Web courseware raising good Qs

Are they a) learning aids, b) Cliffs Notes lookalikes, c) intellectual property theft, d) none of the above, or e) all the above? One thing's for sure: open courseware projects and sites are universal. They range from MIT's famous OpenCourseWare, putting all coursework on the Web for free, to RipMixLearners, a wiki for sharing class notes and other courseware at University of the Western Cape in South Africa, to the largely US Ivy League-focused FinalsClub.org with class notes and study groups. And so many others, e.g., Course Hero, Knetwit, PostYourTest, Koofers, blogged about in the Digital Natives blog. Some of the content - for example, problem solution keys and old exams - raise healthy ethical questions that lend themselves less to yes/no answers than to excellent, class and family discussion. The blogger, a science major, wonders, for example, "if the availability of solution keys feed a kind of 'get the answers and the answers only' kind of mentality – an unhealthy focus on the solution rather than the process.... Canny students can usually find the solutions online, whether in freely available old exams/problem set solutions or more involved digging through archived course sites.... Say I find the instructor’s solution manual to my math textbook online – is it okay for me to use it? To copy my homework? To check my homework? If it’s freely available online, am I really taking advantage of an unfair edge? But there's also, arguably, the karmic payback, when it comes to an exam and one hasn’t really learned the material."

Invisible publics

In this digital-media age, teens' invisible audiences are many: relatives, employers, marketers, school officials, government agencies, and possibly even stalkers. Another way to think of some of these publics - not just marketers - is as "data miners," mining on an individual level (mining individuals' private thoughts made public) as well as mining profiles in aggregate. Yet, I'm seeing it said in a number of research papers and analyses that teens are either not aware of these invisible publics or choosing not to care. In a paper in FirstMonday - "A privacy paradox: Social networking in the United States" - Susan Barnes looks at the implications, asking if social networkers really have any privacy. She mentions privacy scholar Oscar Gandy’s "metaphor of a Panopticon - an architectural design that allowed prisoners to be monitored by observers" and writes that "online social networks allow for high levels of surveillance.... Social-networking sites create a central repository of personal information. These archives are persistent and cumulative." New information is not replaced in this global archive of innermost thoughts; it's just moved down. So, instead of the well-used definition of privacy that might make teens' eyes glaze over, parents and teens might consider this as worth protecting: "Privacy isn't just about hiding things. It's about self-possession, autonomy, and integrity." Barnes is quoting Simson Garfinkel, author of Database Nation. Parents, note that many teens already practice this approach by adding fictional elements to their online profiles (see "Fictionalizing their profiles"). Barnes makes this point too, while pointing to potential social, technical, and legal solutions. I agree with her that "it will take all levels of society to tackle the social issues related to teens and privacy," and that "awareness is key."

Related links

The Digital Natives Project's Diana Kimball takes you (anyone) on a "field trip" through Facebook's privacy controls.

I'd be very interested to know - via anne(at)netfamilynews.org - if what you hear from your kids when together you dig into this subject (in a single family discussion or over time) is not the rough equivalent to: "Young people today are already developing an attitude toward their privacy that is simultaneously vigilant and laissez-faire. They curate their online personas as carefully as possible, knowing that everyone is watching - but they have also learned to shrug and accept the limits of what they can control." That's from Clive Thompson in the New York Times Magazine.

Who'll see what I post 20 yrs from now?

That's a question that needs to hang around 24/7 in the back of social networkers' and bloggers' minds, because - according to the authors of just-published Born Digital (Basic Books, 2008) - "at no time in human history has information about a young person been more freely and publicly accessible to so many others.” This comes as no surprise to many parents, but few of us know the reasons. Here's one good one from authors John Palfrey and Urs Gasser: Teen "social norms suggest that more information about yourself will attract more friends." So a few interesting questions you could ask your kids in a dinner-table conversation (from a blogger in the Digital Natives blog) are: Will sharing their thoughts and everyday life online make them more popular? (Remember, it's normal if they feel that way - this is a commonly held view among youth - just explain you read it was a social norm and are honestly interested in your child's take on it.] "Do [they] understand the gravity of what and how much information [they] expose of themselves on the Internet?" And do they "ever take into account that [their] information is owned by the companies offering the services [they] are using? (Parents and teens can look at any social site's Terms of Service for information on how users' own content might be used; hopefully the site enforces them.)

Internet = 'giant popularity contest'

The social Web is, in essence, a huge popularity context, Digital Natives blogger Sarah Zhang points out, with even Google search rankings based on how many people visit and link to the sites in your search results. We can't afford to assume "that what is popular is also most worthy" or we stand to miss a whole lot of quality material that hasn't yet hit the public radar. Sarah writes about how people and organizations try to game the system to appear to have widespread grassroots popularity ("astroturfing") - and also how Web users can often tell and be put off by said. But how can we and our children assess the quality of the information we're seeking? That's where media literacy comes in - why it's so important and why its top practitioners, librarians, are so important in the current and enduring information glut. But media literacy is not only about content we consume. It's also about intelligently handling communication and behavior via email, IM, phone texts, or one's profile) - what's going out as well as what's coming in. Constantly reworking the algorithms is great, but critical thinking is essential.

Online harassment: From one who's been there

Lisa's experience of "cyberbullying" is probably the most common - some anonymous person(s) who made up "random screennames" and sent her IMs saying "stupid things" like "you're stupid" or "you're fat," she told a reporter from the Digital Natives project at Harvard University's Berkman Center. Though it probably wasn't cyberbullying as defined by researchers (see this), it certainly made her wonder: "Are my friends really my friends?" It was "kind of an uncomfortable ordeal because I never knew who it was in the end, but it wasn't as bad as being made fun of in real life could've been," Lisa, a University of Massachusetts, Amherst, student from New Jersey, said in an audio interview.

That last point gets at the distinction between online harassment and cyberbullying, which has a more hurtful connection to school life. In real life, Lisa says, "it's hurtful because it's direct and it's personal and you’re standing there and it hurts. If it's on the Internet, you can easily disregard it because it's not personal, they don't know who your are, and they can't offend you because they're not talking about you - they're just trying to give a comeback. So if it's on the Internet, it's kind of like you have more power, you're in much more control, it's kind of like a big shield."

There you have possible talking (or coaching) points for parents whose kids are being harassed online. As Lisa points out, these experiences are indeed a big deal when you're in the middle of them, and they do raise all kinds of unsettling questions about who your friends are, but if they're anonymous meanness, a parent might say: You can choose to make that same anonymity that they're hiding behind your "shield," as Lisa put it. They have no idea how their words affected you, so you're in control - you can choose to let the words roll off and not react. Because reaction is very likely exactly what the harasser wants, and you can decide whether s/he gets it." The uncertainty that goes with incidents like this is rarely unique to the incident; it's more like a constant of pre-adolescent life that spikes each time such an incident happens. As tweens learn social norms, figure out and create their school's social scene, and explore identity, they're also learning how to cope with the uncertainty and other challenges associated with the wider circle of relationships in adult life.

I hope parents will actually get the chance to have this conversation with their children, since kids so rarely report online harassment - only 10% of 12-to-17-year-olds tell parents or other adults, according to research from UCLA (see this post), which also found that the harassment Lisa described was the most frequently occurring kind among the young people in its survey. Harsher cyberbullying may call for outside professional help.

A much tougher story that does fit the emerging definition of cyberbullying was told in the Long Beach (Calif.) Herald this week. For details on the slightly one-sided telling of the story (because the alleged bully's family declined to comment), please read the article. But the outcomes so far indicate a lot of maturity on the part of the girl, "Mary" (15), who experienced the online abuse. After having to leave her school (she is still being home-schooled a year later), "Mary said the experience made her stronger, but only after a period of depression." She told the Herald that, even though people tell her bullying is "part of life," she feels that it is not and should not be. She also told the paper that she could handle having her experience told publicly if it could help somebody else.

Solution creation

One of the conditions of cyberspace that enables harassment and bullying is disinhibition, a word psychologists use to describe what happens when we lose the face-to-face part of communication. It's like suddenly, in this environment, we're more robots than humans. So it seems to me we'll be able to mitigate cyberbullying when we begin to reduce the disinhibition effect and increase the empathy factor - when it begins to sink in with children (everybody, really) that behind those text messages, avatars, profile comments, and IMs are real people with real feelings.

Cyber Bullying: A Prevention Curriculum for Grades 6-12 takes disinhibition head on - with collaborative learning that teaches empathy. The curriculum (book plus printable materials on a CD) - by educators Susan Limber, PhD, Robin Kowalski, PhD, and Patricia W. Agatston, PhD - is designed for schools, but parents and community-service programs will find it helpful too. At the core of the curriculum are true bullying stories like some that have appeared in NetFamilyNews in the past few years. The titles are pretty self-explanatory: "Boy Found in Locker after Three Hours"; "Being Excluded Online" (peers defriend a girls and stop IM-ing and texting); "Hip Hop Dancing Girl" (who unthinkingly videotaped herself and later found a peer posted the video online for all to see); "Tired of Being Bullied at School, Teen Strikes Back Online" (with a defaming Web site about the bully and faces charges); "Teens Facing Felony Charges for Cyberbullying Revenge" (posting a video of their retaliation beating of the peer on a video-sharing site).

With the curriculum, students lead discussions, role-play, write journal entries about the incidents, design anti-bullying Web sites, etc. There's a complete training module for teachers. For school administrators and resource officers, the curriculum goes beyond education to resources for dealing with this on-campus, off-campus challenge. Supporting materials include boilerplate letters to parents, incident reports, acceptable-use policies; guidelines for choosing students leaders; and legal information, including forms for evidence-gathering.

The curriculum is based on the holistic ("whole school") Olweus Bullying Prevention Program that seeks to involve all stakeholders (at school, home, and in the community) not only in reducing and preventing bullying but also improving eliminating in preventing and reducing bullying problem but also improving "peer relations at school."

Related links

So international. If anyone had any doubts that bullying is a universal problem, here's news from Bangalore, India: The Daily News & Analysis reports that a three-year study involving 1,200 students and 600 teachers, 59% of boys and 65% of girls (ages 14-18) said bullying was occurring at their school.

Toward "social intelligence": earlier NetFamilyNews coverage here and in an item on "stalking" as a form of social intelligence-gathering.

"'Cyberbullying' better defined": Researchers cite three factors that escalate it beyond the online harassment Lisa experienced (above): repeated aggression; power imbalance; ties to "real life" (school life, for the most part).