Are you a parent who wants to learn a lot more? Social networking professor, researcher, and all around guru, danah boyd (she prefers no caps), delivered this lecture at the Olin College of Engineering in Needham, Massachusetts in 2009. Her presentation gives a terrific overview of the social networking world and offers a bit of a window that enables parents to peek into the digital souls of today's children and young adults.
If you are a parent, teacher, or other adult working with children this blog aims to help you learn lots more about helping digital kids grow into thoughtful, collaborative, and savvy digital citizens. The blog's mission is to help adults understand more about the digital world, 21st century learning, and the virtual environment that children take for granted.
Rheingold’s vision of a person’s personal trust network copied from the video.
Teaching children to evaluate resources and determine credibility is the biggest challenge of our 21st Century world. Until now authoritative textbooks have dominated the world of education, but not anymore.
In the video below, Howard Rheingold, the digital thinker, professor (Stanford and UC Berkeley), and personal learning network advocate, describes how parents and educators should help students develop the ability to ask questions when they discover digital information, thereby evaluating the quality or lack of it. Rheingold calls this “crap detection,” a term originally coined by Ernest Hemmingway.
We need to teach kids, Rheingold points out, “how to search and how to find” and how to be sure that what is found is of good quality. The long-range goal is for each individual to develop what Rheingold calls a “personal trust network.”
Have you been ever in a work situation where you feel especially old — as younger colleagues occasionally roll their eyes, proudly demonstrating their up-to-the-minute technology skills? Or maybe you’ve seen more experienced workers shoot down younger worker’s ideas. Lots of people in mid and late career periods, well people of all ages really, note these frustrations. It’s not all about age or technology — it’s about working together.
…and guess what?
Teams with differing ages and skills are often the most productive. While technology skills are important, collaborative skills and teamwork are more significant. In today’s fast-changing world, we are spending considerable effort teaching tech-savvy students how to work together with people who have differing perspectives and different kinds of ideas. Twenty-first Century employers are on the lookout for workers who can collaborate.
Sometimes older and more experienced team members offer points of view that add innovative problem-solving puzzle pieces to a team’s project. Younger workers can push limits and eagerly try new things. Older workers can also be skilled mentors. Skilled leadership, the ability to help people form a cohesive team, is a key to success.
Image made with Wordfoto with a picture taken at the Library of Congress.
Much of what a child or teen does online gets added to a digital profile. Even when information is not supposed to be collected, it accumulates – somewhere. Moreover, when a child or adolescent acts impulsively or thoughtlessly online, no way exists to erase or delete a digital mistake. Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society posts a great digital dossier videothat parents and educators may want to use as a conversation tool.
To learn a lot more about the state of privacy policy, especially as it concerns children and adolescents, read the article Congress Revisits Online Privacy Legislation over at Boston.com.
As always, Common Sense Media hits the nail on the head with clear, well written, and to-the-point parenting information. I’ve inserted a list of the questions.
Pay special attention to the two questions that I’ve listed below:
How do I teach my kids to recognize online advertising?
Our digital society hasn’t figured out what to do about privacy. More importantly, it hasn’t figured what to do about the privacy of our kids — we keep confusing privacy with transparency.
It’s problematic enough that adults are diving willy-nilly into the digital world, sharing everything about themselves, private and not so private, but it’s even worse to observe a world where everything a child does and almost every mistake he or she makes is now public. These days we are giving children and adolescents no cover and no protection as they blithely explore the digital world while making what in any other era would be common and developmentally appropriate errors.
Lest I sound like a digital Luddite, I’m not. I love participating in the activities of my digital world, actively but moderately, and I have an arsenal of digital gadgets in my purse, book bag, and lying around my house. As an educator, however, I am keenly aware of how much we are forgetting to nurture and honor kids’ developmental stages as they grow up in this digitally dense world. Part of solving that problem involves ensuring that children have a guaranteed amount of privacy.
The Pew Internet & American Life Project has just published new survey results finding that 74% of smartphone owners — that’s three-quarters — appear to be using location services on their phones.
This statistic is double what it was when Pew conducted a similar survey in May 2011. The increase in location services occurs despite privacy concerns about tracking and data collection. Check out the report to look at the data by age, gender, and ethnic group, depicted in a range of charts and graphs.
I am still minimizing or turning off the number of location services that I use on my phone. While some of us use more location services than others on our smartphones, it’s critical for parents to know how location services work and how to limit access on the phones that their children around each day. Many apps ask to turn on location services during the installation process.
Do you know about Foursquare ? If it’s on an adolescent’s cell phone a parent needs to learn about it. Find out more about location services by reading a post that I wrote about location services, Location, Location, Location – Services that Is.
Each adult needs to figure out how much privacy is necessary or desired in his or her digital life and also in the digital lives of children. People seeking one right answer won’t find it, however it’s best to take the time to understand the devices that family members carry and apps that they use.
Today, as everyone is talks about the public stock offering and it’s worth, writer Taso Legos examines the value of Facebook as a societal public space that enables people to share ideas and speak up. Without a doubt, face-to-face communication is occurring less and less in coffee houses and community centers, but we are all aware of that aspect of our 21st Century virtual world communication bargain.
I wonder, though, about what is the best balance between face-to-face and electronic communication — the best to ensure a vibrant democratic process. It’s up to parents and teachers of digital kids to help identify the right balance.
Most Interesting Quotes
We engage more in the public sphere because it has never been easier to do so.
… the new electronic public sphere offers instantaneous dialogue with little time for reflection. Democracy is thus now on steroids and this speeding up affects how we make decisions.
Summer is the time when many digital children start using e-mail accounts – and often the laid back summer lifestyle means that parents spend less time helping their children develop strong and collaborative digital habits.
Last year’s post offers parents some ideas and suggestions for getting started and setting limits.
Hundreds of digital options — e-mail is only one of them — are available and waiting for your child to discover them, so in the final analysis you cannot prevent digital access. You can, however, make decisions help you focus on educating your child about digital citizenship.
In his 2008 TED talk, law professor Lawrence Lessig describes the history of copyright policy, illustrating the reasons why our laws in general and copyright laws in particular should evolve to reflect contemporary culture and information.
Thoughtful and thought-provoking, this lecture contains information that can be used as conversation starters for parents and teachers of digital kids.
The Public Forum, Facebook, and Democracy
Posted by Marti Weston on May 6, 2012
Visit the U.S. Capitol — a symbol of our democracy.
Read Social Media — The Public Space on Steroids, a May 4, 2012 opinion piece in the Seattle Times.
Today, as everyone is talks about the public stock offering and it’s worth, writer Taso Legos examines the value of Facebook as a societal public space that enables people to share ideas and speak up. Without a doubt, face-to-face communication is occurring less and less in coffee houses and community centers, but we are all aware of that aspect of our 21st Century virtual world communication bargain.
I wonder, though, about what is the best balance between face-to-face and electronic communication — the best to ensure a vibrant democratic process. It’s up to parents and teachers of digital kids to help identify the right balance.
Most Interesting Quotes
If you enjoyed this post, you might want to read, Conversations on Commenting.
Posted in commenting, conversations on commenting, digital citizenship, digital parenting, electronic communication, parents and technology | Tagged: democracy, digital kids, digital parenting, Facebook, public sphere, Seattle Times, sharing ideas, Social media | Leave a Comment »