Have you ever wondered about what is behind “Yes, I agree” when you sign up for a new application or website? Let’s be honest, how often have you read the Terms of Use, the Privacy Settings or Data Collection and Copyright Policy of e.g. social media applications? I have never been a big fan of long legal documents. At the same time
How does that make me able to proactively manage my digital identity and property? The New Digital Citizenship – Empower Proactive Digital Learner
I asked several people whether they know storytellers and if what story kept in their mind. Some of the answers: “My grandfather always told us stories.” or “I had an aunt. She always told us about her life when she was young.” or “My father knew everything about the people selling animals at the market.” They often said this with nostalgia and kind of sadness that they can’t remember those stories. Interestingly often storytellers were understood as people who tell the stories orally and in front of others, f.e. at the family table.
But that is only half of the story…
Somewhere I read: We are ALL storytellers. Unfortunately I can’t remember where but it is so true. Our life is so full of interesting stories and often we wish to share them. Some people write a book. Some write articles for a magazine. Some tell stories during a dinner when they meet friends. Others make professional movies and record their story. As a teacher I read or tell a story to children. Personally I really like to read autobiographies because they tell the story of an interesting person (Recently of Marcel Reich Ranicki, who is a well known German literature critic and survived the second world war amongst other skills by telling stories.)
There is a new dimension to the storytelling. Everybody is a storyteller but everybody has also to possibilities to record them – Digital Storytelling. Wikipedia says:
Digital storytelling refers to a short form of digital media production that allows everyday people to share aspects of their life story. … “Digital storytelling” is a relatively new term which describes the new practice of ordinary people who use digital tools to tell their ‘story’. Digital stories often present in compelling and emotionally engaging formats, and can be interactive.
This week I saw and listen to so many good stories and I’m amazed by the possibilities. It doesn’t have to be a huge and difficult project anymore. Because of the technology development over the past few years everybody can do it. You can choose to work with your laptop, your tablet or your smartphone. But technology is actually just a tool. If you want to go a little bit further then just recording something, follow The 7 elements of Storytelling or 50+ Web 2.0 Ways to Tell a Story.
Personally I again (like so often during this COETAIL course) feel positively overwhelmed (and stressed?) so I don’t know where to start and whether actually somebody wants to hear my story. I guess I just have to tell the story I have told many times before.
Soon to be continued … Soon one story will be told …
During the last 3 month I realized that connections, connectedness (does this word really exist?), connectivity on the Internet are possible in endless ways. The main two streams though are:
Through Webpages as a graph (works only with Firefox) you get a visualisation of your website and in particular also of your hyperlinks. It looks beautiful!
The blue dots are actually the important ones because they show me the hyperlinks on the blog. To understand the graph fully you need to know at least a little bit of HTML which is the language to create webpages. That reminds me that I – maybe 7-8 years ago – created a website for a friend. Unfortunately it doesn’t exist anymore and also archive.org didn’t take a snapshot (probably I put the robot.txt to avoid spam – do I mix up something?). In this context I thought about how to optimize the search engine result and – here it comes – hyperlinks. Google obviously looks at both links – to and from your website. To have an impact on your page rank the links to your website are important. You can imagine, suddenly I was curious about my page rank. There are several ways to check and in the end the chrome apps are the most convient one. The app I really liked is PageRank Status. A screenshot of part of it says: 
Hmm, does it really means that I’m the first on the search results? How can this be? I’m sure that not that many people linked to my blog. The reason probably is the connection to the Coetail website itself. Please, other cohort follower, please correct me if I’m wrong. I try to understand.
Anyways, my point is if we make sure (somehow) that there are enough hyperlinks from other sides to our than the ranking goes up. We need to set the links but the machine does the rest.
There are other ways to connect on the Internet – again driven by human beings but the machines do the rest, f.e. by suggesting people we might know or suggesting website, groups or people to follow. Recently I intensified it by using f.e. various social website:
And, and, and … To be honest, I still wish to create and contribute more. This experience here with Coetail helps me to connect with other people and how to use the Internet in a less consuming way. Let’s create, contribute and share! It’s worth!
When I checked the verbs “to mob” (mobbing) and “to bully” in a online dictionary, I got very strong verbs in German that I haven’t used for years in my active vocabulary: belästigen, anpöbeln, tyrannisieren, schikanieren, einschüchtern, piesacken, drangsalieren, etc. Thinking about those verbs and about my experiences as a teacher, the connection to the article “Bullying” Has Little Resonance with Teenagers came in my mind and the following quote of a person who commented:
Technology is not to blame. Bullying has been in existence since there was civilization. Technology has escalated and changed how bullying occurs.
I agree bullying happened / is happening in the offline world as much as it is happening in the online world – then called cyberbullying (German / English). You can observe the same kind of actions (to bully – belästigen, anpöbeln, tyrannisieren, schikanieren, einschüchtern, piesacken, drangsalieren), just in different environments and with different impacts.
This week’s questions were:
Who’s responsibility is it to teach students to be safe online? Who’s job is it to teach these skills? When and where should we be having these conversations with students? Are we taking this seriously?
Cyberbullying has to be taught but in my opinion it doesn’t start with kindergarten or school and in the first row it doesn’t have anything to do with “cyber/being online”.
I had a situation in Grade 3 last week. There is student A who is always late. When he came in the classroom, another student B said: “Finally!” with a very derogative voice. There it starts already. I asked student B to think about what he just said and how student A might feel to hear something like that. Children no matter what age need to get aware and be aware that words and actions can hurt another person. As adults, as parents, as friends, as teachers we need to model how to feel empathy for somebody. (“Bullying” Has Little Resonance with Teenagers)
It also reminded me of a unit in Grade 1 called “Use your words” where the students learn a strategy to deal with conflicts. It’s called STOP – TALK – WALK – HELP and gives children a tool to say NO to something, to ask WHY somebody is doing something, to have the courage to walk away and to ask for help. And again children no matter what age need to get the self confidence to stand for their own whenever they feel to be in a wrong situation. As adults, as parents, as friends, as teachers we need to get involved into strategies so we can again model for the children.
Does the strategy STOP – TALK – WALK – HELP would help for cyberbullying as well? Will a teenager be able to say STOP when he or she gets bombarded with mean or even worse text messages? Will he or she be confident enough to ask for reasons? Will he or she be strong enough to ignore or ask for help? It’s probably something you can learn no matter what age but the earlier the better. And again – as adults, as parents, as friends, as teachers we need to encourage our children.
Growing up in a small village, being a daughter of an unpopular teacher, being a teenager at that time let me experience how it is to live with gossip around me (and our family). Students of my father talked behind my back and in a very direct way as well. Since then I hate gossiping and it’s hard for me to stand people who a big gossiper. And again, the article “Bullying” Has Little Resonance with Teenagers came in my mind, because it says:
I hear teens’ dramas reflected in their stories about how their parents fight – with each other, with their friends and family and colleagues, and with them. What teens are doing is more coarse, more direct, and more explicit. But they’re witnessing adult dramas all around them and what they tend to see isn’t pretty. Parents talking smack about work colleagues or bosses. Parents fighting with each other or ostracizing their family members over disagreements. And it’s not just parents…Teens are seeing fights and dramas all over the media. Celebrity fights and dramas aren’t just in their face; they’re glorified! And even if MTV comments on domestic abuse after airing Jersey Shore, the way that the housemates treat each other sets a standard for what’s societally acceptable. Teens are seeing drama everywhere – they’re seeing it as a legitimate part of adult society that can often lead to notoriety.
Photo Credit: ekai via Compfight cc
Reading about plagiarism and copyright this week made me realize how huge and important (!) this topic is. You can inquirer into this topic from many different perspectives: location where you are in the world, from the perspective of the students, the teachers, the bloggers, from the perspective of the kind of media (article online, movie, blog, image, comic, … endless).
First of all we as teachers need to know about copyright and plagiarism. Working at a PYP school and not having any books for teaching (which I really like) makes it difficult to have resources and of course we get them through the internet. Wikipedia says about Fair Use:
In United States copyright law, fair use is a doctrine that permits limited use of copyrighted material without acquiring permission from the rights holders. Examples of fair use include commentary, search engines, criticism, news reporting, research, teaching, library archiving and scholarship.
I was happy to read the word teaching, but what about In United States copyright law? Germany seems to be always kind of stricter. Reading the wording of the law I’m realizing that I’m not a lawyer and I’m not used to read laws. Meaning it is complicated. Said very simple: § 53 Urheberrechtsgesetz (UrhG) allows us to copy for the use during lessons. There are different interpretations (using something during the lesson or saving something on the computer) written on the German website lo-recht (Recht und digitale Medien): Vervielfältigungen für Unterricht und Prüfungen. But … I have to admit that the article is quite old and I still feel quite confused. Therefore – my German colleagues (working at a German school): Please let me know more. How do you handle those issues? Thx. We need to know as teachers, for us and as important for getting the students aware.
At the moment Grade 5 at our school is working on their exhibition topics. In German the students are inquiring into a ecosystem which is related to their Central Idea. Right in time I heard about compfight, a flickr search engine, which gives you the code for attaching the caption. I also realized that Google allows you find pictures with certain usage rights (Advanced Search). Very helpful for the students is as well EasyBib: A Free Automatic Bibliography and Citation Generator.
In the context of the students writing their pieces for their exhibition as well as in the context of myself writing blog entries, the website plagiarism.org was very informative and surprising for me. There are 10 types of plagiarism and I’m wondering now how much remix and mashup my students do?! And what about myself? I’m reading several websites/articles and recently I started to write down the source. Then I try to build my opinion, combine it with my own experience, ask new (or old) questions – what am I doing?
Last but not least the readings this week made me think about licensing own work. It feels good to know more about Flickr and Creative Commons which allows you to license your work easily if you want to share it. I don’t have to share and contribute so much at the moment, but I told a friend about it who is an artist and she was very happy to hear about it. Let’s spread the word! That is also part of all this with Coetail.
And how about 3D plagiarism? Today at the Maker Munich there was a talk about: Piracy hoch drei: Öffnet die 3D-Technologie wirklich die Büchse der Pandora? – in English something like:
Piracy power three: Does the 3D technology really opens the Pandora’s Box?
I’m living in such a exciting and interesting time!
Photo Credit: DonkeyHotey via Compfight cc
While reading and understanding the article for this week (Don’t overestimate privacy of online information & Beware: the internet could own your future) my Grade 4 came in my mind which inquires into the Human Rights at the moment. In particular I was reminded of impressive pictures of William T. Ayton who painted a picture for each Human Right. (First time that I asked an artist whether I can use his pictures – Thanks for replying so quickly, Mr. Ayton! – Check out his website!)
Photo Credit: William T. Ayton via U.D.H.R.
Article 12 (U.D.H. R. – picture of Ayton):
No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to attacks upon his honour and reputation. Everyone has the right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks. (Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Article 12.)
One interesting question for me is the following:
Do we just have to adapt and accept the fact that there seems to be less and less privacy online?
The control over who has access to my pictures, to my information, to my location and so on seems not existing anymore. I try to understand the privacy setting f.e. of Facebook and and it gives me a good and kind of safe feeling but a rest of distrust is always there. I feel like that there isn’t the possibility to control my privacy online anymore. But in my opinion to just give up is too easy although I’m not sure whether I have a chance.
I found information about a Post-Privacy-Movement which believes and is convinced that we are living in a time without any privacy. Really?
On the other hand there seem to be a lot initiatives which try to protect privacy like Me & My Shadow campaign, like a German initiative against the change of the data retention laws (Stopp! die Vorratsdatenspeicherung – German/English), like the Global Network Initiative (GNI) and of course there are many technical inventions which try to protect privacy (f.e. TOR).
All that reading led me to another interesting question:
How is “The Right to Privacy” and “The right of Freedom of expression” related to each other?
Photo Credit: William T. Ayton via U.D.H.R.
Article 19 (U.D.H. R. – picture of Ayton):
Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers. (Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Article 19)
Living in Germany luckily I haven’t experience the feeling that I can’t express freely my opinions. But it’s definitely a different story in other countries in the world like f.e. China and North Korea. And maybe I don’t have to go so far.
I found a quite new (2012) Global Survey on Internet Privacy and Freedom of Expression done by UNESCO. They say that the Internet lets us rethink about our understanding of privacy because compared to the pre-internet-time:
Even though there might be a common definition of privacy it seems that it exist a very different understanding of the concept of privacy depending on country and also government. Therefor the relationship between both rights is very complex as well.
Common Sense Media: Digital Footprint Intro from Joaquin E. Jutt on Vimeo.
Since I worked for a Software Company (2000-2004 Infopark) I always felt quite aware of my traces I might leave or I want to leave on the Internet. Will Richardson writes about it in his article “Footprints in the Digital Age” and defines it the following:
– the online portfolios of who we are, what we do, and by association, what we know –
Certain email addresses for different use were a must for me and also anonymous names for certain accounts. Googling myself was also something I did on a regular base. During my year of traveling I was writing a blog but again kind of anonymous and only friends and family knew about it. I always thought I’m quite lucky and safe to have a quite common German name – even my sister in law name is Verena Zimmer. It was not that easy to find information about me.
I have to be honest, I never really thought about my digital shadow. Sure I’m booking online, buying online, etc. but using fake names made me feel save. It’s probably even trickier and less controllable than the digital footprint.
My thinking changed for the first time when I spoke with a colleague/friend at my previous school in Seoul few years ago. We both thought about a teacher portfolio but unfortunately we never really made time for it.
My thinking changed even more over the last 8 weeks. I’m still hesitating and I don’t know where this is coming from (it’s out of my comfort zone and a change of my own mindset) but now actually I want to be found now and it’s okay that people find (professional) information about me. The exchange with other people, teachers so far, but hopefully sooner or later with non teachers as well, I highly appreciate.
My big question though is: Are we 100% in control of our digital footprint?
At the moment it’s this blog, my comments on other blogs; it’s through Twitter, Facebook, Diigo, Google+; in future it will be …
Photo Credit: blaho_blaho cc
A digital footprint/portfolio gives us the chance to learn, to be inspired by others, to connect and discuss with like-minded people, to share and reflect on experiences and work, to ask questions, to improve, ….
The question whether we should have a digital footprint / teacher portfolio as a teacher is YES. Teaching and learning is a passion and any kind of reflection and exchange helps us to find our own position as well as to promote ourselves. And Vivian made a very good point: If we live an integer life anyways then we don’t need to fear about possible leaving some negative traces.
Future employers get an additional perspective of the applicant. Fair enough – they want the best fit for their school / company. The applicant on the other hand can convince the future employer that she / he is the right one for that particular position.
Maybe a good and productive match is even more likely with those additional information. But how will an application look like in near future? Somebody of Coetail asked this question before but I can’t find the post anymore. Sorry. How would you apply for a new teaching position or maybe even a different kind of work?! Maybe the way schools / employers will choose a new way as well?!
Realizing having a digital footprint has a lot of advantages the logical consequence must be: YES, we have to let our students know about those advantages. YES, to clarify the risk is important too. But even more important is that we as teachers emphasis the advantages and chances. Being online is a great chance for learning and growing, no question.
And it is Will Richardson again who puts it in words. As a teacher I feel we need to support the students to know
When and how to start? I found several resources on the Internet, f.e. Lesson: Trillion Dollar Footprint (6-8). It really depends on YOU as a teacher, parent, friend, on the STUDENTS, and the circumstances. We shouldn’t negate and avoid that topic anymore, maybe just because we might feel uncomfortable. Let’s be aware and let’s spread the word.
The only thing I like more than teaching is learning. 