November 10, 2005

Teen Blogging

I was talking with my friend Dan this morning and he’s giving a presentation tonight regarding Internet Safety based on the government’s iSafe program. He asked what I thought about sites like Xanga and MySpace.

The real questions seem to be, “should these sites be blocked by schools and parents” and “should students be allowed to use these?”.

The broader question that gets asked is “are blogs bad?"

First of all, blogs are not bad. In fact, I believe that students should be encouraged to blog. Blogging encourages students to express themselves in passionate ways about things that they care about. Through features such as comments and trackbacks, blogs allow for an interaction and linking of thoughts, ideas and commentary that can not be matched in other ways. Students can be forced to really examine their own opinions on matters and join others in a participatory online forum.

Second, for the most part, Xanga and MySpace are NOT blogs. This is not to say that they could not be used as a blog or that they are invalid ways to share content online. If used in a monitored and guided way, they can be used as effectively as any blogging tool. The majority of posts to these sites are purely social, attention-grabbing text nuggets that equate to public instant-messaging. Users of these services are rewarded for the number of other like-sites that link to them and this encourages users to find ways to attract other people in what teens mistakingly see as a pretty anonymous and harmless world. The truth is that it would be great place for those that prey on the innocent to find a target and learn their name, what they look like, where they attend school, who their friends are and what they like along with daily habits and routines. What could be more dangerous?

Here are a number of articles that I have found that discuss this. A couple of these make the mistake (in my opinion) of saying that bad things can happen and this looks like blogging, so blogging is bad. Other articles explore the good and bad aspects of this issue. I would encourage anybody, before they say that teens shouldn’t blog, to google for K-12 blogging OR go to Will Richardson’s site (weblogg-ed) and see the great things that are being done with blogging.