The Kids
Kids today are not different from past kids
The tech has changed
Social Network Sites are a place to hank out
Properties & Features
Properties & Features
Friends
Friends turn into your expected audience
Friend Clusters
10s -- immediate friends
100s -- everybody at their school
1000s -- not the kides, they aren't connectors
Comments
They are connversations
No depth
But it's the same as conversations in the hall
It's social grooming
You want to be seen having friends
News Feed
Constant feed of what you're friends are having for lunch
It's about periferal awareness
Not Twitter
Average age of Twitter user is 31
What does it mean
They'd rather gather off line but lack of mobility
What are the differences
Persistence
Conversation hangs around
Replicability
Copy & paste to other places
Convenience
But also bullying
Scalability
Available by millions of people
Mostly you reach 10 people
What scales is often what was humiliating (negative)
Searchability
You & your ideas are searchable
Usually people who have power over you
Parents
The police
(de)locatability
GPS makes us findable
Many Questions on the horizon
Dynamics
Invisible Audiences
The immediate audience can nod back
Assume English
Knowledge
Understanding
Mutual Context
But invisible audience is not connected "two-way"
Can't make assumptions
Collapsed Contexts
We assume common contexts with audience
Can't assume the same context of invisible audience
Not new, but only celebrity before
Stokely Carmichael Story
We have to read the social network from the network's perspective
Public = Private
All mixed up -- Destablizing society
Student Quote:
Is home Private -- "No"
Not private because they lack control
Is is Internet Private -- "yes"
Private because they're in control
Network Sites:
quote
Myspace
Lower castes
Facebook
Higher castes -- "more cultured and less cheesy."
Mobile -- Don't really know what's going to happen here
Problem
Colleges are making asumptions from your networking site
Race, immigration, socio-economic
What does it mean for learning
Sociality is not something else that we need to filter out
Kids are learning important skills when they engage in social networks
Work out boundaries
Understand Norms
Understand how Society Works
These are skills that have to be worked through
Learning to Learn
Classroom?
Just because students are using social networking doesn't mean that it can be fit into the classroom
It has to be thought through pedagogically
Have to use it in everyday life before you can fiture out how to use it in the classroom
Problem with Social Networking sites in the classroom
They are all about friending
There assumptions that the kids will all want to friend each other and outside the classroom they do not all get along.
Students are working out all sorts of social structure stuff on their networks
You may not want to bring that into the classroom
Social Media may be different
Search has been changing
Sharing differently
But not curriculum
Not using Delicious, but through AIM
Live and breath on open information systems (Wikipedia)
They don't understand where it's coming from what it's disadvantages and advantages are.
They're producing their own content
But they don't know how to think about it.
The greatest disruption
Making us rethink what our position is as adults
Can't tell them, we have to open up a dialog