Tag Archives: Facebook

learning, reading, Social media, Teacher librarians

Stop telling me I’m wasting my time on Facebook

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I’m a little tired of people telling me I’m wasting my time on Facebook.

Yes, I do enjoy keeping an eye on what my friends and colleagues are up to, seeing photos of their weddings, new babies and celebrations, particularly when they don’t live close. But I also use Facebook professionally. I’m a teacher librarian – I resource the curriculum, and that means I need a constant stream of information coming to me. Facebook, my Twitter network, Google Reader, my Diigo and Delicious network, my Vodpod network – all connect me to what I need to do my job. The same goes for what I’m interested in.

Some read the newspaper, others do it differently.

I don’t know what you see on your Facebook page but this is a cross-section of what I see –

You get the idea…

Digital citizenship, network literacy, technology

Control your identity online

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This has been cross-posted from I get to say what’s culture.

Taken from Jenny Luca’s presentation

Kids these days are connected and mobile. Wherever they are, they have access to information and can communicate with their friends online.  Although I do believe that the media sensationalizes and demonizes social media, becoming informed about how to stay safe and behave responsibly online is crucial – for teachers and parents. Even for those of us on Facebook, it may come as a bit of a shock to realise how much we are unaware of in terms of privacy settings.

Do you know how much of what you or your kids post online is visible to others?

The Generation Yes Blog alerted me to the new A Parents’ Guide to Facebook by Connect Safely.  You can download the whole document as a pdf file here or take a look at an overview of recommended settings for young people here.

I like the recommended settings for young people as an alert to what Facebook users should be thinking about. Actually, I doubt whether most young people would be taking the time to fine-tune their settings, and Facebook doesn’t seem to be making it easy or intuitive to do so. That’s where kids need education. We all do, teachers and parents, so that we can recommend to our young ones what they should be taking control over.

I’ve included screen grabs of some of the information on the Recommended Privacy Settings for Teens here –

Jenny Luca has created some top quality slideshow presentations which I highly recommend. Take a look at them on her wiki.

You can also find good information on ACMA cybersafety website.

Finally, I’m sharing my ‘cybersafety’ Diigo links here.

I do think we need to be informed as teachers and parents because the issue of cybersafety and digital citizenship is not only relevant but crucial to our students’ lives.  Kids know how to work out technology but that doesn’t mean they’re going to be informed about consequences.

What do you think?

Social media, Web 2.0

Facebook’s wall a consolation in death

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People use social media for different purposes. The wall of Joseph McLellan’s Facebook is a touching tribute to the loving relationship between him and those family and friends who have survived him. Joseph McLellan, Archimandrite Joasaph, left this world too early for those who love him. And yet his Facebook wall is still a living noticeboard posted with regular notes to him.

I knew Fr Joasaph in my first year of marriage when I accompanied my husband to Jordanville, upstate New York, in his third year of seminary. He was a year ahead of my husband, and although I lived there for nine months only, Fr Joasaph clearly made an impression because my memories of him, his academic brilliance, his talents and wonderful sense of humour remain clear.

It was on Facebook that my husband and I were reunited with Fr Joasaph after a lengthy lapse in communication. At a time when I heard many people criticise those who ‘wasted their time’ on Facebook, we were enjoying the ease with which it allowed us easy communication with those who lived far from us.

In the short period of Facebook friendship, we learned that Joseph had decided to leave Princeton University where he had been teaching Russian and enter into monasticism, moving through the ranks of ordination quickly and being elevated to the rank of archimandrite. At the time we didn’t know of his illness and wondered what the rush was.

In December 2009 we joined many others in expressing our grief at his passing, and in expressing our condolences to his family.

And now his Facebook remains open. Family and friends continue to ‘talk to him’, to remember him, to console each other.

I open his Facebook page on and off to see how he continues to live through the comments of those who still love him. I hope it stays open forever.

debate, Education, internet, network literacy

Whose job is it to teach responsible online behaviour?

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Everybody’s talking about it: online behaviour.

We’ve come around, finally and reluctantly, on the whole, to accepting that social media is part of our world, young people as well as adult. Even television shows and radio stations are tweeting and blogging – how more mainstream can you get?

On the negative side, we also hear about  bad behaviour online, and the confusion arising from changes to privacy, particularly on Facebook. Many people have spoken out about what needs to be happening in schools, including Jenny Luca and Will Richardson. There are many passionate responses to Facebook’s handling of privacy on the web.

Some people are leaving Facebook.

Some people are staying.

It’s interesting that morning programs on television are often featuring conversations about social media, Twitter and Facebook in particular. This morning Channel 7’s morning program featured a spokeswoman talking about Facebook privacy and the inappropriate content that was being shared outside the users’ immediate circle of Facebook friends. I was surprised that the tone was reasonable, and many interesting points were raised, for example, the question as to why people post strong and even abusive comments to people on Twitter when they wouldn’t behave that way if they met these people face to face.

That’s the difference – face to face interaction compared to faceless interaction. Facebook, ironically, is faceless. When we get involved in a passionate discussion we may be talking to friends of friends who are faceless to us. We don’t expect to meet them, and we don’t exercise the same caution that we would if we knew we’d be seeing them in person. It’s the same with road rage.

For me, that’s the message we need to get out to students. Don’t get me wrong – I’m an advocate of the connective power of social media, but I think that students should be reminded that while they are chatting with ‘friends’ in the privacy of their bedrooms, their conversations are very public.

Facebook is very easy to use. It’s easy to add friends, photos, applications, become fans and group members. But it isn’t easy to wade through the new privacy regulations. Even with a manual it confuses me. And it’s not something young people (or anyone) are likely to do any more than they would happily peruse a legal document. Changes occur without enough notice, it’s easy to let it all go and hope for the best.

The Australian government’s cybersafety program directed by The Australian Communications and Media Authority has published units of work designed to teach responsible online behaviour.

But who is responsible for teaching this? Will it be taught by the few educators who have independently decided it’s important, or across the school following a directive from principals?

I worry that while primary schools may consider this an essential part of the curriculum, just as they educate children about bullying, drug-taking, etc., secondary schools may be confused as to whose role this is.  It may not fit into an already overcrowded curriculum. It may be perceived that secondary students are old enough to be responsible or that what they do in their private time is no concern of the school.

I would like to run parent sessions on Facebook, but it’s blocked for staff and students in our school. The leaders of our school have made this decision in the best interests of our students. Fair enough, but have they thought the issue through? Blocking Facebook at school prevents education. It indicates serious handwashing.

Parents are talking about feeling helpless and ignorant when it comes to their children’s online activities. We could say that they should monitor their children’s Facebook activity, but until what age? Try monitoring a 16 year old and see what happens.

Parents should be educated but then so should school leaders and teachers. The only way to understand something is to get into it and see how it works. It’s not a matter of saying ‘it’s not for me’; we can’t afford to say that anymore. We can’t keep blaming parents, schools, the government.

I remember a primary school principal once saying that what the students did out of school wasn’t his responsibility (when I raised the issue of pornography sites being passed around online). We can no longer separate school and home. Online interaction out of school spills into school interaction.

We are all responsible. We should all become educated. We should all educate where appropriate.

21st century learning, Education, learning, networking, teachers, teaching, technology, Web 2.0

Web 2.0 is like a dinner party – Steve Hargadon at VITTA09

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Yesterday I attended the VITTA annual conference 2009. There were many highlights, and one of them was the keynote speaker, Steve Hargadon.

Steve has an interesting quietness about him when talking about dramatic things. His message of the revolutionary changes taking place in the world of work, education and play was presented without any eschatological overtones. All the more effective.

Instead of summarising the entire content of my notes, I’ve pulled out a small selection which is playing around in my mind.

Web2.0 has reshaped our life.

We’re about to go through the biggest change in education in centuries, maybe ever.

It’s going to feel like a tidal wave. How are people reacting to this? Some have their back to the wave, a few are out surfing the wave, but to most of us that wave looks impossible.

I still don’t get how people – intelligent, dedicated educators – do not see the wave. I just don’t get it.

We go to Web 2.0 applications to see peer content, to have peer relationships. We are taking off attributing, collaborating, and creating.

We are changing the nature of communicating; there is a significant cultural change with advent of the internet.

Yes, a cultural change. Notice Steve doesn’t say ‘technological’. Technology is the platform, it is becoming ubiquitous, absorbing the new culture of sharing and co-creating.

The web is a conversation. Many feel it’s a tidal wave.

Yes, the sheer size of what’s there is overwhelming.

It’s changing us into becoming a conversation, not unlike going to a dinner party, engaging in conversation and leaving the party,  fulfilled by conversation. To understand what’s happening in Web 2.0 platforms, we must shift our view of web content as being a conversation.

We don’t follow everything, we choose what we follow, just as we would at a dinner party, selecting conversations that interest us.

We are living in an era of increased openness. Here’s an example: Mitopencourseware, a world-class university, offering all the course content free. This is an enormous historic change. Massachusetts Institute of Technology are intent on being in the forefront of a new way of delivering information.

Amazon.com is another example of the interest people have in peer information; we read what other readers have said about book, not published reviews.

Social networking will become the foundation structure of our educational experience.

Hmmm…. I wonder how, given that most people, even leaders, have their backs to the wave.

Here’s the all-important question for educators:

How well are we preparing our students for this world?

We don’t know how, we’re not really sure ourselves. But we do know that eduction will change. It will feel like tidal wave.

There are all kinds of ways that schools resist change. What can we do? Breathe deeply, turn toward wave and figure it out. The best way to predict future is create it.

Be a learner first. Get back into learner mode. Learn about these technologies.

And here’s an interesting example of innovative use of social networking for marketing purposes. Ikea has used Facebook to get users to willingly promote their merchandise.

Does this have anything to do with education? No, but why can’t we as educators be as innovative?

21st century learning, networking, technology, Web 2.0

What I discovered about my PLN after I told them I’d deleted my Twitter account

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So, if you read my previous post, you know that I was stupid enough to delete my Twitter account in a fatal moment of confusion. You also know how devastating it was for me to realise I’d lost the community I’d grown to depend on every day.

Let me tell you how something devastating turned into something heart-warming.

My first reaction was to tweet out my loss and ask everyone to follow me again. But, hang on a minute, I couldn’t do that because I no longer had a community. Well, not on Twitter. I still had Facebook, and some of my Twitter contacts were also on Facebook.

The response to my status was immediate. One of the first people to respond was Jo McLeay aka @jomcleay who reassured me with the simple but powerful message, ‘We’re still here for you’.

After finally admitting my account wasn’t going to be reinstated, I decided to start a new account from scratch. It was no fun thinking about  how long it would take to rebuild. I wrote a blog post about the experience, but couldn’t tweet it out as I usually would. I could, however, throw it up on Facebook and ask my FB people to tweet it out. Would that work?

The response was swift and very touching.

Soon my message and blog post were being retweeted all over the place. I started following people again, and in less than 24 hours I had a community of people again, over 200 of them, and only a couple of days later, over 300.

My personal learning network had rebuilt one of the most important platforms I had for communication and professional interaction.

I was back in business!

Thankyou, everyone, for all your help and support.

21st century learning, technology, Web 2.0

What I realised when I lost my Twitter account

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                                                                 Photo courtesy of GettysGirl on Flickr

Yesterday I accidentally deleted my Twitter account. As soon as it happened, I was in shock. I’d lost everything.

What have I lost?

Firstly, I can’t believe how much it’s upset me. How long have I been on Twitter? Not a year, surely. How important can it be? I’ve lived without it most of my life, after all.

I feel that I’ve lost a community. I realise now how important my network is to me, and think back to the months I’ve spent discovering people, reading their biographies, appreciating their passion, their individual interests and skills, following them.

What’s also interesting is that I’ve developed new behaviours. I suppose you do when you become seriously involved in something. Hang on, did I say seriously? I think it means more to me than I realised.

I’ve developed behaviours which are social, not technological. I’m not a techie, I stand behind Web 2.0 technologies because they connect me to people. I’ve started to behave consistently as someone who functions in a community. There is nothing I discover without wanting to share. There is no idea that comes to me, no emotion I feel, without wanting to tweet out to people and wait for a response.

I realise that the people I’ve gradually drawn into my network are like-minded, but also diverse. I love that about Twitter.

I never have to wait long to get a response. Any question, suggestion, query, frustration receives a response, and leaves me feeling supported. If there’s little or no support in the people in my immediate community, there’s plenty of it out there in the Twitterverse. The world has become smaller, closer. And I meet some of these people in person; online relationships sometimes go offline.

I’m inspired by the people in my network. Their links take me to amazing websites, blogs, wikis, photos, videos – an incredible array of shared creativity and countless hours of their time. They give me ideas and spur me on to follow my own passion as a learner and teacher.

I really don’t know what to do with myself. Yes, I use Facebook, but not everybody does. I had more people on Twitter, and just the other day Facebook was blocked at school, even for teachers. I really do feel like Rapunzel at school. I feel as if my lifeline has been cut off. Discovering resources, I save them into Diigo and Delicious, but I have nobody to show them to, to talk to them about. I’ve lost the real-time connection.

If people who are anti-Web 2.o applications could experience the richness of online communities, I think they would change their mind. Surely, the negativity and fear come only from the absence of experience, from media-created and anecdotal misinformation – all theory.

If I build you a network of people like you, you too would come to depend on it; you’d also miss it if you lost it.

I’m going to start from scratch. My old twitter username was taniasheko, but I’m not able to keep it, so I’ve created a new username from my maiden name. On Twitter I’m http://twitter.com/taniatorikova I had to create a new email address: taniasheko@gmail.com which I’ll use just for Twitter, and not anything else.

 If you’re on Twitter, if you’ve followed me before, please follow me again once I’ve got a new account.

21st century learning, author, blogging, Children's books, Education, Literature, networking, Teacher librarians, teachers, teaching, technology, Web 2.0

Have you learned to share?

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parrotsharing

Photo courtesy of Eliselovesprada on Flickr

Marie Salinger just shared with me an excellent blog post written by Andrew Douch, No learning for unauthorised persons.   Andrew expresses his disappointment in the fact that many teachers are reluctant to share what they create for their students’ learning. I recommend that you read the entire post.

In my comment following Andrew’s post, I mention that my role as teacher librarian automatically puts me in the position of finding and sharing resources, and that I don’t see why I shouldn’t share outside my school, or even outside my country. Since forming a personal learning network on Twitter, Facebook, Delicious, Diigo and similar networking platforms, I’ve realised that what I share with others is a drop in the ocean compared with what I receive. If only all teachers would experience this.

My blogs and wikis are also a way of sharing ideas, resources and discussions which would otherwise only be shared with a couple of colleagues or not at all. It seems that blog authors find all manner of things useful and edifying, and write about these. I’ll often share resources this way, or even re-post from someone else’s blog if I think it’s worth passing on and giving my two cents worth.

More problematic is the sharing of material which I’ve read in a hard-copy publication. Currently, I’m reading the current edition of Fiction Focus: New titles for teenagers published by Curriculum Materials Information Services, WestOne Services, Department of Education and Training, Western Australia. It’s a teacher librarian’s treasured resource, providing excellent critical reviews of adolescent fiction, as well as reviews of resources of professional interest to teachers. I’m also reading the Centre for Youth Literature Newsletter published by the State Library of Victoria.

It’s frustrating for me to read these excellent resources and not share them online. What may normally occur is that we read them and take out ideas and resources for our own practice, or at best, email a few teachers if we think there is something of interest for them.

So what’s problematic? Well, it’s common practice to re-post online content written by someone else because you can give a synopsis and hyperlink to the actual resource; you don’t have to do more than give a quick summary of the original post since the reader can go directly to the source for more detailed information.

Not so in this instance. I would really like to feature some of the articles in these publications, but how much should I say? I don’t want to overload my readers, and I can’t presume they will obtain the hardcopy publications. I’m not sure if the publishers will consider my efforts a breach of copyright.

For example, there’s an excellent special feature in Fiction Focus, Wow websites – book inspired web wonders, which links to Young Adult fiction websites which

use high quality art and web design to create spaces and interfaces that reflect the character of the fiction that they represent,

providing

spaces for young readers to do what they have always done: play, discuss and imagine…

I applaud the promotion of such websites because I’ve realised that reading becomes an experience when adolescent readers become involved in the art, interactive activities and games, author blog and videos. Providing such websites increases the chances of hooking young people into reading fiction.

themortalinstruments

Here are the links to author websites provided by this article:

P.B.Kerr’s site, Quertyuiop

Angie Sage’s Septimus Heap series

Cassandra Clare’s Mortal Instruments series

Anthony Horowitz’s Alex Rider series

Charlie Higson’s Young Bond series

Robert Muchamore’s Cherub series

For Picture Book authors, there are links to the following websites:

Shaun Tan

Matt Ottley

Chris Priestley’s Tales of Terror   Gothic feel site

Darren Shan

The Bad Tuesdays

Scott Westerfeld’s new Steampunk-inspired website

The selected works of T. S. Spivet by Reif Larsen

The CMIS Fiction Focus blog include more extensive links to more blogs and websites of young adult authors and illustrators.

Fiction Focus also has an excellent article on Steampunk,

a sub-genre of fantasy and speculative fiction. At the core of steampunk is the notion of altered history (often Victorian and London-Victorian at that) combined with technology that is historically impossible, and therefore all the more intriguing.

There are great links included, so you can see my dilemma – I’d like to share all these wonderful resources with people, but I really think they should subscribe to the magazine, or even, the magazine should go online. CMIS has also given us a taste of Steampunk in their blog which is worth adding to your RSS feed reader, but I can’t resist including all the Steampunk blog links given here as well.

Brass Goggles

The Steampunk Home

The Clockwork Century

Steampod (podcasts)

Antipodean Steampunk Adventures  with an Australian slant

The Antipodean League of Temporal Voyagers

Do read the Fiction Focus blog post about Steampunk.

And guess what? From May 2010, the Centre for Youth Literature Newsletter will be going online. Yes!

 

art, creativity, networking, technology, Web 2.0

Facebook performance – What are you doing right now?

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phonetasticview

Photo of An Xiao

I was reading an article in the New York Times,  Where art meets social networking sites, and came across Debbie Hesse who is an installation artist and the director of artistic services and programs for the Arts Council of Greater New Haven. According to the article, Debbie said she was a lot like others in the late boomer generation,

“trying to learn how to not be left in the dust with the new technology.” But she may be ahead of the pack in employing social networking as the theme for an art show.

Social networking a theme for art?

I figure it’s not entirely surprising. Why shouldn’t artists create something from the ubiquitous social networking phenomenon? Where there’s something happening, it’s natural for someone to analyse it or create something from it?

Debbie organised an exhibition named after Facebook’s communication format, Status Update. More than 50 works of art by a dozen artists were displayed.

But how can art come from social networking?

“Status Update” has turned out to be a somewhat unlikely intersection of digital concepts and conventional art.

Ms. Hesse curated the show almost entirely through Facebook, with the help of Donna Ruff, a Brooklyn artist. She found two categories there, she said: “Artists that are using it as a medium, performing in it, using it as poetry, using it as a canvas. And then artists that are commenting on it as a new form and creating new dialogues about what this means in our lives.”

Rachel Perry Welty is one of the artists who comments on the new way of communication.  For her performance, Rachel used her iPhone to enter a status update every minute for 16 hours.  That is, every sixty seconds Rachel answered the Facebook status question ‘What are you doing right now?’ (which has since been replaced by the question ‘What’s on your mind?’)

I hope artists and art lovers will not scream at me if I raise my eyebrows every so slightly in response to Rachel’s compulsive stream of status updates being called a ‘performance’.  Or maybe I’m just annoyed that I didn’t think of the idea first. Or maybe I should reconsider my concept of art.

Rachel says that, after reading an article about social networking entitled Brave new world of digital intimacy by Clive Thompson, she decided to give Facebook a go.

I’ve found Facebook to be useful as a view to the global artist community, but I don’t send gifts or answer quizzes or throw sheep at people. And I don’t update my status on Facebook anymore after my performance on March 11.

Rachel explains the performance aspect of Twitter on the Art:21 blog:

I use Twitter as an extension of my creative process, in the sense that it’s a view into the daily life of a working artist. As an artist, my project is concerned with the minutiae of life. As humans, we spend most of our time engaged in the small moments (whether we tweet or Facebook about them or not) and in my project I am trying to get people to notice the things they wouldn’t ordinarily. In that sense, Twitter seems like a perfect platform for me. It’s an ongoing performance.

You can follow Rachel on Twitter.

It’s worth reading Rachel’s interview in the blog post, but before you do, I’d like to highlight this paragraph, because it’s something I’ve been thinking about  myself (although not expressing as eloquently):

I had been thinking about and observing how we craft a persona online. I started paying attention and reading people’s status updates in learning my way around Facebook. It struck me that some people must spend more time than others choosing their words, just as some people spend more time getting dressed in the morning. Some are clever and entertaining, some vague or opaque, and others utterly banal. Each statement on its own doesn’t say much, but the collective tells a surprisingly sophisticated story, and forms a portrait of sorts. My performance was a way to make a quick and intense self-portrait. Imposing the limitation of 60 seconds was an attempt to make that more real.

‘Quick and intense’ is another way of looking at Facebook or Twitter status updates. We’re not talking great literature here, but as a snapshot of the mundane, it’s a pretty good window.

I realise that when I look back at my year-long daily photo challenge, threesixtyfivephotos. Each day’s snapshots seem banal and almost ridiculously tedious, but looking back at over 300 days now, I can see that it’s a concise overview of a life which would otherwise just pass by and be largely forgotten.

Rachel’s observations provide much food for thought; I urge you to read the whole article. Forgive me but I can’t resist pulling out one more paragraph:

Afterwards, I thought of Sophie Calle’s work where she follows a stranger throughout his movements in a day. My work was the reverse: I got strangers to follow me throughout my day. Well, into the next day, I found myself silently narrating (“Rachel is getting a cup of coffee,” “Rachel is ready for a nap”), this experience imprinted on my brain like the afterimage from a flashbulb.

And a big question which was asked by the interviewer:

In your statement, you mentioned that you aim “to raise more questions about narcissism, voyeurism, privacy, identity and authority, as issues we consider in a technologically modern world.” What do you see as the role of online social media in society?

That’s a big question. I’m not sure we know yet. Clearly, it’s a way to communicate with a lot of people quickly and without friction. Relationships will be easier to maintain for a long time, for good or for ill. Imagine, as my son will probably experience, never losing touch with your best friend from 3rd grade. (Michelle Turner from Mr. Brentnall’s class at NIS in Tokyo, are you out there?!)Will it make it impossible to shed your identity as you move through life? Will you always be who you once were?

This is a fascinating question and one, I think, which we should all consider, and as educators, raise with our students.

I also recommend you read about how other conceptual artists have represented social networking. An Xiao, pictured above, is one of the group of artists.

As an aside, it’s interesting how the Facebook status ‘What are you doing right now’ has been replaced by ‘What’s on your mind?’ – a move from the external to the internal.  Is Facebook becoming less of a place where you keep an eye on what people are up to, and more of a platform to share thoughts, feelings and reactions?

21st century learning, creativity, networking, technology, Web 2.0

Don’t bag Facebook

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Photo courtesy of phillipsandwich on Flickr

This is for all the people who think (and write) that young people use Facebook to waste their time with pointless dialogue, flaunt themselves inappropriately, engage in banal chat about drinking or bully others online.

Here’s a thread started by my 16 year old son who loves classical music and composing. Statistically, you could say he would be a target for derisive comments, and yet, read for yourself:

Maxim is composing his 8th symphony in B minor “Sinister”about an hour ago

good man maxim

cool

Bloody talented composer here. 🙂

I like! I like!! I like how’s already been pre-nicknamed

Maxim Yeah, it’s gonna be really dark and ominous. The very beginning has cello, bass, contrabassoon and bassoon with a dark unison theme. I got the inspiration from Borodin’s 2nd symphony for that.

YAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAY!!!! You must send it to me when you’re done!

Maxim Yes, but it may take a while.

can you please send it to me aswell???

YAAAAAY!!

Maxim Sure! Maybe 1 mvt at a time. This’ll take me a pretty long time.

YAAAAY!! It took brahms over a decade to make his first symphony… Take your time

Maxim Not that long, maybe a month or 2 I meant.

cool!

are there 1000 performers?

Maxim Is that a piece of music? Or are you asking whether my symphony requires that many players? Mine probably wouldn’t require 1000 players.

Well it does now!! It will include a huge choir!! And an orchestra at least 3 times the size of a normal one! YAY!!
(there’s a challenge maxim!)
Mahler’s 8th Symphony is also called “Symphony of a Thousand”. One of the best performance experiences I have ever had. Check out the ending: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uYM54vhLYTU&feature=player_embedded#t=20
Maxim  Oh, ok. Thanks.

My older son says that his friends often share links and information about new bands or where to get sheet music. They’ll find sites which teach you how to play an instrument; they use Facebook to help each other learn or create.

For those who focus on the negative aspects of social networking, think again. There will be negative interaction online, just as there is in life, but platforms like Facebook have enabled young people to connect in new ways, to learn from each other.