Digital Wildfire Youth Panel 2016

HOW CAN YOUNG PEOPLE STAY SAFE ON SOCIAL MEDIA?

MAKE YOUR VOICE HEARD ON THE DIGITAL WILDFIRE YOUTH PANEL!

Tell us what you think for a chance to win a £100 prize voucher!

Social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat etc. are a huge part of our lives. People often enjoying using them as they help us to keep in touch with friends, find out about celebrities or share fun photographs, videos and stories with other people. However there are also negative sides to social media. People sometimes suffer cyberbullying on social media or are the victims of unkind or untrue messages posted about them. Sometimes posts that we think are private spread so that they can be seen by strangers or we leave things in our digital footprint that we wish wasn’t there. 

The Digital Wildfire team is running a project to investigate how we can make social media safer. As part of this we are running a youth panel to find out about young people’s views. We would like to ask you for your answers to this question: HOW CAN YOUNG PEOPLE STAY SAFE ON SOCIAL MEDIA? Send us an answer to this question and we will send you a certificate to say thank you. We will also enter you into a competition and the top entries will receive a prize of a £100 voucher. 

Information for students

The youth panel and competition is open to students in Years 7,8,9 and 10 at participating schools and youth groups. Please check with your teachers/activity leaders to check you are allowed to take part. 

What do I need to do? 

You can join our youth panel by submitting a short piece of work to us that gives your answer to the question: How can young people stay safe on social media? There is no right or wrong answer to this question, we want to find out what you think. You can send us any type of work you want: an essay, poem, video, short story, poster, artwork – whatever you think is best. For ideas, take a look at some of the entries to our youth panel last year on 'What makes a good digital citizen on social media?'

You can also answer the question in any way you choose. For instance you can: 

- describe your personal experiences of social media 

- give your views on a real event that has happened somewhere in the world 

- give advice on what young people can do to stay safe on social media 

- give your views on what you think the law should say about young people using social media

- describe how you might change Facebook or Instagram etc. to make it safer for young people to use 

- design a new social media site that is safe for young people 

Give your work to your teacher/activity leader who will pass it over to us. We will send you a certificate to say thank you for taking part in the youth panel and will enter you into the competition with other schools around the country. We will put the best pieces of work on our website  and a panel of judges will choose the top 10 winning entries. Each winning entry will receive a £100 prize voucher. 

You need to give us your work by June 30th to enter the competition. 

Who is running the youth panel? 

The youth panel is being run by the Digital Wildfire project. This is a research project led by the University of Oxford. You can find out more information about the project on the other pages of this website.

Can I submit my piece of work with a friend?

You can work alone or in a pair to submit your work. If you work as a pair and are chosen as one of the winners, you will each win a £50 voucher. You can each only submit one piece of work. 

What do I need to do when I have finished my piece of work?

 Make sure that you finish your work before June 30th and put your name on it. Then hand it to who will send it to us. 

What should be in my piece of work? 

You can answer the question in whatever way you think is best and use whatever format you want – writing, video, artwork etc. The work must be all your own. You should also make sure it is not too long – up to 800 words of writing and 90 seconds of video. 

What are the judges looking for? 

We will enter all work submitted by June 30th into the competition and a panel of judges will mark each piece of work for 1) originality 2) content and 3) presentation. The judges will select 5 winning entries from Years 8 and 9, and 5 winning entries from Years 9 and 10 – so 10 winning entries overall. These winners will be selected from schools participating around the country.

Information for teachers/youth group leaders

Please organise your involvement in the youth panel with Helena Webb - helena.webb@cs.ox.ac.uk. 

The Digital Wildfire project is a research study that investigates the spread of harmful content on social media and looks for ways to responsibly regulate digital social spaces. The project is led by the University of Oxford in collaboration with the Universities of Warwick, Cardiff and De Montfort. We are particularly interested in the benefits and harms social media can bring to young people and as part of this would like to hear the views of young people themselves.

We are running a youth panel for students in Years 7, 8, 9 and 10. We invite students in these year groups to send us a piece of work to answer the question HOW CAN YOUNG PEOPLE STAY SAFE ON SOCIAL MEDIA? Everyone who sends us something will become a member of the youth panel and we will send them a certificate. All pieces of work received by June 30th will be entered into a competition and the winning entries will receive a £100 voucher.

We hope that you will encourage your students to enter our youth panel. In order to run the youth panel we require a small amount of organisational assistance from schools. 

This involves:

- Advertising the youth panel within the school and encouraging students to participate

- Collecting all entries and submitting them to us (We expect that most entries can be submitted to us electronically. Scanned copies or photographs of artwork, posters etc. are fine and we will not need the original copies. If you do need to post over any entries to us, we can reimburse you for this cost).

- Collating details of all entries in the table below and send it over to us with the submissions. We will use this list to help us with the administration of the competition.

- Passing on certificates to participating students at your school.

- Passing on letters of congratulation to any winners of the competition at your school plus letters to parents we will send out to seek permission to show the winning student’s work on our website.

- To be entered into the competition students must submit their work to you by June 30th 2016. To make sure we can carry out the judging before the end of the school year, we will require you to send us the submissions on June or the morning of July 1st at the earliest. Electronic submissions should be sent to helena.webb@cs.ox.ac.uk. Posted submissions should be sent to Helena Webb, Department of Computer Science, University of Oxford, Wolfson Building, Parks Road, Oxford, OX1 3QD. These need to be posted to arrive at the University of Oxford by July 4th.

- Please check that students have included their names somewhere on their submissions.

- Please fill out a submission table (available from Helena Webb) and send it over to us along with the pieces of work. The table asks for the name, year group and class of each student submitting a piece of work. We will use this information to administer the youth panel so we cannot accept any submissions without these details.