The Guardian posted this article yesterday dealing with the need for internet literacy skills at a younger and younger age.  In this case, the suggest was that children as young as five should be educated about how advertising is presented on the internet.  The article serves to remind us that the internet is a media like no other.

With television, shows that are targeted for a younger audience had rules about the content of the show and of the type of advertising tha is allowed to air during the show.  Older shows actually have a disclaimer message indicating that the content is not appropriate for younger audiences.

Similarly, magazines and books for children have specific rules for what sort of advertising that’s available and appropriate for their audience.

The wide open internet is different though.  There’s typically no control over who goes where and who does what.  You can find the darnedest things if you look hard enough or some things just by an inadvertant click.  It’s not just young children that can be duped either. Within the past month, I had a panic call from someone who got a message that their computer was infected with a virus and that a credit card was required to buy an anti-virus to remove it.  This was a very concerned individual who wasn’t at the top of the technologically savvy continuum but just used the computer to get the job done.  In this case, it was easy for me to dismiss since the computer being used was a Macintosh and the on-screen illustration was obviously files and folders from a Windows environment.  In this case, the advertising almost worked.

It goes to illustrate how good advertisers are at catching your eye.  Advertising isn’t bad.  The bills have to be paid somehow.  Major companies make a great deal of money through advertising.  Vendors sell a lot of products because of effective advertising campaigns.  You can’t really blame a child who tries to click on the bouncing ball or whatever in an advertisement.  Well crafted advertising will seemlessly enter the flow of a webpage and may not even be seen as being somehow different from the regular content of the page.

The article from the Guardian, on the surface, may appear to be overkill but how safe is safe?  Store your credit card information on your computer and an accidental click could end up with some unwanted purchases.  The bottom line here is that internet literacy is a skill that everyone needs.  The Ministry of Education in Ontario has recently licensed “Passport to the Internet” to provide another resource to go along with “Reality Check”.  In addition, on the internet, here are a lot of good people doing good things in this area.  I’ve tagged a bunch that I’ve found with the tag “safety” in my delicious account.

Of course, nothing is better than appropriate supervision and talking about what you see on the screen.  In the classroom, it’s always a good idea to have a portal to your content on your classroom wiki so that a student can click and get to the desired resources.  At our last computer contact meeting, we talked about the difference between “funbrain” and “funbrian” and how a simple slip of the finger can make such a difference.  In a live presentation, I broke the “click on a link and don’t keyboard it yourself” rule and made an embarrassing typo going for pbworks.cm instead of pbworks.com.  Gulp.  It’s so easy to do.

There is a great deal of value for people getting online.  We need to muster all of our skills to make sure that we do it intelligently and safely.

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• Mind Mapping
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• Teach five-year-olds to beware of advertising, says government inquiry | Society | The Guardian
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I was at the Google.org Philanthropy website and just stumbled into this section dealing with the flu in real time.  The logic behind the resource is that people with the flu are searching for information about it.

It’s an interesting concept.

The map is interactive and you can mouse over various parts to get a sense as to how much flu searching activity is happening for various countries.

What do you think? Is this a true depiction of world trends?  Read more about the logic behind the website.  If nothing else, it would serve for an incredible discussion about social awareness issues.

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  Visualize your data on maps, timelines and charts.

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• Hotseat at Purdue University
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• Get the latest News around the Globe from Harsh Ajmera
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I thought that I would spend today’s post showing how Symposium 2009 was documented in words and pictures.  The technology here was very portable.  All of the images come from my iPhone.  It’s much more versatile that carrying around my bigger camera with its flash and programmable settings.

It wouldn’t be Symposium if we didn’t talk about the weather.  London weather was great although very windy.  I should have really checked the weather from Huron and Perth Counties, and Waterloo Region though…

We stuff the registration bags the night before and hire a couple of guards from the front lobby to keep them secure.

Unique to the Lamplighter Inn is the Pointsettia tree.  There were two on display this year; one in the atrium and the other in the lobby.

According to David Jakes’ website, he cannon balled into the pool.  I hope that he also went down the water slide.

The Crystal Ballroom is home for the event.  The stage is flanked by a couple of Christmas trees to set the festive feeling for the day.

And then it’s time for the opening keynote.  David Jakes talks about what really matters when you get past the Web 2.0 Hype.

After lunch, Leslie Fisher helped us with Christmas shopping with her presentation on Gadgets.

James Cowper and Amanda Mundy talked about first time blogging and their project to get all of the classrooms in their schools online and communicating.

My friend Rodd Lucier takes a standing room only audience on a search and understanding of Creative Commons licensing and how it applies to educators.  I had just brought in the two empty chairs you see in the foreground.

In addition to the pictures, the crowd helped document the day by using the hash tag #RCAC09.  I used a free web resource called Twapper Keeper to document the Twitter messages from the day.  Rodd complained about the order and the developer of the resource gave us another link to see the messages in reverse order.  So, you can play it in both directions.  You can even download the entire session and analyse it further if you want.

What a day.  I learned so much and are so appreciative that Western Ontario continues to support this annual event.  The Lamplighter is booked for Symposium 2010 already so circle December 9 in your calendars.

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• We make tech simple – Techlicious
  Our mission is to be your tech-savvy friend, the one you can count on to help you make better informed buying decisions and to get more out of the products you already own—whether for work, family or fun.
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• one word. so little time.
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  as soon as you click 'go' the page will load with the cursor in place.

  don't think. just write

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• System Dynamics Home Page
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• ► spam-o-meter: spam-widget, spam-news, spam-statistics, spam-gallery
  Spam-O-Meter.com is your free source of Spam Statistics and Live Tools to measure the actual amount of spam in the internet. We find our data in various souces in the internet and project it with our spam algorithm to the whole internet.
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  Atomz Search is a hosted application and is delivered completely over the Internet.

  How do we do it for free? By creating a professional site search solution delivered as a hosted service and supporting our costs through text-based advertisements.

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  Bookmark the pictures you like around the web.
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• Using E-Books to Motivate Writing – K12 Online Conference
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• Understanding Science
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One of the things that I think we all get when we introduce Twitter to people is the comment “I don’t get it”.  “I’ve created a Twitter account and nothing happens”.

Well, if that’s all that people do, then they are correct.  Nothing happens.

Like most good things, you have to work at it to get results.  It can be work to find just the right people to follow and it can be work to get people to follow you.  You have to be interesting; you have to contribute.  As I’ve noted to a new person recently, there is no half-way when you elect to use Twitter.  You’re either in or you’re not.  If you’re not, chances are you will still not get it.

Good, and helpful people are there and ready to assist.  I had it happen to me last night.

I’ve been tinkering with Google Chrome for a while now and, if you read my post recently, I decided to give it a go as my main browser.  The tipping point for me was the formal support for extensions.  So, I threw out a Twitter message indicating so.  Within moments, I had a response from someone asking what ones that I was using.  That impressed me.  Someone I wasn’t following cared enough to reply.

The conversation is illustrated below.

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• Intended Consequences
  So, I decided, after stewing over this for a few minutes, and realizing that Art Snacks by Kevin Honeycutt was left off AGAIN, that it was time to take on the Edublog Awards and have our own little awards.
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• www.blogger.com
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It’s a very calm Saturday morning after a very active week in London leading up to the Western Regional Computer Advisory Committee’s Symposium 2009.  It’s always one of my professional highlights of the year.  I’ve been the chair of the committee for a number of years now and really enjoy doing it.  Other than having continual contacts with the committee, I get to make some key decisions for the event.  I get to design the timeline, proofread the program, coordinate the thank you gifts for the presenters, and much more.  I also am responsible to select the keynote speakers for the day.  In doing so, I get tap the shoulder of some of the thought leaders and thinkers dealing with issues happening right now.  Sometimes, it’s a difficult choice.  Other times, it’s like shooting fish in a barrel.

This year was relatively easy.  Unless you’ve been asleep the past few years, you have to recognize that a whole series of technologies and innovations that fall into the category “Web 2.0” are increasingly capturing and engaging the minds and imaginations of students.  Making sense of it is important but more important is leveraging it for its educational value.  There are a lot of bandwagons and a great deal of low hanging fruit in this areas.  I’ve long admired the mind of David Jakes has he helps zero in on what’s really important and worthwhile doing in this field.  I was so happy that he happened to be available to join us on the date.

Closely related to this was our second keynote speaker, Leslie Fisher.  Here is a lady who lives so transparently on the web and totally uses these technologies in so many ways to manage her professional life.  She also seems to have a limitless budget and shares her love of gadgets with anyone who would care to lesson.  One of the hottest areas right now for everyone is going mobile and she nails it with her iPod/iPhone class.  Even as we were connecting her computer to the projection system, she took the time to show me an application or two.

We do ask our keynote speakers to host a breakout session after their keynote.  It’s a first test to see how well they were received.  If they did a bad job, nobody follows them to their breakout.  If they do a good job, then it’s standing room only as people follow them to learn more.

Every year, I try to bring new innovations to the day.  This year, we tried to make it the most connected Symposium to date.  I was delighted when a couple of participants offered to organize a Tweetup in advance of the date.  We turned those extra hands into a group of additional stuffers to prepare our registration bags!  On the day itself, we offered free internet access to anyone with a device.  It worked out well in the breakout sessions; not so much in the Crystal Ballroom.  The sheer volume of requests in such a big area caused some problems.  Oh well; how could you know if advance?  It was great to see that people found ways to get their comments to us.  I saw a tethered iPhone and people just using their iPhone or Blackberry directly.

I tried to make the day Twitter friendly.  In addition to the standard symposium nametag, I had run some extra stick on labels so that people could show off their Twitter name with the purpose of putting a face to a username.  I’ve been to events where people would like to use Twitter as a back channel for the event.  My experience has been that valuable time is wasted determining what the hashtag for the event would be.  So, I tried to cut that out of the picture and put the hashtag right on the cover of the program.  There were folks talking before the event and so it was shared in advance.

What it does do, however, is give the opportunity to analyse what was talked about during the event.  I just went to Twitter search to follow up on the hashtag #RCAC09 and we had generated 7 pages of 50 twitter messages to the topic.  I took that data and plunked it into Wordle for a quick visualization.

Of course, this is incredibly unscientific and I’m not here to argue otherwise.  Of course, the hashtag will be the most frequent term there.  Let me do another without it.

Taking a look through the content is so revealing about what happened.  There are lots of Twitter names (some with @; some without) but I’m so happy to note that the biggest word to leap forward to my eyes is “Conversation”.  Isn’t that what it should be?  I’m equally as glad to see that the words “snow”, “wind”, and “cancel” do not appear.  What doesn’t show in the Wordles are the comments “I’m going to try …” which I did notice as I was putting this together.

In addition to taking a look at the Twitter contributions, I’ve been interested in looking at the blogs to see what people are talking about.  This is always dangerous because I’ll inevitably overlook someone or a post will appear after I post this.  My apologies in advance.  But, if you want to read what others are reflecting, check out:

• 10 Things I Like About RCAC Symposium (only 10?)
• If you can’t attend a conference, fire up Twitter
• Events
• RCAC
• Practical Applications for Web 2.0 Applications in Education
• A Community
• RCAC Symposium

Conversation is so important.  In addition to the original posts, please take the time to read the replies and even add your own.  Events like this should service to inspire after the event closes.  If you’re not a user of Twitter, consider getting a free account and join the continuing conversation.  If you look at the names in the clouds above, I can ensure that those people are great follows and they will be continuing the conversations started anew or conversations continued from Symposium 2009 well into the future.

One final task of the chair is to choose the desserts for the day.  I stand up and declare that the bread pudding is my choice and just caps a perfect day for me!

Social Bookmarks:

• Welcome to Cartography 2.0
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• Orange Gadgets
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• Fat Cat Software – iPhoto Library Manager
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• 21 Things That Became Obsolete This Decade
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