For those of us involved in youth media or technology, the last few weeks have been all about the results of a 3.3 million dollar research project, funded by the MacArthur Foundation called Kids’ Informal Learning with Digital Media: An Ethnographic Investigation of Innovative Knowledge Culture. The project was carried out by investigators at the University of Southern California and the University of California, Berkeley. The purpose of the research? To discover and learn about what young people are doing when they hang out online, doing what researchers like to call “informal learning” and what the rest of us usually refer to as “playing”, “hanging out” and, if we have an assignment due, “wasting time”. During this study dozens of research projects looked at teenagers’ use of MySpace, YouTube, Neopets, gaming sites and more.

Mamas, don’t let your babies grow up to be Luddites is the Globe and Mail‘s take on the research. For a more nuanced discussion, here is a video of Mizuko Ito, lead author of the study, talking about the findings.

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Before I get to commenting on the Women in Linux HOWTO, I think it is ten past overdue o’clock that I get up a post on free software, open-source, closed-source, and maybe just a teensy bit on why people hate Microsoft.

This could go on and on and on: the arguments and positions are complex. Each one of these subheadings could easily be a whole post, or book (and they are).

I’ve been warned that trying to skim over these topics is begging for trolls. I hope to appease the trolls by saying that this is just a taster, a teaser, a CliffsNotes version. (And that you are welcome to use the comments to add your own thoughts and links).

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I am a Victim of H8 is a Facebook photo album created by Gary Shay. Each of the images is of the same slogan, and the idea is that people should tag the images with the names of everyone they know who is negatively affected by Prop 8. Presumably this includes self-tagging.

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It’s true, “GenderAnalyzer” told me so.

I even took a pic of the form results so there is proof. Next time anyone accuses Shameless of being say… a harpies nest of left-wing feminist reactionaries, we can easily fire back with “yeah but we write like men, so whatever, talk to the pen!”

Shameless writes like a boy. Who knew. (Miriam Verburg)

Apparently I also write like a man, or pick manly topics, or use manly sentence structures, or have a masculine vocabulary? Who really knows (sigh). From a quick scroll of the last few entry topics on Shameless we’ve written posts on:

• The US election(4)


• Masturbation(1)


• Halloween(1)


• Abortion(1)


• Fairies vs. Princess (1) ahem - ever so manly


• Sci Fi and Occult TV shows

Oddly both Feministing, and Blogher, were correctly attributed to the ladiezzz. So the theory that this weeks emphasis on politics may have gotten us onto the other team fails, as a quick glance reveals that those two US-based blogs are even more heavily weighted with political content.

(And yes of course it’s silly that ‘political’ writing is considered more masculine, I don’t make the stereotypes I just write about them.)

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Good morning to all you Saturday surfers :). Today I’d like to bring some attention to this troubling article from yesterday’s Globe and Mail - Faceless no more: Social networking comes with a price.

The basic premise is one we are familiar with: “Young Canadians share too much information online and they don’t understand the risks involved - or care about their privacy.”

“During a two month-long investigation, The Globe and Mail tracked more than a dozen Canadians through their open social networking profiles, and used freely available web tools to build detailed profiles of each individual user.”

This not just a speculative moral panic, the Globe actually went and stalked some young Canadians, all in the name of privacy? Whatever sells your paper, right?

The real problem however is not the data-mining (although as far as I am concerned that’s pretty creepy), it’s how the gender of the youth providing the data is framed. Let’s call it the “the naive sex kitten” versus “wild party animal” bias.

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Because it’s Friday, and because I have a big old crush on Eddie Izzard, here’s some YouTube therapy for when your relationship with technology gets that ‘not so fresh’ feeling:

Or it would be if I was doing it on a Curta Mechanical Calculator.
(Damned newfangled electronic calculators have no personality.)

Summary description of the Curta from Dark Roasted Blend:

* Entirely mechanical, no electricity or batteries involved.
* Designed by Curt Herzstark in 1938 and perfected inside a concentration camp.
* Considered to be the most efficient portable calculator (until electronic calculators came in the 70s)
* Simply a thing of beauty, stunning piece of engineering art.

Click the link for more backstory, or watch the Curta do its thing (brace yourself for enthusiastic voiceover action):

I want it I want it I want it. The end.

Drupal Chart in a Sock Heel (emmajane.net)

I’ve been building this site for the upcoming Pan-Canadian Young Feminist Gathering, Waves of Resistance/Toujours Rebelles, using “brand new to me” Drupal. In less techie terms, Drupal is an open source content management system (CMS), with the benefit being that non-professionals can learn to use this tool to build dynamic websites that they have full control over and can allow others to access the process with them.

It has definitely been a steep learning curve for all those involved (even me who has been working on-and-off in the internet world for a number of years), but working with an open-source project has been most rewarding. And now my love of Drupal has turned into a need to show my Drupal pride, especially since only 7% of Drupal users are women (we have our own support group over at Drupal Groups). So as soon as I can breathe a sigh of relief that the Rebelles2008 website is fully functioning I will cast these on: Drupal Socks and a Drupal .ico hat. Maybe soon I can too call myself a Drupal Ninja!

The iTunes franchise has quietly launched a totally free new section in their store, nestled between Podcasts and iPod Games.

It’s called iTunes U, and it contains (free) video and (free) audio courtesy of major universities, PBS and cultural institutions (like MoMA), effectively allowing you to sit in on classes and conferences all over the US. University of California Berkeley in particular has a huge selection of lectures posted.

Meet iTunes U.

It might be the robber baron business model, but for now I’m giving them three gold stars.

Have you tried it? Is iTunes U the new Wikipedia for time suckage?