Jailtime because of Facebook photos?

It's an eye-opening story teen social networkers should know about. "Two weeks after Joshua Lipton was charged in a drunken driving crash that seriously injured a woman, the 20-year-old [Rhode Island] college junior attended a Halloween party dressed ... in an orange jumpsuit labeled 'Jail Bird'," according to a report in CNN.com. Another victim of the crash gave copies of the photos to the prosecutor in Lipton's case. The prosecutor presented the photos of the "unrepentant partier" in a PowerPoint presentation at Lipton's sentencing, and the judge - who later acknowledged he was influenced by the photos - gave Lipton two years, calling him "depraved."

Time for social networking in school?

TechNewsWorld suggests it's time to end the stark dichotomy of second-nature social networking at home vs. a complete ban on social networking at school - even in an academic context. Though not so much in the classroom, "some school districts are going beyond e-mail technology and using collaboration software and online services to share information, host Web conferences and assign tasks and projects," and teachers are social networking with each other for professional purposes. Certainly we don't have to be all literalist about social networking and allow the negative, narrowly defined presentation of it in the news media to be what we picture of social networking at school. There are all kinds of forms social networking can take, from wikis to collaborative video producing to podcasting to class blogging to transworld collaboration in a global classroom! The TechNewsWorld article includes an annotated list of social-networking tools for the education market that might interest parents as well as teachers - for example, Blackboard's Sync, Cramster.com for the college market, ePals for K-12, Jooners, and Wimba Pronto.

Teen Second Life too safe?

I had to add this little addendum to that last item about social-networking options because you don't see comments like this in the news too often. Liz Lawley, mother of a 14-year-old and director of the social-computing lab at the Rochester Institute of Technology, told PC World she's "strongly against some of the restrictive methods used online to segregate adults from children in an attempt to protect kids from predators. On Second Life, for example, she can't interact with her son because he has to be in the teen grid and she has to be in the adult grid," which means she can't learn about how he uses technology and he can't learn from her in real time how to function in "a social context" (I heard this frustration from educators at the NECC conference in San Antonio earlier this month - see "2 virtual worlds" - that keeping teen and adult "worlds" was educationally constrictive). Lawley said she feels "shutting down sites or trying to shut out people won't solve the problem of sexual predators." Education will, she said. Sexual predation is not unique to the online world, she added, where we don't shut down churches or bar kids from them because child abuse has occurred in some of them.

Social networkers want more options

The PC World headline calls it "next-generation social networking." Researchers at the Rochester Institute of Technology are saying exactly what UK teens told Prof. Sonia Livingstone in her study (see "Fictionalizing their profiles"): that social sites need more ways to characterize friends and more options for what anybody can see in a profile. They need to reflect socializing in the "real world" more. "Many social-networking sites essentially force users to become part of a huge community, or they force users to choose whether someone else is a friend or not, with no other subtleties defining that relationship," Liz Lawley, director of RIT's social-computing lab, told a Microsoft-sponsored conference of researchers, PC World reports. Thinking and operating in binaries - friend or non-friend, private or public - instead of in the more subtle gradations of human relationships and intimacy just doesn't work, avid online socializers find. It'll be interesting to see how soon social-networking sites do something about this.

Another kind of filtering needed too

Apple retail stores aren't the only places employing tech "geniuses." Libraries are too. The Internet has turned out to be a "major tool" not only for patrons but librarians as well, saving space, making library resources accessible at home, and bringing more patrons to the library, Michigan's Saginaw News reports. Research that the Saginaw News cites indicates patrons are figuring out that librarians are better than anyone at information filtering. "With their training, librarians are more adept than the average citizen at using search engines to locate and decipher reliable data. [Librarian Gail] Parsons notes her experience helps her discern valid sources and recognize biases." The need for those filtering skills has never been greater - not only for being good scholars and media consumers but also for safe, productive use of technology (phones, the Web, virtual worlds, videogames, media players, etc.). Parents and educators, too, play vital roles in this filtering education. Media-literacy teaching at home and school can be aimed at critical thinking not only about 1) incoming information but also about 2) incoming communication - from everybody, friends or not. It also needs to move beyond what's coming in to include 3) outgoing behavior and communication from a child, via text, images, voice, and video (see "Good citizens in virtual worlds, too"). About Nos. 2 and 3, children can be taught to ask themselves questions like: What's this person really saying to me - is this a form of manipulation? Am I being fair to this person if I IM this about him - would I want him to say this about me? Should I send a photo around with this person in it if I don't have her permission? Will posting this video of me possibly embarrass me in the future if I can't take it down and someone could copy and repost it anytime?

Videogame program for libraries

You just may be seeing more videogame play at a public library near you. "The American Library Association has announced a new project funded with a $1 million grant from the Verizon Foundation" to study how videogame play improves literacy skills and create a "tool kit that libraries across the country can use to develop gaming programs," the Arizona Daily Star reports. One of the librarians charged with developing the program told the Star that she's seeing "growing evidence that games in general, from the traditional board versions to electronic and online ones, support literacy and 21st-century learning skills." Meanwhile, the Charlotte, N.C., public library is offering free workshops in videogame design, the Charlotte Observer reports, the Chicago Tribune asks, "Should libraries stock videogames?" and the Columbus Dispatch reports that "Libraries' videogames are teen magnet."

Polish police ordered off social site

At work, that is. "This little item in Reuters Africa is interesting partly because it's about Polish police being ordered not to use a social networking site at work, partly because it was picked up in Africa, and partly because of this sign of the Poland-born site's popularity. Reuters Africa reports that Poland's national police headquarters has banned the social site Nasza-klasa.pl (which means "Our Class" in Polish) from police offices except "for officers trying to track down offenders over the Internet." Reuters picked this news up from the Polish daily paper Dziennik. The report said "an internal investigation had shown police officers were often using Nasza Klasa ... for idle chit-chat instead of working." YouTube reportedly has been blocked by "other Polish state agencies" to keep workers focused on work.

Fictionalizing their profiles

Adults need to take what they see in teen social-networking profiles with a grain of salt. Case in point:

Six UK newspapers ran a story about a teenager's "wild party" that her mother said never happened. It was a bit of fiction lifted from the girl's Bebo profile. First there was an invite sent out promising "the party of the year" for her 16th birthday, CNET reports. "Subsequent posts on Jodie Hudson's Bebo account spoke of underage drinking, sex acts, and violence that occurred at the celebration." The papers said 400 teens showed up and, encountering the ensuing "chaos," Jodie's mother "punched her in the face out of anger." Amanda Hudson wrote the newspapers that there was no underage drinking, no sex, no violence, and no stealing, despite what her daughter posted in Bebo. She's "suing for defamation and breach of privacy." In its coverage, The Independent cited legal experts as saying "the case may be a legal landmark because there is no precedent in disputes involving third parties who use or publish information from social-networking sites."

The case is also a perfectly timed illustration of a point London School of Economics Prof. Sonia Livingstone makes in her latest study, "Taking risky opportunities in youthful content creation: teenagers’ use of social-networking sites for intimacy, privacy and self-expression" in New Media & Society (June 208).

"It should not be assumed that profiles are simply read as information about an individual," the social psychology professor suggests. Referring to one of her research subjects, Livingstone writes: "Jenny, like others, is well aware that people’s profiles can be 'just a front.' For several of the participants, it seemed that position in the peer network was more significant than the personal information provided, rendering the profile a place-marker more than a self portrait."

Some teens have several profiles on various social sites, some with the peer group more on display than the profile owner. All in all, though, the profiles of the social networkers in her study apparently were more about the individual in relation to his or her group of friends than about the group itself. That blend of individual and group is key and what seems to drive the information that appears in the profile (photos, invites, comments, favorite whatevers). So great care goes into what is made private (to friends only) and what is made public, and - Livingstone indicates later in her analysis - the sites' severely limited choices where privacy's concerned (public or private) is a problem for young people wanting to display more gradations. "Teenagers must and do disclose personal information in order to sustain intimacy [as in sharing innermost thoughts or passwords]," Livingstone writes, but they wish to be in control of how they manage this disclosure."

One final observation I found fascinating, in response to what many adults are thinking these days (and which I'm adding here because the article costs $15 to download): Livingstone writes that "although it indeed appears that, for many young people, social networking is 'all about me, me, me,' this need not imply narcissistic self-absorption. Rather, following Mead’s (1934) fundamental distinction between the 'I' and the 'me' as twin aspects of the self, social networking is about 'me' in the sense that it reveals the self embedded in the peer group, as known to and represented by others, rather than the private 'I' known best by oneself."

My takeaway: There's no reason to overreact to a superficial surf through a bunch of social-networking profiles - even those of our own kids' peers. In many ways their profile fabrications are good. They're...

Protective - only real-life friends, not creeps, know what is and isn't true, which means strangers who try to contact them have zero credibility and usually get ignored.

A safe way to explore identity and social relating, which is part of adolescent development

A creative outlet with instant audience (mostly their friends and creative collaborators), something aspiring writers of the past could only dream about - see the last sentence of this item on the California-based Digital Youth research project.

Readers: Dr. Livingstone told me she'll send a pdf copy of her article to anyone interested. If you are, drop me an email at anne@netfamilynews.org, and I'll pass your request along to her.

Related links

Skewing a little younger: Note how 10-year-old Clementine creates and plays with fictional identities in various sites and worlds online, as told by her mother, New York Times columnist Michelle Slatalla in "Today, I think I'll be Hippohead" ("as of last month, more than 100 new virtual worlds had started up or were in development," Michelle reports).

The social sites teens use: In the UK, "Facebook dominates UK social networking with 45.29% of the market, almost double the share of second-placed Bebo and three times more than MySpace, as micro blogging site Twitter shows major growth," UK-based BrandRepublic.com reports.

"Just because they crave attention?"

Some US police don't take SN profiles at face value - see this on how some "gang members" in MySpace are just wannabes acting out.

Briton wins social-site libel case

This is a social-networking legal first. A British high court awarded a man named Mathew Firsht 22,000 pounds (nearly $44,000) in damages from a fake profile and group about him on Facebook, according to a report in MSNBC. The group, called “Has Mathew Firsht lied to you?”, and imposter profile reportedly were created by a former school friend. The profile contained "false claims about [Firsht's] sexuality, religion and political views, the Financial Times reports. According to MSNBC, "the information stayed on the site for 16 days until Firsht's brother spotted it. Firsht alerted Facebook staff who deleted the pages and told his lawyers they had been posted on the site from a computer at Raphael's home."

MySpace ever more mobile

Trying to block MySpace at school (or home or anywhere) is getting harder, since...

1. "For teens, the future is mobile," CNET reports, and
2. MySpace (not to mention other social sites) is getting increasingly mobile.

MySpace just announced its new social-networking app for the iPhone (available free in iPhone's App Store), Internet News reports. With it, iPhone users can "search the network and add friends, compose and delete mail, and send bulletin blasts to all their friends [in 12 languages so far]. It will also offer the ability to upload and share pictures" and music. MySpace is also available on Helio phones, the T-Mobile Sidekick and other AT&T phones - not to mention its deals so far with 27 carriers in 20 countries offering m.myspace.com (MySpace tailored just for those little mobile screens). MediaPost says games and social networking "lead the way" in the App Store, now with 500 applications in it. And social networking on phones is only just taking off - ITbusiness.ca calls mobile social networking a "goldmine of untapped business opportunities." So, for youth, filtering workarounds are getting easier by the moment. As my tech educator friend Anne Bubnic wrote, this is "another good reason we need to focus on digital citizenship rather than block sites - kind of like trying to block out fresh air when it’s all around you, anyway." Parents might consider setting parental controls on kids' iPhones themselves, though, since 6 out of 10 of the most popular apps named by a site that rates iPhone apps (which was pointed out by a reader and to which NetFamilyNews can't ethically link) are selling porn. For a mobile social-networking reality check, a study in the UK, where youth mobile phone use is even higher than in the US, found that "only 24% of Internet users access social-networking sites with a mobile phone," mocoNews.net reports.

Texting for parent avoidance?

That's according to an executive in Disney's US mobile-phone division: that kids will let parents' calls go to voicemail, then text Mom or Dad about what's up, CNET reports. They prefer texting to talking with parents (and friends) "so that they can continue doing other things like play video games with friends." Check out the texting numbers CNET's Stefanie Olsen reports, citing C&R Research in Chicago: "The average teen generates between 50 and 70 text messages a day, or as many as 18,000 a year." Nearly 50% of US 10-to-13-year-olds and 83% of teens own cellphones.

New project or era for social Web?

The Telegraph calls it a kind of "passport" for Web socializers. Facebook calls it "Facebook Connect." With it, other sites (e.g., Twitter, SixApart, and 22 others so far, The Telegraph says) can use people's Facebook screenname and password instead of storing separate ID info for those users. They can also offer users "the ability to import their list of friends from Facebook," the New York Times reports. Facebook Connect, which won't completely launch until the fall, isn't the only such "passport" system in the works, though. The Telegraph says its competitors are MySpace's Data Availability project and Google's OpenSocial project (Bebo's thrown in with the latter project). Facebook founder/CEO Mark Zuckerberg was speaking about this, some other new features, and his view of a more decentralized social Web in future at a social-networking developers conference in San Francisco this week. He spoke, the Times reports, of social networking being "at the beginning of a movement and the beginning of an industry.” Interestingly, Zuckerberg mentioned that more than two-thirds of Facebook users are outside the US, according to The Telegraph. See also "Facebook to clean up its apps," by my ConnectSafely.org co-director Larry Magid.

'Friending' against school policy

It's against school policy in Mississippi's Lamar County Public School District for teachers and students to text each other or to be "friends" in social-networking sites. "Both texting and social networking have too many gray areas that could lead to misunderstanding and downright trouble," the Hattiesburg American reports. The policy's being considered in other Mississippi school districts as well. This reminds me of a case of teacher-to-student sexual exploitation involving texting in the news this past year (sorry I can't find the link at the moment). I'd like to hear your thoughts on the validity of this school policy - in comments here or, ideally, in the ConnectSafely.org forum.

Another COPA ruling

The federal appeals court in Philadelphia again ruled that the Child Online Protection Act of 1998 is unconstitutional. The decision is "the latest twist in a decade-long legal battle [that] ... has already reached the Supreme Court and could be headed back there," the Associated Press reports. COPA, which was blocked by the Philadelphia court shortly after it was signed, followed the Communications Decency Act, which was also intended to regulate adult Web content. CDA was ruled unconstitutional in "the landmark case Reno v. American Civil Liberties Union," AP added.

New York's new videogame law

Gov. David Paterson today signed a law that establishes an advisory panel to study the effects of videogame violence on kids and establishes $100 civil penalties for "violations of labeling and parental control provisions," Newsday reports. Most videogame consoles already have parental controls, however (see this about a guide for them), and game ratings are available to all at ESRB.org. Critics are calling it "moral preening" after similar laws have been struck down as unconstitutional in other states. "Language making a felony of selling video games that are sexually explicit or contain depraved violence was lost during furious lobbying that derailed [New York's] bill in May 2007. That provision would have made the law among the strictest in the nation," Newsday adds. Let's now see if this version of the law passes constitutional muster.

NSFW 'rating' useful to parents

It stands for "not suitable for work" and, in effect, it's a Web content rating. "NSFW" is "used to indicate that the content of the message or Web page is not appropriate because it is off-color at best or sexually explicit at worst," according to the GetNetWise blog. Like IMHO ("in my humble opinion") or even POS ("parent over shoulder"), it's one of those grassroots Internet terms that just takes off, usually because it's supremely useful to a lot of people. That would include parents, who probably wouldn't want to see it in the Subject field of an email message a child could view or among the search terms among those used for "homework." GetNetWise points out that sometimes it's in the invisible code behind a Web page. The Firefox browser "has a plug-in which allows you to avoid links tagged as being NSFW." Parents might consider downloading that plug-in (or "add-on," as Firefox calls it) and restricting at least younger kids' browser use to Firefox.

Social Web & business

I'm including this in a family-tech blog because kids just could some day be businesspeople! Aspects of social networking are really making inroads into the business world. One bit of evidence this week is the finding that "more than 50% of German companies use the means of communication provided by web 2.0, i.e. blogs, wikis and social networking." That's from Just4business.eu, citing a study by BITKOM and Oracle. Wikis (the collaborative online encyclopedia Wikipedia being an example) in particular are used to help match people with creative solutions to "particular tasks and problems." Other benefits cited: increased productivity, more cooperation between departments and company locations, transparency, increased productivity, and accessible documentation of work processes. Meanwhile, two US-based businesses, the New York Times and the professional social site LinkedIn, just struck a deal that allows the Times "to draw on all the personal profile data that users have entered on LinkedIn, such as the profession or industry they work in, as well as their job title, age, sex and location, the better to target advertising at NYTimes.com," the Financial Times reports. And Visa and Facebook have teamed up to bring "almost half a million small-business owners" to Facebook in an area of the service called The Visa Business Network, BankTech.com reports.

The text version of hanging out

There is a place for micro-blogging (such as with Twitter), and not just for hyper-communicative youth or parents on business trips who use it to keep in constant, drive-by touch with their kids. Fascinatingly,
Clive Thompson at Wired calls it "social proprioception" - the social version of the hand knowing what the foot's doing. He writes that Twitter "gives a group of people a sense of itself.... It's almost like ESP.... You know who's overloaded ... and who's on a roll.... Twitter substitutes for the glances and conversations we had before we became a nation of satellite employees." This is in contrast to past claims that the Net isolates us from one another, and it's where the social Web is heading, Clive suggests. He also offers a good reason for why it's widely misunderstood: It's "experiential" - you can't just view it to understand, you have to do it with a group of friends or colleagues, people with shared lives or interests. Dipping into it from the outside is like walking in on the hanging-out banter of a group of close teenaged friends - you not only need to know a bit about what they're talking about, you need to know them to understand what's going on.

'Computer camp' nowadays

It has changed over the years. Now there's CampGame, where Arizona high school students spend six weeks learning videogame design at Arizona State University's school of engineering. Besides design, they also learn "the fundamentals of the game industry" and how to "develop concepts and prototypes for new games," East Valley Living reports. "CampGame is a part of the engineering school’s support of a national education effort to interest young students in pursuing careers in science, technology, engineering and mathematics." Then there’s ID Tech Camp at Stanford University, where kids and teens learn just about anything their little hearts desire, from programming, 3D character modeling for special effects, digital video production, game mods, robotics, as well as videogame design, CNET reports. See also the St. Louis Post-Dispatch on under-privileged kids performing major computer surgery.

Top 8 workarounds of kid virtual-world users

It stands to reason that bullying happens in kids' virtual worlds (e.g., Club Penguin, Webkinz, Neopets, Nicktropolis, etc.), because, well, it happens in school, instant messaging, and social-networking sites. But I hadn't learned how it happened until Sharon Duke Estroff called me about it. The Atlanta-based parenting columnist, former elementary school teacher, kids' pop culture expert, author, and mother of four spent a couple of weeks in Club Penguin to learn what her eight-year-old son might experience there. She didn't like everything she saw.

Having occasionally watched my own son waddle around and play games in Club Penguin and thought it was pretty cute, I asked her why. Sharon - who will tell you that she's definitely not an overreactor where parenting's concerned - proceeded to tell me what she learned about digital pre-adolescent behavior in CP (and I have no doubt similar experiences are to be had in every other virtual playground on the Web).

Not that her CP time was all bad, of course, but there were some "Lord of the Flies moments" just like in real-life elementary school, and I thought you'd like to know what the virtual versions look like - techniques kids have developed for beating the system so they can move all that social behavior at school, good and bad, online. Simply put, they're "workarounds"- some but not all about meanness or bullying. So I boiled the behavioral parts of what Sharon told me down to a list of eight (note how sophisticated these workarounds' young creators are):

1. Beating the language filter. Putting consecutive words in separate message "bubbles," spaces between letters, creative capitalization and punctuation, etc. - whatever it takes to say what they like, including mean stuff and invitations to "visit me alone in my igloo."

2. Code lingo. Not just POS ("parent over shoulder") or ROTFL ("rolling on the floor laughing"), but text-formatting tricks that get around safe-language rules: e.g., if language filters don't allow numbers, kids share their ages by expressing them in dots. For example, they ask, "How many dots are you?" and get back: "I'm ........."

3. ID theft, kid-style. One of the cardinal rules of online safety is never to share your password because best friends sometimes become non-friends and can impersonate and embarrass you. Password-sharing, however, is rampant in kid virtual worlds - a popular way of offering and accepting best-friend status. It becomes a problem when your "best friend" logs on as your avatar and makes it break the rules so you get kicked out.

4. Stealing virtual possessions. Kids also use peers' passwords to steal their virtual clothes, furniture, and other in-world possessions so the victims have to start over or walk around as naked avatars and so the thief, succumbing to some sort of pre-adolescent digital version of "keeping up with the Joneses," can add to his/her in-world prestige (as well as the real-world kind - because, Sharon said, a lot of penguins know each other as humans at school too).

5. Abusing abuse reporting. The digital version of tattling: being mean by reporting avatars just so they get privileges taken away. "Kids can report other kids for all kinds of vague reasons, but they don't have to give a reason - all they have to do is press a button on the player card and the complaint goes straight to the monitor," Sharon said.

6. Using safety features to bully. Using blocking, ghosting, ignoring, and other in-world user-security tools to ostracize a kid or make it clear he's not a member of "the club" - whatever the club-of-the-moment is.

7. Digital "Spin the Bottle." Those pre-teen games for exploring dating and sexuality have moved into cyberspace. Kids manipulate their avatars and a virtual world's systems to create opportunities to explore virtual sexuality too. An example in Club Penguin: "Spin the Fish," only the fish doesn't spin; "you have to pretend it does," according to young CP lifestyles blogger Imatweetybrd, whose blog Sharon found. "You either say 'I'll spin!' or someone will tell you to spin. Then, most likely, you are just going to say 'spin,' then 'it landed on [the penguin's name that you like most]. At that point, you go up the person and say 'mwah.' Then your turn's over. Your penguin might like you back and ask you out or maybe you want to ask him out, then you guys can leave the game or whatever."

8. Kid avatars have cheats too. Just because the person behind the avatar is only nine years old certainly does not mean s/he's any less savvy about how to find cheats to beat the game and make coins or points a lot faster in order to have a bigger place of residence and more clothes, puffles, and furniture. The kid just types the name of an in-world game into a Web search engine and turns up hundreds of tips, or "cheats," as they're called - situation normal in the world of videogames (clearly also for people of younger and younger age, we now see).

My takeaways

First it should be acknowledged that there are plenty of positive and just plain fun things about Club Penguin too (check out its kid philanthropy feature). It's possible the average child user (probably 7-10 - not teen hackers like Mike 92 in Related links below) could experience or use one or two of the above workarounds, but not likely all, unless he or she is looking for trouble, feeling mean, or really into power in a social sort of way. Putting all the workarounds together here is designed only to help parents ask intelligent questions.

My 11-year-old was an avid CP user for a few weeks last year, but he never noticed any of the above except a few cheats (penguins a little too good at some games) and occasional meanness - trigger-happy abuse reporters or safety-feature abusers - and none of it ruined his fun in CP, but CP also wasn't the all of his entertainment or social life (balanced lives do help us not take certain things too seriously). The workarounds only confirm for me that, wherever kids are online, alertness and critical thinking are needed on the part of children as well as parents. Club Penguin and other kid virtual worlds are not babysitters! But they are great social-networking training for both participants and parents. They offer many teachable moments for learning all kinds of things: e.g., how to treat others online as well as offline, how to be a good citizen and friend, how to detect social and commercial manipulation, how to deal with peer pressure and group think, and even how to be a leader.

Readers, we'd love to hear about your children's virtual-world experiences in the ConnectSafely.org forum. Email's ok too, via anne@netfamilynews.org.

Related links

Visual aids: "Club Penguin Robbery" video at YouTube in which director/producer/penguin Mike 92 robs Club Penguin's bank and gets his just desserts (here's his cheats site). I'm guessing Mike is a teenager who uses CP as a hacking and video-producing creative outlet (hacking isn't necessarily illegal or malicious). Another, more bird's-eye view of cheating the systems is "How to move peoples stuff on Club Penguin."

Numbers: "As of last month [4/08], more than 100 new virtual worlds had started up or were in development," the New York Times reports. "Many sites such as Empire of Sports, Planet Cazmo and Xivio are aimed at so-called tweens, ages 8 to 12.... This year, more than 12 million children nationwide under the age of 18 will visit at least one of these sites, and that number will grow to 20 million by 2011," the Times adds, citing eMarketer research.

For some nearly original digital kid anthropology research, surf around the Club Penguin Coolers blog.

Sharon Duke Estroff's bio Web site

Good for dinnertable discussion: "How social influencing works"

ConnectSafely.org's Safety Tips & Advice page

Griefers: Gamer worlds' bullies

Griefers aren't new to gaming communities, but they're apparently becoming a fixture in multiplayer online games too - games such as World of Warcraft, RuneScape and Everquest, Reuters reports. "Unlike traditional Internet bullies who work through instant messages and cell phones, griefers lurk on online multi-player videogames, harassing their victim by bullying, tormenting or thwarting other players in the game," according to Reuters. For help on how to deal with this, see "10 Tips for Dealing with Griefers" at Microsoft.com, "Dealing with Griefers in Second Life" at MindSigh.com, and in a World of Warcraft forum, "Nazsh's Guide to Dealing with Griefers." See also "Support for young videogamers."

Xbox Live with avatars

It really seems as if all gaming community is going the way of online virtual worlds now. The new Xbox Live, just announced by Microsoft this week, will be more like virtual life than ever. The gaming community for the Xbox console will soon be more three-dimensional - a suitable "space" for the avatars, or animated characters, gamers will create for it," the Financial Times reports. "The avatars demonstrated by Microsoft appeared more sophisticated than the popular Wii Miis of Nintendo's console but less ambitious than the characters possible in the much delayed Home virtual world planned for Sony's PlayStation3." The FT added that Xbox Live's new look and feel will simply happen with a free software update that'll be available in the fall. For more Xbox news, see the San Jose Mercury News.

Videogames: Less predictable, more fun

Ah, the growing challenge of being a videogamer. Not only are there more and more real people behind game characters (in multiplayer online games), but the game characters in console games are getting smarter. "Recent advancements in video game design - and new game consoles with dazzling computing power - have endowed computer-controlled characters with a sense of self-preservation and unpredictability not seen even a year ago," the Associated Press reports. The AP gives the example of the soon-to-be-released Star Wars: The Force Unleashed, in which stormtroopers don't just sit there when you throw something at them. "They may toss a grenade back. Or they might just put their hands up." Increasingly, reactions are not predictable. The latest Grand Theft Auto game was the first to use this technology that creates animation "on the fly," as the gamer plays - probably part of the explanation for GTA4's April sales having surpassed those of a blockbuster movie opening (and may have an impact on holiday wish lists, since only the latest consoles can support this new technology). The moment-by-moment decisions of other people are what create the unpredictability of multiplayer online games.

'Soon we'll all be gamers'

It's not an exaggeration. I'll start with sales figures, but they're not the only indicator: In the first five months of this year retail sales of videogame software alone (not consoles) "grew 45% over the same period last year to $3.42 billion." Overall videogame industry growth was 32%," the San Jose Mercury News reports. In the UK, sales were up 28% the first half of this year to 33 million+ pounds (about $66 million), the Times of London reports. Other interesting indicators from the Times that this is not merely a phase. "Nintendo is now Japan's second most valuable company - trailing the car maker Toyota but ahead of giants such as Canon and Panasonic." High valuation of game makers in general is "an expression of the market's belief that this industry still has an enormous amount of room to grow," according to the Times, pointing to the explosive growth "that comes when everyone is converted to playing videogames" (with the first generation of child gamers becoming parents themselves and "whole families now gathering around a game console"). Female gamers are certainly in there, representing 38-40% of all gamers, CNET reports, citing two organizations' figures, and "the average female gamer plays games 7.4 hours per week," according to the Entertainment Software Association's figures. Meanwhile, the premier gaming industry conference "E3" is in process in L.A. this week (see the New York Times's scenesetter), thus all the videogame news.

Supreme Court justice's P2P security breach

No, Justice Breyer wasn't using a file-sharing network himself. But a guy at his investment firm was on LimeWire and inadvertently shared "the names, dates of birth and Social Security numbers of about 2,000 of the firm's clients, including a number of high-powered lawyers and Supreme Court Justice Stephen G. Breyer," the Washington Post reports. This isn't just about file-sharing in the workplace. It's about how private family records and information can be made public on P2P networks if file-sharers and music fans at home aren't configuring the software correctly. It's only one key topic for family discussion about file-sharing, others being the ethics of file-sharing and the potential for parents being sued by the RIAA for pirated music shared on family computers (at least go into the software with your kid and see how Preferences, Options, or Sharing is set up).

Googles deals with sex chat on Lively

Last week I wrote about Google's launch of Lively avatar chat, ending with a caveat that seems to apply to so much of the social Web: that there were sex-related chat rooms in the Popular Rooms list. This week CNET reports the same: "Despite some injunctions to the contrary, sexual overtones are creeping into" Lively, with the qualification that "a little snooping around revealed some evidence of borderline rooms, but nothing as risque as shows in the more permissive realm of Second Life" (which does have ratings so those who want to can avoid sex-related virtual locations). Google told CNET it's taking complaints about these seriously and is "working to remove them." I think this is an example of one of the points Oxford University professor Jonathan Zittrain makes in his book The Future of the Internet - And How to Stop It - that users' abuses of user-driven services make them less attractive to mainstream users and could have the effect of stigmatizing them or sending the mainstream increasingly to "safer," more controlled services ultimately to the detriment of what's good and constructive on the participatory Web (that may not be his main point, but it was one of my takeaways from a talk he gave).

The costs of communicative families

For a reality check on the cost of being highly communicative families, check out a column by Larry Magid, my co-director at ConnectSafely.org, in the San Jose Mercury News. It's so great that Apple lowered the cost of an iPhone by $200 (to $199), but then AT&T "raised the price of the data plan for the new iPhone by $10 a month, which more than wipes out the savings" from the hardware, Larry points out. And that's the point exactly: Look at the cost of service for all our household communication devices and technologies all told, and try not to choke. Just talking on the phone costs the highly communicative Magid family "$3,720 a year," not including "extras like international calls or when we go over our allotted cell phone minutes." Then there's Internet service, PC security services, cable TV, TiVo or Netflix, Xbox Live, etc., etc. Larry and I were just talking about what this must look like in other parts of the world - wondering if anybody has calculated how many families in third-world countries could be fed for the amount of money racked up by Net-literate, highly connected US families.

A case for critical thinking

This didn't come up when we were in school! Which is why it's important for us parents to know about it: Photoshopped news photos for propaganda and many other purposes. Nikki Leon at the Harvard Berkman Center's Digital Natives site recently blogged about a photo of missiles in Iran having been altered apparently for political purposes. "The picture, a view of three test missiles launching, was altered to include four (hiding one that failed)," she writes. After mentioning that the photo was used by prominent news outlets (e.g., the BBC, L.A. Times, etc.), she asked the good question of what this means for young Net users. She concludes that "incidents like this week’s explosive photoshoppery are a reminder that students need to be taught how to evaluate online material just as they are encouraged to assess historical print sources [because] ... it is likely that propaganda of this variety will be produced with greater skill and distributed with greater frequency. It is up to teachers, parents, and Digital Natives themselves to ensure that young people will be critical enough to demand the truth." In fact, a friend and teacher in Los Angeles recently told me, "our job is no longer to put information into kids' heads, since they already know more than we do. Our job is more to help them filter and manage it all."

2 virtual worlds: NECC and Second Life!

Last week I went to my first NECC, the giant National Educational Computing Conference, this year in sticky, toasty San Antonio. We heard at the keynote (appropriately given by James Surowiecki, author of The Wisdom of Crowds) that some 18,000, mostly tech educators, were there. I was there to speak on a panel about online safety presented by the California Technology Assistance Project, which had Larry Magid and me speak about our book, MySpace Unraveled, a couple of years ago (more about CTAP in a moment) and to steep myself in tech education for a few days.

NECC was both inspiring and overwhelming. But overwhelming was good because, instead of trying to figure out what on earth to sample of the hundreds of workshops and presentations, I decided to go deep. I went to everything I could find about virtual worlds Second Life and Teen Second Life (besides my online-safety meetings). I'd long wanted to learn more about SL and virtual worlds in general, and what better way?

Which takes me to the inspiring part: what tech educators are doing in Teen Second Life (parents, you've got to see this stuff!). I attended presentations by two rockstars of the ed tech world....

Peggy Sheehy of Suffern Middle School in the New York area and creator of Ramapo Islands, I believe the very first real-life school in Teen SL (here's a video intro to what's happening at Ramapo, including the students' views, in the blog of another genius tech educator and Second Life resident, Kevin Jarrett), and if you prefer text to video, here's a transcript in Sheehy's blog of a mock trial based on Of Mice and Men staged by Suffern students (or rather their avatars) in Teen Second Life. Ramapo is now six islands in Teen SL, used by 1,000 students and 35 teachers.

Westley Field from Sydney, Australia, founder of the very international Skoolaborate.com and Skoolaborate Island in Teen SL (to see what's going on there, check out the first video on this page). So far this new project has 10 schools in 4 countries collaborating.

Just a few positives I witnessed and heard about in my NECC brushes with education in Second Life (watch this space for more on all this): a girl who never participated in class blossoming in virtual-world classes and then later in real life; the same for a boy whose mother wrote a profound thank you note to his teacher; students in multiple countries learning what species are endangered in others and together creating virtual spaces for them with the kind of environments in which they can thrive; students thinking critically together about body image and developing more healthy views of said by creating different avatars representing their evolving views; an entire class reading all of Of Mice and Men, not just the Cliff Notes, so they could play judges, DAs, prosecutors, witnesses, court reporters, jury members, etc. in the mock trial; students who don't want to miss any of it logging in from home when they're sick.

The amazing CTAP

I'm referring specifically to Region IV of a statewide project to help California's educators integrate technology into learning but also deal with students' extracurricular use of tech! I definitely have a bias because, through my friend, ed-tech eyes 'n' ears, and CTAP staffer Anne Bubnic, I have learned a great deal about both technology and education! You'll see at a glance on this CTAP4 page how much they're doing for California educators just in the area of cyber safety, which CTAP intelligently defines as "the safe and responsible use of the Internet and all information and communication technology devices, including mobile phones, digital cameras, and webcams."

This one region of a state project has a huge sphere of influence. Its funding is for assisting California schools, but the Web has a way of ignoring borders and the Web-wide, worldwide resources Anne has pulled together in Region 4's site are valuable to educators at least nationwide. In addition to the site it continuously updates, CTAP also trains teachers, administrators, school safety people, etc. in person and via videoconferencing. Obviously this second part of its work isn't as visible to all, so I'm going to zoom in on that training in a feature very soon.

Why all this about tech education in NetFamilyNews? Parents' certainly aren't the only shoulders on which society places responsibility for young people's constructive use of technology! Most of the negative stuff involving youth on the social Web is not criminal, so law enforcement (where people so often turn) usually can't help. Very often, then, the focus shifts to school policy and discipline. Yet, a lot of the imposter profiles, defaming blog posts, and general online or phone harassment that disrupts learning at school originates at home or somewhere else off school grounds. So it can really help parents to know what teachers and administrators are dealing with where student behavior's concerned, so the two parties can collaborate - with each other as well as the student(s) involved, hopefully - in solving tech-related problems that come up (see also "Why schools, parents need to fight cyberbullying together"). Problems involving the participatory Web require participatory solutions!

Related links

Peggy Sheehy's Suffern Middle School in Second Life

Westley Field's Skoolaborate

Kevin Jarrett's The Story of My Second Life

The official California Technology Assistance Project Web site's page about all the CTAP regions and their projects and Region 4's specifically (I'd like to know what other states have along the lines of CTAP - email me, people! - via anne@netfamilynews.org).

Google's new avatar chat

Google's Lively.com, introduced this week, is kind of Second Life Lite. Both provide software you download to create your own avatar (a cartoon-like digital representation of yourself). But instead of creating and living in a piece of a very large virtual world, as in Second Life, with Lively you simply create a chatroom (or choose and customize one someone else has created and made available to all users) that can fit up to 20 of your friends' avatars at a time. The product will probably have a lot of appeal for kids and teens for a number of reasons: it's creative and self-expressive, allowing young people to experiment with identity (a key task of adolescence, child development experts say); it's about communication and socializing; there's no learning curve; it's basically an add-on to teens' existing social utilities, blogs and social sites; and they can embed their chatrooms in their blogs, social-networking profiles, or any other Web page, "as easily as a YouTube video," the New York Times reports (right now the software's only available for Windows XP and Vista computers). Here's brief coverage of the Lively launch from the Financial Times.

Parents will probably want to be aware that there is as much potential downside for young users of Lively as for any other user-driven service of the social Web. As of this writing, right on the second page of the Popular Rooms list are several sex-related rooms to choose from and download. Lively's minimum age is 13 and the service's Community Standards say people under 18 "must have their parent or legal guardian's permission to use Lively. If we become aware that a user is under 13, we will delete their account." However, as far as I could see, neither the Community Standards page nor the Help Center says how to submit that permission.

Google's new avatar chat

Google's Lively.com, introduced this week, is kind of Second Life Lite. Both provide software you download to create your own avatar (a cartoon-like digital representation of yourself). But instead of creating and living in a piece of a very large virtual world, as in Second Life, with Lively you simply create a chatroom (or choose and customize one someone else has created and made available to all users) that can fit up to 20 of your friends' avatars at a time. The product will probably have a lot of appeal for kids and teens for a number of reasons: it's creative and self-expressive, allowing young people to experiment with identity (a key task of adolescence, child development experts say); it's about communication and socializing; there's no learning curve; it's basically an add-on to teens' existing social utilities, blogs and social sites; and they can embed their chatrooms in their blogs, social-networking profiles, or any other Web page, "as easily as a YouTube video," the New York Times reports (right now the software's only available for Windows XP and Vista computers). Here's brief coverage of the Lively launch from the Financial Times.

Parents will probably want to be aware that there is as much potential downside for young users of Lively as for any other user-driven service of the social Web. As of this writing, right on the second page of the Popular Rooms list are several sex-related rooms to choose from and download. Lively's minimum age is 13 and the service's Community Standards say people under 18 "must have their parent or legal guardian's permission to use Lively. If we become aware that a user is under 13, we will delete their account." However, as far as I could see, neither the Community Standards page nor the Help Center says how to submit that permission.

Crucial questions about Web 2.0, society

This story's importance grows as the Web increasingly mirrors "real life." Society seems to be in an interesting transition time, and some important freedoms could be lost as it struggles to understand the user-driven Web. For example, in an effort to reduce risk or prevent harm, people (including parents) sometimes blame Web sites (e.g., social-networking sites) more than the relationships represented in them, for online harassment; so those sites, perhaps to stave off lawsuits, play "a governmental role" and sweepingly "wipe out content that's controversial but otherwise legal," to quote the Associated Press. Users whose legitimate or legal content that gets deleted try to appeal those corporate decisions, but companies' legal advisers are usually the decisionmakers and "no" often the answer. That "governmental role that companies play online is taking on greater importance as their services - from online hangouts to virtual repositories of photos and video - become more central to public discourse around the world," the AP continues. The questions are: whether decisions by corporate legal departments reacting to public fears and ignorance will jeopardize some freedoms we cherish, how to ease those fears and misunderstandings, and where the burden of easing them should rest.

The video-driven Internet

It's really the user-driven Net, but all those users out there are viewing, producing, and uploading more and more video. The lead of this article says a lot: "Video may have killed the radio star, but it doesn't have to kill the Internet." CNET reports that Internet service providers are scrambling to figure out how to keep up with all the "video-driven bandwidth demand." Demand grows as household use of broadband grows. The Pew Internet & American Life Project recently reported that 55% of US households now have broadband connections, up from 47% a year ago. CNET cites ComScore figures showing that "Americans are currently watching upward of 10 billion videos online a month" and reports that that's only the beginning. The rest of the piece is about what service providers are working on as they figure out how to support our habit.

'Wii-hab' for patients

That's St. Mary's Medical Center's Wii-hab Program. The San Francisco hospital uses the Nintendo Wii for patients' physical rehabilitation, this CNET video reports. About 100 people have been helped in the program, which combines the Wii with other therapies. It's the brainchild of Dr. David Liu, "self-described techie" and chair of the back and trauma rehab dept., who says the games' "fun factor" helps patients forget about pain and weak spots and keep moving. Gives new meaning to the term "leveling" (usually applied to that urge to go up higher in multiplayer online games like World of Warcraft)! [See also "Videogame fitness training."]

Wii game & its rating criticized

Zooming in on Beer Pong for the Nintendo Wii, Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal is calling for a change in the way videogames are rated, the Hartford Courant reports. He pointed to the Entertainment Software Rating Board's "Teen" (13+) rating for the game. I couldn't find "Beer Pong" in ESRB.org's search engine, but it may have been removed because its maker, JV Games, says the game's name is being changed to Pong Toss, the Associated Press reports (I couldn't find Pong Toss either). JV Games says "the video game was never about alcohol, but rather the growing sport that has developed around [the popular college drinking game] beer pong." According to the ESRB, "alcohol played a minimal role in the game and no one was shown drinking beer." No one, including the ESRB, could argue that the US's game rating system is perfect, but it does give parents something to go by - a sense of definition - when the pressure's on to buy a game. Certainly there's value, too, in bringing attention to anything that promotes or even gives kids any comfort level with excessive or binge drinking. See also WhatTheyPlay.com's 3 tips for videogamers' parents.

Good citizens in virtual worlds, too

I truly believe that children's good citizenship online helps protect them - and it's a large and growing piece of the online-safety puzzle. How so? Because (I know I've quoted this here before) "youth who engage in online aggressive behavior by making rude or nasty comments or frequently embarrassing others are more than twice as likely to report online interpersonal victimization," according to an analysis from the University of New Hampshire's Crimes Against Children Research Center. So I was delighted to find "Raising Good Citizens for a Virtual World," a five-lesson course from author and tech educator Doug Johnson (thanks for bookmarking it, Anne Bubnic). But this is not rocket science, parents. Don't be put off by the words "course" or "five lessons." If you can just help your kids apply what they're learning about how to treat people respectfully and function in community to the online part of their lives, you're accomplishing a lot. Doug points out that the degree of anonymity cyberspace has an all-bets-off effect that people take advantage of. It's true. But this doesn't complicate things; it's simply why the same ethics and citizenship we've always taught them need to be applied to online behavior too. The other protective tool that needs to be applied online is critical thinking (see "How to recognize grooming" and "How social influencing works").

Predation in online gaming

Police have been saying that predators go where kids go, and they've been saying it since before there was an Internet. So the "place" that the news media and online-safety advocates are increasingly focusing on is online gaming. I first linked you to a story about this in January 2006 (see "Teen exploited while gaming"); in May, a report out of Cincinnati saying the FBI was investigating "a number of cases in southern Ohio" concerning Xbox Live; and last month we heard from a US attorney in Massachusetts that cases of man-to-minor predation involving World of Warcraft were under investigation. This week USATODAY reported on online-game predation cases in Utah and Michigan. Where the Xbox Live gaming community is concerned, "Microsoft trains police at national conferences," according to USATODAY. Parents need to know that "Xbox has password-protected 'family settings' that allow parents to turn off Internet access or track content and contacts. PlayStation and Wii also have such controls." I was delighted to learn last summer that there is some "neighborhood watch," or community policing, activity in Xbox Live (see this feature) and hope to see more evidence of this other form of protection that can be empowering for kids. For some context around all this, see this editorial too. The No. 1 message for parents in all this is the importance of teaching our kids to be alert and responsible wherever and whenever they're in places where lots of people interact, online or offline. Alert about what? See "How to recognize grooming" and "How social influencing works."

South Africa's child abuse hotline

South Africa has joined the ranks of countries that have child pornography hotlines. The hotline is available via the Web. "The website, www.fpbprochild.org.za, which is available 24 hours, seven days a week, was launched in Johannesburg on Tuesday by Deputy Minister of Home Affairs Malusi Gigaba," South African news service Bua News reports. At least 29 countries have hotlines now. INHOPE, an international association of child abuse hotlines, lists them here.

Child info floating around the Net

The Los Angeles Times article features a very anxious mom whose story illustrates a data security issue much broader than lost or stolen laptops with databases of people's personal info on their hard drives. It's about what's happening as "vast databases of sensitive information are bought and sold by private companies" focused a lot more on monetizing millions of registered users than on protecting the users' privacy. "Reunion.com's privacy policy says the site "prohibits registration by and will not knowingly collect personally identifiable information from anyone under 13'," the Times reports. "But that doesn't address the site's own data-gathering." The company told the Times it had bought the records of 260 million people from a data broker that it said was told not to include minors in the purchased data. Still, the name of the mom's 4-year-old child showed up on a page she stumbled on in Reunion.com. "She was especially distressed that the listing for her husband's name included the family's town, Beaverton - not the sort of information she wanted anywhere near her son's identity." And now it's in the L.A. Times too.

Young sex offenders branded forever

One of the scary things about the social Web is how much exposure its users bring to their everyday lives and innermost thoughts. But think about the impact of mixing exposure - to public view or just to law enforcement - with impulsive, unthinking adolescent behavior that involves sexual exploration with peers. For example, in the state of Washington alone, "since 1997, more than 3,500 children in the state - some as young as 10, though on average about 14 - have been charged and convicted as felony sex offenders, a mark that remains on their records forever, barring them from careers in medicine, teaching or a host of other professions that serve the vulnerable," the Seattle Post-Intelligencer reports. A 13-year-old (now 23) whose story led the article was arrested at home by himself and handcuffed to a plastic chair while his mother was called and told her "pervert son was going to jail." The vast majority of these young felons are rated least likely to reoffend, the article continues. Even so, the Post-Intelligencer reports, "Washington is among the few states to include juveniles in its sex offender management plan, assessing youths with tools designed for adults and funneling them through the courts with adult-sized punishments."

Data insecurity on the rise

Here's one reason why verification of online children's ages or identities is a slightly scary concept: data breaches are up. What does this have to do with online kids? If age verification is required of Web sites, children's personal information would have to be stored in a database somewhere, so that Web sites' "bouncers," or ID-checking technology, will have a collection of information against which it can check the info kids provide. The problem is, "businesses, governments and universities reported a record number of data breaches in the first half of this year, a 69% increase over the same period in 2007," Washington Post security writer Brian Krebs reports, citing research from the San Diego-based Identity Theft Resource Center. Interestingly, hacking was "the least-cited cause of data breaches in the first six months of 2008.... Instead, lost or stolen laptops and other digital storage media remain the most frequently cited cause of data breaches. See also "UK data security breach & kids." And I seem to be seeing more news of data breaches all the time, the latest for Google employees - see CNET.