 I'm Judy Singer. I'm the Senior Vice Provost for Faculty Development and Diversity, and I would like to welcome you today to our panel discussion and demonstrations on the use of social media in academia. We're going to begin with a few words of thanks to the groups that are participating here, and it'll give you a sense of what we were trying to accomplish. This event is co-sponsored by a number of Harvard groups and represents an effort across the university to try to think about how the changes in technologies around us can influence how it is that we teach, how we do research, and how we communicate to each other as colleagues and to the outside world. So we are privileged to have sponsorship from the Berkman Center for Internet and Society, and I want to say thanks to Urs Gasser, who's the Executive Director and his staff for participating in this. The Harvard Office of Public Affairs and Communication, and I want to say thank you to Perry Hewitt, who you'll be hearing from shortly, and her staff for putting this together. My team in Faculty Development and Diversity, in particular Amy Brand and the rest of the staff in making this all happen, and our corporate partner, Dell Computers, who, oops, I didn't mean to make that go, corporate partner Dell Computer, who has provided the computers outside that we will be using for demonstrations at the end. The genesis of this event is from a set of conversations I've been having with faculty over the past few years about how the world is changing around us and we simply can't keep up. And I find myself thinking about the day in the 1995, 96 school year, and I thought I was very technologically savvy. I teach statistics at the Graduate School of Education. I use computers a lot in my classroom, and I was using this really sexy web browser called Lynx. Anybody remember Lynx? It was a text-based web browser. And sometime, I can't actually date it, but sometime in the winter, one of my teaching fellows came in and said, you're gonna be blown away. And she sits down on my computer and she types in to Alta Vista. I had never seen anything like Alta Vista. All of a sudden, the worldwide web from that Lynx, which was a text-based browser, to something that was more graphic, was there's going to be a change going on. And if I could just master that, I could keep up. I won't even tell you about the day I walked into my classroom and one of the students said, have you seen Kenyon's Facebook page? And I said, what? And he said, Kenyon's Facebook page, he's put together a spoof group about your class. And I said, I heard about Facebook, but somebody came to my office and showed me how to get on Facebook because this was in the days when you needed a Harvard.edu address. And this was going to be the way, the students in my class were communicating about what was going on in my class on Facebook. And I had no idea what was going on. The rate of change in technology and how it's going to influence how we teach is something that I think most of us are having a hard time even keeping up with. And what we're trying to do here today is to bring together resources from across the university so you can hear how colleagues are thinking about this problem space and both in terms of very concrete kinds of things we'll be having demonstrations outside, but also in terms of the thought processes about why are they doing this? Why are they changing what they've been doing quite happily for many years because the students around us are changing so much more rapidly than we can ever think about. Few words of housekeeping. This event is being webcast live out there. Hello. It is also being recorded. It'll be up on YouTube on the Berkman site so that people can in fact participate in both real time and then moving forward in virtual time. It is also being tweeted. I understand I just said that correctly. With the hashtag academicSN for social networks. You are welcome to eat. I'm glad to hear the sounds of plastic going on here. Please continue to eat during the sessions. And this is going to sound very Luddite like but there's no Wi-Fi in this room. So you are welcome to tweet with your smartphones but this is not a Wi-Fi space. So let me segue over to our host for this afternoon, John Palfrey sitting over here. John is a Henry NS Professor of Law and the Vice Dean for Library and Information Resources at Harvard Law Schools. He is also the Director of the Schools Library and Co-Chair of the IT Committee. He is one of the faculty co-directors of the Berkman Center, a co-sponsor for this event. And John's research focuses on internet law, intellectual property, the potential uses of new technologies to strengthen democracies around the world. And he is the co-author of many publications including two books, Born Digital, which I know I'm not. Understanding the first generation of digital natives and access denied, the practice and politics of global internet filtering. John, thank you. Professor Singer, thank you so much for this amazing event that you have pulled off. It's really a joy, I have to say, to be here about to kick off this afternoon. I cannot imagine actually having had this conversation with such an august group if we had thought eight or nine or 10 years ago about the issue of social media and how it might intersect with the academy. And it's so fun to see the oversubscribed capacity that your group has brought together. And I thank to Amy and Perry and others who have brought this event together and to bring the Berkman Center into the main fold here of the university. You may know the Berkman Center as one of the outliers on Harvard University's northern and maybe northwestern territory, a little yellow building out there. In the last few years, we've become a university-wide center, an inner faculty initiative. And it's from there that we have in many respects aspired to be part of this more mainstream conversation about how we use technology in service of our core pedagogical goals at Harvard University. And it's fun to have this chance to explore it. But I actually want before we start to complexify the conversation before we get into the specifics because I think it's actually much trickier than it looks at the outset. And maybe that's why all of you are here to try to figure out what are the handholds we can use as we think about this problem or this opportunity in the context of our work as teachers and scholars and as more broadly people communicating with the outside world. I wanna make three quick points and then I'm gonna introduce a great friend who we've got the pleasure of hearing from first off. The first point is I think it's incontrovertible that there is enormous growth in usage of new technologies including social media among kids. I think we don't need to go deeply into that question. We can sort of stipulate it as we as lawyers do. But there are a couple aspects of it that I think that are very important. One is that not all of our students come into Harvard College or any of our different schools the Extension School or the professional schools with an equal set of abilities in this way. I suspect that Dana will talk to some of these data that there is what we call not just a digital divide in terms of the ability to access the technology but skills wise. And it's very often a socioeconomic divide. I think this is something that in our society it's very important to start with as a framing device. Though we wrote a book called Born Digital the truth is not all kids, not even all kids at rich institutions are born digital in the same way. I think this is a very important starting point. And to note that there are issues that we have in terms of basic skills before we get to the very advanced things among our students as they come into the academy. And Dana will pick up from here in terms of many of the very specific kinds of usages that people are putting these technologies to. Second is a framing question which is how do we think about the use of new technologies in an institution that's very good at what it does in terms of teaching and learning? And in the Berkman Center we argue about this a lot and there are at least two ways to think about this problem. One school of thought says we know that lots of people are using these technologies. We know that it is dramatically changing in some ways that the most sophisticated kids, often the richest kids are relating to one another to information and to institutions. So we know that's happening and therefore we should get in the mix, get our hands dirty, experiment. Experiment with the knowledge that it's gonna be relevant one way or another. And in some ways that guided our initial efforts in this space. In 2002 we hired a research fellow, someone who was one of the early bloggers, a guy named Dave Weiner, who was sort of a pied piper of blogging. And the project we set up with him was to put up a web server, a blog server, that would let anyone on the Harvard campus, anyone with a Harvard.edu email address to set up a blog for free, which we would host. It turns out this blog server is still going. It took about a year before there were 500 people blogging on it. Any of you may sign up if you had any wifi. You might be able to do it from your mobile device in here at blogs.law.harvard.edu to join this community of scholars. And the thing that that experimentation did, we didn't know the outcomes. We didn't have a set of metrics we were leading to. But it transformed the way that we talked to one another within the Berkman research community and our students. And it was fascinating, the extent to which we would start going into meetings where people knew the conversation that had been happening all week between research fellows. Dana talking to Ethan Zuckerman, talking to Dorothy Zinberg over the blogs in a way that was asynchronous to the conversations we were having in person and increasing our students would come in and say, oh yeah, I read that on your blog before class and so forth. It changed in a way the nature of the discourse and actually it improved our internal communications dramatically. And it also helped other people to see what we were doing. And the number of different faculty we'll hear from today, Professor Mencu in particular has a very well-regarded blog and we can talk about how that fits into his scholarship and his teaching. But that's the first approach. It's basically put it out there, try it, throw spaghetti at the wall, as we say in technical terms, and see what comes of it. I think there's another approach which is to say define your pedagogical goals first and work from there. Figure out what are we trying to do? What is the core mission that we're trying to accomplish as teachers and as researchers and so forth and to build from there? I admit that I prefer the second approach. It is more natural to my own way of thinking and I think both have some benefit. I think one of the great things about the university is we can have centrally planned and common goals where we work from core principles and we can also have experiments in labs and so forth. And I think as a university that having a combination of these two approaches is actually a good idea from a portfolio perspective and I hope at the end of this two hours plus and when we hear from Perry as to what's going on and offered through the university and the demos and so forth, you have a sense of this portfolio which is both very planful in terms of thinking about what does innovative teaching look like and how do we use these technologies in service of that as well as straight experimentation like what we would do in a lab so that we are a little bit ahead of the curve and we know these technologies and are using them well. Okay, so third and by way of introduction of a great friend and colleague, I think one of the places that's useful to start particularly in the face of uncertainty is to look to the data. And in this particular field, if we had asked 10 years ago what are the data around social media and their usage and their roles in an academic setting, we would have nowhere to turn. There was very little in the way of data. Turns out that thanks to a small group of pioneers and the best of those pioneers sitting in this room and about to speak to you, we actually have a fair amount of data now about how young people in particular use these technologies both in a learning context and in a social context that is broader than the academy. So we're gonna start in the first hour or so hearing from Dr. Dana Boyd. Dana is in my view the best researcher working on kids and the relationship to technology. The person that I and many people turn to for the sort of core information about how this is happening. She is a slightly unconventional researcher in various ways, all good, I assure you. She has her PhD in information from the iSchool at Berkeley, which is a hotbed of leadership in this space. She is a senior researcher which equates to a tenured level appointment within Microsoft Research down the street in a wonderful facility, which if you haven't been to is called NERD, New England Research and Development at Microsoft. She's been a longtime Berkman Fellow. She's now a visiting researcher, working in a research group with me at the Harvard Law School. She also has the single longest list of pending speaking requests. She needs to be scheduled a year out in advance about the same as Professor Sandel sitting here as well. So we are enormously, enormously grateful to Dana for making time to share with us some basic data and then we'll go from there into some further presentation. So, Dr. Boyd. Good afternoon. Thank you so much for coming out. So, John was so kind to me. My name is Dana Boyd and I'm a researcher. And most of my work is actually ethnographic in nature. I spend most of my time running around the United States talking to young people about how they use social media. And I've been looking at social media practices actually really since 1999 with a focus on social network sites since 2003, which at this point is particularly long. My goal today is actually give you a higher order conceptual understanding of what it is that young people are doing with social media so you can understand the conceptual works, the cultural logic in other words. And we can kind of go from there to get into the more depths of what it means to be engaging with this stuff. The first is to locate social media. Many of you are familiar with the top names, things like Twitter and Facebook, things that are coming out, but I want to sort of give you a way of thinking about what it is that these services actually do. And the way I'm gonna do that is I'm gonna give you an idea of what social network sites are. Social network sites have some very interesting components of them. The first is actually a profile. And the key to understanding a profile is actually to realize that it's a way of writing yourself into being online. When you walked into this room, you had a body that was very convenient. It allowed you to sort of move and be recognized, to have presence, to exist. Online, by default, you're an IP address, which is not particularly interesting. So for most people, there's a way of trying to express yourself and having a place where you can do that. And if you look at the creation of profiles online, a lot of it is about expressing yourself and having that embodiment of identity. Of course, what young people do with that, in many ways, looks like the ways in which they might decorate a dorm room. It's a collection of images, a collection of materials, a way of showing off who they are to their friends, to anybody that might enter. And they're constantly thinking about how they wanna show off. This is also the way in which they repurpose a lot of technology that was intended for one reason for a different. For example, you will find that there's this whole process of liking things on Facebook. The intention was so that you would go and you would like McDonald's or a corporation and show your corporate interests, right? What young people have done is actually repurposed this to make an expressive format, right? A way of actually building networks and expressing themselves, again, through that moment of really doing presence work. The next key component of a social network site has to do with the friends structure. For the longest time, people would scratch their heads and be like, why are people friending everybody? What you have to understand about the friending structure is it's a way of actually writing the audience into being, right? The idea is that when people go into a public space, they have an understanding of who the audience is and they're trying to figure out how to negotiate that. What these friends lists are is the people's understanding of who the public is that they care about. And so when you see a college student only friending other college day students, they mean that to be a college space. They mean that to be a college audience, a college public. And they don't necessarily mean to include you, right? And that's where it becomes very tricky because in some ways it's a way of reading the understanding of the public and to realize that people aren't speaking to all people across all space and all time. Another key component of social network side and many other social media seems to be a lot of public conversation, right? And if you look at the content of most of this conversation, again, you might scratch your head and be like, why are people spending so much time going back and forth saying, I love you, I love you too. You're my friend, we're friends, aren't we? And what you'll find is that this is social grooming. This is really a way of acknowledging one another and doing it in a public place where we can really actually build those relationships and acknowledge those relationships. Now, we can kind of laugh at it and get going and be like, I don't do that. I dare you to listen to the conversations that will happen in the hallway when we're done and you will realize that it is basically a constant game of social grooming. It's just that young people are doing it online. Next key component that sort of is constantly lamented has to do with this idea of writing the details of what's going on in your life. This is usually complained about in terms of the what I ate for breakfast problem, right? And the funny thing about it is that my mother conveniently writes what she wrote for breakfast. And I found a really interesting moment of realizing that it allowed me to see the temporal patterns of my mother's life. And what you see with a lot of the data creation in these environments is about actually being present when you're not physically co-present. It's about a sense of peripheral awareness, right? And all of those come together to explain why it is, or what young people are doing with a lot of these social media. Of course, the next reasonable question to ask is why, right? If they can get together in person, especially in a college environment, why on earth would they do this? And quotes are here gonna come from high school students, but I think the same thing operates at a much older level as well, which is depending on what the social media of their particular friend group is, being a participant is absolutely essential to being a part of the social world, right? It's like knowing where your friends are and making sure you show up there, except that this showing up is a showing up online, not just a showing up in person. So what makes it interesting? One, the idea that everybody is on it, right? It's the place that you can go where everybody knows your name, right? It's really about that sense of community. The ability of keeping in touch with people for a much longer time. This, by the way, is one of the things that's radically changing the higher education landscape is that young people are actually in touch with their high school, middle school, elementary school friends in unprecedented levels. So the idea of college being a space where you break away from all of that is really radically changed, which I think is particularly notable in a place like Harvard. Finally, it's about actually having that moment where you actually get all of the updates. You're aware of what's going on. And what you see is that for young people, it has become a scrapbook of their social lives. It's a way of really tracking and having a sense of what's going on, what's going on with all of the people around them. So again, at a higher-order conceptual level, the way you can actually understand all of the social media is as the creation of a new kind of public space. We think about publics, and I'm using very much a public's notion here. We think about publics often in civic terms, in community terms, in places where people come together for action. But there's also a heavy importance for publics as a social space. And this is where people come to gather and understand broader societies. Of course, the challenge with networked publics is that networked publics aren't quite the same as the physical publics and the physical networks of people that we're so used to. And part of it is that the affordances of these technologies radically change some of the kinds of dynamics that play out. I'm gonna give you four affordances and three dynamics in order to sort of put this in position. One is persistence. What you say online sticks around for a very long time. This is great for asynchronous conversations. This is really embarrassing when the things that you wrote when you were 13 are still online. And we get this really interesting moment of what you have to do when you're dealing with the idea of time. And we're so used to an understanding of having ephemeral conversations for social purposes and really sort of published or formalized conversations in very specific and limited ways. And what you see is that this is really changing. We're now having really persistent conversations even during everyday ephemeral interactions. So this is all getting messing or messing everything up. Another key affordance has to do with replicability. You can copy and paste content from one place to another. And it's very hard to tell the difference between the original and the duplicate. This means that what you're seeing online may be a copy of something that happened somewhere else and you may not know all of the ways in which this moves. By the way, this is a way in which young people actually torment one another. It's a way in which they torment faculty. The idea of taking material from one place and replicating it somewhere else, totally blowing up its context. A third key affordance of network publics has to do with searchability. Now my mother would have loved the ability to stand in a room and scream grep or fine and figure out where I was when I was with my friends. She couldn't for which I am deeply, deeply grateful. But what you see right now is that a lot of young people become extremely searchable. And they're not just searchable by just anyone. They're searchable by people who hold power over them. In high school, this often means parents and teachers, college admissions officers. At a college level, it means their faculty and it means they're possible employers. This moment of becoming searchable, and again, what are you reading when it's taken out of context? Finally, there's the issue of scalability. Now, Technorati a few years ago decided that they would look at how frequently blogs were read. And they found that the average, and I do mean average blog, was read by six people. And what you will realize about that is that there are a few blogs that are read by lots of people and many blogs that are read by absolutely nobody. So just because it is online doesn't mean it's necessarily getting widespread distribution. One of the challenges of scale online is that which scales tends to be that which is most embarrassing, sexual or grotesque. So one of the big challenges is that as all sorts of people are saying, hey, don't put stuff up online, everybody can read it, most people are going, actually nobody reads it, I would love it if they read it. So you have this interesting tension around scale. So what are some of the dynamics that sort of fall out of this? The first is this moment of having to constantly figure out how to negotiate invisible audiences, right? I'm in this room, I have a sense of what the context of this meeting is. I'm very much giving a talk with you as the intended audience with my understanding of you. At the same time, there's a camera at the back of the room. I have no idea who's at the other end of that. I don't know if they're watching it now, I don't know if they're watching into the future, I don't know if they speak English, I don't know if they have any understanding what Facebook is. And what you see is that how you understand a space and how you interact with it has to do with your imagined audience. The imagined audience is usually based on an understanding and interaction in a space like this. But what happens online is you're constantly dealing with invisible audiences. Not just in terms of lurkers, but people you didn't even imagine to be a part of your community. And this becomes a really interesting challenge of how do you actually imagine speaking to an imagined audience? The next key issue has to do with the collapsing of contexts, right? We understand contexts to actually have certain spaces or certain properties. For example, there are norms that come with that, right? The norm of this space is that I'm speaking, you're supposed to be pretending like you're paying attention, right? And nodding along. There are ways in which we could change this, right? Any one of you could suddenly get up and dance on your chair, and I'd be totally entertained. But that would totally violate the context and the rules and the social norms of this environment. What happens online is that we have this interesting collision of contexts constantly coming together. Some of those contexts are with the same people who may go to the pub at night together and then be in the classroom the next day together. Those different environments have different norms, but they're coming colliding together online. And young people are trying to actually manage this, they're trying to manage how to deal with these contexts. Finally, there's an interesting blurring of what's happening about public and private. And this is where, you know, we're gonna dive deep into this for a moment because I think that this is a huge tension that is really coming into play around what's going on in terms of social privacy. We understand certain places to be public, certain places to be private. And yet we realize that that's always actually been an imagined construct to begin with. And what we see is that young people are trying to actually deal with this online. So let's talk a little bit about some privacy and publicity issues. Because it really sort of shapes how it is that you are to interact with young people, college students, with your fellow faculty when you see them online. This is a quote from a couple years ago which I think is actually really delightful because she sort of highlights the key issue here. My mom always uses the excuse about the internet being public when she defends herself. It's not like I do anything to be ashamed of, but a girl needs her privacy. What you will hear over and over again is that privacy is about an understanding of having social control over the situation and about having agency to assert that social control. And both end up getting challenged for young people online, right? You will see that young people will constantly come back being like, I don't have anything to hide, I didn't do anything wrong. And that's the constant frame of what they think that privacy is supposed to be about, but yet they want privacy. And they're constantly running back and forth about this. And what you see is that just because young people are participating in a public environment, just because they're participating in these networked publics, doesn't mean that they've actually thrown privacy out the window. So I really love talking to teens about this because you see, even at that young age, how they're starting to work through and see the differences. I'm gonna read you this quote because I think it's really delightful because she really highlights the tensions that happened around technology change. I think that it's just technology is redefining what's acceptable for people to put out about themselves. I've grown up with technology so I don't know how it was before the boom of social networking. But it just seems like instead of spending all of our time talking to other individual people and sharing things that would seem private, we spend all of our time putting it in one module of communication where people can go and access it if they want to. It's just more convenient. I think adults think about privacy because when they see pictures being put up or things, they never had that ability. So when they see our photo albums or when they see conversations on Facebook wall to wall, they think that it's this huge brief of range of privacy and your personal ideas or whatever. So I just think it's different because I think it depends on how you grew up and what you're used to. Like I said earlier, there are things you shouldn't put up and things you shouldn't say. But I think privacy is more just you choosing what you wanna keep to yourself. I don't think Facebook is violating privacy. I think it's letting people choose how they wanna define privacy. What she's highlighting here is actually a radical transformation in about how we negotiate privacy. When we have an interaction, a face-to-face interaction, our interaction is private by default, public through effort. We have a conversation and you have to choose what you want to publicize. Media changes that. Media makes the act of publicizing things much, much easier. And what is happening with young people as they engage with network publics is they start to actually deal with an environment where interactions are public by default, private through effort. They assume things to be public and they make a conscious choice of when to make things private. And it's hard. It's really, really hard. And they're constantly struggling with this. They're constantly struggling with how to deal with it. But it's not because they're rejecting privacy is because they're trying to actually create intimacy. And they're trying to create spaces for intimacy at different layers. And that doesn't mean that they necessarily want you looking in at any moment. And what you see is that young people actually seem to share a lot of things but they don't actually share those things. So for example, they give the idea of where they are without giving the details. And you have this moment where they're starting to sit there and they're sharing but they're not sharing everything. I liken this actually to a great conversation between a journalist and Angelina Jolie a few years back where this was before Jolie had children and she was asked why are you putting up all of this stuff in the public about you? You give everything away. You make it so easy for us journalists and she smiles and she goes, the more that I appear to be public, the less you look at the things that I care about the most. And what I see from young people is a similar and interesting move, the moment of how they put things up in order to keep privacy. Of course, they care deeply about who's doing the looking and one of the big challenges in this is that they're constantly dealing with this power boundary. Their primary one is about that direct moment, right? So parents are constantly in their attention and they're dealing with the context issues all the time. So, for example, a few years back I received an interesting phone call from a college admissions officer and Ivy League admissions officer. They'd received an application from a young black man living in South Central in Los Angeles and he'd written a college essay about wanting to leave the gang-ridden community that he was coming from behind and they called me up to ask me a funny question. They said, why would he lie to us when we can tell the truth online? They had gone to his MySpace at the time and had found that it was filled with gang insignia. Now, I've spent a lot of time actually in South Central and I know what that environment looks like and there's a whole moment where those performing for certain audiences having to look legit to your peers doesn't mean that's who you are across all space and all time and to all audiences. And so here's this interesting moment that he was having to deal with a very specific idea of public, a very specific idea of negotiating that and he was engaged in a very private act between him and the college hoping to get out of this environment and here the college wasn't coming and judging him in a particular way. So some of the people that young people don't want to keep in mind, right? You always hear about mom. Mom is always the issue and so for those of you that are parents in the room, I'm sure you've heard this in different forms. Another thing has to do with teachers, right? Which is what you hear with teachers is interesting because teachers are both good and bad depending on judgment. Same with parents for that matter. And so what you see is that young people actually start to develop really innovative strategies to try to work around this, to try to achieve privacy. You know, it's interesting. Since I started studying my space, originally looking at all of this, young people were much more open and much more willing to put things up. Facebook has actually been interesting because as it's been more locked down and as parents have become more part of the process and as young people started to be aware of college admissions officers being there, they've started trying to innovate different strategies for achieving privacy. My favorite of which is the overuse of pronouns, right? So I can't believe what she said, right? Everybody knows what that she was about, right? And they know what happened and they know the full context. So you can put this referent up there knowing that other audiences won't see it. Another thing would just be screaming yes, knowing that the right people will ask. Now not all young people are doing this but they're starting to really experiment with this and it's part of why they're experimenting with this is because over and over again, adults are judging them out of context, taking the material that they put up on these environments and assuming that they can understand and interpret what's going on. And young people are trying to push back, showing that they actually care about privacy and they really are screaming keep out but the social norms aren't working as a way of actually regulating the space. So how do we think about this in terms of learning in higher ed, right? There's some obvious implications in terms of what it is in terms of invading privacy especially for the college admissions community about what it means that you may or may not be able to interpret that red cup and what's actually going on in that image. But there's also some interesting implications for the classroom. So one of the things about Paul Fri's work which is beautiful is that born digital and the notion of digital natives is not that all young people are digital natives. And what you will find is that there's a huge variation in skill, in experience, in understanding of these kinds of environments and what they're trying to do with it. Even those sort of extreme strategies of privacy achievement are actually exceptions at this point. I actually think that they're becoming more commonplace but they are exceptions. And one of the challenges is that we see all of these technologies proliferate is how do we actually deal with people who are using them in a wide variety of different ways. And so when we think about and putting technology into the classroom we can't assume that just because they're young they understand these technologies. Because oftentimes they don't and what they understand of them is very different than what adults are understanding of them. My favorite has to do with all the flows of information. Young people, many of them have grown up with a search engine. That doesn't mean that they know how to write a query. That doesn't mean they know how to actually get information or understand the credibility of specific information. So just because they're used to a search engine and have it at their fingertips doesn't mean they actually know how to think through this. And that's where things like media literacy become extremely important. Likewise, they're starting to create their own content but they don't always understand the implications of it. They don't understand what it means. They have no idea what the concept of copyright means, right? That doesn't exist in their minds that all they know is that they're playing with cultural material and trying to make sense of it and being creative and they don't understand why this is a problem. Likewise, at the same time that they're starting to use things, they're having a lot of backlash from a lot of adults in terms of their usage. My favorite of which has to do with actually information around the Wikipedia. Well, I don't know the current stance of Harvard on this one but I'm amazed at how many high schools and colleges around the country have basically come out with Wikipedia as bad as their answer to Wikipedia. So the idea rather than looking at it as a nuanced space, it's just bad. So young people basically go and look at it, feel guilty because they know they're not supposed to be there, try desperately to figure out the citations at the bottom in order to cite those for their paper and move on. But this is an amazing opportunity where media literacy could actually be in action. So my mother, when she came to the United States, one of the first classes she took in the seventh grade was actually an American history class. And very early on they got to the American Revolution. My grandfather picked up the textbook, was horrified and burnt it. That was his response to it because as a Brit, this was actually wrong, right? Everything that was said about the American Revolution and her textbook was wrong and therefore she should not be taught it, it was unacceptable. What's interesting to me about this entry on Wikipedia is that the Americans, the Brits actually had to resolve their differences. And it's amazing to go through the detailed history of the revisions to create this entry, right? Because this entry basically has a conversation about whether the Americans were terrorists, which is a really interesting language at the current time, or versus Patriots, and these different ways in which these things get resolved. But the thing is that when people look at Wikipedia, they look at the end result, they don't look at how it was created. And one of the most amazing about some of these social media is actually the process of creation. Now, many of you have written books as part of your career and you realize how much thinking goes into the creation and how draining it is, and then you hope that this is this perfect end result that people will love as you kind of run away and be like, I don't wanna hear about any corrections or any problems with it, right? Well, Wikipedia has sort of challenged that and says these are living things, these are constantly evolving, you can see how the process works. And that's one of the beauties of it and it's moment of media literacy. It's one of the exemplars of where we can actually teach media literacy, rather than just saying this source is good, this source is bad. Likewise, we see blogs and Wikis sort of entering the classroom, which was a really interesting thing on my understanding is there's gonna be a great panel talking about this so I won't go into detail. But one of the challenges with this is that just because young people are using these environments to talk to their friends, doesn't mean that they know how to craft it in this format, right? They don't necessarily know how to speak in this way. The other thing is that what does it mean is that you are forcing young people to publicize their thinking in action. And the reason I say this is I'm always amazed at how many academics refuse to put out material themselves when it's thinking in action and then expect their students to do so, right? So it's like putting out your draft paper, publishing that online, most academics are unwilling to do that and yet they think that it's totally appropriate for students to have this on their permanent record for the digital era, right? So I think that one of the challenges in this space is while we explore the opportunities for doing this and there are amazing opportunities for getting feedback, we have to think about how we create this as an environment that's about living thinking and not just publishing. One of the other things to keep in mind, especially if you start thinking about using social network sites in these environments, is that social network sites have brought social dynamics, right? People don't always get along. And so I think it's really challenging as faculty, we often want young people to work together in group projects thinking that everybody should get along and that's not necessarily the way this works. And I'm sure all of you as faculty have had that experience. So what happens with online environments, especially if you think about things like Facebook being a social space, is that asking people to actually also turn it into an academic space says they have to actually friend people that they may not get along with, that they may not want to be a part of their public. So you really want to sort of deal with these different tensions and not just assume that because they're engaged there that it's always inherently a positive thing. Teachers involvement is also sort of really interesting. And I think this is one of the things I'm certainly seeing at the high school and it's a really interesting implication for the college, which is when we talk about how young people, their lives go on beyond school and they have to deal with ramifications beyond school, that's also true for teachers. So a lot of teachers have found that their presence on social media requires that they respond to students 24 seven, right? Which has been an interesting dynamic. And this can be both good and bad. Mr. C in this case is sort of an interesting moment because he laments that in his school he's so stuck to the standards in high school that he can't actually teach people why they're learning. And then he uses social media actually to help people understand why it is that they're learning to do the more community building thinking stuff. So another big question for all of you is is that where is your relationship with your students end and where does it sort of begin and when does it get blurred, right? So we have this moment of like, you certainly have office hours of different forums, but what happens, the ways in which social media challenges that makes it part of the blurred environment? Again, just sort of questions to think about. So you have the ability, as we sort of think about this more generally, you have the ability to look in on the lives of young people, but one of the challenges for everybody in a position of power is to think about when and where you're judging those young people. You have the amazing ability to help them and learn from them, but you also have the ability to judge them in ways that are deeply problematic. So as we see these participations online, we have to think about them in terms of that tension. And this, by the way, has a lot of implications for recruiting because what you see online may not actually be the whole person. It's only one face of their story. It's only one understanding of who they are to one particular kinds of audience. So you really have to think about what respect looks like in an era of social media. And I think that's one of the big challenges of dealing with these environments. To also realize that social networks are messy. Different kinds of networks are coming together and they're blurring in all sorts of ways. So treating them as one and assuming that the Facebook or their Twitter is their entire universe is not going to be an inaccurate portrayal. Of course, that doesn't mean to sort of run away. This is not to be afraid of these environments, but to be curious. This is a new kind of public space. What it looks like, how it plays out is radically changing. It's constantly evolving and there's amazing opportunities to explore and experiment. But one of the best ways you can do it is actually doing it with your students. Don't tell them how this is to be run, but imagine this is a game of tango. You are very much trying to dance with them. You're trying to actually get away of really sort of helping them learn, helping them engage. And you are in one of the best universities in the country to be able to do that. Because many of your students do want to learn. They do want to participate. They do want to experiment. They do want to understand what these new media are all about. And working with them to help sort of evolve the use of these technologies in higher ed becomes really important. But keep in mind that this is a new kind of public. Everything that's gonna happen here is going to sort of evolve and be radically different in short order. Everything I told you is probably gonna be outdated six to nine months from now. Things are really, really changing. And that's one of the most delightful moments because it's a phenomenon. And we're really seeing a moment where public life gets reworked in all sorts of interesting ways that have implications for all of us. Thank you very much. Questions with Dana and the panel members can ask questions as well. Sure. But I thought we would have some pushback on Dana. Please. Questions? She'll take it, trust me. Questions from the audience? Dana, let me start with one just to do the warm up bit. One thing you said at the end was that this was a great time to experiment and to do things with the technology but also that it'll change in six to nine months. I've written a book called Born Digital that was obsolete the minute it was printed. I know from this problem. One way that one might react to that though is to say let's get under the umbrella and wait for the sunshine to come out. This is New England after all and the weather changes quickly and not actually engaged at any moment because it's so unstable. I think one could draw exactly that inference rather than the one that I think you drew which was getting the mix and start tangoing in the rain. So I wonder if you could help us unpack that possible tension. Right, I mean one of the challenges is that if you think about your undergrads they're here for four years. They're here for a short period of time and they're trying to understand how the world is working. And one of the things is they're trying to understand how things have sped up. And so these moments where we get more conservative and be like oh we don't have to worry about the speeding up of things means that they're further and further removed from this. I'm facing this because a lot of your students are coming to me asking desperately to have faculty guidance of some way and I'm like I'm not sure that I count as faculty here but thank you. So I think that as you start to thinking about the fact that you're trying to actually help a generation, part of that helping that generation is helping them actually explore things that are moving fast. Right, and this is a weird tension as academics because a lot of our work as academics is to sit back and think slowly, think long term. But at the same time our role as teachers is to actually very much help people engage with what's happening as a rapidly changing environment. Not just simply so that they can get jobs but so that they can understand the world out there. So I think that the more conservative we are and the more we sort of refuse to acknowledge the outside world, the more irrelevant we make ourselves in this environment when young people so desperately are coming to our universities to understand what's going on in our larger society. And our society is changing fast and I don't think it's gonna slow down anytime soon. No computer, can you comment on that? Sure. Digital light is a very tricky concept because there's a couple of different ways to looking at it. One is in terms of pure access to internet and in some ways that gap has been closed at some levels. So Pew Internet and American Life Project has found that they're at this point they're at I think 94% of American teens ages 12 to 17 have some form of internet access. Of course some form is what we'll sort of get to in a second. It's important to note that the remaining 6%, the vast majority of them come from families where internet access is not desired. This by the way is primarily religious and homeschooling. So that's a separate kind of divide that we have to deal with. In terms of some form of access we get some really interesting inflections. The lower socioeconomic population is the more likely that their internet access is through a school or a library in a very constrained time and heavily basically filtered. So their filter access becomes really problematic. What's been interesting to watch in is an interesting division between urban and rural in terms of socioeconomic, like low socioeconomic urban and rural in terms of their practices. The urban are all learning how to use proxies basically to figure out how to politically work around all of the filters and restrictions. This is not true in rural environments. When it comes to mobile telephony it's been also you see an amazing urban and rural divide. Rural mobile telephony is atrocious of all ages because of limited towers and certainly limited 3G. Urban environments you see a lot of low socioeconomic populations have jumped first to mobile. And one of the things that was most interesting to me is there used to be a device called the Sidekick which was actually this predated all of them sort of iPhones and sort of new smartphones. And it meant that urban, primarily black and Latino, young people were getting onto smartphones before smartphones were at all popular. They were primarily using it for instant messaging and for web access. Each of these kinds of devices, each of these kinds of experiences really shapes your understanding of what these spaces are. Shapes your understanding of social media, shapes your understanding of information access. And part of the challenge in all of this is that it's not so cleanly like a curve like this where it's just about low experience. It's basically inflected in all sorts of different ways with different understandings of what these practices are, different understandings about the purpose of technology, different understandings of what it can actually achieve or not. So one of the examples of how this plays out is that Facebook on the mobile, actually you couldn't adjust your privacy settings on Facebook on the mobile. So an amazing number of people who were mobile only access actually had no idea that there were privacy settings to begin with which put them in an amazing state of vulnerability and that was primarily low income populations. That has changed but it's still complete mess. So we're seeing these huge variabilities in terms of understandings of the technologies, in terms of skill, all of which you will usually hear talked about either as digital divide or as participation gap, which is more the language of Henry Jenkins. But I think it's important to realize that it's not that there's just sort of a curve like this but it's just a complete mess right now in terms of experience. It's a great question. There's so much data in this area and so many implications. It's worth really exploring. I think it end up Virginia Weiss from the law school. I sort of think of the classroom as a place that should be protected. So when you talk about using social media like Twitter and like Facebook and Myspace, I want to ask you why is that better than having a course webpage where students can interact about the content of the course rather than doing what you just suggested a moment ago at the end of your speech, forcing my students to friend people they don't necessarily want to friend so that they can interact collaboratively. It seems to me that there are already some better collaboration spaces that exist. So I'll let the panel do a lot of that conversation because I know that that's there. But I think part of it is to really go back to what the pedagogical goals of your particular classroom are. And they're gonna vary widely across the college, right? Different folks are gonna have different reasons and different goals. And the university, of course. Sorry, Virginia is talking about the law school. So they're gonna vary widely. So part of it is really saying what is the goal and how do you get there? One of the challenges that I'm facing, you know, when I see hiring decisions at corporations is that corporations are looking at people and saying if you don't have a presence on social media, we're not hiring you because you shouldn't be invisible if you're coming out of college at this point, right? And that's a very interesting move. So how do you actually simultaneously learn to be a part of the public and the public sphere and find ways to have those safe spaces? So depending on your classroom, your classroom may be a place for creating that, but how do you also help young people actually figure out how to have a voice in a broader community? And I think that's where we see a lot of interesting tensions. I love Microsoft, Dana, but there might be a more cynical way to look at that particular hiring thing, which is if someone says something bad about you and you have no other presence, that might well be the first 10 Google search hit results. And if you have a robust presence, it actually might be number 11, right? So this would be corporate branding behind it. Reputation becomes a really interesting challenge for a lot of people online, honestly. And it's become this really interesting tension how to do that. And you know, mind you, Harvard puts out lots of information that becomes Google-able about your students. You do it in the form of their sports scores. You do it in the form of any awards they've given. You have amazing amounts of information that you already pump out about your students without them actually having control over it. That's precisely my point in a way, which is that I want, within my classroom, I want them to feel a protected environment where they aren't exposed to the entire world, everything they say. And I think that's your right. I think that you have the ability to do that, but part of it is dealing with both the good and the bad of these, right? To deal with where they become really advantageous to actually have these voices and where it becomes something that you wanna create as more of a private space. Your classroom may very well need to be very private. It may be a more appropriate environment. Figuring out the tools for that might be extremely important. But to realize there's gonna be huge variability across different classes. I think this is a very important point on the different perspectives that different teachers, even perhaps within the same school, otherwise are gonna have on this topic. We often in the law school talk about whether to ban laptops, right? This is one proxy for that same conversation. And advanced legal research may be a place where you don't ban the laptops, but you do keep out social media and so forth, right? And that these may be a number of different things on different interlocking kind of spectrums that we looked at. Maybe one more question for Dana and then we'll switch over, sir. And just realize it's not one size fits all ever. So nothing about this today should be one size fits all for all of you. Thank you for your presentation. I'd like to push this point here. We hear a lot about, from your presentation, a lot about grooming. And I think it's the right term. The conversation on the internet moving from web, from emails to Facebook to Twitter becomes thinner and thinner. And I must say that I observed in the classroom the extent to which, and I don't know if it's something that is shared by colleagues here, the extent to which students starts to have a difficulty of having focused and sophisticated conversation in the classroom. They're losing an ability of taking the time to listen and to project themselves into a higher conceptual level. And I must say I'm an enthusiastic supporter of social media, and especially using it at a global level because it does open new doors. But I must say I'm quite in distress over the, let's say two, three years to see the extent to which it has an impact in the culture of students in the classroom and diminished their ability to engage in sophisticated conversation that may last more than 20 minutes. So, you know, it's really interesting. I totally hear what you're saying and it's happening at a funny time because it's both at a time where we can look at technological change and a time in which we can look at the implications of no child left behind. And what is really painful for me is that same phenomenon that you're talking about, I'm seeing all the way back to the middle schools in the classroom having to do with what schools can do and achieve in the classroom. And I'm actually, to be honest with you, I think you guys are gonna have some real pain very quickly from what I'm seeing in the middle schools and high schools in terms of what's happening at the educational level. I'm worried about education. I'm worried about young people's ability to actually engage in these conversations. But from my perspective, walking in and out of these schools, I'm watching the high school and middle schools change much faster than the technology as being a huge explanation as to what's going on around this. And I think that one of the challenges for you as a university and as one of the premier universities in the world is to figure out how we deal with what's happening about education writ large, about the changing nature of it. And one of the funny jokes I often say is that what Harvard gives more than education is it gives social networks. It gives the ability to actually know a lot of important and powerful people. And I think that that's actually true for the university and what it's giving people. I think as educators, one of the big challenges is how then do we also basically do the work that should have been happening at the younger levels that we're unfortunately not seeing happening so that not only do they have those social networks, but they actually have the knowledge and the skills to be able to leverage them to do really powerful things. But I share your worry. I just don't see it as being rooted in the technology as much as I see it as rooted in the radical changes and undermining of K through 12 in this country. Wonderful, Dana, please join me in thanking our keynote, Dana Boyd. Thank you.