Response to Podcast

First of all, learning from a podcast is FER SUX-I often had to stop, rewind, and listen again.

Ok, now for the real response:

One thing that struck me is that she said "I hope they (educators) live up to the challenge-so this person is not an educator? I don't know how credible anything else she said can be given that fact. The whole "walk a mile in my moccasins" kind of thing.

Good primer on SNS - she should write "SNS for Dummies"

One point she made: preferences are displayed by the network of friends. Back in the day in BBS's one's preferences are displayed by what you said, where you said it, who you said it to, and how you said it. Nowadays it is just who you know. Though this is important, I lament for the generation coming up that this is the only thing they are about. I consider myself an amateur but one with long standing in the cyber-community. I was on IRC when it was just us nerdy types on there. I played all the first generation of FPS games (Wolfenstein, Doom, etc...) and I pwned. (if ya don't know what that means, read this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pwned ) The point is, us older Gen-Xers can see some serious issues with SNS from the point of view of people who are technologically savvy. We're not the ostriches, but the emus. (why an emu? I dunno, I just think they are good solid birds, similar to ostriches, but without the "head in the sand" issue) We can speak the language, and we have something different to say. Personally, I think Facebook is WAY too focused on friends and communication, and not enough on blogging, issue discussion, and political activism.

She had a good point about these aspects of "Mediated Public Spaces"- her term for SNS

persistence-I don't want what my children say at 13 or 15 or whatever to be accessible to their future employers. Hell, I wouldn't want things I wrote at 25 to be accessible now. One good thing about blogs-you can DELETE things!

search ability-good and bad. Parents can use the find feature to find out things about their kids, but the flip side is, so can predators.

replicability-hello plagiarism! It was bad once things went digital, now what are the chances that a term paper can be sold online? Pretty good. The flip side is, the "hey that's cool!" thing-look at this blog, it's my version of it.

invisible audiences-Being primarily Concrete Operations thinkers, I do not think that teenagers can comprehend the idea that others could be reading this, and that their words are permanent. This natural deficiency can be exploited.

Good points about context and scale. On the scale side of things, I agree, teenagers have no clue how "loud" their voices are on the Internet.

She touches lightly on the legal aspect of SNS profiles. I would like to expand on that. Our privacy laws are not "up to speed" with current technology. As of right now, anything on an SNS profile could be used as evidence. An argument for this is that there is overt intent to make this information public. It is not unlike climbing the tallest building in town and announcing something with a megaphone.

I like her ideas about proactive uses of SNS profiles-helping kids at risk or feeling depressed, etc... 'course we had that on BBS's- plenty of them were support groups. What's funny, is that kids will think they're inventing something new. Heh, they probably think that about the Internet too, and we all know Al Gore invented that.

The other suggestions that teachers can use...finnally!...A-#1 idea we need to get across to kids: I (your teacher) and ANYONE ELSE can see your profile, create it accrodingly. It is a great power to have this public space on the internet. As Peter Parker once said "With great power comes great responsibility."