On the heels of its recent privacy misstep, Facebook yesterday announced a new approach to site governance. It has published a set of proposed Facebook Principles intended to guide the future development of the service, and a Statement of Rights and Responsibilities that will define Facebook’s and user’s commitments to the site.

Perhaps more significantly, Facebook is asking for users to comment and vote on the documents, signaling a new openness to member participation in future policies. This may offer an opportunity to get other issues, such as group size limits, on the table.

More: Facebook news release

The Publishing Trends Blog posts five interesting takeaways from “Youth and Creativity: Emerging Trends in Self-expression and Publishing,” a session of the O’Reilly Tools of Change Conference. This session focused on usage habits among teens who were using digital media as a means of self-expression but who weren’t considering design or art as possible careers or fields of study.

The takeaways:

• Teens don’t see buying a software program (like Adobe Photoshop) as a major “life event.” Whereas people in their twenties and thirties may sign up for classes and buy instruction manuals after purchasing a program, teens churn through many different technologies quickly, using programs only for what they need and then moving on.
• At the same time, teens feel as if they have mastered these programs. Westerman [one of the session presenters] pointed out that when he asks an adult, professional Photoshop user if she knows everything there is to know about Photoshop, that adult will usually answer, “No, I haven’t even scratched the surface.” Teens, on the other hand, will answer, “Yeah, I know Photoshop.” Nor are they concerned that they haven’t learned all the “right” ways of doing things with a program–they’re concentrated on the outcome, not the tool. They don’t ask, “How do I use the masking tool?” They ask, “How can I create a cool rain effect?”
• That’s not to say that teens aren’t asking for help. They are! But they’re going to their peers online or typing queries into Google. There’s a return of the “apprenticeship”–teens learning skills from their more knowledgable peers, actively seeking critiques of their work, and really adopting a craft mentality. Learning is a process of watching and doing on the fly. “There’s no more learning curve,” Westerman said.
• Any niche site can become a social hub–teens aren’t just using Facebook for social networking. One subject in the study, “David,” spent most of his time on the “Silverfish Longboarding” discussion boards. (A longboard is a type of skateboard.) These microcommunities give teens, who tend to define themselves through 2 or 3 major interests when creating online personas, a sense of belonging.
• Teens aren’t using the fanciest, newest technology. Most of those surveyed had fairly old computers and older versions of software. They were making do with what they had. And they were not pirating software. One teen, “Gina,” bought a copy of Adobe Photoshop with her friend at Costco, and the girls took turns using it at home, since they only had one license.

Not to belabor this issue, but James V. Schall at First Principles
weighs in with a reflection on what, exactly, it means to be a professor:

The great act of being a student is first simply to listen, to listen to one who knows human and divine things, not all of them, to be sure, but enough to be himself awed by them. The “last professor” implies a world in which the young are never exposed to wonder, a world in which they never experience the fascination of what is because they once encountered an honest man who simply talked to them about what was true.

The last professor may indeed disappear from the universities. In some sense, he already has. My Students’ Guide to Liberal Learning, now that I think of it, was premised on this suspicion. Universities will go on specializing and teaching us how to find a job, how to be practical, something that is not unworthy of us. But we will have to go elsewhere to find out about what is.

As a follow-up to my last post about Fish’s and Donoghue’s predictions for liberal arts, there’s this from Charles M. Haskins’s The Rise of Universities:

By the thirteenth century…[professors of rhetoric] advertised their wares in a way that has been compared to the claims of a modern business course–short and practical, with no time wasted on outgrown classical authors but everything fresh and snappy and up-to-date, ready to be applied the same day if need be! Thus one professor at Bologna … promises to train his students in writing every sort of letter and official document which was demanded of the notaries and secretaries of this day. Since … such teachers specialized in the composition of student letters, chiefly skillful appeals to the parental purse, their practical utility was at once apparent.

While colleges and universities bemoan the admissions frenzy, high schools keep upping the ante.

Yesterday, the Wall Street Journal ran an article on student athletes eschewing the use of private athletic-recruiting counselors, which can be quite costly. Instead, they are using do-it-yourself web sites to promote their talents to coaches at colleges and universities throughout the country. The burst of online methods available to help student athletes promote themselves demonstrates how the web continues to change the way prospective students participate in the recruitment process.

One of the hottest sites, according to the WSJ, is beRecruited.com. Students spend $39.99 to post their resume, along with photographs and videos of them in action. A huge savings compared to the typical cost of hiring a counselor. Of course, sites like beRecruited.com rely on coaches’ willingness to weed through a lot of information to land on talent they might ultimately want to pursue. Relying on a counselor to assist with the process is certainly a more direct, time-effective way to identify desirable talent. That said, if a school relies mostly on recommendations of this kind, they might be missing out on low-income students who can’t pay the $700 and up fees associated with hiring a private counselor or consultant. The availability of cost-effective, online resources can only help ensure that more students ultimately find the school that is right for them.