If web 2.0 can be categorised as online conversation, whether that be through the written word, images, video or a mix of the three, do we join these conversations based on who they’re with or what they’re about?

Contacts or content?

The difference is most notable when comparing a service such as Facebook and something like Twitter. Facebook replicates real world friendship and contact groups, whether professional or personal. Although some people gather ‘friends’ as those they’re life depended on it, the convention seems to be that I need to know you before I allow you to be my ‘friend’.

Conversely with Twitter, the friendship aspect is taken away. I can become a ‘follower’ of someone’s Twitter feed (the list of short comments or ‘tweets’ that are made and posted online). Becoming a follower of their feed does not make me their friend. It means that what they are saying is interesting and I would like to know what they have to say. It may be that I know this person in the real world and know that they are interesting, but there is much more opportunity to take the ‘contact’ aspect out of Twitter and keep your relations based on your interest in the conversation.

The course focuses on the use of free services such as blogger, youtube (or schooltube and teachertube), flickr and google maps, but takes these further and looks at how these can be used more effectively for creating a professional record of a gap expedition or project that can then be used for a variety of purposes, as well as looking at the use of technology in remote locations.

The course is ideal if you are looking to:

• Create a multimedia record of your Gap Year
• Involve family, friends and sponsors in your project or expedition
• Have an online project or expedition CV for future funders
• Use your Gap Year as an educational opportunity and share it with pupils and teachers at your former school

The course runs for a half-day on Wednesday 28 January 2009 and costs £55 (incl VAT) and can be booked with the Royal Geographical Society.

Quality.

I have watched YouTube videos that pupils have made. It’s always quite exciting to see which teachers have been secretly filmed. If you’re a teacher and never searched YouTube for your school, it can be quite revealing. The quality of these videos is pretty poor, and not just the content. Sound quality, framing, narrative, soundtrack, etc. are all out of the window. However, for a small group of people they are interesting and amusing. Quality in web video production gives you access to a greater audience.

There are blogs that I read that are easy to navigate, well laid out and full of interesting content. On some blogs, the design really adds to the content, giving a sense of place, ideas and inspiration. Others are truly shocking, full of garish fonts and mis-sized photographs, with dull headlines and lack of decent opening paragraphs. Again, unless you have a very particular interest in the person/people writing the blog or the content, you will not browse, but move on.

When Digital Explorer started, the inspirations were the model of the broadcast news journalist reporting from across the world, and the rigour of the professional expedition. Digital Explorer remains adamant that no compromise should be made in terms of quality, but that costs money.

A curriculum for the digital global citizen would include…

• the skills to shoot, edit and upload a quality digital video (nothing more complicated than an establishing shot, a few interviews with proper framing and decent sound quality, and maybe an appropriate cut-away or three)
• the skills to create or identify an engaging, appropriate and accessible online platform (blog, ning, social networking group or page, etc.) and the ability to write engaging content with a mix of digital media to back it up (photos, video and maps)
• an appreciation and knowledge of digital mapping technologies and how they can help to inform and contextualise issues online
• the ability to apply these skills to learning in Citizenship, English, Geography and Science taught curricula, so that any digital content has proper rigour in terms of research methods and young people understand how to create change

This curricula involves money and time. Who will build this capacity outside of the current taught curriculum? Where will the money for additional hardware come from? Who will link these new skills to local, national and global issues?

In the future, Digital Explorer wants to grow its current programmes to become a techno-eco-scout movement for the 21st Century.

Give young people the skills they need to become leaders.

We are failing them if we don’t.

ICT in secondary schools: a short guide for teachers, edited by David Mitchell and produced by the GA with the support of the RGS-IBG and Becta, outlines some of the most important ICT available for teaching and learning geography, both in and outside the classroom. Drawing on the work of geography teachers and what they find really works, each short chapter takes a separate area of technology and explains, in simple terms, its meaning, why it is helpful for teaching and learning geography, and practical steps to get started.

Digital Explorer’s work is highlighted in the section on Virtual Fieldwork, written by Jamie Buchanan-Dunlop.

The Offscreen Education Programme used the Digital Explorer model on the joint expedition in February 2007, giving it a design edge inconceivable a year ago.

The next collaboration sees 8 students and 4 teachers from Lebanon, Bahrain, the UAE and Oman come to the UK in July 2008. Whilst in Beirut Injaz Lebanon and the British Council organised a Youth focus group to look at technology and web trends amongst teenagers in Beirut and beyond (download the full report – pdf 44k).

There were a couple of interesting points. The first that Facebook has complete dominance as the social networking platform amongst young people. The second was that call rates on mobiles are prohibitively high and so there is a large text and bluetooth culture. Interestingly, the dominance of Facebook made RSS an anathema and Flickr obsolete. Some still used YouTube, but again the video functionality of Facebook was a big factor.

If you would like to discuss these matters, please join the Offscreen in Lebanon Facebook group.

Please, please, please don’t host your video only on YouTube or similar media-sharing sites. Only the most enlightened schools haven’t blocked these.

By all means use a service such as tubemogul to propagate your video on a number of sites. This will mean that young people can access your content on their own terms outside of school.

I am looking to develop a hosting service for teachers, schools and other developers of educational web video. If you don’t have the ability to host web video at the moment and want your films to be viewed in the classroom, Digital Explorer should be able to help sometime in 2008. Busy times ahead!

Christian, the lion, was released into the wild, having been raised by keepers at the Born Free Foundation. After a year, they go back to the area where they released him, and called his name. Watch the video to see what happened next…

Young people are using these outside of school and then have to “power down” as soon as they enter the school gates. This experience is well described in a Guardian article ‘In class, I have to power down’.

Who are the blockers? Who is holding back young people accessing the social web for positive means in schools?

Services such as rafi.ki replicate MySpace or Bebo type communities in a better moderated environment, thus allaying some child protection concerns. The Child Exploitation & Online Protection Centre is doing good work, especially with the Thinkuknow campaign for young people.

The real losers are going to be young people. Organisations looking to create positive educational materials and projects for pupils will be held back as the most attractive and cheapest web communications methods are banned from the classroom, leaving fashion, music, gaming and trends to dominate pupils’ online time.

Wouldn’t it be great, if teachers could create meaningful multimedia blogs about projects and educational visits in the UK and overseas and use the open source and free web technologies available to engage young people in creating a better world?

Any answers or suggestion greatfully received!