Course 1 was interesting however I already have been helping teachers to set up their own WordPress Blogs, Twitter and Google docs accounts (for those that show interest). So it was about 20% new things for me.  This course was totally different. I learned so many news things but at he end I have the sensation of studying disconnected subjects. Only when I started do design and reflect about a new way to introduce a RUP did I finally connect all the dots!

This semester was very difficult for me to collaborate with my COETAIL colleges because of my health situation. Between a sick leave, a surgery and moving to another country and another school, I managed to get connected with them mostly trough my twitter account and my comments on blogs. I ended up collecting individual and collaborative works and adding on to my ongoing project about network policies and security with my college Fernando that is the IT manager from E.S.C.O.L.A, another International School in Luanda.

Even with the advancement of sharing tools these days I have always prefered a face-to-face meeting with the local school IT Managers around me. Every school that I’ve worked at has become a ‘lab’ where other schools can come and exchange experiences and implement new things.

Back to the final project, the main questions was not about the RUP or AUP or whatever new document with 3 acrimonious letters. In fact the main question was:

How can we make students, teachers and staff understand the big concepts that involve the proper use of digital resources?  Things like copyright, cyber-bullying, licensing, good digital citizens and digital manners? (IT policies should be signed by all members of the school, not just students)

It was pretty clear from the beginning that a simple document will not be enough to accomplish this matter alone. So we decided to create a system that engaged people to manage their own responsible use knowledge and reward themselves. The system proposed here was inspired by common drive licenses process and gaming engagement.

The system is defined by 3 elements. RUP + Quiz Game + Level Access. All the 3 elements are connected and work live together.

Some rights reserved by Rodrigo Brasil

As in real life if you want to drive a bus you should have a different knowledge and get a different drivers license specfically for that.  The same thing if you want to pilot a boat, jet-ski or drive a motorcycle.  Every equipment/resource requires a different knowledge or skill set. And here we apply the same concept, implementing rewards.  So…

Why should we put the majority of school expenses for high speed Internet bandwidth for members that want to watch music video clips or play Battlefield 3, instead of using it for learning, creating and sharing knowledge?
Lets educate and qualify the school community members on RUP and reward those who use Internet in a productive way.

So basically, this is how it works (we tested it with students from Year 5 as a Beta test). Students receive a copy of our RUP in Google Docs that contains a hyperlinks embedded for all the subjects we consider essential knowledge for using our technological resources. Subjects include copyright, cyber-bullying, licensing, good digital citizens, digital manners, digital footprint, etc…After a week they sign the PDF electronically (no paper please) with their username and password. From this point they receive an e-mail with a hyperlink and instructions to a Quiz that has more than 50 questions divided by subject areas. The Quiz is what we call adaptive. If you get three answers right from the same subject the game stops asking you more questions related to that topic (nobody deserves answers 50 questions). At the end of the Quiz you receive a level access that will allow you to increase your bandwidth and Internet access privileges. As technology evolves rapidly, every year the level of access of everyone is normalized and a new Quiz starts again.

Consideration about this method.
1. Everyone in the school independently of getting the Quiz done has normal Internet access without any restrictions (according with the SLT resolution about the Internet filters for different groups)

2. The Quiz only increases ones level, never decreases. People can take the Quiz as much as they want if the result from the current Quiz is worse than your previous scores.  If your score doesn’t increase you stay at your current level.

3. Increased level of access gives you more bandwidth(Internet speed) on your username, access to the school Internet from home (VPN), a chance to migrate your personal devices such as cell phone and tablets from guest networks to the school network, etc…

4. The bank of questions is subdivide into 3 banks (Lower, Middle and Upper School) because the perception and RUP is different from each school level. We only implemented the Middle School.

5. This proposal is very specific to an IT environment and should be implemented by your technology department.  If interested, contact me for more details.

6. At the end of this quiz there is a small Microsoft Visual Basic script to increase the level of access for each student. Otherwise this will become a nightmare for the technology department to manage.

7. Results were fantastic. In less than 1 week half of students already have upgraded their Internet level access and increased their knowledge about our policies.

Have a FANTASTIC summer!

This week I have discovered a good surprise about 3D browser. I didn’t have time yet to try it, but it will be the first thing I will do after the Final Project of course 2. Back to the reflecting questions this week… TCP/IP was created very close to my birth year.  My generation was the first to experience a few analog devices and at the same time start to use for the first time the most amazing technology that we have til today, digital devices. My generation was blessed! The 70′s!

Hyperlink is so important for the web that without it, Internet would be an enormous address book where you need to search manually by initial letter and type the address on your browser (Very similar to our analogical phone system). Navigation through information on the same site or from one site to another would be impossible without hyperlinks.

Below is the hyperlink graph generate by algorithm about our school website. The algorithm is amazing but I would like to add the possibility to click on the orange links and discover which link is broken so I can fix. Maybe I am going to collaborate with the article on this open-source project to add this little and helpful feature.

Generated by Marcel Algorithm at http://www.aharef.info/static/htmlgraph/

As everything in life, hyperlinks can have a bad side or side effects. So many links within a webpage or article online lead us off onto tangents, which cause us to think in a non-linear way. It becomes hard to start and finish an article completely, without getting lost. Many articles could take you so deep into other articles and references that maybe you will need to use 10 times your back button on your browser to come back to the original article.

I love it this topic and I have a good reason for that, let me tell you why.  Both cases, Sexting and Cyber Bullying, I have had to deal with as a student and as Tech Director.

Bang With Friends on Virgula Website

Back in 2001, I was a student at PUC-Rio, where I graduated in Information Technology, when a Sexting case happened with a fellow student. I personally didn’t know her even though I took at least 3 courses with her. At that time she was dating another guy from our course that got upset with her after they broke up.  He discover that she was cheating on him.  What happened? Her ex-boyfriend published a video of them having sex. Looking back in 2001, there wasn’t Facebook, Twitter or other major social networks.  However the video was forwarded to the student email list of our technology course.  I never received so many forwards of the same message in my life.  The girl came on the next day and disappeared for the next two weeks, because she couldn’t handle the humiliation that time. She eventually returned to College with different hair (colored and short), different closes and more reserved. Next term I graduated and have never seen her again. But the question was always in my mind…did she handle the Sexting and finish her course? Well in 2007 I returned to PUC-Rio to fill up some paperwork and accidentally bumped into her on the bus leaving the University. I spoke with her, of course without bringing up the scandal, and discovered that she graduated from our course, did a Master and was in the middle of the PhD in technology and close to becoming the first women to have a doctorate from the new technology course offered by the University. It’s amazing how some people have the power to come through a bad situation and exceed expectations. Good for her!

About Cyber Bullying as a Technology Director, in the last of 6 years, I’ve handle several cases.  Most of them the school leadership team relies on the technology department to track the cyber bullying activity.  For my surprise, most of the bullying is done after school hours or with students personal cell phones and data plans where we can’t track it.  Even though parents know that in most cases school doesn’t have power to punish (at least in most countries) the students because they can’t prove the episode, they put a lot of pressure onto principal and directors to sort out the cases once the persons involved are identified as students in that school.  Most of the cases also involved public humiliation related most of time with peoples physical attributes or personality. I have seen various types Cyber Bullying cases such as a girl that smelled different and another one on a girl that had extra pounds. There are plenty of cases involving boys and bullying as well.

After reading all the this week’s articles I am definitly convinced that the best thing schools and educators can do is orient their students to become digital citizens instead of digital natives. Digital citizens include more civil and moral responsibility than digital natives. Hope the laws around the globe can be updated as well to support serious cases.

As Jeff Utech asked us in this lesson to reflect on how we teach about copyright laws in Africa, I found myself asking the question, “Are there copyright laws in Angola?”  Yes!  I found them.  So for those colleges that teach in Angola here it is, Angola Law on Authors’ Rights. For teachers who teach in others parts of the globe, I recommend also going to this website dedicated to this subject. http://www.copyright-watch.org/.

Some rights reserved by Kalexanderson

Like many others countries, Angola Law n# 4/90 from 10th of March of 1990 did not include any reference to digital creative material or sharing or reuse. The only mention in the law about digital content is related to computer programs, in article 6(n). So it’s very difficult to teach kids about copyrights when in the “adult world”  they are not able to keep up with the fast changes in the creation of material these days.  However, it is still valid to teach them to credit people’s work, show them how to read common licenses like Creative Commons and how they can’t publish their content under one of those licenses. I think it would be a good exercise for our students at LIS to rewrite the Angola law (only 7 pages) embedding digital creative content and new licenses that create the possibility to share, reuse and remix the original material with authors permissions.

Privacy online? Not really. I totally agree with the article Beware: the Internet could own your future where Husna Najand said – “By the time anyone becomes aware of a tag on a particularly unsavory picture and asks his or her friend to take it down, dozens have probably viewed it already.” It’s impossible to have total privacy online and I am going to give you an example.

Trying to keep my Grandmother’s privacy

Even my grandmother that has never touched a computer in her life (when I say never, I mean it) is in cyberspace. How could this be possible? It’s very simple.

• Her Grandsons and Granddaughter, published photos of her and wrote her name (because they cannot tag her, as she doesn’t have a social account);
• Telephone company in Rio publish her address and land line phone into the public online phone book;
• Every government payment, like her retirement pension, from my grandfather that died and pension was transfered to her, is publish on Official Government Diary that started online in 1994;
• In the public records of civil courts, where no privacy is required her name also appears

As Internet is not legislated, so far thank goodness, it’s impossible to get control of what people, government or companies publish about you. The only thing you can do is from time to time research your self and check if you find something very disrespectful or untrue about yourself. And if found, contact the website site and ask them to remove it or go through a painful legal process.

But the point is, we are in different times and people must learn in be comfortable with not having as much privacy as they did before.  Make sure you talk about privacy online with our students and ask them what they understand about privacy. You will be surprised with the answers.  I would guess students feel privacy for them is less important than older people view it.

After reading all the recommended readings, Your Online Reputation Can Hurt Your Job Search, Calculate your Digital Footprint, Companies Using Social-Networks to hire employees is on the rise, Positive Digital Footprint, Would You Hire You? I was completely shocked of my own conclusions. First of all I did a search on myself using PeekYou and I found a lots of me.  Let me explain… I couldn’t believe how many Rodrigo Brasils exist. Yes there are a lot of people with my namesake!

Some rights reserved by Ric e Ette

And I am starting to think, how can I brand myself and create a positive digital footprint without people getting the wrong me? It’s already hard to keep our references (Digital Footprint) “clean” and positive on the web and on top of this you need to make sure people don’t mistake you with another person.

It became clear to me that more and more social networking sites like Twitter will also allow the general public to get their accounts verified by paying a small fee. The account verified will help us to avoid the high risk of risk of impersonation.

On times where we have a lot of content created under the license Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike Non-Commercial 3.0 License it is extremely important as an educator that we credit all the information we are reusing or reshaping and teach our students the importance of recognizing peoples work and contributions.

Well as the critical person that I am, I decided to understand better what was the fascination and success behind wikis.  When I look at wikis I saw boring pages, bad design interface and tons of pure text. How could students  be interested in wikis? And the answer is… they are not naturally.  Most of the time students are oriented by teachers to use wikis in their classroom as a collaboration tools. Really?

It’s indisputable that wiki is an amazing tool to create collaborative text content. However I think that in the near future wikis as we know them will vanish and will be replaced by a combination of wiki + youtube and will equal better looking design. I truly believe that it’s possible to create, for example, a collaborative wiki concept but using video.

If you have time and speak french or portuguese please take a moment to watch this video.

According with this video, humankind keeps replacing function and opening space for new function and creativity.  Youth is already losing the capability to calculate because they have calculators and computers. Very soon we will lose the ability to write because we have videos. It’s interesting that in the near future we are going to produce more videos than text. So why not use the wiki concept in video format. I can wait to see what happens.

This week we completed the reading “Living and Learning with New Media: Summary of Findings from the Digital Youth Project”. I enjoyed every minute of this reading. At the end, I was very surprised, in a good way, when I saw the statement “Although we do not believe that youth hold all the answers, we feel that it is crucial to listen carefully to them and learn from their experiences of growing up in a changing media ecology.” I intensely share the same idea as the authors. Everything today is fast-moving and temporary. If you don’t listen, you waste a unique moment to be part of something that may not exist next year.

Since we are talking about accelerated times, I start to reflect on Jeff’s question in how are you changing what you do, or modifying what you do in the classroom? For the past 6 years I have been responsable for the IT department in two schools (EARJ and LIS). My goal was always have a strong IT infracture to support all the teachers and student dreams, or better said, desires. I confess that I committed mistakes over the years, but none of them were more impetuous then trying to standardize the IT resources and IT knowledge across the faculty.

IT is an uncontrollable beast. Today I see the future of technology departments like good fathers helping their kids grow. Tech depts. should provide sufficient technology funds, updated devices, best Internet access possible, good advice and encouragement for people to try new things in new ways as described in the article, “Shaping Tech for the classroom”.  Let teachers and students discover together what best suit them. They will find their way reading RSS, watching workshops on Youtube, steeling good ideas on Pinterest or from the tech savvy teacher.

Reading my words above you will probably think that it will create caos, but not really. Make teachers and students responsable to choose their preferred technological tools to support their teaching and learning, instead of providing the same technologies to all.  Each classroom/teacher can customize the technology to meet their needs and interests.  Make the technology personal to them and they will be more likely to optimize use of technology.

Before I say see you soon to this post , I want to share a technology video made 3 years ago at EARJ by the great Tech team there. Today it seems a ridiculously basic IT infrastructure. You can check the progress the we’ve made at LIS by visiting our CMS website and our PYP and MYP blogs.

“School system has evolved an extremely delicate balance between many sets of pressures — political, parental, social, organizational, supervisory, and financial” by Marc Prensky