As I said earlier, I don’t have high hopes for this being the year that schools begin to embrace social software in systemic ways and that 2007 may pose more challenges to that thinking. Case in point a couple of items in the aggregator this morning. First, from Michael Stephens, it appears that Illinois is going after DOPA: The State Version. You know the drill…no social networking in libraries, schools, outhouses, etc. And this won’t be the last bill or the last state to try to put it through.

Second, Chris Lehmann points to an article in the New York Times yesterday titled “Teenagers Misbehaving, for All Online to Watch.” As you can imagine, it’s not a great advertisment for the transparency of the Web these days.

Most suburban teenagers, it seems, can rattle off a litany of the latest teens-gone-wild offerings as though they were the local multiplex listings: boys holding cellphones under the lunch table to photograph up girls’ skirts; an innocent kiss at a party posted out of context on an ex-boyfriend’s Web site; someone bursting in on friends who are in the bathroom or sleeping, drinking or smoking; students goading teachers into tantrums; assaulting homeless people.

Lovely.

Chris expresses his concerns about what this all means, and notes, accurately, I think, that the stakes are getting higher, and he says that schools have to play a bigger role in educating kids about how to make “smart, safe and ethical choices.” The more I turn this in my own brain the more I get to the fact that this is cultural. It’s societal. And those of us who have whatever limited enlightenment into the workings of the world about these matters need to do more to educate all of our constituents.

Before any of this is going to get better, more folks who don’t have any concept of learning in social networks need to at least be shown the possibilities. Whether they embrace them into their own practice is something different altogether.

Technorati Tags: learning, DOPA, education

Oy.

From ZDNet:

Reining in social-networking sites: Last summer, over the objections of civil libertarians, librarians and educators, the House overwhelmingly approved the Deleting Online Predators Act, which would restrict ambiguously defined social-networking sites in schools and libraries that receive federal funding. The proposal ultimately died last year, but on the first day of the 110th Congress, Sen. Ted Stevens, a veteran Alaska Republican, reintroduced identical language in what he portrayed as a renewed effort to protect children online.

Anyone have any details? A quick look at the Stevens homepage makes no mention…

Technorati Tags: dopa social_networking education

So the news on DOPA is eerily quiet. I’m starting to think (hope?) that our best outcome right now is that the Senate Commerce committee won’t deal with it until after the October 6 target recess date which means that it will become a post election issue. That might just allow cooler heads to prevail.  (Here’s the meeting schedule through Sept. 28…DOPA isn’t mentioned.)

In poking around, however, I did find this interesting tidbit that I hadn’t seen and that I can’t seem to confirm. Geoffrey Fletcher writes in THE Journal that “DOPA also wants to
make these sites available only to people age 18 and older,” as in people under 18 wouldn’t be able to use them anywhere, in or out of schools. Is that right?

At any rate, I don’t think now is the time to get any less vigialant about this. If you haven’t already done so, write your senators and tell them that only education will truly protect kids from falling victim to predation on the Net or anywhere else for that matter.

technorati tags:dopa, education, weblogg-ed

I’ve feel fortunate and somewhat honored to have been asked to contribute to a new blog at the District Administration Magazine site called “The Pulse.” It’s an opportunity for me to reach a wider audience of administrators and to join in a conversation with some pretty respected thinkers about education in general, not just educational technology, folks like Alfie Kohn, whose books I have loved, Susan O’Hanian, and Etta Kralovec, to name a few. Also in the mix are David Thornburg, Roger Shank, and about a dozen others who I’m looking forward to engaging with and learning from. Hope you’ll stop by. I put up my first post today, not surprisingly about DOPA.

A bit of disclosure: I’m receiving no compensation for posting at The Pulse, and I have agreed to not write for competitors during my tenure there, so I won’t be posting at Ed Tech Insider any longer. This last bit took me some time to agree to, but I decided in the end that the opportunity to do some blogvangelizing more directly to administrators was worth the switch. And, in the interest of disclosing, I’ve added some information about my work to my About page. If there’s anything else you think I should be adding there, let me know.

Ok…that’s waaayyyy too much about me these last couple of days…back to our regularly scheduled blogging tomorrow.

technorati tags:The_Pulse, District_Administration, blogging, education

So that was a fast 20 minutes, much faster than the NYC area traffic that slowed me down to the point that instead of going to the WNYC studios for my little radio appearance today I ended up pulling off and doing the interview from a friend’s office phone. Nonetheless, it was fun and interesting, as always, especially the callers. When the first caller started off disagreeing with my take on the MySpace issue, I thought I might be in trouble. But then a parent who started a MySpace site, a minister who uses MySpace to connect with his kids…now that was all a pleasant surprise. Maybe we’re turning a corner. Here is the link to the streamed version of the interview. The MP3 is also up.

BTW, anyone have any news on DOPA???

technorati tags:MySpace, teaching, education, blogging, safety

If you’re in the New York City area (or sittlng by your computer) tomorrow morning at 10:40 EST, I’m scheduled to appear on The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. The topic, I think, is DOPA, but it could be about other fun and interesting things as well. Talking points, anyone?

Here’s hoping I don’t make a fool of myself…

technorati tags:dopa, Brian-Lehrer, WNYC

We really need more articles like this one, don’t we?

“Within schools, social networking sites like MySpace put schools at risk from the legal liabilities of kids posting threatening or defamatory information about their classmates or their teachers,” said Paul Henry, vice president, Strategic Accounts for Secure Computing. “These networking sites have allowed kids to take threatening behavior to the next level — basically allowing kids to become cyberbullies from the comfort of their own home or from a computer in the school lab.”

But wait! There actually is some good news! Look at this column by Roy Mark on Internet.com. Seems things might not be as bad as the election year politicians and for profit businesses are making it out to be. A new Harris poll shows 80% of parents actually monitor their kids’ use of the Internet, even though a minority don’t feel fully up to the task. And over half of parents think Congress should keep out of the issue.

Even better, look at this:

And now for the second report out this week: The number of youths sexually solicited online is actually declining.

Moreover, most solicitation incidents — almost 80 percent — happen on home computers. And fewer than 10 percent happen on a school or library computer.

Funded by the federal government and researched and written by the University of New Hampshire’s Crimes Against Children Research Center, the Online Victimization of Children report states that in 2001, 19percent of children reported unwanted sexual solicitations over the Internet.

Five years later, the number fell to 13 percent.

“Despite the decline in the proportion of youth who received solicitations, however, the number of youth receiving the most dangerous sexual overtures, aggressive solicitations that move, or threaten to move, beyond the Internet into real life, has not declined,” the report states.

Nor has it increased over five years, suggesting the problem is being badly blown out of proportion by vote-hungry lawmakers.

I’m still amazed at how little coverage this has gotten. Still nothing in the major papers about DOPA, and it’s literally on no one’s radar. Oy.

technorati tags:DOPA, education, social, MySpace, fear, politics

A few weeks ago, Danah Boyd posted a short blurb about a visit to the Lucas Educational Foundation Skywalker Ranch where she had some discussions about schools and education in a networked world. It’s one of those teaser posts that I wish she would have developed more fully because I found the ideas she listed there intruiging and somewhat challenging. Here are the lines that caught me:

…a small group of us came to the realization that schools need to start serving the tension between ego-centered, personalized, individualistic society and globalized society.

Networked society is altering the relationships between people, and communities are suffering because of the lack of cohesion, social norms, etc.

When we think about education, we need to stop damning technology and start engaging with the shifts that have occurred in the architecture of sociality.

I’ve been thinking a lot about this of late, trying to sort out how I feel on a personal level by the ways in which these technologies have changed my life. I wonder if my online life is better or worse than the more offline life I used to live, or if it’s just different. That’s what I try to teach my kids, at least, that just because something is outside of the realm of their current experience doesn’t make it inherently bad or good…it just makes it different. That goes for skin color, music, clothes, sexual orientation, whatever. I think changes make us suffer when we immediately react negatively towards them because they simply aren’t what we are used to.

Which gets us back to our favorite topic these days: DOPA. It’s nothing more than an attempt to damn the technology instead of engaging the tensions of a globalized world. We don’t want to do the tough work of understanding what the changes mean, good or bad. We just want to resist.

These are interesting times.

technorati tags:education, learning, DOPA, world

If you’re not already convinced that things are much worse than they seem, do a search for DOPA at Google News and find about 15 articles written in the last few days (most of them in opposition, at least) and then do one for Paris Hilton. (Did you know she was abstaining for a year? The humanity!)

Get prepared…

technorati tags:dopa, blogging

So the article titled “Authorship Gets Lost on Web” in USA Today has somewhat of a connection to the very interesting discussion from a few days ago about taking work that others do and publishing it on your own sites, commercial or otherwise. (Let me just say, btw, that I found that whole thread to be immensely thought provoking, especially the back and forth between Tom and Stephen, who both made my brain hurt. And, interestingly, that the publisher of the site in question took my feed out of the mix. It would have been even more interesting to get his/her thinking on this issue as well, but…) The article is a recap of some of the more blatant stealing that is going on as an author of a Businessweek.com piece found his work had been published under the names of 13 other authors on the Web.

But here is the money-quote, I think, that describes the bigger shift “out there:”

In some quarters, plagiarism remains a serious offense. But where it involves the Internet, an acceptance of plagiarism is taking hold, and when confronted, offenders often shrug it off as hardly newsworthy. Pew Research two weeks ago said it found that of the 12 million adults who blog, 44% say they have taken songs, text or images and “remixed” them into their own artistic creation.

So, what to do? Certainly, there is a central ethic that is involved here, that of owning your own work and attributing the work of others. Putting your name on someone else’s stuff is theft, plain and simple, and should not be tolerated. But as the article points out, much of the problem is simple sloppy work in terms of sourcing and attribution. And the bigger problem is that it is being tolerated.

This is fundamental, third grade on work that we have to start doing with our students. But it’s also a challenge to us as educators to model the process and make it transparent. Tom caught me just yesterday not citing a source. (He’s good at that.) And it was a good reminder of how careful I need to be. In the grander scheme of things, we need to have some much broader discussions of how this all impacts our process, our curriculum and our teaching.

technorati tags:plagiarism, education, literacy

Some more good news on the DOPA front…it appears Senate action will be put off until next month. That’s not a guarantee or anything, but it’s a step in the right direction.

As is the fact that Internet safety expert Larry Magid has come out with a pretty provocative argument for why DOPA is dopey.

But even if the bill weren’t overly broad, it would still betroublesome because it is the wrong – and I would argue a dangerous approach – to Internet safety. While nearly everyone agrees that Internet predators should be”deleted,” this bill doesn’t address that issue. Unlike the Adam Walsh Child Protection and Safety Act of 2006, which the President signed into law on July 21, DOPA does nothing to strengthen penalties orincrease prosecution of criminals who prey on children. Instead, it punishes the potential victims and educational institutions chartered to serve them, by denying access to interactive sites at school and libraries.

As Larry says, this might be better called the “Deleting Online Teenagers Act.”

Just my humble opinion, but I still think we have to take this fight outside of our community. Anyone writing any letters to editors? Calling up talk shows? E-mailing their friends? I’ve done the last and am working on the first. Doug Noon has a great sample letter to send to your senator.

technorati tags:DOPA, blogging, education

Dave Cormier just Skyped me with a link to this article that details the patents on learning management systems that were just awarded to Blackboard. By the looks of it, Blackboard now owns learning management systems. The day the patent was awarded, Blackboard sued Desire2Learn for infringement, and although the Moodle board doesn’t seem to indicate a great deal of panic, I’d be interested to know what people in this community make of this. Dave says it’s not good…here is his depressing Skypequote:

“DOPA takes all the open sites, and Blackweb all the closed ones…”
Oy.

technorati tags:Moodle, DOPA, learning, Blackboard, education

Seems that Vermont Senator Pat Leahy has agreed to slow DOPA down so to speak and that the bill is now going to the Senate Commerce Committee. Here is a list of members of that group that you might want to contact. 

technorati tags:dopa, education, social_software

From the “Another Powerful Example of How Blogs Are Changing the World that We Won’t Be Able to Teach” Dept. comes this article in the Wall Street Journal via David Weinberger: “In the Midst of War, Bloggers Are Talking Across the Front Line.”

Bloggers from Lebanon and Israel — some on the scene, others around the world — are providing live updates of their experiences, commenting on each other’s writing and sometimes linking to blogs across the border. The dialogue is all the more unusual since the populations of the two countries had few ways to interact even before the fighting began. Lebanese law prohibits Israelis from entering the country, and there are no phone connections between the two states.

Sure, we can discuss the story. But fuggedabout actually showing the conversation to our kids or having them reflect on it on their own blogs where other people might be able to inform their thinking and learning. God forbid we forget to actually teach them how to stay safe from those Mid Eastern predators out there.

I’ll get off of this horse soon, I promise…

(BTW, if you want a really good rudown on the DOPA dopiness, try this post at The 463.)

Technorati tags:DOPA, Education, Blogging,

The last couple of days, the one picture I can’t get out of my head is the one of groups of Congressmen huddled around talking in hushed tones along the lines of:

“Ok, so what is a blog again?”

“Look, just think MySpace.”

“Ohhh, yeah. MySpace! Blogs are evil…dangerous!”
“Dang straight…and that Wikipedia thing is just a mess.”

“Wikiwhat?”

“Nevermind…just think prisoners taking over the asylum. We need to take back the truth!”

“Take it back! Absolutely! But…um…how do we do that?”

“Do what?”

“Take back truth?”
“No, no, no…truth doesn’t matter. This is about DANGER. We’ve got all sorts of people out there, predators I tell ‘ya, and our kids are in DANGER! We have to DELETE the PREDATORS!”

“Mercy! The people will love us, won’t they?”

“Absolutely!”

Ok, so maybe that’s a stretch. Bottom line is that too few of them have any idea of what is happening because they haven’t the experience to understand them. They don’t live in this world. They don’t live in kids’ worlds.
And that’s true for 90% of the non-kid population (and, to be honest, probably about 1/3 of the kid population too.) What I’m reminded of by the DOPA decision is that once again, this community, this “echo chamber,” is not representative of the real world when it comes to how these technologies can impact learning. We feed off of each other’s energy and passion, but that makes it so easy (for me, at least) to forget that there are about a gajillion people out there who still have no clue about this. And in my specific case, it hasn’t helped that I’ve been out there more and more having great conversations with inspiring and inspired teachers and administrators who get it and see the importance of understanding. I’ve been preaching to the choir, as we all have, but I’ve forgotten that the choir is infinitesimally small.

I’ve blogged about this before, this idea that we have to find ways to take this message to other groups outside of education, to parents, to school boards, to local politicians, to businessmen. And here’s the irony: we bloggers who believe in blogs in the classroom should be doing less blogging. I’ve been sitting here growing complacent because everyone who is commenting and linking and posting on their blogs and podcasting gets it or at least has the context for the discussion. And then, boom…DOPA passes by 400 votes. 400! I think that’s what gets me most…the sheer number. The fact that ONLY 15 voted against it.
15.

Amazing.

Despite the best efforts of bloggers and ISTE and CoSN and ALA and others, I’m not optimistic about turning the tide in the Senate. That number, 15, is a serious reality check. If it had been 150, or even 100…

But it was 15.

So, I’m doing what I can short term, but I’m thinking harder about long term. Those of you who have read this blog for a while know that I believe in the end, these changes are inevitably going to impact classrooms in profound ways. The only question is when. DOPA, if the Senate passes it, will be a setback, although we don’t yet completely know the impact. But in the long run, it’s just a bump.
But we have got to move this discussion into wider circles. This comment on my last post does a great job of articulating a different strategy. And again, the irony is, I think, that we’ve got to do it in Web 0.0 ways, by writing books, articles for print in magazines that don’t have anything to do with education or technology (read: Good Housekeeping), letters to editors, calling into radio shows, make CDs and DVDs, and maybe some Web 1.0 ways too like e-mail and discussion groups. We’ve got to stop preaching to the choir and spend more of our time “out there.” I’ve got a couple of ideas I’m pursuing that I’ll no doubt blog about if and when they happen, but the bottom line is, I’m looking more outward.

I’d love to hear others’ ideas of how best to articulate these stories to the wider universe..

technorati tags:dopa, read_write_web, education, blogging