Digital literacy 4: Watch your back!

I'm always asking myself the question - what do my students need to know to be able to use the web effectively? One of the important skills I identified in a previous post on digital literacies is how people manage and protect their privacy. This is aligned to e-safety, which is about protecting people online. Indeed, each of us is vulnerable because there is a huge potential for our privacy to be breached in any online environment. You would certainly be very angry if someone came snooping around your house and rifled through your personal belongings, wouldn't you? And yet many of us can be careless about the way we handle our personal data when we go online. And the extent to which many of us are now electronically connected to others is astounding.

This begs the question - can any of us protect our privacy on the web? Social media seem increasingly pervasive, and many millions of people put up details of their private lives every day - contact details, personal photographs, dates of birth etc - details they would never dream of giving to a stranger. Oh look, there's someone I haven't met before. Hellooo. I'm going to go up to them and give them my phone number and address, some photos of me on holiday in my swimwear, a list of my best friends and my date of birth! Oh, and they can have my credit card details too while I'm at it! Would anyone do that, even if they were very extremely attracted? It would be bizarre behaviour. And yet people do exactly that every day online. I'm amazed at the photos some students put up on social network sites. It's not just pictures of them falling out of a pub at 3 o'clock in the morning, it may also be pics of their friends too. With their permission or not? I wonder if they will still be happy about those photos in a few year's time when they apply for a job, and their potential employer Googles them to see who they are.

For me it's all a matter of choice. How many of your personal details you make available on the web is really up to you. Your privacy settings may help you to protect stuff. but even if you know how to choose the correct settings (and many students don't) how can you be really certain that your content is fully protected from prying eyes? Posting up your home address and telephone number, and then posting in your timeline that you are going on holiday next week, might be asking for trouble. How do you know who has access to your timeline? How do you know how many people read your Twitter feed or your updates?

You also leave a trail behind you wherever you go on the Internet. Google and other search engines maintain a record of all the sites you visit during your time online. Many sites send cookies to your pc when you enter them. Some of these can be malicious, allowing other people to gain access to your pc memory, and if spyware has been used, to also record your keystrokes when you pay for something on Amazon using your credit card. Although it's still quite rare for this to happen, this kind of criminal activity is on the increase, and without appropriate Internet Security software, you run the risk of being one of the victims. Have you thought about the amount of personal detail you hold about yourself and your friends on your mobile phone? If you use public wifi networks or open your mobile to bluetooth connectivity, you may also be opening up the entire content of your mobile for intruders to capture and use. This useful report from the BBC Click team reveals that although malware for mobile phones is on the increase, it is still simple user naivety that is responsible for the majority of problems of this kind.

For me, raising the awareness of students and other web users to the dangers of the Internet will always include the problem of maintaining privacy. The golden rules are: Be careful what sites you visit (your security software should alert you to any unsafe sites), be careful what you post up online that may have personal information in it (this is just common sense) and watch your back - protect your identity, because you never know who may be looking over your shoulder. On Monday: Managing digital identities.

Watch your back by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

New spaces, new pedagogies

I'm kicking off the new academic year by presenting a keynote paper at the Annual International Conference of the Royal Geographical Society in London on Thursday, September 2nd. The session is entitled Innovative spaces of learning: debating their origin, nature and pedagogical significance, and is a sub section of the main RGS conference. Others speaking in the session include Derek France (University of Chester), Ruth Weaver (University of Plymouth) and Wendy Woodland (University of the West of England). Here's the abstract for my keynote:

New Spaces, New Pedagogies: Harnessing the Power of Social Media in Education

A rapid emergence of social media – the so called ‘Web 2.0’ – has opened up new opportunities for participatory learning in all sectors of education. Students now have the capability to create and share their own content through blogs, wikis, video- and photo-sharing services such as YouTube and Flickr. They can easily connect into and maintain contact with multiple communities of interest, gaining access to experts using social networking tools such as Myspace and Facebook. They can organise their own resources through free and easy to use tagging and social filtering tools. In this presentation I will argue that this rapid rise of user generated content is blurring boundaries between novice and expert, and challenging the traditional notions of knowledge, ownership, privacy and identity. In tandem with this, the proliferation of personal devices such as iPods and smart mobile phones is enabling students to move beyond the boundaries of the classroom into ‘any time, any place’ learning. In the light of these developments I shall explore new teacher roles, examine new learner expectations and explore some of the new learning territories that are emerging beyond the walls of the institution. I will offer some examples of how Web 2.0 tools have already been harnessed to support professional mentoring and to promote deeper engagement in learning through collaboration and reflection. I will discuss the concept of the personal learning environment and its potential to enrich student experiences. I shall speculate on the potential impact of emerging technologies such as augmented reality and touch screens and their potential in shaping the future of education.

Image source

New spaces, new pedagogies by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
Based on a work at steve-wheeler.blogspot.com.

PeLC's digital footprint

I'm sat here exactly one week after the 5th Plymouth e-Learning Conference - #PeLC10 - ended, and reflecting on another great event which everyone seemed to enjoy and learn from. As part of my reflection on the event I have been looking at the digital footprint the conference has left on the Web. There are blogposts, images, videos, and a huge Twitter stream searchable through the #pelc10 hashtag.

I'm sure there will be more accounts, images and videos posted (including the official videos of the two great keynote speeches by Josie Fraser (see the Video here) and Dave White (see the Video here) links of which will also appear soon on the conference website.

Here are just a few of the blogposts and other remnants of the event for you to revisit if you were there, or get a flavour of, if you were not able to attend this year...

Privacy has gone by James Clay

Don't feed the Pelicans by James Clay (includes a podcast and interviews)

Keep calm and carry on by James Clay (Podcast of debate)

Taking a step back by Fleur Corfield

Twitter is dead... Really? by David Hopkins

Learning without limits by Malinka Ivanova

PeLC10 e-learning debate by Bex Lewis

The view from our window by Our Lesson

5th Plymouth e-Learning Conference by Zak Mensah

Mypelc10 - Day 1 by Flea Palmer

Mypecl10 - Day 2 by Flea Palmer

5th Plymouth e-Learning Conference by Mark Pannell

Busy month ahead by Pat Parslow

Make sure you see the Pelican (Part 1) by Dan Roberts

Images of PeLC10 on Flickr by Dawn Wheeler

Community, privacy and identity by Steve Wheeler

Pushing all the right buttons by Steve Wheeler

Angels in the architecture by Steve Wheeler

There is also an aggregation of #pelc10 Delicious tags, Flickr images and Tweets here. And finally, here is an interesting statistical breakown of all the tweets that were tagged #pelc10 during the conference, courtesy of Andy Powell from Eduserv. It's a clever little application you can use to compare the #pelc10 statistics against those of other recent conference tags such as #jisc10 and #mootuk10. It is interesting reading indeed. If you know of any other pelc10 artefacts that are out there on the Web, please post a link in the comments box below.

PeLC10 final plenary session photo courtesy of Dawn Wheeler (from L to R: Steve Wheeler, Thomas Fischer, Josie Fraser, Dave White). The link to the uStream video of the final plenary session is here.

PeLC's digital footprint by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.