Connected Blog

As part of a series of posts, we examine the latest research on how young people and the wider population in the UK use the internet, and what it means for Local Authorities, schools and teachers.

Age-by-age: what do parents feel about their children using the net?
Early years’ parents
“Viruses and breaking the machine”
Concerns of parents of younger children (7 to 8 years) tended to be quite basic, i.e. focusing on breaking the computer or downloading viruses. They did not expect their children to surf much or really experiment although some had begun to try to communicate some of the basic rules around safety and had banned
certain sites.

Later Primary parents
“Accidental stumbling”
Parents of children in this age group (9-11 years) were beginning to feel more concerned about their
children stumbling across inappropriate material or being exposed to paedophile activity. However, they still felt reasonably confident about being in a position to monitor and control their children’s internet activity.

Parents of secondary
“Inappropriate communication”
The parents in the sample who expressed the greatest levels of concern were those whose children were in early secondary school. Parents of younger teens were particularly concerned about social networking sites and gaming communities. Their concerns centred around: Inappropriate sharing of personal details; the risks of befriending a paedophile; and the posting of inappropriate images.
They felt that the changing lifestage (and a growing interest in the opposite sex) coupled with their growing knowledge and confidence in using the internet meant a greater potential for inappropriate behaviour on-line. (Parental knowledge decreases here)
Parents of and children in the 10 to 15 year old age group were also particularly concerned about cyberbullying. (Mostly on MSN chat)
Most teenagers were confident that if they did end up somewhere they didn’t want to be they could just click away.

Parents of senior secondary
“Let them get on with it”
Parents of the oldest children in the sample felt that there was less they could do
to control their children’s safe use of the internet and tended to assume that their
children would be more aware and sensible by this point anyway. They were
more prepared to turn a blind eye and ‘let them get on with it’.

As part of a series of posts, we examine the latest research on how young people and the wider population in the UK use the internet, and what it means for Local Authorities, schools and teachers.

66% of 15-24 year olds have broadband and about 82% of them have Social Networking Service (SNS) profile. Most 16-17 yrs have a profile (67%).
15% of very young children (6-11 yrs) have used Bebo, 4% have used Facebook and 8% have used MySpace. By 12 yrs most kids can describe what a SNS is, although they don’t know the term. Most adults don’t have a SNS but are more likely to if their children do (is for the purposes of snooping?).

The most likely intellectual rejectors of social networks are older teens. In social networks most people have between 1-20 friends.

Mobile net use
24% are concerned that the existing ways of controlling the web would not have any effect on the many young people accessing the net on their mobile phones. Many of those who don’t use the net (this tends to be the older generations) are most likely to also not use mobile technology. Those who do use mobile phones use them most for (2007 compared to 2005):

• Sending texts (83%, up from 79)
• Taking pictures (60%, up from 38%)
• Sending photos (44%)
• Playing games (27%, down from 28%)
• Listening to music (25%)
• Accessing email or the net (15%, up from 11%)

Acceptable Use Policies (AUPs)
100% of schools should have Acceptable Use Policies that are regularly reviewed, monitored and agreed with parents and students.

A child starts planning the storyboard, while another begins cutting some archived film. Two other classmates seek out some images on the net. Each student in this group, like all those students who attend Islay High School, are using their own Ultra Mobile PC (UMPC), which they bring to and from school to provide a continuous portable base for their work.

But this is not just a story about cool gadgetry – this is a school which has changed itself entirely in the past five years.

I was taking in all of this on Friday, the same day the school won Learning and Teaching Scotland’s Ambition Awards at the Scottish Education Awards. I was joined by John Johnston, primary school teacher and blogger from Glasgow’s Sandaig Primary School, whose account shows how visits like these can lead to new practices in schools many miles away. Krysia and Doug Semple also joined us along with John’s Head Teacher; blog posts to follow, I hope…

But what grabbed us all was the scope of change. First, everyone in the school community (that’s students, teachers and parents, too) is part of a grand peer-assessment ring, with the UMPC acting as a show-and-tell hub for the work and discussions that took place at school that day. Using OneNote, students can capture text notes, audio and video from their classes, with teachers as accomplices in the recording of their explanations and discussions. All too often, the thought of having a teacher recorded on the fly by a student would have the teacher confiscating the device doing the recording. Here, it is celebrated, with OneNote allocating each segmentof audio to each relevant paragraph.

Students can be heard sharing secret numerical codes – their machine’s unique IP Address – so that such documents can be shared and edited collaboratively in real time. This is how students brainstormed and created storyboards collaboratively, keeping all their progress for future analysis in their review of their work thus far.

Andy Wallis, the English teacher running this excited film-making adventure, brings the class to a brief pause, to encourage them to video their own discussions for the next few minutes. It’s a real eye-opener for those who have been hogging discussions, providing a spotlight moment for those who’ve been a little quieter until now. As they say, the camera doesn’t lie. Another piece of evidence for for the formative assessment pile.

It’s not just pedagogy that has changed to make learning work here; the timetable has seen the beginnings of change. Wednesday and Friday afternoons are curious times for the uninitiated: students who, when I was at school, even had separate social areas are now collaborating on projects. It’s not uncommon to have a 14 year old S3 student working alongside a 17 or 18 year old sixth former who’s seeking to work through a brand new subject area. Here, the class you are in is decided by your level of attainment, not your age. Twice a week these afternoons offer an opportunity to expand horizons through extended project work.

As John says, it’s the overriding desire to learn which can be felt from every member of the school community that is quite overpowering – you wonder why you’ve not felt it in every school you’ve ever visited. It’s the responsibility that has been transferred to students – when they misuse their UMPCs they are subject to the ‘normal’ rules of engagement you’d find in any school. The technology has changed all the things it should do, and left some elements of school life, rightly, untouched.

This is a school where the introduction of a new piece of technology has helped introduce changes across the rest of the system. Or where the system’s changes led to the necessary introduction of the technology. You see, that’s the other thing. When change is so integrated into everyday life, it’s hard to remember what happened first.

See the rest of the photos from this trip on Flickr.

Update: Doug “DigitalMaverick” Semple has just added his extensive thoughts, too.

Get ready for Charlie Leadbeater’s keynote at this year’s Scottish Learning Festival by taking a look at this little video, which explains the complexity of the new connected world in which we live, and how we might be able to navigate around it. You can read more about these ideas from Nesta’s launch event of the book that accompanies the keynote.

Between June 9-13 you have the opportunity to help young poets from Georgia and Glasgow’s East End with their poetry. In On The Street Where You Live, young poets will write about their neighbourhoods (or should that be neighborhoods?), and you are invited to leave your two stars and a wish comments to help them on their way.

Glasgow University has announced an interesting research project looking at social networking of today in comparison to the social networking of the 19th century – conducted through the post office instead of the internet. 

The introduction to the project explains, “Social networking employs the whole range of available communications technologies to a fault; but communication has always exploited available technologies as soon as they become affordable.  From the eighteenth century diaries and correspondence increasingly contained non-textual features or were accompanied by parallel series of commonplace books and albums…. Social networks are certainly more tractable than correspondence by our contemporary postal services, but that is no good reason for concluding that they are novel.  In the nineteenth century Gladstone wrote to his wife three times a day, probably as many times as we in our 24/7 culture would wish to communicate with our partners.  Sir Walter Scott, the Duke of Wellington and Queen Victoria all conducted vast correspondence with their extended families and friends.  Social networking takes place within a public space in contrast to the apparent private space of diaries and letters; but in some contexts there are reasons to question the nature of such privacy.  Some diaries and letters seem to have been written explicitly with publication in view or at least to be read by others than the author or the intended recipient.”

The research will concentrate on a large archive in the National Library of Scotland of correspondence between an 19th-century Edinburgh family and their sister who lived in India. The correspondence includes both letters and sketches of family events, rather like the photos that people put on their blogs and Facebook/MySpace/Bebo sites today. Then the researcher will select comparable social networks and blogs operating now and compare the two.

Among the aims are to find out “Is [it] just a question of the technology employed or does the technology radically alter behaviour?  What type of content is most commonly posted to networks and how does this differ, if at all, from content kept in the analogue and will this have ramifications for future preservation strategies?  Does the apparent abandoning of ‘form’ in the digital communication reduce the trust that users place in social networks?”

 More details on the Humanities Advanced Technology and Information Institute website.

Lucy Crichton

Learning and Teaching Scotland

Sometimes it’s hard for educators to see why anyone would be interested in what they are doing, how they are teaching and what their philosophy behind learning is. For Paul Park, a Saskatchewan teacher sent to Afghanistan with the Canadian forces, blogging for his students and family must seem an obvious thing to do.

This blog provides not only interesting reportage for any student wanting to better understand what’s at stake in this war-ridden country, but the fact that Paul is on top of the comments young people and teachers are leaving means that we have an enviable reach into a conflict that, until now, we’ve experienced through spoonfed mainstream news.

Tanya Byron’s report for the Prime Minister on children, games and the net is, as yet, nowhere to be seen on the web. However, you can find out a bit more about the report and catch up with this morning’s news reports, interviews, blog and newspaper reactions.

A newly discovered blog from West Lothian led me to a newly discovered project written by the brother of an old(ish) aquaintance, and whose company is also doing some interesting work for Channel 4. If this is a sign of things to come, then we’re certainly advising the right thing on the C4 Education Board.

We Tell Stories is Six Stories based on Six Classics (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6) told in Six Different Ways through the net and written by Six Different Authors (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6), by the brothers Hon’s company Six To Start. It’s a dream for any English language and literature teacher, with one new story every week for the next six weeks.

The first week has a Google Earth-fresh lit mash-up from top Scot author Charles Cumming. The 21 Steps is based on Buchan’s The 39 Steps and takes the reader on an intriguing mystery through the streets of London and up on the plane to Edinburgh. It’s all a bit too close to home, but wonderfully done. There’s a phone clue in one chapter which I’ve just called, but gutted that the solution to the clues lies in St Pancras Station – where I’ve just dashed from this evening on my way home. Had I been playing instead of working today I’d have been unable to unlock a seventh secret story. I just wonder if the Alice character is inspired by one inspiring gamer I work with occasionally.

Almost as intriguing as the story itself is the backstory to how these six (or seven multimedia Web 2.0-ey ARG-type games have been created, and the challenges both authors and coders came up against. It would make a superb literature project for the 21st Century student seeking out a dissertation subject:

Adrian Hon, chief creative of the online games company Six to Start,
says:

“Authors don’t need to be great artists or programmers right now.
They ‘just’ need to write. To make anything more advanced than a normal
story, though, you need more skills.”

Most authors aren’t also computer
programmers, and most programmers aren’t novelists. As Hon says:

“Web
people come up with cool ideas, such as telling stories by web 2.0
series, wikis or e-mails. Twitter, but it fails because they can’t
write a good story for it.”

This needn’t be an insuperable hurdle. We
may see a new partnership added to the traditional artist-and-writer
combination for illustrated books, or musician-and-writer team for
songs. Writers could work with programmers in this new form of
storytelling.

It also kind of puts claims that Amazon’s Kindle is the innovation in e-books into stark contrast with where the real innovations can take place.

So what are these innovations? Well, the Hons see them falling into only six categories, around which one could start design one’s own interactive literature. To see how this works in the context of the first story, you can read the process involved on the creator’s own blog or get into even greater depth in the Gamasutra interview. Better still, see what others make of it from the project’s airing at BarCamp Brighton (presentation below). One of my first ever non-edublog pals Rachel covers it all beautifully.

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Thanks, Adam, for the initial tip-off and, yes, it’s something we could, in theory, adapt for Modern Languages. Watch this space. In the meantime, I think there are numerous possibilities for the Frenchies and Germanists amongst us to exploit the playing/experiencing of the adaptations of  the 1001 Nights, Hans Christian Andersen’s fairytales (I know he was a Dane, but his work and 1001 Nights formed the basis of my Honours degree dissertation into the Fairytale Since the Time Of Perrault), and Zola’s Thérèse Raquin .

The most exciting development in 21st Century Literacy this year? Probably.

Update: If you’re a teacher short of time and want to try preparing something around this, Rachel and others have worked it out and provided some spoilers. Don’t read, these, of course if you just want to experience the story.

The ScotEduBlogs site is dear to my heart. An opensource effort by teachers in Scotland to aggregate and redistribute the posting by Scottish educational blogger of all shapes, ages and sizes ScotEduBlogs has become an more than every day read for me.

At the Scottish learning Festival side dish TeachMeet07 4th Edition I made a plea for support for ScotEduBlogs. At that time it was being hosted by Jonesieboy, Robert Jones, who is also the main programmer of the site. I was approached during the dinner following Teach Meet by Joe Wilson of the The Scottish Qualifications Authority, who proposed that the SQA and Learning and Teaching Scotland should support ScotEduBlogs. Ewan who is National Adviser: Learning and Technology Futures at LTS was quick to agree.

To cut a long story short; ScotEduBlogs has now moved to its very own server which should lead to (and Robert will correct me if I am wrong) more stability, better updating etc, etc. The SQA and LTS logos now sit prettily on the ScotEduBlogs sidebar.

It might take a few days for ScotEduBlogs to settle into its new home, so if you notice anything strange let us know.

If you are a Scots Educational blogger you can do your bit to support ScotEduBlogs too:

• Make sure your blog is listed.
• Make sure the tags on your listing describe your blog.
• Link from your blog to ScotEduBlogs (there are some images and help on the wiki).
• You might want to help out by designing a new graphic or in other ways, see the wiki again.

As well as just reading the front page ScotsEduBlogs can be used in lots of other ways:

• The front page has an rss feed.
• On the Blogs page you can filter blogs by tags and get a rss feed for your tag or set of tags.
• You can even follow the ScotEduBlogs tweets on twitter.

See the wiki for more ideas.

As there are more and more ScotEduBloggers ScotEduBlogs will become more and more useful as a learning tool, enabling you to get ideas that you might not pick up through your favourite feeds.