Poke 1.0 afterthoughts

catherine — Tue, 04 Dec 2007 08:45:38 -0600

On 15 November 2007, Matt Riddle and I attended the “Poke 1.0” symposium at London Knowledge Lab organised by Neil Selwyn. Some brief thoughts and notes on the day here: overall, it was a really exciting and energising event, and I felt there was a strong sense of a nascent research community starting to coalesce. Here are parallel reviews by Lewis Goodings and Juliet Eve.

“Poke 1.0” sought to bring together UK-based social science researchers with an interest in Facebook, as an example of an innovative “social networking” application that is currently used by the majority of students in UK higher education. The audience heard a range of research papers, from media consultancy Human Capital's “macro” view, involving web metrics from Nielsen NetRatings, to Sonia Livingstone's “micro”-level qualitative study of UK teenagers’ use of social networking sites. Our paper represented a “mid-point” between these two extremes, presenting a single-institution case study and focusing on Facebook’s impact on staff/student relations at Cambridge. We also demoed a Facebook mashup widget developed by CARET developers Nicolaas Matthijs and Nick Desmet. The widget allows Facebook users to expose personal Sakai VLE resources on their profile (only the owner can see / access their personal resources). So, we've proved it's possible to do it, the real question now is do students want it, and is it desirable, both educationally and in terms of privacy?

The best came at the end of the day, with a really lively discussion on research ethics and methodologies. The problematic bits are always the most interesting... The consensus in the group seemed to be that many of us are finding that many "gold-standard" research ethics guidelines (e.g. BERA, BSA, Assoc. of Internet Researchers) are not adequate to cover this new research terrain. Is it possible, or desirable, to do "covert" observational research in a "semi-public" environment, for example? (There seemed to be some general agreement among the group that social networking sites are effectively "semi-public" environments, despite their privacy settings and access / searchability constraints.) It's early days yet of course and this sense of newness generated a certain collective enthusiasm, alongside the feeling that, to some extent, we're re-inventing the rules as we go along.

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Poke 1.0 afterthoughts