If you don’t know about MySpace and Xanga, now is the time to learn about it! Go to Xanga, click on “blogs” and put in the name of your local high school or junior high school. After you click around a bit, you’ll find that students at your local high school are hooked together by the blog – eventually you may find a teenager that you know. To search MySpace, you have to create an account, which takes less than 5 minutes. Again, you’ll find that MySpace has made it easy for students from the same high school to link together – if students put in the correct name of their high school. Each of these online areas allows individuals to journal, post pictures, post comments, and have a chat area. These are the most popular online teen hang-outs. As I was researching information for this article, I went to Google News. I found 3,740 news articles written about MySpace in the previous four weeks across the nation!

MySpace has surpassed eBay, Google and AOL in number of page views. MySpace receives more than twice the number of daily hits as Google. “MySpace is one of the hottest Web sites around. It’s got 54 million members. It’s gaining 150,000 new ones each day. Punch in the zip code for Middletown and you find 3,000 MySpace members within 10 miles.” (Times-Herald, New York, Feb. 12, 2006)

Maybe you have read the news article about the teen in New York, or the teen in Seattle or the teen in Fresno, California who met someone via MySpace who assaulted them once they met in person. Or perhaps you read the article about the students who posted threats to their teachers or their school on their sites and were suspended. This is the aspect of these online meeting places that is alarming and must be addressed through education, not just restriction.

Students need to learn the importance of online safety. One Internet safety expert recommends teaching teens to “Google” their name once a week to see how others can find them (a good idea for adults, too). Wiredsafety recommends a list of 20 rules for using the Internet. The top 3 rules for teens should be taught by every parent, every teacher, and every librarian:

• I will not give my name, address, telephone number, school, or my parents’ names, address, or telephone number to anyone I meet on the computer.
• I understand that some people online pretend to be someone else. Sometimes they pretend to be kids when they’re really grown ups.
• I will not buy or order anything online without asking my parents or give out any credit card information.

However, both MySpace and Xanga are opportunities to apply the Big 6 stages 4-6, Use of Information, Synthesis and Evaluation. For Use of Information, students can “take notes” in their area as well as collect pictures for that research project. They can post the first draft of an essay and then have their friends comment on it (Synthesis/Evaluation). At the end of each posting in MySpace and Xanga, there is a place for comments. For the technologically transformed teacher, students can post their final project on Xanga or MySpace and the student can simply email the URL of the posting and the teacher could click, read and then grade the work (Evaluation). These online areas are great for ongoing journaling about the recent novel read for an English class (Synthesis). The teacher and the students in one class can all be connected to one another’s journaling area through the linking features in both MySpace and Xanga. By utilizing these online tools, teachers then have opportunities to talk about online safety – not just once at the beginning of the school year, but throughout the year. We know that 90 percent of teens go online every week for a variety of reasons, one of which is to post new thoughts or pictures to their Myspace or Xanga site and the other is to read what their friends have posted as well…and then to write a response to the other person. The challenge for all librarians is to educate students and teachers about the appropriate uses of the World Wide Web and then use many of these great (free) features for digital age learning strategies.