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social networking
resources and tools

SOCIAL NETWORKING

There is nothing wrong with myspace or any other technology. The problem is in ourselves, the adults of this nation. We have failed to see we are roadkill, unless we wake up and use our expertise to educate our children instead of punishing them by throwing them out of our schools and censor them and stifle them and filter them. Participatory cultures involve being a part of online communities, producing digital media, problem-solving collaboratively, and shaping the public discussion (via blogs, podcasts, etc.). And access to these is becoming key to young people's ability to succeed. They will not be stifled, filtered, censored and we (adults) don't get that. Social network sites are the Internet generation's equivalent of the town hall, the school cafeteria, or the workplace water cooler - the place where people come together to exchange both ideas and idle gossip. Second Life, MySpace, Flickr and all the other web 2.0 aren't places to go, but things to do, and a way to collaborate and express yourself. If you can get millions of users generating content, millions of users organizing that content, tens of thousands of users distributing that across the Internet, and thousands of people not on the payroll actually building it you've got a web 2.0 biz you can sell for millions of dollars.
Defining
Cultural Literacy and Technological Literacy

Educational theorist E.D. Hirsch, Jr. Hirsch said literate people in every society and every culture share a body of knowledge that enables them to communicate with each other and make sense of the world around them. The kinds of things a literate person knows will vary from society to society and from era to era; so there is no absolute definition of literacy. In the early twenty-first century, however, cultural literacy must have a large technological component.
Technological literacy is a much richer concept than computer literacy. Technological literacy can be thought of a comprising three interrelated dimensions that help describe the characteristics of a technologically literate person who has knowledge of technology and is capable of using it effectively to accomplish various tasks. He or she can think critically about technological issues and acts accordingly.

U.S. Students Need 21st Century Skills to Compete in a Global Economy Oct. 10, 2007
- A new, nationwide poll of registered voters reveals that Americans are deeply concerned that the United States is not preparing young people with the skills they need to compete in the global economy. An overwhelming 80 percent of voters say that the kind of skills students need to learn to be prepared for the jobs of the 21st century is different from what they needed 20 years ago. Yet a majority of Americans say that schools need to do a better job of keeping up with changing educational needs. The national poll was conducted by Public Opinion Strategies and Peter D. Hart Research Associates on behalf of the Partnership for 21stCentury Skills.

• Eighty-eight percent of voters say they believe that schools can and should incorporate 21st century skills such as critical thinking and problem-solving skills, computer and technology skills, and communication and self-direction skills into their curriculum.
• Sixty-six percent of voters say they believe that students need more than just the basics of reading, writing and math; schools alsoneed to incorporate a broader range of skills.
• Fifty-three percent say they believe schools should place an equal emphasis on 21st century skills and basic skills.

What every administrator, Policy Maker and Parent should know:

NSBA Social Network Report.pdf

MIT professor and clinical psychologist Sherry Turkle thinks "the impact of social networking on individual users and society in further accentuating "the tethered self" a person who understands himself and his feelings more in relation to others. " It seems to be part of a larger trend in media culture for people not to know what they think until they get a sense of what everyone else think." "Tethered adolescents are given a cellphone by their parents. In return, they are expected to answer their parents' calls. On the one hand, this arrangement gives the adolescent new freedoms. On the other, the adolescent doe not have the experience of being alone, of having only him or herself to count on: there is always a parent on speed dial. This provides comfort in a dangerous world, yet there is a price to pay in the development of autonomy. There used to be a moment in the life of an urban child, usually between the ages of 12 and 14, when there was a first time to navigate the city alone. It was a rite of passage that communicated, 'You are on your own and responsible.' Tethering via a cellphone buffers this moment; tethered children think differently about themselves. They are not quite alone." And time alone to digest, reflect, and form our own views - not just in relation to how our friends or fellow IM-ers or social networkers think is a good thing.

Parents, teachers, and administrators who are concerned about what their kids are doing out of the house should also know what their kids are doing online.

• Tools that a parent needs to supervise and keep children and teenagers safe on the internet.
• SAFE SCHOOLS AND THE CyberBully - What about those bystanders who just stand there and watch?
• Parents need to know how to Keep Your Child Safe
  Myspace Police Surveillance officers consider MySpace one of their best resources. Learn *how* police they use MySpace in investigations. Start with a name or an event or an area. Find a person connected to it and then drill down, through friends and friends of friends, visiting their sites, riffling through their pictures, reading the correspondence they display publicly, and making printouts of anything incriminating, find out where the big bashes will be. Even when youngsters use aliases, their face can still turn up in someone else's photo album of raunchy parties captured in embarrassing or illegal moments.
• Parents need to understand how to prevent the CyberBully from bothering their child.
  FULL TRANSCRIPT   of information for parents, legislators and press who are concerned about the dangers of MySpace.
  Tell students that it's about YOU wanting to "BRAND" YOURSELF on the Internet. You are more complex than a single label and it takes time to get to know people's complexities. Don't give people an excuse to think of you in a single dimensional way. Most Importantly, whatever you put up there will get cached by search engines forever and ever - do you really want that up there for ever and ever?
  Mr Rubert Murdoch, 74 appointed 33-year-old Jeremy Philips to run News Corp's internet strategy and armed him with a $1bn fund to buy more sites like myspace.com - like YouTube.com, Friendster, Linkedin, revver.com and Facebook.com, Tagged.com . Murdock hires lawyer Parry Aftab (a friend of Educational CyberPlayGround RingLeader Art Wolinsky) to clean up the myspace.com business from sexual predators who like teenagers. Then every news program does the expected sensational good for ratings show on molested teenagers. Now MySpace.com has hired Hemanshu Nigam to be its first chief security officer. Nigam, currently the director of consumer security outreach and child safe computing at Microsoft, will oversee safety, education, privacy and law enforcement affairs because of all the bad press on the issues of safety and privacy for the 68 million teenage members.
• "Teens are blogging everyday, reaching an audience of millions," ... the tools they need to blog legally, and understand how to defend their rights."
• EFF's "Legal Guide for Bloggers" is a collection of frequently asked questions (FAQs) designed to educate bloggers about their legal rights in a number of areas, including libel law, copyright law, and political advocacy. The guide will help bloggers understand the basics about the laws that affect them so they can better protect and defend their rights. Schools can respond to off-campus harmful speech in a very limited way based on the Tinker Standard which says that schools can only punish the student with formal discipline in cases where the school can show (reasonable proof) that the what got posted (off-campus speech) will have a substantial and material disruption with the work of the school or the safety and security of students.
• Social Networking sites have been around for years. Create your own social network for anything you want.
• Weblogs - AT ISSUE Student Blogs, School Cracks Down
• THE LAW LOTS OF REAL EXAMPLES LIKE
  Find Blogs used to Bully Kids and
  11/28/05, - Here's kind of a funny, kind of spooky off-topic myspace.com anecdote - since you mentioned your 14 year old likes the site. I found my husband's cousin's profile there the other night. She's 16 and her mother is verging on a nervous breakdown trying to keep up with her. The girl had posted pictures of herself in her panties, bragged about smoking, sex, partying and driving, doing drugs - on and on. It was really easy to gather a bunch of detailed information about her, her friends, where they worked, where they hang out. A real jackpot for any pervert that would be on the lookout. At the end of one of her explicit blog entries, I posted a simple comment: "Fancy finding you here... See you at Christmas, doll." - and signed our names. The next day, the racy pics were gone, as were all the blog entries and other silliness. I can't wait for Christmas now - muahahahahaha.
• Update on busted teenage cousin story:
  The dear girl yanked her blog and the raciest of the pictures from the page after realizing I had seen it. Her mom went looking for the page as well and found it - after the edit job. Two days later most of her old content was back up there. Her mom revisited the site, saw all that garbage and went into orbit. I'm guessing the dust is still settling at their place and that the girl's car is being sold out from under her because she's going to be grounded for a very long time. I just don't think it has ever occurred toher or her friends how vulnerable these sites make them when they include a lot of personal information about themselves. I see kid's profiles there all the time - even though you're supposed to be 18 to create an account. ~ Laurie
• Meet some of the Folks responsible for creating social software web 2.o stuff like Alex Bosworth, designer of SWiK working of social software like zoka and Bram Cohen author of Bittorrent and CodeVille.
• Social-networking will drive the next-generation cellphone market. What parents can do with the cell phones now. JuiceCaster 2.0 for phone-created Web content (enabling more kid-produced media on the Web).
• Department of Homeland Security official, Brian Doyle, was arrested and "charged with 23 felony counts, including using a computer to seduce a child and transmitting harmful materials to a minor,"

WEB 2.0 TOOLS

• TECHNOLOGY TOOLS FOR K12
• How and why do you Integrate Technology into the Classroom?
• FLICKER - social networking with tags but it's all about photographs that are public for all to see whose purpose is that people with similiar interests can connect. Like Marissa Mayr of Google leading to Global X
• MySpace Codes - Here is a website offering kids the code needed to hide information .
  MySpace codes to help you tweak your myspace profile
  If the codes messes up your profile, use "SAFE MODE" to edit / remove the code

LIST OF 5 DOZEN SOCIAL NETWORKING SITES

• BlogSafer Wiki
  Anonymous Blogging Guides in English, Arabic, Chinese and Persian.
  BlogSafer Contains a Series of Guides on How to Blog Under Difficult Conditions in Countries That Discourage Free Speech - outlines steps a blogger in a repressive regime can take, and tools to use, to avoid identification and arrest. These range from common sense actions such as not   providing identifying details on a blog to the technical, such as the use of   proxy servers.
  "A repressive regime trying to still free speech first goes after and shuts down independent print and broadcast media," said Curt Hopkins, project director of Spirit of America's Anonymous Blogging Campaign. "Once that is done, it turns its attentions to online news sites. As these outlets disappear, dissent migrates to blogs, which are   increasing geometrically in number and are simple to set up and operate." In the past several years at least 30 people have been arrested, many of whom have been tortured, for criticizing their governments. This trend is likely to increase in the coming year. SNIP
• xanga.com
• myspace.com
• livejournal
• my diary
• open diary
• diaryland
• YouTube.com, Google Video, iFilm.com, AddictingClips.com, stumbleupon.com
• faceparty.com
• esnips.com - must be 13 get 1 gig upload anything
• Facebook publicly opened registration beyond the world of students for the first time (!) to people with select corporate email accounts. Facebook's corporate foray will make college career counselors uneasy that unscrupulous employers might use the site to dig for dirt on students who have applied for jobs. Read the FaceBook Blog
• Seeking teens, marketers take risks by emulating MySpace
• Social Maps http://platial.com/splash with tags
  Watch the video hear the NPR story about it at
• Social Music Revolution Last.fm - then submit listening data to it
• Over come Censorship with text messages

Taxonomy, FOLKSONOMY and TAGS

Thomas Vander Wal, the information architect credited with coining the term "FOLKSONOMY".

Normal ordinary humans = FOLK
SEE FOLKMUSIC
Scientific Classification = TAXONOMY
SEE Taxonomy Community of Practice (TaxoCOP)

FOLKSONOMY - According to various speakers at Online, folksonomies and tagging are becoming increasingly important. Web 2.0 presents exciting opportunities for networked information of the future - see The Hive Mind. "Many recently developed concepts and technologies are seen as contributing to Web 2.0, including weblogs, wikis, podcasts, rss feeds and other forms of many to many publishing; social software, web APIs, web standards, online web services, AJAX, and others."). See popular tags used for music

Tags give you subject related Metadata

Tags add value to the giant piles of data that are already out there. What are tags? Thousands of members use tags to give some contextual meaning to more than 3.5 million pictures that might otherwise get lost in the shuffle. You can give your photos a "tag", which is like a keyword or category label. Tags help you find photos which have something in common. Let folks loose categorizing their own stuff on their own terms.

Del.icio.us - is a social bookmarks manager using Tags are one-word descriptors that you can assign to any bookmark. Tags can't contain quotation marks or whitespace, but are otherwise unrestricted. You can assign as many tags to a bookmark as you like, and rename, delete, add or merge tags together. Joshua Schachter began del.icio.us, a way for people to store and share their favorite Web-browsing bookmarks online. Instead of organizing them himself, or even creating a standard taxonomy of categories, Schachter used something called user tagging people simply labeled the bookmarks by any name they wanted, and eventually the group as a whole effectively voted on them by either adopting those tags themselves or rejecting them.

Tag Defintion - example of system:media:audio
http://del.icio.us/tag/system:media:audio
http://del.icio.us/rss/tag/your+tags
system:something:specific taxonomy

Furl, MetaFilter and the blog index Technorati are generally considered folksonomy trailblazers.

PODCASTING

PODCAST - A podcast is a radio show that listeners subscribe to online.  Podcasts are a unique combination of subscription and publication.

National Children's Folksong Repository AUDIO BLOG

Please record your American Playground Poetry, the folk songs, jump rope chants, kiddy rhymes, circle games, play parties, call and response songs,

GET SMART -- using your ipod, shoe phone, or computer.

VIDEOBLOG / VLOGS Video blogging Broadcasting Software

RSS THERE IS NOTHING SIMPLE ABOUT RSS IT IS DIFFICULT. RSS: podcasts are syndicated, meaning listeners just have to find them once, and receive them every time a broadcast is issued.

SMART MOBS A new form of social coordination made possible by the usage of modern technology, in particular the Internet and wireless devices.

WIKI "the simplest online database that could possibly work."