Access, and Apple as App Gatekeeper originally appeared on Moving at the Speed of Creativity on April 20, 2010.

1. David After Dentist. Views on YouTube as of today: 57,105,747
2. Miracle-Herb Brooks” Pre-Game Speech. Views on YouTube as of today: 2,856,540
3. Joshua Sacco, 5 Year Old at Fenway Park. Views on YouTube as of today: 669,108
4. The Yippity Yo Cooking Show. Views on YouTube as of today: 139,841
5. Scarface School Play. Views on YouTube as of today: 119,764

Kipp Rogers alerted me via Twitter to the video, “A 2.5 Year-Old Has A First Encounter with An iPad.” This was featured on BoingBoing, and now has 798,064 YouTube views. Is this exploitation of your own child for financial gain, or digitally saavy, entrepreneurial parenting in the 21st century? Perhaps it’s just innocent fun? I lean toward the first answer.

If you publish a video which is getting a lot of views, YouTube contacts the channel owner and asks if you want to place advertisements on your video and revenue share the profits. The article “5 Secrets of YouTube’s Success” in the April 2010 issue of Wired Magazine highlights various examples of people who have become global, YouTube superstars and struck it rich in different ways. The race to create the next YouTube viral phenomenon is an element of an ongoing “Internet gold rush” which is unlikely to subside anytime soon. The payoffs can be BIG, easily numbering in the hundreds of thousands of dollars for videos with millions of views.

This past fall, my 9 year old published a 90 second response video to President Obama’s speech to students. Neither Sarah or I anticipated the response this video incited globally. This situation, and recent presentations I’ve shared with my own children at educational conferences, have raised similar questions as those Lisa Belkin discussed in her article about parents, their children, and social media. Seeing Adora Svitak present a couple of weeks ago over Skype to a group of educators in New Hampshire made me wonder about this too. So does my daughter’s online video publications on “The International Cooking Show” project. Where do we draw the line between a healthy, supportive opportunity for young people to share their voice and express their ideas with social media, and a parent pushing the child to become an online superstar to earn money for questionable motives?

Should there be rules about publishing videos of your own children online? How is young David, the boy in the video “David After Dentist” which has been seen (to date) by over 50 million people worldwide, going to feel about this stardom when he’s in high school? When he’s in college? Would it make a difference if the video made him look smart and saavy, instead of showing him plainly hurting from the effects of dental anathesia? One of the commenters on Lisa’s NYT article reflected on this by writing:

[The] worst [scenario] is to be a kid who got famous because people hated you. But is it better to be David or the less photogenic kid whose post-dentist video will be floating around forever as a testament to his lack of popular appeal? Based on child actors, I think it’s probably better to be the less famous kid. But it still probably sucks to find out your parents tried to exploit you but you weren’t likable enough.

Adults are often quick to lament a lack of common sense, ethics, or responsibility when it comes to young people’s uses and mis-uses of social media, but what about parents like David’s Dad? He’s doubtless cashing in on his Flip video of his anathesia-hung over child. What do advocates for digital citizenship say about this?

At the Palm Beach County (Florida) Technology conference a few weeks ago, David Jakes suggested I share a presentation or write an article about my experiences with Sarah publishing on YouTube. There are a lot of important lessons to mull over from that situation. I don’t have all the answers, but I definitely DO think there is “a line” out there which should not be crossed by parents when it comes to publishing children’s voices / videos online. We’ve all probably known mothers who pushed their young daughters into beauty pageants for their OWN egos. In those cases, I’ve wished the mom would think of the needs or desires of her child more than her own desires for parent stardom. Bad parenting choices are all around us, they’re not hard to find. It’s strange to see, in at least some cases, parents financially rewarded by YouTube’s ad revenue sharing program (the “YouTube Partners Program“) instead of facing societal censure. Hopefully we won’t see these trends increase and get worse, but I fear we shall.

The following posts give more background on my experiences with Sarah’s YouTube publishing this past fall, and some of the things we learned:

1. Remember to turn YouTube channel comment moderation ON
2. A hazard of moderating comments on a popular YouTube video
3. Addressing the R Word Proactively and Flagging YouTube Videos
4. Criteria for moderating comments on a viral video
5. YouTube comment moderation is great (and recommended) when videos go viral
6. Over 17,000 views on YouTube in 24 hours
7. Using Blogs and CoverItLive to Discuss President Obama’s Speech
8. President Obama’s Speech to Students: A Great Opportunity for Synchronous, Live Discussions
9. YouTube Honors for Sarah’s video response to President Obama’s speech (<24 hours after posting)

It definitely would be worthwhile to reflect at greater length on these issues of publishing a video of your child on YouTube, especially if it goes viral. What are your thoughts?

H/T to Larry Ferlazzo for sharing this New York Times article via Twitter.

Technorati Tags:
david, ethics, sharing, video, youtube, viral, dentist, parent, responsibility, parenting, revenue, partner, line

Lucrative rewards of viral videos encourage parents to put their children on YouTube originally appeared on Moving at the Speed of Creativity on April 17, 2010.

This was displayed today in my computer’s web browser when I tried to visit the website Flickr, which is included on the website whitelist we distribute to schools in advance of our Celebrate Oklahoma Voices workshop. Several things about this Internet filtering “block” message are worth noting.

First of all, the technology director in the school holding our workshop had specifically whitelisted flickr.com the day before, on Monday. Yet today, on Tuesday, the site was mysteriously blocked again. I guess the district’s Internet content filtering could be considered, “highly aggressive.”

Second of all, the webpage title of this “blocked” message was:

busted

The English Wiktionary definitions for “busted” which apply in this case are:

Caught in the act of doing something one shouldn’t do.

and

Caught and arrested for committing a crime.

The normative message from this content filtering page is: You have committed a grevious error. You are in the wrong. You should be ashamed of yourself.

Perhaps we could go even farther. Is part of the message: Accessing websites not approved by our school district’s Internet provider is a big game, and for your last attempt we give you a score of ZERO?! You failed, you’re busted!

Internet content filtering is not game. It’s not funny, and I resent being shown a message which implies I’m a criminal when I’m only trying to visit a website which provides access to millions of educationally valuable, copyright-friendly images for teachers and students to use.

The third comment I’ll make about this “blocked” page is the message at the bottom. The assumption inherent in this offering of “alternative websites” (Google, Yahoo, CNN and Fox News) is that the only reasons a learner at the school would be using the Internet is to either search for information or read the news. These are CONSUMPTIVE activities. This supposedly “helpful” set of links on the block page (which I’m sure is viewed hundreds if not thousands of times over the course of a school year by students as well as teachers) completely misses the point that the Internet can be used, is being used, and SHOULD be used by learners for serious work CREATING and SHARING content on websites which power creative productivity. A mindset persists in schools and many businesses that “real work” on the computer is done only in Microsoft Office, and “the Internet” is used just to “look stuff up” and read the news. This perspective is sorely out of date.

Draconian content filtering in our schools makes me angry. I don’t get angry often. I am well aware that our hostile network computing environment has necessitated firewalls and layered security approaches to protecting organizational network resources. There are “lots of bad guys” out there exploiting vulnerable computer systems and networks, and it’s important to have IT staff (supported by saavy vendors) who can and do help stand at the virtual gates of the organization and fend off would-be attackers.

The levels of severe, out-of-balance content filtering in our schools, which in many cases make all blogs, all wikis, and virtually all “interactive” websites blocked / banned / prohibited are incompatible with the values of a free society. We need to go beyond simply “unmasking the digital truth.” We need a well-planned and designed, coordinated social action campaign to promote balanced content filtering in our schools. We need this campaign to highlight the vendors and others who, like all too many political figures in our era, fan the flames of fear for their own financial and/or political advantage. Threats to network security are real in our schools, but so are the threats to freedom of information access and freedom of expression.

We need a campaign which can create incentives for service providers who filter the Internet to promote Internet accountability. We need to stop treating content filtering as “THE solution” to objectionable Internet content. Basic levels of filtering are needed and mandated by federal E-Rate law in the United States (for E-Rate recipients) but draconian content filtering is NOT. We need a campaign to celebrate, reward, and highlight companies which support BALANCED approaches to content filtering, not approaches which would make the central committee of the People’s Republic of China proud and happy.

One of the teachers in our workshop today, when asked the question, “What instructions: guidelines do you give students NOW about getting photos to use in a video project?” responded:

Pictures must come from a legal website. No obscene pictures.

When I asked the teacher how he defined “a legal website,” he said it was a website which students were able to access because the district’s content filter allowed them to view it.

Let’s deconstruct this comment, because the assumptions here are a BIG problem. This teacher assumed that EVERY website which was NOT blocked by the content filter was OK. That somehow, the school’s Internet filter was acting as an all-knowing, uber-grandmother figure, granting permission and giving blessing to any site which was NOT blocked / on a blacklist. I regret to suggest this perception is common. I lament this perception, as well as its normality in schools.

Folks, WE are the filter. Our minds are the filter. Legality and ethics are not defined by the whim’s of an Internet service provider, a tech director who decides to block or unblock websites, or for that matter by a company which decides today “certain applications” are cardinal sins to own and use but tomorrow become authorized in “their online store.”

We make ethical decisions and judgements based on values, not based on the whims of organizations or individuals. I tried to make this point in our workshop today and my discussions with this particular teacher, but I don’t think I made much headway. The perceptions that “if the filter doesn’t block it, it’s OK for the kids to use in a video project” as well as the belief that “it’s not my job to make decisions about right and wrong online, since our content filter does that for us” are both erroneous and depressing at multiple levels.

We’ve got so much work to do when it comes to digital literacy and digital citizenship.

photo credit: Caveman 92223

Technorati Tags:
digital, edtech, education, schools, technology, citizenship, ethics, content, filter, filtering

Cognitive dissonance from the school internet filtering message originally appeared on Moving at the Speed of Creativity on April 13, 2010.

…the process of scanning through a large number of blogs, usually daily, searching for and copying content. This process is conducted through automated software. The software and the individuals who run the software are sometimes referred to as blog scrapers. Scraping is copying a blog that is not owned by the individual initiating the scraping process. If the material is copyrighted it is considered copyright infringement, unless there is a license relaxing the copyright. The scraped content is often used on spam blogs or splogs.

I’ve noticed (usually by looking at the trackbacks in my WordPress dashboard) a variety of scrape blogs grabbing content from my site over the past few years. Sometimes these sites include an attribution link, other times they do not. Alan Levine growled about scrape blogs today in his post, “Take My Whole Blog Post, Please? Why?” and after reading it I thought I’d add my voice to his and start a chorus. I’m not suggesting there is a constructive pathway of action for stopping this type of behavior, but am rather just lamenting this type of content replication and promoting greater awareness of the phenomenon. As Open Educational Resources (OER) become more common and popular, it’s entirely possible we’ll see blog scrapers who specialize in OER. (Let’s hope not, but it’s possible.) Blog scrapers are seeking page views for advertisements, and seem to copy posts from well read blogs / blogs highly rated on Google to boost their own page view potential. It’s certainly NOT a bad thing to be an entrepreneur and seek ways to earn money, but the legitimacy and ethics of these methods appear dubious at best.

The screenshot below is one I snapped from Google (with Skitch) last week on April 8th, after I posted about my Facebook account hack. I discovered these scrape blogs when I was searching for other bloggers who might be writing about the same situation. I didn’t find any: Instead, I just found scrape blog examples. The screen snap shows top Google search results for the keywords “cnbc8 facebook phish” (without quotation marks in the query.) There were 348 results on Google as of April 8th:

In that query, you’ll note my post (which is the only “real” post in the first five Google results for that query – everything else was a copy/scrape of my post) my post was listed first.

In this same search today, my original post is listed third, and the top two results are scrape blogs. Total posts matching the search is now up to 1180.

I’m not losing any sleep over this, but it is interesting (and maybe a few other things, like “irritating”) to see how blog scraping is continuing. I don’t have research results to cite that show blog scraping is on the rise, but I strongly suspect it is along with legitimate blogging more generally. Authors of the post “Defending Your Site From Scrapers” suggest bloggers and website owners should use a “cloaking” method to somehow send garbage content to “blog thieves.” I have no idea how such a method would discern how to send “correct” content to legitimate readers and garbage to the scrapers. It also seems that strategy would contravene the open standards which power blogging and RSS/feed aggregation in the first place.

“Web scraping” is not just a term used to describe wholesale copying and re-posting of blog content to generate ad revenue and page views. It’s also used to describe data harvesting activities. The following description for a “Web Scraping project” was posted on smartfreelancers.com on April 7th:

I need an experienced operator to conduct a quick web scraping project. The site to be scraped is: www.isc.co.uk I need the names of all the schools on the site along with the Headmaster name, the full address, telephone and email address… (Budget: $30-250, Jobs: Web Scraping)

I don’t really have a problem with that type of web scraping / data mining, but like Alan I think wholesale copying of blog content without the addition of ANY commentary or original ideas seems dishonest and wrong. There’s a difference between plagiarism and the legitimate use of quotations with citations. Alan wrote:

I am still left trying to figure out the purpose of a web site that just lifts full content from others and republishes it (in the worst case, it is a splog, but this site was not that bad). The site is affiliated with a town in Colorado.

But c’mon- if you are going to have a blog powered site, its one thing to write stories based on what other people blog, maybe pull quotes, but to lift an entire blog post and republish it is either lazy or worse.

Like Alan I publish under a Creative Commons license, so when scrape bloggers include an attribution link they may POSSIBLY be complying with my use license and attribution terms. Still, this type of content re-use is NOT what Creative Commons sharing is all about or, in my view, seeks to empower. I suppose this is a mildly dark (or at least irritating) side of open content licensing.

In the case of blog scrapers, as well as email and blog comment spammers, my main thought is: How sad these folks aren’t doing something more CONSTRUCTIVE and CREATIVE with their technology and communication skills?! The coders who are doing these kinds of sites can be anywhere in the world, so who is to say what their vocational options might be at this point? It would be great if someone could point the scrape bloggers of the world (and the spammers) to lucrative, legal, and constructive ways to use their talents. Perhaps this would make a good case study / discussion topic for educational courses focusing on blogs and blogging.

The Simple Trackback Validation Plugin for WordPress is one I use to cut down on trackback spam. I don’t think there’s a plugin which can stop scrape blogs, unfortunately. If there was a Creative Commons license which specifically forbade blog scraping, I’d be very interested in learning about it and consider using it here. Brian Lamb, commenting on Alan’s post, points out the CC Attribution license permits authors to specify attribution terms. I include attribution terms on my blog now, and am not sure if that could legally prohibit/disallow scrape blogs or not.

Growl, growl.

photo credit: breakdecks

Technorati Tags:
ad, copy, scrape, blog, scraping, splog, sploging, splogs, theft, steal, advertising

Scrape blogs: A mildly dark (and certainly irritating) side of open content licensing originally appeared on Moving at the Speed of Creativity on April 12, 2010.

In case Flickr is blocked in your location, I’ll transcribe these. The first is sponsored by the Family Violence Prevention Fund and reads:

Teach your son to respect women. He’s watching. He’s waiting. He’ll listen.

The photo on the billboard is of a young boy, holding a basketball and wearing a basketball jersey which reads, “Awaiting Instructions.”

Unfortunately I know more than a few people whose fathers apparently did not share this message when they were young. The world is a tangibly worse place because those men chose to perpetuate a sexist worldview for their children to reflect and continue. Of course we all have choices about what we’ll believe and think, but many times the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.

The second billboard advertisement is a direct message from George Wickliffe, Chief of the United Keetoowah Band of Cherokee Indians:

Elder abuse is NOT the Keetoowah Cherokee way.

This reminds me of Ed Young’s picture book, “I, Doko: The Tale of a Basket,” which I bought a couple of years ago in Shanghai, China.

Kudos to these organizations for prominently posting these public service announcements for the families and individuals in the Tahlequah community. It’s too bad we need advertisements like these, but we DO, and I think these messages are a great way to use highway billboard real estate.

Technorati Tags:
learn, oklahoma, tahlequah, ad, advertisement, sign, abuse, elder, cherokee, keetoowah, chief, respect, sexism, men, women, son, teach, child, community

Teach your son to respect women originally appeared on Moving at the Speed of Creativity on April 12, 2010.

I’ve been wrestling with a question for months now, and perhaps you can shed some light on the answer for me. Why did Apple remove the ACOT (Apple Classrooms of Tomorrow) research documents from its main website, if those “research results” were intended to help inform educational decision makers about the potential value of educational technologies through the dissemination of valid, reliable research results?

Apple Classrooms of Tomorrow (ACOT) research was conducted in the 1980s and 1990s, and was at the time the longest longitudinal study of classroom technology integration conducted by anyone. The research was funded by Apple, and Apple certainly stood to gain financially from research findings which pointed to the positive impact which appropriately utilized technologies could have on teaching and learning inside as well as outside the classroom. ACOT2 (Apple Classrooms of Tomorrow – Today) is a “next generation” research effort by Apple, which ostensibly seeks to carry on the successful research model and results of the original ACOT program which spanned ten years, from 1985 through 1995.

Here is what mystifies me: If ACOT2 is legitimate research which should be respected on a par with academic research published in journals not affiliated with commercial vendors, why are there not ANY linked references back to the original ACOT research on the ACOT2 website? Why does it appear Apple has removed/deleted all the original ACOT research reports from its corporate website? This seems very strange, and even fishy.

The published report, “Changing the Conversation About Teaching, Technology, & Learning ~ A Report on 10 Years of ACOT Research” was published at some point on http://images.apple.com/education/k12/leadership/acot/pdf/10yr.pdf and www.apple.com/education/k12/leadership/acot/pdf/10yr.pdf. Those links are now broken. The Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine grabbed copies of the first PDF URL in 2006 and 2007, and the second in 2003 and 2005. Those dates do not necessarily reflect the only years during which this document was available online at those addresses, however. A Google search for the document title reveals it is still available as part of Marco Baeza’s old student portfolio for his Internet Masters of Educational Technology degree from Sacramento State. It appears Baeza’s archived copy was not authorized or sanctioned by Apple. I haven’t spent hours looking for it, but other than Baeza’s link and the Wayback Machine’s copies, I can’t locate this document online anywhere else. This seems REALLY strange.

A Google Scholar search for “Apple Classrooms of Tomorrow” yields over 20,000 results today. This reflects the authority and legitimacy with which ACOT research has been regarded by many. One of these websites includes archived copies of the periodic ACOT published research results. This is an example of ACOT Report #8. (PDF) Again I am mystified why Apple would remove these “research documents” from their own website.

The current Apple “Resource” page for Teachers & Professors does not include ANY references to original ACOT research, or links to any ACOT research materials. There IS a link to the “ACOT2 White Paper,” but again no link to original ACOT research publications or findings.

I think many of the ideas expressed in the ACOT2 documents are superb and needed. We absolutely need to rethink formal education, classrooms, and learning environments. It troubles me, however, that Apple has apparently jettisoned its “past research” (ACOT 1) in the publication of this new and updated, ACOT 2 framework. Why would legitimate academic or scientific researchers do this? They wouldn’t, which leads me to question the legitimacy and validity of both the original ACOT research as well as the ACOT2 research initiative.

The other thing which troubles me deeply about Apple’s ACOT2 initiative is its “Challenge Based Learning” framework. Project-based learning and problem-based learning are pedagogical approaches which have a relatively long history, particularly when compared with the short history of educational technology. EduTopia’s website portal for “Project Based Learning” includes a rich assortment of videos and other resources which clearly establish the academic history of PBL. In its ACOT2 initiative, rather than state something like, “Educational experts and researchers at Apple endorse and support project-based approaches to learning,” the Apple Challenge-Based Learning website states:

To address the need to create new ways of engaging students to achieve, Apple worked with educators across the country to develop the concept of Challenge Based Learning. Challenge Based Learning applies what is known about the emerging learning styles of high school students and leverages the powerful new technologies that provide new opportunities to learn to provide an authentic learning process that challenges students to make a difference. Challenge Based Learning is an engaging multidisciplinary approach to teaching and learning that encourages students to leverage the technology they use in their daily lives to solve real-world problems. Challenge Based Learning is collaborative and hands-on, asking students to work with other students, their teachers, and experts in their communities and around the world to develop deeper knowledge of the subjects students are studying, accept and solve challenges, take action, share their experience, and enter into a global discussion about important issues.

Just as many of the ideas included in ACOT2 are great and ones with which I agree personally and professionally, many of the ideas embodied in “Challenge Based Learning” are on target. I think its disingenuous and unfortunate, however, for Apple to “lay claim” to the core concepts and principles of project-based learning as it has been developed for decades by numerous educators as well as researchers.

Perhaps it’s silly of me to worry about questions like these, but integrity is very important and I find it lacking in both of these situations regarding Apple. Why did Apple take down all its original ACOT research from its website, and by a lack of hyperlinks dis-associate itself with the body of recognized educational technology research which was ACOT? Furthermore, why is Apple attempting to rename “project based learning” as “challenge based learning” and give itself corporate credit for coming up with this pedagogical approach, when it is patently obvious “they” are not the originators of the concept and method?

My only conclusion is that for Apple today in 2010, it’s all about selling stuff– Whether you’re working for Apple Education or working in an Apple Store. It’s not about a learning revolution. It’s not about fundamentally changing education, it’s about trying to simply shift educational decisionmaker attention to Apple products so that quarterly profits can go up yet again.

I can’t fault Apple for being a corporation. They ARE a corporation. I always thought Apple stood for values which were far bigger and more important than “just” profits, however. I’ve even heard Apple leaders say as much in the past.

I guess when you get really big, some basic things can change.

I miss the old Apple, and the friends I thought I had who used to work for that old company.

Technorati Tags:
apple, change, edtech, leadership, learning, research, school, technology, acot, acot2, valid, reliable, study, report, scholar

Questionable Apple Behavior Regarding Original ACOT Research and Challenge Based Learning originally appeared on Moving at the Speed of Creativity on March 19, 2010.

The word hackintosh (or Hackint0sh) is:

…a portmanteau of the word “hack” and the name of Apple’s main brand of computers, Macintosh.

A search on the English WikiPedia for “hackintosh” redirects to the article, “OSx86,” defined as:

… a collaborative “hacking” project to run the Mac OS X computer operating system on non-Apple personal computers with x86 architecture and x86-64 compatible processors. The effort started soon after the June 2005 Worldwide Developers Conference announcement that Apple would be transitioning their personal computers from PowerPC to Intel microprocessors.

Interest in creating hackintosh computers has ostensibly risen thanks to the proliferation of inexpensive netbook computers. If a person purchases a netbook computer with hardware supporting required hackintosh installation software, it is possible to now have a functioning laptop computer running the Macintosh OS X operating system on hardware costing just $200 – $300 U.S. As I’ll discuss in greater detail in this post, it’s important to note while this is TECHNICALLY possible, it is currently not LEGAL.

photo credit: charliekwalker

As an obliquely related aside, I found it interesting reading the Wiktionary definition of “portmanteau” one etymology of the word is traced back to 1872, when it was invented by Lewis Carrol in “Through The Looking Glass” to describe the words he coined in Jabberwocky:

Well, “slithy” means “lithe and slimy.” “Lithe” is the same as “active”. You see it’s like a portmanteau–there are two meanings packed up into one word.

This reference to the Jabberwock has more significance to me after recently seeing Tim Burton’s cinematic rendition of “Alice in Wonderland” and reading Kevin Hodgson’s post, “Losing the Jabberwock.”

Investigating the world of “hackintoshes” may naturally invite comparisons to Alice and rabbit holes. The OSx86 Project homepage (www.osx86project.org) provides two different destination options, referencing Morpheus’ choices for Neo in “The Matrix:”

1. Take the blue pill and return to the classic OSx86 Project wiki. Wake in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe.
2. Take the red pill and discover our new news and forum portal, InsanelyMac. Stay in Wonderland and see how deep the rabbit-hole goes.

If you’d like to peer a bit down the rabbit hole of “hackintoshes,” you’ve come to the right place– at least for the next couple of days as I continue to guest-blog here.

photo credit: jpockele

The fact that it’s been possible and remains possible to create a “hackintosh” computer is controversial because Apple has made the process illegal. According to the “Legal issues and Apple objections” section of the OSx86 article in the English WikiPedia:

Apple does not authorize the use of the Mac OS on any x86 PC other than the ones it has developed itself. The company used a Trusted Platform Module, or TPM, to tie Mac OS to the systems it distributed to developers after announcing its switch to Intel’s chips.

The Mac OS X EULA forbids installations of Mac OS X on “non Apple-labeled computers”. On July 3, 2008, Apple filed a lawsuit against Psystar Corporation for violating this restriction, among other claims. Apple claimed Psystar “violated the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) by dodging copy-protection technologies Apple uses to protect Mac OS X. “Apple employs technological protection measures that effectively control access to Apple’s copyrighted works [...] Defendant has illegally circumvented Apple’s technological copyright-protection measures.” Specifically, Apple charged Psystar with acquiring or creating code that “avoids, bypasses, removes, descrambles, decrypts, deactivates or impairs a technological protection measure without Apple’s authority for the purpose of gaining unauthorized access to Apple’s copyrighted works.” This brief revealed that Apple considers the methods that it uses to prevent Mac OS X from being installed on non-Apple hardware to be protected by the DMCA.

In yesterday’s post, “Ripping Personally Owned DVDs for iPhone or iPod Viewing: Legal and Technical Perspectives,” I reflected on the irony that “legality” when it comes to creating backups or compressed versions of legally purchased DVD movies continues to be defined by geography, rather than the inherent ethics of the act. As far as I know, it is not “legal” to create a hackintosh in any country or territory on our planet. Through their operating system EULA, Apple has decreed it taboo worldwide.

One sign of the sensitivity which surrounds the topic of “hackintoshes” was visible over a year ago in January 2009, when Brian Chen (a writer for Wired’s Gadget Lab blog) had his video taken down on the advice of Wired’s legal team after they were confronted about it by Apple representatives. In his article for CNET, “Wired takes down Hackintosh video,” Tom Krazit noted:

Apple has appeared to gently tolerate the “Hackintosh” community that sprung up after the company decided to adopt Intel’s x86 processors for the Mac, so long as the project didn’t advance much beyond science fair mode. But it has shown a clear interest in protecting its licensing agreements for Mac OS X this year, through its legal battle against Psystar, a clone maker selling generic desktop PCs with Mac OS X preinstalled.
In its article, Wired admitted that the practice is illegal, requiring the installation of hacked software, linking to well-known torrent site The Pirate Bay to provide a source for the software. It also offered the following disclaimer: “Disclaimer: The following process potentially violates Apple’s End User License Agreement for Mac OS X. Please ensure you own a copy of Mac OS X Leopard, if you wish to follow the procedure.”

Apple does continue to sell 5-user “family packs” of its latest Mac OS X operating system, but officially a hackintosh installation cannot be made legal through the purchase of a software license. Apple’s EULA makes no exceptions for non-Apple hardware running OS X.

If, despite the legal realities, you’re still interested in creating your own hackintosh, a number of websites are available with helpful information. Hackintosh.com offers:

…links to everything you need to build your own Hackintosh and get Mac OS X 10.5 “Leopard” or Mac OS X 10.6 “Snow Leopard” running on an unsupported computer — instructions, step-by-step “how to” guides, and tutorials — as well as installation videos, lists of compatible computers and parts, and communities for support.

Your laptop hardware manufacturer may even provide user forums with helpful tips. The Dell Mini 9 and 10 netbooks support Hackintosh software, and the Dell-sponsored mydellmini.com site includes forum groups specific to hackintoshing, like its Mac OS X forum. Total posts in that forum to date (49,051) far outnumber the total number of posts in all the other forums on the entire site combined. It is fascinating to see how some college students are supplementing their income with periodic hackintosh code development.

The hackintosh rabbit hole is deep indeed.

Technorati Tags:
apple, howto, install, tutorial, hackintosh, netbook, hack, osx, eula, legal, illegal, mac

What is a hackintosh? originally appeared on Moving at the Speed of Creativity on March 15, 2010.

1. Ban on Public Statements [by developers]
2. App Store Only [for distribution]
3. Ban on Reverse Engineering
4. No Tinkering with Any Apple Products
5. Kill Your App Any Time [Apple can]
6. We Never Owe You More than Fifty Bucks [that's Apple of course]

From an ethics standpoint, I think it is both troubling and remarkable that the use of THE SAME application can be a EULA violation one day, and an enthusiastically supported iTunes App Store download the next. Exhibit A in this category would be the UStream Broadcaster iPhone App. At NECC 2009 in Washington DC, the ISTEConnects live blogging / webcasting crew had to purchase a special Nokia phone to provide mobile Ustream coverage of conference interviews and sessions. They couldn’t use the Ustream iPhone broadcaster app at that time, because it was “illegal” and required a jailbreak. Wouldn’t do to model EULA violations for ISTE educator attendees, would it? This year for ISTE 2010 in Denver, that same application will be available and in use by many I’m sure, since it’s been approved in the iTunes App store since December 2009.

When it comes to ethics, generally “right” and “wrong” are not defined by the daily decree of a corporation. That officially IS the case when it comes to apps on the iPhone and iPod Touch, however.

I hope someday, King Steve will smile down on us and approve multi-tasking iPhone apps, so users of ScreenSplitr can finally come out of the shadows and walk in the bright sunlight. Until then, it’s probably best to stick to the dark alleys.

photo credit: edbrambley

Hat tip to Digg and Wired for this news item.

Technorati Tags:
apple, iphone, developer, agreement, secret, ustream, broadcaster, iste, isteconnects, iste2010, necc2009, necc

Secret iPhone Agreement (now public) and Apple User Ethics originally appeared on Moving at the Speed of Creativity on March 12, 2010.

1. One in three (34%) texting teens ages 16-17 say they have texted while driving. That translates into 26% of all American teens ages 16-17.
2. 48% of all teens ages 12-17 say they have been in a car when the driver was texting.
3. 40% say they have been in a car when the driver used a cell phone in a way that put themselves or others in danger.

These statistics should get our attention, but in many cases they don’t. Different organizations are attempting to leverage the power of online video to stop this dangerous behavior. Public service announcements (PSAs) which show (in some cases) graphic depictions of violence are controversial and raise questions about the propriety of using shocking images to motivate people to change their unsafe behaviors.

photo credit: indyplanets

In August of 2009, MSNBC published the article, “Is PSA about texting while driving too graphic?” about a video originating out of Gwent, Wales. Some versions of the video have been pulled from YouTube for terms violations. This version, “PSA Texting while Driving U.K. Ad [HD]” is still available. WARNING: This video includes a graphic depiction of a multi-car accident in which several actors are killed.

The state of Utah has launched its “Zero Fatalities” campaign which includes the following fifteen minute video, also aimed at changing teen and other adult drivers’ behavior with respect to texting while driving.

Oklahoma librarian Whitney Allen created the Ning project website, “Don’t Text and Drive” to focus student attention on the issue of texting and driving. Students from Indiana, Washington, Michigan, and Oklahoma are currently participating, and more are invited to join.

In her K12Online09 presentation, “Digiteens: Digital Citizenship by Digital Teenagers,” Georgia teacher and noted edublogger Vicki Davis (CoolCat Teacher) showcased several PSA videos created by her students, including one persuading others not to text and drive.

What do you think of PSAs like the Gwent, Wales, video which are graphic and disturbing? MADD (Mother’s Against Drunk Driving) received criticism in the 1980s and 1990s, as I recall, for using graphic images at times to bring attention to the problems associated with mixing alcohol and driving. When you see videos or images like these, it is hard NOT to pay attention. Where do we draw the line when it comes to attention-getting PSAs, however? How is YouTube drawing that line? The stakes are high, so perhaps the line should be at least a bit beyond the range where we are “comfortable” watching a video. We SHOULD be disturbed by the violence and destruction which results from both drinking and driving and texting while driving, and be motivated to change our behavior if we have done these things in the past.

Technorati Tags:
video, youtube, text, texting, driving, violence, psa, gwent, wales, controversy, project

PSAs to stop texting and driving originally appeared on Moving at the Speed of Creativity on March 9, 2010.