A great teen-adult conversation to join

I've just joined the Focus on Digital Media community and hope you will too. This three-week-long online conversation starts April 13 (but you can register now here) and is the "first-ever among parents, educators, and teens about ethical questions in digital life ... questions like, "Should parents and teacher ‘friend’ their kids on Facebook?" It's a joint project of New York-based Global Kids, a nonprofit urban youth educational organization; San Francisco-based nonprofit Common Sense Media; and the Harvard Graduate School of Education's GoodPlay Project, exploring how youth view and practice ethics and citizenship in social media. This is a key question for everybody's online well-being going forward, I think, and young people involved in this exploration are doing pioneering work. I want to see what they think about the idea that civility, ethics, and new media literacy bridge the participation gap by fostering participants' physical, psychological, and reputational safety (see this on Henry Jenkins's 2006 white paper on the participation gap and this more recent post on social media literacy.