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6th January 2007

Teen perspectives on DSN

posted in blogs, isafety, literacy, socialnetworking, web 2.0 |

Sharon Peters has posted an excellent podcast interview with Meg, her 14 year old daughter, that provides good insight into the ways some teens are using digital social networking sites and being safe/smart about the information they share online. Meg agrees with the idea of NEVER sharing your correct age on MySpace. She also is a VERY enthusiastic author, writer, and contributor to fictionpress. I had previously heard of fanfiction, but not fictionpress– so I’ll be checking that out. Great to see sites like this where authors of any age can publish their work and receive feedback in safe ways! The website description of fictionpress is:

FictionPress is a growing network of over half a million writers/readers, and home to over 900,000 original works. As a writer, this is a place to showcase your creativity and for a reader, FictionPress is an opportunity to feast to your heart’s content.

Meg also mentioned the website and software service iLike, which I hadn’t heard of before. I’m particularly interested in the feature to discover artists that create and freely share music similar to what you like and already have in your iTunes library– but are sharing their music freely (and legally) through Garageband.com. This ability to make recommendations for new artistic works based on your preferences reminds me of both NetFlix and Pandora. The important difference, however, is that while NetFlix recommends commercial videos and Pandora recommends commercial music, Garageband.com and iLike recommend independent artists who may or may not have been yet “discovered” by a commercial label.

Thanks to Sharon and Meg for sharing these insights and recommendations!

On this day..

This entry was posted on Saturday, January 6th, 2007 at 1:57 pm and is filed under blogs, isafety, literacy, socialnetworking, web 2.0. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

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  1. 1 On January 6th, 2007, Terry Freedman said:

    Hi, Wes
    I back you up on all this: I was so taken with the interview that I’ve asked for permission to use it in a presentation I’m giving next week for the British Computer Society, and Sharon was kind enough to grant it.

  2. 2 On January 7th, 2007, Cheryl Oakes said:

    I heard the podcast as well, and I can’t wait to chat with my high school students this week at school. Especially after spending a couple hours reading facebook. Teachable moments are what it is all about.