In six years Facebook has gone from being a social utility for students of a single northeastern US elite university (a sort of directory+community where Harvard students could find and socialize with each other) to a social utility for nearly 400 million people of multiple ages, languages, and walks of life worldwide (FB passed its sixth birthday last Thursday). My theory is, that fairly spare … [Read more...] about Facebook’s orders of magnitude of change
Literacy & Citizenship
Social norming: SO key to online safety
I doubt the term "social norming" means much to most people, but it's actually common practice in family life, at school, and on sports teams. It's the cultural or behavioral norms we create to teach and model values and ethics for our children – showing up in statements like "we don't say 'hate' in this family" or "we respect the other team." Maybe because it's so second-nature, we don't often … [Read more...] about Social norming: SO key to online safety
Help with cyberbullying on YouTube
Say you're 15, care greatly about a particular environmental cause, and use your YouTube account to vlog (video blog) about it in an earnest way that triggers some really nasty comments on your page. What do you do? YouTube has some tips it blogged with just that scenario in mind, linking to the National Crime Prevention Council's new anti-cyberbullying campaign, Circle of Respect, which came up … [Read more...] about Help with cyberbullying on YouTube
’21st-century statecraft’ at home & school
Live on the Web, I was just listening to Sec. of State Hillary Clinton's call for 21st-century statecraft (as well as the need to protect free expression online) and couldn't help but think about how much we need to respect, teach, and model good citizenship at home and school (here and in every country) – using the media kids use and love – in order to realize Secretary Clinton's vision for … [Read more...] about ’21st-century statecraft’ at home & school
The decade of the social Web (fixed & mobile)
The '00s were when Web 2.0 hit – the increasingly mobile social Web, from desktops to laptops to gameplayers and smartphones, that spelled a media makeover as radical as the printing press did nearly 500 years ago. Why so radical? Well, maybe people felt the realtime one-on-one conversations of the telephone were just as radical in their time, but now we're talking realtime multi-directional, … [Read more...] about The decade of the social Web (fixed & mobile)