danah boyd @ Sosial web og laering - 2008

ITU: Sosial web og læring: danah boyd from ITU on Vimeo.

Annotation

In this presentation to a Norwegian conference on the social web, danah boyd seeks to contextualize young people’s use of social media in a broad historical context. She briefly details that history of social network sites from “Six Degress,” through MySpace and describes it as a social shift as much as a technical one.

She also describes the awkward nature of SNS’s of expecting users to explicitly identify “friends,” noting that MySpace even allows users to rank them. This is an example of the type of wholly different social environment that kids have to deal with and that parents can barely understand.

She then elaborates on five aspects of online “publics” that distinguish them from their offline counterparts.
--persistence (what you write may never go away)
--replicability (your utterances can be reproduced and transformed)
--scalability (most postings are largely unread but could, usually through embarrassing circumstances, be broadcast to millions)
--searchability (people can easily find what you’ve said and done)

While these aspects may not inform how one thinks about evaluating the educational value of SNSs, it does inform how one could develop and use one. Perhaps a closed an purely educational SNS should not be blocked from indexing by search bots and should have all of its content discarded upon completion of the formal learning experience. This might make participants feel more comfortable with openly discussing ideas that they don’t necessarily feel comfortable with.

boyd, D. (2008). danah boyd Sosial web og laering. Oslo, Norway. Retrieved July 10, 2009, from http://www.vimeo.com/1998402?pg=embed&sec=1998402.