As a person interested in research regarding the use of the Internet, and who believes in education through the use of digital devices, I have always tried to find positive aspects about the phenomenas created by our digital environment. I was born in 1983 and although I’m considered a Digital Native, I don’t necessarily consider myself “born” digital, and have the privilege of being able to reflect on what has changed since computers and digital devices have entered my life. I remember clearly the first time I ever saw a computer and how, initially, it always seemed to be related to video games. Then, I started using e-mails and, ultimately, chat-rooms. After that, my memory seems to get blurry, signalling around the time I started to view digital technology as a part of everyday life. By then, I felt all the information in the world could be reached through the Internet and a lot of useful things could come out of it.

When I think of dossiers, however, nothing positive seems to come to mind. I did a lot of research before deciding on how to write this post, trying to find arguments that could point to the benefits of having an extensive Digital Dossier. However, the search was not successful.

The first idea that came to my mind referred to a conversation I had once with a friend. By then, I was mentioning to her the fact that I always get bugged when I go buy something on Amazon.com. The website knows exactly what I might buy and how to make me spend money on things I didn’t even need. Interestingly, this friend of mine said that this was exactly what she loved about it. She didn’t have to keep searching for information on books: the website would offer her all she needed.

In his text “Surveillance in cyberspace: the Internet, personal data, and social control,” David Lyon writes: “The Internet was born in (and for) an era in which two cultures found themselves in tension – the culture of the free consumer and the culture of control, … consumption has become a central way of organizing society around the idea of free choice. But consumer management, in a delicioux paradox, attempts assiduously to guide our choices!”

When thinking of all the personal information I have spread on the Internet, all I can think of are security or privacy issues. For me to use services on the Internet, as I said before, I give free access to my personal information in exchange. This personal information is then used for different purposes: I receive credit cards I did not order from different banks, my personal data is sold to companies trying to sell me something (they keep calling me), people have access to personal information made available against my will, etc. None of these uses seem to have any benefit for me!

It seems Digital Dossiers have become a fact of life. Everything from the message I send on my cell phone, to the channels I watch on my digital TV, to the pictures I upload on my Flickr account: everything is tagged, creating a diffused map of who I am. What I ask, is for you to help me find a positive aspect on it. How can Digital Dossiers be used in a positive way, enhancing social relations and all the possible connections that may come out of it?

– André Valle

Earlier this week, Diana kicked off the discussion of digital dossiers with a fantastic post on the Facebook News Feed as dossier. News Feed may be powered by an automated bot, but the user tells the bot what to do. If you’re savvy about privacy settings, News Feed allows you to manage exactly what could show up in your friend’s feeds. It gives the illusion of no control while you’re in control. There’s another dimension to digital dossiers though, and the most concerning part is the information that you can’t control.

Before launching any deeper into this discussion, I’d like to link back to a great video produced by Kanupriya Tewari, one the summer interns here at Digital Natives. I didn’t fully appreciate the meaning of “digital dossier” until I watched this video, which follows the digital life of Andy from before birth to after death. Andy’s digital dossier includes all the usual suspects such as his Facebook profile and email archive, but it also includes his online credit card statement, the GPS tracking device on his cell phone, the surveillance cameras around his college buildings, etc. At the end, Kanu says that Andy probably never knew how large his digital dossier was. Neither did I.

Even given fluid nature of the Internet, we have a fair degree of control over our digital identities. Digital dossiers, on the other hand, are by definition the accumulation of all digital information, most of which is out of our hands. This quote from the Digital Dossiers chapter of Born Digital linked sums up the key issues surrounding dossiers:

The problem with the rapid growth of digital dossiers is that the decisions about what to do about personal information are made by those who hold the information. The person who contributes the information to a digital dossier may have a modicum of control up front, but he or she rarely exercises it. The person to whom the information relates — sometimes the person who contributed it, sometimes not — often has no control whatsoever about what happens to the data. The existence of these dossiers may not itself be problematic. But these many, daily, individual acts result in a rich, deep dataset associated with an individual that can be aggregated and searched. The process, start to finish, is only lightly regulated.

Those who are vigilant about privacy may find the lack of control over our digital dossiers quite unsettling. Although most of the information is gated, there is no one or no central location to go to for our digital dossiers. Information is strewn across the Internet, with or without our knowledge.
Sometime last year, I had posted a short comment relating an anecdote about Facebook in Slate.com’s The Fray. (For non-Slate readers, The Fray is their discussion board and comments section rolled into one.) There were a few more comments back and forth before the discussion, as most threads do, eventually died out. I forgot about this exchange until I recently Googled one of my frequent Internet handles and found many of the results to be Chinese. Perplexed, I investigated further. What happened? Someone had taken the original Slate article by Christopher Hitchens along with several reader comments (including mine), translated it into Chinese (it was a very good translation, no Babelfish there) and posted it on a Chinese website. Several Chinese forums then picked up the article and discussions ensued. That my comment had sparked an entire conversation in a different language halfway across the world was something I only became aware of when I was vain enough to Google myself. My name, or my pseudonym, was attached to something that I didn’t know existed — another piece of my digital dossier I wasn’t aware of.

-Sarah Zhang

In September, 2006, Facebook users revolted. The debut of the News Feed—a feature that allowed users to “get a quick view of what their friends are up to, including relationship changes, groups joined, pictures uploaded, etc., in a streaming news format.” (via) Thousands of students joined a Facebook group dedicated to protesting the News Feed. College students denounced the feature as “stalkerish.” An uproar; a measured response from Facebook. Privacy features. Fine-grained controls. The uproar quieted. And people got used to the News Feed. In fact, it’s now hard to imagine life on Facebook without it.

This story is not new. Two years later, the anecdote is already a classic case study in the fraught user dynamics that can plague social networks. In fact, I’m pretty sure I heard this very story outlined at one of Jonathan Zittrain’s The Future of the Internet—And How to Stop It book talks. The story usually ends with the News Feed prevailing against the apparent odds. And that’s a fine ending. But given this week’s topic—which I’ll get to in a minute—it’s worth going back to the beginning, and asking: what dissonance provoked the uproar in the first place?

Prior to September, 2006, Facebook was largely static. Students would update their profiles with their latest favorite bands, or change their relationship status after a bad breakup, or switch their profile picture to something a little more flattering. But no one would know about those changes unless they visited your page. The changes, in fact, weren’t even indicated as such. (I’m fairly confident that the yellow highlights on new information were only introduced later.) In order to glean what was new—literally, what was newsworthy—from a friend’s profile page, you would need to visit the page frequently enough to remember what used to be there. And visiting someone’s page frequently enough for that became affectionately known as “Facebook stalking.” You might admit to your friends that you were “Facebook stalking” your crush, but you would think long and hard before admitting to your crush that you were Facebook stalking him. It was a cloaked world. News still traveled fast, and still reached the people who mattered…as long as they were checking your Facebook profile regularly enough. But it was hard to acknowledge that newfound knowledge in any sort of meaningful way: to do so, to introduce its content to a conversation, would be to admit that you were a little too interested.

Enter the News Feed. It’s been compared to 19th-century society pages, and I think there’s something to that. A reporter circulates through town, picking up on shards of gossip and announcing marriages. Announcing, even, who went to high tea at whose house. Except it’s the 21st century, and it’s Facebook, and instead of marriages, there are “It’s Complicateds.” And instead of high teas, there are hectic parties, documented via grainy cell phone pictures. And the silent reporter, slipping through town? She’s a bot. A bot who knows everything.

From this sidelong sketch, some concerns emerge. If Facebook’s News Feed algorithm is the silent reporter, then where’s her tact? You never told a reporter your secrets, after all. They just came to light (when you posted them to your Facebook profile, or someone else posted a picture of the previous night’s revelry), and the reporter relentlessly found them. Distressing, to say the least.

And now, finally, this week’s topic: dossiers. I wanted to lead off with a discussion of Facebook, since of all the repositories on the Internet, Facebook is the single destination that most resembles a comprehensive dossier for many Digital Natives. As I approached this week’s theme, though, I realized that I wasn’t 100% clear on what, exactly, a dossier was. I knew it referred to a collection of personal information, but I wasn’t sure what other connotations the term “dossier” had. Fortunately, Wikipedia came to the rescue, with the following definition:

A dossier is typically a briefing paper based on an individual of interest in police or intelligence circles. They generally contain a relevant biography, most current information on activities and any special information of interest to the agency, such as having training in various specialized fields i.e. (assassination techniques or money laundering contacts). When the target in question has retired or died, or is of no further interest, the dossier is generally filed away for reference. If the information contained inside, or the identity of the person is too sensitive, the dossier is destroyed along with all records of it.

I found this definition both illuminating and troubling. The term “dossier,” far from being neutral, actually implies some sort of surveillance—a suspicion of future wrongdoing, documentation in support of future prosecution. Is “dossier,” then, even an appropriate term for the collections of personal information amassed on Facebook?

It is and it isn’t. It isn’t true, for instance, that every Facebook profile is the object of suspicion and active surveillance. Moreover, these “briefing papers”—profiles plus Mini-Feeds—are constructed not by secret agents, but by the subjects of the briefings themselves.

There is, however, an element of apparent surveillance in play. And it is that element, I would argue, that provoked the Facebook uproar in the first place. The silent, algorithmic reporter—who, until September 2006, had been hiding in the shadows—finally announced her presence. Students felt exposed. Worse: they felt surveilled.

So what changed? Where did the uproar go? Students realized, I think, that they could take this algorithmic reporter into their confidences, and feed her headlines. With such an intermediary at their disposal, they no longer had to take responsibility for their own self-promotion. They acquired, as I wrote elsewhere in a piece on the differences between Facebook and Twitter, the “illusion of absolution”:

I think what’s so striking about this social signaling in Twitter is that it’s imbued with intentionality. On Facebook, when you do something or friend someone or post on someone’s wall, Facebook just reports it; the “hey, look at me” is automated. Therefore, the person who wants to be looked at is absolved of responsibility, vanity, or attention-seeking. Twitter is all about self-reporting, and so that all-important illusion of absolution is whisked away.

Enabling this new cozy relationship with the algorithmic reporter on Facebook, of course, was the introduction of fine-grained privacy controls on Facebook. Privacy controls—to mute relationship changes, or friend additions, or comments on other people’s Walls—allowed each student to whisper certain things “off the record.” The reporter, in these situations, might kiss. But she would never, ever tell.

And so, Facebook users turned the police blotter into the society pages. One thing I hope this sketch makes clear, though, is that the opportunities were there from the very beginning. What could you do with publicly acknowledged social omniscience? How many small-talk-athons could you skip if you already knew all the relevant news, and your friends knew you knew it, too? With all of its dangers, pleasures, and opportunities: this is the world that many Digital Natives live in today.

In this week’s video, Diane Kimball and Sarah Zhang take us into the world of the “silent dance experiment” – a silent, synchronized dance party which, with the help of the Internet, drew throngs of people from all over Boston, the US, and the world to Faneuil Hall in Boston in February.

Such “flash mob” happenings have picked up in popularity over the last few years thanks to the publicity they have gained through blogs, online event pages, and most especially Facebook. Of the event in Boston, one site wrote, this “silent dance party involves a large group of people assembling at a given area on a pre-decided time. They mill around inconspicuously, and at the signal (in this case, an airhorn), insert their headphones into their ears, hit play on their portable music player and start dancing as passersbys confusingly look on as a swarm of people dance in silence.”

You can check out this hilarious, spontaneous production below:

[kml_flashembed movie="http://www.youtube.com/v/0dYnbMRAHJs" width="425" height="350" wmode="transparent" /]

Enjoyed this video? Look out for more Reporters-in-the-Field productions every week.

Though my writing for the Digital Natives blog went into hibernation over the summer, I quickly discovered that I couldn’t stop thinking about all the things we talk about here every week: creativity online, safety, communication, activism. More than anything, though, I could not stop thinking about online identity. In the middle of the summer, I posted to my personal blog an essay I wrote last spring, titled Algorithms and Avatars, or: What I’ve Learned So Far. In it, I explored the paradox of “building” authentic online identity:

We build up our personal online identities, in large part, through the detritus we automatically leave behind: pictures we wanted others to see, articles we wanted others to read. Online identity is a very weird idea. It hinges on faith in honesty: if identity implies authenticity, then the information that helps to construct it cannot be false. But online identities are definitely constructed in other ways. They constitute the internet’s built environment: the structures we can see and study, and whose construction we can interrogate for meaning and consequence. These structures are in some ways completely under the owner’s control, and in others complete out of it.

For instance, I control what information appears on my website and my personal Facebook page. I select and monitor the information that appears in those places, religiously. But I do not control the words and pictures that other people post. If those things have my name—my textual name—attached, then they become part of the constellation of my online identity. If a search engine can find a piece of information and associate it with my name, it suddenly reflects on me. My name is my keyword: it unlocks the floodgates to my online identity. Keywords and passwords are worth thinking about. We are putting an awful lot of stock in words.

But no matter how much stock we are putting into words, we are slyly putting even more into static photographs and grainy videos. In one of my spring classes, Constructing Reality: Photography as Fact and Fiction, we often talked about the presumed indexical quality of photographs: that they represent a real person, a real moment, and a real photographer’s proximity to that moment. Though a generation of Photoshop users surely must know to be skeptical of the content of photographs, still something tugs at our faith when we see human faces rendered flat. We both suffer from and depend upon that faith when we perceive and produce our online avatars.

These online avatars comprise words and pictures. Sometimes, as in Second Life, the avatars are full-blown—illusory three-dimensional human-form characters, constructed in online avatar engines. Choosing your hair color, gender, and clothing are recognized to be self-creative acts: they need not correspond directly to physical reality, but are rather allowed to exist metaphorically. Second Life avatars are accepted to be fictional fronts for inner realities, the executors of ideal “second lives” in a fantasy world. Facebook profiles, on the contrary, exist in a subversive fantasy world, masquerading as a mirror of reality. By tethering profiles to a real-world college environment from the beginning, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg set the stage for an assumption of unstudied authenticity. Real names, real phone numbers, real photographs, real addresses: the world of Facebook is a world that supposedly resists deception.

And yet, Facebook cannot resist the management that goes into curating an online identity. In one study, researchers found that about 10% of teenagers who are unhappy with their real-life appearances are happy with their online appearances. This happiness, I have to believe, comes in large part from the ability to select and manipulate photographs so as to place the subject “in the best light.” A Facebook avatar is really just that: a museum of presumed real-world artifacts, curated so as to cast their star in the best light possible. This concept of “best light” is no mistake: it comes straight out of the tradition of glamour photography. Online identity management, then, is something like glamour curation. It is a skill at which millions of teenagers (and adults) are quickly becoming expert. Ironically, though, most of the photos that make it through the curation process are snapshots taken with harsh flash in nighttime social settings. The indexical quality of the photographs—where you were, with whom, wearing what—is more important than their composition. Social glamour, on a fundamentally text-based internet, is almost as important visual glamour.

Thanks to a few lucky links and some very smart writers, this essay ended up threading its way into a larger online conversation about identity. Tony Delgrosso weighed in with an essay on what he termed “Avatardentity,” writing:

It’s my general belief that the person we “put ourselves out there” as online is, phenomenonally speaking, no different than the person we would have put ourselves out there as 20, 30, or even 50 years ago. Yes, the tools are there to handcraft a virtual personality for ourselves, but I don’t see how it’s all that different than what people have always done to make the same impressions; the effort to craft an impression of “us” has simply shifted to a different kind of community and in-crowd. Today we are no more the sum of the things we choose to put on Flickr, Twitter, blogs, etc. than we were the sum of our shiny DeSoto and Cape Cod house and electric range and picket fence in 1954. Same rules, same desires to “be” a certain person, different means of projecting an image. So despite our newfound ability to shape our online self—our “avatardentity”, if you will—we’ve always been shaping ourselves.

The methods we use to judge the authenticity of a person online versus in person do get a bit more involved, I’ll admit; the line between truth and fiction is much less pronounced. It’s more difficult to engage with people and participate in communities of interest when we’re always uncertain who is being “authentic” and who is simply playing a role. But I’m confident that most people sophisticated enough to participate and be accepted into many of those communities have pretty good instincts, and don’t tend to misread the boundaries of sarcasm, personal truth, and outright fiction. I also believe the next generation of people to have spent the entirety of their lives cultivating an online persona will be even better equipped to function in that space; kids today have the best bullshit detectors of all. They have to.

It’s worth highlighting two points from Tony’s essay. The first is that we’ve always curated museums of self. It’s just that these museum’s didn’t contain “presumed real-world artifacts”; they contained real artifacts, full-stop. The second is that Digital Natives, “kids today” will have to be even better equipped to read the “boundaries of sarcasm, personal truth, and outright fiction.” That skill is sometimes shorthanded as “media literacy,” but I think the need goes deeper than that. From a very young age, Digital Natives will need to learn how each of the component parts of online identity—words, pictures, even search histories—can be constructed. How each component part is manipulable, and how often individuals manipulate them.

A few days before Tony wrote his post, Jason Gingold addressed some of the same issues, emphasizing that the internet as a catalog of action tends to trend toward truth:

I think we grow into our authenticity. I think time is the great seeker in the game of identity hide and seek. It will always find us. We might begin our venture into the social networking world with the idea that we will become someone or something we wish for ourselves. But the more time we spend online, the more messages we write, pictures we share, dialogs we have, comments we make, the greater the chance that our true selves take over where the guise of a persona falters. The more we become certain of ourselves as individuals, the easier it becomes to maintain consistency of character. Or the more of our true feelings, thoughts, beliefs, and opinions become revealed to the communities we enter.

I find this idea fascinating—that since online identities are composed of a catalog of actions, the online consistent self that can emerge is the one closest to the truth.

A recent New York Times Magazine article, in fact, addressed this very thing: the self-portraits that emerge over time, the soft pulse of an online identity being constantly updated; refreshed. Titled “I’m So Totally, Digitally Close to You,” the article explored the idea of ambient awareness:

This is the paradox of ambient awareness. Each little update — each individual bit of social information — is insignificant on its own, even supremely mundane. But taken together, over time, the little snippets coalesce into a surprisingly sophisticated portrait of your friends’ and family members’ lives, like thousands of dots making a pointillist painting. This was never before possible, because in the real world, no friend would bother to call you up and detail the sandwiches she was eating. The ambient information becomes like “a type of E.S.P.,” as Haley described it to me, an invisible dimension floating over everyday life.

Since we’ll be talking about identity all week, I wanted to loop in some of the ideas and issues I’ve been grappling with in that arena. One final provocation, though, is the idea of the log vs. the wiki. Any catalog-like format—blogs, Twitter, Flickr—provides a sense of time, and therefore an implication of change over time. By seeing the trajectory of posts in these places, it is possible to develop not only a mental portrait of another person’s identity, but also an “ambient awareness” of their daily habits and their path of change over time. Authoritative documents, on the contrary—like MySpace, Facebook, and other profile-based sites—act like the front page of a wiki, the page that comes before the list of changes. It is always current, therefore hiding its own course of evolution.

How do you construct your online identity, or identities? What methods have you seen that you respect? What methods make you suspicious? We’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments!

One final reminder: starting tomorrow, on September 23 and 24, Harvard Law School will be hosting the Internet Safety Technical Task Force (ISTTF) Open Meeting. We hope to meet many of you there!

Reading through Diana’s post yesterday I noticed that many of my previously considered topics were present in her ideas: cyberbullying, the role of parents in controlling Digital Natives’ access to the Internet, the ideal extent of this control, the abuses it might reach, etc. Although I’m in Brazil and Diana is in North America, we as Digital Natives ultimately experience similar issues concerning safety in the online sphere.

With a simple google search, one can find multitudes of sites which list parents’ concerns regarding their young Digital Natives and Internet safety. Here in Brazil, I found websites regarding how to make computers safer for youth, how many parents are becoming virtual spies of their own children, and legislation which suggests various types of Internet monitoring..

These concerns are sometimes supported by frightening stories that exemplify negative use of the Internet. I myself have such a story:

In Brazil, Orkut is “the” networking website. While initially, users were only granted access through an invite, Orkut later changed its policy to admit anyone who wanted to join. Ultimately, the site picked up in popularity and users began using its tools to connect to other people, and publish photographs and personal information, including about family members. Unlike Facebook, Orkut initially did not have privacy tools to block users from accessing such personal information.

Around this time, we began to hear news stories about people who received false calls which ended up being money scams. The calls were meant to fake kidnappings and force parents to make money transactions in order to release a hypothetically kidnapped relative. Parents, mine included, started ordering their children to erase all pictures and personal information from the Internet, and Google almost shut down Orkut in Brazil due to crimes that were happening through the website.

All that naturally brings us to a discussion about how Internet safety policies are often built upon fears of occurrences such as the one described above. While we think of ways to improve the Internet safety for Digital Natives, we often simultaneously forfeit other rights, such as privacy.

According to Born Digital, “the introduction of the Internet as a mass medium, and one that is particularly alluring to young people, has given rise” to a generalized fear of what is being done on this mean of communication. “Our challenge is to parse out which of these fears are worth worrying about, and then to figure out how to deal with them. At the same time, we need to resist the temptation to reach for simplistic, politically expedient solutions that will do more harm than good.”

One important topic lately discussed in Brazil that exemplifies a “politically expedient solution” is a law project on cybercrimes created by Senator Azeredo that has been voted to be approved. The “Digital Crimes Bill”, which aims to punish 13 new cybercrimes has gained mass opposition from the online community which claims that it is not only an invasion of privacy but impedes on the right to free speech. Such an initiative attempts to justify a trade-off of privacy for safety, as Palfrey and Gasser note in Born Digital.

Digital Natives’ safety has undoubtedly raised some concerns, especially among parents: What are these youths being exposed to on the Internet? With whom are they chatting? How do we prevent Digital Natives from accessing harmful content? Most importantly, to what extent are we willing to give up our privacy for safety?

– André Valle

Last week, I wrote that the ultimate goal of Born Digital and the Digital Natives Project is to facilitate better conversations between students and the adults who care about them. This is true. But what if the conversations are not forthcoming? What can adults then do to inform themselves; to better fortify the safety of the Digital Natives in their lives?

The answer is simple: put the tools to work. Talk to each other.

Tripping through links this week, I encountered a 2007 article about schoolyard harassment moving online. The article was good, but the comments were the real highlight of the article. Parents used the article’s comment section as an ad-hoc forum, sharing strategies and revealing concerns. One parent outlined her own efforts, writing:

I am a mom and a middle school teacher. I struggle at home to teach my own boys to be kind and also try to be a role model for my kids at school. Personal responsibility is a difficult thing to teach. It’s a constant struggle, but one that will be well worth it in the long run. I am always looking for new information to take to school and will definitely be ordering some new books before the start of the new school year!

The reasoning is clear; the intentions are boundlessly good. I particularly admired this parent’s resolution to “order some new books before the start of the school year,” since parenting Digital Natives is a challenge to be approached like any other: through investigation, contemplation, and conversation. Another parent drew parallels between cyberbullying and more familiar bullying scenarios, writing that:

My daughter, now 29, was the victim of bullying behavior and it still brings tears to her eyes when we discuss this issue. She was very small in early elementary and that’s when the bullying started by a girl from an emotionally abusive home. This is not a new issue, but tremendously facilitated by technology. Parents MUST be educated about the effect of cyberbullying, and must monitor use. We hope to start programs on Internet Safety at our PTO’s this year.

Her observation that “this is not a new issue, but tremendously facilitated by technology” is one of the core arguments of Born Digital: the problems aren’t new, they’ve just accelerated. The intention to “start programs on Internet Safety at our PTOs this year” reveals the beginnings of more persistent conversations among parents about the challenges facing Digital Natives. Though these programs will prove to be echo chambers without some sense from the Digital Natives themselves on “what’s really going on,” parents can only bolster their knowledge and arsenal of strategies by sharing information with one another. This can occur in forums, in comment threads, on email lists, or even in “real life,” in forums such as PTOs.

There’s another advantage to all of this. When parents and educators use digital tools to communicate about something deeply salient to all of them—the safety of the young people in their lives—something happens in the background. They learn about the tools themselves, almost without trying. This is the world that Digital Natives live in: the tools are secondary to the message. The tools are what you use to have the conversation. When you have a reason to use a message board, or a commenting system, all of a sudden these tools aren’t impenetrable intergenerational obstacles. They’re just simple, elegant, lightning-fast ways to share information. Whether that information is about cyberbullying or Hannah Montana, media literacy or Club Penguin, doesn’t matter so much in the end. What matters is that, by sharing it, you all of a sudden know more than you ever did before.

What tools do you use? What forums do you learn from? We would love to hear about your strategies in the comments!

And, a quick and exciting reminder: next week, on September 23 and 24, Harvard Law School will be hosting just such an information-sharing forum: the Internet Safety Technical Task Force (ISTTF) Open Meeting. We hope to meet many of you there, and look forward to continuing the conversation!

To enter in brazilian universities, students must go through the admission process known as Vestibular. This admission process is composed by exams (usually two) with levels of difficulty and dispute compatible to the quality of the University. In Brazil, public universities such as University of São Paulo and private institutions such as Pontifícia Universidade Católica are examples of important qualified universities in the country. To be part of these universities (specially those which are not payed), many of students enroll in specialized prep-courses known as Cursinhos or in expensive schools that more than educate (or instead of), will train them to perform better in these exams.
This process of admissions can be very much questioned both because it leads schools to teach how to be successful in the Vestibular instead of enrolling in an educative enterprise and also because it creates an unfair competition between those who study in expensive and well prepared schools versus those who have no other choice but to go to weak schools. Although that seems to be a cornerstone in brazilian education, it does not seem that many things are going to change right now.
Yesterday, the Estado de São Paulo newspaper published an article about how students are using the Internet to create collaborative activities in order to get better prepared for the Vestibular. According to the article, brazilian students are themselves using tools such as instant messaging, e-mail, and Orkut (the Google Networking Tool that is most popular here, such as Facebook in North America) to create clusters of students who intend to reach a common goal and be better prepared for the exam. In these clusters, the students usually discuss previous exams, exercises they could not solve and debate polemic topics.
My point here is to call attention to how technology is actually empowering these students to find their own paths, their own way to practice whatever they are learning in their own ways. Yochai Benkler, in The Wealth of Networks, states that “as collaboration among […] individuals becomes more common, the idea of doing things that require cooperation with others becomes much more attainable […]”. I believe this article exemplifies how the possibility of cooperating actually enhances learning experiences for students who engage in such type of activity. From this perspective, I might say that these students are actually managing to use the ubiquotous computing in a positive way, instead of having it only as a distracter. On the other hand, I received a comment to my last post, in which a colleague reffered to the fact that these digital natives seem to be, actually, consuming all these tools instead of producing something meaningful, they would be just absorbing information.

All these ideas point me to some questions (and I would love to see some of your thoughts about it):
– Till what extent are we supposed to let digital natives themselves and only handle technology, without any instruction?
– In educational activities, are we supposed to instruct Digital Natives explaining how they should use this or that tool, or should we just provide the tools and let the students themselves figure out how it works best for them?
– What is this movement we can already observe in which the digital natives do not seem to care much about retaining information, once everything can be reached online? What happens with the teacher who now needs to deal with the “teacher as a facilitator” idea?

The mentioned article is an example of how brazilian digital natives have found a path to deal with an specific necessity of them whithin a certain context. Do you see anything like this in your context?

– André Valle

Here at Digital Natives, our wiki and Twitter and YouTube channel and Facebook are our tools. But they are laboratories, too. We use them because they are useful, but also because we want to understand them; because when someone uses the tools in imaginative ways, we want to be there to hear about it.

This week, we had the enormous pleasure of seeing an experiment in one of these laboratories go dramatically right. Andy Oram, editor at O’Reilly, posted a preliminary review of Born Digital to the Digital Natives wiki for comment. After John Palfrey announced this spontaneous forum on Monday, many people jumped into the conversation. In brackets and italics, they etched the discussion into the text of the draft. All of this discussion culminated with Andy posting his review to the O’Reilly news site—a document reflecting not only an opinion, but the embedded nuances of a conversation in action.

We were elated to see Andy using these tools so imaginatively, and excited to have such an in-depth conversation about the marketing, message, and conclusions of Born Digital. While the full wiki conversation is worth reading, I wanted to take a moment to respond to one of Andy’s major points.

Andy kicks off his review with this analysis:

Born Digital postulates a watershed between those born on or before 1980 and those born after. Although the book is advertised as a guide to the latter for those born earlier, I suspect that the marketing became unmoored from the authorship. That’s because the book’s arguments culminate in the message that its lessons need to be learned by “digital natives” most of all, and that they are the ones best positioned to alleviate the social dislocations caused by digital media and the Internet.

He goes on to write about the seeming irreconcilability of this situation: Digital Natives are the ones who need this information most. But they are also—by definition—the ones least likely to even read a paper book, let alone buy one. The question then becomes: if Digital Natives don’t learn this information from a book, where and how will they learn it?

The answer, I think, is deeply tied to the ultimate goal of Born Digital: to facilitate better conversations between teachers and students, parents and children, by seeding those conversations with good information and provocative ideas. Conversations, as the internet has irreversibly proven, are inherently memetic; information travels, mutates, and impacts people along the way. And we’re much more likely to listen to someone we respect and care about than someone we’ve never met.

As pre-teens and teenagers, Digital Natives are acutely socially aware. They put great stock in the opinions of their friends. For parents and educators, this priority schematic can often feel like a brick wall stationed resolutely between their voices and the student’s ears. But the fact remains that, in the grander scheme of things, parents and educators are still easier to respect and care about than disembodied professorial voices—or even a sheaf of dead trees, covered with unchanging words.

It is true that Digital Natives form their own first line of defense. But that defense can be made much stronger by informational reinforcements. Fortunately, those are exactly the tools that parents and educators are best equipped to give their charges. These reinforcements, though, can never be transmitted and utilized if parents and educators don’t have them in their arsenals in the first place. By educating themselves, they can transform their fear of the unknown into a set of questions and a catalog of anecdotes; a lens through which to view their Digital Natives’ activities, and the knowledge to have intelligent conversations about the digital worlds they live in.

The measure of Born Digital’s success will lie not in unit sales, but in conversations started. The entire team here was honored, this week, to participate in the conversation Andy started. We look forward to many more, here on the internet; and hope that even more take place offline, between Digital Natives and the adults who care about them.

(cross-posted from John Palfrey’s blog)

Andy Oram, editor at O’Reilly, has posted something quite extraordinary on the wiki for our book and associated research project. It appears that he has read Born Digital and then posted his review on the wiki for comment before he posts it to the O’Reilly Media web site. I hope others will take up his challenge to comment on it; just the sort of conversation we’re delighted to have, in small measure, provoked. (For the record, this review-in-the-making is an effective critique of the book, which points at several of the inevitable soft-spots in our arguments.) Thanks much, Andy, both for doing the honor of reading and reacting in depth to the book, but also for doing it in this fashion.

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