First, I run a study skills session with the group. Then they break into smaller groups for the school’s GROW program (Glossary  Research Organised Writing) where they work on writing styles, identifying key terms, marking criteria, supporting evidence, using scaffolds for writing, and advanced research skills. It is a really impressive program and takes into account the sort of navigation literacy skills that students need.

While waiting Year 11 to arrive, I was flicking through their booklet and came across a section ‘How Web 2.0 Savvy are you’. I quickly jotted down a few points to see whether I was savvy as the Year 11 students:

• Am I comfortable using the Internet. Yes.
• Do I have a web page. Yes.
• Do I read blogs. Yes.
• Do I write a blog. Yes.
• Do I have a Myspace etc page. No. Doh!
• Do I use YouTube. Yes.
• Do I use podcasts/vodcasts. Yes.
• Do I subscribe to RSS Feeds. Yes.
• Do I use Flickr or similar. Yes.
• Do I read/write wikis. Yes.

So I felt pretty good about how I would compare to a web savvy student. Mind you, 6 months ago prior to this subject for uni I would have only been able to answer yes to 3 of these!

But I started thinking – what else should be on this list? What else do we expect a Web 2.0 afficiado to be comfortable with?

I would probably add:

- Do you use a aggregator? (Mainly cause know I know that is what it is called – check out NetVibes as an example).

- Are you aware of the educational value to be found in Second Life? (Mainly cause I used to think it was just an advanced Dungeons and Dragons type thing but now am realizing there are great educational experiences taking place).

- Do you Skype? (or similar)

- Do you Twitter?

And why doesn’t the list talk about MSN/Chat programs: do we just assume all students are using them?

So then I started to think a bit more about the definition of Web 2.0 and this is what I found on a quick search:

Definitions of Web 2.0 on the Web:

• A term often applied to a perceived ongoing transition of the World Wide Web from a collection of websites to a full-fledged computing platform …
  www.2020systems.com/internet-ad-glossary-r-z.html
• Web 2.0 is a perceived or proposed second generation of the web. This is were the web has evolved and improved over time and now offers better and more up to date services like blogs, wiki’s, social networking sites etc
  germworks.net/blog/2007/02/11/web-jargon-explained/
• a term introduced in 2004 to characterize design patterns in a constellation of new generation Web applications which may provide an infrastructure for more dynamic user participation, social interaction and collaboration.
  www.csa.com/discoveryguides/scholarship/gloss.php
• The second phase of architecture and application development for the web. Web 2.0 applications often use a combination of techniques devised in the late 1990s, including public web service APIs (dating from 1998), Ajax (1998), and web syndication (1997).
  www.aardvarkmedia.co.uk/glossary.html
• Web 2.0 is an expression which was used for the first time in 2004 and referred to the second generation of Internet. The main characteristics of new era in Internet is connected with its constant development and delivering services tailored to the needs of each user.
  www.share.uni-koeln.de/
• Web 2.0, a phrase coined by O’Reilly Media in 2004, refers to a perceived second-generation of Web-based services-such as social networking sites, wikis, communication tools, and folksonomies-that emphasize online collaboration and sharing among users.
  en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web 2.0

I think I like the wikipedia one best (although I have no idea what folksonomies are).

So what’s your definition of Web2.0 and are there other technologies that should be on a Web2.0 list? Suggestions welcome.

You probably think you own the rights to your Facebook content. Well read on, you might be surprised….

Social Networking sites are definitely here to stay. But do users really think about who might be looking at their information and what it could potentially be used for? If we want to use social networking sites in the e-learning process we need to be aware of potential issues.

• We need to think about safety. Obviously one should never give away personal information (particularly home addresses) – students especially need to aware that the people they are interacting with may not necessarily be who they represent themselves to be.

• We need to think about identity theft. This is a growing area of concern and too much publicly posted info makes it easier for the would be identity thieves among us. Reclaiming your identity can be a costly, time-consuming and frustrating process.

• We need to think about the future. There have been examples in the US where candidates were not hired as interviewers have examined potential employees facebook pages and decided that their personal life did not fit in with the image the company wanted to portray. Things lurk on the net for a long long time. You think you may have deleted a file but it could easily have been held in cache by google and be around for a lot longer. The best way to think about it is never to post anything that you wouldn’t want anyone in the world to see from now until the rest of your life (and beyond!). Because those funny-at-the-time MySpace photos could come back to haunt you when you are trying for the job or career of a lifetime….

AND IF THAT WASN’T ENOUGH… THIS IS REALLY SCARY!

After listening to the discussion on ABC Radio, I went and checked out the terms page of Facebook for myself. Do you ever read through all the terms and conditions for anything? I know I don’t every time. Well perhaps we all need to start spending a bit more time on it. This is a section from the Facebook terms page (http://www.facebook.com/terms.php), think carefully about what the implications are:

“When you post User Content to the Site, you authorize and direct us to make such copies thereof as we deem necessary in order to facilitate the posting and storage of the User Content on the Site. By posting User Content to any part of the Site, you automatically grant, and you represent and warrant that you have the right to grant, to the Company an irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, fully paid, worldwide license (with the right to sublicense) to use, copy, publicly perform, publicly display, reformat, translate, excerpt (in whole or in part) and distribute such User Content for any purpose, commercial, advertising, or otherwise, on or in connection with the Site or the promotion thereof, to prepare derivative works of, or incorporate into other works, such User Content, and to grant and authorize sublicenses of the foregoing. You may remove your User Content from the Site at any time. If you choose to remove your User Content, the license granted above will automatically expire, however you acknowledge that the Company may retain archived copies of your User Content. Facebook does not assert any ownership over your User Content; rather, as between us and you, subject to the rights granted to us in these Terms, you retain full ownership of all of your User Content and any intellectual property rights or other proprietary rights associated with your User Content.”

This means Facebook has the right to use any of your content for any purpose at all. They could take all your photos and publish a book entitled ‘mad party animal people’. They could collate all the personal info you have posted and reformat it, take excerpts, use it any way they like – even granting sublicenses. Now while you might say ‘well I’m careful about what I put on the site’, do you really want to give that sort of power away?

Certainly something to think about.

PS. And here’s a tip – if you are trying to remove images, rather than deleting the image, upload a blank image with the same file name, this should then replace the old image so when you delete it hopefully only the most recent copy (the blank one) will have been archived. I also do this with files I want to delete that may have sensitive info. First I delete all the content, save the file as a blank file with the same file name, and then I delete it. Not that I am paranoid, but you never know….

Let me say upfront I come from a Catholic background. There are things I like about the Catholic church and things I don’t. One of the things I do not like is that the Catholic church seems so backward in things like the concept of women or married priests (in fact I sent the Pope a Christmas card this year, all the way to the Vatican, explaining that due to priest shortages my mother’s parish can only have mass every second week and asking if they could explain why we can’t have married and women priests – I just don’t get it. No reply yet but it is only 3 months, I am hopeful).

Anyway, this article astounded me. Despite being so behind the times in so many areas, the Catholic church has realised that if they can’t beat them, they have to join them.

So what has happened? Well a new social networking site for Catholics was launched yesterday: http://www.faithtrip.net/

It will be like any other social networking site – there will be blogs, music, forums : but with a religious theme. Founded by Australians (go us!) the aim is to create a virtual parish, harnessing technology to spread their message.

What amazes me is that a such a tradition bound organisation can realise and embrace the potential of technology…and yet our educational system is lagging behind. At a grassroots level we are doing well with individual teachers finding lots of ways to integrate technology but at a policy-making level we still have a long way to go.

So perhaps the Department of Education needs to follow the lead of the Catholic church (that just seems so wrong as I have not really ever viewed the Catholic church in my lifetime as ground-breakers) and create a similar social networking site for students where the discussions are centered around school and learning and teachers can have students interact in a safe environment without the problems that come with public sites like MySpace and Facebook.