Learning Strategies

My impression is that there are significantly more female teen bloggers than male ones, but maybe I’m wrong. A fascinating study by David Huffaker says that “BlogCensus randomly sampled 490,000 blogs to find 40% male and 36% female, with the rest of the blogs unidentifiable in terms of gender”; on the other hand, he also cites another study that “found there are more females than males in the teen category.”

More important are Huffaker’s conclusions about Internet safety:

...teenagers reveal a considerable amount of personal information in their blogs, including name, age, and location, as well as contact information in the form of an email address, an instant messenger name or a link to personal homepage. The content of blogs typically reflects what is expected to impact a teenager’s life, such as school, intimate relationships, sexual identity and even music...

Males average more emoticons in their posts than females. Males also reveal their homosexuality more often than females, expressing their sexual identity or coming out. Males reveal their location more often than females, while females present a link to a personal web site more often than males.

Labels: teaching and learning