Workflow

Timeline

Phase 1

  • Early Oct 2020: Project initiated after discussion with Dr Tony Clarke and Dr Jillianne Code of the Centre for the Study of Teacher Education.
    • A scan of all 60 school district websites was conducted. A database of any policy relating to social media was created.
  • Oct 25, 2020: A version of Email 1 (Subject: Gathering information on social media policies) sent to 59 of the 60 school districts.
    • Email 1a asked the SD to confirm if my records reflected their most current version of their social media policy and if there were any other relevant policy documents I might refer to.
    • Email 1b explained that quick scan of their district website didn’t immediately show any current policy or procedures related to social media and asked them to refer me to any relevant policy.
  • Oct 28, 2020: Email 1b sent to SD#63 after deciding to include it in the study. An initial search found that there was only one school policy available in English, so I thought to exclude this SD on that ground.
Email_1a_Please-confirmDownload
Email_1b_No_policy_foundDownload
  • October 2020: 34 of the 60 school districts replied to Email 1.
    • As the emails came in, I replied to them with Email 2 (Subject: Gathering information on social media policies – Gratitude).
      • 20 of the replies came directly from the superintendent
      • 4 from executive assistants
      • 3 from assistant superintendents
      • 3 from communications managers
      • 1 from Executive Director and CIO, Information Technology
      • 1 from District Vice-Principal (Technology)
      • 1 from Director, Communications
      • 1 from Director of Instruction
Email_2_GratitudeDownload
  • Nov 9, 2020: Email 3 (Subject: Social Media Policy Resource Document (Draft) – November 2020) was sent to all 60 SDs.
Email_3_Social-Media-Policy-Resource-Document-Draft-November-2020Download

Since the end of last year, I have been working on other projects an,d with the ongoing strain schools have been under during the pandemic, I felt it better to pause the project before the next phase. During this time, January to May 2021 I also participated in the Program for Open Scholarship and Education (POSE) at UBC where I learned more about OPEN. I decided to use the capstone project for this program to revisit and reboot this SMP project. A video of my capstone presentation is below: this page is the result. I will continue to add to this page to make my workflow open and transparent.

POSE Capstone presentation
  • July 5, 2021: Copyright Permission Request sought from the website of the Government of British Columbia to use the School District Contacts Map from BC Ministry of Education website
    • July 12, 2021: permission denied – “This email is to let you know that we are unable to grant you permission in line with your request (to include the interactive map in a web-based document) as we cannot confirm that the Province owns the data behind the interactive map or if the Province has sufficient sublicensing rights over use of that data.”
    • July 15, 2021: assistance sought from Jeremy Alexander at the UBC Human Early Learning Partnership (HELP) who shared a map with the SD boundaries. I modified this map and will use this going forward (see new map here)
  • July 7, 2021: Version 1.1 (Nov 2020) of the Social Media Policy Resource Document was archived to UBC’s digital repository, cIRcle – http://hdl.handle.net/2429/78868

Next steps

Phase 2

  • Ensure that V 2.0 has an open copyright license (CC BY-SA)
  • Review SD websites for any changes and repeat the process to update resource
  • Analyze policies with the aim to providing, in V 2.0, some “best practices” to SDs who may wish to use these to create/update their policies.

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