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Wednesday Nov 05, 2008
Engaging the digital natives
For the purposes of this piece, the digital natives are young people who have grown up not knowing a time when the internet and other digital technology hasn't been around. Let's focus on the opportunities that the internet is opening up. In particular:
- The evolution of this new kind of online virtual reality
- The step change in information and advice provision that the internet has enabled in a new more open society
- The internet's social effects and how getting together in groups has got easier
Exploring the online virtual reality
Today young people are faced with living in a new kind of virtual reality- an online virtual reality.
It's important not to get carried away, virtual realities are nothing new: since humans have been able to imagine, virtual realities have existed. Art, fiction and dreams have all conjured up powerful 'virtual' realities down the ages.
But this new digital virtual reality is different.
- It's persists (our lives lived in this virtual digital reality can stick around for a lot longer than we ever imagined)
- It's searchable (not only does it stick around- we are getting cleverer at opening up this reality to new search technologies)
- And it's coming to a home near you (anyone with online access can reach this information)
This is a virtual reality that is breaking down the conventional barriers between public and private lives. The boundaries between our public and private lives is blurring.
For example, who has a Facebook account with work friends and home friends, and has had some kind of situation where some of your home friends have posted a photo of you in a home friends kind of a party- and now your work friends get to see what you get up to at the weekend.
To give you another example, who checks private emails at work, or who gets work emails to a private email address?
Who knows who is reading your emails when you send them? You think you know, but how often have emails been forwarded on repeatedly to people the original sender of the email (you) never would have imagined might eventually read them? Who has hit the 'reply to all button' or replied to a group email list- thinking they were just replying to the sender?
Who has taken part in a online discussion in a chat session, discussion board or forum? Who do you know has seen what you wrote? You don't. Before, when you wrote an article in a newspaper or print publication or letter, you didn't know who read it either. The difference with digital is that we often kid ourselves that we do know to a greater degree than we should. Or may be our sense of security comes from far off and unclear consequences. This can lead to sharing parts of our private lives or thoughts that in days gone by we would never have dreamt of having done. In short, the line between our public and private lives is blurring.
As a result, if we want to engage young digital natives in our youth work, one of the first things we need to be able to do is consider their privacy and confidentiality. If you're looking at third party apps that are remotely hosted, the following offer options to limit access to the content you publish on the web:
- Google Sites - allows you to create web pages and then control who can view and edit them. We've used Google Sites to set up a secure space online to help support peer advisors who answer relationships questions on advice service askTheSite
- Vox - is blogging software that gives you the ability to set privacy controls for every post - let your friends see some, your colleagues others. You don't have to share everything with the world
- Drop.io - allows you to fileshare simply, upload the files to a URL you create and then set an access password as necessary
Open Society
One of the things that gets people most excited about the web is that it promises to change our society. Let's get political for a second. One way of seeing society before the internet is to see it as a wheel or hub. At the centre of the wheel are the people who traditional have been the main sources of information in our society.
Information has been held centrally. However, since the invention of the printing press that model has progressively been challenged more and more. Now with the internet more and more people have the means to publish, the means to distribute what they publish and possibility to interact with their audience.
The possibility for access to all kinds of information we need in our day to day lives is unprecedented. Young people have an opportunity now, as we all do, to be empowered to make the choices that are appropriate to them in their circumstances.
For example, take financial information in a survey YouthNet conducted in partnership with Citizens Advice, young people told us that the internet was the first place they looked for financial advice, after parents and friends.
All this means today with potential access to an unprecedented level of information, we are faced with a new kind of problem: with this quantity of information out there now, how do we find the information we need, when we need it? In many cases it can seem like a case of information overload.
Three examples of where to start in the fight to make the firehose of online information manageable are:
- Delicious.com - we've used Delicious to help manage the online resources we've collected whilst looking for support for our users to askTheSite, such as articles, videos, organisations and services
- Advanced Google - may be pointing out that Google is a great way of finding needles in haystacks of info on the web is a bit like getting gran to suck eggs. However, many overlook a bunch of advanced Google features like restricting your search to a single domain or using related pages to pull up clean lists of similar organisations
- Local advice finder - we offer access to UK Advice Finder (UKAF) for free on TheSite.org. UKAF is a database of advice services that the professionals use to identify support for their users
- Socialmedian.com - is a brand new site just out of private beta that offers a fresh approach to collating and organising news information according to the topics and subjects that interest you
Group forming - getting social
The social effects of the internet are only really now being felt as this new technology is becoming bedded in to our technology today. Social uses of the new internet technology have in the past almost been an afterthought. Now, as Clay Shirky says in his book 'Here Comes Everybody', group action just got easier.
Shirky points out that one of the most powerful social networking tools on the internet has been the 'reply to all' button in email. It allows groups to be formed at the touch of a button. For the first time it was as easy to reply to everyone the sender of the message had contacted, as it was to contact the sender alone. This meant that groups could formed in an instant based on the fundamental equality that anyone could contact anyone else.
Now we're surrounded by social web applications like Facebook, MySpace and the others. But it's easy to forget that these have really only sprung up during the course of 2007. As far as designing a social web, it's really early days.
Shirky has done a lot to focus the debate on social effects of the internet. You don't need organisations to organize nowadays. A favourite example was the students who grouped together to campaign against the HSBC's decision to scrap its promised interest free overdrafts at the beginning of the student year in 2007.
What makes this new digital age of the internet particularly distinctive has been that not only can we publish and distribute quickly and easily; we can now congregate and interact with this content too. This means that any web page now effectively the seed of a new online community.
In the past, it's worth noting how many charities trace their beginnings back to a letter or article published in the pages of a newspaper, Amnesty International, War on Want and Rethink to name but a few. Now this same phenomenon continues but on a scale hitherto unimagined. Every news article published on the internet draws together people with diverse passions or interests by stimulating comments either directly on the same web page or indirectly on another blog.
Guide to Modding (moderating) on TheSite.org - Building community requires support for users, as well as security. In practical terms, this means that anyone who moderates needs to be able to offer support to users in need, not just to keep the community secure from spam or other kinds of abuse.
100 top learning tools - It's crucial to think through how we can make our opportunities for young people to engage also opportunities to learn. Jane Hart has one of the best run downs of great e-learning tools out there on the web.
Finally, the most important place to look for new web tools is of course from the young people themselves that we, as organisations, are hoping to engage. Sounds obvious - but in the new digital age whose social effects are only just being felt and understood, being driven by the needs and lives of young people is not just a question of good practice, it's about remaining relevant and being able to justify our existence.
Finally, the most important place to look for new web tools is of course from the young people themselves that we, as organisations, are hoping to engage. Sounds obvious - but in the new digital age whose social effects are only just being felt and understood, being driven by the needs and lives of young people is not just a question of good practice, it's about remaining relevant and being able to justify our existence.
Posted by Patrick Daniels ( 1:39 PM ) Link to this post Comments[0]
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