Social Network or Networking?

Just viewed an excellent video of a talk given by Dana Boyd at the Teaching & Learning with Technology conference at Penn State University where she talks about her recent research about the use of Social Network Tools by High School students.

Hey it turns out that kids are basically the same. The dislike authority, they like their friends and they just want to hang out with them. Additionally, they don't like everyone and they talk about those they dislike behind their backs. The difference is that they have cooler way to do it! When we grown ups think they are "networking" they are just using the network. We are imposing our values upon their behaviours. It makes sense and when you think about it...pretty much what I see whenever I enter a school.

Her research has found that the Digital Natives aren't wiser than we "Immigrants". They still need our wisdom to guide them. It's just a different landscape to negotiate. She states the disruption is that we have to re-think our power as adults. We need to dialogue with our students and ask them to teach us how they use tools like face book, youtube, MSN and wikipedia. Then we need to talk about things like ownership of information, bias, supporting resources and references. Hey we need to provide a scaffold to engage CRITICAL THINKING to make sense in a broader world!

Students need to have guidance in the use of internet resources, taught how wikipedia works, the importance of appropriate online presence (ie pics). Parents are worried, teachers are afraid...who should take the lead? I'm thinking that educators need to get with the program and administrators need to ensure they are on top of this and staff their schools accordingly. Perhaps a Teacher Librarian??

Social Media from ASI

Playing with Twitter

OK so I click on the link to Joyce Valenza below, then I find myself immersed in new twitter tools. Check this out:

Get your twitter mosaic here.

A mosaic of the tweets I follow. How cool is that?

The Internet as Humanity?

I'm watching a lecture on TVO's Big Ideas, that is so interesting! The lecturer, David Weinburger is very excitedly discussing the nature of knowledge, technology and the internet. He is really making some great connections to how we accept the www because it is openly human. How knowledge must be linked to mutual understanding and the www is the tool that is enabling this. He draws connections to wikipedia, traditional journalism, blogging and society and invites us to think about how we as humans interact with web 2.0.

He argues that the metadata of the internet is what makes us understand, connect and link cultural and linguistic boundaries and is in fact what drives what we interpret as knowing.

This isn't technology, this is sociology!

Virtual School Society Conference

OK David Warlick is live blogging a conference in BC and it's where I would love to be right now. He posted an really interesting discussion yesterday about implementing social networks and the features of them. The presenter talks about the features of social networks using an interesting diagram.

Social Networks are all about:

Identity,
Presence,
Relationships,
Conversations,
Groups,
Reputation The diagram shows how 3 different networks play on these relationships.

Imagine how powerful these tools could be for learning if school districts could get past the fear and unblock them. We need to educate the educators so that we can use such tools wisely in learning environments.

Smith, Gene. “Social Software Building Blocks.” [Weblog nForm] 4 Apr 2007. nForm User

Experience. 23 Apr 2008 http://nform.ca/publications/social-software-building-block.