Untitled and Undecided

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).

This entry was posted on Friday, January 20th, 2006 at 11:45 am and is filed under design, learning, youth.