Originally posted on Cyborgology (The Society Pages), 5.14.14:

The other day I met a friend’s extended family over dinner, including their two sons of about middle school age, and we all had a discussion about young people’s use of technology. Some pundits argue that young people do not have standards of privacy at all in the digital age. In spite of this, studies find that youth do care about privacy but perhaps in ways that are different from adults – for example, they prefer to be visible online to peers and some public audiences but not always to parents and other family members. Over the course of dinner, however, I realized that researchers occupy a complicated position between adults and the youth they study. Parents assert the need to control standards of privacy for their children, and researchers could, accidentally, jeopardize young people’s private spaces by exposing them to their families in ways that may not encourage real dialogue.

I sat myself closer to the youth during dinner because I enjoy talking with them. Interaction habits for youth ethnographers are sometimes hard to shake; I tend to see myself as no different from the youth I interview. I sat back in my chair, relaxed, and avoided words like “kids” so to avoid creating a boundary between me and them, adult and child, and make them less comfortable. Although they seemed shy at first around new people, I tried to put them at ease by asking about school, sports, and video games. Soon enough we were happily talking about the Xbox One andsocial gaming and they seemed much more relaxed. Mission accomplished.

An hour into dinner their parents asked about my research. I said that I study how youth think about privacy and how it informs their uses of new technologies. When they probed further about my dissertation, I said that I’m hanging out with teachers, parents, and youth to try to understand the different influences on how technologies are taken up by young people in the longer term. Usually conversations about my research interests last just a couple of minutes, if not seconds. But the dinner table soon turned into a lively and concerned discussion about technology addiction among children. I enjoy these kinds of dialogues, and try to interject with research findings to anchor the debate. At one point, someone asserted that young people are too hooked on Facebook. I explained that recent studies have actually found that youth are less engaged with Facebook and have shifted their attention to other platforms like Snapchat and Instagrambecause, in part, they can find a place with their peers away from parents.

“Really?” said one adult at the table. Another looked at the boys and said, “Do you both use Snapchat?” All eyes turned to the youth and they reverted to being shy again.

In that moment I realized that, in a way, I had betrayed them.

Although research about youth practices with new media platforms is public, I was the person who wielded those findings at the family dinner table. In doing so, I had — even if it was just a little bit — breached tacit understandings of privacy and trust among youth and their habits with technology. Based on my work and my understanding of current research, I do not think most youth are addicted to technology. I also think that many kinds of tech uses and gaming experiences can be educational and highly prosocial. And, as a youth ethnographer and social constructivist, I do not believe that adults are so different from youth: everyone deserves their own private spaces with friends. Yet, by talking about my research at that dinner table, I invoked a discussion that turned the boys into collective research subjects without their permission. Youth share information about themselves in quasi-public ways: they enjoy visibility online to peers but prefer to be obscured from the vision of parents and other family members. They currently use new media platforms like Snapchat and Instagram to hide in plain sight, so to speak, and hang out and socialize with friends. Their online practices with peers are done away from the watchful eyes of some adults because they need spaces to more autonomously play and grow as people. This dinner conversation made those spaces just a little less private.

While I think my impact during dinner was minimal — youth are pretty smart and are capable of finding and maintaining safe spaces online to hang out with their friends — I am trying to think more critically about my role as a tech researcher who wants to support young people. My data, including frequent observations of classrooms and school life, online contexts where youth interact, and interviews with teachers, parents, and youth, positions me to reflect on actual technology behaviors exhibited by young people and the impacts that teachers, family, and peers have on those practices. Parents clearly want and need more informational tools to best support their children. But putting youth at ease through thoughtful respect of their privacy is necessary to having thoughtful dialogue about technology not just about them but with them.

Originally posted on the Connected Learning Research Network blog, 4.11.14:

A common topic of discussion among our team of Leveling Up researchers is how communities maintain different barriers to entry. Every community, be it an online forum for Worldwide Wrestling enthusiasts, One Direction fangirls, or Starcraft II players, has its own etiquette and sets of rules for entering the community and becoming a full participant. But for platforms that wish to continually attract a new and engaged user base, designers must think through how to minimize barriers to entry. In essence, learning communities should make central to their mission a key design principle: support the n00bs.

Our cases show a number of different ways that n00bs, or new folks, are (and are not) supported through community design. For this post, I will review a few features from my two cases — Sackboy Planeti and Fashion Camp — that illustrate how both infrastructural and cultural design can render communities, in the words of one of my respondents, “a nice place to be part of”:

Guided Introductions

Hanging out in a new community for the first time can be an intimidating experience. Both Sackboy Planet members and Fashion Camp leaders make it a priority to welcome new members and guide them through the basic features of the community so they can begin to familiarize themselves with their environment. For example, new players are encouraged to post on a page for “Introductions” to share a bit about themselves and why they joined Sackboy Planet. Every introductory post is responded to within a matter of hours by existing members. Many responses to introductory posts are welcoming and identify resources:

Hello and welcome to Sackboy Planet! This is the perfect place to you. To help you get started, I’ll provide some links just for you. You might want to check out the Level Arena where you can share ideas you have for new levels to create. You can also ask others for help on your ideas and can receive advice about design.

Players join Sackboy Planet for a variety of reasons, and many community members actively assist in guiding new members to the resources that might best suit their interests, including specific directions and links to resources provided by other community members on how to improve those skills. Fashion camp leaders, too, make every effort to welcome their new fashion designers. Before every lesson begins the teachers introduce themselves to new students and ask about their general interests in fashion, like which styles they love at the moment. Before one lesson, Amy, the camp leader, learned from a new student that she thought ombre print was really cool. Amy briefly left the conversation to dart to the other side of the room where she pulled a bolt of fabric and brought it back to the new student. “Well look at that, we have ombre!” She then talked with the student about how she could apply her interest in ombre design to the fashion sketching lesson for that day that would start in just a couple of minutes. This type of interest-focused introduction, which is typical at both Sackboy Planet and Fashion Camp, maintains a low barrier to entry by providing opportunities for rapid engagement in learning activities.

Empower the Existing User Base

A community design strategy that works well to engage new users, especially as a community scales in size, is to empower the existing user base with key roles. For example, Fashion Camp leaders typically oversee a camp lesson of about 15-20 youth. Since the courses are project based, participants work on widely different designs at different stages and at varied levels of expertise. The camp leaders often do not have the bandwidth to help each student one-on-one throughout the course of a given lesson. To address this issue, teachers identify youth who have expertise with particular design sets to help other students who need help. This strategy has two important outcomes: it makes the helper youth feel good about their growth as designers, and it empowers them to distribute the mentoring work throughout the community.

Sackboy Planet members also empower select users with roles and titles that are assigned key regulatory tasks. For example, the community leaders identify users who are active and helpful and ask them to serve as Moderators. Moderators are tasked with welcoming new members (per the “Guided Introductions” section above) as well as mediating conflicts when other members alert them to a problem. Moderators also typically pursue their work with gusto; being selected by the Sackboy Planet leaders to moderate is considered to be a flattering signal of their budding fluency with community practice and procedure. Just like at Fashion Camp, Moderators on Sackboy Planet take on important work that the leaders themselves could never accomplish. Moderators, with the help of other community members, comb through hundreds of new posts a day and interact with new players in ways that maintain low barriers to entry and participation.

Design for “Thumbs Up,” not “Down”

Reputation systems, including badges or metrics like “thumbs up,” “thumbs down,” or “favorites,” exist on many web platforms.Sackboy Planet leaders experimented for months with different sets of reputation designs to try to establish a supportive culture among members. For example, through an iterative design process, the leaders learned that certain reputation features breed negativity and elitism:

What I wanted to avoid was giving people the feeling of elitism or building false classes into the site. You get that a lot in other sites where users who have been around longer tend to treat new users like they are less worthy.

One way Sackboy Planet leaders minimized obstacles to a culture of inclusivity was by designing the infraction system metrics out of public purview:

We have infractions, like saying you did something bad, and we have record of it…and that is private. It’s between us and the user. No one else can see the infraction. That can cause a lot of problems…especially if you want to give them the opportunity to improve.

Sackboy Planet leaders design for “thumbs up,” not “thumbs down,” as a way to cultivate a community of support, validation, and improvement. When “thumbs down” features did exist on the forums years ago, players reported higher instances of trolling, or bad behavior and negativity.

Community design, in the form of both infrastructural changes (like metrics and infraction systems) and cultural features (such as empowering users with roles), plays a powerful role in establishing the level of inclusivity in a particular environment. Designing to support the n00bs is a critical extension of Connected Learning theory. Learning communities need to maintain low barriers through inclusivity to entry to ensure wide participation and a diversity of membership and talents.

And remember…we were all n00bs once.

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iSackboy Planet and any names used in this post are pseudonyms.