http://www.flickr.com/photos/johanl/138132641/

I’ve been thinking about posting about this issue since I read this article in the local paper. In summary, commercial radio stations want to ditch the 25% Australian music quota requirement that has been in place for a long time now. This naturally has the local music industry calling foul but the issue is complicated by the fact that the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) has exempted digital radio stations from the same requirement.

I’m not a big listener to radio but I do enjoy Australian music and I’m sure that radio does have a fair bit to do with how Aussie bands fair in the marketplace. 25 per cent is a reasonable ask but does the radio industry have a point in an age where anyone with an internet connection can tap into music from any of the web based radio stations out there. I’ve often used YouTube as a way of exploring new music and reacquainting myself with some classics from the past – and I’m not required to adhere to any quota.

So, this is the internet and I’ll do my bit for Australian music. I can usually ignore whatever is on the charts anyway so I’ll leave you with four reasons why you should ensure that your own music lists have a bit of Aussie in it. (And I won’t insult you by including anything from TV talent shows.)

Enjoy.

For the same reason that I set boundaries in my face to face interactions with students, I maintain some sense of professional separation in online spaces. I’d encourage you to consider carefully you and your community’s comfort as you intentionally choose the public faces of your online self. And, whatever you decide, please communicate it to the students and families in your care. Make sure your administrators know what — and where and how — you’re doing.

My response:

Bud, a number of teachers I work with use Facebook as their main entry point onto the internet and they treat it very much in the way that more experienced social media experts warn us that our students are using it – to let off steam, to let their hair down – without realising that it is not just their close circle of friends who may be watching. They would argue that it is their right to treat Facebook as part of their private, non-school life without being bound by a higher behaviour code than their non-school acquaintances and family members. So party pics, expletive laden comments and membership of dodgy “likes” still abound in their accounts – it makes it hard to be giving out advice to students about “be careful about what you post” when they don’t see that everything posted onto this one site is forming a very comprehensive digital footprint. But then again, for a few teachers teaching is just a job, not a calling, so naively believing that one can separate one’s private from professional in the digital world is probably not surprising.

It always seems unfair to hold educators to higher levels of conduct than the general population, especially when it doesn’t seem to make much difference to the public perceptions of the profession. But we are in a different era now. Kids used to think that teachers lived at the school and had no private life. But now without some carefully considered lines drawn in the sand, kids now have access to anything that an educator chooses to post online. Saying that one is entitled to a private life doesn’t make a lot of sense if you don’t actually take some measures to keep it private. We all know Facebook is the least private place going around.

View My Journey As An Educator in a larger map

I was thinking that this could be a great tool for so many things – great for SOSE, mapping locations from stories, creating narratives, histories, mathematical journeys etc. This has been blogged thoroughly by the talented Silvia Tolisano, and this project could also kick start some great story telling and learning. I could imagine some powerful stories from my school’s multicultural student population tracing their family’s journey to Adelaide – although many have histories that may not be pleasant to re-visit so sensitivity is always required. An upper primary colleague now wants me to work with her class using Google Maps. I like the look of the Map Maker as well, especially as it comes with plenty of self help documentation. And if I knew how to create the required XML file, then something like Map My Life would be possible.

In an age where we are concerned about privacy and the role that closed circuit video has in our society for catching wrong doers, it is ironic that people think nothing of the potential surveillance in people’s hands and pockets in the form of their smartphones. So, when things swung out of control in Vancouver, those “caught up in the moment” never considered that their actions captured and uploaded to the web might come back to bite them on the backside. One of the sites that Stephen points to is run by Captain Vancouver, who combines the actions of naming and shaming real people behind the protection of an online alias. Here, commenters sway between admiration for this new form of online accountability or the reviling of an online vigilante squad caught up in their own moment of “seeking justice”. I’m still not sure where I sit because some of the actions of those participating were so moronic and lacking in any moral fibre that seeing some form of justice dished out seems to be perfectly defensible. But then the comments take their own dark turn and the Captain’s intents are being hijacked by others and turned into racist, misogynist, homophobic attacks that undermine the moral high ground that the site’s owner wants to be able to maintain.

In a lot of ways, the rioters who posted about their own antics on Facebook and Twitter have messed in their own nest, and are reaping the consequences in more ways than they ever could have anticipated. It is a fascinating insight into mob human behaviour. People behaved as if they were truly anonymous, unleashing their most inappropriate and hedonistic actions on property, public and private – and what I’ve viewed across the web, there is certainly no stereotypical rioter. In fact, most of the names and faces that crop with regularity seem to be bright, ordinary people – kids still at high school, people working for charities and university students. Did they fail to notice the array of mobile phones held high recording moments for posterity? Except posterity is now a Facebook profile, or a Twitpic link or a YouTube upload. And are the bystanders whose footage is now being used in the digital witchhunt just as guilty for standing by and being part of the rebellion? Or were they adopting the position of citizen journalists?

http://www.flickr.com/photos/tzofia/5840853460/

So the rioters had their fun, the police dispersed them eventually and the mainstream press filed their reports. But many net savvy citizens were very unhappy about the way that individuals had not only trashed their city but gleefully shared their antics for anyone in the world to see. So, the various shaming sites I mentioned before started to spring up. Some merely had the goal of posting clear pics of persons of interest asking if anyone recognising them to contact the Vancouver Police Department.

http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/2011-06-22-facebook-vancouver-riots_n.htm

Just five days after the June 15 riot that plunged the Canadian city into three hours of chaos, police had received 3,500 e-mails that included 53 videos, 708 photographs and 1,011 hyperlinks to social media sites such as Facebook.

Now police have warned outraged residents to avoid using social media to exact vigilante justice. Authorities “are asking the public to resist the temptation to take justice into their own hands,” the police said in a statement.

Others, like Captain Vancouver, decided that some meticulous research across varying forms of social media held to some personally defined standards would be the way to ensure that these everyday people were held to some form of justice. These sites weren’t buying the “I was caught up in the moment” reasons offered by some identified and also felt that the court system would merely give out a “slap on the wrist” for anyone who was arrested anyway. But there is always the risk of getting the facts wrong, as the police found out.

So, maybe not quite uberveillance but another cross-pollination of mobile devices combined with social media mixed in with old fashioned mob rule produces results that spiral and viral way beyond the control of any individual whose profile can be matched. I mean, what are the odds of wearing the same outfit when stealing from a store as on your social media profile? And someone is ready to mix and match the whole concoction together in another example of internet remix interactivity.

Name That Moron Screengrab

For me, it started with books mixed with the occasional dose of television back in a fairly isolated childhood back on the farm. My first impressions of what life might be like in the English countryside were shaped by Enid Blyton books and popular music culture via Molly Meldrum and the weekly Countdown Top Ten. I was so insulated in this rural, Lutheranised existence that when I started Year Five at the Appila Rural School (school population: 13 kids) I had no answer to the typical Australian playground question, “Who do you barrack for?” My then best friend went for the Port Adelaide Magpies and so I did. His favourite player was Russell Ebert and so he became mine. Saturday afternoon SANFL broadcasts on the radio and Saturday evening replays suddenly opened up a part of the world that I had no idea existed.

So information flowed to me through newspapers, radio, books, films and television, painting a collective picture of the world beyond my day to day experiences. My concepts of other countries, of other places, of other people were all shaped by this information drip feed. And I thought that I was pretty well informed although in reality, my grasp was pretty opaque in its clarity.

Contrast that now to the view of the outside world that I now get through digital technologies. Much has been written about the fire hose effect of the web but the freedom I now have to pursue any line of research or interest that I want is bringing my learning to an unparallelled level. A concept or topic might come up in conversation and via the internet, I can be tracking down digital pieces to bring together a richer and deeper understanding. Maybe a few examples paint the picture about how the web can fill in the gaps of comprehension.

A few years ago, my class were covering an inquiry unit on the plight of refugees and we were lucky enough to have a student teacher of Serbian background whose family had fled war torn Sarajevo speak to the students about her experiences. That talk prompted my own curiosity and via the web, I easily found articles, video clips and images that helped to grasp some (definitely not all) of the wider perspective of an extremely complex situation.  I could read first hand accounts from multiple perspectives, view the work of photojournalist Ron Haviv or view any number of first hand home video accounts on YouTube. All of this adds up to a much more complex and informative picture than any sanitised television special or reference book could provide.

Digital information and media delivers more detail, more avenues to explore and a greater opportunity for self-participation in the pursuit of learning than mere paper based text or traditional media can deliver alone. That does not mean that traditional outlets don’t have a part to play in my expanding knowledge of the world that I cannot see, touch or feel on a daily basis but my greatest moments of clarity happen more and more online. Individuals who I have never met face to face offer insights into their personal life that enable me to peek into the ordinary and mundane (to them anyway) parts of their everyday life that I find personally interesting and insightful. Be it Doug Noon’s descriptions of an Alaskan winter, the first snow fall in Chris Harbeck’s Winnipeg, Sue Waters’ tweets about American Coke or Leigh Blackall’s family trip to the Philippines, I get a little taste of the world beyond my limited suburban Australian vista.

It does reinforce the old adage that the more you know, the more you start to realise that you don’t know very much of what there is to know. The internet is the greatest repository of human knowledge ever assembled and traversing its vastness one network link at a time is all one person can do.

It’s in the February edition and below is a screen grab of the column. I’ve then copied the article into a easier to read image if you actually want to read it or you can check out the whole virtual version of the magazine here.

Although like Animoto, all of the heavy lifting is done for you, this tool has some potential in the classroom. There’s all sorts of talk around the need for primary school students to have “digital literacy” skills and be able to extract meaning from more than just text, and I could see Qwiki as a way of introducing a topic, analysis of a concept, making reading Wikipedia more engaging, assisting kids with reading difficulties and looking at how the actual Qwiki could be improved to effectively communicate about its topic.

For example, I did a quick search for Australia Day.

When it finishes, it shows a number of related Qwiki shows that can help add context to the original, like the Day Of Mourning or even why Geoffrey Blainey‘s point of view was quoted. While this tool should not substitute effective research, I think that students would find it a useful starting point for topical research within a number of curriculum areas.

Qwiki also has a process for improvement and users can add suggestions for better images, relevant YouTube footage or even the correct pronunciation of key words. (Even Oprah Winfrey managed the correct pronunciation for Melbourne the other night – Mel-bn, not Mel-born.) Student discussion around these points can be a useful part of analysing the role of imagery and audio in conveying information. I’ll be trying it out at some stage and I’ll post some reflections here when I do.

The open web created by idealist geeks, hippies and academics, who believed in the free and generative flow of knowledge, is being overrun by a web that is safer, more controlled and commercial, created by problem-solving pragmatists.

These are the pragmatists who would be happy to see RSS die before the casual web user becomes aware enough to see its worth. (Another link from Stephen’s Daily Newsletter.)

I’m not much of a futurist but I certainly wonder about the impact of the corporatised  internet within the next decade on people like myself who have found a niche on the open web. The uncertainty surrounding delicious is certainly a indication that learners need to be nimble and adaptable in order to keep their free ranging options open. I can see a future where teachers who haven’t started blogging and sharing resources won’t need to bother because self hosting and options like Edublogs will be too difficult to access, audience too difficult to find and networks too hidden behind service barriers. Facebook and Twitter will set the blueprint for short drips of information, inane games and “Likes” that strip meaningful connection back to quick wordbites and image overload.

Net neutrality is a big deal. We may look back at the Web 2.0 phenomenon as an exciting period where anyone could publish to the web while still maintaining control and integrity. It may be that if I have say, Bigpond, as my internet provider, I can only get the Bigpond filtered and ratified web. More open independent ISPs may become niche expensive services as the mass population weaned onto a diet of of Apple and Android apps, or social media one stop shops find that cheap, corporation sponsored internet is all they know or care about. Where one can actually find an authoring or sharing site, one will need to sign over all intellectual property rights to the megawebcorporation overlord before one can even say “Hello World.” All of this digital citizenry stuff could well be beyond the skill set of the average educator. Don’t worry, Google will provide a set of online lesson plans for us to follow and then the kids can add another sponsored widget onto their online portal.

We can only hope that human ingenuity will prevail over the insatiable need for profit. Facebook has a powerful grip for now, but as soon as users decide that another service is newer, shinier and cooler, then that particular walled garden will need to re-invent itself (like MySpace) or face irrelevance as the users flock to the new service. But the trend towards capturing audience for the benefit of advertisers is now everyday with the public so used to social media games, getting free virtual dollars for favouriting consumer products and connecting to vague acquaintances. The KMarts and Targets of the world try to cater for everything a consumer would need in one place – there is a huge possibility that the online world will adopt the worst aspects of the offline, face to face world where giant corporations control far more than they should. I’d like an internet that is more like a countryside dotted with quaint, unique little hamlets and villages than an internet with a few major cities and miles of soulless freeway.