Speaker, consultant, writer, learner, parent
Some interesting new survey data from Pew about the effect of social networking sites on our lives and our friendships.
- Facebook users are more trusting than others.
- Facebook users have more close relationships.
- Facebook users get more social support than other people.
- Facebook users are much more politically engaged than most people.
- Facebook revives “dormant” relationships.
- Social networking sites are increasingly used to keep up with close social ties.
Had a great conversation with my friend and former colleague Rob Mancabelli the other day about the challenges that individual teachers face in understanding and, more importantly, practicing learning in these online spaces. Rob started a blog for a bit a few years ago, one that I thought was exceptional, but he dropped it in short order. He’s mulling over a return, thankfully, because he’s continuing the work we started at my old stomping grounds by rolling out a student 1-1 pilot this fall, one that will hopefully move teachers and students to more self-directed, inquiry-based curricula and classrooms. Personally, I keep begging him to share that process in a blog; I think I may be breaking him down. ;0)
Anyway, we were talking about the pilot group of teachers that had been selected for the work, and at one point the talk turned to the reasons why this is such a hard shift for many. It’s not the technology, we both agreed, as much as it is the shifts in transparency and privacy, and the emphasis on writing and creating that go along with putting yourself out there online. “It’s not about blogs,” he said “so much as it’s about human development.” I totally agree, but since our conversation I’ve been thinking about what the implications of that are, exactly. The Web and the social connections and learning it affords is moving us, I think, to a different type of consciousness, a different way of being in the world. While the way we interact with people in our personal spaces will always be crucial to our personal development and well being, we are in many ways being asked to recreate ourselves in virtual spaces, sometimes multiple spaces. And we’re being asked to do that work in public with others. I happened upon this old Doc Searles quote this morning, and it made even more sense than it did two years ago when I first read it:
“We are all authors of each other. What we call authority is the right we give others to author us, to make us who we are… That right is one we no longer give only to our newspapers, our magazines, our TV and radio stations. We give it to anybody who helps us learn and understand What’s Going On in the world.”
The comfort zone required to live in that “author-ity” space is pretty difficult for many of us, educators and non-educators alike, to find. And while our kids may seem to exist more comfortably in these online, social spaces, I still question whether they completely comprehend the potentials of their work there.
danah boyd delivered a talk for Microsoft recently with the title “Social Media is Here to Stay,” and I’d classify it as must reading for educators wanting to get nudged a little further down the path to rethinking classrooms. I just love the matter of fact way she describes what has happened in terms of kids’ uses of social media and what it all means for us. The whole thing is definitely worth the 10-15 minutes or so that it takes to read it, but let me cut to the chase with this snip:
Specific genres of social media may come and go, but these underlying properties are here to stay. We won’t turn the clock back on these. Social network sites may end up being a fad from the first decade of the 21st century, but new forms of technology will continue to leverage social network as we go forward. If we get away from thinking about the specific technologies and focus on the properties and dynamics, we can see how change is unfolding before our eyes. One of the key challenges is learning how to adapt to an environment in which these properties and dynamics play a key role. This is a systems problem. We are all implicated in it – as developers and policy makers, as parents and friends, as individuals and as citizens. Social media is here to stay. Now we just have to evolve with it.
A couple of things strike me here, not the least of which is the de-emphasis on the tools and a focus instead on the “properties and dynamics” or the “network effects” that they bring about. I think it’s safe to say that we have made huge inroads in getting people to use the tools. Last week at NCTIES about half of a roomful of people raised their hands when I asked how many of them taught at schools where kids are blogging somewhere in the curriculum. (It turned out it wasn’t happening with a lot of regularity, but still…) Where we still have a long way to go, however, is in truly understanding that stuff danah is talking about. And that’s the important part, because that’s what should be driving our decision making and pedagogy around using these technologies in the classroom. But as I’ve said many times before, that’s the hard part, because it really does involve some buy in on the part of teachers in terms of changing their own practice.
But there is another telling passage in this piece that really got my brain thinking. When talking about how kids don’t really use Twitter very much because it’s so much more of a public space, danah writes
Teens are much more motivated to talk only with their friends and they learned a harsh lesson with social network sites. Even if they are just trying to talk to their friends, those who hold power over them are going to access everything they wrote if it’s in public. While the ethos among teens is “public by default, private when necessary,” many are learning that it’s just not worth it to have a worrying mother obsess over every mood you seek to convey. This dynamic showcases how social factors are key to the adoption of new forms of social media.
It’s funny (not) how when I read that “those who hold power over them” part I immediately thought of schools and the aversion we have to kids creating in public, social spaces. Kids are being driven to become more private in a world where transparency and openness create huge learning opportunities for those that know what to do with them.
Make sure to read the five properties of social media and the three social dynamics that danah says have been “reconfigured” by social media. And then think about the idea that
All of this means that we’re forced to contend with a society in which things are being truly reconfigured. So what does this mean? As we are already starting to see, this creates all new questions about context and privacy, about our relationship to space and to the people around us.
Those are the questions that we have to be examining deeply for ourselves as educators. And right now, those are the questions that few schools really want to have any serious discussions about in terms of the implications on school culture and curriculum. As systems, we’re not even close to getting on the reconfiguration road.
Well, most of us aren’t, at least:
Interesting article in the NY Times magazine section yesterday on the effects of Facebook and Twitter et. al. in terms of social awareness, friendship, and host of other aspects of how our lives are being affected by these technologies. A lot of it made me think, “yeah, that’s me,” especially parts like:
Many avid Twitter users — the ones who fire off witty posts hourly and wind up with thousands of intrigued followers — explicitly milk this dynamic for all it’s worth, using their large online followings as a way to quickly answer almost any question. Laura Fitton, a social-media consultant…recently discovered to her horror that her accountant had made an error in filing last year’s taxes. She went to Twitter, wrote a tiny note explaining her problem, and within 10 minutes her online audience had provided leads to lawyers and better accountants. Fritton joked to me that she no longer buys anything worth more than $50 without quickly checking it with her Twitter network.
It’s not all pretty, obviously, (some interesting thoughts of what this means for kids which I hope to write about more later) but what intrigues me so much about what the article brings up and about all this stuff in general is simply that it’s different, and that we’re in the midst of learning what it means right now, all together. At the end of the day, that is still the pull of social learning with social online tools for me, the fact that that brain work is transparent. Sure, I like knowing where folks are or getting some snippets of their personal lives; that adds to the picture, no doubt. But what I really like is being able to tap into the thinking of hundreds of really smart, active, engaged people who are willing to share their work and their learning with me on a scale that was not possible even five years ago. (Maybe not even two years ago.) How I manage and navigate all of that to the maximum benefit is always a struggle, but it’s a struggle that I enjoy greatly.
So, yes, this is yet another post on the thinking of Clay Shirky, who what with all of the videos and interviews available out there on the Web has been pushing my own thinking on almost a daily basis. (I’m also happy to report that I’ll be doing a live streaming interview with him on July 10 at 11 am for those that might be interested in how this all translates down to K-12 education. Stay tuned as I’m going to be asking for some audience participation…)
In a presentation to the Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce (RSA), a site that is getting a Ted Talks feel to it, btw, Shirky talks about these shifts in terms of how our use of media is changing. Whereas we used to use media to know things, we can now use media to do things. In this world, to speak is to publish, and to publish is to gather. At one point he says that “every URL is a latent community now,” and that community can not only consume the information there but can build platforms to act together. He discusses a number of examples that he used in his book, but he adds a great story about how the businesses in Palermo, Italy are using these new abilities to fight back against the mafia in some creative ways.
This idea of using media to act has been borne out in some interesting ways in our community in the last few days as well. Doug Belshaw found himself in the midst of some controversy recently when he posted his negative feelings about TALMOS, a Virtual Learning Environment that he had found difficult to use. Seems TALMOS contacted his school and asked that they get Doug to take the “offending” material down, which he did. Doug noted on the post:
***I had criticized TALMOS in this section, but they contacted my school to ask me remove my ‘potentially commercially damaging’ comments. It’s a shame to be effectively silenced through legal threats when all I did was compare their offering unfavourably against another…***
Love it. Of course, when people found out about this, they started writing and Tweeting about it, and it now appears that the company has backed down, saying according to Doug’s comments, that they wanted to “start a dialogue.”
And the other example was the networks reaction to ISTE‘s announcement of its seemingly restrictive policy about videotaping and streaming at next week’s NECC conference. After a number of bloggers wrote about it and attempted to frame a coordinated plan of action, ISTE re-evaluated it’s stance and has now made it much more accommodating to sharing.
But while that is all well and good, there is a part of another Shirky video interview that resonates here. He talks about groups’ abilities to use these tools for action, but he differentiates between using them reactively and using the proactively.
We’re not seeing a lot of real world collective action where people are coming together to build things and not just complain about things.
Now certainly, there are some examples in our network of that kind of work. But to me, that’s the real challenge for us as educators, teaching kids to use the tools for connecting and learning and acting, but also teaching them to do it not just as response but as creation, as inspired construction. That’s the real creative, potentially transformative piece to this. That’s what I want my own kids to be able to do.
Tom Austin, a researcher for Gartner, is interviewed in Fast Company this month and makes some interesting points about the value that businesses can find in implementing and using social tools in their workplaces. I like the idea that we should be hiring more “cultural anthropologists” in our IT departments, people who understand the social shifts that are occurring. It’s a pretty interesting interview throughout, with some points made about how we assess collaboration and what we should look for in our employees.
But here’s the quote that I thought was most interesting:
Look at teenagers today. They’re teamagers. They work on projects as a group and think nothing of doing it that way. I expect to see that kind of thing percolate through the enterprise as an unstoppable force over the next two decades.
Nice twist on the word, but I’m wondering if you agree that teens have group collaboration down as a part of the way they do their business. What are you seeing?