What are your teens doing online?

Pew Internet and American Life Project just released a new report called Teens and Social Media on what teens are doing online. According to the report, “content creation by teenagers continues to grow, with 64% of online teenagers ages 12 to 17 engaging in at least one type of content creation, up from 57% of online teens in 2004”. Creating blogs, uploading videos and photos and of course commenting on others’ creations is becoming a way of life for our kids. “The survey found that content creation is not just about sharing creative output; it is also about participating in conversations fueled by that content.” Not surprisingly, there are more girls than boys involved in this kind of communication. Also, more and more, teens are moving away from email and are communicating through other means, including MySpace. If you have teens and have the time, check out the report. It’s always good to educate ourselves on the sort of things our kids are doing!

 

Interesting class!

Well, I had 10 people show up for the Blogs, Wikis, RSS Oh my! class this evening! Not bad considering the time given in the paper this morning was 10:00 am not 6:00 pm! We ended up talking about all sorts of Web 2.0 applications.

One student asked how Web 2.0 could be defined and though I described it as best I could, I thought I would give a little more info here. Web 2.0, a phrase coined by O’Reilly in 2003 and popularized by the first Web 2.0 conference in 2004, refers to a perceived second generation of web-based communities and hosted services — such as social-networking sites and folksonomies — which facilitate collaboration and sharing between users. O’Reilly Media titled a series of conferences around the phrase, and it has since become widely adopted. (From Wikipedia)

Tonight we not only talked about blogs, wikis, RSS, feeds, etc. but looked at some of the “social networking” sites. We looked at myspace.com, YouTube, Digg, Twitter, and Flickr. For most of the students, these were new terms and certainly new experiences. We went to YouTube and looked up the Beatles. Did we find anything? Of course, lots and lots of Beatle videos. Go ahead and check it out for yourself!

All in all, a fun class for all!