Lisa Harris Marketing

I was particularly interested this week in the video of a presentation by Danah Boyd. Key points:

The underlying dynamics of teen culture have not changed. The environment they are living in has changed – but teens can choose whether or not to engage with it, (or rather the extent to which they engage with it).

Danah confirmed our findings with students at Southampton that teens use social networks to hang out with their friends, not to network. It’s definitely not about meeting new people. This means that using Facebook directly for teaching purposes will probably backfire – it is an invasion of personal space. It’s ok to teach around the appropriate use of social networks, for example ethics, privacy etc, which is a more indirect approach.

Social media interaction with young people makes us rethink our position of power as adults – we certainly should not assume that students know it all (aka digital natives) but instead that we can each learn from each other. Again this confirms our own findings.

I also spent some time this week reading and commenting on the for-credit student blog posts. There seemed to be some concern about information overload (also echoed by participants in the chatroom during the Elluminate class sessions). I’m wondering whether an approach which introduces students to the various tools gradually through the course might help deal with this? Or is the idea to deliberately encourage students to find their own routes through the large amount of content in a way that works for them? Are the students perhaps given too many tech options at the beginning, would it be better to start with one and build in new ones through the course? Feedback on these points from any other course participants would be very welcome J