privacy

Our Bad Laws Make Us Criminals

Posted by Dean Shareski on in privacy, rants 2 Comments

Lawrence Lessig has been fighting the copyright fight for a while now and often says that "outdated copyright laws have turned our kids into criminals". If you're not familiar with Lessig and his thoughts on the law and copyright, this 9 minute video will help catch you up to speed.

 

So since our laws just don't address the reality of 2012 and the digital world of sharing we enjoy, most of us carry on and don't feel the slight bit guilty for a remix video or image modification. But beyond copyright, our laws continue to create unreasonable and unrealistic parameters and ignore the realities of a digital age.

Under FIPPA, it is an offence to store or allow access to personal information outside of Canada unless it is authorized by the individual the information is about. 1

See the problem? Consider the plethora of sites that most of our best teachers are using. Be it blogs, wikis or other sites, the current environment consists of small pieces loosely joined. Even when districts attempt to host clone applications and services, there's no way they can keep up with the variety of new services and tools available for students. Certainly it's not essential for our students to use every new tool that comes to rise, but at the same time limiting their use seems antiquated. In addition, we all know students and teachers who use these tools and spaces that blend both educational and social purposes. It's not as simple as the law would like it to be.

The current laws do nothing to acknowledge today's reality. We live in the cloud and we don't particularly care where the cloud is located. Many would argue we should care. Many see privacy concerns being ignored by people like me. I don't think that's true. This once again is tied closely to helping our students and teachers develop and understand their online identities. I understand the intent of the law is to protect our information and privacy and schools do have an obligation to protect. However the challenge is that these laws completely miss the affordances and opportunities that exist for students as they publish and share online. 

In the meantime, schools, districts and teachers will choose to abide by the letter of the law, ignore it, break it or seek work arounds. I fear for those districts trying to abide by this law and in turn rob our students and teachers of learning opportunities. My own district dealt with the modification of a privacy policy to address the notion of publishing students full names. With regard to the FIPPA concerns, I know of districts and teachers working on addressing the concern by adding a simple sign off to their existing release forms. I sympathize with districts trying to sort this out. They obviously want to work within the law, protect their students and thus those mandates outweigh the effort to make the necessary change. 

I hate that our government has to make great teachers and schools feel like criminals when they simply want to provide students with the best opportunity to learn.

1 http://www.oipc.bc.ca/pdfs/public/CloudComputingGuidelines(February2012).pdf  

Understanding Lurkers

Posted by Dean Shareski on in privacy, socialnetworks 8 Comments

Almost, but not quite a follow up to my last post about stages, this snippet from Spark’s latest podcast sheds some interesting light on why people choose to lurk rather than participate. If you’re one of those who tries to persuade others to invest in social networks and embrace them, perhaps this might help, or maybe you would challenge the premise. Either way, it’s a worthwhile 3 minutes.
Gator

Academic Stages

Posted by Dean Shareski on in Blogs, Classrooms, ecmp, privacy 22 Comments

As I begin another class with pre-service teachers I was asked for the very first time, “Does my blog have to be public?” I didn’t give a choice. It would be great to have a discussion around the benefits and issues around public sharing but given the time constraints of the class (specifically this term as it’s only over a 6 week period), it’s difficult to provide students with enough information in a short time to make an informed decision.  To be honest, I never really thought much about doing it any other way. In my zeal to have my students experience the joys of networked learning and prepare for a world where ideas and sharing should be and hopefully will be more transparent, it seems logical.

Ever since the day I wrote my first blog post and received a comment, I knew that learning in public had huge potential.  That was over 4 years ago. Today I’m one of those who has embraced a lifestyle of learning that is founded on transparency and connectedness. I’ve wondered many times how and when learning should be private.  My belief that the pendulum for most of education sits way on the side of private and needs to move way more to public.  It does seem a bit odd to me since we have no qualms about student athletes or musicians or actors to perform in public. No athlete ever joins a team and suggests they just want to practice but don’t want to play in front of a crowd. For many, that’s part of the appeal. I’ve often talked about stages: athletic stages, artistic stages and then wondered about academic stages. We have almost zero expectations for students to publicly share learning. While I understand some people’s hesitancy to participate in online spaces, I believe the benefits are worth exploring even it it means some discomfort.

When we academic stages be the default?

When can we begin to expect that just like our sports teams, drama clubs and bands, our students academic work will be publicly on display? Is asking pre-service teachers to post content online outside of a walled garden a bad thing? Is age a factor? Does it matter that I’m teaching future teachers? What’s the worst that could happen? What’s the best? (I already know the answer to this since it’s happened often during my various sections of teaching this course). I would value and love your input on this issue.

EdTech Posse 5.4 Grumpy Old Digital Residents

Posted by Dean Shareski on in digitalcitizenship, EdTechs, Podcasting, privacy 0 Comment

We missed Rick and Alec but welcomed back Heather Ross and Kyle Lichtenwald as we talk about digital safety and identity, digital residents and digital tourists. I was able to elaborate further on the debacle of the other night’s presentation. I actually don’t show up until about 15 minutes into the conversation. I was busy eating donuts. Thanks to Rob for the quick turn around.

The Continuing Saga

Posted by Dean Shareski on in gratitude, Personal, presentations, privacy, socialnetworks 7 Comments

I had one of the strangest events of my professional career on Tuesday night. Coming back from 10 days in Europe I checked my calender to see I was schedule to speak at a Parent night at a high school in a neigbouring district.  I remember being asked a few months early about speaking as part of a 3 person lineup on Internet Safety. I was very up front with the organizer stating that I don’t spend a great deal of time on the dangers and lures of the internet but rather how to leverage online spaces for positive purposes. I acknowledge dangers but also utilize many research studies that debunk common beliefs about internet safety.

So spend part of Tuesday revamping and cleaning up a few previous presentations to fit into the 20 minute time slot I was given. I was called that afternoon to confirm my appearance with the school counselor and a local police officer. About 30 parents showed up which is pretty typical. While I recall being told about the scheme set up to test kids willingness to add friends in Facebook, I didn’t fully understand the concept until the counselor revealed the plan.  She created a fake profile and tried to get as many students to add her as a friend. The point was to show the parents and students how willing the students were to add strangers. She dropped this bomb on the parents and emphasized the dangerous behaviour shown by the students and how vulnerable they were to predators et. al.  Parents were shocked and their faces were filled with dismay, anger and concern. This went on for about an hour. The police officer who introduced himself to me by stating he didn’t know a lot about computers or the internet proceeded to present for almost an hour on how dangerous the internet was, how it was not policed and was a playground for predators.

And then it was my turn.

I immediately announced that I would be providing a very different perspective and that while I acknowledged some of the dangers and concerns I actually disagreed with many of the points made by the first two speakers. I’ll not post the presentation here, it wasn’t that inspiring but it contained similar content to this one done last summer.  I recognized the lateness of the evening but also wanted to provide hope and balance to a very one sided and what I believed to be somewhat misguided discussion. We had a brief Q and A afterward and many parents expressed their gratitude about hearing another side.

It was a weird evening to say the least. While I recognize the concerns of students acting badly online, these students, I presume are using facebook the way most are: posting a few photos, giving status updates and connecting with friends. I’ll restate this piece of research from the PEW Internet and American Life Project

Our research, actually looking at what puts kids at risk for receiving the most serious kinds of sexual solicitation online, suggests that it’s not giving out personal information that puts kid at risk. It’s not having a blog or a personal website that does that either. What puts kids in danger is being willing to talk about sex online with strangers or having a pattern of multiple risky activities on the web like going to sex sites and chat rooms, meeting lots of people there, kind of behaving in what we call like an internet daredevil.

This completely contradicted what both the police officer and counselor were saying. I stressed that I wanted my kids stuff to be online and that sometimes that included personal things. My 10 year old writes about personal things. That’s what she knows. I don’t worry about her. My own kids see me modeling appropriate behaviour and we talk about what we do online. As Will writes, I want my kids to be found. I also stressed that my concerns continue to revolve around cyberbullying, understanding the changing nature of privacy as well as the lack of critical thinking and understanding of digital content and authentication of information. I also added this quote from danah boyd:

Why are we so obsessed with the registered sex offender side of the puzzle when the troubled kids are right in front of us? Why are we so obsessed with the Internet side of the puzzle when so many more kids are abused in their own homes? I feel like this whole conversation has turned into a distraction. Money and time is being spent focusing on the things that people fear rather than the very real and known risks that kids face. This breaks my heart.

I feel like I’ve posted about this too many times. 2 years ago, we had few educators using any form of social networks and thus the discussions were few. Today their is more information and we have more educators using Facebook and have just enough knowledge to be dangerous. I’m perplexed about how to shift the conversation away from the fear. Fear is usually attached to the unknown. Most of these parents and teachers simply don’t know and it’s always easier to attach a quick label to the unknown. If it’s presented as a threat to children, well, you know the rest of that story.

Today this happened at the school.

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That’s just not my style. I still haven’t fully comprehended what message was being sent other than don’t add strangers to your Facebook account.  It seemed like a lot of effort to spend on a quick emphasis to something that requires much more context and teaching and modeling. Maybe more discussion will follow. I hope so. But I’m not hopeful.