What This Instructional Technologist Learned from the MOMO Challenge

Yesterday I spent hours researching a sinister mother bird known as MOMO. This is time I can never get back but the time I felt needed to be spent to best support the families of our school. Trying to discern whether the MOMO Suicide Challenge was real or not. Trying to discern how pervasive the issue really was. Trying to answer emails from concerned parents. Trying to decide how best to communicate with our stakeholders regarding it all. Wavering between "it isn't something to be concerned about" to "yes, it is something to be concerned about" over and over throughout the day.

The frustration over all this is high but it has also been a huge eye-opening learning experience for me. Today, our school sent out this email to families regarding this hot topic. As someone that has lived with suicidal thoughts during a time in my life, I don't take this lightly. That being said, I also believe that social media can cause this to be blown out of proportion and it becomes glamorized. That's my concern.

Here are some interesting thoughts I have had while researching this:

• This is a direct hit to adult responsibility because MOMO is now showing up randomly inside what would be considered kid-friendly videos on YouTube (Peppa the Pig and Fortnite, for instance). When I look around I see adults oftentimes unaware of what children are actually doing on devices. There is a false sense of security and complacency that some adults have accepted that is getting a huge slap in the face.
• I spent hours researching MOMO and I'm still not sure of its initial pervasiveness and impact on society and this worries me as an instructional technologist. 
• Adults seem to be propagating the issue and it's mainly on Facebook. I get it, parents are scared. The MOMO character and it's message should not be heard by anyone but when I ask students what they know about it, most know very little. Facebook is now an adult heavy platform and the fear we are seeing there is not translating into actual issues- at least at our school. The concern is a breeding frenzy. The more we repost and share, the more likely that bad people continue to create bad things. We feed their need to think what they are doing is worthwhile.  
• This is a digital citizenship issue at every level. Yes, there are videos on YouTube that have been created in what I feel is a copycat manner based on the original concept of what purportedly was happing in the WhatsApp messaging app. But if you are allowing your students/children to watch any video of Peppa Pig uploaded by any person, these are pirated videos and the chance of them containing inappropriate information is there. Adults should use this time to model and teach children about looking for ways to view things that take copyright laws into account. If you want to watch a video on YouTube, look for an official owner of that video to see if it exists. If it doesn't, YouTube isn't where you should be going to watch someone's version of a video recording of that streaming TV program. 
•  We are in an era where we cannot just repost and retweet what we see on social media without looking a little deeper. Snopes.com is a great place to check for validity. What we are seeing this week regarding MOMO is lightyears away from what was originally being suggested was happening. It is still horrifying that people are trying to trick small children to watch self-harm videos but we need to be vigilant in knowing we have a responsibility on the information that is actually being shared. 
• Fear causes people to shut down good things. With every good gift that God has given us, there will always be people that use it for sinister plans. YouTube and WhatsApp aren't inherently bad, they just need to be used in appropriate ways. Don't allow evil to win. This is a reminder of the "Blue Whale Challenge." We must be both discerning and vigilant in the way we both address and ignore these type of things within our community.
• This is a great opportunity to talk to children about self-harm and self-awareness. Creating a sense of open communication is important in all aspects of a child's life, not just technology.  
• Lastly, there will be something else. When I was young it was listening to Ozzy Osborn records backward. Recently it was the "Tide Pods Challenge" and the "Blue Whale." As adults, we need to look at the last few days and not immediately repost what we are seeing or assume it is real. This is why it took me days to figure out if this problem was actually immersive or not. Help the world by not feeding the frenzy. 

Curation of Information: Harnessing the Beast of Ubiquitous Information

I have this crazy little habit that helps empower me every day for the educational tasks at hand. For the past two years I've taken part in the #OneWord movement and this year my word was "brave." As part of this year's word, everyday I have chosen some phrase and photo to put on Instagram to embolden myself for the day to be educationally brave to make a difference for students. Each phrase has #brave2017 in the comments. Some days I run across quotes that resonate with me, some days I write what is in my head, and some days I make a real effort to Google a theme or "educational quotes" and find something for the day.

A quote that I have seen over and over on multiple occasion is the one in the image above: "The best teachers are those that show you where to look but don't tell you what to see." It is attributed to Alexandra K. Trenfor. Out of curiosity one day I decided to see who exactly this person was because I felt this little nugget of wisdom was so powerful. Imagine my surprise when not only I could not find anything about the person but found that other people had been on the same search. There is a bit of irony not lost on me that educators on a regular basis repost this quote and put it on educational websites and it can't really even be checked for authenticity. I mean, when I posted it I continued to attribute it to Alexandra K. Trenfor but I don't really know if that's right or not.

That left me thinking about the overwhelming need for curation of information in today's world. When we want to quote a website, oftentimes it is downright impossible to find the correct citing unless one uses an online bibliography that searches it from the URL and sometimes even then we come up empty handed.

Today as I was sick in bed I found myself digging around the internet looking for information on some topics I've been pondering and I came across this video that was uploaded in 2007. It's titled "The Machine is Us/ing Us." It speaks into the fact that WE are the creators of the web by the things we post on a regular basis, like this blog for instance. I am putting information out to a worldwide audience that might sway someone towards or away from a certain way of thinking about education. The "machine" is us but at the same time the machine is using my information, thoughts, and clicks to develop itself further. It's both alarming and intriguing to think of the power every John Q. Public has in the world today.

That being said, how do we as educators guide students to make ethical choices in what they claim as their own information? How do we guide them to best discern what is good information? How do we help them critically think about what they read and to turn information into knowledge? Especially when we ourselves are struggling with it as well. We are bombarded by fake news, wikipedia, and find ourselves searching snopes.com for discernment but I'll be honest some days I still don't know what is real or not (especially in regards to politics lately). We are being manipulated by our clicks as to what "real" is to us and yet we also have access to great information that allows us to learn anything we want to at the typing of a few key words. While we struggle with the shotgun method of information that comes at us regularly we must learn alongside our students how to best manage this resource. I don't want to be seen as a machine but I do want to know that I am adding value to the machine. I want my students to experience that as well. The ubiquity of technology cannot be ignored but it can be used for good.