Educators That Rock!: Danah Boyd
Last week, findingEducation caught up with
Dr. danah boyd at the American Association of School Librarians National Conference in Charlotte, N.C. boyd is an internationally recognized social media expert researcher for Microsoft Research New England, a fellow at Harvard University's Berkman Center for Internet and Society, and an ethnographer, blogger and contributing author to the book “
Hanging Out, Messing Around, and Geeking Out: Kids Living and Learning with New Media.”
boyd explains on her blog that “there are a lot of reasons … some personal and some political” as to why she decided to omit the capital letters in her name. A keynote speaker at the conference, she drew from her research on social networking sites such as MySpace and Facebook to explain how kids use these tools to communicate and to “create digital bodies” to express themselves.
In her online biography, boyd describes herself as a bored and rebellious student that went to “smart kids camp” in the summer but had trouble fitting in until she went online. “The Internet opened the door of possibilities to me. I found other smart kids year round ... Strangers taught me so much about the world and about myself,” she wrote.
“Unstructured environments are critical to social learning,” boyd said in her talk. Educators must “work with the grain, not against it.” She told findingEducation, “It's not about getting kids to be passionate about the things that librarians and teachers are passionate about, but using what kids are passionate about as gateways to learning.”
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