Frances Bell’s Blog

This very interesting post http://edorigami.edublogs.org/2009/05/21/digital-citizen-acceptable-use-agreement/provoked a bit of discussion on Twitter this morning.  Andrew Churches has done some useful work on deriving an Acceptable Use Policy based on 6 tenets of digital citizenship.

“The Digital Citizen will follow six tenets of citizenship.

1. Respect yourself

2. Protect yourself

3. Respect others

4. Protect others

5. Don’t steal

6. Honour Intellectual property.” http://edorigami.edublogs.org/2009/05/04/the-digital-citizen/

I really like those tenets as, apart from #5 as Alec Couros pointed out, they are all stated positively. When these tenets are converted into an Acceptable Use Policy, I think that they can work within the specific context for which they are developed, and for a specific service.  So Andrew has developed them for ICT services at the school where he works that has already stated Christian values.  The term Digital Citizen implies behaviours that go beyond school and beyond one service, and that’s where I think the difficulties begin to creep in.  Citizenship is clearly an important part of the School curriculum (http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&q=citizenship+education&btnG=Google+Search&meta=&aq=f&oq=) with good resources developed to support it.  However, the learning of what it means to be a good citizen implies some sort of active engagement with the ideas, and some degree of flexibility in what might be (un)acceptable.

One approach to developing an AUP, shown in our work a few years ago at CABWEB (http://francesbell.com/respectingdifferencerespectingdifference/) followed Amy Jo Kim’s advice on online community policies - Create, Enforce, Evolve but wasn’t without its difficulties.  Students were asked to consider and discuss the UNESCO Principles of Tolerance.  In the event, without much tutor scaffolding, their discussion focused on their commonsense understanding of ‘tolerance’.  Discussion was lively though, and included examples of openness and peer  regulation by argument.

There is a healthy gap between declarative statements about the behaviours of citizens and policy statements for the use of ICT services, and it’s in that gap that productive dialogue can take place.  For example, “I will not visit sites that are degrading, pornographic, racist or inappropriate” is a perfectly reasonable caveat to have in a school AUP (though inappropriate is a tricky concept).  An interesting topic for (citizenship) class discussions would be the proposition “My government should prevent its citizens from visiting sites that are degrading, pornographic, racist or inappropriate”.  Educated citizens could have diverse views on that one.

I am teaching a module on Emerging Technologies and Ethics/use policies are something we shall address. Clearly AUPs are necessary and valuable but I think there is space between being an acceptable user of a service and being a digital citizen.  Come to think of it there spaces between AUPs for different services too.  The challenge is in dealing with diversity.

I have just read for the second time George Siemens post on Teaching as transparent learning.  It’s an interesting post that stresses the importance of engagement by novices and experts.

The idea of ‘experts’ talking through their learning made me think about the notion of expertise in an online course.  Even where the teacher/facilitator is an ‘expert’ most of the time, they could also genuinely be learners learning from the students in some particular aspect.  A support for this (that would also promote transparency) could be  to stress that novice / expert are roles rather than people.  Similarly ‘lurking’ does not need to be a universal behaviour.  Valid participant goals (that would make for productive dialogue) could be to make a few significant contributions over a period of time and to engage with the contributions of others, affirming or critiquing them.

I listened to part of #learntrends at http://bit.ly/42i7ke but didn’t feel moved to contribute (as corporate education/ training is a little outside my comfort zone).  It was all quite interesting and then someone pointed out that of the circa 100 participants, about 50% were women but the conversation had been male-dominated to that point. Dave (Wilkins??) was very positive about the opportunities that Web 2.0 technologies offer to women, given their communication skills, and the possibilities for more transparent recognition offered by recommender systems.

I sat up very straight at this point and tried to contribute but failed miserably with mike failure despite having done the audio wizard.  So what was I trying to say?

1. I experienced a sense of déjà vu at the sense that the web would bring liberation for women.  That was claimed the first time around but researchers like Susan Herring soon showed us that gender was not invisible even online.

2. And really, why would we expect things to be different online? There is no previous evidence of technology liberating and democratising groups in general and women in particular, despite the many examples of women making effective use of online communication.

3. A better way to find out what men and women are doing is to ask them and to observe them where we can.  Women, say, may be engaging in (semi) private spaces and so their traces may not be publicly discernible.

There are differences between tools e.g. differences in Relationship Symmetry but the significant differences are in people’s practices. If you look at men’s and women’s blogs, do you find a difference in their blogrolls - do men cite men and women cite women or what? Women can still be the subject of harassment online .

Let’s not rely on technology to bring equity for women and other groups.  Let’s invest in research  to to tell us how technology mediates changing relationships between men and women in organisations and society.

This recent Edupunk conversation rumbles on:

Stephen Downes  in OL Daily seems concerned that Martin Ebner ’s approach is insufficiently unwashed.

Graham Attwell quotes Scott Wilson’s Personal Learning and Web 2.0 presentation on how institutions can respond to Web 2.0.

I agree with Graham that the music analogy is getting stretched - I even spent some time looking into links between popular music and societal change without a huge amount of success.  My conclusions were:

• Punk probably appeals more as a metaphor to those who played/enjoyed it first time around than those of us who largely missed it during our ‘baby years’  - i.e. as parents (me) or current students (babies  and young children then)
• Making education systems more like the music industry would not necessarily be a good thing (check out volume of open content in popular music - good but limited)
• popular music can accompany and reflect social change (and did so long before punk) but that change happens often slowly and elsewhere.

So some may use Punk metaphor because thay think that it can model radical change in education - well where’s the evidence?

So what is important in the Edupunk concept?

I think that one good thing about the concept of Edupunk is that it encourages us to engage with student (and teacher) use of institutional, ‘open’, Web 2.0 and their ‘own’ technologies in constructing their personal learning environments and networks.  In doing that, we’ll need to use whatever language and metaphors fit the task in hand.

I think that many of us have the creativity and experimentation aspects of Edupunk, as we try out the latest Web 2.0 offering that visualises our social networks or lets us share our marbles collections or whatever!  What we need to keep an eye on are the reflective and critical aspects - what happens if I put my stuff there? what if the service died overnight? will that person in my photo mind being published there? Will publishing my home location and travel plans make it easier for me to be burgled? etc., etc.

In the spirit of reuse, I have dredged up and de-Salfordised an image I used in a (failed) JISC bid.  Writing the bid and drawing the diagram helped me to think about shifting boundaries for students and the role for educators in supporting students who are crossing those boundaries (like the educators themselves).

The idea that I was trying to convey was that as the boundary shifted between institutional and external web services, the boundary manifested itself to the University in two ways.  Conscious of legal issues and responsibilities (as Information Services often are), the university would want to make students aware as they crossed the hard boundary between university provided resources and services  and the World Wild Web - “You are now leaving the 21st Century University - you’re on your own now mate!”.   On the other hand, ethically, as educators we might like to regard that boundary as soft, and offer support (by way of digital literacy support activities) to students who, whilst responsible for their own actions, are still, like their teachers,  becoming cyberprofessionals (winces at word used in bid;) ).  In a shifting, changing environment, becoming is forever.

So, the Edupunk concept is important to teachers but even more to students.  What is challenging me now is the language I’ll use with students as I try to encourage (or at least not stifle) creativity and  experimentation with Web 2.0 , alongside being reflective and critical. All suggestions welcome!

I have been scratching my head to see why the term Edupunk raises vague and irrational feelings of irritation and suspicion in me.   I love the philosophy of bricolage, workarounds and experimentation that it seems to encompass.  After all the ‘poster boy’ for Edupunk, Jim Groom, has been blogging his experiments and thoughts on BuddyPress (brought to me via Joss Winn).  This is the front runner for technology support for a new module called Emerging Technologies, delivered to 450 budding Edupunks on Salford Business School in September (so I am personally grateful to Jim and Joss for their ideas and work).   Here is a selection of my grumpy tweets from yesterday, from http://search.twitter.com/search?q=francesbell+edupunk - I think just have to get over this by blogging my way through it!

Selection of my tweets on Edupunk

On Monday, there was an Emerging Mondays session on Edupunk that I missed as I was travelling with no Internet access, and so there was a little twittering about it.  I empathised with Liam Green-Hughes’  characterisation of Edupunk as a bit “Dad at Disco” uncool.   I listened to the recording of the session enjoying the thoughtful and ambitious work that is being done at TU Graz by Martin Ebner and colleagues. I also checked out Steve Wheeler’s post about what he would have said if his mike had worked.  Having checked out these and previous responses on Edupunk, I realise that I have missed a dimension that Chris Sessums captures in his response to a blog post on a previous Edupunk sessions

“Edupunk embodies this notion of educators as artists, those who intentionally trace and explore traditional boundaries and human expression. The edupunk meme signifies more than just a tart phrase pasted on the media landscape. To truly understand its meaning, you have to live it.”

That is really important, to capture the creative outlets that an edupunk approach offers to teachers and other learners.  I am prepared to live it, and am privileged to work with students in higher education who are negototiating challenging boundaries in learning, work and society.

Jim Groom’s original Glass Bees post gives an incisive analysis of the link between capital and cultural change

“I don’t believe in technology, I believe in people. And that’s why I don’t think our struggle is over the future of technology, it is over the struggle for the future of our culture that is assailed from all corners by the vultures of capital. Corporations are selling us back our ideas, innovations, and visions for an exorbitant price. I want them all back, and I want them now!”

So was I completely off beam?- I don’t think so. We could espouse the creative, experimental philosophy of edupunk by using web services like twitter and Blogger but still be vulnerable to the appropriation of content that we might wish to move elsewhere but can’t.  That is what is so appealing to me about the Buddy Press environment - although the platform can be hosted in an educational institution, the data is under the control of the individual user.  Students and staff can, with a little support, port their blogs to their own domain.  Thus, the identity they create on Buddy Press can be continued (unlike their usual experience with university accounts deleted 3 weeks after graduation).

In a follow up post, Jim Groom said

“I don’t police or control data, nor am I so concerned about scaling enterprises or the next generation of Web 2.0 tools as sold by corporations or systems of technical complexity and control. The idea is to make real, localized, and human connections that echo out into some kind of circumscribed eternity.”

If Edupunk were concerned only with the latter, then I think that Edupunks would need to join forces with those who are critiquing the control of data and the scaling of enterprises.  I do think we need hard-nosed critique of commercialism around all areas of educational technology not just monopolistic providers of Virtual Learning Environments like Blackboard.  What Tom Woodward called Client Enslavement is also called Supplier lock-in, and that sacrifice of power can happen wherever monopolies prevail - with proprietary VLEs, with ‘free’ Web 2.0 services that are bought out in the game of Googlopoly, and even possibly with Open Source software.

In any case, since we (and our students) are making choices about which particular lash up of proprietary and OS software, own-hosted and web service, controlled and given data we use, we need to acquire the knowledge, evaluation and reflection skills that will help us weave our way through it.

Edupunk is only the beginning!