The Future of Privacy: your future

privacy

Living life in public is the new default many of us have been experimenting with in recent years. It’s amazing how readily we have adapted to sharing our daily activities, thoughts and knowledge via social media. The consequences of this voluntary act of sharing and its impact on our privacy, is causing us to adjust our norms and our preparedness to be less private than we may once have been. Yet as danah boyd illustrated through her research of teenagers in – It’s complicated: the social lives of networked teens, young people are surprisingly selective as to what they make public.

We are living in the age of big data where once inconsequential information such as our purchasing habits are now being collected as an invisible, routine process. Where is it all heading? The Pew Research Center has recently released the report – The Future of Privacy: digital life in 2025 in which experts conclude that the struggle with our personal data and public profiles will extend through the next decade as attitudes and legislation adjust to the new landscape.

Some expect that governments and corporations will continue to expand upon the already prevalent tracking of people’s personal lives and the data-basing and magnetisation of personal information. Others expect it may be possible that new approaches will emerge to enable individuals to better control their identities and exercise more choice about who knows what.

There is much food for thought in this report as it looks towards the next 10 years.  Read the report…

Image source: https://www.flickr.com/photos/epics18/4239334095

OLMC Facebook Fan page update

Bright Ideas featured Our Lady of Mercy College Heidelberg Library’s Facebook Fan page three weeks ago. As most readers would know, Facebook has had some serious fallout due to privacy changes (or more to the point, lack of privacy) and OLMC have changed their approach to Facebook. Teacher librarian Michael Jongen says:

This week following the lead of the Media Teacher I pulled down olmclibrary Facebook page as he had pulled down his media page.

This was because of safety concerns. A speaker on cyber-safety had spoken at the school and demonstrated that identifying a school is a danger to students who ‘fan’ the site.

Both of us have re-established our pages as a group which is invite only and private. The groups name is anonymous in terms of identifying the school. Both of us will need to build up the audience base we had to promote our services and useful links and information. We have used the same branding as the media department.

As a school we have looked at using Facebook for assessment and concluded that wikis and blogs and googlesites were better Web 2.0 tools for providing collaborative and private assessment within and educational context.

It seems clear that with recent Facebook controversies about safety and privacy that if as educators we wish use Face-book to communicate with our students it should only be done as a closed group with strict membership control.

This is a parallel post reproduced with permission from Michael’s blog web 2.0 and other library stuff. Thanks to Michael for taking the time to inform readers of Bright Ideas of the changes and why they were necessary.

Family Connections

Family connections is an application where users can set up their own private website, for the purpose of secure communication and sharing with family and friends. 

 family connections

Sharing with only selected family and friends means that photos, documents and messages are secure and only those you have selected can view them. Ideal for anyone with family and friends interstate or overseas.

Jabbster

Jabbster is a free online tool that enables you to keep in touch with and share items with family and friends and only family and friends.

Homepage
Homepage

The website explains its features:

Jabbster Features

  •  Share photos of all your experiences,
    knowing they will stay private and safe.
  •  Let everyone know when and where you’ll be,
    by adding your trip to the event calendar.
  •  Share up to date contact & birthday info,
    knowing everyone who can view it can be trusted.
  •  Plus much, much more!
    We roll out new features every chance we get!
  •  Everything you add is completely private,
    so the rest of the internet doesn’t know it exists.
  •  Keep in touch through group discussions,
    and allow everyone in your group to participate.

As well as personal/family uses, Jabbster could be useful for parent/teacher/student/class communication and student learning networks.

Scratch

Looking for a fantastic free animation development site? Scratch just might be what you are after! Developed by a team at MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), Scratch is designed to be used by educators.

Scratch homepage
Scratch homepage

According to the Scratch website

Scratch is a new programming language that makes it easy to create your own interactive stories, animations, games, music, and art — and share your creations on the web.

Scratch is designed to help young people (ages 8 and up) develop 21st century learning skills. As they create and share Scratch projects, young people learn important mathematical and computational ideas, while also learning to think creatively, reason systematically, and work collaboratively. Scratch is available free of charge: go to Download.

As Scratch is aimed primarily at children (8-16 years), there is a raft of information for educators:

 Scratch is designed with learning and education in mind.

As young people create projects in Scratch, they learn many of the 21st century skills that will be critical to success in the future: thinking creatively, communicating clearly, analyzing systematically, using technologies fluently, collaborating effectively, designing iteratively, learning continuously.

Scratch can used in many different settings: schools, museums, community centers, and homes. It is intended especially for 8- to 16-year-olds, but younger children can work on Scratch projects with their parents or older siblings, and college students use Scratch in some introductory computer science classes.

There are a variety of resources that can be helpful in introducing Scratch.

See Scratch Videos for videos on how to use and to introduce Scratch

The Getting Started Guide offers a step-by-step introduction to Scratch

Scratch Cards offer a fun way to learn Scratch code you can use in projects

The Scratch 1.3 Reference Guide is a manual that explains the Scratch software

The Translation page lists resources in Spanish and many other languages

Different people get started with Scratch in different ways. Some like to tinker with various blocks to see what they do. Others like to experiment with the sample projects that come with Scratch, and then make changes to the scripts. As an initial activity, we often encourage people to create a project using the letters in their name.

To learn more about the educational ideas underlying Scratch, please see:

One-Page Handouts
Learning with Scratch | Creating with Scratch | Programming with Scratch

Programming Concepts in Scratch 1.3

Scratch education case study from the National Center for Women and Information Technology

Scratch and 21st Century Skills

Sowing the Seeds for a More Creative Society

Rethinking Learning in the Digital Age

Technological Fluency

Learning by Designing

Research papers about Scratch

Scratch Educator Online Forums

Visit the Educators forum to discuss ideas with other educators using Scratch

New! Visit the Scratch Classroom 2.0 wiki

As you can see, Scratch has excellent resources for educators and as Scratch is available in many languages, LOTE classes are well catered for. The terms and conditions  of Scratch explain that the site is open to any age and users are encouraged to flag inappropriate content.

The best part about Scratch is that you and your students can download the program for free, without even registering on the Scratch website. That means that your students can keep all animations completely private if you wish and only upload the animations to the Scratch website if they really want to share their work with the world.

Stay tuned for another animation tool shortly.

thisMoment

An interesting Web 2.0 resource that could be useful for the beginning of the school year is thisMoment.

thisMoment is a type of digital portfolio that can chronicle events in a person’s life. As with all of the best Web 2.0 tools that can be used for educational purposes, thisMoment has privacy settings so that students’ work can be shared only with selected people.

‘Moments’ appear in the form of a timeline, with the ability for you to upload photos or videos alongside the text that you write; a description of what the moment is and how it made you feel. Getting students to create their own moments could be a great way of getting to know them at the beginning of the year. If thisMoment was introduced to year 6 students on orientation day, they could collect moments over the Christmas holidays ready to upload and share with their new school mates and teachers. For those schools with pets, accounts for pets can be created and (for example) the life cycle of a pet could be chronicled. This type of activity has applications for VELS areas such as Science, English, Humanities, ICT and Personal Learning

There are lots of social networking tools that users can tweak to add to their thisMoment experience.

ToonDoo

ToonDoo is another social networking/comic strip creator that has relevance to education but is also a lot of fun!

The best part about it is that the ‘toons’ use just one, two or three frames. Such a short toon means that students must really think about how to get their message across in three ideas. Applications for ToonDoo could include:

  • Book reviews
  • Demonstrating understanding of a historical event by using three key ideas
  • Writing Haiku poetry

And as users can select from multiple languages, there are endless uses for LOTE classes.

ToonDoo also have their own blog that gives examples of educational uses of ToonDoo. One example is to learn a new word each day and make a one frame toon that shows understanding. A great tool for literacy.

For teachers and parents worried about the content of the site, there is a ‘safe search filter’ which edits out any toons that have been flagged as inappropriate by other users. And toons and books do not have to be shared with other users if you prefer students to keep them private or share with friends only.

It is also simple to embed toons into blogs by simply clicking on the toon and dragging it into the blog. You can also save your toon to your computer and then copy it into Word, PowerPoint, etc.

ToonDoo also has ‘books’ where comics that are longer than three frames can be created. Books are perfect for story writing or longer presentations such as planets in the solar system.

ToonDoo has a range of images, props, backgrounds and effects that you can select from or you can upload your own pictures to incorporate into the toon or book.

ToonDoo also has a help wiki linked to its site and you can add features that you’d like to see on ToonDoo to their wishlist. If you would like to see how ToonDoo works, access this slideshare presentation which outlines the steps.

Have a look at this toon I created in about 5 minutes:

ToonDoo has a lot to offer educators and students. The use of the three frame toon means that students really need to identify the three most important points of any idea they are addressing. An excellent tool!

Comiqs

Students are just going to love this Web 2.0 resource! Comiqs lets users create and share their own comics, which can be created by using your own photos, photos from Comiqs’ photo library, or photos from the internet and then adding text. There is also  a privacy option when saving completed comics, so it is ideal for schools. Comics can be published publicly, just for friends or only for you to see.

Students could use Comiqs to create their own stories, but also for school work such as

  • How a science experiment was conducted
  • A book review
  • A review of a school production
  • How to apply a mathematical formula
  • Explain the rules of a sport
  • And many other ideas

In fact, when Google launched their new web browser, Google Chrome, they produced a comic to show people how it worked.

Here is a short example of what can be created in a few minutes. This example was achieved using the Comiqs photo gallery. Comiqs could also be a good holiday boredom buster for the kids.

Feature wiki – Preston Girls’ Secondary College

On their arrival at Preston Girls’ Secondary College earlier this year, teacher librarians Judith Way and Reina Phung grappled to get a handle on the curriculum requirements of the college. Job-sharing the 1.0 position, with no support staff, Judith and Reina found it difficult to find the time to meet with subject coordinators to ask for their input. Aware of the few audio visual resources and a collection that needed updating, they decided to set up a ‘Curriculum Audit’ wiki.

Not a link, just a screenshot of one of the pages from the wiki

Not a link, just a screenshot of one of the pages from the wiki

It was decided that the wiki was to be kept private, for the use and eyes of the  school staff only. Staff were emailed an introduction and request to contribute to the wiki. The email contained a word document attachment that included detailed instructions and screenshots on how to contribute to the wiki. Staff were then asked to contribute their thoughts on a number of questions:

  1. Do you need library resources for this topic/subject?
  2. What type of resources do you need? Please be explicit.
  3. Are you happy with the resources the library already has?
  4. What resources would you liked to be purchased or discovered?
  5. Do you have research skills embedded into the topic?
  6. Would you like to work with us to embed research skills into the topic?
  7. If you’d like help, when can we meet? Please nominate a time/date.
  8. How else can we help you in the teaching and learning process?

Some staff not only responded quickly and in some detail, but were enthused about the possibilities of wikis. One teacher, Les Kyle, proceeded to quickly create her own extremely detailed wiki for her VCAL class; the whole curriculum, topics and links to resources (with some contributions from Judith and Reina). This wiki was kept private within Preston Girls’ (using an email to the students’ email address inviting them to join the wiki) as full student names appeared on the wiki and discussions between teacher and students took place. Judith and Reina were proud to think that their Curriculum Audit wiki was the catalyst for Les’s fabulous wiki.

However, many staff did not know what a wiki was, and some had trouble even logging on. The ideal situation would have been an introductory session during a Curriculum Day for those interested/needing guidance. However as all Curriculum Days had been allocated to specific topics (Literacy), Judith and Reina continued to work one-to-one with interested teachers. Judith and Reina believe that something like the SLAV Web 2.0 course for teachers would be terrific, as they often felt that the majority of the teaching staff would benefit from the introduction to the Web 2.0 tools out there that can enhance teaching and learning.

The idea that wikis were the ideal tool for student/student and student/teacher (and teacher/teacher) collaboration was introduced to teachers. That students projects could be completed in teams, and the teacher automatically alerted by email to when contributions had been added. Students taking full responsibility for their own learning becomes apparent when those with access to the wiki can see (and also have email alerts) who has contributed what to the wiki. The way discussions and comments are structured means that students have to think about their responses, rather than perhaps plagiarise by cutting and pasting.

The bonus was that discussions about wikis and blogs now regularly take place and teachers who have not yet made a contribution to the wiki promise to do so when the VCE classes finish. The new ICT Coordinator has begun his own blog. And the teachers who contributed to the wiki will have the best resourced subjects in the school!

The only problem that Judith and Reina found was that the initial wiki grew so large that it had to be split into two; years 7-10 and years 11-12.

Ning – create your own social network

Forget MySpace and Facebook! You can now create your own social network. Whether it be for staff communication or professional development purposes, or for student learning, Ning can provide you with all the tools you need to crate your own social network.

Have a look at the Ning for the Educators’ Guide to Innovation.

ning2

As with any Web 2.0 tool, the privacy of both students and staff need to be addressed before entering full names, photos and other information. Please note that users of Ning need to be over 13 years of age. As of July 2010, Ning will be charging for most nings, but there is said to be a sponsored deal for schools in the pipeline.