Teens & Social Networking in School & Public Libraries

Annotation

This brief document prepared in 2008 by the Young Adult Library Services Association of the American Library Association emphasizes the potential educational value of Social Networking for teens, although I feel that many of their ideas are applicable to younger students, as well. The main point of the first section of the report emphasizes the obvious read/write nature of social networking sites. If students are using SNSs, they are searching, reading, writing, and synthesizing all in an authentic and meaningful way. The report acknowledges the safety concerns around the use of SNSs, but highlights them as an opportunity to teaching students about boundries, expectations, and safe SNS use.
The rest of the report was a list of ideas about how to best sell the value of SNSs to educators, parents, and the community at-large.

This report, while not novel, echoed what so many progressive organizations have to say about the educational value of SNS. Basically they say, that these sites, like any social space have their security concerns, but that we need to look at the boarded picture of potential value in order to judge them effectively.

Teens & Social Networking in School & Public Libraries. (2008, January). Young Adult Library Services Association. Retrieved July 2, 2009, from http://www.ala.org/ala/mgrps/divs/yalsa/profdev/teen_sn_brochure.pdf.