SOS : sharing online stories

• Main Author: Cameron, Brett Charles
• Language: English
• Published: University of British Columbia 2012
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/2429/43345

Social network sites (Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, etc.) provide opportunities to millions of users to share themselves with an online global community. Youth enter adolescence eager to explore and experiment with the world as they learn about and negotiate through identity forming and decision-making. Youth use social network sites as a tool to develop their public and private selves. As guides for youth, teachers need to integrate social network sites into their classroom practices to facilitate and aid adolescent development and formal learning. This study employs grounded theory methodology and a focus group of nine thirteen and fourteen year-old research participants to discuss and investigate adolescent use of social network sites to better understand how they make decisions, share, and learn on these websites. These learnings around adolescent social network site use are then applied to my own teaching practice to establish and organize a new strategy for the introduction of social network sites to teaching. The exploration and research generates three fundamental categories – choosing, sharing, and learning. Choosing, sharing, and learning are synthesized and demonstrate that sharing on social network sites influences adolescent identity forming, decision-making, and informal and formal learning. === Education, Faculty of === Graduate