I learned about Esther Wojcicki's high school journalism program and learning community from my personal learning network - the people I sought out on Twitter because they seemed to know something about the topics that interest me, including digital journalism and digital media and learning. When I want to learn about a topic,… more

As adults, we take social skills for granted... until we encounter someone who lacks them.  Helping children develop social skills is viewed as a reasonable educational endeavor in elementary school, but by high school, educators switch to more "serious" subjects. Yet, youth aren't done learning about the social world. Conversely, they are more driven to understand people and sociality during their tween and teen years than as small children.  Perhaps it's precisely their passion for learning sociality that devalues this as learning in the eyes of adults.… more

The Social Media Classroom, a browser-based, free and open source environment for teaching and learning, grew directly out of the first minutes I stepped into a physical classroom and began to realize that I needed to readjust my assumptions about students, classrooms, and educational media. Five years ago, when I began to teach at Stanford and UC Berkeley, two places where I had expected web-based media to have permeated the classrooms, I was surprised to see blank looks on so many faces when I announced that students should start their personal blogging and wiki collaborations.… more

With Facebook systematically dismantling its revered privacy infrastructure, I think it's important to drill down on the issue of privacy as it relates to teens. There's an assumption that teens don't care about privacy but this is completely inaccurate. Teens care deeply about privacy, but their conceptualization of what this means may not make sense in a setting where privacy settings are a binary.  What teens care about is the ability to control information as it flows and to have the information necessary to adjust to a situation when information flows too far or in unexpected ways.  When teens argue that they produce content that is "public by default, private when necessary," they aren't arguing that privacy is disappearing.  Instead, they are highlighting that both privacy AND publicity have value.  Privacy is important in certain situations - to not offend, to share something intimate, or to exclude certain people. Yet, publicity can also be super useful. It's about being present in social situations, about chance encounters, about obtaining social status.… more

It's easy to see new Internet phenomena and panic, especially when the technology in question opens up a portal to all of the weird parts of the Internet.  This is precisely what is happening around ChatRoulette, a new peer-to-peer webcam-based video chat site. Although the site was built by a 17-year-old Russian high school student to connect with other teens, nearly every adult who has visited the site runs screaming that this is a terrible space for young people.  In some senses, they're right.  But the more that they panic and talk about how bad this is for teens, the more teens get curious and want to check it out. The result? A phenomenon generated through fear.  But there's more to what's going on than just fear and sketchiness...Let me provide a provocative counter narrative to the dominant one presented in the press in the hopes of encouraging a dialogue.… more

Questions-and-answers have played a central role in digital bonding since the early days of Usenet.  Teenagers have consistently co-opted quizzes and surveys and personality tests to talk about themselves with those around them.  They've hosted guest books and posted bulletins to create spaces for questions and answers.  But when teens started adopting Formspring.me this winter, a darker side of this practice emerged.  While teens have always asked each other crass and mean-spirited questions, this has become so pervasive on Formspring so as to define what participation there means.  More startlingly, teens are answering self-humiliating questions and posting their answers to a publicly visible page that is commonly associated with their real name.  Why?  What's going on?… more

Raquel Recuero, a Brazilian professor, is an Internet culture researcher in South America.

Wherever social networking sites have reached the mainstream, privacy seems to have become a more common worry for users. Brazilians, in general, have not thought much about social network privacy, but that is definitely changing.… more

Internet access in Brazil has been growing. Data from IBOPE/Net Ratings from December 2009 showed that Brazil had 67.5 million Internet users, with 1.2 million new users just since September 2009. Accessing the Internet from work, schools, and home are all on the rise. This growth has also fed social media usage in Brazil. According to data from CGI (Comitê Gestor da Internet), for example, almost 67% of Internet users access social networking sites such as Orkut and almost 90% use Internet for everyday communication. Interestingly and disturbingly, the use of social media in education and learning is not increasing, because of lingering institutional prejudices against these sorts of social learning tools… more

Carmen and her mother are close.  As far as Carmen's concerned, she has nothing to hide from her mother so she's happy to have her mom as her 'friend' on Facebook.  Of course, Carmen's mom doesn't always understand the social protocols on Facebook and Carmen sometimes gets frustrated.  She hates that her mom comments on nearly every post, because it "scares everyone away...Everyone kind of disappears after the mom post...It's just uncool having your mom all over your wall. That's just lame."  Still, she knows that her mom means well and she sometimes uses this pattern to her advantage.  While Carmen welcomes her mother's presence, she also knows her mother overreacts.  In order to avoid a freak out, Carmen will avoid posting things that have a high likelihood of mother misinterpretation.  This can make communication tricky at times and Carmen must work to write in ways that are interpreted differently by different people.… more