e-safety

e-Safety Guidance: Supporting Learners on the Autistic Spectrum

Posted on by Josie Fraser

Star-1024x599

Yesterday saw the launch of the Childnet STAR Toolkit . The toolkit offers practical advice and teaching activities to help schools explore internet safety with young people on the autism spectrum. The launch took place at Leicester’s New Walk Museum, in the beautifully just-refurbished Victorian Art Gallery.

The STAR toolkit is one of Leicester City Council’s DigiLit Leicester projects, a professional  development approach designed to make sure that staff have the confidence and skills to get the most out of the investment being made in technology for schools through the city’s Building Schools for the Future Programme. Childnet worked closely with three of Leicester’s SEN schools – Ellesmere College, Nether Hall School and West Gate School, to design the resource.

Will Gardner, CEO of Childnet, said:

“The Childnet STAR toolkit is designed to give schools the building blocks they need to develop a tailored approach to online safety for their pupils with ASD. By working with Leicester City Council and three fantastic schools in Leicester we have been able to develop a practical online toolkit that addresses the online risks faced by young people living with autism spectrum disorder, such as cyberbullying, contact by strangers and exposure to inappropriate content. Importantly, this resource is available to all UK schools free online. Through the teaching activity ideas and forum we want to encourage educators across the country to use these resources, and also to feedback and share their ideas and materials so we can collectively and collaboratively provide excellent e-safety education for young people with ASD.”

The STAR Toolkit

The STAR Toolkit is designed to assist teachers in educating their pupils with ASD about the internet and support them in managing online risks.

The four sections –  Safe, Trust, Action and Respect – all feature the concept of friendship and emphasise the importance of finding the balance between online and offline interactions. At the same time, the resource promotes a positive, fun and safe experience for young people with ASD.

The online resource includes a forum to encourage educators to share their teaching ideas and how they have used and adapted the STAR Toolkit in their educational setting. This will provide a platform for sharing best practices in online safety for those working with young people with ASD.

The resource is licensed under a Creative Commons License.

Launch event in Leicester

The event was opened by Councillor Vi Dempster, Leicester’s Assistant City Mayor with responsibility for children, young people and schools. Councillor Dempster said:

“I’m really pleased to be launching this innovative resource as part of our commitment to transform learning through the Building Schools for the Future Programme.

“It’s vitally important that we keep young people safe online. This resource will help to tackle some of the challenges involved in ensuring young learners who could be more vulnerable are aware of the risks.”

“It will help make sure that all our learners get the chance to benefit from the many positive learning opportunities the internet can offer.”

Twitter for School Staff Professional Development

Posted on by Josie Fraser

All school staff benefit from engagement with continuing professional development (CPD) – keeping up to date in their subject and curriculum area, and in teaching approaches and methods. Web and mobile based technologies have changed the landscape for school staff in terms of how they can connect to other educators both locally and across the globe. Personal learning networks (PLN), developed and managed by educators, allow school staff to discover, discuss and share relevant ideas, resources and approaches.

Twitter is jam packed with educators from all over the country and world, who are interested in sharing with and learning from colleagues. I ran two Twitter for Educators CPD sessions in March, designed to support staff in using Twitter in developing their professional networks. The workshops support work around the DigiLit Leicester project sixth framework strand – Technology supported Professional Development, and were designed to help staff improve their confidence and skills in this area.

Two sessions were held at De Montfort University: a beginner workshop, aimed to get staff up and running with Twitter and to introduce the basics and an intermediate workshop, offering essential tips and tools for improving the Twitter experience.

Create your Twitter Presence

This session was aimed at absolute beginners and assumed no prior use of Twitter. Staff were walked through the sign up process and introduced to the basics: creating a username, choosing an avatar (profile picture) and writing a 160 character biography. The interface and functionality of the site were explored through a desktop tour.

Twitter worksheet

Understanding the component parts of a tweet is important for beginners wanting to get to grips with the service. This Twitter basics worksheet (word) was created to help staff identify and become familiar with the key conventions used in tweets.

Twitter tips focused on the use of Twitter as an educator, and issues relating to online behaviour and identity for educators. These include advice about connecting to and communication with students, parents and carers,  and validity checking information before retweeting.

Developing your Personal Learning Networks (PLN) on Twitter

The second session was designed for staff who are familiar with Twitter basics and already have profiles. This session focused on engaging with school communities on Twitter and using the site to establish and develop personal learning networks.

This session included a discussion about tools and approaches to help staff manage and work with Twitter: goo.gl – Google’s URL shorting service which provides users with useful, basic engagement measures,  a review of mobile  and desk-based clients, and sites for saving and sharing useful tweets.We also reviewed Twitter user info using this Twitter network building worksheet (word).

 

Bonus links:

 

e-Safety: The Critical Agenda

Posted on by Josie Fraser

I'm delighted to be curating the Digital Safety strand at Learning Without Frontiers, an international festival of learning and technology, taking place in London January 9th-11th. I very much hope to see some of you there, but if you can make it in person or not I hope you'll join in the discussions.

The first session, running from 9.45am – 10.45am on the 11th, is titled e-Safety: The Critical Agenda. The session gives some of the UK's foremost practitioners in the field of e-Safety an opportunity to propose and defend what they think are the most important issues facing e-safety research, policy and practice today.

Chaired by David White (senior manager, TALL, University of Oxford), the panel includes Will Gardner (CEO Childnet International), Sonia Livingstone (Head, Department of Media and Communications LSE) Annika Small, Director Nominet Trust. Each speaker will propose the two issues or topic areas they believe to be amongst the most important current e-safety concerns and defend their priorities. 

Everyone is welcome to join in and contribute to the debate. We'll be taking questions and discussion from 10.15, with comments and questions welcome via Twitter – the conference tag is #lwf11.

We'd also like you to vote! Please let us know what your top three e-safety priorities are – you can also submit your own e-safety priority area.

Voting will close at 11am on the 11th of January so that the results can be announced/posted at the start of the second session.

Here are the panels selections. You can vote from this post under the descriptions, or open the vote selections in a new window by clicking here.

Josie Fraser:

  • Address geolocation services

Geolocation services offer many interesting opportunities for learning and interacting.  However, they also raise some serious issues – about personal safety, about privacy, and about just how well we understand and manage service settings. Geolocation services can currently be considered emblematic of the lag between new and emerging technological practices and tools and public and educational policy and practice. Because of the seriousness of their potential misuse, we must prioritise ensuring both independent and service provider information about effectively managing risks is available to children, young people, parents and educators.

  • Network responsibility not just personal responsibility

e-Safety is often regarded as an issue of personal responsibility. However, unlike other safety issues, many areas of digital safety and cyberbullying characteristically take place within networks. We should focus on supporting the skills to operate successfully within networks – including taking responsibility for looking out for all members within those networks. This approach requires reviewing how we respect others digital identities and privacy, and how we negotiate issues of consent.

Will Gardner:

  • Parents and carers remain a priority 

There has been a lot of work aimed at parents particularly in the UK, including with the UK Council's Zip it, Block it, Flag it campaign, Childnet’s Know IT All for Parents, as well as a range of other initiatives and information, including from service providers. Yet this need is a continual one as parents and carers continue to have a key role.

  • Increase the trust and transparency in reporting to service providers.

Research shows that reporting to service providers by young people is currently not high. In the social networking world, where moderation provided by service providers is limited and a reliance is put on the user community to self-moderate, it is vital that the reporting process becomes as transparent as possible.

Sonia Livingstone

  • Reaching younger children

The age at which children first go online, and use social media sites and services, is decreasing. This raises new challengers for educators and parents to find appropriate ways to discuss issues such as sexuality, pornography, violence and drugs that, previously we’ve hoped to leave until post-primary school. My research suggests that, although few young children encounter online risks, when they do it is particularly upsetting for them. Additionally, parents and carers will not necessarily be aware when children have encountered upsetting material.  Addressing safety advice to young children therefore raises new and pressing challenges.

  • Engaging with already vulnerable children and young people

Research shows that children and young people who are vulnerable or at risk offline are also likely to be more at risk online. While many children will encounter something online that bothers or upsets them, most are reasonably well able to deal with it. However, those who are vulnerable, lacking in social support or facing other difficulties may lack resilience, or even seek to engage in high risk activities.  Already vulnerable children and young people may well be particularly in need of safety advice to address online risks, and may also be one of the hardest to engage groups.

Anikka Small:

  • Integrating e-Safety into Digital Literacy

Nationally, we need a greater emphasis on digital literacy and e-safety should be a key part of this – and not considered as a stand alone issue. The digital landscape is changing all the time and young people need to be equipped to cope with – and contribute to – this dynamic environment.

  • Engaging young people in e-safety discussions

In order for e-Safety advice to be relevant and remain up-to-date, it is  critical that we ensure young people are involved in the identification, co-design and sharing of digital safety resources and practices.

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Many thanks to everyone who took the time to vote and to come along to the session! The vote results are below:
eSafety the critical agenda - vote results

Should you friend your students? The short answer is no

Posted on by Josie Fraser

Earlier this year I delivered a further cyberbullying guidance document on behalf of Childnet International for the UK Government's Department for Children, Schools and Families. The Guidance follows up (and designed to compliment) cyberbullying guidance, a comprehensive document  that formed part of the Safe To Learn: Embedding anti-bullying work in schools suite of advice. While the initial document was really well received both within the UK & internationally, teachers unions and associations were increasingly being asked to deal with school employee cyberbullying cases – in which the staff member was the person being victimised. I welcomed the opportunity to produce further guidance which would both support employees in term of basic digital literacy information and encourage employers to meet their statutory obligations. The document set out, ambitiously, to encourage policy and procedure be put in place for preventing and dealing with cyberbullying as a whole school community issue – which includes meeting and recognising the specific needs, rights and responsibilities of employees. In no other area of harassment would it be acceptable for an employee to be expected to deal with cases that rose within the work place on their own – yet the reports from school staff included cases where cyberbullying was not taken seriously or understood, and where they had been expected to sort out situations for themselves.

Cyberbullying: Supporting School Staff (PDF) was released in April this year (Google doc version here).  I've been talking about the document a lot recently, and I want to just explore in a little more detail the thinking behind the advice given to school employees regarding friending students in social networking services. The actual text is (with my emphasis):

‘Friending’ refers to the act of giving contacts permission to view information or contact you within web-based services. The terminology will vary from service to service – ‘Friends’ may be called contacts or connections, for example. Most social sites enable you to give different levels of access and set privacy levels on your own content and activity. These functions will vary from service to service but typically include:
•     Information that is only available to the account holder
•     Information that is accessible by contacts on the account
holder’s approved list, and
•     Information that is made publicly available, either within
the service or across the whole of the internet.

‘Friends’ does not necessarily refer in this case to people who are your actual friends, although you may choose to restrict your connections to that. ’Friends’ in this context may also be work colleagues, family members, and people that you have met online.

If you have a social networking account, do not friend pupils or add them to your contact lists. You may be giving them access to personal information and allowing them to contact you inappropriately. They may also be giving you access to their personal information and activities

So the text above outlines three basic levels of permissions granularity that can be found on most sites, gives a definition of friending, and very explicitly says don't friend pupils. This is explicitly prescriptive advice, based on the case studies reviewed during the document negotiations, and an implicit understanding that the school staff accounts referred to are either personal, or contain elements of personal activity (I previously posted on a definition of three basic online identities, characterised as personal, professional, and organisational).

The approach taken then – don't friend pupils – reflects the kind of boundaries between staff and learners that we'd expect to see in offline behavior. You wouldn't expect a teacher to give a school aged pupil their home phone number, show them pictures of their friends or regale them with the weekends social exploits. Obviously friending isn't the only issue here – managing publicly available information so that you are comfortable with what co-workers, learners and employers can access about you is also addressed in the document. The research and anecdotal evidence indicates that we operate within social network services as if we were in a closed, private world. This isn't naive – I think it's a necessary fiction which makes social networking services human spaces. The do not friend advice is there to reinforce the message that private online is typically back of a post-card private, especially if we are within environments where we're not entirely sure who has permission to see what (*cough*Facebook*cough). It also reflects the leakiness of our online identities, the way in which the personal is often hand in hand with the professional.

What the advice isn't trying to do is to put anyone off evaluating social networking services to see if they could support learning & teaching effectively. The advice goes on to state:

If you want to use web-based social networking sites for a class or for the whole school, use a service that doesn’t give contacts access to personal information and updates, or allows collaboration without requiring permissions.

Alternatively ask pupils to create new, work-focused accounts for themselves, and run them as they would an online portfolio or CV.

You can find more information and advice about Social Network Services at www.digizen.org/socialnetworking.

The problem with the mother

Posted on by Josie Fraser

Protection

Link love: This post builds on the case study I contributed to the Eduserv workshop on Digital Identities at the British Library today. Everyone's case studies are lodged over at the Pattern Language Network site, along with Yishay's Slidedeck pattern language tutorial on writing a case study. It also moves forward some observations I made in my post Pictures of Children Online a couple of years ago.

From the workshop intro:

"We use the term ‘digital identity’ to refer to the online
representation of an individual within a community, as adopted by that
individual and projected by others. An individual may have multiple
digital identities in multiple communities.

Eduserv have recently funded three projects on digital identity as
a result of our 2008 grants call. This workshop will help the projects
gather case-studies about the ways in which digital identity is
currently manifest in UK higher education.

This event is aimed at people who have an interest in the issues
around digital identity in higher education including employers, HR
staff, careers guidance staff, standards experts, students and
academics.

Prior to the workshop we will be collecting a series of “stories”
about digital identity from people attending the event. On the day, we
will be working in groups to discuss and add to the series. Following
this, we will analyse the stories in order to find reoccurring themes
or patterns."

The group I worked with looked at two case studies, my own and Controlling Flickr Contacts, from Margarita Perez Garcia. 

Case Study: other people's identities

Summary:   
This study looks at issues of parental responsibility & identity disavowal
Created 08 Jan 2009 by Josie Fraser
 
Situation:
What was the setting in which this case study occurred?

Like most people working in the field of social media, I have a purposefully easy to find online presence. I belong to multiple social networks, for work, for research, and for experience. The social networks (& I’m using a broad definition here, as outlined in http://www.digizen.org/socialnetworking/ )  I use most frequently are typically those that I can also most easily repurpose and use to maintain a constantly updated pubic presence – Twitter, Fickr, my own blogs, Delicious. Probably more importantly though, they are also the ones that allow me to socialise, discuss, hang out and meet new people. I started using the internet about 12 years ago to socialise, prompted by the physical limitations of being a single mother, of being broke all the time and not having a social or family network. For me the experience of being online was an extremely positive and liberating one, & remains so.

Task:
What was the problem to be solved, or the intended effect?

The primary issue was wanting to protect my son from harm, in the broadest sense, and to act respectfully towards him.

I am used to belonging to self-determined communities of people who I like and respect, who I often know exclusively or primarily online. It might seem like an obvious extension of my friendship and relationship building to share stories and pictures of my son, and to model a sense of my everyday experience – which heavily features the joys and logistics of motherhood -online.

However, there are several reasons why I don’t do this. Firstly, there’s thorny the issue of consent, and how my son negotiates and understands this at different points I his life.

There are also ethical, or just straightforwardly thoughtful, considerations. My mum has a particularly embarrassing picture of me that haunted the whole of my childhood. As an adult, I’m ok with it (no, really). Thankfully my mum was mostly sensitive about my particular loathing of this picture and didn’t get it out at every available opportunity – if she’d have put it online I can imagine I would have been mortified. Maybe not at the time she put it up, but certainly a few years down the line, and especially if anyone from my school had come across it.

There's also the issue of digital presence. Is it up to us to contribute to our children’s digital presence? Would you have liked your parents contributing to what searches of you might return? Perhaps by now I would have loved that embarrassing picture of myself – maybe it would have come to mean something entirely different to me. But at different points in my life it certainly wouldn’t have been at all welcome.

The other obvious issues are internet related child abuse and bullying. I’m very much against a moral-panic approach to using technology, and I also think it’s very important that we evaluate and regard risks appropriately. While the vast majority of child abuse takes place entirely offline, and is typically perpetrated by the victims family or immediate circle, that’s also no reason to dismiss the chances of a child or young person we know coming into contact with someone who could harm them. We take steps to educate them about a range of strategies they can use to look out for themselves in their offline and online dealings. In the same way, we need to model good practice ourselves.

Another reason for ‘protecting’ my son and not talking about being a mother was linked to financial insecurity. My career is on the way to being well established, and I’ve proven that I can manage to raise a child ‘alone’ (I moved closer to my mum and sister, so I have the luxury of a support network now) and so it worries me less that people might judge me and choose not to employ me because of my status as a single mother.

Actions:
What was done to fulfil the task?

Initially, I kept all pictures of my son strictly within private, friends or family only permissions on Flickr. This has changed – I have a couple of pictures of my son as a small child in public. I’m similarly careful about the rest of my young family members too – I posted a picture of my  then 14 year old niece last year only to have it immediately favourited by a complete pervert. I removed the picture from public view, and blocked the pervy guy.

Similarly I don’t really talk about being a mother, although I’ve noticed this changing as my son becomes more independent himself.

Basically, I negated any public online identity that explicitly represented me as a mother for a long time.

Results:
What happened? Was is a success? What contributed to the outcomes?
    
Yes, it worked very well, since I have been consistent and systematic , had clearly defined rules about representing my son which I’ve stuck too. However, my son is getting older, his and my identities are both significantly shifting, and I’m wondering about ‘not having been a mother’. Was it just a handy tactic, or was it a cowardly disavowal of parenthood?  Is ‘being a mother’ in this sense important? For me, or for others?

Lessons Learned:
What did you learn from the experience?

Protecting your children online is actually really easy; watch out for the political speculation.

As we worked through stories to patterns, a very strange thing happened – the role of motherhood disappeared. And this was very clearly another compromise on behalf of the child – in order to demonstrate the meta pattern/problem concerning the protection of the child, we had to make the troublesome issue of the mother go away. The problem of the mother turned out to be that she was the mother. The problem wasn't one that could be solved outside the context of wide spread social and political change. So our title became Others First Managing the tensions between identity & personal responsibility, where identity is enmeshed and shaped by, in this explicit case, the vulnerable other of the child. From this it's possible to extrapolate the pattern on to a broader context – for example, anyone who needs to manage their own or another's online identity or personal safety. If we had more time we could have extended the pattern to look at different kinds of identity management – for example the management of being gay within a homophobic society, the management of responsible friendship etc.

What really struck me today was how the solution to effective protection – that could be interperated as concealment, repression, or confinement to specific circles, mirrors and perpetuates existing social inequalities – making already under represented and less visible groups – namely children and mothers in this case, though I'd argue the same strategy can be applied to a lot of other troublesome identities/bodies – as shadowy in online public spaces as they are off line.