Saturday, March 10 at SXSW

The first day of panels was quite fascinating. Educators had the stage for panels dealing with problems and technologies in higher education, students & children, and scholarly production and publishing. How is public life different now for teens? What do internet technologies mean for students today? Schools need to radically change in order to prepare kids for college and life. (Citizenship was not discussed nor was the commercial nature of many of these online social networks). While educators were on some of the panels, many of them were composed of consultants or company representatives.

Adults are always trying to understand kids, and yet the answer is always just around the corner. The panels all carried a similar theme in the belief that supporting thoughtful changes in our education and social systems (not just investing in teachers but also guidance counselors, social workers and the like) are more important than limiting technology access in addressing critical issues in our society.

Under 18: Blogs, Wikis and Online Social Networks for Youth

danah boyd (HASTAC member) started off by giving a brief overview of the social creation of ‘teenager’ in U.S. culture beginning in the Industrial Revolution and the ensuing contraction of their access to public life because of this segmentation. [This history lesson would be echoed later in the panel “The End of Education?”] This segmentation led to a loss of freedom in some ways, and by 1941 “teenager” had become a marketing term. The web has changed all of this, though, and opened up a new space for public life for children and teenagers, fundamentally different from previous “real world” public spaces in that it can be defined as containing persistence, search-ability, replicability, and anonymity.

Most of the panelists are not only researching the under 18 crowd online, but participating as well, involved with various youth-oriented sites: a site for teenage girls that builds in education - http://www.zoeysroom.com/, an MIT project building free online learning tools, a social networking / protest and activist organizing site for teens [ http://takingitglobal.org/ ].

Legal issues were addressed mainly concerning DOPA [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deleting_Online_Predators_Act_of_2006 ] and related legislation. The panel mostly agreed that government reactions to problems online were being addressed in a completely draconian way and were not addressing the root problems. There was also discussion about difficulties that parents were facing in dealing with their children and the self-education that was needed.

Problems such as cyber-bullying, cheating in academics were thought by the group to be part of a larger issue of the need for cyberethics, both to be taught and understood by parents, kids and educators. Despite hype to the contrary, the internet represents a potentially more valuable workd for children: a recent study found that children who have online and offline relationships with other children have deeper, more valuable relationships.

Outta Control: Does Education Matter Anymore?

Challenges to education were the focus of this panel, in which they addressed internet technologies that are transforming education and attempted to address a few important questions and problems such as:

• Have courses died and been replaced by referential websites and wikis?
• Are scholars equipped to fully engage todays students in learning?

And also issue pronouncements:

• “Middle schools are useless. High schools are not preparing students for college work either so a complete overhaul of education system is needed.”

Adobe Executive director of Education Ellen Wagner stated that learning hasn’t really changed, and the challenge is to “codify the development of competencies” in conjunction with the new technologies available. Her “rules for engagement” in the new world of education are :

1. Capture people's attention
2. Convince them to care
3. Motivate them to change.
4. Give them choices
5. Connect them with community
6. Induce them to participate / eugene lee
7. Enable opportunities to contribute
8. Make it an experience to remember

Web 2.0 and Semantic Web: The Impact on Scientific Publishing

In New Webtech and Scientific Publishing the panel discussed issues again related to the historical antecedents of academic publishing and how they relate to the landscape of new methods and ways of publishing today.

Matthew Cockerill, publisher of BioMed Central Ltd, began with a nice overview of the semantic web, describing it as an outgrowth of the realization that readers of websites are not necessarily humans but also robots and computers and therefore website need to be meaningful for the computers (and work in multiple contexts). Standardization is also necessary for the robots. citing the human genome project where semantic web tools need to be able to capture the semantic structure and make sense of the results.

The moderator John Wilbanks asked Timo Hannay, Director of Web Publishing for the Nature Publishing Group (publishers of Nature Magazine) how citation numbers as a measurement for an articles importance and reach were giving way to new metrics of the impact of research. Hannay responded that average citation rate in journals still holds sway but that new applications are beginning to have an impact, namely Google Scholar, Crossref.org , and that there is promise for scientific blogs, freely released data sets, and delicious style sites such as Connotea. There are no formal measurements in place for these new technologies as of yet.

The format and method by which research is now published online is in flux. as well, with online journals looking more like databases and databases looking more like journals, blurring the distinction between the two. Online databases are beginning to contain more formal citability, versioning and peer review capabilities.

Cockerill reminded us that the goal of any author is to communicate the results of their research and that sharing is part of the process. Most journals these days are associated with database work and what is most missing is the standards necessary to interweave data. Web 2.0 concepts such as bottom-up knowledge production, tagging, embedding computer-readable language can contribute to solving these difficulties.

Who pays for all this work, however? Is the burden on the researchers to do the extra work to bring their published articles into Semantic web compliance, is it on the publisher? How do proponents motivate individuals to contribute to open knowledge concepts in fields where data sets are closely guarded? Many of these issues are truly beyond the scope of any organization or individual, as Cockerill states, and thus things like open annotation servers (such as those used with the genome project) become necessary and are instrumental in facilitating the spread and use of knowledge and research. (see also http://www.w3.org/2001/Annotea/ )