Brains working towards machine consciousness

I was honoured to be asked to provide sessions who a whole day Internet Safety event at the Royal Masonic School for Girls (http://www.royalmasonic.herts.sch.uk/) (apologies for not linking properly, it appears I have temporarily mangled my Drupal set up - I would go and fix it, but I want to write about today first!). The day was organised by Drew Buddy (http://twitter.com/digitalmaverick) and went smoothly; quite a feat considering the number of pupils involved.

The first session I did was with the year 7s. They worked on one of the exercises from our original ThisIsMe workbook, 'Name that Penguin', which encourages the learner to think about the issues involved in choosing a name from the perspective of being a grown up helping someone else, for example a younger sibling. They came up with really important points, such as the safety of the site (i.e. should you even be encouraging someone to use it!), and whether the child you are helping has parental permission to use it. They also brought up not using your real name, and were only really at all stumped by the question about whether a choice of avatar creates a link to the individual who owns the account. This gave rise to interesting discussions about whether it makes a difference to your DI if you change your avatar.

Years 8 and 9 had a go at the Attention Game. On reflection, I probably shouldn't try running this for 200 people at once, as it is hard to explain the process properly, especially in a room with slightly sound deadening acoustic properties. However, with some walking around to explain, I think every one got the idea, and choices were made for which titles to use for their 'blog posts'. I used the standard set of cards, which are rather geared to university students and academics, and it was nice to see that the pupils naturally chose to ignore those that they didn't really understand. They came up with some wonderfully creative home-made cards to use, and not only was there a nice bit of discussion about the possible long term impact of the attention seeking encouraged by the game format, but also comments about how they could imagine it happening in real life. Chaotic at times (which was my fault) but overall I think it was successful.

Years 10 and 11 had been sitting for too long when I started my session, and were duly grateful when I got them to get up and move around a bit! Although there was a quiet level of murmur throughout this session, it was lively and engaged. I didn't run an activity for them; I think that would have been stretching things a bit far at that stage in the proceedings, but opted instead to engage in a conversation - plenty of great questions about how your DI might impact university or job applications, and a little entertainment when I revealed that I use female 'characters' for some interactions on the Internet.

Year 12 was again mainly discussion. On reflection, I should have gone ahead with my original plan to run the Attention Game for them too, but, to be honest, I had misplaced the cards during the previous session, so that was not possible. The group brought up some wonderful points about whether it is right for university admissions tutors to use services such as Facebook, and were interested in the idea of making any public facing material engaging for the audience they are looking to impress next.

I was intrigued that over half the year 7s suggested that they are Facebook users, a number which rose through the years to being almost all the year 12s. Not surprising, but interesting. More interesting still is that more year 8/9 than year 10/11 and more 10/11 than year 12s reported having blogs. Also on the 'very good news' front, almost all those who reported having Facebook accounts said that they had customised their privacy settings.

A great, high energy, and very tiring, day. My immense thanks to everyone at the School, Drew and his colleagues and to each and every one of the young ladies who made the day very rewarding for me.