I’ve yet to hear Danah Boyd speak in person but I enjoy her papers and posts.
Danah describes herself as ‘Researcher at Microsoft Research New England and a Fellow at Harvard Law School’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society’. She recently completed her PhD at the School of Information (iSchool) at the University of California (Berkeley), and her research ‘examines social media, youth practices, tensions between public and private, social network sites, and other intersections between technology and society’.
I’ve been reading her ‘rough unedited crib‘ of her presentation “Living and Learning with Social Media” from the Symposium for Teaching and Learning with Technology Penn State: State College, PA on 18 April 2009. It’s an interesting read. Here’s a taster…
One of the most problematic mistakes adults make when trying to make sense of social network sites is to presume that kids interact on these sites just like they do. This ain’t true. Teens are using this space as a social hangout with their pre-existing network.
Just because youth are using social media doesn’t mean that it can fit well into the classroom. It needs to be thought through pedagogically and y’all need to understand how it’s being used in everyday life before bringing it into the classroom.
Of course, while adults are increasingly using sophisticated tools to aggregate and disseminate information, youth are predominantly not. Teens are not familiar with RSS feed readers or aggregators like Del.icio.us. Again, just because you use these forms of social media doesn’t mean youth do. For the most part, teens are primarily sharing through IM and their SNS of choice. Or simply by word of mouth.
In the same vain, most teens live and breathe open systems like Wikipedia but have no idea how these systems work
For all of the attention paid to “digital natives” it’s important to realize that most teens are engaging with social media without any deep understanding of the underlying dynamics or structure. Just because they understand how to use the technology doesn’t mean that they understand the information ecology that surrounds it. Most teens don’t have the scaffolding for thinking about their information practices.
It’s critical to realize that just because young folks pick up a technology before you do doesn’t inherently mean that they understand it better than you do. Or that they have a way of putting it into context. What they’re doing is not inherently more sophisticated – it’s simply different. They’re coming of age in a culture where these structures are just a given. They take them for granted. And they repurpose them to meet their needs. But they don’t necessarily think about them.
Educators have a critical role when it comes to helping youth navigate social media. You can help them understand how to make sense of what they’re seeing. We can call this “media literacy” or “digital literacy” or simply learning to live in a modern society. Youth need to know more than just how to use the tools – they need to understand the structures around them.
You need to understand what they’re doing and why. Most importantly, you need to not reject what they’re doing or fetishize it.
[image: shareski adapted from Ewan McIntosh]
