Blogg-Ed Indetermination

The use of social networking by organizations to promote their goals is rapidly expanding. What was once thought of as an service for individual use is quickly being embraced as an avenue for schools to communicate with many constituent groups and individuals. The field is changing so rapidly that it is difficult to promulgate guidelines let alone policies. Nonetheless, it is important to avoid serious missteps in this new medium.

Here then are some suggestions for using some of the most well-known social networking and web 2.0 technologies: Facebook, Linked-In, Twitter, YouTube, and iTunes.

• Each technology should be used to its best advantage based on its users, message type, and consistency with overall school messaging protocols and strategy.
  • Fit the message to the medium. Twitter may not be the best choice to announce a tuition increase, for example, but its a great place to update sports scores.
  • Linked-In may be a better place to look for professional mentors or adveretise a job opening  for students than Facebook, whereas Facebook is terrific for connecting with alumni.
  • YouTube is the place for video. Link to it when you need to share video content, using your own school-branded channel. If the video needs to be private, use an internal network. (If you are a Google education or enterprise customers put it on your Google video site.)
• Mutli-channel communications are powerful and should be used with forethought.
  • Use the small to drive to the large; Twitter or Facebook status updates to YouTube, iTunes, or new blog entries.
    
  • Keep the daily updates down to one or two per day to start with. Anything more than that can be seen as spam by users. As your channels become more diversified, you can increase the total number of updates coming from the organization overall, while keeping the per channel communication number low.
  • Strategically link applications to reduce staff time. For example, Twitter can update Facebook status.
• Official channels of communication should be marked as such.
  • If you have a Facebook fan page or group, use your logo and something like “An official Facebook page of…”
• Determine which channels will be one-way, and which will be two-way.
  • Institutional tweets should be for announcements, not conversations; Facebook groups suggest camaraderie and message exchange whereas, Facebook fan sites can be controlled like a regular Web site; an official YouTube channel should be moderated like any other official channel of the school, with publishing guidelines understood and enforced.
  • Channels need regular feeding and attention.
• Twitter, Facebook, Linked-in and similar channels thrive on daily updates, whereas iTunes and YouTube feature episodic publishing schedules based on when new multimedia content becomes available.
  • If you are concerned about mentions of your organization through non-official channels, subscribe to any one of a number of clipping services which monitor social networks and news organizations.
  • Faculty, staff, and students should be encouraged to create content for and subscribe to these new media gain familiarity and comfort with them, distribute the burden of content creation, and enrich the experience for all users.

My thinking is far from being fully formed on this topic, and I could really use the input of others. Please comment.

Many moons ago (1962 to be exact), Helen Gurley Brown, the then editor of Cosmopolitan Magazine, published Sex and the Single Girl, which went on to be a best-seller and eventually made into a movie. In many ways it was to the sixties what Sex and the City was to the 2000’s, a manifesto about the sexual freedom of women.

Almost fifty years after the publication of Sex and the Single Girl and just a few years after the airing of the last episodes’ of HBO’s Sex and the City, we now have young women who have very different attitudes about sexuality than perhaps even Brown or Carrie and her posse might imagine; one in which sexually charged text messages (aka “sexting”), including nude photos, is becoming commonplace amongst teens.

Or at least this is the thesis in a wonderful article by Slate columnist Dalia Lithwick, which also appears in this week’s Newsweek magazine. Lithwick describes the conundrum facing parents, school officials, and law enforcement when teens send, receive, and sometimes distribute nude photos of one another. None of us are equipped to deal with this using conventional rules, regulations, or law. And as for the students, as Lithwik says, “We seem to forget that kids can be as tech-savvy as Bill Gates but as gullible as Bambi.”

Right on, Dalia! It would be far too easy to overreact, as some have done, by charging these children with child pornography. (Ironic, no?) As for kicking these kids out of school, they need to be in school where they have a support system to learn how to deal with dumb mistakes.

There are dumb criminals who deserve to be punished, and then there are dumb acts that deserve consequences. As adults, it is incumbent upon us to be able to distinguish between the two and act with justice and compassion in each case.  We know that always holding children to adult standards of conduct is not developmentally defensible. Adults have every right to be concerned and offended by sexting by their children. How we respond more about ourselves and our maturity as it does about our children’s.

In a previous post, I reviewed Generation Text: Raising Well-Adjusted Kinds in an Age of Instant Everything by Michael Osit, and promised to follow-up with a review of a  new text from ISTE, Raising a Digital Child: A Digital Citizenship Handbook for Parents, by Mike Ribble.

Judging by the title, one might think that these books might be redundant. But they are not, for reasons that I will describe below. Both deserve a place on the educational technologist’s bookshelf, but for different reasons.

Ribble’s book is based on his previous volume from ISTE, Digital Citizenship in Schools. It takes the themes he developed there and extends them to the family.

Ribble’s central tenet is that we need to teach students how to be digital citizens, and that such citizenship is comprised of nine elements. These nine elements, in turn, may be broken into three categories.

HOME AND COMMUNITY

• Digital Access: full electronic participation in society.
• Digital Commerce: the buying and selling of goods online.
• Digital Communication: the electronic exchange of information.

HOME AND SCHOOL

• Digital Literacy: the capability to use digital technology and knowing when and how ot use it.
• Digital Etiquette: the standards of conduct expected by other technology users.
• Digital Law: the legal wrights and restrictions governing technology use.

HOME

• Digital Rights and Responsibilities: the privileges and freedoms extended to all digital technology users, and the behavioral expectations that come with them.
• Digital Health and Wellness: the elements of physical andd psychological well-being related to digital technology use.
• Digital Security: the precautions that all technology users must take to guarantee their personal safety and the security of the network.

What I like about Ribble’s approach is that it is “not simply a list of rules… but ideas and guidelines for thinking about technology.” This is consistent with my school’s alternative approach to “acceptable use” policies for students, which eschews a long list of “thou shalt nots” (and the regular need to amend the list as technology changes) and instead focuses on “honorable use.” Learning how to think about technology is also consistent with the new concept of “digital wisdom” espoused by Mark Prensky.

In the not-so-distant past, parents could rely upon their own experience as children and teens, and the guidance of their adult mentors, to help them navigate the challenges of childhood and adolescence. But parents today often lack experience in social networking, collaborative web technologies, text messaging, blogs, wikis, and other elements of the technology landscape so familiar to their children. Without context and the practical experience that comes from the mistakes, parents have little experience to inform their intuition and therefore be able to act as competent, wise coaches for their children. Lacking such experience, parents may be clueless about what their children are doing, think that everything on the Internet is harmful or dangerous, or abdicate all responsibility for digital education to the schools. There are obvious shortcomings to each of these approaches.

The only approach that has really makes any sense is to engage your child in conversation and practice about technology, learning as much as you can about the technology yourself by participating in it, and talking with other adults (parents and teachers) about technology.

Ribble describes a four stage process for parents to address digital citizenship:

1. Awareness
2. Guided Practice
3. Modeling and Demonstration
4. Feedback and Analysis

My experience is that most approaches to parent education about the technology use of children stop at stage 1, Awareness. This may be followed by (2) hand wringing, (3) installation of blocking software and/or keystroke capture software, and (4) lectures about the perils of the internet. Ribble’s model makes much more sense.

I am particularly fond of the idea of parents practicing with their children, and then modeling for their children, the responsible use of technology. I wish Ribble’s chapter on this model went into more detail about this process.

And this leads me to my major caveat about this book. Raising Digital Children will work best, I think, when used as a textbook in a parent education class led by an experienced educator. There are many open-ended questions that beg for an opportunity for parents to discuss among themselves before bringing these questions to their children. Similarly, while I believe it is instructive for parents to learn something about technology from their children, I also believe there is safety and security to be had when a group of parents learn how to create a Facebook account together, from another adult who knows about things like recommended security and privacy settings.

Taken together, Raising a Digital Child and Generation Text are two different yet compatible takes on the role parents have to play in rearing children in a digital age. The former would make a wonderful text for a class on the subject, while the latter would make an excellent companion reader.

For some time I have been reading about the challenges social networking present to schools. Not the students in school, mind you. They have taken to social networking like ducks to water. But the adults are a different story and are largely playing catch-up. Some schools have responded by banning all of use social networking by students and employees. Others (a small number) are using social networking tools in interesting ways. Most seem to be in the middle, engaged in much hand wringing and asking colleagues in other schools:

• What are YOU doing about Facebook and MySpace?
• Do you have a policy we can look at?
• Our faculty and staff are asking for guidance in this area. What do we tell them?

I don’t have the answer. But I do have some opinions, and I’d like to float them here to see what others have to say about them and then, in the best of social networking tradition, incorporate your suggestions into something that I can run by my colleagues. So here goes.

Proposed Guidelines for Use of Social Networks by School Faculty and Staff*

New technologies, such as social networking tools, provide exciting new ways to collaborate and communicate. Nevertheless we must exercise care to be sure we use such tools with students in ways that are both age-appropriate and consistent with the mission of the school.

School faculty and staff are expected to behave honorably in both real and virtual (online) spaces. Activities which are improper, unethical, illegal, or which cause undue discomfort for students, employees, parents, or other members of the school community should be judiciously avoided in both physical space and cyberspace.

To that end, we offer the following guidelines for school employees who use online social networking applications which may be frequented by current or former students.

1. COURSE USE OF SOCIAL NETWORKING: In order to provide equal, age-appropriate access for students to course materials, faculty should limit class activities to school-sanctioned online tools. New social networking tools and features are being continually introduced which may or may not be appropriate for course use. The same care must be taken in choosing such tools as other tools and support materials.
2. MODEL APPROPRIATE BEHAVIOR: Exercise appropriate discretion when using social networks for personal communications (friends, colleagues, parents, former students, etc.) with the knowledge that adult behavior on social networks may be used as a model by our students.
3. FRIENDING ALUMNI: Accept social network friend requests only with alumni over the age of 18. Do not initiate friend contacts with alumni.
4. UNEQUAL RELATIONSHIPS: Understand that the uneven power dynamics of the school, in which adults have authority over former students, continues to shape those relationships.
5. OTHER FRIENDS: Remind all other members of your network of your position as an educator whose profile may be accessed by current or former students, and to monitor their posts to your network accordingly. Conversely, be judicious in your postings to all friends sites, and act immediately to remove any material that may be inappropriate from your site whether posted by you or someone else.
6. GROUPS IN YOUR SOCIAL NETWORK: Associate with social networking groups consistent with healthy, pro-social activities and the mission and reputation of the school, acting with sensitivity within context of a diverse educational environment in which both students and adults practice tolerance and accept competing views.
7. PRIVACY SETTINGS AND CONTENT: Exercise care with privacy settings and profile content. Content should be placed thoughtfully and periodically reviewed to maintain this standard.
8. MISREPRESENTATION: Faculty who use social networks should do so using their own name, not a pseudonym or nickname.
9. PUBLIC INFORMATION: Recognize that many former students have online connections with current students, and that information shared between school adults and former students is likely to be seen by current students as well.

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*Some of the ideas for this list come from a Facebook group I belong to, Faculty Ethics on Facebook. It is geared towards higher education, and so if you stumbled upon this post and really want to read about colleges and universities, head on over to Facebook. I also appreciate colleague Matt Montagne’s feedback via Google Docs on an earlier draft of these ideas.

When many of us were growing up we were very protective of our bedrooms. We didn’t want anyone coming in to our rooms uninvited; not siblings, not our parents. We posted “Keep out!!!!” or “Danger, Radioactive Materials” signs on our doors. We would, of course, grant access to our friends and then immediately shut the door for privacy. Woe to parents who cleaned our rooms accidentally discovered cigarettes, condoms, alcohol, marijuana, or other contraband. Oh the feelings of betrayal on both sides.

Some things never change. Many teens are still territorial about their private spaces, but these areas now extend to virtual worlds that many parents don’t realize exist. Even if they’ve heard of such things as FaceBook, MySpace, Xanga, or Blogger, they have no idea how much time their teen is spending there. As parents, how can you guide and protect your child when you don’t know where she is? You can not (and should not) be with her every minute of every day whether it is in the physical world or the virtual world. Because of your own familiarity with the risks inherent in the real world you teach her how to safely cross the street, exercise caution with strangers, and how to call for help when they need it. But are you as familiar with the risks in the virtual worlds that your daughter inhabits?

In a survey conducted of random sample of Castilleja upper school students conducted by the Tech Department last spring, 34% of students reported having a personal web site or blog My observation of behavior in the computer labs indicates that this percentage has increased remarkably, and that students in the middle school are also active participants. This is in keeping with national trends being reported as reported in recent articles in the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times describing a the current generation of teens who have grown up in a digital world. Writers are having a field day inventing clever names for this generation: digital natives, generation M, iKids, the net generation, and screenagers.

What’s a parent to do? Here’s my advice:

1. Educate yourself. Go online and visit the web sites previously mentioned (MySpace, Xanga, Blogger). Google your child’s name and see what (if anything) comes up. Talk with other parents about what experiences they may have had with their children using such web sites. Once you have gathered some information, and your wits, you’re ready for step 2.
2. Talk with your daughter. Ask her if she has a blog, or if she has friends with blogs. (I assure you that at least one of the two answers will be yes.) Converse (this is a conversation, not an interrogation) about blogs: what she likes about them, what she doesn’t like. You may ask her to show you some blogs, including her own if she has one. Ask her who reads her blog (most blogs allow you to be available to the general public or only to invited readers.) This should be an easy conversation, not an awkward one.
3. In a very unscientific survey, I asked about twenty upper schoolers how many of them had blogs. Sixteen raised their hands. Then I asked how many of their parents know that they have a blog. About twelve hands went up. So the good news is that many of you may already know that your child has a blog, or in the very least their are other parents you can speak with who know that their child has a blog. Step three is to make sure that your child understands the attributes of cyberspace that, I find, they often overlook: context, openness, misrepresentation, and persistence.
   • Context. Written communication, the most common form of discourse in blogs, often do not fully convey the context for remarks that are made. Email users understand how easy it is for messages to be misconstrued. Managers have learned that email is NOT a good mechanism to communicate emotionally-laden messages. Teenagers don’t know that. They often write in a stream-of-consciousness mode with little regard for how something may sound to another. Sometimes their remarks can be very hurtful to the people they’re writing about, even when they believe that person is not reading their blog. Which brings us to…
   • Openness. Students, especially middle schoolers who are just getting into this, have no idea how powerful search engines like Google are. Information they think is private may be found by other computers. They may believe that only the friends that they have invited to read their blog are doing so—forgetting how much a social activity this is among friends who gather around a computer to read blogs with one another. I inadvertently caused a few raised eyebrows among some of our seniors in the computer lab the other day by suggesting that college recruiters might be looking at the blogs of applicants.
   • Misrepresentation. I have previously written about cyberbullying, and that a contributor to phenomenon this was the anonymity provided by virtual personas. In addition to anonymity, the web allows you one to create a completely false persona, which is exactly what online predators do. Children need a healthy skepticism of anyone they meet online who they do not know in the physical world.
   • Persistence. In some ways cyberspace seems so fleeting. But this is illusory. Information that is put on a blog may continue to live on even when the blog is “deleted” by the user. It’s been cached by search engines. Backed up on server tapes. Visitors may have downloaded files, examined the HTML code, or even taken screen shots. In short once it’s out there, it’s out there. Students have no idea!
4. Repeat steps 1-3. Keep educating yourself, stay in dialog with your daughter, and help her understand the characteristics of cyberspace that are so easily overlooked.

In conclusion the worse thing you can do is to try to forbid this activity. Many teens, who are already finding ways to assert their independence from their caregivers, will simply find it all the more attractive. And indeed, blogs can be a healthy and entertaining means of self-expression. The key is communication. After all, that’s what blogs are supposed to be all about.