Professional site of Sylvia Libow Martinez
Check out the results of the 2013 ‘Have your Say’ survey, the UK’s largest ever survey of young people’s attitudes toward online rights and responsibilities. Over 24,000 young people age 7-19 from across the UK responded to the survey, and a further 90 young people explored these findings in focus groups.
Two infographics below with primary and secondary results – these are large files, so why not make a poster! And ask your students what their top ten are to compare.
Sylvia
Here is the archive of the Connected Learning webinar I participated in recently.
Social Media and Peer Learning: From Mediated Pedagogy to Peeragogy
Discover how giving students more responsibility in shaping their own curriculum can lead to more active participation.
This was a really interesting experience. The panel, moderator, and main speaker Howard Rheingold all convened in a Google Hangout. The Google Hangout is very good for groups and it was easy to have a very natural conversation. There was also a livestream and a moderated chat so that questions were coming in from the virtual audience.
You can watch the video, and read the PDF capture of the online chat here.
Even though Howard Rheingold opened the session talking about college-age leaners, I connected with many of his thoughts about how to create open-ended classrooms where the students co-create the learning. In my experience in K-12, it’s very similar as you figure out how to be a learner and/or a teacher in these kinds of situations.
I’ll write more later to expand on some of the points made in this webinar, but for now, I hope you enjoy watching the recorded video!
Sylvia
Social Media and Peer Learning: From Mediated Pedagogy to Peeragogy
Discover how giving students more responsibility in shaping their own curriculum can lead to more active participation.
I’m going to be on the panel for this webinar from Connected Learning, moderated by Howard Rheingold and Mimi Ito. I hope you can join us for a lively conversation!
When: Tuesday, April 10, 9AM Pacific (find the time in your time zone)
Howard Rheingold is the author of Tools for Thought, The Virtual Community, Smart Mobs, Net Smart and teaches at Stanford University, Communication Department. Mimi Ito is the author of Hanging Out, Messing Around, and Geeking Out and a cultural anthropologist of technology use, focusing on children and youth’s changing relationships to media and communications.
UPDATE: Webinar archive here…
I’m excited! See you there –
Sylvia
New Pew Report: Teens, kindness and cruelty on social network sites
Social media use has become so pervasive in the lives of American teens that having a presence on a social network site is almost synonymous with being online. Fully 95% of all teens ages 12-17 are now online and 80% of those online teens are users of social media sites. Many log on daily to their social network pages and these have become spaces where much of the social activity of teen life is echoed and amplified—in both good and bad ways.
Part 1 » Teens and social networks
Part 3 » Privacy and safety issues
Part 4 » The role of parents in digital safekeeping and advice-giving
Part 5 » Parents and online social spaces: Tech tool ownership and attitudes towards social media
The good news – “The majority of social media-using teens say their peers are mostly kind to one another on social network sites. Overall, 69% of social media-using teens think that peers are mostly kind to each other on social network sites.”
This a great statistic to use for “positive norming” when talking to students about online behavior. Positive norming is showing that what most people do is positive and healthy, rather than focusing on the alarming behavior of the small minority. See this blog post (Cybersafety – do fear and exaggeration increase risk?) for a great slideshow from Larry Magid on how to present to parents and students about positive online behavior rather than rely on fear tactics (which don’t work, by the way!)
Don’t let the statistics get skewed – you may also see that 88% of social media-using teens have witnessed other people be mean or cruel on social network sites. But before getting alarmed, realize that lots of people have seen something bad happen, it doesn’t mean it’s happening all the time. If someone asked you, “have you ever seen someone being mean to someone else in public?” – probably 100% of us would say yes. It does not mean that it is the norm. And in fact, only 12% of the 88% who saw meanness, saw it “frequently.”
I think this is another study showing that parents and kids are both doing pretty well navigating the brave new world of social networks and online life. Schools need to build on this positive trend!
Sylvia
via press release:
A new research report was issued today that summarizes the results of an extended look at school principals’ use of social networking. The underlying research for the report, “School Principals and Social Networking in Education: Practices, Policies, and Realities in 2010,” was conducted by edWeb.net, IESD, Inc., MMS Education, and MCH Strategic Data.
Since the creation of MySpace and LinkedIn in 2003 and Facebook in 2004, online social networking has quickly become a pervasive means for people to connect all over the world. Yet schools are one of the last holdouts, where many of the most popular social networking sites are often banned for students, and often for teachers, librarians, and administrators, out of a concern about safety, privacy, confidentiality, and lack of knowledge about how best to ensure appropriate use.
At the same time, education reform initiatives from all corners—Federal and state programs, education research, and policy initiatives—are advocating the use of innovative and collaborative technology to drive improvements in teaching quality and student achievement.
The goal of this research study was to take a close look at the attitudes of school principals about social networking for their own personal use, with their colleagues, and within their school communities. Principals can play an important role in encouraging and training their teachers and staff to adopt new technologies, and in setting policies for the use of technology and the Internet in schools.
The research was conducted in two phases: an online survey sent to a cross section of educators across the country in the fall of 2009, followed by an in-depth EDRoom online discussion with 12 principals who are currently using social networking in their professional lives.
Among the key findings:
The PDF is being made available for free. Download School Principals and Social Networking in Education: Practices, Policies, and Realities in 2010 (PDF)
“Please do the following: sit down with your child (and they are just children still) and tell them that they are not allowed to be a member of any social networking site. Today!
Let them know that you will at some point every week be checking their text messages online! You have the ability to do this through your cell phone provider.
Let them know that you will be installing Parental Control Software so you can tell every place they have visited online, and everything they have instant messaged or written to a friend. Don’t install it behind their back, but install it!
Over 90% of all homework does not require the internet, or even a computer. Do not allow them to have a computer in their room, there is no need”
From an e-mail sent home from a New Jersey middle school principal attempting to curb cyberbullying at his school (source)
Changes in technology mirror changes in society and culture, and can impact schools in a number of ways. Some schools hide their heads in the sand. Some take extreme stands like the principal quoted above. Some attempt to address the issues more evenhandedly, even though the law is not clear, nor is the “right” thing to do always obvious.
Schools try to create policies to address issues of cybersafety, security, fair use, and other new issues brought up as technology changes. But these are not actually policy issues, any more than cyberbullying is a technology issue.
People have difficulty making a choice when presented with too many options. And schools are collections of people, and to make it more complicated, people who do not have ultimate authority since they have to answer to parents, the community, school boards, district, city, state, and national oversight.
I just read a study that said that when people do make a choice from among equal options, afterwards they realign their thinking to elevate whatever choice they made to be the best one. We’ve all seen this, once a school policy gets created, it’s hard to change people’s minds. It’s not just that it’s a lot of work to re-do policy, it’s also that once you do the work, your mind creates the illusion that the work and choices you’ve made are the best and most valuable.
As schools face cyberbullying, sexting, fair use, online security, etc. they see a confusing array of policy, tradition, legal, moral and ethical concerns. When confused, people retreat from the threat. Then once that choice to retreat is made, even if they know it’s not optimal, they remain stubbornly wed to that choice.
Julie Evans of Student Speak-Up shared this insight last year after her focus groups with students said that teachers who got training about the Internet started using it less. Confusion creates support for limitations, and those limitations get set in stone. It’s human nature.
To me, this makes the task to involve schools in making informed choices regarding technology policy even more urgent.
The problem with this principal’s stand is not that he’s wrong. In fact, he’s probably right. If he had a magic wand and could actually make parents stop their children from texting and accessing the Internet, and the children actually stopped, and we rolled the clock back to 1970, we could just go back to the good old days of kids harassing each other in person.
The problem with this principal’s plan is that it won’t work. We simply can’t put this genie back in the bottle. We HAVE to address the issue of digital citizenship in the real climate that children actually live in.
This is a floodgate well and truly open, whether or not you declare it closed.
In the last 10 seconds, 9 iPhones were sold, 90 people joined Facebook, 100 blog posts were created, 6,000 people joined a “social game,” 7,000 tweets were tweeted, 125,000 videos were watched on YouTube, and 2,00,000 SMS text messages were sent worldwide. This is according to a cute little Flash app by Gary Hayes, a social media producer and speaker from Australia. Be sure to click on the social media, mobile, and games tabs to see all the numbers. It’s astounding.
It’s a hyper-charged world out there, gaining momentum every second. And every second, schools are closing the doors to this world to students. Whether this is out of fear, confusion, or a belief that this is just a social fad, it’s lost time for schools.
The world is changing, and insisting it’s not won’t do any good. Schools must grapple with the questions and the implications even though the challenges grow and the rapid changes in technology constantly call every decision into question. Tackling these questions, even if mistakes are made along the way, is better than irrelevance.
Sylvia