By now, educators and parents are aware that teens use Facebook and Twitter extensively, but a new study delves deeper into the specifics of how teens are using social media and what the experience means to them.

Conducted by the PEW Internet and American Life Project, the snapshot of teen social media use aggregates data from over 800 surveys of teens in a nationally representative group

via New: 20 facts about teens, Facebook, and Twitter | eSchool News.

Ever wondered how students really act online? What they’re actually sharing with their friends? Heck, if they’re even using their real name and other information? Chances are good about 1 of every 4 teens seem to have a ‘fake’ social media account with false information. There’s a lot more to this new privacy study on what teens actually share by the Pew Research Center that you should check out too. Here are some highlights from the Pew folks:

Teens are sharing more information about themselves on their social media profiles than they did when we last surveyed in 2006:

91% post a photo of themselves, up from 79% in 2006.

71% post their school name, up from 49%.

71% post the city or town where they live, up from 61%.

53% post their email address, up from 29%.

20% post their cell phone number, up from 2%.

60% of teen Facebook users set their Facebook profiles to private (friends only), and most report high levels of confidence in their ability to manage their settings.

56% of teen Facebook users say it’s “not difficult at all” to manage the privacy controls on their Facebook profile.

33% Facebook-using teens say it’s “not too difficult.”

8% of teen Facebook users say that managing their privacy controls is “somewhat difficult,” while less than 1% describe the process as “very difficult.”

continue reading- New Study Uncovers What Teens Actually Share On Social Media | Edudemic.

By STEVEN PINKER
Published: June 10, 2010

NEW forms of media have always caused moral panics: the printing press, newspapers, paperbacks and television were all once denounced as threats to their consumers’ brainpower and moral fiber.

So too with electronic technologies. PowerPoint, we’re told, is reducing discourse to bullet points. Search engines lower our intelligence, encouraging us to skim on the surface of knowledge rather than dive to its depths. Twitter is shrinking our attention spans.

But such panics often fail basic reality checks. When comic books were accused of turning juveniles into delinquents in the 1950s, crime was falling to record lows, just as the denunciations of video games in the 1990s coincided with the great American crime decline. The decades of television, transistor radios and rock videos were also decades in which I.Q. scores rose continuously.

continue reading- Op-Ed Contributor – Mind Over Mass Media – NYTimes.com.