Saturday, March 8, 2008

Thing Twenty B: MySpace

I chose part B because I am not ready to start up a social network account. I thought the MySpace pages of the Denver and Minneapolis public libraries contained a lot of images and little text. The pages seemed to have a lot of flash with little substance. I did like that the Denver page contained links to websites that can help teens with homework, but I did not like that music played automatically on the page. The schools where I work do not allow access to MySpace. Some argue that students care about MySpace, and we should allow them access to what they are interested in. Based on what I have seen and heard about MySpace pages created by teens, I disagree.

Addendum: Now that I have learned more about Facebook, and now that my wife has joined the social network to keep in contact with her friends, I have changed my mind about student access to online social networks. As teachers, we should allow students to have access to social networks in schools so that we can teach them what is acceptible to post, and what is unacceptable (i.e. personal information, bullying, illegal activities).

1 comment:

GGalles said...

I'm trying to look at a variety of the 23 things blogs and your entries look great.

It will be interesting to watch how the use of social networking sites evolves in schools.

I think that there may be a place in public libraries and their teen program for these sites, but not sure how we will use these in schools. An interesting use of Web 2.0 tools to watch however.