LRA2011

For those visitors who attended my LRA presentation on Friday, welcome! I will post the paper soon, and you can email me at michaelayers@me.com.

In the Future, Everyone Will Be an Internet Troll

I missed this last month in the New York Times, but it seems relevant enough. There’s apparently a site called Topix that allows users to write in forums that are organized by geography. At first glance, it looks like any other Internet forum, so there’s nothing particularly novel about the technology: it’s in how that technology has been picked up and used. Specifically, Topix is becoming popular in small towns as a means for having the sorts of conversations that have always happened in small towns. People gossip. Sometimes that gossip has terrible consequences.

The forums have provoked censure by local governments, a number of lawsuits and, in one case, criticism by relatives after a woman in Austin, Ind., killed herself and her three children this year. Hours earlier she wrote on the Web site where her divorce had been a topic of conversation, “Now it’s time to take the pain away.”

Other cases described in the story appear to be simply trash talk; one mother of two was called ”a methed-out, doped-out whore with AIDS.” The next paragraph is a bit confusing:

Friends and relatives stopped speaking to them. Trips to the grocery store brought a crushing barrage of knowing glances. She wept constantly and even considered suicide. Now, the couple has resolved to move.

I don’t quite understand why friends and relatives would stop speaking to them just because someone wrote something nasty online, if the whole thing was made up. And I imagine, with the increased scrutiny that comes when you’ve been featured in the Times, that Topix will try to clean up its act a bit and clamp down further on the outright libel. But what really interests me about the story is this bit:

A generation ago, even after technology had advanced, many rural residents clung to the party line telephone systems that allowed neighbors to listen in on one another’s conversations. Now they are gravitating toward open community forums online, said Christian Sandvig, an associate professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

“Something about rural culture seems to make people want to have conversations in public,” said Mr. Sandvig, who has studied the use of social media sites in rural areas.

This strikes me as very similar to the conversation about the Twitterstorm here: a recognition that this behavior did not begin with the Internet, but that the Internet has seemed to change it in some way that’s difficult to identify. So one of the questions to wrestle with is this: is this actually noteworthy? Or is it just that when people have been affected by gossip and rumor-mongering before, it wasn’t so easy to see it after the fact?

A Facebook Class? Teaching Web 2.0 Etiquette and Ethics

The recent Twitter storms (for background click here and here) got me hunting around for news stories about this happening elsewhere. Among the interesting stories I found was that there is talk in Australia about having schools teach about “proper internet use”:

The move follows a series of suicides in Australia blamed on cyberbullying, as well as postings of racist and anti-Semitic   content and sexual slander.

The Federation of Parents and Citizens’ Associations of New South Wales, which represents parents at about 2,200 schools, said students were often unaware of the consequences of posting offensive content. It has called on the government to formally incorporate classes into the school curriculum.

“Kids engage in these acts without any thought of the consequences,” a spokesman for the association, David Giblin, told the Daily Telegraph.

Here’s where I start to have an argument with myself. Do kids really not understand the consequences of saying mean things to one another? Of using derogatory language in name-calling? This strikes me as analogous to saying, “Due to a recent rash of racist, anti-Semitic, and sexist graffiti, we should do more in school to help children understand the consequences of such an action.” Yet, such a response seems flip and inadequate, an appeal to the notion that “kids have always bullied kids,” which allows us to comfortably escape the question of our own responsibility.

While our local Twitter brush fire was still aflame, I tried to figure out the appropriate metaphor to understand the scale of the offense. Is it more like someone passing along the cruel message in a note? Scrawling it on a bathroom wall? Spray painting it on the side of my garage? Paying to have it flown across the sky over downtown Cedar Rapids? It is all of these things and none of them.

Would it help to teach explicitly about online ethics? I think probably so. But not because kids don’t know that it’s wrong to bully other kids.

The Beginning

Well, I’ve let this blog sit for a good long time, as with Panoptiblog. I figured I’d get back to blogging when I was done with this dissertation. That seemed so far away, for so long, that I’m completely out of my blogging groove.

But now that I have a defense date, and I’m getting close on the actual dissertation, I figure it’s a good time to start writing again, writing something else. Recent events have probably pushed me into this faster than I would have otherwise. Within the last four days, My School has been in a Twitter Crisis. By coincidence, in the middle of that time, Steve Jobs passed away. The conversations around both these events–sometimes rewarding, sometimes deeply frustrating–have led me to one conclusion:

We need more discussion of the benefits and hazards of social media in schools, and it can’t wait.

On the one hand, social media makes amazing things available that weren’t before. Students can write for authentic audiences, not just for teachers (the subject of my dissertation in a nutshell). The proliferation of mobile devices has, to a degree, lessened the problem of never having enough computers for all students. It has also made anonymous bullying and rumor-mongering much more possible; yet it has also taken that bullying out of the shadows and into the daylight, allowing communities to rally around the victims of bullying. It is a dense constellation of issues. It will take thoughtful discussion, requiring input from all sorts of teachers, from early adopters to those who find the new media landscape troubling.

So that, for now, is going to be the purpose of this blog. I don’t know who my readers will be, but I expect that at times they will include my students, my teaching colleagues, and fellow researchers. Conversations like this one–how best to serve kids in a changing world–is why many of us got into teaching in the first place. We must make time to have it.