Untitled and Undecided

In my last rambling post on thinking about the potential learning that might go on when kids get a hold of HTML in MySpace, I mentioned a possible objection to notions of “learning” when equated with “cutting and pasting.” Namely, what is learned from cutting and pasting? Isn’t it the equivalent of copying another kid’s math homework?

A few days after writing, I was in my first day of class called “Literacies: Old and New” and this idea came up again in a different context. Professor Andrea DiSessa was showing us work done by middle schoolers using his Boxer software (online description not where it used to be… sorry for no link) and mentioned how kids were able to copy and paste Boxer scripts from a shared library of Boxer scripts and that this helped the cutter/paster build more complex projects. He also talked about the satisfaction kids had when walking through their scripts with less experienced kids, which was often followed by enthusiastic idea exchanges. DiSessa posed the question to us: can one claim that this is some new sort of “cut and paste literacy?” And, if so, how might it relate to textual literacy, where quoting is encouraged, but “copying and pasting” is the equivalent of plagiarism? I think that his point went way beyond making sure to attribute source code to original authors.

Two colleagues of mine found this interesting and mentioned having explicitly heard the term “cut and paste literacy” or “copy and paste literacy” or something like that before. I did a quick search and found a few potentially interesting links:

A 21st Century Challenge: Preparing ‘Cut and Paste’ Students to be ‘Information Literate’ Citizens, by Paula Murphy of the Teaching, Learning, and technology Center at UC, published online in 2002.
Educating the Cut-and-Paste Generation.(teaching information literacy) published by HighBeam Research (warning: I have no idea who this group is and didn’t want to pay for the article or deal with the trial version…).
Cut, Paste, Publish: The Production and Consumption of Zines by Michele Knobel and Colin Lankshear in 2001.

I have not read these pieces thoroughly (or at all, in the case of the second one). My point here is to just give some evidence that this is not something “new” (as in just thought about for the first time in 2006), and that there is probably a lot more literature out there to go through, in both academic journals, popular press, and other venue.
To end on an ironic note, while cutting and pasting these links and titles, I realized that I may be helping boost their ranking on search engines, even though I haven’t read them. If I hadn’t realized this, would I have been demonstrating an “illiterate” or “non-literate” practice associated with cutting and pasting? And how that I have decided to leave the links in, even though I still haven’t read them, what am I demonstrating?

Recently there has been a lot of press about MySpace. While some of it has been about its founders or about Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp’s purchase of the site last year for over half a billion dollars, or about its rapid rise to the near the top of Internet’s page view rankings, a more recent category of articles are those that look at the darker side of the site. A San Antonio radio station’s news article reported on terror threats broadcast over the site that led to a kids skipping school en masse. The Wall Street Journal described the tension between kids and their parents with respect to privacy and spying on kids’ online activities (subscription required). The LA Times’ Calendar Live talked about kids’ “addiction” to MySpace, their use of online anonymity to experiment with questions of identity, and their supposed naivete with respect to “predators” and making information public. A colleague of mine here at SIMS, danah boyd, responds to this type of press (not necessarily these particular articles), and I’ll let her words speak for themselves. danah knows way more about MySpace than I do.

I don’t bring up this recent MySpace controversy to comment on this particular debate. What interests me is that almost lost in this discussion is MySpace’s potential value as a learning environment, and not just as a learning environment that may help with identity formation and social “development,” but learning in the sense of skills and learning how to learn.

What skills am I talking about? Technical skills. In an earlier entry, I commented on a recent article in BusinessWeek Online about kids ability to customize their MySpace environments. I am not any closer to a good understanding of what the tools are that MySpace provides to enable these kid designers, but I do know that a lot of the work involves the writing, cutting, pasting, and modifying of HTML code.

Quick, what’s the most popular search on MySpace? As of this writing, “HTML.” The same goes for a random day that I checked last month. HTML? Wow. To me this is a big deal. Of course, I don’t know if this is teenagers’ top search as there are plenty of twenty somethings on the site, but I would guess that it it’s up there. A cursory glance at the search results for “HTML” reveal tutorials created by MySpace, tutorials created by MySpace members for other MySpace users, and discussion in the various comments of tricks and techniques for getting someone’s space to truly be HisSpace or HerSpace.

This sounds like a learning environment to me! Furthermore, it sounds like something in the vein of “social constructivism,” “situated learning,” and “constructionism” to name a few of the learning theories which may be applicable to the study and analysis of this behavior. And to get away from theory, it sounds a lot like what programmers do when they need help solving a problem: consult their social networks, friends and colleagues, and look online or in a book for someone else’s solution.

Skeptics may wonder if a majority of people’s use of HTML is copying and pasting and therefore the equivalent of looking over someone’s shoulder in order to solve a math problem. I see it differently. In this case, “merely” copying and pasting code has a tangible effect (the instantaneous change of a visual or aural aspect of the page), and I would guess could lead to more in depth learning. The point here is not that learning occurs every time, but it opens the door towards potential learning,in a nice scaffolded way: the first time a teenager copies and pastes code, he or she may not learn anything, but I suspect that over time, he or she begins to understand more or more. Online tutorials for programming languages frequently instruct people to copy and paste, see what happens, and then take them through the code in depth. I know that I often learn a while creating programs this way, even if I don’t fully understand all of the code the first time through.

Of course, my description here barely scratches the surface of what is going on. But, I get excited by the prospects of millions of kids learning HTML and other design skills by a site that has recently been vilified in the media. In the case of MySpace users, I really don’t know what kind of learning happens, what the processes of learning are, or how many kids go from HTML to more complicated scripting languages, and this sounds like another area ripe for research on kids as designers of media.

A friend of mine was doing research on people and their web-cam portals and commented “I bet the best CSS developers in this country are middle school girls from Kansas.” He mentioned that many sites had quite sophisticated code (including JavaScript) that not only led to the creation of technologically complex sites, but also code that was used to hide their code from other people who may be compelled to “steal” code. I asked him if he remembered which sites in particular he was referring to and said that many don’t exist anymore. His theory? Many of those people now exclusively use MySpace.

(Incidentally, the top ten searches on MySpace, as of this writing, are: 1. HTML 2. Videos 3. My Chemical Romance 4. Downloads 5. Coldplay 6. Ringtones 7. Dates 8. Music 9. Photos 10. Friends).

Two years ago, a friend of mine told me that I’d be blown away by what his sister did to customize the desktop of her PC. He knew that I was interested in topics of kids’ design practices in their everyday lives and in issues of usability. I don’t remember the specifics, but what he described involved an onslaught of bright colors, unreadable text on contrasting backgrounds, and pictures and file icons scattered about chaotically. In short, her desktop probably violated just about every principle of visual design and was probably unusable to anyone but her. His point, though: kids’ desire to appropriate a space, to make it their own, was a key factor to consider in the design of systems intended for this audience.

To anyone who has seen a teenager’s home page on MySpace, neither the above anecdote or the insights drawn from it may be all that surprising. I recently read an article in BusinessWeek Online entitled MySpace: Design Anarchy that Works that makes the following argument: MySpace’s success can be attributed partially, if not totally, to the founder’s choice to provide people nearly unlimited customizability in the look and feel of their pages:

Regardless of its aesthetic consequences, this customizability is one of the site’s most attractive features, and the do-it-yourself sensibility of the site resonates with the audience’s desire for self-expression.

I had a chance to see this upclose while doing participant observation at a local youth program. During their free time, kids frequently logged in to MySpace and showed us their pages and some of their friends’ pages. The pages were cluttered with pictures. Embedded audio and video clips pounded my senses. And pages that required lots of horizontal scrolling were common.

One of the most interesting points that Jesse James Garrett makes in the BusinessWeek article is that the rather poor design of the default pages on MySpace encourages this practice:

If the default presentation and the common areas of MySpace had cleaner, more professional designs, users might hesitate to customize their spaces, feeling intimidated by having their amateur design work side-by-side with the professional-looking defaults. Instead, the unpolished style invites users to try things out, telling them they don’t have to be professional designers to participate.

Garrett admits that it’s a “mystery” if these decisions were intentional. But regardless, he’s on the verge of claiming that the breakdown of one part of what is thought of as a component of good interaction design, specifically the visual design aspects, is what leads to people’s enjoyable experience with the site. Of course, good visual design is only one aspect of good interaction design, so I am curious to understand how well designed the tools that enable this “design anarchy” are.

Furthermore, I am still not sure how much it matters. Academic researchers who have explored the importance of good usability for children and kids have argued that it does matter. But, I have to think that very few kids and teenagers care very much that their friends’ MySpace sites are designed poorly according to current standards of HCI. There are a lot of nice research questions to investigate here. From the perspective of kids and teenagers using MySpace, how much does usability matter? Despite the wide adoption of MySpace, what, if anything, don’t they like about the site? What, if anything, do they find frustrating in the process of design?

(thanks to Ypulse for the pointer to the BusinesWeek article).