Posts Tagged ‘University of Southampton’
Safer Internet Day and beyond means serious fun with identity and privacy
February 9th, 2010
Safer Internet Day 2010 has again raised awareness of safer and more responsible use of online technology and mobile phones, especially among children and young people globally.
Insafe launched a pan-European quiz on 1st February, for 5-11 and 12-15 year-olds, open to individuals or school classes who compete with the objective of becoming increasingly aware of their role in protecting themselves and others online. An online SID Fair will also showcase participating organizations across the world, and schools are invited to register the events they will be running to mark the day.
SID’s “Think before you post” campaign asks not only young people but also challenges every digital citizen to examine how we deal with identity and privacy in digital environments. It’s a subject that academic colleagues Lorraine Warren and Kieron O’Hara have looked at in some detail.
There’s still a long road before we have constructed a theory and research methodology so Lorraine and Kieron’s early work is extremely valuable in mapping out the terrain.
Lorraine sets up the challenge and the goal really nicely in her recent posts; she argues for more detailed understanding of identity and its consequent effects on our view of online privacy. How, when and where we construct selves online has meaning for how we responsibly manage privacy.
As she says: “The challenge for today’s researchers is to take that thinking forward, and also create new ways of thinking about identity, how it is constructed and performed, not only in Web 2 world, but looking forward into a web 3 world too. In doing so, we can make a useful contribution to the debate on privacy – because identity is the nexus between the individual and society, and where so many of the debates are played out.”
Her views are amplified in a post on privacy and identity in the digital age that deals with separation of multiple online identities
Dr Warren’s University of Southampton colleague Kieron O’Hara, also draws out a few pathfinder ideas in recent papers on the limits of the person, privacy and empowerment which are worth reading in detail(http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/17123/ and http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/18242/).
Out of all these early discussions, we can build a coherent picture that helps us focus on how we understand and engage online; what’s really valuable and worth protecting.
And, as Venessa Miemis argues in her EmergentbyDesign blogpost, as social networks expand they force us to reassess the nature and value of privacy and identity. At the same time, they also engineer an effect that changes relationships and responsibilities. This drives people to position their personal reputation in terms of the value it has to the networks to which they are connected. This echoes Dr O’Hara’s ideas around privacy as a public good and that is an area where open discussion and detailed research would make a positive contribution to our understanding of what we are online.
The debate continues and the Privacy and Identity panel, postponed postponed in January because of ‘snow on the mind’, has now been rearranged for Tuesday 23rd March at The Royal Society in London.
Details of the event are here http://webscience.org/events.html.
Privacy and the currency of disclosure on social networks
January 15th, 2010
Comments by Mark Zuckerman, founder of social network Facebook, have reignited the debate on the value of individual privacy, an argument expanded in an elegant blog post by Kieron O’Hara, senior research fellow in Electronics and Computer Science at the University of Southampton.
Kieron argues that privacy is actually essential, not only for the individual to act freely but also for society to function effectively. While his argument addresses broader issues than the impact of social networks, it acts perfectly as a test for these communities.
Social networks redefine the notions of individual privacy. We join tribes of people who we may have never met and who do not “belong” to our physical community. Our individuality is reshaped as we adopt new or different personas to mesh with the norms of these groups and to engage successfully with these tribes, we need to disclose ‘personal’ information.
In these exchanges, the essential, private “me” is revealed to be a chimera. Online, we are who we choose to be and we do so because it a benefit to aspects of our multi-faceted selves, and to the communities we belong to. The selective disclosures we make blur the line between private and public spheres in positive ways for both us as individuals (playing the game) and our communities.
Of course, communities are not simply atomised “game players”; they are also host to business entities, and the individuals who play the role of corporate sentinels. Communities have swiftly educated companies who thought that they could hide their commercial purpose and the sentinels also find that the selfish, disingenuous strategy has no place in these open, sharing groups.
In this sense, communities are self-healing and corrosive activity, which damages the tribal members and the tribe as a group is kept to a minimum. Information is exchanged “on my terms”.
The isolated, private individual whose engagement is limited mainly to passive adoption of social and commercial transmission is the ideal consumer unit. Association with social networks, with a subscription paid in the currency of disclosure, is clearly a benefit to both individual and community, offering multiple reference points for informed choice.
Does the Zuckerman imperative then present challenges to the legal concept of “reasonable expectation of privacy”? Responsible consent informs this challenge and there is little doubt that unwitting disclosure of personal data by an individual – and its misuse by third parties – would be deemed unreasonable. If the agent enabling that misuse is a commercial entity, like Facebook, then the consequences for that company would be terminal.
Facebook’s business strategy is almost wholly dependent upon the currency of disclosure. It is in Zuckerman’s interests, and indeed all those leaders of social networks, to ensure that this currency is exchanged equably.
There are certainly issues over how the multi-faceted individual reforms and represents aspects of his/her online selves. The networks archive snapshots of personas, which do change and the management of these progressions is complex. It requires continual disclosure and responsible openness – neither of which is in itself harmful; quite the opposite.
Unexpected and catastrophic use of personal information by government or commerce must surely educate individuals to understand the true value of their personal information, which persona they adopt and how much they give away.
There is a recent and shocking UK legal case in point where a woman who alleged she was raped by a group of men had IM messages she had posted used against her by the defence. According to reports, her credibility was “shot to pieces” with the submission to the court of excerpts from her MSN messages, which showed that she was “prepared to entertain ideas of group sex with strangers”. The judge at Preston Crown Court ordered the jury to return “not guilty” verdicts.
Should the messages – fleeting representations of her changing thoughts and ideas – have been kept private? There is a strong viewpoint made on the F Word about the case. I personally find the court judgement extraordinary and dangerous. Whatever the view, the judgement is a clear lesson on the need to understand the currency of disclosure.
A regular guest on the Liberate Media blog, Lorraine Warren, Director of Postgraduate Education and senior lecturer in Entrepreneurship and Innovation in the School of Management at the University of Southampton, has blogged on the complexities of privacy, freedom of speech and management of relationships on social networks like Twitter. We’ll be picking up the arguments and discussion on privacy with her and hopefully with Kieron over the next few weeks. There’s a world of ideas to explore - and we’d love to hear your views.
Universities funding cuts a key moment in management of UK decline
December 24th, 2009
Guest blogger Lorraine Warren, who is Director of Postgraduate Education and senior lecturer in Entrepreneurship and Innovation in the School of Management at the University of Southampton, argues that the Government’s announcement of big cuts in university funding could damage the economy irreversibly
Yesterday’s announcement of spending cuts to universities has aroused widespread concern with talk of two-year degrees and increased financial strictures on prospective students.
Like Nigel Thrift, the Vice Chancellor of the University of Warwick, I too find a £553M cut to universities a “considerable blow to a sector that is central to economic recovery.”
More than that, I would argue that Mandelson’s attack on universities is a seminal moment for the UK. Right now, there has never been a greater need for universities to play a vital part in taking hold of the Knowledge Economy and driving it forward on the international stage.
Instead, our political leaders seem hell bent on policies of attrition that seem to be driven only by a vision of managing decline. If we don’t reverse these policies, this attack on our skills base will in time be seen as one of the key milestones in the irreversible decline in the status of UK universities worldwide.
As an example, let’s take the kite-flying over two-year degrees. Yes of course it is possible to develop rich two-year learning experiences that cram a lot of contact hours and self-directed learning into two years and for some individuals in the short-term that might seem like a useful way forward. But what is lost?
For students, there is the lost opportunity to reflect on, connect and develop ideas over time, rather than hurtling through superficial assessment of concepts at breakneck speed. There is the lost opportunity to explore other interests and possibilities in life.
So what? Well, from a work point of view, it is here that the foundations of social networks are created that will be essential in developing so-called ‘portfolio careers’ throughout life.
Further, is all our learning to be entirely functional, geared to a credits audit machine? What an impoverished view of the future we are presenting for upcoming generations. For academic staff, there will be the lost space to develop new thinking, new ideas, new connections and new knowledge, as evenings, weekends and (current) student vacation periods fill up with the management and assessment of learning.
Finally, in the globalised world of the 21st century, we cannot afford just to look inwardly. We have to think about how two-year degrees will be seen in the wider world. How will they be perceived by universities and employers overseas – are we in effect confining students to a restricted future with our ‘bargain basement’ approach? That would be a betrayal indeed.
Mandelson vision for active partnerships positive but universities’ role is still to challenge ideas
November 16th, 2009
Guest blogger Lorraine Warren, who is Director of Postgraduate Education and senior lecturer in Entrepreneurship and Innovation in the School of Management at the University of Southampton, on the latest Government initiative for higher education and industry
Peter Mandelson’s recent ‘Higher Ambitions’ report calls for businesses to be active partners with universities and not passive customers (point 7, page 16, http://www.bis.gov.uk/wp-content/uploads/publications/Higher-Ambitions.pdf). This is something that I would endorse strongly, having been a proponent of action research in industry contexts for many years.
My research has benefitted enormously from a range of industry connections, including interventions to set new organisational strategies, Teaching Company Schemes (now redesigned as Knowledge Transfer Partnerships) and latterly, looser internet connections that keep tabs on what leading-edge companies are doing, or planning to do, in the Digital Economy, my current area of interest.
The benefits have been mutual: organisations have benefitted from unfamiliar ways of thinking, or new knowledge; similarly my knowledge has advanced through contact with industry and reflections thereon have led to publications that were richer than they might otherwise have been.
To me, management is an applied discipline. In all of the partnerships in which I’ve been involved, formal and informal, there has been mutual respect, as all the parties concerned had opted in around a set of mutually agreed objectives. My teaching has benefitted too, with student placements and projects enriching the learning experience and further ongoing connections.
But it isn’t all plain sailing. Back in the 1990s, I was involved with introducing a variety of holistic, consultative methods into the workplace as part of the process of new strategy design.
One organisation I worked with had a culture and tradition that was based on hierarchy and they found the approaches quite challenging at times and eventually they only accepted about three quarters of our recommendations.
As I recall, there was a fair bit of pressure at the time to come up with the ‘right’ answer from a managerial point of view, which presented a values clash that took some time to resolve.
Again with student projects, it isn’t always straightforward, as I can’t always match a student to any project - academic projects tend to start at a given time of the year and must last for a specific amount of time to support the student’s progress through their course, which may not meet the needs of the organisation concerned.
So, while I remain a strong supporter of greater industry involvement, we shouldn’t lose sight of the idea that the role of the university in society is not only to reflect industry needs, but also at times to challenge them and to stimulate new ways of thinking that may be geared more to the needs of society as a whole than to business per se. This may not always be popular, particularly in the short term. Universities also enrich society through developing new areas of research where the horizons are long term and the business benefits are uncertain may not be realisable in industry timescales, if at all. Of course, some subjects, such as Classics, may be valuable in developing a particular kind of trained mind that certainly enriches the mix, but may not be seen as having direct business impact.
Another concern is, of course, resourcing. Industry projects, teaching or research, tend to be seen solely at the ‘output’ side, at the project coal-face where the work is carried out. A great deal of ‘invisible’ work goes in to get a student, or a research area up to speed enough to be ready for an industry connection — the background knowledge work, estate overheads, networking, marketing, teaching, course administration, writing and reflection.
It will be interesting to see how industry responds to costing models that reflect that fully!
Digital natives may still lack much-needed skills
September 4th, 2009
Guest blogger Lorraine Warren, who is Director of Postgraduate Education and senior lecturer in Entrepreneurship and Innovation in the School of Management at the University of Southampton, on the three types of ‘digital native’.
As my colleague Lisa Harris points out in a recent post, there is quite a bit of evidence against the existence of the ‘digital native’ student, that is, someone who has grown up with the technology and uses it proficiently and naturally. ["How competent are new students with technology (really)", www.lisaharrismarketing.com].
In our experience, many students are actually quite weak in technology skills and reluctant to engage in new learning styles based around social media. Worryingly, they sometimes think they are proficient when their skills are actually quite basic. If that is so, what needs to be done? My own recent blogpost, ["Digital Skills – Raising Aspirations?", www.doclorraine.com] identifies three levels of ability:
- Passives – adept at using technology for basic communication and accessing information – they consume the outputs of others
- Creators – network more actively, create and upload material, yet largely within their own circle of friends
- Disruptors – maintain a strong online personal identity, download applications, use social media to develop connections outside their sphere of existing influence.
My experience suggests, in terms of numbers, a pyramid, where most students are passives, with only a few aspiring to be disruptors:
What’s more, those in the passive category may mistakenly consider themselves to be quite skilled. If our students are going to impress employers, we need to challenge this firstly, by enabling them to have a more realistic appraisal of their skillsets and secondly, raising their aspirations to become Creators or Disruptors. Such students will stand out from the crowd in a difficult employment market.