Savvy Web 2.0 Teens Forge Critical Thinking Skills
RSSBy Lauren Barack
Teens are crafting new ways to connect online, says a Toronto, Canada-based researcher, who's studying how students use Web 2.0 social media tools to make friends-and are inadvertently transferring these skills to the classroom. Natalia Sinitskaya Ronda, a PhD candidate with Toronto-based York University, discovered that a handful of 14-year-old girls in a pilot study used critical thinking skills independently online. "How teenagers use Web 2.0 tools has huge implications for teaching critical thinking skills," says Ronda, citing Wikipedia as one example. "While adolescents are using tools like Wikipedia in their social lives (one of my participants actually admitted she read Wikipedia for fun), they are frequently discouraged from using Wikipedia in the school. Instead of banning Wikipedia, really important conversations can be held about how Wikipedia is constructed: the processes of peer editing, the differences between paper and online encyclopedias, can encyclopedia (paper or online) serve as the only source of information when conducting research." Educators also can give out an assignment to analyze a whether a Wikipedia article is accurate, biased, or has supporting evidence, she says. Students can even collaborate on writing a Wikipedia article on a topic they're studying to see how the process of peer writing and editing works. "These conversations and activities can be really important, and can teach students valuable critical skills: how to find information online, how to examine the accuracy and source of information they find online, and how to be not only consumers of information, but active participants in creating it." The purpose of the pilot study was to examine how teens use digital social media in novel and exciting ways. What was surprising? Not all teens are enthusiastic users of tools such as Facebook. "One teenager was a reluctant convert to Facebook, and she cited previous bad experiences with MySpace as one of the reasons she was one of the last people to join Facebook in her peer network," says Ronda, adding that she was also interested to see how teens tailored online tools to suit their own needs. "One teenager used YouTube as a social networking tool, viewing videos of potential friends in order to make a judgment whether this person would be interesting as a friend." Another interesting finding was related to privacy. Those in the study had a good idea of what their privacy options were, and all put some time into researching their privacy settings, says Ronda, explaining that teens made decisions on who they connected to and what they shared, after exploring options and reflecting on how these decisions would affect their online experience. "And even though one participant chose to make her profile public, it was an informed choice." While all of Ronda's subjects were adept online, and fluent digitally - that didn't mean they all flocked to social media sites, a common conceit among those who are familiar with teens. She managed to debunk that cliché after discovering that one of her participants was actually a very recent Facebook convert, having signed-up after friends cajoled her. Natalia Sinitskaya Ronda "This goes counter to the popular opinion that all teenagers are online, or if not, they want to be," Ronda says. Ronda presented her recent study "Will You Be My Friend? Adolescents' Social Use of Web 2.0" at the Canadian Society for the Study of Education Annual Conference in Montreal and has already expanded her study to older students, continuing to see how teens adopt social media to their own use, especially in the areas of networking and school work. "The pilot study allowed me to get a glimpse of what adolescents are doing online, how they are using new social tools, and what they think about these tools being used in school," she says. "In the future I would like to continue the investigation of how new digital tools can be used to support learning." Rhonda says she became interested in exploring adolescents' use of social media and their application in education because kids are getting increasingly proficient in new digital tools, such as Facebook, YouTube, and video gaming. "These tools grow and diversify, and researchers need to catch up to what teenagers are doing online," she says. "Teenagers are engaged in practices that are not only important socially, but are important educationally. Social media tools hold great potential for developing important proficiencies that have to do with communicating and expressing ideas and thoughts, conducting research, and accessing and creating knowledge." Since teens in the pilot study didn't talk about Facebook as a tool for learning-or see any relation between their social uses of Facebook and learning in school-Ronda says educators should be mindful of the fact that Facebook is primarily viewed by teenagers as something that's social and not educational. "That being said, there's great potential in addressing information literacy skills through Facebook (and Facebook can be used or talked about as one of the examples, so kids who don't have Facebook won't feel left out)," she says, citing the exploration of different privacy settings as an interesting online information literacy lesson. "This will help students understand better what their options are, how they can be put more in control of their own information online, what information about them is being made public and how they can change that." The pilot study is aimed at exploratory work to test the ground for a larger study. And while the sample size is limited, the students she studied "can tell us many important things about how they use new technologies."
