Adolescent Interview

Hello and Happy Holidays to you celebrating. For our interview with an adolescent user of new media, I chose to look at the use of social media in and outside of the academic setting, the amount of time spent collaborating with others for multiple purposes, and their ability to multi-task, or more properly described as task-switching (Growing up Digital). I wanted to see how students were collaborating online and if any of it was considered academic collaboration--projects, homework, or study groups. Student A is a 9th grader who uses social media sites like facebook, tumblr, instagram, snap chat, sound cloud (Student A is an active user of sound cloud) and various messaging services. He also uses blogger to update his homework. I interviewed Student A once at the beginning of the week, beginning with questions that required him to predict his time usage of social media for the following activities--interacting with friends on a purely social basis, creating/collaborating with friends for non-scholastic purposes, creating/collaborating with friends for scholastic purposes, and how many of the activities are done, "simultaneously" or during the same period of time. We identified examples for the following: - What he classifies as socializes with friends--Facebook Messenger, Instagram, Snapchat - What he classifies as collaborating/creating with friends--soundcloud, garageband, youtube. - What he classifies for scholastic purposes--Blog Updates, Tumblr feed I began asking him to predict his time usage for each activities, he replied, "I do everything at once, except when I'm making music that I spend most my time on." Student A had to go on explaining to me, exactly what he meant by creating music, the tools he uses for creating and collaborating on beats, and the various sites, blogs, he is in constant check with other online music makers for collaboration. I was fascinated, unaware that such an online community exists. He showed me his sound cloud pages and the various other musicians on the site who he has collaborated with. In Growing Up Digital the authors discuss how children are becoming authorities on this type of new media, but through my interview with Student A, I realized it was more than that, they were leaders of these online communities--creating, maintaining, and collaborating with others to keep them alive. Often people mistake this generation for lacking ambition, but through their creative use of new media they are turning out more digital products than previous generations at this age. In Hanna Lindstrom's "The Irreversible Way education psychology and technology changed the Brain," she discusses that we have written off the Internet as purely entertainment, but to students like student A they are using new media to "create things in new ways." Next we discussed his ability to multi-task, he explains, "all I ever do is multi-task, and I don't even realize I'm doing it." As an educator I know I've often fell under the assumption that multi-tasking is a sure way of losing focus on an given activity. However, based on this weeks reading and after interviewing student A, I've realized students like Student A who have grown up in this digital world are able to switch tasks better than others, including myself (I've also learned that I fall at the older end of this New Media generation!). Student A explained to me that it actually helped him complete his blog homework, switching back to Facebook to check in with one of his friends about a question for school, and then to take a mini break and read some news on tumblr. I couldn't deny that student A is a star student, never are his blogs lacking in detail or shortened through the dreaded internet lingo. At the end of the week we reconvened and student A gave me his updated responses. He explained he set a timer every time he switched task then added up his time, "every night I spent approximately two hours on homework, like going back and forth from doing other stuff, but altogether around two hours, I spent like only 45 minutes talking with friends. Then like after everything was done usually around 30 to sometimes 2 hours, depending on how fast I got my work done, creating music, working on some older stuff, and on music forums." Not bad.