Dear blog,
Right now I am enrolled in CEP 956: Mind, Social Media, and Society taught by Dr. Christine Greenhow. We have assigned readings each week that we are to post a response to in our ANGEL discussion boards. This week being our 2nd week, I thought I might spice it up a bit and live-tweet my assigned reading using the hashtag #MSUepetReads. We are required to tweet twice per day for class using #MSUepet, so I thought this would be a fun way to differentiate the two practices. Plus, I didn’t know if my meta-cognitive tweeting might expose my cognition as lacking, so I didn’t want to poison #MSUepet with my humble ramblings.
From our course wiki, here are the readings:
U.S. DOE (2010, March 5) Transforming American Education: Learning Powered by Technology. National Educational Technology Plan 2010.
http://www.ed.gov/sites/default/files/NETP-2010-final-report.pdf
Government web site: http://www.ed.gov/technology/netp-2010Edutopia in collaboration with Facebook (2012, May). How to Create Social Media Guidelines for your School.
http://on.fb.me/Jbs0eJInternet Safety Technical Task Force. (2009). Enhancing Child Safety and Online Technologies. Berkman Center for Internet & Society, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA
http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/pubrelease/isttf/
Read the Executive summary and other sections you in which you are interested.
Overall, the readings were intriguing. I was familiar with both the Berkman Center’s report and the National Educational Technology Plan (which I’ve read nearly a dozen times now). I have to say that our governmental, business, and non-profits are truly exploring the implications of new media/technology in terms of what it means for learning, for teaching, and even for safety. What I noticed lacking was an attention to privacy concerns. After all, privacy is one of those rights enshrined in the constitution, as James P. Steyer noted in his NPR Fresh Air interview for his book Talking Back to Facebook. He noted that the folks over at CommonSense Media advocate for an “eraser” button for. He mentioned that kid-specific browsers have been found to have more cookies than more mainstream browsers intended for adults. The fact that we are trading our privacy for these fun, free, and even educational tools is a very real concern that I did not see adequately addressed in these documents.
In my live-tweetings of my readings (and how glad am I that my classmates joined into the live-tweeting fun!), I ended up with some interesting conversations around these documents (and my concern about the lack of attention to privacy issues). Here’s the Storify of this week’s #MSUepetReads:
