After getting a fair amount of criticism in the mainstream press, Facebook has finally made it possible to delete a Facebook account. Prior to this, users could only “deactivate” accounts, in which case their personal information was no longer available on Facebook but was still stored on the company’s servers.

Despite much ado in the media, most of the college-age friends I’ve talked to have found the issue trivial. “Why would you even want to delete your Facebook account?” was their flippant response. Yet that is exactly why this issue is important. The fear is that because Facebook has become so ingrained in the lives of young people, it then establishes the norm for digital privacy. Unlike Beacon or News Feed, Facebook’s permanent storage of personal information doesn’t readily jump out as a violation of privacy. And because it is not obvious, it has taken over 3 years for it to change, in contrast to the much more immediate responses to Beacon and News Feed.

What is most disturbing then, is Facebook’s pattern of behavior. Although Facebook often emphasizes privacy as one of its strengths (compared to MySpace at least), its actions have proved otherwise. It has consistently pushed the limits of privacy, only step back in the face of a backlash. Perhaps it’s not so out of line to say that Facebook would not have put controls on Beacon if not for the media attention it received.

A few months ago, when Beacon was making its debut, I had the opportunity to sit in a guest lecture by Chris Kelly, the chief privacy officer of Facebook. He spoke a lot on the need to balance business decisions with PR, which the company, given its success, has done quite well. I’m inclined to believe it won’t have this type of popularity forever though. So at point will users become disenchanted with Facebook? But will this be a matter of privacy or convenience? Will Facebook have permanently changed our conceptions of privacy by then?

-Sarah Zhang

Ever wondered what bitTorrent means?  Tired of explaining MySpace to your grandmother?  Want to weigh in on how online predator is defined?

Please go ahead…Digital Natives’ glossary is up now!  We’ve made it a part of our wiki, so we look forward to YOU helping us refine these definitions, and add new ones!

Here in Cambridge, the XO laptop is everywhere. Or at least it can seem that way, what with the steady flurry of press coverage that attends the global One Laptop Per Child initiative and its sturdy green-and-white wonder machine. Founded by Nicholas Negroponte and “a core of [MIT] Media Lab veterans,” OLPC last fall finally realized its vision of building an affordable, creative laptop that could potentially galvanize education worldwide. At least, that’s the hope.

The XO laptop really is a wonder machine. Its practical features stagger: the laptop is heat-resistant, water-resistant, and dust-resistant; boasts unusually long battery life; has an easy-to-read screen; and a host of other features, not the least of which is its remarkably low cost. And yet, its most public testing ground demands none of these capabilities. Last fall’s Give1Get1 program raised enough money to ship thousands of laptops to children in need. As a side-effect, though, a nearly equivalent number of laptops made their way to the living rooms of families across the United States who “gave one to get one.”

Reports from these living room testing scenes have been pumping through the blogosphere for months now. However, I was especially intrigued to read Virginia Heffernan’s take on the XO laptop in the New York Times Magazine. Heffernan watched a group of kids, born and bred in the U.S. digital milieu, explore the laptop for themselves. She observed that these young people were drawn into the practical aspects of the laptop by its toy-like qualities; that in order to hold their attention, the laptop needed to be almost overtly flashy. Her conclusion is surprising and illuminating, especially in illustrating the way one adult perceives children’s interactions with technology:

If Negroponte wants to convert kids to the global information economy, he might consider the chief virtue of the XO laptop: its lights and sounds. Even Western kids, whose toys flash and squeal, are drawn with primitive wonderment to the peculiar phenomena of this computer — the distinctive hums and blinks that seem like evidence of its soul.

Is this an oversimplification? How can educational technology usefully appropriate the flash and dazzle of toys? Does technology have an inherent flash and dazzle that, as Heffernan suggests, persists even for children in an environment saturated with electronic gadgets? This intersection of play and learning is fascinating, especially since this is precisely the intersection that Negroponte and his collaborators wish to take advantage of. How do you perceive the intersection of play and learning in a digital age?

The Internet is out there. It’s not going away anytime soon. So how do educators adapt their teaching methods to address this reality? And what are the consequences for those who ignore it?

At the Digital Natives project, we’re constantly confronting these questions. Technology, it’s clear, is a tool—not an impediment, necessarily, but likewise not a cure-all. Just as paper and pencil are handy for writing but not as handy for 3-D modeling, chat rooms, blogs, and Wikipedia are useful for some aspects of education and not for others. This much we know. But the rest, the good answers and best practices, are still somewhat up in the air. Since we’re always seeking good examples to follow, I was delighted today to read teacher Ben Chun’s post on engaging his students in a group discussion through an innovative classroom technology, Moodle.

Mr. Chun’s greatest insight, in my opinion, was to use the right tool for the right topic. The classroom discussion he facilitated revolved around PBS’s Frontline Documentary, Growing Up Online, and was therefore immediately relevant both to his students’ lives and to the medium used for the discussion. The medium, Moodle, is a sort of group commenting tool designed for educational interaction. Although I have not used it myself, I imagine that Moodle is especially suited for educational interaction because it provides a structured, facilitated environment that still engages students without being as free-form as something like Facebook or MySpace.

The students’ reactions to the documentary are fascinating for their own sake, and worth a close read. But in terms of the teaching method itself, Mr. Chun’s strategy reminded me of an indelible quotation from Mark Prensky’s article on wired students and education, “Engage Me or Enrage Me”:

All the students we teach have something in their lives that’s really engaging—something that they do and that they are good at, something that has an engaging, creative component to it. Some may download songs; some may rap, lipsync, or sing karaoke; some may play video games; some may mix songs; some may make movies; and some may do the extreme sports that are possible with twenty-first-century equipment and materials. But they all do something engaging.

As Prensky rightly points out, this is a reality not to be shunned, but to be celebrated. And while students’ external engagement provides a challenge for twenty-first century teachers, Mr. Chun’s classroom experience shows that it also provides an opportunity. Every student can contribute to a conversation that matters. Mr. Chun’s closing words sum this up especially well:

So, beyond all the endless talk about technology and schools and new forms of literacy, here we have a case where digital video, downloaded from the web, discussed on a blog, shown on an in-class LCD projector, and followed by an online classroom discussion all conspired to arrive in the place we should have started and known the whole time (apologies to Eliot): Asking students to write about their lives and their experiences and issues that affect them directly.

For young students today, the Internet isn’t an occasional matter. It’s the place where they’re living out large fractions of their lives. The experiences they have there are just as real as those they have on the playground or in the lunchroom. When educators access students’ reactions to those experiences, they tap into and legitimize a channel that already captures the bulk of students’ attention.

So no, the Internet and other disruptive technologies aren’t going away anytime soon. But fortunately, neither are smart, creative educators like Ben Chun. And that is a reality worth celebrating.

with thanks to danah boyd for the link

Hundreds of thousands of Columbians are expected to march today in 185 cities across the globe in protest of Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) and their use of kidnapping as a weapon. How did such a mass movement get started?  Facebook.

The Christian Science Monitor reports,

“We expected the idea to resound with a lot of people but not so much and not so quickly,” says Oscar Morales, who started the Facebook group against the FARC…

Morales started the Facebook Group “UN MILLON DE VOCES CONTRA LAS FARC” on the 4th of January 2008 – it now has 265,833 members.  While  the low barrier to participation in joining a Facebook group may call into question the power such action truly holds, today’s march proves that in some cases, a click of the mouse may be the first step in becoming truly politically engaged.  The protest also depicts just how powerful a tool social networking sites such as Facebook can be in organizing political action.

Also of note is language of choice – as Facebook users go global, how do languages play out?  Currently, one must have some knowledge of English to sign up and work the features of the site – limiting the international user base to more educated segment of society.  Efforts are underway to make Facebook available in other languages: acknowledging the power of the crowd, Facebook has turned to their users to translate the site into other languages.

– Miriam Simun

(cross-posted from Berkman home)

An upcoming edition of PBS Frontline on “Growing Up Online” will feature Berkman Fellow danah boyd sharing her expertise on how young people are using the internet. The website explains, “In ‘Growing Up Online,’ FRONTLINE peers inside the world of this cyber-savvy generation through the eyes of teens and their parents, who often find themselves on opposite sides of a new digital divide. From cyber bullying to instant ‘Internet fame,’ to the specter of online sexual predators, FRONTLINE producer Rachel Dretzin investigates the risks, realities and misconceptions of teenage self-expression on the World Wide Web.”

danah comments: “You have a generation faced with a society with fundamentally different properties thanks to the Internet… We can turn our backs and say, ‘This is bad,’ or, ‘We don’t want a world like this.’ It’s not going away. So instead of saying that this is terrible, instead of saying, ‘Stop MySpace; stop Facebook; stop the Internet,’ it’s a question for us of how we teach ourselves and our children to live in a society where these properties are fundamentally a way of life. This is public life today.”

This episode will air on January 22nd at 9PM on PBS. You can stream the trailer at Frontline’s website, and the entire program will be posted after it airs. To learn more about danah’s work and Berkman’s project on how young people use the internet, visit the Digital Natives webpage and blog, and be sure to check out danah’s apophenia blog.

(cross-posted from Corinna di Gennaro’s blog)

The Pew Research Center for People and the Press has just released a new survey on the role of the Internet in the 2008 US campaign. The report shows that almost half (42%) of 18 to 29 year olds learns regularly about the campaign from the Internet, double the number in the 2004 campaign (20%). The age divide between young and older people in looking for campaign information online has also doubled since 2004 from 13 percentage points in 2004 to 27 percentage points in 2008 (it should be noted though that the proportion of 30 to 49 year olds and 50 year olds and older turning to the Internet has also grown since 2004, although not as dramatically as amongst 18 to 29 year olds – showing that the Internet is increasingly becoming a source of political information amongst the general population, even though it is still lagging behind TV and daily newspapers).

The Pew findings also show that traditional online news websites such as MSNBC, CNN and Yahoo remain the most visited sites for political information seeking, but amongst young people 37% of 18 to 24 year olds (and 27% of those younger than 30) have gotten campaign information from social networking sites like MySpace and Facebook (compared to 4% of those in their thirties and 1% of those 40 and older), showing how these online spaces have become an important space not only for entertainment but also for more civic minded activities. Two caveats, though….

…there’s a feeling amongst pundits and young people themselves (as many of the young people we interviewed for our Digital Natives project voiced) that membership in political groups on Facebook is so low cost that it is actually meaningless: joining a candidate’s group is like putting a bumber sticker of your favourite candidate on your car. But does this translate into actual offline participation/higher voting turnout? Also, Pew reports that 59% of web users under the age of 30 have come across campaign news online while they were actually looking for something else. Is this kind of exposure better than no exposure at all? Should we consider as political engagement only the one that is costly and face to face, like canvassing and campaigning door to door in the rain or is this exposure to online news a good starting point?

(Cross posted from Dr. Palfrey’s blog.

Last month, the MacArthur Foundation, along with MIT Press, announced the release of a series of new books on youth and new media. The series is a treasure trove.

I have been working my way through the six books over the past several weeks as I’m simultaneously working on late drafts of the book that Urs Gasser and I are writing on a similar topic, called Born Digital (forthcoming, Basic Books, 2008).

I’d highly recommend to anyone remotely interested in the topic to read these books. They are academic in style, structure and language, but remarkably accessible in my view. I’m not a social scientist, nor an expert in most of the fields that are represented by the authors (in fact, I’m not sure if there are any lawyers at all in the list of authors!), but the editors and authors have done a lovely job of making their fields relevant broadly.

For starters, the series Foreword, by the group of “series advisors,” is wonderful. I can’t imagine how six people came to agree on such a clear text, but somehow they did. There must have been a lead author who held onto the pen; it’s far too coherent to have been written by committee. (The advisors are: Mizuko Ito, Cathy Davidson, Henry Jenkins, Carol Lee, Michael Eisenberg, and Joanne Weiss. One imagines that the voice of the program officer at the MacArthur Foundation who made it all possible, Connie Yowell, is in there somewhere too.)

The Foreword is worth reading in full, but a few key lines: “Unlike the early years in the development of computers and computer-based media, digital media are now commonplace and pervasive, having been taken up by a wide range of individuals and institutions in all walks of life. Digital Media have escaped the boundaries of professional and formal practice, and the academic, governmental, and industry homes that initially fostered their development.” Those are simple statements, clear and right on. One of the reasons to pay attention to this topic right now is the pervasiveness, the commonplace-ness of the use of these new media, especially by many young people.

Also, their working hypothesis: “those immersed in new digital tools and networks are engaged in an unprecedented exploration of language, games, social interaction, problem solving, and self-directed activity that leads to diverse forms of learning. These diverse forms of learning are reflected in expressions of identity, how individuals express independence and creativity, and in their ability to learn, exercise judgment, and think systematically.” The work of the series authors, I think, bears out this hypothesis quite convincingly.

At the same time, the series advisors make plain that they are not “uncritical of youth practices” and note that they do not claim “that digital media necessarily hold the key to empowerment.” It is this spirit of healthy skepticism that one can hear through most of the essays in the series — and which is essential to the academic enterprise they’ve undertaken.

So far, I’ve finished the book on “Youth, Identity, and Digital Media” (ed. by David Buckingham) and “The Ecology of Games: Connecting Youth, Games, and Learning” (ed. by Katie Salen) and am part of the way through each of the others. Each one is excellent.

In the ID book, I found particularly helpful the first piece on “Introducing Identity” by David Buckingham, which took on the hard definitional and discipline-related questions of identity in this context. He put a huge amount of scholarship into context, with sharp critiques along the way. The essay by our colleague danah boyd (on “Why Youth (heart) Social Network Sites,” a variant of which is online) is already a key document in our understanding of identity and the shifts in conceptions of public and private (”privacy in public,” and the idea of the networked public — related to but not the same as Yochai Benkler’s similar notions of networked publics). And the notion of “Identity Production as Bricolage” — introduced in “Imaging, Keyboarding, and Posting Identities” by Sandra Weber and Claudia Mitchell — is evocative and helpful, I thought. The many warnings about not “exociticizing” (danah often using the word “fetishizing”) the norms and habits of young people and their use of technology, as well as echoes of Henry Jenkins’ work on convergence and his and Eszter Hargittai’s study of the participation gap came through load and clear, too. (I am pretty sure I can hear dislike of the term “digital natives” in between certain lines, as well.)

There’s much more to like in the book, and much more to work into our own understanding of ID in this environment, than I can post here. There’s an equal amount of insight in the Games book too. (The class I am co-teaching with David Hornik starts in 31 minutes and I should probably prepare a bit more than I have already.)

–John Palfrey

(Cross posted from Dr. Palfrey’s blog)

It seems as though there was another promising uptick in voter turnout last night in Iowa. This fact, if true, is the best news out of the caucuses, in my mind. (I am supporting Sen. Obama for president, so I’m excited about that, too.) Early analysis by many of those working on getting youth out to vote, like Adrian Talbott and his colleagues at Generation Engage, suggest that the youth vote is headed up. So reported the Boston Globe as well. Congratulations to all who have been working so hard on this crucial topic.

–John Palfrey

As I mentioned in my last blog post, one of the most interesting things about the Totally Wired forum was hearing Katie Salen talk about games in education.

In her introduction (PDF) to a new volume entitled “Ecology of Games,” Salen quotes Nobel laureate Herbert Simon: “the meaning of ‘knowing’ has shifted from being able to remember and repeat information to being able to find and use it.” Salen believes that games are a perfect way to teach these “new media literacy skills.”

The use of games in school is controversial, and it’s easy to see why.

On one hand, learning through play is so fundamentally natural that it transcends species.

Moreover, games are especially relevant to digital natives. A recent study found that games are the most popular use of the internet among kids in the US aged 6 to 11 — far more than homework, email, music, video, or just surfing.

On the other hand, playing games in school clashes with a long held cultural belief in the separation of work and play.

“Education and entertainment are two different processes,” Iowa State journalism professor Michael Bugeja recently told the Chronicle of Higher Education. “They require two different interfaces. Our whole society is being eroded by entertainment.”

Personally, I have no doubt that kids can and do learn a lot from games. Salen has amply proven this with a plethora of ideas and insights she’s gained by looking at education through the eyes of a game designer. I came away from Totally Wired wondering what other sundry subjects could be illuminated by game design, Freakonomics-style.

Still, I wonder how much of this game-based learning needs to happen in schools. Obviously kids need no encouragement to play. Why not focus on making educational games kids will want to play on their own time, and invest school time in activities most kids won’t do on their own, like read Shakespeare, or build robots?

To be fair, kids will undoubtedly learn more from games when guided by teachers and well designed curricula. As for traditional literacies, Salen acknowledges their importance, and believes they should be taught in tandem. In fact, she told the audience last week, “for kids and even for us, it’s not a huge distinction anymore.”

At any rate, soon Salen’s theories will be put to a dramatic test. She’s currently spearheading development of The Game School, an experimental public school in New York City that, according to its website, “will use game design and game-inspired methods to teach critical 21st century skills and literacies.” Talk about an exciting experiment! From a July article in Wired News:

Right now, the ideas are vague but intriguing: Alternate reality games could be used to study science, as those players typically seek out and analyze data, and then propose and test their hypotheses. Salen also envisions harnessing the creative urges that kids already express through fan fiction, blogging and the creation of avatars and online identities.

How well this works remains to be seen. One thing’s for sure though: a lot of fun will be had finding out.

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