Are children safe online?

Honestly, I feel a little uncomfortable opining my reactions to High Tech or High Risk:Moral Panics about Girls Online. Think before you post right? However, I will always remember the advice of my social studies education professor when it comes to addressing ideological concerns, "stand behind the research". I am confident in the work of Justine Cassell and Meg Cramer (couldn't find a link). So here goes nothing.

There is no way around it, the risk of teenage girls (and boys) online is one of the hottest of hot button issues. However, to avoid posting about is to delay the inevitable. When I become the social media specialist at your school and begin integrating Web 2.0 into the curriculum, online safety concerns are sure to be knocking on my door, ringing my phone and filling my inbox.

So...what does that research say? If you have been alive in the last 10 years, you know that main stream culture believes that girls are unsafe online. However, contrary to popular belief, the percentage of single offender crimes against girls where the offender is an adult and a stranger has declined, not increased, since 1994—concurrent with the rise of internet use.

Cassell and Cramer argue that the dangers to girls online are "not as severe as they have been portrayed, and that the reason for this exaggeration of danger arises from adult fears about girls’ agency (particularly sexual agency) and societal discomfort around girls as power users of technology". They analyze the gendered relationships with communications technologies through history.

Our research shows that there has been a recurring moral panic throughout history about the putative danger of communication technologies to young women. However, when we investigate the kinds of statements made about the nature of the danger, in each instance it is less the technology per se that turns out to be the culprit (or even the kinds of relationships made possible by the technology), and more the potential sexual agency of young women, parental loss of control, and the specter of women who manifest technological prowess.

The authors conclude that communications technologies in the past have played important roles in developing mature identities, and developing social relationships outside the family for young women.

I am still the student so I ask, how are you encouraging your young students to explore communication technologies? If you aren't why not? If you are, what media literacy lessons do you teach to prepare them for the chaos of the world wide web, and how have you garnered parental support? I feel like I ask this every time I post, but how do we get administrative support to open the social media doors in our schools?

My most pressing question is how do you stand behind the research when it flies in the face of popular cultural opinions regardless of political persuasion?

Why New Media in Education?

I am still waiting for my copy of Hanging out, messing around and geeking out. But I did do some reading from Jenkins' interview of the writers on his blog. The hanging out, messing around and geeking out perspective describes my life in the new media environment perfectly. As a "digital native" or the term I like better from Lankshear and Knobel, "digital insider" I have seen myself go through these hanging out messing around and geeking out stages since elementary school.

Looking forward to getting my hands on that book. In the meantime, as I read through the Jenkins syllabus I am seeing a more nuanced vision of the new media literacy landscape. In his post, Eight Traits of the New Media Landscape, Jenkins describes the new media landscape as more than just a collection of tools and emerging technologies. The new media landscape is a culture that is in transition. New media culture is a set of relationships that we need to understand before we attempt to develop a curriculum that might foster the skills and competencies needed to engage in this new paradigm.

The text is important because it builds a succint framework for talking about media literacy in the 21st century. It seems to be Jenkins response to Prensky. The rhetorical method he employs to call educators to action is much more effective than Prensky. First of all, it is written within the context of a new media itself, blogging. It also has benefited from a good 5 years of Web 2.0 research, Jenkins has a clearer, yet still nebulous vision of new media.

The question I have is: Why is all of our focus on changing education? Why not change other institutions? What about government or healthcare. Imagine the networked doctor or the networked bureacrat. Why is education at the bleeding edge of adopting the latest media shifts?

The perfect loaf of bread and my new literacy

Tonight I baked two batches of Steamy Kitchen's 3-Hour French Bread. I could not have done it without new media literacy.

It all started this summer when I took a course with Cassie Scharber at the University of Minnesota titled, Teaching Writing through Digital Storytelling. In addition to actually completing a digital story of my own, another assignment for the course was to share a digital "story-of-the-day" with the class. While watching countless YouTube video's I came across the breadolution. It has changed the way I think about literacy.



To be sure, I never really thought much about what literacy was before last year when I started working on my degree in education. But after witnessing MacLeod Pappidas' revolution a new idea occurred to me. Literacy is not only about connecting people to ideas, but also about connecting people through ideas. After experiencing my own breadolution, I now have a shared connection with someone I may have never known otherwise.

The breadolution lead me to the no-knead recipe and then finally to the three hour french bread. After having some trouble with the recipe and making a comment on the SteamyKitchen site, it has sent the largest inbound traffic to my blog in the last several weeks.

What is so important about me making connection to other people interested in bread? What if the story were different, what if I had connected to experts in my field of study or authors that are working on new media projects? What if, and this is the biq question, what if our students were making connections with other students based on shared interests?

Let me tell you from my own experience. A whole new world of connections and possibilities are opened by engaging in the new media particpatory culture. Don't be afraid to write and let your students write. Just make sure you leave a trail of bread crumbs behind you.