I have 1 friend! November 6, 2006

I just signed up for Facebook!  Being a bit on the edge of the age group using Facebook (i.e. TOO OLD), I’ve never felt the need to do so, and apparently neither had my friends (Facebook lets you check if any contacts from your email addressbook have accounts). But I found my classmate Susan!  I doubt that I will continue to use this service, since I feel rather lonely on it right now…

After reading Identity Production in a Networked Culture: Why Youth Heart MySpace (Boyd) I admit I was curious to see my classmate Shauna-Lee’s perspective, since I know she was a teacher. I gained a lot of perspective from Boyd’s article about how teens use sites like MySpace to practice ‘identity production’, and Shauna-Lee sums up perfectly the “benefits to teens of online social networking: 1. Identify experimentation; 2. Identify formation; 3. Peer-validation; 4. Solidification of social groups; 5. Formation of social skills; 6. Tool for information sharing” from this week’s readings.  Thanks Shauna!

There is a lot about the Deleting Online Predators Act (DOPA) in this weeks readings, and how this US Act will restrict the types of online services public institutions will be allowed to provide access to.  The most important result is that poor youth will be hit the hardest by this act (as discussed in the article The Moral Panic over Social-Networking Sites), since they do not have home PCs and rely on public computers (libraries and schools, mostly).  Poor youth will no longer be able to keep up with their more wealthy peers who have 24/7 access to PCs in their homes and are free of the government’s restrictions.  While tearing access to a crucial part of youth culture away from the poor, the government will be doing little to protect youth from predators, who are generally known to the victim and most often related.  Furthermore, by blocking access to a few sites you will not succeed in protecting youth, since other internet sites will still pose a danger to youth, and since other social networking sites will quickly pop up in their place (just as how new downloading tools crop up whenever a popular one shuts down, i.e. Napster). Henry Jenkins nails the solution when he says that to truly save young people from online predators, we need to “teach social networking in the classroom, modeling safe and responsible practices, rather than lock it outside the school and thus beyond the supervision of informed librarians and caring teachers.”

The DOPA act would also rob US educators (including librarians) of using these tools in instruction.  Henry Jenkins article discusses a thesis by Ravi Purushotma that puts forward many uses of social software for delivering innovative instruction.  I can relate to the language instruction comments, being a Spanish major, and I have often thought of how much more interesting and relevant some of my classes could have felt if they involved more learning outside the classroom, on my own terms, and catering to my own interests, through social software tools like blogs, podcasting, flickr, etc.  From looking at library’s foreign language collections in the past I know that funds must be scarce in those areas since books always look well-used and old - web content, especially the social software content, is current and free!  It would be a shame to loose this instructional option just as it is catching on.

And if you are looking for a shortcut this week, the last article Discussion: MySpace and Deleting Online Predators Act nicely summarizes everything.

Don’t forget to poke me on Facebook!