Posts tagged ‘Social Capital’

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May 19, 2009

An electronic front porch

Web 2.0 is re-shaping the way individuals communicate to those living near them, and, concurrently, social media needs to re-form to meet the demands of local communities.

I found an interesting article with a long name, Networking Serendipitous Social Encounters in Urban Neighbourhoods, written by Marcus Foth and published in Australia, which makes the above argument very well.

I had been considering it since another Twitter friend, Michael Cayley (@memeticbrand), challenged me last year to consider how social media supports the way we interact in our neighbourhoods. As Social Capital Value Added blogger and the founder of Riverdale Rapids ning, Cayley’s question is an honest one.

Here’s what I learned from Foth’s analysis:

  • If so designed, Web 2.0 tools can compliment community development work, allowing on-line communities of choice to merge into communities of place. Social media supplement and enhance local channels for communication. (U of T professor Barry Wellman had written extensively on this dynamic, as well.)
  • In times before electronic communications, we relied on neighbours and came to know them. “The fact that people residing in the immediate surroundings were known also established a feeling of security, community identity and a sense of belonging – a feeling that clashes with the experience of living in today’s high density, compact urban environments.” (Foth, 2009) We find community in other places now.
  • The construction of physical “town squares” and other public spaces has becomes less important in these technologically connected times. Electronic communications now facilitate personal interactions and, often, ways of meeting physically. Community connections are strengthened in different ways now.
  • Caution is required as traditional power dynamics can get played out through social media. These electronic “front porches” also have a hierarchy. Those with more social capital gather more social capital.
  • People won’t be attracted to place-focused web 2.0 tools simply because of proximity. Websites like Neighborhood Fruit or Wikimapia or the ubiquitous Craig’s List all offer some more concrete reward for interaction, whether it’s a fresh peach, esoteric knowledge, or a new job.

Foth identifies a social media project he is working on in three Australian cities to develop “urban tribes” which offer enough diversity for on-line subscribers to find others to be self-sustaining, .

In the end, it was a compelling article to find. The magic of the Web2.0 internet is that it offers serendipitous encounters, like those afforded by sitting on a front porch. (In fact, as our neighbourhoods become more homogeneous, the chances that our communities of interest and our local communities will overlap only rises. Our interconnections will only be stronger.)

Only a few days ago, I was talking to a neighbour, by phone, about how the two of us were both sick and therefore house-bound. The only interactions we had had for a few days were through things that plugged into walls. It seemed sort of sad at the time.

Now I can see we were riding the crest of the future.

Posted in Daily Life, Neighbourhoods, Social Capital | Leave a Comment »

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April 30, 2009

Proximity makes the heart grow fonder

How do friendships form? gives some insight into why mixed neighbourhoods are important. The study, from Marmaros and Sacerdote, researchers from Google and Dartmouth College, tracked the 4.2 million e-mail exchanges between university students for more than a year to identify the social networks they established.

As Dartmouth students are assigned randomly to student residences, the researchers were able to track how factors like geographic proximity, family background, racial identity and shared student activities affected the formation of friendships between students.

The literature explains we are most likely to become close friends with people with whom we have frequent contact.  Fostering friendship with a random stranger further away requires an additional investment of time with no guarantee of a positive pay-off of a close friendship. Marmoros and Sacerdote wanted to test the theory that we are more likely to become close friends with someone with whom we have “lots of local, low cost social interactions.”

In essence, when we see a neighbour regularly, we get a short-term and a long-term benefit: in the immediate interaction, we are provided with the opportunity to exchange information and then, over the course of time, trust is built through reciprocity. Both these benefits can emerge at a fairly low cost to ourselves without a large investment of time or other resources. Random interactions expose us to the possibility of bigger pay-offs.

Marmaros and Sacerdote found such a “neighbourly effect” among the students whom they mapped. Students were more likely to form friendships with those who lived close to them or who shared an activity or class. The effect was lessened if students did not share the same racial or family background, however, the effect was still positive.

A caution from the study:

  • The positive effects on social interaction were only found at fairly close distances, such as among those living on the same floor in a school dorm.

Otherwise shared activities were required to demonstrate significant cross-cultural friendship formation. Even while seen as a broad societal benefit, the authors explained, an individual may be less likely to form a cr0ss-cultural friendship if it is seen as more “costly” in terms of time or additional risk factors. Happily, proximity to each other seems to help overcome the racial barrier.

Two additional noteworthy upsides:

  • Close friendships continued even when students moved further distances from each other. The opportunity to form friendships across a variety of identities, provided by living close to each other, provides a lasting effect. Once friendships are formed, most students found it worth continuing to invest in them.
  • Citing other research and expanding on their own, the authors describe the positive equity effects on the attitudes of white students who live with a Black roommate. While the white students were not more likely to have a larger circle of Black friends (as a result of having one Black friend), they are “more likely to support affirmative action in admissions and societal income redistribution.”

Posted in Daily Life, Diversity, Neighbourhoods | Leave a Comment »

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April 6, 2009

Ontario School Information Finder

In a bid to improve access to information and individual school accountability, the provincial Ministry of Education made a big misstep. This week, it introduced the Ontario School Information Finder which allows parents (and others so inclined) to comparison shop between shoes, er, schools.

Parents can find schools by name, or even more easily, by typing in their postal codes into the search engine. Then adding additional schools to their shopping cart, school bags, they can select three, hit the “Compare the Schools I selected” button and see how each school compares to the others in two domains: student achievement (as measured by provincial testing) and student demographics (including percentage of students from low income families, recent immigrant families, families with a university level-education and students receiving special education).

“What’s the objection to parents knowing this information?”, a reporter asked me today.

No objection. Parents already have access to this information. It is publicly available through the Fraser Institute and C.D. Howe, probably the most famously, but also through individual school profiles published by school boards, real estate agents, Toronto Life, and even a school board trustee.

However, the problem is the way the Ministry has packaged the data on student achievement and student demographics, as if it were a meaningful measure of a school. Learning the number of immigrants at a school, or the number of low-income kids, only tells you about the “input.” It doesn’t tell you how good the students are and it doesn’t tell you how good the school is, how much learning goes on there. However, it’s very likely that the Ministry website will be used to shop between schools.

When parents choose a school for their child, provincial test scores are probably one of the least reliable measures of a good school (and was part of the reason so many parents resisted the introduction of the EQAO). To be bald, provincial test scores correlate highly (although not absolutely) with student demographics, as the TDSB’s recent work on its Learning Opportunity Index attests. So, if parents choose a school by its test scores, they will likely be choosing a school where wealthier students attend rather than a school where great learning is happening.

Well, maybe peers are important. Higher income kids are three times more likely to go to university then kids in the bottom 10% of income (TDSB report). Isn’t that a good influence? It may be, but there are other considerations.

Social mix strengthens an important civic function of public education. We learn to get along with each other there. Students who attend more homogeneous schools learn alot less about others who are different from them – and, frankly, this is already a problem that occurs in many of Toronto’s schools, as Professor David Hulchanski’s work on the sorting of neighbourhoods by income has shown. A tool like this will accelerate this segregation. (And it is segregation; parents I spoke to in a focus group last year in one upper income neighbourhood worried that their kids only see people of colour at the local corner store and that their kids will not understand diversity in any real or granular sense when they move out of their enclave.)

Given the choice, parents acts for the benefit of their own child, as they should; so if “good” schools are defined, uncritically, as the ones with higher test scores, poor kids will be left further behind. Poor kids will be left further behind because they have fewer options, whether it’s bus fare to travel to “better” schools or parents who know how to hunt through the system. Left unfettered, two streams will emerge: elite schools and “bad” schools.

In a bid to give parents greater free choice, to ensure their own family’s gain, the Ministry has created a tool that gives free rein to individual license without considering our common good. What we will see is greater inequality, and it sounds all too familiar in these economic times.

The common good, the idea that a social mix strengthens us all, is even part of the calculation.

People for Education has been quick off the mark on this one, posting an open letter to the Premier, because the Ministry website undercuts the very foundation of a strong public education system. Parents and educators are signing up in droves to endorse the letter.

So, what should parents want to know when selecting a school?

  1. Is the principal an excellent educational leader?
  2. How well do teachers connect to the community? to each other? to the students?
  3. How happy are other parents with the school?
  4. Is the school a small enough size that people know each other and big enough to allow some diversity?
  5. How welcoming is the school culture?
  6. What additional supports are available to students?
  7. What sort of improvement do students make when they attend the school, i.e. what is the value-added?

School visits will give you that information.So what if you wanted to build a web tool which might work?

Rate My teacher is a website that lets students get at some of these issues, even if it is focused at individual teachers. Perhaps a more useful website would have been one that let parents connect with each other, to share their experience and learn from each other.

Suggestions like this are often met by fear (and anyone who has ever read the anonymous comments left on a newspaper website has some reason for this fear). However a moderated forum or a wiki format would achieve the same school-level accountability and transparency that the Ministry was trying to achieve and have provided more meaningful information for parents looking to learn more about their local schools.

Perhaps counter-intuitively, when Ontarians are polled about the performance of schools in OISE’s biannual survey, the happiest people in the system are usually those closest to the the school system, that is parents. And parents are most likely to be happy about their own school and although they may worried about other schools. A Wiki page for each school would allow parents to build a shared vision of the strength of their local school. A Web 2.0 approach would have been a much better model. We may get there.

Posted in Demographics, Inequality, Neighbourhoods, Public Education | 2 Comments »

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March 10, 2009

Five reasons why mixed neighbourhoods are important

Mixed neighbourhoods matter. Without them:

  1. Neighbourhoods become increasingly segregated in multiple ways: income, education, race.
  2. Some neighbourhoods and residents then live in concentrated disadvantage.
  3. Neighbourhoods with less resources have lower levels of resiliency and are less able to weather negative changes.
  4. Negative effects are felt more strongly by less mobile residents, those that are more vulnerable: seniors, children / parents, low-income, and  recent immigrants.
  5. Social problems which cluster together multiply, creating “hot spots” of social disorder, which then, in turn, spill into other neighbourhoods.

read more »

Posted in Blog menu, Diversity, Gentrification, Inequality, Neighbourhoods, Social Capital | 4 Comments »

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February 1, 2009

Local school reviews: the problem of declining enrollment, pt. 2

So, if school enrollments are dropping across the country, what are some of the emerging solutions?

As I mentioned in my last post, our local grade school, one which has stood in the east end of the city for more than one hundred years, is facing an accommodation review. As its enrollment has been dropping over the past decade, like the majority of Canadian school, it’s not much of a surprise. (For more on this trend of declining enrollments, see People for Education’s special report published last spring. Full disclosure: I worked with this great group of parent activists for years.)

However, what’s different now, compared to the panic of ten years ago, is that the school board review is not simply about how to close this neighbourhood school. The proposed solutions are far more creative:

First, recognizing the trend a few years ago, the school began to hunt for magnet programs, which could boost enrollment. French Immersion was rejected as an option (on account of the perhaps-stereotypical image of idling SUVs ferrying children from nearby wealthy neighbourhoods), but the school council has recently been exploring housing an alternative school.

Second, the school board has agreed, through the accommodation review, that students  attending the local school can stay at the school until grade 8, thereby increasing the number of students inside its walls.

A cynic (or someone with a long memory) will rightly point out that this is only an option because Design & Tech  and Home Ec. programs have essentially been eradicated from Senior Schools (grades 7/8).  Dedicated, specialized classroom space was de-funded during the Harris years, and most schools cut these programs. Ergo, grade 7/8 schooling can now be delivered in any general classroom. In sum, there is no longer any reason to ship kids away to bigger, more specialized schools at the end of grade 6. So why do it?

There is a real upside to this decision though; that is, that it minimizes the number of shifts students face within a short scope of years (at the ends of grades 6 and 8). Keeping students at their local schools means they can maintain the social relations they have built over years.

One of the best studies to demonstrate the importance of strong relationships in building the resiliency of children and youth was done two years ago by Resiliency Canada, Toronto Public Health and Doorsteps Neighbourhood Services, called A Community Fit for Children and Youth. Children and youth in this age group who felt connected to their families, their schools and their communities were the least likely to participate in risky behaviour. Yet at the age of twelve or thirteen (just as they were leaving grade six and entering grade seven), they were also beginning to  feel disconnected from these same supports. Part of the challenge from the reports’ recommendations was to families, educators and communities was to examine how to maintain these important connections.

I learned this on a deeply personal level,  one day, when my son was still in grade school, he and I began to talk about the people that he knew in our neighbourhood. It began as an idle question, but soon, gifted souls that we are, we began to make a list of everyone he knew. By the time we got to one hundred people, we stopped, exhausted and awed at the strength of these visible ties he had to our community. Those sorts of social connections need to fostered, and our local school review may just provide the opportunity to do that.


Posted in Demographics, Neighbourhoods, Public Education, Social Capital, Youth | Leave a Comment »

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