It’s about understanding.
A cross post from my ITS coursework blog.
The readings for class this week should be required reading for all teachers and parents!
The Identity Production in a Networked Culture: Why Youth Heart MySpace article by Danah Boyd provided great information about why students engage in the use of online social networking sites. The phrase “identity production” was new to me, but makes all kinds of sense when you think about it. Students are all about their persona and what others think about them. The ability to generate a profile that makes statements about who they really are would be an obvious draw to the sites. The comments about moral panic over today’s use of the technology to connect were well related to the reaction adults had to rock and roll music and television use by the younger generation from the past. A sentence from the conclusion said it all for me:
Regardless of what will come, youth are doing what they’ve always done – repurposing new mediums in order to learn about social culture.
The If You Can’t Beat ‘Em, Join ‘Em article was another great read that I forwarded on to a few folks. I’ve been out of the classroom for about 5 years now and this article had me longing for a classroom of my own. From the article, “One of the roles of education is to help students learn to socialize,” says Karen Greenwood Henke, chair of the Emerging Technologies Committee at the Consortium for School Networking (CoSN)“. As I work with teachers on using technology in the classroom, this type of teaching is a new road for us. This reminder that teaching about socializing is important is nice to hear. Another quote on the third page especially got to me.
“It has given me a whole different relationship with my students,” Messier says. “They can message me and it’s private, or they’ll e-mail me. It’s like we are more of a community and I’m not just a teacher—I can be a friend at the same time.”
Not only would I like to teach in a room with this feeling of community, I am anxious for my children to participate in a classroom with this feeling. It’s not all about using technology just for the sake of using technology. It’s about using the technology to make a difference in the learning environment for the students.
The E-Mail is for Old People article was from 2006. If email was out in 2006, you can bet it’s even further out for today’s students. As an adult, I use email to communicate a lot, but as I move around in different online networks, I know my email use has declined. It’s not the easiest way anymore. I can’t say I totally agree with the use of MySpace for the college community – I don’t think kids like having ‘professional networks’ overlapping their personal networks. Creating a type of network that mirrors a personal social network might work better in some situations. This particular institution was small and the use of MySpace worked out fine for them. A larger institution may not meet the same level of success.
All the readings can be summed up with a sentence from the Email is for Old People article:
“The key is, you can’t do just one thing…”
Filed under: Thinking... and
This is a great article. Too many times we look past the mental and social benefits of a technology like myspace. It is great that teachers are beginning to use this to their advantage in the classroom. If a teacher can relate to students more on their level, it creates a more fertile environment for education and growth.
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