Join the UGC revolution

Another day, another social networking site for tweenies. ITwixie (tag line 'join the revolution') is aimed at girls and is certainly less saccharine than some sites that have been developed. However, if you had any doubt about the demographic profile of its key users, then you just have to look at the videos here. These girls have gardens bigger than our local park. Never mind, at least users can upload user-generated content. At last these web site producers are getting the message that this is what many kids want. Even Disney has now launched 'U Rock 2', a site that users can upload videos in which they lip synch or dance to songs - a little like the site Bedroom TV, that I have blogged about previously, except U Rock 2 is specifically targeted at children. There is no doubt Disney know all about trends and children...so when will we see a Disney version of 'Twitter' that lets kids follow their favourite bands, pop singers and even U Rock 2 stars?

Goffman and social networking

Whilst at AERA, I heard that the proposal for the BERA symposium on 'Literacy in Virtual Worlds' we submitted back in January has been accepted, which is great. My paper is titled 'Countering chaos in Club Penguin: Young children’s use of literacy practices in the establishment of a virtual ‘interaction order’' which, as the title suggests, draws on Goffman's work. I first became interested in Goffman when a PhD student I supervised, Rosemary Anderson, drew on his theories to explore how children with reading difficulties managed their identities in the classroom and so I began to read his work in more depth. The more I read of it, the more I felt it helped me to understand young children's enagagement in digital literacies a little more. Of course I am not alone here - a growing number of people are interested in Goffman's ideas in relation to social networking - see here, for example. I know that some feel his ideas are perhaps not fluid enough to manage poststructuralist conceptions of identity - Guy, for example, has said he prefers the work of Holstein and Gubrium in this respect - but I feel that it is possible to read Goffman through a postructuralist lens. In the meantime, I recommend Rosemary's UKLA minibook based on her work - no Goffman in there, but plenty of good strategies for teachers!

Girl Ambition

I noted with interest the launch of a new social networking site aimed at girls aged 7-12, titled Girl Ambition. It was formed by three parents keen to provide a safe space for their children to engage in online activity and develop a site that challenges the traditional, stereotyped discourses about girlhood that circulate the internet. Whilst there is certainly a need for sites such as this that aim to develop girls’ self-esteem, I feel that it is unfortunate that the site looks so retro. It is hard to compete with the designs of commercial sites, given the marketing budgets they enjoy, but nonetheless a more up-to-date design would attract more users. I can’t help feeling that the site will appeal to a certain demographic and miss an opportunity to speak to a wide, diverse audience. I hope I am wrong and will be monitoring the site’s development. In the meantime, if anyone has had an opportunity to review the content of the site, do post your comments (or link to your review) here.

Digital social capital

Thanks to Sheila Yoshikawa, I can post a photo here of the seminar I gave in Second Life, on children’s use of virtual worlds. ‘Twas fun and people made some very interesting comments in the discussion of the data. One of the points we discussed was that the children in my study used 'Club Penguin' to meet friends and family. This is one of the findings of the 'Digital Youth and media' project run by Mizuko Ito and team in the US. They have released the report on their three-year study of children and young people’s informal learning with digital media. The report can be accessed here. It makes for fascinating reading, and the summary includes the following finding: 'Most youth use online networks to extend the friendships that they navigate in the familiar contexts of school, religious organizations, sports, and other local activities.' I think there are interesting issues to explore here in terms of digital social capital - do these online networks reinforce offline ones? What implications does that have for children who find online access difficult at home - are they further excluded from these communities of practice? Or is it, like those of us who avoid networks such as 'Facebook' and 'Twitter', that the connections you want to make will be made anyway, so little is lost in the lack of their use? I think that for different groups, this will play out in different ways and that for some children, not being invited to classmates' 'Club Penguin' parties will mean decreased social capital and a risk of further exclusion in offline spaces. This is an area worthy of further research - if only I could fit it in!

Swarms

This photograph was taken at a staff induction to Second Life today, on a skychair tour of Infolit ischool led by the marvellous Sheila Yoshikawa (literally in the driving seat here). I didn't dare take the tour because of my propensity for travel sickness, but a great time was had by all, no matter how much of a 'newbie' we felt. In-world, we helped each other to become more familiar with the landscape of SL. Once again I was reminded of the power of social networking, which was reinforced when I became aware that this project, A Swarm of Angels, is open to re-registration again , having first started in 2006. It is an open source film project which aims to raise £1million to make a film that will then be free to access on the web. If you subscribe to the project, you can vote on creative decisions and collaborate in the production process if you wish to. I think the title of the project is interesting, as it draws on the notion of 'swarming' as an activity made possible by Web 2.0. Zygmunt Bauman used the concept of swarming in his work on liquid modernity and this has informed its use in thinking around technology and social/ mobile networking, but I think his notion was quite different from what is actually happening. He suggested that:

In a swarm, there are no specialists - no holders of separate (and scarce) skills and resources whose task would be to enable/assist other units to complete their jobs, or to compensate for their individual shortcomings or incapacities. Each unit is a ‘Jack of all trades’, and needs the complete set of tools and skills necessary for the entire job to be fulfilled. In a swarm, there is no exchange, no cooperation, no complementarity – just the physical proximity and roughly coordinated direction of the current moves. In case of the human, feeling/thinking units, the comfort of flying-in-swarm derives from the trust in numbers: a belief that the direction of flight has been properly chosen since an impressively large swarm follows it, the supposition that so many feeling/thinking humans wouldn’t be simultaneously fooled. As the self-assurance and the sentiment of security go, the swarm is the next best, and no less effective, substitute for the authority of group leaders.

This seems to me to be pessimistic in its estimation of why people join collective groups and in people's ability to determine the nature of the joint action. In addition, in socially-networked 'swarms' there are indeed specialists - the success of projects such as 'A swarm of angels' is dependent upon different people contributing their different expertise in specific ways - and surely the bees flying at the edge of swarms have to use their navigational expertise in a different way than the bees in the middle of the swarm? I don't know, I am no bee expert, but projects that embed collective action and collaborative decision-making at their heart seem to me to be good things to foster. Anyhow, I look forward to seeing the final outcome of 'A Swarm of Angels' - maybe it will be shown in Second Life? Hope so, my avatar needs a sit down after all that flying about today...

Social networking

Following close on the heels of the Byron Review report, Ofcom have published a report today on the use of social networking sites such as Bebo, Facebook and MySpace. I haven’t had time to read it but on a first skim-through, I noted their categorisation of the non-use of these kinds of social network sites. They suggest that there are three categories of/ reasons for non-participation – (i) people concerned about online safety, (ii) the technically inexperienced or (iii) intellectual rejecters who think they are a waste of time. I think there is a fourth category/ reason they have omitted here – people, like myself, who think social networks are of interest and can serve useful functions, but who have decided that they do not wish to use them because their own networking needs are met in other ways and spaces such as Facebook are just surplus to needs. I know I am not alone – Guy discusses this on his blog. Maybe they didn’t talk to people who strategically choose not to participate in such spaces. Not being interested in them personally doesn’t mean to say that I think they are of little value to educationalists, however and here Julia offers a number of reasons for using social networking sites in schools. Let's hope voices such as Julia's get listened to in the flurry of moral panics that appear to be proliferating around children and social networking.

Content creation

I spent some of the recent break watching my three nieces using Club Penguin. They love it, but they would like the ability to create things in it as well - one niece was desperate for her penguin avatar to have a wig that included a tiara, something not available in the Club Penguin catalogue as yet, unfortunately, and she would have liked to have been able to create it herself. Maybe this aspect of the site will be developed in time. Certainly, online creation by young people is growing. A recent Pew Internet and American Life report on 'Teens and social media' indicates that 64% of online teenagers aged 12 - 17 engages in at least one type of content creation. There are other interesting aspects of the data, including the report that the teenagers who use social networking sites are 'super-communicators' who also use a range of other communication tools more frequently than non-SNS users. This shouldn't be surprising as the key issue is motivation for use and if the urge to chat to friends and family is strong, then it will strong across media. And different modes of communication are good for different things. Maybe an email to Disney about the possibility of content creation in Club Penguin would be a good thing...

Social graph

I am currently in Melbourne and this is the first opportunity I have had to blog since I arrived in Australia. I have been learning about a lot of the exciting digital literacy work going on in Australian schools, and discussing issues that face educators both here and in England. For example, we have talked about the need to move beyond conceptualising the digital divide in terms of access to hardware and software, although that is important. What will be of significance in the future will be how well embedded individuals are in the social graph. I for one will be well out of it, as I have resisted joining Facebook for various reasons and am willing to accept the limitations that will bring. But what are the consequences for young children if they are not able to make choices about social networking because they are not aware of the options available to them? Social capital will become social networking capital, which will relate in some ways to economic and cultural capital. I was interested to read the National School Boards Association's report in the USA in which parents expressed positive views towards their children's use of social networking sites - this report adds to other work that suggests that schools embrace and not ignore these sites. Every child needs the chance to make choices about whether and where he/she appears on the social graph.

Parent power

Online sites aimed at children are becoming increasingly focused on giving parents and carers reassuring messages about safety- they realise that the path to commercial success has to take account of parental needs. Club Penguin is popular with parents because of its limited chat possibilities and the close monitoring of open chat, strategies that are explained carefully to parents in specially marked areas of the site. The social networking site aimed at 8-14 year-olds, imbee, even considers the needs of parents whose technical skills might be less well developed than their children’s. Their marketing brief states:

"For adults who might be intimidated by technology, imbee.com has made its powerful parental monitoring tools easy-to-use and making it simple for parents and guardians to have effective insight and control over their child’s online activities."

These moves are proving to be persuasive (link here for an example of a parental review of Club Penguin, for example). For younger children, this attention to the needs of parents will be irrelevant to their own engagement with these social networking sites - what do they care who else the sites they like cater for as long as they are fun for them? But at a later age, children will start to get a little itchy about this... it would be interesting to trace children’s developing sensitivity to social networking sites’ orientations to the parental audience. Another project I'll never have time for, unfortunately...it's enough just to be focused on tracing children's changing interests in popular culture and media and considering the implications for educators!

I will be away from a computer for the next 10 days, so no more blog posts from me for a while. I hope to be seeing some sea life, not the virtual penguin kind (fun though that is), here.