Failure to Communicate: Profile Facts

Today in my fifth grade class, I tried to help them grapple with the realities of truth and fiction on online profiles. We sat in a circle and discussed, in an open ended fashion, whether or not you should use facts that are real or facts that are fake. In the end, the class was victim to my own teaching! It turns out that they really believed me back in second grade, third grade, etc. that they are never to share their real name, their birth dates, their addresses and their sports team names. However, they somehow generalized that to believe you should never share anything real about yourself. I can't help but feel I have failed them. Part of it is that there is no clear answer. I think they got the message that people do lie on their profiles in order to make themselves look better. They also got the message that some information is unsafe to share. But I'm not sure if I didn't teach them all it's okay to lie online. Oh my goodness, what have I done? I better work on this.

Image used with permission from: http://www.flickr.com/photos/digitalpotato/2714653723/

Virtual Playground

I never got around to publishing my research paper on Social Networking and Identity Development for the Marshall McLuhan class I took in the Fall. This 14 page paper outlines the research I synthesized from various cutting-edge researchers on the topic of how socializing online affects children's development, specifically their sense of self, or identity.
You can read it here: http://docs.google.com/Doc?id=dg9rtthh_5g6zxftfp

Digital Immigrants Making Friends

The entire process of making friends online is certainly different than than the one we used in gradeschool. Today, I met Alex Ragone in person. He's someone I have chatted with on email, in some forums, and I invited him to speak at the AIMS Conference today. I'm on the Academic Advisory committee for AIMS and my job is to select the technology sessions for the conference. I was impressed with what Alex was doing with Skype and asked him to present. He talked a little bit about how building relationships online is necessarily incremental.

I mean, you usually start interacting in text and then move on to audio and maybe photos, but video is last. That enthralls me. Think about it. Text is impersonal and private. Reading is a private activity. Seeing a photo of someone allows you to connect to that person on a visual level and that makes the relationship more intimate (keep your heads out of the gutters, please). Hearing that person's voice starts to shift the relationship even further and then once you see that person in video, you no longer have as many illusions about the person. Your imagination (your private sphere) no longer plays a role in developing that person's personality--it's just reality. Thinking about that process today made me see how the very PUBLIC NATURE of communication, of our entire culture these days is directly related to how we developed relationships in the "Gutenberg Galaxy." I wonder if these rules about how a relationship develops apply to the digital natives? I'm thinking not, but maybe....