While reading through this week's materials I kept seeing the name danah boyd pop up - first in Henry Jenkins piece and then later as the author of the second piece on the history of social networking sites. And finally, I found that Shirk mentions her in a later chapter of his book. I was intrigued partly because she did not capitalize her name and second because most researchers in this field would have to be fairly new to the social media academia. It turns out Jenkins was her advisor at the MIT Media Lab where she earned her Master's degree.On boyd's website I found that she is known as as a researcher who "examines social media, youth practices, tensions between public and private, social network sites, and other intersections between technology and society." From reading about her I surmised she is fond of the Creative Commons movement and has posted links to all of her published works including her 406-page dissertation. boyd's work is important in helping us to understand social media and how it can be used effectively in instructional design and human performance.
Here is a video of Boyd talking at a 2009 Penn State Symposium on the topic: "Teenagers who are Living and Learning with Social"
The capitalization issue has come up for me time and again. I cite boyd's work often enough, and editors almost always capitalize her name when creating page proofs. And then I have to correct them. Sometimes they tell me that there's nothing they can do, that they simply have to capitalize. Sigh ...
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