I was scrolling through my Google Reader on this lovely summer morning and came upon Ian Jukes’ reposting of this article from eclassroomnews.com: “Some Teens Aren’t Liking Facebook As Much As Older Users.” WHAT??? Now that we adults finally figured out where they are, signed up for accounts, talked about friending your kids, how to set privacy and account settings, made policies about whether teachers should or shouldn’t friend students…… they are going elsewhere? Of course. That’s what kids do.
“Facebook is just not the big fad anymore,” said Kim Franklin, a 15-year-old from Gaithersburg, Md., who does not have a Facebook account and prefers social media site Tumblr. “It was like everybody was constantly on there, but now not so much.”
Franklin said her 13-year-old sister Nicole hasn’t signed up for a Facebook account, either.
Meanwhile, Laura Franklin, the girls’ 37-year-old mother, always has Facebook open on her computer while working on her parenting blog, Better in Bulk. That, she said, has led her teen daughters to dub Facebook a “mom thing.”
Everybody was there… so they will leave.
This reinforces for me what I’ve been trying to cultivate as a habit of mind: it’s not about the tool. Tools come and go. It’s about the skills, the processes, the connections.
Julie Kallio, PhD 