Because we all learn by practicing and to get its middle schoolers ready for adult life in a digitally enhanced networked world, The School at Columbia University created The Social Network. "It’s basically the pre-kindergarten version of Facebook," Forbes reports. There's also The Tube for sharing videos and The Gallery for photos. All of it is archived at the end of the year so that – with … [Read more...] about School helps its students practice social networking
social networking
What Facebook’s ‘Subscribe’ signifies
In social media, the only constant is change. Remember those commentaries about how social networking was "trivializing" friendship by throwing all levels of acquaintanceship under the big digital umbrella labeled "friends"? Well, I always felt the commentators were taking what they saw in social sites a bit too literally and failing to understand how much "real life" socializing rules its online … [Read more...] about What Facebook’s ‘Subscribe’ signifies
A Missouri law: Well-intentioned but flawed
Missouri is the "11th worst state in the nation for teachers losing their license for sexual misconduct," State Sen. Jane Cunningham told my ConnectSafely co-director Larry Magid in an interview for CNET. So she sponsored a new law aimed at protecting students from such misconduct. It's great the law makes it much harder to "pass the trash," a term that Senator Cunningham explained refers to … [Read more...] about A Missouri law: Well-intentioned but flawed
Catching up with our kids in social sites: Study
The number of people using social network sites "has nearly doubled since 2008" to 59% of US Net users (47% of US adults in general) and the population of social sites has gotten older, the Pew Internet Project found. "The average age of adult-SNS [social network site] users has shifted from 33 in 2008 to 38 in 2010. Over half of all adult SNS users are now over the age of 35." As for which sites, … [Read more...] about Catching up with our kids in social sites: Study
Various fresh findings on Facebook use
There used to be two bodies of research most relevant to kids online: social-media research and youth-online-risk research (as co-chair of an online-safety task force last year, I tried to bring more of the former into the discussion). But that binary is fading fast, as it should; since the Internet mirrors virtually all of human life, what's happening on it should be looked at by researchers in … [Read more...] about Various fresh findings on Facebook use