Architecture of Ideas

Living Up To Your Reputation: Talking Points

In response to requests from others on our talking points in the Living Up To Your Reputation presentation last week, here are our notes. Hopefully they will help as others frame conversations and engage students in issues of safety and citizenship:

Talking Points

• Intro, Online Privacy, and Digital Footprint: (Laura)
  
  • Goal today is to help students consider their online interactions in a forward-looking manner (college, professional life, adult life).
  • Overview of how interactions have changed over time, and even though students think of their online spaces as "their mall", "their spaces", these spaces and forms of interaction are in fact a paradigm shift--new forms of communicating, interacting, collaborating, etc. (Laura gave overview of how her personal and professional communications and work have changed dramatically.)
  • Students noted how they were "freaked out" by parents signing up for Facebook. (Significant # of parents joining)
  • Showed BBC Facebook Parody-
  • Purpose was to relax the audience and build common understanding of how Facebook is generally being used, and opening up conversation of audience and boundaries.
  • Private or Public? How conversations have changed. Now more a broadcast nature w/potential for "voice changing." Issues of over-sharing and online vs offline identify.(Shared example of how worst thing that might have happened before the broadcast culture was a rumor or bad reputation spread to a limited audience.)
  • Who Is Your Audience? Different audiences that often merge when online. Do you remember who you "friended" when you were in 8th grade? When the # of friends you had was such a status symbol? What conversations are they hearing now?
  • Online Networks have Different Level of Private vs. Public
  • Examples:
  • Twitter and how public it is.
    •     Facebook-more choice now on public/private
    •     Facebook-think about what you are sharing, who you are talking to, and who might     overhear. (Talked about personal settings and "friends" settings. If having     conversation on your friend's wall, and her settings aren't limited, who can see those     conversations.
  • Facebook-walked through where to change settings, and suggested Custom settings (w/customize feature) as opposed to Recommended. Also discussed Facebook Places and the need to disable friend's tagging you "there." (Ex: Steak and Shake at midnight.) Note--most students were unaware and not using Places.
  • Moving beyond individual sites, introduced notion of Digital Footprint w/Common Sense Media clip.
  • Asked Students if they'd ever Googled themselves. (maybe 1/2 had?) Shared a Google search of a student (with his prior permission) as well as Laura's.
  • Case studies
    • 27 year old teacher, drunken pirate posting, fired
    • College professor posted to Facebook, public in Dartmouth network. Screenshot taken and blunder exposed.
    • Cisco Fatty incident. Student hired but posts negative comment on Twitter. Cisco picks it up. Makes MSNBC.com
• Digital Empathy (Sarita)
  
  • What it feels like to be "left out." We've all been there. Exacerbated when it's public and online.
  • What is empathy? To show empathy is to identify with another's feelings. Very difficult to do online when you cannot see the person and cannot read their social cues as easily as you can when you are face to face.
  • Rutgers situation. How many of you know who this is? (Amazing how few did, though later acknowledged they'd heard of the case.)
  • Discussed the case. Tyler Clementi, as well as the two students. Noted that the two students look like "good kids"; not evil. They just made an insensitive, dumb decision. People are more likely to do risky things when they feel like they are anonymous.
  • Asked for examples of when students might say something on line that they would not say face to face. Not much shared, except for something like "I love you."
  • Looked at a few examples of what people post on Twitter that you think would never be said f2f: I hate my job, I hate my boss, I hate my coach. (Aside, very few postings about I hate my spouse, etc.) Easy to forget how what you say affects other people.
  • Thinking Points--start here before you post
• Closing: "David Letterman Top 10 Things to Remember Online

Living Up To Your Reputation

Our high school students spent yesterday in a pilot program,  the "21st Century Symposium." This day-long event was designed to replace "Career Night" and give the 10th-12th graders a different experience while  9th graders were off campus for the Service Initiative for the Ninth Grade (S.I.N.G.) two-day outreach program. The morning started with a remarkable keynote by alumnus Glen Jackson on becoming storytellers and "wake makers" (emphasizing character values such as integrity and persistence and highlighting creativity) followed by a variety of sessions on careers, college, and living online. The day concluded with a session on journaling and time in advisories for the students to reflect and "make meaning" of the day.

I  was asked to design sessions for all 300 11th and 12th graders addressing issues of online privacy and citizenship. Of course, this age group is far more challenging an audience than our faculty (to whom I had presented in August), and the fact that my daughter is an 11th grader added more pressure. So, I called for reinforcements.  Sarita Yardi, an almost-30-but-looks-like-she's-20-year-old-PhD student at Georgia Tech, hangs out online for her research and spent a summer working with her friend, colleague and mentor danah boyd. Together, we put together a 50-minute preso to share in three back-to-back sessions.

The slide deck is uploaded to Slide Share and included below for reference. Although it was tough to get a clear read on audience response, the fact that my daughter was not totally embarrassed and admitted that a number of people stopped her to say they loved it, meant that perhaps we weren't a total #fail.

The biggest hits were probably the BBC Facebook parody (approved by our high school admin team) and the "Letterman Top 10"  Things to Remember Online. Of course, the discussion of the Rutger's situation had the room at a hush.

I don't know what will stick with the students over time, but I suppose my hope is that they think more, react less, and learn to promote their best selves.

 

Living Up To Your Reputation

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