Web 2.0

This post is part of a series of interviews highlighting leaders in the field of New Learning (what we call “NLI at Inquiry”). Recently, we interviewed danah boyd—Senior Researcher at Microsoft Research, Visiting Researcher at Harvard University’s Law School, and Adjunct Associate Professor at the University of New South Wales—on subjects including how youth develop online identities, social norms, and privacy issues. Here, in the third and final part of the interview, she discusses how different communities bring different behavioral norms into the online spaces.

Listen to the full interview here, with bonus content about how youth and adults view online bullying differently. danah shares two cases from her extensive field study to illustrate how young people deal with online drama.

I was pretty excited when I got my Google+ invitation last week. I might have fist-bumped the air, and just perhaps I crowed a little on Facebook by offering invitations to my friends. The flood of answering excitement never came. Two people asked for invites, and more asked, “What the heck is Google+?” My two invites aren’t posting much of anything. Even my generally tech-savvy supervisor wanted a rundown.

To say it’s Google’s answer to Facebook is the short explanation. The interface definitely shares some strong similarities at first blush. There’s a posting box that allows you to share web links, videos, photos, or your location. There’s an activity feed and suggestions of folks you might want to add. All this works and is great.

Everyone who’s had to make a poster for a class project at one time or another, raise your hand. I’m going to guess that pretty much all of you reading this raised your hands and at some point in your schooling had to wrestle poster boards on the bus or walking down the street, worrying that the glue wouldn’t hold and various attachments would fall off and fly away on the wind. (Okay, maybe that was just me?)

Posters are time-honored methods of sharing information: not only are they still used to communicate important ideas to people all over the world, but of course educators have been using them as assessment products for years. Creating a poster forces students to consider what information to include and how to organize, arrange, and illustrate it. These are still valuable experiences for youth—skills that are no less important today than they were twenty years ago when you could write a computer program with a hole punch. Glogster seeks to bring the poster into the 21st century by allowing users to create a digital poster, or glog, with multimedia and hyperlinked elements to extend and supplement the information it contains. (The initial “g” in “glog” is meant to evoke “graphics.”)

Music loops have long been a staple of electronic and experimental music and have since worked their way into rock and roll, hip-hop, techno, and other musical genres. As with so many of the tools we’ve looked at, creating loops from a series of samples — once a painstaking process for all but professional music producers with special equipment — is now easy thanks to applications like Audacity and GarageBand, which make home recording and mixing fairly simple if you want to create your own audio. What if you just want to play in someone else’s musical sandbox? Then Looplabs is for you. In-browser editor? Check. Pre-loaded samples? Check. Easy publishing? Check.

Loop creation just got as easy as drag-and-drop.