Reading, writing and rupturing

danah boyd, speaking at Handheld Learning 2008 was resplendent in her famous wooley hat and scarf. She told me she was 'feeling the cold' and pointed out that it was warmer outside that inside here at the Brewery, East London.

Danah wasted no time getting into her stride - she believes that simply incorporating technology into the classroom does not in itself promote good learning. Technologies have actually ruptured aspects of the society we live in but also constitute the networked culture we find ourselves immersed within. Educators have two responsibilities she says. Firstly, teachers need to know about the technologies that exist and how they can be used. Secondly, teachers need to understand how to apply technology to open up the world we live in to children. In short, we need to understand exactly how technology is fundamentally rupturing the world we know and how they are changing it.

Social network sites such as Bebo, Facebook and Myspace, says danah is where people go to socialise and be a part of the world. They go to engage with people who are their friends, classmates, etc. To be present without a body, we must 'write ourselves into being', creating profiles that clothe ourselves suitably for the digital environment. We also write our audiences into being by friending those who we feel are interested in us or in whom we are interested in communicating with.

The comments section of a social networking site has a different function according to boyd. She sees it as a having a third person testimonial function - using it as a space of conversation. This does not mean they don't use other means of communication such as MSN. It simply has another kind of function - a 'public form of social grooming' - a social 'upkeep' which goes beyond simply friending someone and then never speaking to them again. Teenagers are using social networking sites to 'hang out' in and in a time of increased vigilance about safety, perhaps this is inevitable.

boyd feels that there are several key features that provide the power behind social networks. The first is persistence - what is written on the web stays there. Replicability, the second feature is a two-edged sword. The ease in which we can copy and paste items can work both ways. Next, scalability - the potential to reach millions of people through posting on the web - is an important feature to consider. Searchability is also important - the ability to find people and track what they are doing is also something that can work either as a good or bad effect. de-locatability is the notion that mobile technologies make it meaningless where people are. The dynamics of the interplay between these features, says danah, is important to understand if we are to know more about how social networking tools are being used by young people.

We don't yet understand it, and this is why when we try to introduce say, Facebook into the classroom as a teaching tool, it just doesn't work. I also suspect that this is because Facebook and other social networking tools are not designed to be used in this way... the discussions will continue.