Social Networking: Do You Know What Your Kids are Doing Right Now?

The term “social networking” for me conjures up images of upwardly mobile men and women working parties and social gatherings, handing out and collecting business cards, planning future meetings, making contacts, schmoozing amid cocktails in order to widen a valuable (often invisible) web of people who may at some point have some of the same interests and be mutually beneficial to each other.

While that “web” may still be unseen in some ways, social networking in Web 2.0 makes many of those connections much more visible than before. I’ve been on Facebook for about a year and a half now. I’ve watched and been involved in renewing connections with friends, former business associates and colleagues, and grown new friendships with former acquaintances. People don’t have to ask for my friend’s e-mail address if they can simply send them a message after finding them in my list of friend’s on Facebook. The last two concerts I attended were almost exclusively planned through Facebook contacts. In fact, the last band I saw only got back together in response to a “Reunite…” Facebook group devoted to getting the musicians back together (Reunite the Watchmen is now my favourite group on Facebook, because it has positively impacted on my life).

In my former life when I wrote about music on a regular basis, MySpace was the main social networking site for maintaining and gaining contact with artists and other music industry people. If I got a query about interviewing an artist or reviewing an album, often it would be through MySpace, where instantly I could listen to the relevant musical selection and decide whether it would be a suitable assignment for myself. In fact, Myspace can accept a lot of the responsibility for the idea that today anyone purporting to be a musical artist can now be heard everywhere at any time.

So although I had in fact been using social networking sites for my own purposes for some time, I had until recently not considered possible educational uses for the same electronic spaces. How could we use sites that seemed centred on entertainment or social purposes to help learners further their education?

It seems that many have already come up with a number of ideas in this area, including rationales for doing so. First, it’s clear that social networking sites of one sort or the other are here to stay, and students will utilize them for their own reasons. In an article entitled Scaffolding the New Social Literacies, Stephen Abram points out that not only have MytSpace and FaceBook become prominent in learners’ lives, younger kids have flocked to sites like webkinz.com and clubpenguin.com. Abrams goes on to ask an important question:

“By creating safe places where you need letters from your teacher to get online, or protecting kids by narrowing the rules, can kids ever develop the critical thinking about their identity and privacy that will be essential for success in their future?”
(http://www.sirsidynix.com/Resources/Pdfs/Company/Abram/MMIS_23.pdf)

Let’s think about this for a minute. Will learners build their own skills in maintaining privacy and security if educators disallow social networking sites in schools? Will the majority of students somehow extend their own knowledge in these areas without any guidance from teachers? I have seen no evidence that the hoped-for result will magically appear. Abrams suggests that, just like we scaffold personal knowledge of our community and our world starting in elementary school, we should scaffold tools for students to use in social networking situations right from the beginning. Makes sense to me.

If we are to be honest, social networking sites are a great example of a Web 2.0 tool that young people have already embraced; more mature lifelong learners could probably learn a lot from our students in this area. One of my students last year did an amazing presentation about her blog, which was hosted on Livejournal. If we were to look at Facebook sites as speaking directly about our students’ interests, hopes and desires, wouldn’t we be gaining a much stronger rapport with our customers/clients?

As Jason Johnson stated in his article The Case for Social Networks, “At its core, the issue is not about technology at all, but about helping students understand where the public sphere ends and the private sphere begins, how to converse in those domains, and how to be part of a community”. (http://doug-johnson.squarespace.com/blue-skunk-blog/2006/1/25/the-case-for-social-networks.html) Social networking is one of those places where students are now finding their own identity, their own voice, and their own communities. As educators, it is up to us to help them on their journey, which is often about learning in its own way, instead of sticking our heads deeper into the sand (or snow, if you are in Winnipeg like me).

At the same time, there are a number of issues which many educators have to face before we can delve into social networking with our students. First of all, how many of us can access them from school? Nings seem to be one way to go in our classes. One of the best things I’ve learned in the past two weeks (courtesy of Traci Gardner) is that Ning networks can be made private and available only to invited members (http://ncteinbox.blogspot.com/2008/09/social-networking-ning-thing.html). I haven’t had enough experience with Nings to give examples, but I recently joined one and will see what could be done. At any rate, a comment posted in response to Gardner’s article has got me a little worried that nings too may be blocked in schools. Mrs. Stanford wrote:

“I am in love with my ning site for my class. However, my school district which had previously approved the site has now deemed the site inappropriate due to the site bypassing the proxy that blocks sites such as youtube.”

Ouch. Social networking may be one Web 2.0 tool that requires some strong lobbying before sites are made easily available for school use. Clearly teachers and librarians are making use of nings to make valuable connections, share resources, and extend learning communities. Just check out some of the groups connected through http://teacherlibrarian.ning.com/ and you should get the idea that there is already something out there for almost everyone.

I’ll leave the last word to Stephen Abram, who wrote an appealingly eloquent introduction to his article on Scaffolding the New Social Literacies:

“OMG – reading literacy and numeracy, civic literacy and all the rest. Now we’re hearing that schools must expand the teaching of information literacy, computer literacy, media literacy, critical literacy, health literacy, technacy and transliteracy. And, do it all across the curricula. Dozens of types of literacy are discussed on websites and Wikipedia. How can we possibly keep up with another one?”

Abram goes on to explain that what he calls “online social literacy” is essential because young people have already embraced social networking, many at an amazingly early age. How can we keep up with another type of literacy? Perhaps the questions should really be, How can we afford not to do so?