http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/youthandmed…

Rey Junco’s favorite color is purple. He also mixes beats on his laptop. Electro beats, to be exact. And he’s got an energetic, friendly voice and enthusiasm for online platforms that make him a particularly good candidate for studying social media. Rey, a Berkman Center faculty associate and Youth and Media Lab Mentor, looks at how Twitter and other social networking platforms can be used by instructors to enhance student academic success. In this podcast, Luisa Beck talks with Rey about how these platforms can increase student engagement, what ‘engagement’ in different contexts may mean, and about some of the research questions he’s currently pursuing.

Rey outlines his 2012 study “Putting twitter to the test: Assessing outcomes for student collaboration, engagement and success”, in which he finds that the use of Twitter in educationally relevant ways can increase student engagement and even lead to better grades. He explains that students get a lot more excited about using social media for class discussions than learning management systems like Moodle, Blackboard, or Desire2Learn. In his research, Rey also found that the quality of discussions about class material is better on social networking sites than on learning management systems.

This year, Rey wants to study how online anonymity may allow introverted students to feel more comfortable being creative, voicing their opinions and experimenting in online spaces. Scholars refers to this as the “online disinhibition effect” which, as Rey explains, would be when normally shy students who wouldn’t risk saying something “dumb” in the physical classroom, may feel less anxious about sharing anonymously or pseudonymously online. Rather than focusing on the incivility (such as cyberbullying and name calling) that media often associate with online anonymity, Rey’s goal is to focus on such positive opportunities. He hypothesizes that when otherwise inhibited students receive responses to the thoughts they share or questions they ask online, it will give them validation. In turn, this may encourage them to share their thoughts and ask questions in the classroom and other physical spaces.

Links:

• Rey’s Blog
• NPR’s Michel Martin interviews Rey: “Can Online Anonymity Be A Good Thing?”

 http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/youthandmed…

Thomas Jefferson once hailed town hall meetings the “wisest invention ever devised by the wit of man for the perfect exercise of self-government.” But in many 21st century towns and cities, town hall meetings are barely even attended. And if they are, it’s often the same people showing up, from the same demographic groups. But Eric Gordon, Berkman fellow and founder of the Engagement Game Lab wants to change that. With games like Hub2, Participatory Chinatown and Community PlanIt, he wants to increase civic  participation by gamifying planning processes. In this podcast, Youth and Media Research Assistant Luisa Beck had the chance to talk with Eric about his interest in games, civic engagement and how his lab has managed to combine the two.

Luisa learned that Eric became interested in games for civic engagement through his interest in the connection between media and urbanism. In his scholarly work, he was studying how people navigate urban spaces and how media frames those spaces, both historically and in the present. He started thinking about that theoretical and historical work in an interventionist way.

The first project Eric worked on, Hub 2, used the online platform Second Life as a tool to help people navigate and make decisions about the development of a park in Allston. During the game’s design and implementation process, Eric explored the affordances of how mixed reality could augment deliberation. Entering a virtual space gave people a baseline understanding of how designed spaces might look in the future and how they might navigate them.

Eric’s second project was called Participatory Chinatown. It was an extension of the Hub2 idea, but instead of using Second Life, his team decided to partner with the Asian Community Development Cooperation and the Metropolitan Area Planning Council to build a game around the Chinatown master planning process. To develop the game’s content, youth from an organization called “A-VOYCE” photographed Chinatown neighborhoods. These photographs became the skins for 3D models of Chinatown. The youth also created composite characters for the game based on real-life interviews they did with people in their communities.

The Engagement Game Lab’s most recent game is called Community Plan It. Its challenges are designed so that players generate comments about the planning process, while also learning something about their city. Those comments are then collected, shared with city planners and officials, and made publicly available online. When the game is over, players can pledge the coins they earn during the game to a local cause they care about. It has had many successes in cities such as Boston, Detroit and Philadelphia. But Eric explains that there are still quite a few challenges: CPI is great at generating data, but what Eric wants to find now are ways of empowering people to deliver their own data to city officials in ways that are so compelling that they can’t be ignored.

For more information about the Engagement Game Lab, you can go to engagementgamelab.org or read Eric’s blog at http://placeofsocialmedia.com.

Help the Youth and Media Team learn more about how youth use social networking platforms (such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Tumblr)  and other online tools (such as Google, YouTube, Snapchat, email, and online games)!

If you’re a student, you can help us by participating in focus group interviews. If you’re a teacher, you can help us by recruiting students. If you want to help spread the word, you can hang up our poster at your local school/library. If you want get involved, you can learn more about the privacy research we do.

Students

Are you between the ages of 12-18? Do you like using Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Instagram or other social networking platforms? Do you live in Boston, Chicago, Denver, or Los Angeles? Do you want your voice heard about what youth really do online?

If so, we’d love for you to participate in one of our upcoming focus group interviews! We’ll need just 90 minutes of your time to discuss what you think about privacy settings online, what you typically do online, how you control the information you post, and what you think about parents/teachers/adults being on the same social networking platforms you’re on. You’ll receive $25 for telling us your thoughts and we’ll get an even better perspective of youth behavior online–it’s a win-win! We’ll keep all of your information confidential and anything you share with us will be reported completely anonymously.

Interested? Email:  youthandmedia at cyber.law.harvard.edu or text: 442-222-1170.

Educators

Are you an educator in a secondary school in the Boston, Chicago, Denver, or Los Angeles areas? Do you know students who might be interested in sharing their ideas about online privacy settings, what they do online, or how they feel about adults on social networking platforms? You could help the Youth and Media Team recruit students to participate!

Learn More

To see some of the results of our latest focus group findings, please see our latest publication, “Parents, Teens, & Online Privacy” that we co-released with researchers at the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project, or watch the video made by our summer interns based on focus group findings.

Interested? Email:  youthandmedia at cyber.law.harvard.edu or text: 442-222-1170.

Dates 

Flyers

Alex: I know a lot of teachers say they don’t use Wikipedia because anyone can edit it. That makes sense. You don’t – if anyone can edit it, you don’t know what kind of people are going to post on certain articles.

As Alex pointed out during a focus group interview conducted by the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University, students in K-12 are often told by their teachers not to use Wikipedia. Can we trust anything on Wikipedia, if we don’t know who is editing it? Certainly, serious errors (intentional or otherwise) have been found in Wikipedia entries before. However, perhaps teachers are being overly cautious, as students appear to be fairly aware of the limitations of Wikipedia, regardless of whether they actually use the crowd-sourced encyclopedia. For students, credibility seems to be the primary factor as to why they dismiss Wikipedia as a high quality source of information. As another participant reported, “I don’t use Wikipedia because, like, you could just, like – anybody could say anything on Wikipedia.”

Researcher: Given that your teacher tells you not to use Wikipedia but you spend a lot of time on it anyway, what do you think about your opinions versus your teacher’s opinions?

Julie: I just want to get my work done.

Despite the fact that students have stated that they believe that Wikipedia is not very credible, they continue to use it. In a 2010 survey of 176,192 Wikipedia users, youth ages 12-17 represented 24.2% of the sampled group. In studies done on Wikipedia in higher education, students often report using Wikipedia but avoid citing it in their reports. In a personal context, students from Berkman focus groups report using Wikipedia to look up pop culture, like “a band or a song or an album,” or any other topics of interest.

Additionally, although anyone can edit and add to Wikipedia, that doesn’t mean that everyone is exercising their editing powers. As of May 2012, there are only 77,000 active contributors/editors, with 23% of contributors having completed degree-level education and 26% who are undergraduates. The quality of Wikipedia articles is admittedly uneven at times, but a Nature study famously showed that, on average, Wikipedia has 3.86 mistakes per article. In comparison, Encyclopedia Britannica had 2.92 mistakes. This isn’t to say that we should blindly trust the credibility of Wikipedia, of course, but perhaps we should be more skeptical of encyclopedia articles in general and less skeptical of Wikipedia in particular. Citing Wikipedia is not recommended even by Jimmy Wales (“Citing an encyclopedia for an academic paper at the University level is not appropriate – you aren’t 12 years old any more, it’s time to step up your game and do research in original sources”).

So…perhaps the use of Wikipedia is not necessarily bad. The information quality framework extends beyond credibility and includes factors such as timeliness and relevance, taking a more holistic approach to evaluating quality (Berkman Center for Internet & Society). If we continue to tell students that they should avoid using Wikipedia, but they use it anyway, then we are missing out on an opportunity for students to learn more about information quality. Conceivably, we could teach students how to use Wikipedia.

Nick:  I also use Wikipedia because it does have a bibliography at the bottom, and the only thing you have to worry about for accuracy is things with a citation needed at the end of a sentence in a Wikipedia article.  But like, if it has a number that signifies a certain source was used, then I would see that as reliable.

Researcher: Do you then look up the source. or once you see the number, you are relieved?

Nick:  It depends.  If it’s—sometimes the source links back to a book and obviously I can’t just go to a book on the computer, but sometimes it will link to another website and I’ll use that.

In 2007, Middlebury’s history department made headlines by banning Wikipedia in citations, although they did not ban its use. “Don Wyatt, the chairman of the department, said a total ban on Wikipedia would have been impractical, not to mention close-minded, because Wikipedia is simply too handy to expect students never to consult it” (New York Times). A 2010 study in First Monday reports that over half (52%) of college students surveyed frequently use Wikipedia, although 70% of all students surveyed only use Wikipedia at the beginning or near the beginning of their research process. “Students in the sessions explained that Wikipedia entries have value in the beginning because they provide a ‘simple narrative that gives you a grasp,’ ‘can point you in the right direction,’ and ‘help when I have no idea what to do for a research paper’” (First Monday).

For individual students, Wikipedia can be used as an overview of topics, or as a springboard for links to primary sources. For teachers, Wikipedia can be an opportunity to expose students to better information quality. Instead of banning Wikipedia, let’s come up with some best practices about how to be more critical in searching for and evaluating information. Furthermore, exploring content creation and the peer review process  (or Wikipedia in the social context)  is possible by teaching students how to create well-crafted articles. For instance, one high school teacher documented his experiences teaching social studies with Wikipedia, and Edudemic has created a list of ideas for using Wikipedia in the classroom, based off the Association for Psychological Science’s Wikipedia Initiative.

The quotes used in this blog post were  informed by the focus group data collected by the Youth and Media Lab at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University.

For more about information quality: http://www.pcworld.com/article/170874/the_15_biggest_wikipedia_blunders.html