nethui youth forum

I have a group of students in my level 3 media class that found out about a exhibition at Te Papa last term that tried to convince me that we should do a field trip to attend. It would have been great to see the Game Masters exhibit, however with a week till it close and being the end of the term we were unable to go.

I then had a phone call from a Primary School teacher that I know through twitter asking me if I wanted to take a group of students to nethui, as this year they introduced a Youth Forum, 16-21 year olds talking about issues that are facing there use of the Internet.

EOTC form, flights, tickets for the bus all needed to be organised and paid for, plus tickets to the youth forum, these were unavailable on the nethui website and with many emails, tweets we managed to get 13 tickets, 12 students and one teacher.

Students up before 6am and meeting at the airport, I don;t think some of them have ever been awake at that time of the morning, we managed to get onto the plane, and look forward to an exciting day.

The students worked hard, listening and giving there ideas and issues that they are facing, both at school and at home. Interesting talking about the issues at school and the idea of an "open internet" why is it that schools block sites from students. Schools provide wifi coverage, yet they block social media sites and youtube. Both that are showing some signs of being used for educational contents.

We also looked at the role of the Internet and how Governments are trying to control the use of it. Pacific Fibre also came up in discussion. The Skynet law, privacy and copyright. It was great seeing the students taking part in the conversations and offering ideas in how these can be solved.  They were also able to talk about situations that they or fellow students have been in during the last few months at school or home.

I got to spend a little bit of time in the auditorium talking about education and the network for learning, however to the person talking about the school in Dunedin that just got 9 computers and went over their data cap of 10Gigs, thanks for ruining the session. Yes there is a disparity of ICT in schools in NZ, but there were other things we needed to find out.

Thanks to Ludwig and Amanda for running 3 great sessions that introduced students to an issue, discussed the issue and were able to give ideas/opinions.

To nethui, please can you run the youth forum again and get more high schools students to attend, I thought there would have been more Secondary School students from wellington in attendance.