EDUC 628-Spring-08

This interview brought about so many familiarities in my life, given that my 15 year old spends quite a bit of time on MySpace.  The core structure that Boyd spoke about, being the profile, the friends, and the comments (private ones as well) was right on the money in our situation.  My daughter has friends and talks to only them—-all the time.

As a matter of fact, my daughter told me not IM on Yahoo because she thought it was dangerous.  I don’t IM much anyway, but I just thought it was an irony.

Also, I thought I would join MySpace one day, and after joining, I got this “friend” suddenly, and it scared me.  His name was Tom(I think).  After I cancelled my membership and told a few people, I found out quickly that everyone new this guy.  He was the owner they said.

Back to the interview with Danah Boyd, I thought it was interesting when she was asked how these types of skills would help high-school students in the workforce, and I don’t think she gave a specific answer to that.  I do know that she spoke of the upcoming communication on cell phones being a different type of entity that kids are mainstreaming to—if they can afford it.  The other day, i finally called my carrier to put the media package on my daughter’s cell phone for unlimited Internet, Text, sending pictures….whatever, and that is much cheaper than paying for 4000 more text messages over the 1000 free ones we started out with on her original plan.  This is the reality at my house, and the child does see it as much less of an intrusion that calling.  One day I said, why don’t you just call them, and her reply was —what…not when I can text…

I have decided that before I make anymore judgements about MySpace or Facebook or -is it Twitter…that I need to go see what the fuss is all about, so after I explore some of these sites for a while then I will come back to what I think about this.  I didn’t think it was fair for me to only judge it through my daughter’s  eyes.

Also, I went out and am trying to read and participate a little more and I am in the middle of watching this video from Stephen’s Web ~ OLDaily

Web 2.0 and Your Own Learning and Development

When I finish it and learn some more technology I’ll keep you posted.  

While I am trying to think of an intelligent response to social networking technologies, I have printed off  Danah Boyd’s  lets define our terms : what is social networking technology as well as her and Nicole Edison’s Social Network Sites: Definition, History and Scholarship and finally the Economist Debate on Social “Networking.” 

As I acquire my feel for these types of assignments I will always click on every link to everything, and this is frustrating me because I waste (or seems like I am wasting my time) as I try to just answer a question.

In terms of social networking I will give you some insight on the conversation that went on as my family and I drove home last night. My husband asked me what I was thinking about, and I said, well, I am thinking about my blog.  His response:

·        You are just as bad as our daughter (she’s 14) and is on MySpace everyday.

·        My daughter said Mom, you need to be careful with Yahoo IM’s….it’s not like MSN IM.

And my thoughts drifted back to that mornings conversation that myself, and two other colleagues had about MySpace, cell phones, and social networking in general and teenage girls.  One of my colleagues said that they do not allow her kids to access the Internet because it seems like they never study.  They never bring home a book.  I agreed because my 14 year old had recently gotten in trouble for her grades because I never see her with a book (her consequence was that she had her cell phone and the computer taken away for a period of time).  I thought about my daughter and her friends and how they use social networking sites continuously everyday…how they take pictures on their phones and digital cameras and race home to put them on their sites/spaces.  These kids could be photographers I think sometimes. 

Now, there are times that I have to set limits for the amount of time I allow my daughter to spend on the computer if she never comes out of her room, as I should, and there are also times I need to set the some limits for myself.   I know she is socializing with her friends and I do know that she knows everyone she socializes with, and I don’t have a problem with this.  I think that she could be out and getting into some kind of trouble and she is not.  She is at home.

As far as education and culture and technology, I think that the culture of the teenagers who use SNS will not stop, and that is educators can set limits of how they want to use SNS incorporated into their instruction, then this could help tie education to social networks—networking sites.

I went out to google social network and social networking and Wikipedia returned the following:

 Social network   From Wikipedia, the free encyclopediaJump to: navigation, search

Not to be confused with social network services such as MySpace, etc. or virtual communityA social network is a social structure made of nodes (which are generally individuals or organizations) that are tied by one or more specific types of interdependency, such as values, visions, idea, financial exchange, friends, kinship, dislike, conflict, trade, web links, sexual relations, disease transmission (epidemiology), or airline routes. The resulting structures are often very complex.Social network analysis views social relationships in terms of nodes and ties. Nodes are the individual actors within the networks, and ties are the relationships between the actors. There can be many kinds of ties between the nodes. Research in a number of academic fields has shown that social networks operate on many levels, from families up to the level of nations, and play a critical role in determining the way problems are solved, organizations are run, and the degree to which individuals succeed in achieving their goals.In its simplest form, a social network is a map of all of the relevant ties between the nodes being studied. The network can also be used to determine the social capital of individual actors. These concepts are often displayed in a social network diagram, where nodes are the points and ties are the lines. 

Social network service From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Jump to: navigation, search 

A social network service focuses on the building and verifying of online social networks for communities of people who share interests and activities, or who are interested in exploring the interests and activities of others, and which necessitates the use of software.Most services are primarily web based and provide a collection of various ways for users to interact, such as chat, messaging, email, video, voice chat, file sharing, blogging, discussion groups, and so on.The main types of social networking services are those which contain directories of some categories (such as former classmates), means to connect with friends (usually with self-description pages), and recommender systems linked to trust. Popular methods now combine many of these, with MySpace,[1] Bebo[2] and Facebook[1] being the most widely used in the anglosphere, Hi5 in parts of Europe,[3]Google’s Orkut in Brazil,[4] and Friendster being the most widely used in Asia.[5][6][7]There have been some attempts to standardize them (see the FOAF standard) but this has led to some privacy concerns. 

And a list of social networking sites from Wikipedia.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_social_networking_websites