Wednesday afternoon, at tutoring, my students Benjamin and Max wanted to have more of a discussion than an official physics study. I know how boring and exhausting it is to be concentrated and learn again in their freetime, brutal, and so it was decided to forget the books. Both asked me what im doing in my freetime, they were surprised what they heard from me.
Teacher of the old-school
I told them about my gaming career which i finished in 2006, about my work as designer and some design works i´ve done so far. We had coffee and cake and this was a pretty nice discussion. I always wonder what my students do after school, especially on pc and web. It was pretty nice and interessting what they told me.
Social Networks
We talked about social networking and blogging in general. Honestly i was really surprised about the fact that both, and it seemed mostly of their class, know alot about this kind of networks. Max is WoW player, Benjamin tortures his XBOX 360 all night long, they arent really interessted in flickr or twitter, but both use myspace. I was really curious about what my student’s perceptions were with regards to Facebook and MySpace. I also wanted to take that opportunity to discuss in brief how to make wise choices online.
Facebook&MySpace
My students vary in age from 14 – to 17 years old. I found that 2/3 of my students have a MySpace profile. Two of five have a Facebook profile. And 25% have both.
I then asked them which they prefer, MySpace or Facebook. They answered unanimously that they preferred MySpace. I asked again why and the meant that MySpace is easier to use and configure, has no annoying "invitations" and the most important i emerged, its quite easier to send messages to friends / leave comments.
What made me smile was that they all hated being pummeled by invitations to things like "you´ve been bit by a zombie".
Pro/Contra
They quickly followed up with one thing they really liked about Facebook, that they didn’t get "30+ friend invitations each day from strippers and ho’s." That just made my day when I heard them say that.
Overall, I got the impression that they didn’t see much value in Facebook but were still heavy users of MySpace. I never used MySpace and probably never will, perhaps it could be possible one day that i create a DIV overlay – but there is nothing planned in my near future.
What´s with you, your children or friends and family?
