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Stay tuned for Part III of our interview with danah boyd, coming later this week with bonus audio.

Youth Social Norms and Privacy Online: Interview with danah boyd, Part II

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 excerpts from Part II of the interview, she discusses how young people control private information in public online spaces by “hiding in plain sight.”

Would you talk a little more about the social steganography and its implications for young people’s interactions with each other?
Social steganography as a concept is really the idea of hiding in plain sight, and my favorite example around this is a young woman that I met who I call “Carmen.” Carmen is a young Latina. She basically had a bad day: she had broken up with her boyfriend and she was feeling really, really sad, and her mother was really active on her Facebook.

[Carmen] was trying to figure out how she could post something on Facebook because she wanted to let her friends know that she was sort of having a bad day, that she was feeling really sad about the whole thing; but she didn’t want her mom to think she was suicidal, and her mom had a tendency to over-react to everything. So she was originally going to put a really sappy song lyric up and she decided that this would be too costly, that she would have to do too much explaining to her mom. So instead, she decided to post the song lyrics from The Life of Brian called “Always Look on the Bright Side of Life.” She posted the song lyrics without any context, without any reference to the movie, and her friends, who had recently seen Life of Brian with her, completely understood this, but her mother didn’t. And so when her mother saw this and said, “Oh, it’s just words,” immediately she commented, “Oh, it looks like you’re having a great day,” because “Always Look on the Bright Side of Life” is a very positive song. Her friends, on the other hand, having recently watched the movie, know that this takes place when the key character Brian is about to be executed. They immediately text her and ask how she’s doing.

So the way in which she sort of put this information out, knowing that those who were recently part of that conversation would recognize the reference, her mother would not because she knew her mother had never consumed this content, had never seen Monty Python. And it also became layered at another level, which is that all sorts of people who may have access to her profile, including her teachers, coaches, these kinds of folks, wouldn’t know what she was talking about. They may recognize Life of Brian, but they have no idea that she had just broken up with her boyfriend. There’s this way that she’s hiding this information from different audiences in different ways because you needed both of those pieces of information, the idea that she’d broken up with her boyfriend and the idea that the Monty Python movie is referring to a specific thing to really get what the context of that was.

So the key with social steganography is this idea of hiding in plain sight, and the concept of steganography is a really ancient term used to refer to the idea of wax tablets, or the idea, as horrific as it is, where people would tattoo messages on the heads of their slaves, wait until their hair grew back, and send them off; and then the person receiving them would know to shave their head to get the messages. The history of this, of course, is sordid, but it’s this idea of hiding in plain sight, that you have to know where to look. And in some ways, that’s the strongest kind of encryption you can get.

What you see is that young people are using this as a really critical strategy for putting out information where they rely on people looking at this and understanding what’s going on. And it’s really powerful to see just because it’s so much stronger of a way of encoding information than anything else. I guess I should also note that one of the things that tends to shock a lot of adults is that young people share their passwords pretty frequently. I’m waiting to get numbers on this, but we’re talking well over 50 percent have shared it with somebody, and the vast majority of [teens] have shared them with their parents who have been pretty much forceful about sharing a password. But the message that has been set forth on this is that if you trust me, you will share your password with me. Whether the trust is through coercion or not depends on the family.

What ends up happening is that teens also share their password with their friends and with their significant others. Not unlike the idea of sharing your locker combination, back when we were all in school with lockers. And so the idea is that you share as a way of signaling trust, and you also share for really functional reasons. Just like you wanted your friend to pick up your textbook at school because you were absent that day, you may want your significant other or friends to check your messages on Facebook because you can’t get access to Facebook today. So it is also really important to realize that there is a lot of information that becomes accessible functionally, so a lot more of it becomes controlling access to meaning instead of controlling the access to content.

I think that kids have been doing this for a long time. I used to be a classroom teacher and I remember my students quoting song lyrics in class, or I mean, I think to some degree, some types of slang are used this way; they know their teacher is not going to know what this word is. There’s mistaken belief that everything involving new technology must be new. The vast majority of what I see young people do is modernize old strategies. They’re taking things that have been done for a long time and finding new, weird ways of doing it on the Internet.

To be continued...

How do online youth spaces develop social norms? How do our physical communities affect our online communities?

Next time we will publish Part III of our interview with danah, focusing on the answers to these questions and how mobile devices are changing youth communication trends. Our final installment will also include an unabridged audiocast with bonus content. Stay tuned!

Additional resources on danah boyd’s work:

Digital Youth Network: Kids’ Informal Learning with Digital Media

Taken Out of Context: American Teen Sociality in Networked Publics (PDF)

Why Youth Heart Social Network Sites: The Role of Networked Publics in Teenage Social Life (PDF)

Exploring Google+

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.


What’s really special, though, is the concept of circles. We all have different circles of people in our lives: friends, family, colleagues, people we know from specific activities, and so on; and what we might want to broadcast to one group (“hey, friends, check out this hilarious but completely inappropriate for work video!”) we don’t necessarily want to share with our coworkers, parents, or the first baseman on the weekend league softball team. To manage this on Facebook, you have a couple of options: you can send a group message with a link to the video; or, if this group of people shares such things with each other regularly, you could create a private group page. If you and your friends choose the second option, you have to visit the group page to see what’s been added to the activity feed. It’s only an extra click, but it’s still an extra step you have to take.

Google+ lets you micromanage who sees what. Every post you make to your stream can be shared with everyone, including those without a Google+ account (public), extended circles (in not only your own circles, but also in the circles created by the people in your circles), or specific circles. When you set up your account for the first time, one of the pages you’re directed to allows you to sort your contacts into these circles. Google provides a few default circles, but you can add as many circles as you like. Once you’ve got your circles named, it’s as easy as dragging and dropping people from your Gmail address book or connecting your Yahoo! or Hotmail account using the Find and Invite function.

Circles aren’t just useful for selecting who sees which posts: Google+ also allows you to use them to determine the visibility of different pieces of your account profile. Users can control which circles others can see in your profile (both who you’ve connected with and who has connected to you), as well as each discrete profile section. They even use handy little icons next to each item so you can see at a glance what your privacy settings for each informational section are. To ensure that you’ve got everything theway you want it, Google has given users the ability to view their own profile as someone else. Again, you can choose to view it as a stranger on the web, or as someone in one of your circles. This allows you to make sure you’ve properly tucked things away when they’re intended only for a specific audience and not for public consumption. What about the problem of people reposting something I wanted to limit to a specific circle of people, you mayask? Well, Google’s thought of that trick, too. It’s not here yet, but the next update promises to give users the ability to lock posts down, meaning that they can’t be shared with people outside the original circle. Pretty nifty.

Another perk is the ability to create Hangouts, which are basically group video chats. I’ve been pretty pleased with GChat, and the ability to have more than two people involved is really cool, not just from the socializing standpoint, but for business meetings. Having just tested it out, they’ve definitely considered having a group conversation—there’s plenty of real estate for lots of smiling faces.

Lastly, after the wonderfully configurable privacy settings, my favorite thing about Google+ is its integration with Gmail and Google Docs. I have the (bad?) habit of keeping my Gmail open while I work so I can monitor incoming messages and put out fires quickly. Using the new Gmail theme, Google’s added a little activity counter in the upper-right corner of the screen. Right now it only appears in Gmail (with the proper theme enabled), Google Docs, and Google+, but I suspect Google Calendar will follow soon. The user interface team has done a great job of keeping it unobtrusive, and it’s very strategically placed for easy use. “Well, that’s nice,” you say, “but why is this a big deal?” By clicking on the counter, you can not only view the recent activity, but respond to posts as well without leaving off what you were doing. Lovely.

Coming soon: Some thoughts on how to leverage Google+’s features for educators and students.

Additional Reading on Google+

• “Introducing the Google+ Project: Real-life sharing, rethought for the web.” Vic Gundotra. The Official Google Blog. (with lots of videos!)
• “The Great Migration to Google Plus.” Dave Gray.
• “Why Google+ Is an Education Game Changer.” Liz Dwyer. GOOD.

Youth Social Norms and Privacy Online: Interview with danah boyd, Part I

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 excerpts from Part I of the interview, she discusses how youth navigate online privacy issues.

danah boyd is a Senior Researcher at Microsoft Research, a Research Associate at Harvard University's Berkman Center for Internet and Society, and an Adjunct Associate Professor at the University of New South Wales. Her work examines everyday practices involving social media, with specific attention to youth engagement, privacy, and risky behaviors. She recently co-authored Hanging Out, Messing Around, and Geeking Out: Kids Living and Learning with New Media and formerly co-directed the Youth and Media Policy Working Group, funded by the MacArthur Foundation. She blogs at http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/ and tweets at @zephoria.

Tell us about your current research.

My research goes in a couple of different places right now. One is that I’ve been doing a lot of ethnographic work trying to understand how young people build out a sense of privacy in very public places, and that line of inquiry is really pushing back against the myth that kids don’t care about privacy. I’ve spent a long time watching young people and their engagement with social media and it’s very clear that they care deeply about privacy; so I’ve been looking at the strategies that they attempt to achieve privacy, how it fails, how they try to cope with it, who they actually consider with regard to privacy, etc. That’s a sort of fun, on-the-ground set of fieldwork.

Another set of ongoing work that I’ve been doing is looking at some of the legal structures around kids and privacy. There are various laws in the U.S. that attempt to restrict data collection about young people, but inadvertently tend to limit their access to all sorts of online places. So I’m doing different research there. One that is about to go to the field is looking at parents’ understanding of age restrictions online…

What are some of the nuances of privacy that exist for young people today?

The whole thing about privacy is that there are many different ways to understand what privacy is, and this has been debated by philosophers, legal scholars, political scientists, and computer scientists for a very long time, so I’m not trying to say that I have “the” answer to “What is privacy?” But it’s very clear to me when I think about teenage enactment of privacy, and I look at it from their perspective, that there are two really important factors at play, and those two really critical factors are the ability to control the social situation and the ability to have agency within that social situation.

Control and agency are really critical factors in all this, which comes out in really important ways: even if you can technically control something, if you don’t have the agency in that environment, it doesn’t matter because you’ll lose that control immediately… Young people often lack agency in their social situations just because of the presence of their parents and their parents’ belief that they have the right to violate privacy at any given point. A good example of this is that even if a teenager can figure out how to structurally lock down their Facebook—which, albeit, is extremely difficult these days—all their parents have to do is look over their shoulder, and that really ruptures any chance to achieve a form of structural privacy. So one of the things my colleague Alice Marwick and I spend a lot of time doing in the field is looking at what are the strategies that young people do to try to achieve privacy, and how does it play out.

We found three categories of strategies that we think are really interesting. The first is the attempt to assert social norms. This is the equivalent of putting up the “keep out” sign on the door in the bedroom, which is like, “I’m going to tell you what the social norms are, and you should follow them.” The challenge with this is the ability to assert is really an interesting one, but then the ability to regulate that assertion is extremely difficult, and this is where power comes into play in really significant ways. And so we see countless adults who are like, “Well, it’s publicly accessible, therefore I should have the right to access it,” violating any attempt to do social norm management.

The next category of strategies that we see comes into what we think of as structural strategies. These are strategies that involve using features in the technology, locking doors, trying to deal with the architecture—whether it’s the online architecture or the physical architecture—to try to assert control over a specific space, a specific set of content. One of the things we see in all of these structural strategies is that they can often be violated through basic social hacks. Even if you can stop who sees your content, it just takes one of your friends to copy and paste things and pass it on for the structural strategy to have failed.

The third and strongest of the strategies that we see (that we haven’t found good phrasing for, but we’re going with the idea that they’re social strategies) are when young people work to regulate access to meaning instead of trying to regulate access to content. So in other words, a good example of this would be, “Oh my god, I can’t believe what she said.” And if you post something like that, everybody who’s in the know knows who “she” is and what was said. It becomes a signal and it becomes a block. So you might be able to say, “Oh, who are you talking about here?” And depending then on how I feel about you, I may or may not tell you who that is. And needless to say, parents are usually kept in the dark on this one. That’s a way of making it visible that you’re hiding; but there’s another sub-practice in there, which I think is really interesting, which we talk about in social steganography. And the idea of social steganography—a cryptography concept—it means “hiding in plain sight.” Young people post song lyrics all the time. Some song lyrics are just song lyrics. Some song lyrics have either meaning to them specifically, generally, et cetera. And so we see young people putting up song lyrics as a way of encoding content, encoding concepts, encoding meaning into written text.

So these are just some of the strategies that we see, and one of the things that becomes really interesting here is that obviously gender is a factor that we see, young women in particular being much more consciously aware of all these different kinds of social protocols. But what’s been really noticeable to us, and what we’re having a really hard time untangling, is that it seems like an even more salient factor has to do with class, and that the more marginalized youth are, the more innovative they seem to get with some of these strategies… And they’ve learned that there’s the idea of street smarts, and they’re taking the notion of street smarts to the digital street.

To be continued...

How do youth view online communities? How do they navigate the different group norms of friends and family? How do they use highly contextual information to keep sensitive information private in online public places?

Next time we will publish Part II of our interview with danah, focusing on what she’s learned about online behavioral norms and privacy from the youth with whom she’s worked.

Additional resources on danah boyd’s work:

Digital Youth Network: Kids’ Informal Learning with Digital Media

Taken Out of Context: American Teen Sociality in Networked Publics (PDF)

Why Youth Heart Social Network Sites: The Role of Networked Publics in Teenage Social Life (PDF)

Make an Android App? There’s a Meta-App for That.

Google Introduces SF Bay Educators to App Inventor for Android

Mobile apps have changed our relationship with information access in the wider world. With mobile devices such as smart phones and tablet computers becoming more powerful and affordable, more people are regularly supplementing their experiences out in the world by calling up services like Google Maps, Yelp, Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, Four Square, and Shazam to record what they’re doing, find out what other people thought about whatever restaurant/park/business they’re at, or share their own opinion.

Ten years ago, if I passed a statue of some historic figure and wanted to learn more, I’d have to make a note and then go visit the library. Now, I can just whip out my phone and Google the name. I can also use my phone to take a geo-tagged picture, upload it to Flickr (which will automatically highlight it in my Facebook feed), share a web link about what I learned about the statue on Twitter, and check in on Four Square. What’s that song playing at the café I just passed? Shazam! “Bossa for the Devil” by Dr. Rubberfunk. Apps are changing how we interact with the world.

For youth, using apps to learn more about places as they experience them is second nature, and those apps can be powerful learning tools. What isn’t second nature is app development. Designing and building a working app generally requires some serious programming savvy, but youth are very interested in apps—they see how relevant apps are to daily life and how they’re being used by more people, more frequently—and this motivates those with an interest in tech to take the programming plunge. Learning programming can be a long slog through lots of information to create very simple programs. I remember taking an intro to CS class, which had us learn BASIC. I can’t find my notes, but I’m pretty sure it took us a week to know enough to code the “Hello, world” program that seems to be lesson 1 for just about any programming course, regardless of language. My classmates and I found our interest in programming waning fast. And if motivated college students ten years ago lost their interest so quickly, imagine what happens with the youth of today, living at a mile a minute.

Enter App Inventor for Android, a web-based app that allows users to both design and build apps utilizing a drag-and-drop user interface. One screen controls the UI (user interface) and builds the code using puzzle-piece like blocks that are put together to create the app. It's not foolproof, but it doeseliminate nearly all syntax errors from programming. There are a number of online tutorials for building sample apps that walk you through different functionality possibilities. They'renot particularly kid friendly, but adults can get through them fairly easily. Don’t have an Android device to test on? No problem: you can install an Android emulator on your computer. While not as fun as seeing your app work on the phone, it does provide faster feedback as you tweak your app. When your app is finished (the first sample app took me only about 10 minutes to create), you can save it to your Android device and take it with you.


The palette for app building is large and includes a drawing canvas, password textboxes, tinyDB (tiny database) support, and a media player; and you can tap the device’s phone, SMS, Twitter camera, accelerometer, location sensor, and device orientation sensor. Google has also included tools for use with Lego Mindstorm robot controls, which should interest robotics educators.

Our hosts at Google shared two case studies of how App Inventor's already being used by educators, both after-school programs that won the 2010 DML Competition, sponsored by the MacArthur Foundation:

• Youth Lab's Youth AppLab: Youth based in Washington DC get hands-on experience developing mobile apps, learning the software development cycle in the process. It's been so successful that parents are asking for workshops, too.
• Youth Radio: Youth in Oakland are teaming up with professional developers through their Mobile Action Lab to propose, create, and market apps that address real needs in their communities.

App Inventor for Android is still in beta and it has its issues (mostly around phone recognition in our workshop), but it has a very active user forum with helpful folks, including a dedicated forum page for educators. I look forward to really digging into this tool to see what it can do, as well as hearing how other educators are using it with their youth.

Digital Dispatch: Biodiversity Quest in Chicago, Week 3

The students from Bouchet Academy are scattered around the Tropical River area at Lincoln Park Zoo's McCormick Bird House taking part in an ethology activity (the study of animal behavior) to sharpen their scientific observation skills. A variety of birds surround them, mostly nestled in small trees or walking on the ground. Occasionally, a bird flies over the students’ heads and someone tries to snap a picture with their smartphone. Each student has selected a bird in the area to watch closely for three minutes. Every ten seconds a zoo staff member directs them to “Look!” and the students quickly make a note on their clipboard about the behavior their particular bird exhibits.

The highlight of the third week of the Biodiversity Quest program in Chicago was the first field trip to Lincoln Park Zoo. Unlike some school field trips to the zoo that must keep to a tight schedule and don’t always allow time for personal exploration, the youth participants in the Biodiversity Quest program were given time to explore the exhibits that most interested them. These youth also had a unique purpose for their visit: to research information for the mobile quests they would be designing over the next five weeks.

The packed day started off with an introduction from Director of Student and Teacher Programs, Dr. Leah Melber. She offered the students suggestions on what to include in their mobile quests. In one instance, for those students who selected a species that is less active during the day at the zoo, she suggested that they add videos or photos from the ARKive.org website to their quests to enhance a visitor’s understanding of that species when they visit its exhibit at the zoo. Next, Dr. Melber led the BQ participants through the ethology activity in the Bird House. After learning how to observe species closely through this activity, the students were then ready to explore the zoo! During their first round of exploration, the students used Zoo Tracks guides. These curriculum brochures, created by the Zoo, educate young people about a particular theme, such as predator-prey relationships, and then lead the visitor to different species around the zoo that exemplify that theme. The guides helped the students orient to zoo grounds, but also served as an example of how to draw connections between several exhibits, similar to what they will do when designing their own mobile quests.

Finally, the small groups had time to walk around to visit the exhibits in which they were most interested. Not surprisingly, this led most of the groups to the Regenstein Center for African Apes for a visit with the gorillas and chimpanzees. Students navigated their way around the zoo documenting what they saw as they moved from exhibit to exhibit. By the end of the day, the students’ smartphones, clipboards, and minds were packed with research and ideas for building their quests back at the school.

Tool Review: Glogster

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.”)



Features
Working on a glog is a bit like working on a one-slide PowerPoint presentation. You can change your background (Glogster calls it the “wall”) and add text, shapes, and pictures. However, one thing PowerPoint doesn’t do is play well with multimedia; it takes a little savvy if you need to move your presentation around. Glogster makes it very easy to add videos or audio from the web, your computer, or SchoolTube. If you shell out for a premium account, your students also gain the ability to attach files (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, or PDF) to their glog.

My favorite feature is being able to hyperlink just about anything. This makes it easy for viewers to find more information than what can comfortably be contained on the poster. These sources could be web pages, a Google Document authored by the student, a Twitter account—the possibilities are really fun to think about and do a good job addressing the many different ways we get information today.

There are two versions of Glogster: a public version and an education version. The free teacher account on the education site lets you administer 50 student accounts and share glogs. Premium accounts add some nice features like the ability to micromanage 200 student accounts, organize glogs into classes and projects, do mass messaging, and take advantage of extra glog functionality. However, I’m not sure too many teachers will want to shell out the premium price of $99 a year unless they’ve got a grant to cover the cost. It’s nice that Glogster understands an educator’s need to manage students and organize work and make those tools available.

Sample Classroom & Youth Program Applications

• English Language Arts: Have students pick a short poem or a selection from a longer work and create a glog that links to pages of literary criticism and author biography. The glog could also incorporate other works of art, music, and cinema that relate to the piece’s tone or theme.
• Math or Science: Students create a glog illustrating one of the concepts being studied. The glog can integrate or link to other real-world applications of the mathematical or scientific concept.
• Arts: Glogs can create mini-exhibitions of art in the public domain. Students pick an artist or musician (linking to a bio), research the artist’s work, choose a theme, and curate a glog exhibiting works that relate to the theme. The student writes a brief explanation of how each piece relates to the overall theme of the glog.

Breakdown

• Price Structure: Free and premium
• Pros:
• Easy media integration.
• Simple user interface.
• Publishing glogs on social media and blogging platforms also straightforward.
• Cons:
• Shapes can only proportionally change size, so if you want a wider fancy text box, you have to increase its height as well.
• Premium accounts are pricey.

Do you use Glogster with your youth? Do you have any activity suggestions, tips, or tricks to share? Comment below or contact us!