From School Computing

Contents 1 Surveys/Data on SNS 2 Positive Examples of Using SNS 3 Dangers 4 What Can Schools Do 5 Social Networking Sites 6 Software for SNS

[edit] Surveys/Data on SNS

• NSBA, July '07

[edit] Positive Examples of Using SNS

From: Nancy Willard Wed May 31, 2006 to WWWEdu list

• Create a profile that showcases your talents and interests. Treat your profile like a college application or job application.
• If you are an artist, graphic designer, photographer, or musician use the site to showcase your talent.
• Use a social networking site to coordinate the activities of a club or sports team. Include schedules and photos of games.
• Use social networking to engage other teens in your school or community to discuss and propose solutions on local issues of importance to teens.
• Create a family history social network. Invite all of your extended family to participate, including your grandparents and great grandparents. Scan in old photos and ask for family stories.
• Find a way to use social networking for a social service project -- in your own community or on the other side of the world. Does a local homeless shelter need clothes and toys for kids? Does an impoverished village in Africa need books and supplies for a school?

Other:

• Join a social network for teacher professional development. There are several listed at Ning in Education. For educators using Web 2.0 or collaborative technologies in the classroom, Classroom 2.0 is very popular.
• Create a social network for your faculty and staff to allow for extended discussions that might not be possible in regular physical meetings.

[edit] Dangers

Of course there are positives - it gives people an easier way to blog with no setup time, aside from creating an account. But like many other social networking sites there are plenty of other uses such sharing pictures, keeping in touch with friends (or allowing friends that you've lost contact with to find you), and so forth. One could even say that whatever positives come with a social network site, it is very easy to get sucked into the 'darker side' of them, depending on the user's personality. Overall the aspects of this are much like chat rooms or even instant messaging - having the opportunity to act out and pretend with seemingly few consequences can be pretty enticing. You could even say that it is an enabler for people to dissasociate from who they really are - with positive or negative results.

Knowing both students and friends with MySpace accounts, a few observations that come to mind are:

• The ability to be whoever you want to be, without anyone knowing differently. Kids often have a desire to be someone else, act older or more mature than they are, one-up each other, and so forth. MySpace enables you to say whatever you want about yourself, post any pictures (within reason) you'd like others to see, and network with very specific demographics.

• A 14 year old girl, that thanks to stating she is 19, suddenly has invites to all manner of clubs, older guys making approaches (themselves in reality being potentially much older, or dangerous, than they seem), publicly stating things that due to their age could get them into serious trouble, and so forth.

• All it takes is adding someone to your Friends list (3, maybe 5 clicks) to get in touch with them. I've found that younger girls are often all too eager to get the attention of a cute guy - almost regardless of age - and I've done plenty of worrying in my lifetime to back that up. Because anyone can become anyone else on MySpace, there's no sure way at all to tell if that 20 year-old guy you're going to meet isn't a 50 year-old predator - or a 15 year-old nerd.

• Addiction. A friend of mine is nearly addicted to MySpace. She's got something like 500 'friends.' Why? Perhaps it is an achievement or something - but with that many people that are connected to you somehow, it results in tons of messages and a lot of 'work' to keep up with. This then sucks time from schoolwork and real-life relationships.

• Security and safety. What happens when a student say, has a drug problem, and writes about it on MySpace. Can you use that as proof? What if they do not have a drug problem, but in acting out, write that they do. Can you use that against them? Issues of privacy and speech come up all over. That being said I'm sure that should a school happen to face an issue such as the above, they have prior procedures to follow - I'm just thinking out loud.

• Predators. Should a student be ignorant enough to put what school they attend on their public MySpace page, it becomes a predator's dream - and it gives me chills. A system with good-enough intentions, that can be utilized in this manner should be enough to make any educator sit up straight and pay very close attention. Should a student be a member of a high-profile (read: rich) family, and the situation can get worse.

[edit] What Can Schools Do

So what can someone do to crystalize safety concerns to students, while at the same time respecting their want/need to 'let loose' and have fun (a delicate balance, to be sure)?

• When discussing social networking with parents, faculty and administrators, it is important to have the student perspective in mind. The significance of the social networking experience in the lives of our children must be taken into consideration before we become too critical of the process. The key is communication with the students, a firm understanding of appropriate online behavior, and the realities and inherent dangers that arise from publishing personal material in a public place. -Jenni

• You can set MySpace pages to be private, so that only those in your 'network' can see your full page. Highly recommended, as it prevents poking around.

• Block MySpace using a filter. It doesn't prevent them from using it at home, but does help with any potential liabilities. Plus the time-suck I've seen from kids using it during school could be avoided.

• Inform parents of the positives and negatives. The kids won't like their parents knowing, but in this case it really is for their own good.

• Narc. Not recommended unless there's an absolute need. Sign up for an account, do a search by school name (or e-mail address, or full name). Once you've found one student you can check their Friend list to find other kids, and eventually the one you are looking for. I can almost guarantee that the picture painted on their MySpace page will be a shocker - or at least surprising.

So if you didn't know too much about MySpace, I hope this was helpful. Like many other web trends, it has both positives and negatives - I've found some great indie bands on it, but at the same time I've run across plenty of pages that make me cringe. *justin d 17:22, 13 Dec 2005

• Two resources which may be of some indirect help, at least with the older students are: A recent NPR story about two start-ups which help people clean-up their online personalities: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=6462504 (This can be a useful lead-in, as in 'why would such a service be necessary?') A very useful document linked to from the NPR story is a long and thoughtful piece called 'Not Just Your Space - The College Student's Guide to Managing Online Reputation' http://www.naymz.com/blog/?page_id=79 Both of these resources are aimed primarily at college students, but they could be helpful for some of our more mature students.

• We don't block social networking sites (we are a boarding school) because the "principle" of social networking is precisely what young people should aspire to; developing networks of friends and acquaintances around the world. While some students have had pen pals, the Internet makes this process much easier. We also acknowledge that bad things will happen when students expose themselves and their school to people who wish to exploit children, but that issue has been discussed on this list. We have always had a section of our Handbook called "Reach of the School." While it is deliberately vague, the principle is that while one is a student at our school, regardless of where they are in the world or cyberspace, they represent the school. Consequently, any behavior that violates our Honor Code or defames the school in any way will be handled as a disciplinary matter. Of course, we have to become aware of the offense in cyberspace, but several people at the school and some parents have helped us with the due diligence.

• St. John's Prep Approach -- we are an all-boys high school (approximately 1200 boys). We had some issues with MySpace postings by our students and we took a multi-pronged approach... [Our approach has been education, not punishment. When we find students posting inappropriate material to MySpace our Dean of Students talks with them and their parents. No punishments are handed out and the inappropriate material is usually removed within 24 hours.]
  • We block access to MySpace.com and facebook.com (along with lots of other sites) from computers on campus. No students have made any argument that access to MySpace.com fits into the framework of our acceptable use policy ("educational use"). That's not to say that there aren't arguments to be made, the students just haven't made it in issue since they can access it as much as they want to from home.
  • We sent a letter to all parents talking about the good and bad aspects of myspace.com and facebook.com. We didn't get a great deal of feedback, but the few parents who did reply thanked us for opening their eyes and helping them understand what their sons had access to.
  • We had a speaker from the Essex County District Attorney's Office come speak to our parents (about 30-40 parents showed up) about internet safety. She didn't talk much about MySpace.com and Facebook.com, but she did talk a great deal about chat rooms, instant messaging, and the ease in which children and adolescents can get wrapped up in more than what they can handle.

[edit] Social Networking Sites

• MySpace
• Facebook
• MiGente
• YFly
• Bebo
• Tagged
• Jookster
• Friendster
• Schoolster
• PCD Music Lounge
• Hi5
• Ringo
• Xanga

Nings

• Ning Build your own social networks
• Classroom 2.0 Social network for educators using Web 2.0 and technology in the classroom.
• Independent School Educators Ning ISEnet on Ning
• Education Social Network for educators building social networks using Ning

For Kids

• Imbee
• Club Penguin

[edit] Software for SNS

I'd also put in a vote for Drupal. We began using DrupalEd (http://www.drupaled.org/) for the Laptop Institute site (http://www.laptopinstitute.com) this summer and have been very happy with the results. We use it for posting conference information and updates but most importantly it is a tool for teachers and techies to collaboratively work together and promote the spirit of the conference year round rather than just those three days in July. I've also used Elgg which is nice but I think DrupalEd has a greater amount of flexibility and adaptability since it is built on the Drupal core. Elgg is a bit leaner and has less administrative abilities (for example, to change menus in Elgg you'd have to customize the theme and do a bit of coding whereas with Drupal/ DrupalEd you have an administrative panel which gives you a GUI to do most of the work).