MIT’s conference last week on Scratch (an innovative programming tool for kids developed at MIT’s Lifelong Kindergarten Project) seemed a whirlwind kind of event. Educators and technologists sprinted around the Media Lab, academics and school teachers discussed such juicy topics as digital literacy and copyright, and attractive swag (blue messenger bags with the friendly Scratch cat on them) abounded. I attended Sharing Issues: Intellectual Property and Scratch, a session featuring presentations by Berkman fellow Wendy Seltzer, Arizona lawyer Dan Pote, and Sociable Media Group director Judith Donath.

The issue up for discussion was this: according to the Scratch terms of use, all projects put online are licensed automatically with a Creative Commons license. This allows other users to take projects freely and distribute them or change them, so long as they give the original creator credit. Many users do not give each other credit, however, while others attempt to prevent re-use of their code by including the phrase “all rights reserved” in their projects. The speakers at the panel were asked how best to educate Scratch users about the intellectual property rules governing their work.

Each speaker took a different tack. Donath and Pote both used young peoples’ perspectives as a jumping off point – whether discussing why some kids like to copy and others don’t or showcasing how a user interacts with Scratch itself (I won’t get into their presentations here, though both were excellent). Seltzer’s presentation focused on intellectual property law itself – she gave the audience a crash-course in copyright, summing up its roots in the Constitution, its limitations, and the concept of fair use all in a few minutes.

The fact that Seltzer’s bit consisted largely of explanations of copyright highlights the reality that before educators can teach kids about IP issues, adults at large need to actually understand it. Seltzer does a fine job of explaining copyright – if she chose jet around the country giving basic lectures on intellectual property, we’d all benefit immensely. It doesn’t seem she’ll be free for a national tour anytime soon, however. What then?

In an age where everything is replicable and 64% of online youth 12-17 create Internet content, an understanding of copyright law is more necessary than ever before,. Intellectual property, however, is not a topic consistently taught in schools and not something that all adults understand or agree about. In previous eras, IP concerns were largely the domain of professional content creators, such as filmmakers trying to get the rights to a piece of music or famous figures looking to control use of their speeches. Now, though, being a good citizen (and avoiding an RIAA lawsuit) requires basic knowledge of these rules. In attempting to “update” their curricula for a new generation of students, educators have incorporated new media (such as the online classroom tool blackboard) into the classroom. If they really want to stay apace of digital trends, they’ll need to update what they teach as well, and many may need to get caught up on IP issues.

A quick class trip to scratch.mit.edu might help.

— Nikki Leon

Here’s the second installment of our three-part video “The Ballad of Zack McCune.” You can view part 1 here.

What do you do when you’re sued by the recording industry? And how do kids and teens reconcile the law (and corporate interests) with a culture of illegal downloading? Last year, Brown University student Zack McCune was faced with both of these questions. He explains…

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Look for a new Digital Natives podcast every Wednesday, now through October. And Watch Part 3 of Zack’s story here on August 6th.

February 2nd 10:00 AM: In my hotel room in Amsterdam – I’m here with a school trip to an MUN (Model United Nations) Conference – and packing my bags for our return flight to Cairo in the evening.

10:15 AM: Suddenly, my room mate bursts in:

– You are not going to believe this!
– What?
-There’s no Internet in Egypt!!
-You have got to be kidding me…….

My initial reaction, on hearing this not-so-spectacular piece of news, was evident disbelief; I really thought my friends were collectively playing a joke on me. Unfortunately, once they provided the evidence – headline news on all the major news sites on the web (all sanity had not been lost, and Internet was still available in Holland it seemed) – I had no choice but to face the music.

No Internet? The idea seemed ridiculous. And what more incredulous reason than because an underwater cable had been damaged?

News reports showed that a cable underwater off the coast of Dubai was cut at 05:59 GMT on Friday and that this was following a cable cut in the Mediterranean on Wednesday. Reports highlighted:

Damage triggered wide Internet outages, hampering businesses and private usage across the Mideast and Asia

With this news in my head, I grabbed the closest computer to me in the hotel lobby and initiated ticking off things one needs to do before going web-less:
– Check email inbox, and send last emails to loved ones, tick;
– Check MSN and tell everyone online about what has happened, tick;
– Check Facebook, MySpace and leave my status to explain my disappearance (so no-body gets worried), tick;
– Check weather, news, and essential entertainment gossip online, tick; and
– Finally kiss the Internet Explorer interface goodbye, tick.

I had ceremoniously parted with the Internet and ensured that I would survive the tremulous days ahead. But, being the naïve little Digital Native I am, I did not stop and think that if this was bad for me, it would definitely be much worse for others, especially those in commercial businesses. And it was.

Wireless Internet providers in Egypt were forced to give all customers a month of free Internet for the inconvenience caused – a substantial loss in revenue. Telecommunications companies were bombarded with complaints and inadvertently lost significant customer goodwill. Businessmen in general lost money; a friend’s father who was waiting for some documents to be sent via email for a crucial meeting with a client never got them and so lost out on big deal. The phrase ‘the end of the world’ no longer seemed as farfetched when I found Digital Natives, Internet consumers and providers all in utter chaos.

On a more personal level, after stepping off the plane and into my home, I noticed the hollow look my laptop had without the green ‘online’ icon. In school, sitting in the ICT (Internet and Computer Technology) room was a mockery, where my hand kept itching to check my email but which I knew would be futile.

On a more positive note, I can say that this incident afforded a rare opportunity for my friends and me to engage in greater “real-life” social interaction, as we now suddenly found ourselves spending more time discussing the latest gossip face to face (no more Facebook for that, remember?).

So, the incident was…I wouldn’t go as far as to say refreshing….but different, nonetheless.

Thursday July 17th 4:00 PM – In the Berkman Center’s kitchen, writing this blog post. Four months since The Incident, and still thankful that we have Internet!

-Kanupriya Tewari

As more and more of our lives become enmeshed in the digital world, more and more of our lives are detected, stored, and compiled by the digital systems that serve us. As we call friends on cell phones, navigate streets with GPS systems, login to Facebook from our notebooks, and swipe our employer IDs at cafeteria cashiers, bits of data are collected about us, stored, and compiled in various databases, owned by diverse entities. This collection of digital tracks that we leave behind add up to form our digital dossier.

Compiled all together, this data can say a lot about us. But who has access to this data? How is it collected, and how is it stored? And what rights do you have over your own data? These are important questions to ask – especially for Digital Natives, who are leaving digital tracks from birth, compiling a digital dossier vaster and more detailed than any generation that has come before.

What does this mean for Digital Natives? What does this mean for the future?

Our research indicates that Digital Natives are often unaware of the data that is being collected about them, and what this means for their privacy. The young people we talked to that were aware of privacy concerns often became so after a “learning moment” – something happened to them that made them uncomfortable, and think twice about their privacy online.

Learning by error can work, but it can also be costly. How do we teach youth (and adults, for that matter) to be aware of the data that is being collected about them, to be wary of privacy issues, and to become informed actors in the debate over the ever growing market of information in our new digital world? This is a question we grapple with here at the Digital Natives project, and at the Berkman Center more widely.

A group of designers – John Evans, Drew Hemment, Theo Humphries, and Mike Raento – have come up with one interesting way. They’ve designed a grass roots surveillance system called Loca.

Loca aims to enable people to question the networks they populate, and to expose the disconnect between people and the trails of digital identities they leave behind.

The creators of Loca used old mobile phones to create a monitoring system that tracks all mobile phone users in the vicinity that have their Bluetooth set to discoverable. The system collects data on individuals’ whereabouts, tracking users’ movements, and sending users messages in response to knowledge of their whereabouts. Individuals in the area with mobile phones, without doing anything, receive messages such as:

We have seen you here five times in the last three days.

Or

You spent 30 minutes in the park and then walked past the flower stall. Are you in love?

After such a message spooks a user, it then challenges people to think. Users also receive a message indicating the whereabouts of the Loca headquarters, where they can scan their mobile phone and receive a printout of the every time and location where the system detected them, providing a physical manifestation of the surveillance of their movements.

As the Loca video below explains,

Messages sent to users make the presence of the network know, and illustrate the types of data that can be gathered, and the inferences that can be drawn from it…[Loca] aims to raise awareness of the networks we inhabit, and provoke people to questioning them.

Loca brings up interesting questions for users who were tracked in San Jose, California at ISEA2006. But what about those of us who will never encounter this provocative system? Reading privacy agreements is boring, and can be very confusing. How can we bring awareness to the privacy issues raised by our ever growing digital dossier – and encourage people to think critically – in fun and educational ways?

Living in a digital world makes many things more convenient, available, and even simply possible to achieve. But often, the very tool that makes something good – like mobile activism – possible, also raises concerns in other areas, like privacy. Privacy laws need to safeguard the individuals whose data is being collected. But individuals – especially Digital Natives, who are growing up in a digital world, and will come to lead us into our digital future – need to take an active role in the formation of a society that deals with information and privacy in a responsible and human-centered way. The first step in addressing the issues of information collection, retention, and sharing – and the concern for the future of privacy – is by raising awareness.

– Miriam Simun

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I’ve been ruminating for a while now on The Real Paul Jones’ excellent post on the differences between social and collaborative spaces and practices, and the implications:

This points out the weaknesses of social networks versus networks for collaboration. When using say del.icio.us, I want collaborators for much of my research and teaching and work. But when it comes to say last.fm, I want my friends who share and enlighten me about music. People using FaceBook for work can see right away what I’m getting at. I do feel close to many of my coworkers and they keep me in touch with a lot of things I’d otherwise miss, but I don’t use FaceBook as a work resource — except for those times I need incidental or ad hoc help. I think that LinkedIn is defining itself less of a social space and more of a collaboration space. Not so much for active collaboration in any constant way but in a kind of punctuated temporary way that is slightly ad hoc but more about information exchange — I see Bill is in your network and he seems to have the skills we need in my office. Could you recommend him?

After mulling this over, I don’t think that that’s quite right, but I’m also still figuring out what I think the difference is between social and collaborative spaces. LinkedIn – in that it basically presents contact and relevant contextual personal information (in its case, work experience rather than, e.g., music tastes) – seems more like a traditional profile-based social networking site (SNS), mainly useful for the maintenance and growth of social capital. That it’s a professional and not a particularly sociable space (as, e.g., Facebook or MySpace is) is not quite the point – whenever collaboration occurs, it will be as a result of actions taken on LinkedIn (that is, social actions) but the collaboration itself will take place elsewhere. Mostly, existent SNS are designed for sociability, and functionally are crippled for collaboration – they include neither the basic features (e.g., document storage; basic word processing, etc.) or the flexibility of interface (truly open API) necessary for it. It’s also not for nothing that these SNS have become perceptually established as social spaces and thus users are likely resistant to their re-framing as collaborative work spaces.

I don’t think that, at present, there are many truly collaborative spaces online. Something like Ning suggests other possibilities as a collaborative space because,

1. it hasn’t really been established as a social space, for many people, and
2. it does include the flexibility of interface to make it into a collaborative space

Indeed, many self-organizing social networks on Ning are explicitly organized around professional projects or interests – constructed social spaces for the purpose of collaboration. Not being in the prognostication business, I’m not going to call for Ning to be The Next Big Thing but I do think that we’ve reached or are rapidly approaching a transition point in online activities.

While the socializing-online-will-destroy-the-world crowd still gets in their punches, an increasing body of research combined with the personal experiences of a large share of society are revealing that social activity online can actually be a net benefit and indeed result in more offline socialization rather than less. Part of this is down to the maturity and ease of use of the technologies, part to habituation of users, but basically – many people have “figured out” socialization online, and it’s a relatively uncontroversial part of many people’s daily lives.

Work and collaboration, by contrast, still exist for most users in the same hybrid online-offline space that has predominated since e-mail became a widespread tool and computer workstations a taken-for-granted element of office life. We’re talking about 10, 15, 20 years here, which is kind of awesome to contemplate – almost literally forever in Internet time. Most people still collaborate by e-mailing successive drafts of a document and then talking about it in meetings, or accessing copies on a shared drive. A range of platforms are making document-based collaboration easier, but this is just a part of the puzzle. The perceptual shift that hasn’t quite happened yet – and this is, again, a function both of technology and of habituation – is the movement of collaboration from a splintered, multi-modal (Word Doc -> meeting -> IM conversation, etc.) process to one that is streamlined and takes place in a single space, or at least a space in which all of the various elements are coordinated in such a way as to make the space effectively unitary.

Okay, so maybe I am a prognosticator: this is going to happen, even if the particulars of the how remain to be sorted out (and there’s more grist for the mill). But it will happen especially and increasingly among those for whom living online is the default presumption, who’ve grown up IMing each other for help on homework and working together as squadrons in Halo. That perceptual difference – of always having additional cognitive resources in your ear or at your fingertips – seems to me the bridge to be crossed in developing truly collaborative spaces online.

–Jacob Kramer-Duffield

This past Wednesday, June 25, featured a wonderful collaborative conversation at the Berkman Center – the Digital Natives Forum on Creativity and Media Literacy. Thirty five of us crammed into the Berkman conference room on with gyros and baklava to talk, discuss and brainstorm about the issues facing various production/research venues in our neighborhood, and five projects from around the area shared their obstacles and their opportunities in today’s digital age. Here’s a taste of what happened:

-Jayne Karolow of Locamoda demonstrated Jumbli. Karolow shared an interesting mobile-text specific challenge with the group: Privacy and Trust. It seems many people do not trust “just send us a text message and win!” campaigns. There is a general feeling, Jayne reported, that mobile-texting games will charge you more than the usual text message or that the company will steal your information and spam you. How should LocaModa to counteract this bad image? The group suggested that they work with established intermediaries to become a more trusted brand. More specifically, some Berkman group also suggested that Jumbli position itself as a spelling game for schools, where all kids are mobile-ready.

-Eugenia Garduno of Harvard’s Graduate School of Education talked about River City, a Multi-User Virtual Environment for middle school students that teaches epidemiology and the scientific method. Even though students report more interest in science after playing the 17 hour curriculum, is there any way to ensure that they will be able to apply what they learn virtually to their offline lives? Prominent research says no. The Berkman group suggested designs for a second level of curricula—one that would takes kids out of the classroom and into their community—applying what they learned in River City to their own cities. Because situated learning is the only learning that ‘works,’ teaching anything on any subject must relate to real life if it is to transfer for the student.

-Karen Brennan, and Andrés Monroy-Hernández of MIT Media Lab presented Scratch, a simple graphical programming language for construction of animations. Scratch has over 15,000 pieces of unique animations and almost every minute new content is added. Students can reuse each other’s work but sometimes do without giving credit, so Scratch developed a way to track source code so that previous designers (from one level up) could be credited. How can they make clear its principles of sharing, creativity and remixing?

-Anna Van Someren and Clement Chau of MIT’s New Media Literacies explained their Learning Library project, an informal setting to explore media, mash-ups and appropriation. While they are still working out the logistics of their tool, they too are caught up in issues regarding ownership, authorship and copyright. How will NML engage students in thoughtful, nuanced or balanced exploration of the issues around digital engagement and the law? All parties present seemed to agree that young people need to learn what it means to share, to credit, and to build on others’ opinions. But how to do that, while navigating the complexities of the law, is a challenge.

-David Dockterman of Tom Snyder Productions showed off Timeliner, a software program that visually organizes information on a time line or number line. The next version Timeliner will launch with a built in internet browser that will allow students to embed and attach movies, music, photos from the web into their reports, but this will raise even further copyright issues. It can handle attribution through links to source sites, but attribution is really not a copyright issue. How can kids publish or share their work if the work they’re using is copyright protected? How can teachers encourage them to use such unsafe work?

The five main issues that emerged from the day were: branding and symbol clarity; the transfer of knowledge; authorship and plagiarism; simplicity in language; and educating about the law. These themes circle us as we too attempt to design meaningful learning opportunities in the Digital Natives context. How can we make simple what we teach? How can we make sure students learn content in the context of their real lives? How do we connect digital appropriation to ethical principles? How can use words and build web models that reflect our ethics? How do we connect our social norms and practices to the principles of the law, government and political balance?

Digital Natives’ copyright curriculum group was thrilled to have these groups here—to learn from their stories and to consider ways for complementing their efforts.

Our hope is to continue the conversation, with each other and with others. Our next Digital Natives forum, Civic Engagement, will be held on August 4, 2008. We will feature two researchers and one project, and will continue the conversation begun Wednesday.

-Rosalie Barnes

Some links that’ve come to our attention this week:

*Anne Collier with a nuanced, informative post on the state of online safety and privacy for teens today

*via Fred Stutzman, Douglas Rushkoff talks about identity, Obama’s brand, and participatory politics – following up on Fred’s own thoughts on Obama’s online organizing

*via Jon Phillips, the excellent and promising Creative Commons Case Studies. Definitely check it out.

*Atrios sez: “I don’t need the younger generation understand my “it’s actually really hard to find out if your favorite band is going on tour” teenage years, but for some reason I kind of want them to understand how things have changed. Or maybe that’s the same thing. Turn that music down!”

*danah boyd on feeding the trolls in an attention economy

As the school year winds to a close and the summer hovers ahead, things are about to switch up a bit at the Digital Natives Project. More on that soon, in a series of farewell-for-now posts from myself and the rest of the 2007-2008 interns. But before we switch things up completely, I wanted to spend a moment thinking about the fascinating Digital Natives Mythbusting discussion that took place at the Berkman@10 conference on May 16.

Since I ended up running the question tool for the discussion, I got a first-hand peek into how “backchannels” can work in conference settings. For the Mythbusting discussion, there were at least three backchannels running in parallel. The first, the sanctioned “question tool,” hosted official questions and suggestions, and was projected onto two screens at the front of the room. It was visible to everyone, and fairly restrained. We used it to gauge interest in the 8 different myths we offered up, and ended up choosing to address the question of “Are kids wasting time online?” because it got so many votes in the question tool. It was very neat to watch questions, rebuttals, and subpoints surface on a public screen, and it was exciting to have that first backchannel interact fluidly with the conversation at hand.

The second backchannel was Twitter—a sort of all-purpose, soundbite-based, socially-oriented repository for quick “tweets” about conference proceedings. Many people used Twitter to peek into the other concurrent breakout sessions, and thus “participate” in multiple conversations at once. They’d float ideas and ask questions about the topic matter present in other panels, and people actually in those panels would pick up on the information and send it into the mainstream of the conversation. Twitter, since it’s an all-purpose all-the-time backchannel, was a less fine-grained conversation medium in relation to the conference. But it was widely used, and provided an informal way to keep track of everything going on in an information-rich conference.

The third backchannel, though, was to me the most interesting of all. It was not a new tool. In fact, it was a very old one: IRC. IRC, as I understand it, is essentially a chatroom protocol, introduced in 1988. Since IRC requires marginally more technical expertise than Twitter (and has a history of being more techie-oriented), the berkman@10 IRC channel did host a high concentration of very savvy, prolific chatters. It was another fairly informal backchannel, and since it wasn’t projected onto a screen, it became a home for a lot of skeptical backchatter. This, of course, made it incredibly fascinating to watch; it was like reading people’s thoughts in real-time.

In the Digital Natives Mythbusting discussion, the irony was thick and delightful. During a conversation about whether kids waste too much time on the internet, and whether they can “really” multitask on their computers while listening to lectures, there were dozens of real live people in the room (young and marginally less young) chatting away in IRC about the content of the discussion. While multitasking, they were expressing their opinions about multitasking.

The discussion provides a window into an alternate view of DN issues. Wonderfully enough, Alex Leavitt—a conference attendee—had the foresight to copy and paste the IRC discussion into a post on his blog. I highly recommend reading the entire thing, but I’ve lifted one particularly interesting segment. At issue is the question of what counts as “participations” in a classroom, and what kinds of “participation” actually contribute toward the end goal of learning. After you read through it, we’d love to hear your thoughts; there’s no reason the conversation should stop here! With thanks to Alex for capturing the discussion in the first place.

DIGITAL NATIVES MYTHBUSTING SESSION: IRC CHAT

[11:54am] jeckman: And yes, classrooms should be wired during class
…
[11:54am] sc1olist: (digital natives) So far, no mention of it being useful in class to find context to what’s happening/discussed. Or that people take notes on laptops.
[11:55am] daithi: or IRC it
[11:55am] saraw1: exactly. i don’t know why professors are so threatened by it.
[11:55am] ltsui: connectivity is great for looking up things in wikipedia during class
[11:55am] saraw1: besides, what constitutes participation? Can you participate without talking? I think yes
[11:55am] sc1olist: @ltsui Exactly. ESSENTIAL in history, particularly at the graduate level.
…
[11:56am] EricaG: jassamyn, it’s so time for revolt. these aren’t supposed to be lectures.
[11:56am] jessamyn: speaking of IRCing it, does anyone have a link for THIS Scott MCloud (do I have that right?)? I keep finding the cartoonist
[11:56am] dwitzel_: shouldn’t your twitter feed count for “participation”
[11:56am] saraw1: i was in school before we had any computers in the classroom. i knew then how to feign participation/interest
[11:56am] saraw1: dwetzel-I should say so!!!!
[11:57am] jessamyn: I am trapped by my own politeness
[11:57am] fonchik: I came to college with an electric typewriter
[11:57am] saraw1: the computer has nothing to do with whether you are participating or not, nor BTW does speaking in class
…
[11:58am] sc1olist: @saraw1: I disagree on the latter, but the former is quite true. In fact, it often helps give people the confidence to talk.
…
[11:58am] alexleavitt: I don’t see why IRC shouldn’t be implemented in classroom, or at least seminar, discussion
…
[11:59am] saraw1: why does speaking in class count as participation while being silently involved does not? it’s discrimination against introverts
[11:59am] alexleavitt: http://alexleavitt.com/2008/05/16/berkman10-irc-and-the-dialogue-of-education/
[11:59am] saraw1: besides, note that there is such a thing as saying something just to say it. e.g. content-free participation
…
[12:00pm] alexleavitt: most of my English teachers have counted class participation simply through attendance; class participation grades just seem to be part of the old system that needs to change
[12:00pm] daithi: @sara: it can raise interesting gender/class/social/ethnic/disability issues too, i.e. multiple options for participation can be an anti-exclusion device

Last week, in my post on ROFLCon, I wrote that

–Diana Kimball, Digital Natives intern

I am 35 years old. I have been on the internet for half of my life. I “speak digital” fluently, but I have to admit that I don’t speak it as a native, and likely never will. I’m a dinosaur in this world, and I know I will be replaced by more nimble successors.

I’ve been thinking about it, and my big failing is that I can’t multitask like the younger set, or as women are famed for doing. The cost of switching between digital life and real life has a real mental cost, especially in terms of attention, in the psychological sense. And the reason why I feel as though I am not a digital native is that I feel this cost with every transition. I’m monolithic. I can think about one thing at a time. I am Windows 3.11. I am Mac OS 7.

This hit home for me during ROFLCon, where, armed with iPod touch and a long-established Twitter account, I thought I could keep up with the real and virtual worlds into which I was immersed. My droll plan was to live-twitter during my own panel, perhaps with just a “HAI WORLD. IM IN UR PANEL…” As it was, the panel was too fast-paced, and required too much of my attention just to keep on top of it. I had to be present, in the moment, and any step away from that would have been unfair to everyone else in the room.

I would try to keep an eye on Twitter during the conference while I was in the audience, but always ended up discovering that focusing on it took too much away from my understanding and enjoyment of what was going on in the panels. Twitter was useful, it did enhance the experience, and I believe it was the right medium that consensus established as a backchannel. However, for me, it was a matter of stepping out of the real life experience of the Con, and stepping into a digital reality. It was not an augmented reality; for me, ROFLCon’s digital backchannel was simply another parallel session track that I could follow. It seemed clear that for the younger set at ROFLCon, there was far less difficulty in meshing the real with the virtual.

So. I don’t feel like I’m a digital native. There are some trends, some things my younger colleagues love, that I know I don’t share in fully. I think they point to my failure to change context nimbly, but it could possibly just be me. What do you think?

Unlike nearly every person out there, I hate watching video while at the computer keyboard (with one notable exception). That is, I hate browsing through YouTube. Thankfully, I don’t have to miss out on videos of cute kittens, theremins, or both together, because I can defer YouTube to its proper context: I mark a promising video as a “favorite,” and when the mood strikes me, I use my AppleTV to catch up on all these effectively bookmarked videos while lying back on my couch.

I love music. I have spent tens of thousands of dollars (erk) on a legitimate music collection over the years. Yet I hardly listen to it, primarily because I can’t listen to most music whilst working. Music with lyrics (and I love intelligent lyricists) just collides with all the reading and writing I’m constantly doing at the keyboard.

As I close in on finishing a large, overdue project, I realize more and more that I need to swear off instant messaging. I have been instant messaging, in one form or another, ever since 1990, when I stepped onto the proper internet. I like to think I communicate well in the medium. However, IM takes far too much of my attention: I dedicate myself far too intensely to a real-time conversation, and everything else that I try to do is disrupted. I don’t dip into chats while continuing with my emailing, my writing, my editing, my coding, or my web surfing. The chats eat my attention.

I look at the next generation, say, my three-year-old daughter, and am in awe of what they will accomplish, having all the collected knowledge of the world wide web at their fingertips from day one. I’m am absolutely confident my daughter will develop the mental agility that I lack in order to mediate between the real and multiplicity of digital worlds she will be presented with. I hope, both as a parent and as an educator, I can help develop the critical facilities she and her peers will need to filter through all that information.

In the meantime, I’m having fun in this new world, myself. I get by pretty well with the language, after all. I know there will come a time when I will reach my limit, when all I can do is sit back and watch in wonderment what these kids can do.

But not just yet.

Adam Lindsay finally got used to being called The LOLCODE Guy while at ROFLCon. He sporadically blogs at http://lindsay.at/blog/, and formerly blogged more regularly on the role of digital multimedia tools for research in the humanities at http://mediadescri.be.

What happens when you’re standing at the front of a room full of digital natives?

Better yet: what happens when they’re armed with laptops?

For the past 6 months, I’ve spent the majority of my time putting together a conference called ROFLCon. As one member of the ROFLCon team-a group of undergraduates from Harvard and MIT-I found myself at the center of something that quickly became bewilderingly huge. It’s a little bit out of the journalistic mode we strive for here at Digital Natives, but since this was such an unusual project, I wanted to take a moment to record some of my observations from the inside.

Last week, we heard from Sarah about her thoughts on ROFLCon. Her post-about the gender question at ROFLCon-incited a lively set of comments and responses, including some remarks from one of ROFLCon’s panelists, Adam Lindsay of LOLCode. Sarah just so happens to be one of my fellow interns on the Digital Natives project, and her post just happened to be really well-written and thoughtful.

But when you’re at a conference about the Internet, held at MIT, where the majority of the audience is under the age of 25 (the age we usually consider to be the upper bound of digital-nativehood), a cavalcade of instant blog reactions suddenly becomes the norm.

In fact, all barriers between real life and digital life seemed to collapse during the conference. In an audience full of laptops, iPhones, BlackBerries, and digital cameras, the volume of instant commentary created was enormous and baffling. But it wasn’t even just the audience: Adam Lindsay apparently live-posted much of his own panel directly to Twitter, between answering questions about LOLCode. And he wasn’t alone.

These layers of metacommentary were almost necessary for understanding the ROFLCon at all. At one point, I went up to the microphone at the end of a panel, to announce that audience members could organize interest-based dinners in our website’s forums. Someone yelled out from the audience: “Didn’t we already do that on Twitter?” (Twitter is a micro-blogging service where people can track each other’s thoughts and activities.)

The audience had self-organized; they had skipped right over the sanctioned forums. Since I had been running around for most of the day, sans screen, I had missed that entire subtext. The audience, at that point, was running their own experience to a remarkable degree. Their self-organizing skill was one of the highlights of the conference-certainly for me, and I hope for them as well.

Then again, I think that people who weren’t tuned into these substreams ended up feeling a slightly lost. At the end of the first day, a few audience members came up to me, wondering where the main dinners for the evening would be held. Since I hadn’t been tuned in to Twitter, and the forums were vacant, I didn’t know, and neither did they. When I exited into the lobby, I realized that someone (a few ROFLCon team members, I later discovered) had self-organized a solution: a manila folder with main dinner hangouts scrawled in black sharpie, taped to a concrete column. Although the solution ended up coming from the ROFLCon team, it could have come from anyone: another instance of digital/real life spontaneous interfacing.

So what is it like to stand at the front of a room full of digital natives? Surreal. But also exciting. The audience at ROFLCon was far more than just an audience. They were members of a network that was enthusiastically manifesting itself both online and off. Almost invariably, they were there at the conference (in real life) because they’d heard about it on the internet. They wanted to be there, make friends there, fill their blogs and streams and feeds up with information about the conference. They were out in full force, and that made it so thrilling to be right out there with them.

If you had asked me two weeks ago what I expected from the conference, I would have predicted a lot more negative commentary. But the amazing thing about standing up in front of a throng of self-publishing people (young and old alike) is that later, after it’s all over, you get to hear what they really think, unfiltered by the unbias of journalism. It’s not always pretty. But I think it’s real. And, whatever else it might be, it’s intoxicating to know that you were at the front of a room of full of people who were paying attention.

Well. Some attention, anyway. Can’t neglect Twitter, after all.

– Diana Kimball

If you’ve got thoughts on this matter or any other, please do leave a comment, and / or email: diana dot kimball at gmail dot com.

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