apophenia: answers to questions from Twitter on teen practices

New media researcher and capital-letter-avoider dana boyd recently answered questions about teens and their use of social media. These folks will be in college soon, so it makes sense for us to learn about their media habits.

@mirroredpool: What borders to teens place of social networking
sites and education? How would they react to using an SNS to do class
work?

@annejonas: i’m curious if they want schools involved in social
networks or if they like it as a social space outside the realm of
formal edu.

This is messy. Many teens have ZERO interest in interacting with
teachers on social network sites, but there are also quite a few who
are interested in interacting with SOME teachers there. Still, this is
primarily a social space and their interactions with teachers are
primarily to get more general advice and help. In some ways, its
biggest asset in the classroom is the way in which its not a classroom
tool and not loaded this way. Given that teens don’t Friend all of
their classmates, there are major issues in terms of using this for
groupwork because of boundary issues.

@shcdean: What future do they see for FB or Twitter.

They don’t use Twitter. When asked, teens always say that they’ll
use their preferred social network site (or social media service)
FOREVER as a sign of their passion for it now. If they expect that
they’ll “grow out of it”, it’s a sign that the service is waning among
that group at this very moment. So they’re not a good predictor of
their own future usage.