Not So Distant Future

In keeping with the conversations (Karl Fisch, Wes Fryer, Doug Johnson, myself, and others) going on around the blogosphere about filtering, access, and social networking in schools, I wanted to share this excellent toolkit from YALSA (Young Adult Library Services Association) entitled “Teens and Social Networking in School and Public Libraries.”

The toolkit has ideas appropriate for librarians or technology staff on productive uses of social networking, how to share these tools with parents, etc., and is a great example of a proactive and positive approach. 

In addition, YALSA has an excellent wiki of resources, links, and articles about positive uses of social networking tools — though this was created with DOPA in mind, there are some excellent articles and links here, including a clever Slideshare called “Who would Jane Austen friend?”

Knowing where to find helpful materials on this issue to support each school’s efforts to have a constructive policy in place is part of the solution.  Please continue to share other materials you are aware of as well!

Update:  Shortly after posting this, I ran across a study that Patrick Higgins posted on his blog about the positive effects of blogging on student writing, so I thought I’d add it here since that is part of this conversation.

When grading a stack of student papers, Jacqueline Hicks Grazette, a teacher at St. Albans High School in the D.C. area,  recently noticed that a student used Wikipedia to answer a question, and had made a note of it on his paper.   

That, among other things, led her to write this opinion column in the Washington Post this morning, Wikiality in my Classroom, where she realistically outlines the collision of Wikipedia, Google, online ethics, student stress and web 2.0 tools and the dilemmas teachers face.

“In the online world in which teachers and students navigate, ambiguity. . .
is daily fare. For young people who have grown up with instant access to information, it seems like no big deal. But to educators, trained in accurate sourcing and correct attribution, deciding what the limits should be often poses a dilemma.”

As a student in the article comments:

“We are part of a networked society. . .Your world is different from ours. We are taught to share information and collaborate. We do it all the time. No one really cares where it came from.”

A collaborative world

The student’s comment perfectly highlights the tension between the online culture of sharing and the rigors of academic scholarship, as Grazette highlights. She points to Princeton’s Academic Integrity website which describes this.

The internet is bringing research issues into the forefront in ways that they never have been before, because “research” has become part of our daily lives, not a “once in awhile” project.

A comment from one student she interviews drives home the need for educators to take the time out of the rush towards testing and excellence to really discuss internet ethics with students.  They are already living in the “online” world in ways many of us are not fully, and will be living in this environment for years to come. 

Isn’t it our job to help prepare them for making good choices academically and ethically?   This is not to imply that many of us aren’t doing this–because we are–but how can we do it better across the curriculum?  

Change

I also wonder how is all this going to change our ideas of academic scholarship, copyright, etc?  The use of information has become such a grass-roots, democratic (little d) movement, that  it is going to drive change in all our systems, and maybe changes that will make information more accessible to all. 

Is MLA format really going to be the best way for tracking citations in the future, for example?  What about the Dewey Decimal system?  While both systems are capable of handling change and were designed in ways that can be flexible, on the other hand, is that linear way of thinking going by the wayside?

What questions does her article raise for you?

   dewey decimal signage–Seattle Public Library

photo credit:  http://www.flickr.com/photos/getdown/114686279/

As more and more content is used and shared online, the once clear rules regarding copyright become more and more blurred.   Mash-up videos combine songs (copyrighted) with original video or edited news clips(copyrighted) with songs, or mix clips from movies(copyrighted), or….  The list goes on and on.

  Lawrence Lessig, author of Free Culture, a book which is available online, (for free and in multiple formats) spoke at U.T. this evening about how the  “read/write” web challenges traditional copyright law.  Because the laws have been slow to change, a nonprofit organization, Creative Commons, has attempted to address the issue.

  Creative Commons, if you aren’t familiar, has established a set of “licenses” that creators can use to designate how their work can be used.   There are different levels of use–a work can be designated as useable by a noncommercial site(like a school) or may only be used if it’s credited, etc.   

Sites like Flickr use Creative Commons to identify images for various uses.  So when a photograph is uploaded, the user can specify which level of use is acceptable to them.

The concept behind it is to allow for the creative “remixing” and “re-creating” that we see students doing and to allow for the interactivity of materials that many of the web 2.0 tools allow within a copyright-type of system. 

Creative Commons also has a search site, where students could search for materials that the authors had given permission for them to use noncommercially, or even works they can alter, with permission.

Lessig gave many fascinating examples of “mash-ups” of different content, but one of the well known ones he shared was about Colin Mutchler.  Mutchler recorded some guitar music, called it ”My Life” and placed it online, giving it a Creative Commons license.  

my_life.mp3

About a month later, a violist, Cora Beth, emailed him that she had downloaded his work and added a violin track and changed the name of the joint composition to “My Life Changed.”

my_life_changed.mp3

Arguably, the song is more beautiful with the added violin composition.  Colin now has an entire album that was recorded this way, by artists he’d never met, over space and time. 

The point of sharing all this?

Our students create content constantly, so as creators and as users, they need to know about Creative Commons licenses.

The open and free way that artists, writers, musicians, and others are sharing their creative works is part of the web 2.0 culture that our students are completely engaged with.   

We need to help them understand the distinctions between copyright and this idea of Creative Commons for “open source” or web-created content.  We also need to explore with them how copyright law as it exists may need to change.

And all of this brings to mind–how are we, as educators, creating our own “new” and innovative mashed-up content?   (And by the way, I wish I could share his presentation here, but it’s not online yet–because the way he puts together his presentations is very stylish and engaging and a great model. )

How can we help our students use wise behaviors online?

That question has been getting a bit of discussion lately because of a recent article in the New York Times.

I’ve been thinking it would be interesting to compile a collaborative list of online “ethics” questions for students to discuss and consider.

The article has been getting some interesting discussion in the blogosphere, for example at the Science Leadership Academy.

How do we deal with opening boundaries for students to participate while helping them understand appropriate and ethical choices?

Update–:

After I wrote this, I ran across this fitting comment at Ed Tech Journeys–entitled “Kill the Messenger.”  Pete Reilly wrote,  “Technology is exposing issues that have always been there. This is a grand opportunity to explore the issues and to hear the message. Let’s learn whatever lessons need to be learned. Let’s not turn the technology off. Let’s turn teaching and learning on.”

I highly recommend the rest of his comments, and tend to agree that many(though not all) of the problems we are dealing with currently are just being exposed by the technology, not caused by it.

    Compared to the last presidential election, where the new web 2.0 tools were mainly part of a grassroots movement, the use of Web 2.0 tools like YouTube, Blogs, etc., is now a mainstream part of a campaign.

TechCrunch draws our attention to a new site, techPresident, which is tracking the web 2.0 trail of all the presidential candidates.

You can see which ones are using MySpace(and how many “friends” they have), who is on the site Second Life(John Edwards), see Flickr photos relating to the candidate, and see who is using YouTube.

And for those of you who attended our Project Tech workshop yesterday on RSS(thanks to Will Richardson’s excellent instruction without which I couldn’t have shared this), you can also grab RSS feeds from the candidates’ pages, all in one location.

Why does this matter?  If our students are participating in a democracy where the social networking tools they use are being used by mainstream entities as political campaign advertising, isn’t it critically important that we are teaching students how to evaluate sources, distinguish fact from opinion, and watch for bias and commercial uses of the web?

As these web 2.0 tools enter the mainstream, they are not only tools that allow “regular” people the ability to have a voice, they allow advertisers and candidates to approach us through many more channels and means.   How do we help students as advertising and content begin to “merge” more and more?

On his blog 2 Cents Worth, David Warlick posts a question for teachers for an article  which will appear in May’s issue of Cable in the Classroom.

What is your greatest challenge in teaching appropriate, ethical use of web-based media to your students?”

Since we have discussed that question here frequently, I would be interested in your experiences and ideas.  If you have comments or thoughts, please share them here. (and your ideas might just get published!)