The Guardian is one of the more sane newspapers when it comes to social panics. But even they could not resist headlining this article ‘Warning to parents over children ‘being raised online’.

The report has not yet been released. But it looks interesting and if the Guardian is to be believed is in line with reports from other countries. However, when it comes to the level of recommendations it simply gets it wrong.

“British children are spending more than 20 hours a week online, most of it at social networking sites such as MySpace, Facebook and Bebo, and are in effect being “raised online”, according to research from the Institute for Public Policy Research” says the Guardian.

“But the IPPR research, to be published next month, raises concerns about the content that young people can access and the lack of awareness among parents about what their children are doing on the internet.

“My mum will ask sometimes ‘Is it safe?’ but she doesn’t really know,” a 16-year-old girl told the IPPR. A 14-year-old boy added that even the sort of child-locks that are put on internet access at school can be circumvented by youngsters, who often know more about IT systems than their teachers. “We have restrictions at school but we can just get an administrator’s account and take them off.”

Children are also aware of the restrictions that the sites implement, with one 15-year-old girl telling researchers: “Everyone lies about their age ‘cos I think it’s like if you’re under 18, your profile gets set to private.”

The report shows that teenagers are digitally promiscuous, switching allegiance from sites as fashions change. One 16-year-old girl told the IPPR: “First it was like everyone was on MSN, then everyone sort of has Bebo, now everyone who had MSN moved on to Facebook, so it’s just what everyone’s doing at that time.”

The IPPR found that four out of five children aged five to 15 have access to the internet at home, with 40% of 8- to 11-year-olds and 71% of 12- to 15-year-olds saying they browse the web on their own. Contact with some form of online pornography was reported by 57%.

The IPPR wants the regulator Ofcom to take a more active role in the protection of children on the internet, by making recommendations to the government about where there is a need for action, such as tackling violent user-generated content. “The government should consider extending Ofcom’s remit to cover internet content.”

It also wants sites that are popular with young people, such as MySpace and Bebo, to develop what it terms cross-industry guidelines and become funding members of the Internet Watch Foundation.

The report suggests there is a lot of work to be done in educating parents about what their children are doing online. Ofcom already looks at the level of what it terms media literacy among consumers, but the IPPR wants the Department for Children, Schools and Families to have overall control of media literacy, with better information and support for parents.

The report, Behind the Screen: The Hidden Life of Youth, comes as Tanya Byron, the television psychologist and parenting expert appointed last year by Gordon Brown to look into the issues surrounding children and technology, prepares to release her final report. She is expected to recommend that computers be placed in communal areas rather than children’s bedrooms so parents can keep an eye on what is accessed.

A committee of MPs, meanwhile, has been investigating harmful content on the internet and in video games.

“The internet offers great benefits and opportunities for young people,” said the author of the IPPR report, Kay Withers. “But … parents need to be reassured about what they are looking at.

“Government needs to improve media literacy programmes for kids and to make sure parents are aware of how they can support young people’s positive online experiences.””

So where does this report get it wrong? The recommendation for cross industry guidelines is good – depending of course on the content of thoee guidelines. But he idea that access to computers should only be in communal areas is just unrealistic. Do we really want a return to the days of the 1950s when lack of central heating meant families huddles together in one room and young people had no personal space for chatting with their friends (because that is what they predominantly do on line). I remember those days, I was there.

The main tenet of the recommendations are controlling digital literacy and reassuring parents. These are not the answers. The key people are the users – in this case young people. And the answer to digital literacy and on-line safety are engaging users, not control or reassurance. That seems to have been forgotten. In a skype chat yesterday Cristina Costa said: “Basically I think kids need more attention, teachers more support and the entire community needs to engage with new technologies actively.” That sums it up for me.

I know social bookmarks are a good idea. But I never really got on with del.icio.us. Guess I could never quite remember where the full stops went in the address. And I kept getting lost in the site. But this week when my Firefox tabs got up to about 26 and I wanted to keep access to them all I realized I had to do something. I was trying out some new OpenID service which Scott Wilson had linked to. And that claimed to give me access to TechCruch without logging in (it didn’t seem to work, but thats another story). But I ended up at TechCrunch and there I found a review of Diigo. “Diigo is a research tool which rocks”, they said. Well, that was talking my kind of academic language.

So I opened an account. I set up about 20 accounts a week and rarely do much with them. But I love Diigo. It truly rocks. And I have set up a group called eLearning 2.0. The description reads “This group is for all those interested in the use of social software for learning and in developing new pedagogic approaches to elearning.” So please come along and join. Lets share bookmarks!

Well….it seems I was a little too quick in announcing the funeral rites for Eduspaces.

But I didn’t see it ending up like this. The eagle eyed A. T. Wyatt leaves a comment on my previous entry pointing to the new announcement on the Eduspaces site..

“It was announced at the beginning of this year that TakingITGlobal would take over and continue to host the eduspaces.net community. Because of their location in Canada, some legal issues had to be sorted out first. This was why EduSpaces members had to explicitly state to have their account transferred to what would have been a new provider. Unfortunately, the legal issues didn’t end there, so, to avoid any more inconvenience for EduSpaces users, TakingITGlobal and the EduSpaces team have decided not to continue with the planned migration.
What will this mean for you? Well, Eduspaces will remain EduSpaces, and your account will stay where it is for the foreseeable future. This means no migration nor termination of the service and you can continue to use and enjoy the service as you have always done. Misja will help look after the community.
We have learnt many valuable lessons during this process and would like to apologise for the way the transition period was handled.
The EduSpaces team – March 18th, 2008”

Welcome home, Eduspaces. And it is great to see that Misja is taking responsibility for the site.

It had to happen but its taken a long time coming. Over the last two weeks I have stumbled on an increasing number of sites offering free access to tools for on-line teaching and learning. Most of them seem to incorporate some elements of social software along with video conferencing software.

WiZiQ advertises itself as a platform for anyone and everyone who wants to teach or learn live, online. With a virtual classroom, educational content and a session scheduler, WiZiQ works best for anyone’s online teaching and learning needs, they say.

Whilst WiZiQ stresses the virtual classroom, Learnhub has a more community orientation. This is a site where people teach & learn online, they say. But the functionality seems much the same. And whilst it is hard to work out WiZiQ’s business model, Learnhub says in the future they will take a percentage from paid for courses.

It’s not confined to the English speaking world. e-teaching.org is a German language portal offering much the same services (and using Adobe software for conferencing).

All these sites are encouraging ‘teachers’ to develop their own courses and run them through the site. All are trying to a greater or lesser extent to build some kind of social software based community.

I think it is impossible to overestimate the importance of what is going on. None of these sites require that you are a trained or qualified teacher. None have restrictions based on age or geography.

It now is very, very easy to organise on-line seminars and programmes. In the past software was always a struggle. But it is not clear how this will evolve. It may be that the most use will be to supplement existing educational programmes. It could be that we will see an explosion in self organised teaching and learning. (I plan to organise a Pontydysgu seminar series in the near future). Or is could be that this is another step down the road to an education free market – and education courses become just another global commodity. I have argued endlessly that technology does not determine social development, instead society shapes technology. There is wonderful potential with this new wave of software but who it benefits will depend on how we use it.

This story from thestar.com in Canada shows just why we need to tackle issues over assessment (thanks to Cristina Costa for forwarding). Ryerson University is threatening to expel a student for administering an on-line study group.

“First-year student Chris Avenir is fighting charges of academic misconduct for helping run an online chemistry study group via Facebook last term, where 146 classmates swapped tips on homework questions that counted for 10 per cent of their mark.

The computer engineering student has been charged with one count of academic misconduct for helping run the group – called Dungeons/Mastering Chemistry Solutions after the popular Ryerson basement study room engineering students dub The Dungeon – and another 146 counts, one for each classmate who used the site.

Avenir, 18, faces an expulsion hearing Tuesday before the engineering faculty appeals committee. If he loses that appeal, he can take his case to the university’s senate.

The incident has sent shock waves through student ranks, says Kim Neale, 26, the student union’s advocacy co-ordinator, who will represent Avenir at the hearing.

“All these students are scared s—less now about using Facebook to talk about schoolwork, when actually it’s no different than any study group working together on homework in a library,” said Neale.

“That’s the worst part; it’s creating this culture of fear, where if I post a question about physics homework on my friend’s wall (a Facebook bulletin board) and ask if anyone has any ideas how to approach this – and my prof sees this, am I cheating?” said Neale, who has used Facebook study groups herself.”

Ir seems fairly ridiculous that we spend so much time and trouble working on the use of new technologies for collaborative learning – and even more so for encouraging autonomous learning, only for academic institutions to take actions like this. Furthermore, every survey of employers suggests that the ability to work as part of a team is both one of the most sought after competencies and one which they feel is not being taught by the education system.

If the university is really worried about the integrity of its assessment system there are many things they could do. At a simple level why not set group assignments. Peer group assessment can provide for individual assessment within a group. Or, they could take a little more time and trouble and develop more authentic assessment to test each learner’s ability to apply knowledge developed through group work.

As Chris Avenir says ” if this kind of help is cheating, then so is tutoring and all the mentoring programs the university runs and the discussions we do in tutorials.”

It is a great pleasure to report what seems to be very good news from elgg. These two extracts form recent posts on the Elgg news blog.

“When Ben Werdmuller stood up at the Elgg Jam 2007, he announced an advanced version of Elgg – version 1.0 – that would come with no features, and allow you to pick and choose exactly which functionality you required on your social web application.  Later the same year, Curverider began talking about Project Searunner, an API-based back-end for the easy creation of distributed web applications.  Today we are pleased to announce that they are the same thing. ”

“From the beginning,

Elgg 1.0 won’t ship with any end-user features; you can think of it as a social application engine that can power all kinds of different sites and applications. In fact, there are three major ways you can use the new Elgg core:

* As a web application in a box, as it always has been.

* As a collection of back-end PHP libraries.

* As a back-end API that you can use as the building blocks of any socially-aware networked application in any language.

With this in mind, who are we to tell you what features you need? The original Elgg codebase came with profiles, a blog, a file repository, communities and an RSS aggregator. On many of the communities we’ve built, forums or microblogging has been much more popular than blogging (it depends on the audience, but a lot of people don’t enjoy writing mini-essays on a regular basis). What if you want to use those instead? Or you want to use it as the engine for a company intranet, or an online game, or a virtual learning environment?

By taking out the features and letting you pick and choose exactly what you want, Elgg becomes a much more powerful system. The plugin system, incoming and outgoing APIs, data import/export and documentation are the major features, as well as user handling and social networking logic. Everything else is optional. In fact, we intend to release the core to download before any extra features are even developed.

On the web as a whole, this reflects how applications have evolved. The era of the all-encompassing, unfocused social network has come and gone; Elgg allows you to build systems that are specific to a particular market or audience, with exactly the features you need.”

If you are worried about maintaining all the features from the ‘old’ Elgg, Ben says that will now be maintained by Misja Hoebe as Elgg Classic.

The eduspaces closure (or not) saga rolls on. To bring new readers up to speed, just before Christmas Curverider,  the comany behind the popular elgg open source software, announced the closure of eduspaces, which describes itself as the “the world’s largest social networking site dedicated to education and educational technology.”

After several days rather fraught debate in the edublogosphere, Curverider rescinded the closure notice, saying that TakingITGlobal, a Canadian not for profit trust, would take over the service. Sighs of relief all round, albeit with some concerns over the lack of transparency regarding the transfer. And for a time all looked good with TakingITGlobal indicating their desire to establish an advisory board to help them run eduspaces. But, come January, things went quiet again. Then this week a new announcement appeared on the front page of the eduspaces site.
“As announced earlier TakingIT Global will continue hosting the eduspaces.net community. Please login to get redirected to a page where you can indicate if you would like to have your eduspaces.net account transferred to a new home on educatorcentral.org. This option will remain available until February 27th 2008.”

This has raised new doubts. As Josie Fraser says on the site forum:

“…it’s currently not possible to be logged on to the site and not select an option before carrying out any other activity – including referring back to this post to ask for further information. I’ve asked to be migrated across but I would have liked to be able to have given informed consent and understood what this means a little better. The transfer notice refers to another URL – does this mean that all existing links on site will be broken (again)? What happens to links between friends on this site who don’t opt in to joining the, in effect, new community? Was it not possible to come to an arrangement regarding the Eduspaces URL?”

Besides the issue of the domain name change, there now is some doubt over the future platform. Most of us had assumed the eduspaces would continue to be hosted on the elgg Open Source platform. But TakingITGlobal has previously used a proprietary platform for its networking activities. The lack of any communication must lead to speculation that they will in fact not use elgg but will transfer accounts to their own platform. And the educatorcentral domain name referred to in the transfer notice is not yet active. In effect edusapces is being shut down with TakingITGlobal offering a new service for those who previously were part of eduspaces.

So the sorry saga rolls on. As Terry says: “the community is the people, not the technology”. But it seems increasingly clear that eduspaces will no longer be a key part of that community.

Around the start of January it has become traditional for educational bloggers to make their predictions on what is going to happen in the world of education technology in the forthcoming year. Predictably, I am late. But better late than never, as the saying goes.

And here is my prediction. 2008 will be the year of web based groupware. Nothing much revolutionary about that. The first on-line application I ever used was FirstClass – jointly hosted by the UK Open University and the BBC in th early days of the web. The interface was not great and of course it was not very fast. But it sort of worked. You could join groups, exchange messages in groups and uplaod files. Pretty basic but that is all most people wanted to do.

I used FirstClass until a couple of years ago. I even got quite smart in administration. After changing hands every couple of years FirstClass seemed to slowly fade, not helped by the refusal to release the code and insisting developers could only work in some horrible thing called RAD.

Of course FirstClass or FC as us aficionados used to call it was not the only groupware product. There were and still are many very good products out there.

But in the last few years groupware has been eclipsed int eh education field by powerful CMS systems, by LMS and VLEs and more lately by social networking platforms. This, I predict, is all about to change. Why?

1. Groupware is scalable. Not so much scaling up, but scaling down. It works just as well for 5 people as it does for 50. Social networking sowfatre does not scale well – especially downwards. It needs considerable activity to show any gain.
2. Groupware doesn’t nag – you do not get endless status upgrades. It shuts out the ‘noise’ of the web.
3. Groupware does the things many people want to do in their work – share files, provide a small repository, share messages with a limited group of people.
4. Google and yahoo have been quietly developing excellent, free easy to manage groupware products.

Lest give you a few examples. I have been struggling for years to get projects to collectively share developmental activity through various CMS and more latterly WordPress based platforms. But it is very hard. What they usually do is send me things which I have to put up. And if none of the group are used to blogging it is very difficult to persuade them to participate in a group blog. But people ‘get’ groupware. they can see the value of it and it is very easy to use. It makes their lives easier, rather than being another thing to learn about. In the last three months nearly every new project I have participated in has set up an group on Yahoo or Google.

Another example – a friend and colleague of mine – John Pallister who is a teacher in a UK school worked for a long time in developing a great blog on his experiences in implementing e-Portfolios. But try as he might he got very little traffic, still less feedback. Now he has started a group on Google called e-Portfolios and PLTs (PLT stands for Personal Learning and Thinking Skills). John says:

“I don’t know whether this will work, but I have watched and contributed to many online discussions about both skills and ePortfolios – most discussions dried up very quickly and did not manage to engage the people who were prepared to throw their ideas into the thinking-pot. Can Google Groups as a vehicle help?

I have set the group up with minimal admin and now hope to sit back and enjoy reading about your experiences, thinking and ideas about how ePortfolios can support the development of Personal Learning and Thinking Skills).”

There have been so good posts to the group, though I think John is a little disappointed there are not more active participants. But, as I have written before, lurking is a great way to learn. Even with limited active participants, groups can be a powerful means of mutual learning. And groups – just as face to face – tend to have peaks and troughs in activity, quietening down and then re-emerging for particular purposes at particular times. Groupware is ideal for supporting such forms of discourse and exchange. So stick in there, John.

So that is it. 2008 – the year of groupware.

I am in York at a meeting of the Jisc Emerge programme. There seems to be increasing disillusionment with Facebook. And the evidence against Facebook is mounting. This is from the latest edition of the LabourStart newsletter.

“Facebook, the social networking website, is getting a lot of attention these days. In the trade union movement, there are differences of opinion about how useful Facebook actually is. Some of us are making a real effort to find out by using Facebook as an organizing tool. One of them is senior LabourStart correspondent Derek Blackadder, from Canada. Derek’s day job is as a staffer for the country’s largest union, the Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE). He’s one of the people who thinks Facebook is potentially quite useful for trade unionists.

Well, maybe not so much anymore. You see, a few days ago, Derek was banned from Facebook. I’ll let John Wood from the U.K. tell the story in his own words: Derek got a note from the good book, telling him he was trying to add too many friends, and should calm down a bit, or else. Now as a union organiser, he’s quite likely to want to add lots of friends – it’s kind of what he does. So he waits a bit and tries again, and is told he can’t add any more at the moment and to wait and try later. Fair enough. He waits a bit more and tries again, same message. By now, he’s probably frothing at the mouth and muttering “must organise, must organise”, so he has another go to see if the coast is clear, and promptly gets himself a ban. That being a ban from Facebook itself – no more profile, no access to the stuff he’s built up, no appeal.

John has launched a Facebook group to sign people up to protest the ban on Derek. I am writing to ask each and every one of you to take a moment and sign up to join the group. “Eric Lee, who runs LabourStart suggests supporters should join Facebook. He says “I know that most of you are not yet signed up to Facebook. This is good time to see whether we can mobilize the kind of support — the thousands of names — that will force the owners of Facebook to reverse course and allow Derek to do what he does so well: organize.”

I am not sure we should encourage people to join Facebook. It may be time to campaign and organise against the platform owners.

Been catching up on the administration – I am sure you all wanted to know that. But at the end of the week it is back on the road. On Thursday and Friday I will be in York at the Jisc Emerge conference. And on Friday evening o travel to Halle – near Leipzig it seems – for the first meeting of the European funded ICONET project.

As ever if anyone is around and wants to meet up that would be cool. Given that I travel quite a lot I set myself up an account on the new social network, Dopplr.

Seems a smart idea – but to be really useful – especially in allowing yiu to work out where your friends are going to be – you need a big social network on the site. And so far only my friend and colleague Eileen is sharing with me. She is at home – at least that is what Dopplr says. Help – I am lonely – anyone else got an account on the site?