I get to do a lot of these within the school and I don't post about most. But a couple of weeks ago I talked to a group of some 80 parents of students about social software and I thought it might be worth saying something about this talk here. (I believe there's value in also saying something about a couple of other talks: clips from one follow below; I'll post about another shortly.) The slides are now on Slideshare, here. (Update: some of these slides have been rendered less than clear in the process of uploading and converting them to Slideshare. If you download the slideshow, everything returns to its original PowerPoint glory.)
Parents are worried about social software — and given the sensational way in which it is commonly reported in the traditional media this is no surprise. I was keen to convey how, from the outset, the web was conceived as social and how, in being so, it is fulfilling something fundamental in our nature.
Some of these slides are ones I've used before: they are, for the moment, useful reference points. Some have parts blocked out in the interests of others' privacy. Few need explanation to anyone immersed in Web 2 culture. The 'St Paul's: ICT Group' slide is a snapshot taken from earlier this term when we had just set up this group: the group is not a replacement for our ICT support but a recognition that communities of users have a considerable body of experience and can be their own best resource for help.
A section near the end, 'IV SPS', looks at what we're teaching this term to our first years (13 year-olds) at St Paul's School (SPS). I'll be posting more about this course soon. My job, as this section goes on to say, is very much about having an open office and my guiding star is danah boyd — whose writings are referenced, explicitly and implicitly, in the closing slides. I can't recommend the Congressional Internet Caucus video too highly.
The social web: a cause for celebration, for thinking again about what we do when we teach and learn … and, as David Weinberger says, for joy.
During this term I talked to our top two year groups (17 and 18 year-olds) on three occasions. The subject of one talk was, again, the social web — its nature, the need for digital literacy, the implications for work (taking newspapers as an example) and the contrast between how long the technological changes have been coming and the perceived suddenness of it all. I don't think there's much merit in publishing all the slides on the web, but here are my favourites from some of the quotations I used:
Hyperlinks … enrich, rather than reduce. Open-ended, decentralized, messy … Most of all, they are social.
Each blogger is a gravitational center, great or small, but there's no sun they're all orbiting around.
… there's no solution that arises from telling people to stop using computers in the way that computers were intended to be used.
… help young people place Wikipedia in a larger context, developing a deeper understanding of the process by which the its information is being produced & consumed. ... develop a more critical perspective on other, more traditional sources of information.
Critically, this expansion of freedom has not undermined any of the absolute advantages of expertise; the virtues of mastery remain as they were. What has happened is that the relative advantages of expertise are in precipitous decline.
Journalism.co.uk, reporting Alan Rusbridger:
For at least 10 years we are going to have to have an act of faith and pump money into digital markets without significant return… [in] the expectation that things will change.
Roy Greenslade, reporting Rusbridger:
The print-on-paper model [for newspapers] isn't making money and isn't going to make money. It's no longer sustainable. Though the future is unknowable, we are taking an educated guess about what we should be doing and where we should be going.
Yesterday, Alan Rusbridger, editor-in-chief of the Guardian, told the staff of his newspaper that now “all journalists work for the digital platform” and that they should regard “its demands as preeminent.”
A Deutsche Bank analyst says (from BuzzMachine):
… newspapers are shrinking while Facebook is growing by 200,000 new users a day. A day. And those users spend an average of 20 minutes each day inside the site vs. 41 minutes a month on newspaper sites …
And on change, Tom Coates:
'The snail! The snail!', they cry. 'How can we possibly escape!?. … the snail's been moving closer for the last twenty years, one way or another, and they just weren't paying attention.
