Interactivism // Think Kids Pitch Day from FutureGov on Vimeo.

How can a game be used to keep young people safe online you ask? Digital Disruption’s Vaccination game allows young people to experience first hand the tools, scams and techniques that can influence them online, and was recently shortlisted as one of three pitches in the Interactivism/thinkkids event organized by Futuregov, NSPCC, Google and Coadec. The project’s guerrilla approach to e-safety combines entertainment and education in order to facilitate more critical thinking in young people’s activity online. A more than chilly first Thursday in December saw the Digital Disruption team made up of Rebecca Ford and Luke Newbold, venture to googlecampus to pitch the project. The three things that the projects pitching had in common were to address the challenge of the day – How can we use tech to help Under 18s get the most from the web and stay safe?

Peter Liver, Director of ChildLine kicked off proceedings with an opening welcome congratulating the three final pitches for getting this far after being narrowed down from nineteen and reiterating child safety online as a prominent issue to be addressed.

The premise of the day was to present great products, projects and prototypes that help children and parents to get the most out of and enjoy the Internet, whilst staying safe. The day was split into a morning session with an “elevator” style pitch to three separate pitching stations. Each project then had some time with the groups to refuel on feedback off the back of the two-minute pitches. The groups were made up of a mix of young people, parents, child safety experts, Google engineers, designers and an array of people generally interested in keeping kids safe online. Who were our fellow pitching competitors? Briefly, there was SecondFriend – which provides an anonymous, secure, confidential chat helpline for kids and TwoTen – a web filtering and guidance solution designed for younger children and their parents.

The first station was chaired by Pippa Green of Childnet which brought about some great feedback and useful questions for Digital Distribution to think about moving forwards – and some of the most challenging ones came from the young people in the group. By the second station, chaired by Vicki Shotbolt of Parentzone, the Digital Disruption pitching had really found its feet and sparked lively conversation around issues such as a place for Filtering solutions. Digital Disruption however presents an opportunity for empowering young people through giving them the right tools to encourage critical thinking, rather than offering filters. By the third and final pitching station of the morning, Digital Disruption were getting some really positive feedback by the station chaired by Jonathan Baggaley from CEOP, with lengthy discussions about the importance of opening up ‘echo chambers’ and using gaming play and discovery in order to facilitate learning rather than education being a sideline. There was an overwhelming amount of positive feedback on the vaccination project Digital Disruption pitched, especially from the young people there and with moral support on the day from a couple of our partners, Demos and Wikimedia, we know that the theory behind the project is solid – we are now building on some great leads Digital Disruption could take. A few key questions that came up during the pitching were:

1. What is the process you learn from failing in the game?

2. Could this game be incorporated into enhanced learning in education in schools?

3. Educating young people to make their own decisions is great – does Digital Distribution create a safe space? How are you going to make sure that they are protected?

With the morning session done and dusted, all three pitching teams left the main arena so that a general feedback session could get underway over lunch by the pitch station participants. The projects took this opportunity to regroup and take all of the feedback on board in order to deliver the afternoon pitch to a packed house and judging panel. These included Dr. Linda Papadopoulos, one of the most well known and respected psychologists working in the UK today, Peter liver, director of ChildLine, Jon Brown, Head of Strategy and Development at NSPCC, Jeff Lynn from Seedrs and Coadec, Dominic Campbell, founder and director of FutureGov, and two inspiring young people who work closely with the NSPCC, Ciaran Weir and Hamza Latif, who took the opportunity to talk about the importance of balancing young people’s privacy with freedom.

Unfortunately Digital Disruption narrowly lost out to TwoTen on the day. We did however, get an amazing amount of positive feedback and met great new people; experts and enthusiastic young people alike, who are supportive and excited about the future of the project. We were really flattered and appreciative that Dr. Linda Papadopoulos personally mentioned that Digital distribution is a genius creative idea and a fabulous take on digital literacy and once further developed, has a great future with its “behavioral inoculation” approach!

The day ended with a keynote speech by Martin Wilson of GO ON UK stressing the importance and urgency by which digital literacy is needed in the UK, with a “nobody left behind” strategy, the range of essential online skills needed all have something in common – they need to be able to perform those skills safely. Digital Disruption continues to aim to increase critical judgment skills in our young people and empower them to be their own gatekeepers. Where does the Vaccination Game go from here? We’re planning a group brainstorm (our own mini hack day) to further expand and develop the idea. If you’re interested in getting involved then we’d love to hear from you – expect bottomless tea and maybe even a ginger snap thrown in too…. email  team@DigitalDisruption.co.uk

Check out #thinkkids for the tweets from the day and here’s a link to the Storify by organisers, FutureGov.You can also take a look at the presentation Digital Disruption used on the day here!

This week we headed over to Microsoft’s UK HQ in Thames Valley Park to deliver Digital Disruption workshops at the National Student Digital Leader’s summer conference.

The SDL programme aims to encourage students of all ages to adopt digital leadership roles in their schools, helping their teachers and head teachers implement a vision and strategy for technology inside school and beyond. On Monday 100 SDLs and their teachers came together from across the UK for a day of talks, workshops, knowledge sharing and exploration of Microsoft’s extensive campus.

The day kicked off with warm welcomes by the conference organisers from SSAT and Microsoft (the SDLs were encouraged to leave their phones on and tweet away!) followed by a keynote by Microsoft search evangelist Dave Coplin. Dave emphasised the need to teach digital usage skills, not tech tools to empower learners to harness the incredible potential of technology – and in particular the importance of critical thinking as a core skill in the digital age. He spoke about how technology enables us to make better decisions, supplementing real-life actions as opposed to replacing independent thinking. Understanding Search Engines is crucial too, given that the absence of gatekeepers on the internet means that locating quality information has become like “finding a needle in a billion haystacks”. Check out Dave’s recent blog post for more on why equipping young people with critical thinking skills is the way forwards. We echo your sentiments Dave!

Next up, a Digital Disruption ‘Truth, Lies and the Internet’ workshop. We’d never had such a fantastic range of ages in one session, with participants ranging from 9 to 18 years old. Focussing on truth and trust online, we encouraged students to place the websites they visit on an imaginary trust scale and discus how authorship, search engine ranking and popularity might attribute to how much you trust a source.

After lunch we embarked on a tour of Microsoft’s campus, where students had a license to talk to any Microsoft employees they encountered along the way. Though in terms of size it’s not a patch on Microsoft’s USA HQ (which one employee described as ‘like an actual city’), the Thames Valley campus is massive! We passed by Xbox suites, the wellbeing centre, and even went on a brief nature walk out by the river…

Our second ‘Truth, Lies and the Internet’ workshop was just as lively as the first, with some stimulating activities, conversations and presentations from participants about internet ‘crap detection’ (as the brilliant Howard Rheingold puts it). Some students had been too quick to make judgements on trusting a site based on it ‘looking professional’ and having a .net .com or a .org domain name, which opened up some interesting discussion and learning points about how to discern the credibility of websites. The day wrapped up with screenings of films made by the SDLs, sharing their activities and showcasing the impact they’ve had in their schools – very inspiring stuff. Check out #sdlconf for tweets from the day, and for more info on how to get involved in SDLs contact Glyn Barritt (Glyn.Barritt@ssatuk.co.uk) who heads up the programme.

In other news we had a fascinating meeting with Wikimedia UK this week, where we brainstormed joint activities to improve young people’s Wiki-literacy. Watch this space for more on that…

Rebecca Ford, Project Director

We have spent the last three months sending out surveys, interviewing teachers and talking to pupils to try and find out how useful our resources have been in improving young peoples’ digital judgment.

The feedback we’ve had so far has been fantastic. Lots of really positive responses, a few common issues identified and a whole host of really creative ideas for developing the Digital Disruption project further.

Last week we had the privilege of visiting Fight for Peace in Newham, London.

The Digital Disruption team with the Fight for Peace Youth Council

FFP is an educational charity that uses boxing & martial arts combined with education and personal development to realise the potential of young people in communities that suffer from crime and violence.

We ran a workshop on online source-checking and identifying propaganda with the FFP Youth Council who gave us some brilliant feedback – we’re now discussing continued collaboration and we hope to see more of FFP’s bright young community soon!

Our evaluation document will be published next month but Digital Disruption will continue to reflect on the impact of our resources and workshops. The feedback of teachers, young people, and anyone else interested in our work will always be invaluable in helping us develop the resources that help improve digital judgment.

As always, we’d love to hear from you! Contact: team@digitaldisruption.co.uk

Ardingly College and grounds

Last week we headed to Sussex to run our ‘Truth, Trust and The Internet’ workshop at Ardingly College with some brilliant groups of Y9 students.

There was lots of really lively (!) discussions about who, where and what to trust online as well as the techniques of propaganda that we might find used on the net.

Defining propaganda

Just a few of the amazing attempts by the students to define what ‘propaganda’ meant to them.

More definitions…

We had a great day of really insightful discussion, drama and debate. A big thank you to Ardingly College and their wonderful students for having us along and being such enthusiastic participants.

Digital Disruption offer a series of workshops all aimed at improving young people’s digital judgement. These can be tailored to meet the needs of different groups, settings and educational needs. If you’d like us to run a workshop with a group of young people then please get in touch with us at:

educators@digitaldisruption.co.uk

Joseph Kony, leader of the Lord’s Resistance Army. Photograph: Stuart Price/EPA (Image: http://www.guardian.co.uk/)

Digital Disruption launched last month and has been getting some great feedback from all over the world. This week I joined the Digital Disruption team (on secondment from a politics PhD at the University of Sheffield) to help evaluate the teaching tools and see how we can develop the project in line with the Digital Disruption mission: to realise the Internet’s potential to benefit society – as something that informs, instructs and enlightens.

Just as I was preparing myself to join the rest of the Digital Disruption team in London a viral campaign by the advocacy group Invisible Children exploded all over the webs’ social networks. Facebook, Twitter and YouTube all saw masses of activity around a video produced by IC to bring to justice Joseph Kony, the Ugandan leader of the Lords Resistance Army, a militia reportedly responsible for the abduction, abuse and slaughter of tens of thousands of children.

The video is chock-full of Hollywood gloss and is at times incredibly affecting, but its grand sweep across our social media platforms got me thinking about the importance of knowing how to critically analyse the things we find online and having the ability to adjudicate between the validity of the sources that crop up – not least because I was bewildered by this very task!

Of course these campaigns are not new, nor has it ever been easy to assess the trustworthiness or value of what we read and watch either on or offline but the KONY2012 case seems important for a number of reasons in the context of Digital Disruption and in thinking about the role of education in helping improve young peoples’ ‘digital judgement’.

The sheer speed and extent to which the material spread on an issue many (including myself) new little or nothing about is unprecedented. It also highlighted the vast networks of trust which exist online, demonstrating the power of personal association on networks like Facebook and of celebrities like Rhianna and Justin Bieber to generate the support to millions of fans (around 14m and 18m respectively) through Twitter on an issue completely unrelated to their stardom. These networks combined to create a very 21st century sense of fervour, with people being implored to watch and respond to this slick piece of viral advocacy by their nearest and dearest or their favourite pop star at every online turn.

Swathes of criticism followed the KONY2012 campaign out of the traps to fill our timelines and inboxes (see the Visible Children blog for an interesting selection). In one sense this almost immediate response and the ensuing debates show the critical faculties of our social networks and the value of the internet in allowing us to easily investigate for ourselves the media we are presented with. But it also highlights the sheer volume of claims and counterclaims to the truth with which we are constantly bombarded and between which we have to try to develop a consistent picture of what to believe and feel. Too frequently, as Demos found in their report ‘Truth Lies and the Internet’, young people are not using (or indeed don’t have) these skills and are too readily convinced by online material with the appearance of authenticity or authority.

We think the Digital Disruption offers a great way to get young people thinking about these issues and provides them with some tools to help them make informed judgements about the information they consume online. The Propaganda Machine tool for example can help us to identify the ways in which the film tries to evoke our support through ‘bandwaggoning’, or its’ reported omission of many of the facts surrounding the case of Joseph Kony and the history of US intervention in the region. Similarly, the Facebook App Who Owns Truth and the Click and Share tool can help get students thinking about the impact of sharing information online, getting them to stop and consider the validity of sources before deciding to share them with friends.

Digital Disruption is based on the idea of learning ‘how to think, not what to think’. Whether KONY2012 is a valuable or effective campaign is up for debate (and it’s been an interesting and insightful debate so far!) but we think it’s a debate which should be based as far as is possible, on facts, from sources we can check, and with as much information about how and why the material is being produced as possible. In this sense Digital Disruption is as much about looking at the ‘well meaning’ material of NGO’s charities and individuals as it is about the holocaust denial and 9/11 conspiracy theories Demos found to be so prevalent in forming young peoples world views.

We’d love to hear your thoughts on this. Do you think the Digital Disruption tools would be a useful way of helping young people think about the KONY2012 campaign?

Email: matthew@digitaldisruption.co.uk

Matthew Garber, Development Researcher

Digital Disruption is a work in progress and we are currently evaluating the use of the tools in classrooms. If you’ve used the tools in your teaching, would like to or if you’ve just got some feedback please get in touch at:

educators@digitaldisruption.co.uk

Welcome to www.digitaldisruption.co.uk – the one-stop-hub to equip young people and educators with critical digital judgement skills is hot off the press server!

It’s been quite a journey… Bold Creative’s Digital Disruption pilot project kicked off in Mile End, London, three years ago. We worked with a group of 12 young people to investigate the ways online propaganda is affecting them and their peers. Are young people really so vulnerable to being manipulated online? What are the stakes, and what do they need to know to protect themselves? These are some of the questions we asked and that formed the basis of four propaganda educational films we produced in conjunction with the project participants. They sparked fascinating debate online, the project won a government innovation award and we were repeatedly asked to share our approach and resources. We realised there was a nationwide need for Digital Disruption. We set out to fill this gap.

A year ago Bold Creative formed a partnership with Nominet Trust, who have supported us in further developing Digital Disruption to bring it to a national audience. We also developed a knowledge partnership with think tank Demos, whose corresponding research on digital fluency was released in September 2011.

In the past year we’ve delivered workshops with young people across the UK, and the insight and content generated in these has been used to design the suite of teaching tools on this site and our Who Owns Truth? Facebook app for young people.

So what’s in store for 2012? Already we’ve engaged in lots of activities and events to showcase and raise awareness of the project, including:

• Previewed Digital Disruption in Nominet Trust’s ‘Digital Society Dome’ at the Learning Without Frontiers festival in January
• Participated in Tower Hamlets Council ColLab (‘Collaboration Laboratory’) – a 1 day event in which a diverse, cross-sector group of leaders came together to develop new partnerships to improve education opportunities in Tower Hamlets
• Delivered a Digital Disruption workshop with ICT PGCE students at the Institute of Education on Safer Internet Day, where we tested and received feedback on the educational tools and explored how to make teaching critical digital judgement skills exciting for young people
• Attended the UK Safer Internet Centre’s Safer Internet Day panel discussion at Portcullis House
• Delivered a Digital Disruption session at a Continued Professional Development teacher training day in Manchester on ‘Helping Students Make Sense of the World’, run by Amnesty UK, the Association for Citizenship Teachers and the Three Faiths Forum

This week we’re launching our Who Owns Truth? Facebook campaign to raise awareness of subjective truth online – do have a go and let us know what you think.

Looking to the year ahead, we’ll be running workshops in more UK locations, developing tools for the website that cover new themes and issues, and pioneering some new streams of work that include teacher training and Digital Disruption events.

Exciting times ahead!

Rebecca Ford, Project Director