Unruly schoolbus gets Wi-Fi, calms down

Clearly, what goes around comes around. I used to do homework on the schoolbus (we won't go into how long ago), and now – since so much homework involves the Internet, apparently – students can now do homework on schoolbuses. IF they're Wi-Fi-enabled, of course. And the Internet's presence, interestingly, on the bus seems to be having a calming effect – see "Wi-Fi Turns Rowdy Bus Into Rolling Study Hall" in the New York Times. "Behavioral problems [offline ones, anyway] have virtually disappeared," it adds, since a school in Vail, Ariz., "mounted a mobile Internet router to bus No. 92's sheet-metal frame." Now they're going to have to train bus drivers in digital citizenship instruction too!

Foursquare & other geolocation apps: For young adults, not kids

More and more, I'm seeing tweets about people becoming mayors of coffee shops in my Twitter stream. They're playing Foursquare on their phones, which pushes their "checkins" or location disclosures out to their Twitter followers. Foursquare is part cellphone social-mapping game, part Yelp (another way to find food, drink, or friends using your phone's geolocation technology). "A large number of foursquare users send their checkins to Twitter and/or Facebook, and therefore make their location available to an audience much larger than just their foursquare friends," says Foursquare. It's not for everybody. Someone over at eModeration in the UK (a company that helps keep kids safe in virtual worlds) thinks it's kind of dumb. It's really not for children. But there's a safer way to play it, if they insist. If yours do, ask them not to use their real photo; you don't want them identified by their photo in shops or restaurants where they "check in." They can just post a face shot of their avatar or dog or favorite cartoon character in their profile. One of the appeals for kids (young and old) is that, like kids' virtual worlds that sell real-world plush toys, Foursquare has real-world objects that serve as awards or "nerd merit badges" representing "the virtual achievements you get for checking in to places using Foursquare," Mashable reports. In other words, you get points for showing up at your favorite Starbucks, points which can add up to becoming its "mayor."

This morning I testified at a US House of Representatives joint-subcommittee hearing on "The Collection and Use of Location Information for Commercial Purposes" – the privacy and safety implications of just this sort of technology. There definitely seemed to be a consensus in the hearing room that consumer privacy law needs to be updated and that, to be effective over the long term, the updating shouldn't focus on any single technology. I completely agree with that because the people who used to have control over how cellphone users' location information is used – the mobile carriers – no longer always do. More and more, control is spread out across the spectrum: carrier, operating system provider (e.g., Apple, Google, Microsoft), app developer, and consumer (because, with apps like Foursquare, we're disclosing our own location). It's all becoming a mashup - which is why parents need to know that all these apps on iPhones and iPod Touches allow kids to share their location.

So – if your child's phone is on a family plan behind your password with, say, AT&T or Verizon Wireless, and if you don't use the parental control that blocks app downloads (something to consider if they're not telling you what they download) – it's a good idea periodically to check what apps your kids have on their phones and ask them what these apps do. If they share your child's location with anyone besides you, you'll want to have a conversation about who's on their contact list. Make sure it's only friends they know in "real life." Certainly all this goes, too, for iPod Touches, which are not on family cellphone plans. As for Google Buzz, which is both phone- and computer-based, see my post on that; parents will want to help their kids see the value of making their conversations "private," or just among friends, which points to a negotiation: All participants in the conversation need to agree that it's just for them and adjust privacy features accordingly.

[BTW, Foursquare isn't the only location-based cellphone app. Others are Brightkite and Whrrl (see this blog post); Gowalla, which isn't a social game (see this blog post); and the cellphone service loopt, which is becoming more app-like (see Mashable.com).]

Did school spy on student? FBI investigating

A Philadelphia-area family has filed a lawsuit against their child's school district for spying on students using Webcams on a school-supplied laptops inside students' homes, and the FBI is investigating, the Washington Post reports. "The FBI will explore whether Lower Merion School District officials broke any federal wiretap or computer-intrusion laws." The district supplies laptops to all 2,300 students at its two high schools, the Post added. At CNET, ConnectSafely's Larry Magid blogged that the remote Webcam monitoring (which the district said is now disabled) was a security measure activated only by the district's security and technology department when a laptop had been reported missing or stolen. "The tracking-security feature was limited to taking a still image of the operator and the operator's screen," Magid reported. The Post article says the district has acknowledged that Webcams had been activated "42 times in the past 14 months," and the activations had helped the school find 18 of the 42 missing computers. But the issue that led to the lawsuit so far doesn't seem to be theft-related. "According to the suit, Harriton vice principal Lindy Matsko told Blake on Nov. 11 that the school [one of the district's two high schools] thought he was 'engaged in improper behavior in his home.' She allegedly cited as evidence a photograph 'embedded' in his school-issued laptop," according to the Post. This is pretty chilling behavior on the part of school officials. "The case shows how even well-intentioned plans can go awry if officials fail to understand the technology and its potential consequences," the Post cites privacy experts as saying. Compromising images from inside a student's bedroom could fall into the hands of rogue school staff or otherwise be spread across the Internet, they said." For anyone worried about being watched remotely through their Webcam, here's some clarity in another piece by Larry Magid at CNET.

Google Buzz & kids' privacy

Because Buzz is brand-new and a hybrid of Gmail, micro-blogging, cellphone social mapping, and social networking, we're all at the early stages of figuring out its implications for kids – a lot of whom use Gmail. Yesterday Charlene Li, a mom and well-known social-media-industry analyst, blogged that she had discovered her 9-year-old daughter was using and really enjoying Buzz. Using it from her computer (people can also use Buzz on Apple iPhones and Google Android phones), the child had had one conversation on it with her friends. The problem was that the kids didn't know their conversation was public. Li wrote that "the easiest thing to do as a parent is to simply disable Buzz, meaning that the Google profile and all followers are deleted – permanently" (go to the bottom of your child's Gmail page and click "turn off Buzz," which will take you to where you can disable it). But because Li's daughter enjoyed Buzz so much, she seems open to "managing groups, privacy settings, etc." so her child can continue using the service. "We’ll give it a try," she writes, "but unless her friends also keep the conversation private, it will all be for naught." Ensuring that with all the other kids and their parents could be quite a project. Privacy is now a collective effort – by users too, not just providers (see "Collaborative reputation protection").

Last summer Google agreed, in response to a complaint by one of the FTC's "safe harbors" (organizations that help it enforce the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act, or COPPA), to require a birth date at registration to Gmail and, if a user indicates he or she is under 13, a session cookie to block the user from re-registering with an earlier birthdate. That's a start, but what this issue points to is the impact on children's privacy of combining social-media products within companies and connecting them across networks such as Facebook Connect. Perhaps the FTC's forthcoming review of COPPA rules and enforcement will address this emerging issue. But we feel the brilliant software engineers and project managers who develop these products need to wear their parent hats more, companies need to be thinking through children's privacy from the earliest developmental stages, and industry best practices need special sections or clauses addressing child privacy and safety. [See also "Google Buzz isn't exactly humming along" in the Wall Street Journal; "Does Google Buzz violate COPPA?" by Marquette University law Prof. Bruce Boyden (the jury's still out, he indicates); and my post at Buzz's launch, "Major buzz about Buzz, but not about its safety."]

Haiti: Texting, social Web connecting survivors with help

Struggling earthquake survivors in Haiti can now text for help. "Countless volunteers" receiving the messages, the US State Department, the Pentagon, aid organizations, and Haiti's leading cellphone carrier make up an emergency contact network for Haitians seeking aid, the New York Times reports. The story leads with the experience of Coast Guard volunteer and Chicago tech firm owner Ryan Bank, who told the Times he's received more than 18,000 messages. Some volunteers monitor Facebook and Twitter postings for information indicating where supplies are needed. Messages through the network have "helped identify a tent city that the American military and relief workers were previously unaware of." To get the word out, the mobile carrier in Haiti sent "the distress code number – 4636 – to every cellphone on the Haitian network. Word of the program also went out on local Haitian radio stations." Text messaging was still possible even with damage done from fallen cell towers.

How much teens text: Latest data

US 13-to-17-year-olds send or receive "an average of 3,146 texts a month each" – an average of 10 text messages an hour for every hour they're not either sleeping or in school, MarketingVox.com reports, citing the latest Nielsen figures. For 9-to-12-year-olds, the average is 1,146 texts a month or four an hour. The teen figure was for third quarter 2009, the tween one for the fourth quarter. Compare those youth numbers to the average number of monthly texts for all mobile users: 500. As for methodology, in its blog post about these findings, Nielsen reports that it "analyzes more than 40,000 mobile bills every month to determine what consumers actually are spending their money on."

Clicks, cliques & cyberbullying, Part 2: Whole-school response is key

Cyberbullying is a serious problem that, according to research, is the most common online risk for young people, affecting about a third of US 13-to-17-year-olds, and has led to some tragic student suicides. Schools and courts are struggling to figure out how to deal with student behavior that occurs off school grounds but can have such a disruptive, sometimes destructive, effect on school.

All the discussion about the legal and First Amendment issues seems to be missing a key factor that points to how to handle cyberbullying: the media environment with which all these incidents are directly associated. The Internet, especially to youth, is now a) collegial or social/behavioral in nature and b) mirrors "real world" life and conditions – it's not something in addition to student or school life. Bullying online is not a whole new problem for schools and courts to deal with. It's a reflection of student relationships, and the bullying's context is largely the life of the school community, not the Internet (or cellphones or any other devices).

Cyberbullying prevention/intervention take a village too

"Because a bully's success depends heavily on context" – write Yale psychology professor Alan Yazdin and his co-author Carlo Rotella at Boston College in "Bullies: They can be stopped, but it takes a village" at Slate.com – "attempts to prevent bullying should concentrate primarily on changing the context rather than directly addressing the victim's or the bully's behavior." That, they add, involves "the entire school, including administration, teachers, and peers."

Author and educator Rosalind Wiseman agrees. In a 55-min. podcast interview she gave fellow educator and author Annie Fox, Wiseman recently said that dealing with cyberbullying "really speaks to a school's culture of dignity....

"Don't do a 45-minute assembly on cyberbullying," Wiseman said. "It's a waste of time. Have a faculty meeting, and then have a parent meeting, and tell the students this is what you're doing – not just a bullying assembly. Tell them 'we understand that this is about the whole culture of the school, and as part of that culture, you have to participate in this as well.'" Slightly tongue in cheek, Wiseman adds that this will increase "the chance of students believing you're not completely full of it."

Quick fixes don't exist

Schools will probably get plenty of eye-rolling and "whatever's" from the more socially aggressive students, but gradually things can turn around – particularly if there's disciplinary backup. [Note the word "backup": discipline is not the goal, but rather restoration of order – more on this below.] For example, when talking with a student suspected of having been the bully in an incident, the end of the conversation could go something like:

"I know we're on the same page, here: You're a person of honor, so I'm taking you on your word that this won't happen again. But you need to be clear that, if you walk out of here and, as a result of this meeting, the life of the target in any way becomes more difficult, then we are in a whole different situation – a whole different level of the problem. You need to be clear that, if that happens, you're taking a very big chance."

That conversation could also include the following. "I hope and expect that you'll be talking with your parents about this, because I'm going to be calling them within 24 hours." Wiseman tells teachers and administrators that of course the kids will talk to their parents, offering their own spin on the situation. "So it's very important to say to the parent, 'I wanted to include you from the beginning, that is why I talked with your child. I fully expected [him or her] to speak to you immediately and now I'm following up so we can work together and have this be a learning opportunity – a teachable moment – for your child."

Turning incidents into 'teachable moments'

Those words are crucial: "learning opportunity," "teachable moment." They are stepping stones on the way to building the school's "culture of dignity," as Wiseman put. Because it's merely logical that a one-time, sage-on-the-stage assembly will accomplish very little. It's also logical that involving all players and skill sets – students, parents, teachers, administrators, and counselors – creates the conditions for changing the school's culture (see this). The school is, in fact, creating a new social norm – as Elizabeth Englander, director of the Massachusetts Aggression Reduction Center and an adviser to state legislators working on bullying-education legislation, told Emily Bazelon at Slate.com – where the whole school community looks down on dissing, flaming, mean gossiping, and other social cruelty, hopefully including students' parents. The Slate piece links to some great resources for school strategizing. For example, here's a sexting investigation protocol from the Center for Safe & Responsible Internet Use offering the spectrum of sexting causes and intentions enabling school staff to ask students intelligent questions.

When an interdisciplinary group of us were working on that protocol, authored by Nancy Willard, it occurred to me that, because it lays out the spectrum of sexting's causes, it'll help school officials see why it's essential that schools not just reflexively hand off investigations to law enforcement (whose involvement some state laws require).

The goal of any incident investigation

"The immediate goal of the investigation is not discipline [and certainly not expediency] but rather support for the targeted student(s) [who may be experiencing psychological harm], and restoration of order. The ultimate goal is to create a learning opportunity for all involved. The learning opportunity should be on-the-spot, as well as school and community-wide, and focus on the areas of critical thinking, mindful decision-making, perspective-taking, and citizenship." That's a statement a couple of us worked up because we feel it's so important for everybody to understand that, in the social-media age, we can only change behavior – in schools and online communities – together, as "a village."

Here's Part 1 of this 2-part series: "Clicks & cliques: Really meaty advice for parents on cyberbullying".

Related links

In another Massachusetts incident, last week Boston-area police charged three students with identity theft reportedly for creating a fake Facebook profile and posting mean comments about a peer. In an editorial last Saturday (2/13), the Boston Globe applauded the police "for taking aggressive action against cyberbullying when so many others have failed to do so." There's the sad reality: that too often the "authority figure" taking over is the police. Law enforcement is only one piece of the multidisciplinary team that should be in place in schools and ready to step in when something comes up. The other essential roles are principal and counselor/psychologist.

"Cyberbullying better defined" – with links to two national studies showing that about one-third of teens

Finding of the Harvard Berkman Center's 2008 Internet Safety & Technical Task Force: "Bullying and harassment, most often by peers, are the most frequent threats that minors face, both online and offline" (p. 4 of Executive Summary)

The Fox-Wiseman podcast

ConnectSafely.org's Tips to Help Stop Cyberbullying

One family's tech policy

One last gem from the Fox-Wiseman podcast that I blogged about last week in "Clicks & cliques" and that, if it isn't already, should be searchable on the Web as text. Toward the end of the interview, Fox asks Wiseman to share her own family technology policy (Wiseman's kids are 6 and 8). Here it is:

"Technology can be really fun to use, and it gives us incredible access to the world, but it is a privilege not a right, and because it is a privilege, you have the responsibility to use it ethically. What using technology ethically looks like to me is that you never use it to humiliate, embarrass ... or misrepresent yourself or someone else, never use a password without the person's permission, never share embarrassing information or photos of others, put someone down, or compromise yourself by sending pictures of yourself naked, half-naked or in your underwear. Remember that it is so easy for things to get out of control. You know it, I know it. So I reserve the right to check your online life, from texting to your Facebook page, and if I see that you're violating the terms of our agreement, I'll take your technology away until you can earn my trust back. This is my unbreakable, unshakeable law."

See also: "'Soft power' works better: Parenting social Web users."

Kids' virtual world that plants real trees

Arbopals is a children's virtual world with very real environmental impact. During its just-launched beta test phase, the Toronto-based virtual world's nonprofit partners in more than 20 countries will plant a tree for each of the first 1,000 users who sign up (so far, kids in 43 countries have) – because "the UN says that to compensate for the damage we have all done to the environment, we should be planting '14 billion trees every year for 10 consecutive years'," Arbopals says on its home page. [Disclosure: I'm a member of the virtual world's Advisory Council.] Aimed at children aged 5-10, the beta site and world (called Arboria) at this point have games, a store, and the Arbopedia, a searchable encyclopedia "designed to complement school curricula." Here, too, is the world's YouTube channel, featuring Arbopals characters Treesa and Forrest. The site is expected to launch right before Earth Day, April 22. [In other recent NFN coverage, see "Moderator wisdom" and "Virtual world news update."]

Virtual goods growth market

Players of the social game Farmville sent 500 million Valentines over 48 hours this past weekend, the Gigaom blog reported. The valentines were free, but players pay for a lot of other virtual goods. Engage Digital Media recently released 2009 figures for "virtual goods-related investments," showing that "more than $1.38 billion was invested in 87 virtual goods-related companies," triple 2008's figure. In a more in-depth story, the BBC reported that most of the virtual economy's momentum is in social games, not so much social network sites (though some social games, such as Farmville, are found on social-network sites). "In Asia, sales are already around the $5 billion mark and rapidly growing." The BBC piece describes how this economy works.

ChatRoulette: Heads up, parents!

"If I were still an unpopular 12-year-old, my first ChatRoulette session might have crushed me for a year instead of just an hour," writes Sam Anderson in New York magazine in the mildest possible description of a site that Brad Stone of the New York Times just discovered was created by a 17-year-old in Moscow. It's a video site that "brings you face-to-face, via webcam, with an endless stream of random strangers all over the world," Anderson writes. Comments from email correspondents of mine confirm what he writes that about 10% of the videos that stream past are of naked males not just sitting in front of their Webcams. Stone writes, "Parents, keep your children far, far away." Anderson adds, "There's no way to manage the experience.... It’s the Wild West: a stupid, profound, thrilling, disgusting, totally lawless boom" with a powerful curiosity factor. And there are serious privacy issues, he adds. Because once you click "Play" on the home page, your computer's Webcam is activated, and you are among those streaming across other ChatRoulette players' screens, with any one of them able to grab a shot of your face and whatever else is within the frame of your Webcam.

Another heads-up: ChatRoulette's not only going viral (300 users in December, 10,000 by end of January, now 20,000 any given night), it's a group thing (hopefully not the new "Truth or Dare" or "Spin the Bottle"). When a friend came over to experience it with him, Anderson reports "the experience was different ... easier to laugh off. We ended up staying on, talking and dancing, connecting and disconnecting, for four hours." As voyeuristic as it might've felt, it wasn't all "shock porn," he writes. "We chatted with Pratt students in Bed-Stuy, with a man inexplicably sitting on his toilet, with a kid waving a gun and a knife, and with a guy who went to my wife’s old high school in California. We saw Chinese kids in computer cafés and English kids drinking beer.... We talked for half an hour with a 28-year-old tech writer from San Francisco." And another email correspondent of mine just heard over the weekend that ChatRoulette is being played by "some of our middle schoolers in [the US state of] Georgia." There may shortly be a spike in Web-filtering sales!

School filters & students' workarounds

Not surprisingly, students seem to agree with Ofsted – though perhaps sometimes for different reasons ;-) – that "locked down" filtering at school isn't the best (see this about Ofsted's report). "Many young people are using 'proxy servers' to get round their schools' internet security systems, " the BBC reports, adding that students' use of these free school-filtering workarounds is on the rise. "It sounds like an obscure, techy area of computing that only geeks would know about. But when we asked pupils in one secondary school classroom who had heard of proxy servers, every hand went up." School filters can block access to known proxy sites, but there are so many and new ones pop up so constantly that it's almost impossible for the school systems to keep up. What most students aren't aware of, the BBC reports, is the security risks associated with some of these proxy sites. Some of them send Trojan software that installs monitoring applications on the computer a student's using which captures passwords and other keystrokes. For a US version of this story, see a commentary in the Washington Post last summer. Of course, the ultimate workaround is a mobile phone or wi-fi-equipped handheld device like the iPod Touch with a Web browser, and – despite school bans – their numbers are growing probably proportionately to overall smart-phone market growth. Banning phones in school is about as effective as the Ofsted report found rigid or "locked down" filtering to be. Instead, schools should embrace and teach with these devices and technologies so students can learn and practice wise use (see "From digital disconnect to mobile learning"). That helps develop the 24/7 cognitive "filter" in their heads that improves with practice and is as flexible as their use of technology is (see this).

More online freedom for students=lower risk: UK watchdog

Students who are "given a greater degree of freedom to surf the Internet at school are less vulnerable to online dangers in the long-term," the BBC reports, citing a just-released study by Ofsted, the British government's education watchdog found. Ofsted looked at the state of online safety in 37 schools for students aged 5-18, finding that five of the schools had outstanding Net-safety conditions and instruction. The five shared some interesting characteristics: They had a whole-school-community approach to student Net safety, and they had "managed" rather than "locked down" systems for filtering and other safety measures. "'Managed' systems," Ofsted explains, "have fewer inaccessible sites than "locked down" systems and so require pupils to take responsibility themselves for using new technologies safely. Although the 13 schools which used 'locked down' systems kept their pupils safe while in school, such systems were less effective in helping them to learn how to use new technologies safely." The weakest area was Net-safety training for school staff, the report said. "Most training provided was 'one size fits all' and therefore did not always meet needs. There was very little evidence of schools drawing systematically on the views and concerns of pupils, their families or governors in identifying priorities for such training."

What Ofsted seems to be saying is that teaching students the critical thinking skills of media literacy ultimately lowers risk. The schools rated "outstanding" in online safety all had managed systems whereby "pupils were helped, from a very early age, to assess the risk of accessing sites. For example, at the elementary level in one of the top 5 schools, students are taught to ask themselves these questions:

"Who wrote the material on this site?"

"Is the information on it likely to be accurate or could it be altered by anybody?"

"If others click onto the site, can I be sure that they are who they say
they are?", and

"What information about myself should I not give out on the site?"

We would add a key 5th question for full social-Web safety (or "Online Safety 3.0"): "What impact will the information (photo, video, etc.) I give out on this site (or cellphone) have on my friends and my community?" We at ConnectSafely feel this question is essential because the preceding four excellent questions deal only with the impact of the info uploaded on the student himself/herself and, to move forward, we need all to understand that online well-being and safety in today's social new-media environment is, by definition, a collaboration – ideally starting in elementary school and broadening outward as a child matures. Interestingly, too, based on the research, posting negative or harassing info about others also increases risk to oneself (see this). [A pdf version of the full report can be downloaded from Ofsted's site here.]

Clicks & cliques: *Really* meaty advice for parents on cyberbullying

Annie Fox's recent 55-min. interview with fellow educator and author Rosalind Wiseman at FamilyConfidential.com is a must-listen for parents, educators – anyone who has anything to do with teens and digital media. It has a lot to say about working through tough situations like sexting or cyberbullying incidents with young people in a candid, respectful way and, in the process, helping them understand the rights and responsibilities of being human beings as well as technology users. It's such great stuff that I felt key points of this podcast should be searchable on the Web as text and got Annie's permission to quote and paraphrase at length (hopefully accurately!). Because it's a long podcast, I'm splitting this into two parts (which are still long – apologies, but they're important!) – this week's focus is parenting; next week's on school, adding more sources.

Both Fox and Wiseman have new books out which I highly recommend: the third book of Fox's Middle School Confidential series for tweens, this one subtitled "What's Up With My Family?", and the re-release of Wiseman's best-selling Queen Bees & Wannabes with a new chapter on the role of technology in teen life. [Here's Fox's blog post about the interview.]

Moral compasses needed for navigating cyberspace

About a quarter of the way through the podcast, Wiseman talks about how she hears what many of us hear from teens: that people have always been mean to each other –cyberbullying isn't anything different from what we've dealt with in the past. So, they ask, what's the big deal?

"The minute somebody says that," Wiseman says, "that is the minute when critically thinking people stop and say, 'Why?!' Because if it involves the degradation of other people – especially if it's done for the entertainment of other people like bystanders – then that is a problem, and that is a tradition that needs to be challenged immediately."

Wiseman says to Fox that, when that comes up with teens, she tells them, "If you are going to be someone who has self-agency in the world, if you in your own way believe you have an obligation for yourself and others to live in the world with dignity, and that you have a moral compass, if you want that ability, then you have to be able to challenge the things that are 'normal' but are not right....

"I think the role of adults," Wiseman adds, "is to pierce this bubble that all of this [mean behavior] is normal now. Children think it's happening so much that [they'll tell you] that they didn't think it was wrong, and it's our role to say, 'No, actually it's not ok, and you're completely in your right to be upset about it." When they say that, teens are reflecting a culture – both online and offline, at home and at school, involving adults as well as kids – in which there has been too much acceptance of flaming, dissing, gossiping about people we know and don't know – too much negative social norming that has got to be addressed (see this about the vital role of positive social norming).

Wiseman's 'SEAL Strategy'

So when teenagers are upset about something mean a peer has said or done to them online or offline, we can calmly help them think through what happened, how they feel about it, and what they're going to do about it. One approach, Wiseman's framework for that conversation, is what she calls the "SEAL strategy" – part of the "Owning Up" curriculum she uses to help educators teach students to "own up and take responsibility for unethical behavior." When doing this strategizing, parents and kids of course plug in their own situation and words. [Don't worry if the strategy seems to be about prepping for a confrontation between bully and victim if that's not what you and your child had in mind. The conversation itself is valuable. It's designed to help the child, if not completely take back control of the situation, at least mentally work her way out of victimization mode.]

Prepping for the conversation

But before we get to S-E-A-L – around 18 min. into the podcast – Rosalind talks about why it's so important for parents to handle this calmly and respectfully:

"As a parent, what I want you to say to your child is [something like], 'I'm so sorry this happened to you; thank you SO much for coming and telling me' ... because your kid is taking a risk to tell you about this. Most of the time they think that going to an adult will make it worse [which is why research shows only 10% of teens report cyberbullying to their parents (see this)]. THEN you say, 'and together we're going to work on this, we are going to think through how we can do this so you can feel that you've got some control over a situation where your control has been taken away from you."

And if we're lucky enough that they do come to us, Wiseman says, a lot of times we'll hear them say, "'I'm going to tell you, but you have to promise not to do or say anything about it.' That might seem to make sense [right then, when you so want to know what she's dealing with], so you may want to agree at first, but if your kid then tells you something you have to do something about, you have to break a promise.... So instead you say, 'I really can't make that promise. I'd love to, but we may have to find somebody who knows more about taking care of the problem than I do.... But what I will promise you is that if we do need to bring someone in, you will never be surprised by their involvement – you won't walk into a room and be surprised. I can promise that. We'll work this through together.' Because," Wiseman says, "you [the parent] taking over robs them of the control they need to have to be able to face the bully."

S-E-A-L

As you sit down with your child, "say, 'I'm going to give you a structure that's going to help you think through the really bad feelings in your stomach and put them into words for yourself before you go and talk to someone else,'" Wiseman says, "'because how many times have you had the experience where you're really, really mad at somebody and know exactly what you're going to say to the person, and then you get in front of the person and you totally lose your words? This is going to be a way for you to have a better chance of that not happening, so you can be calm and have as much control as possible in the situation.'"

S means you "stop and think when and where, now or later, publicly or privately" you will confront the person face-to-face (usually pretty short in public, longer in private). I think it's important to note, here, that Wiseman's saying the young person is doing this neither to be the bully's best friend nor to destroy somebody. "It's not a zero-sum game."

E is about how "you explain exactly what you don't like and exactly what you want." Not something vague like, "you're being mean to me," but "when you stole my password, you know I've had the same one since 6th grade and you used it to send an embarrassing message to my entire contact list making it look as if it was me. I hate that; it was beyond embarrassing to me." Then the teen explains exactly what she wants, regardless of whether or not the kid is likely to do it, something like: "I'm asking you to send a message to all those people saying you sent that other message, that it wasn't me. I'm going to be sending that message to everybody, but I'm asking you to have the courage and integrity to do it yourself." Wiseman explains that, in this confrontation, the targeted child is not asking to be treated with dignity, is not appealing to the bully's sympathy. She is being clear that dignity "is something I deserve because it's what everybody deserves."

A is really two As – for "affirm" and "acknowledge or admit ("some kids like 'acknowledge,' some 'admit'"). They're about rights and responsibilities. "The first A is to affirm your right and everybody's right to walk down the school hallway or be in this world without being treated like dirt." As for responsibilities, this parent-child conversation is providing your child some space in which she can ask herself, 'Is it possible that I contributed in some way to the dynamic that I'm now dealing with? What are my responsibilities to other people and have I respected those responsibilities?" Wiseman adds that this is sometimes the hard part for parents – asking their own child about her role in the situation, but it's essential, she says, if we want our kids to have the ability to put on the brakes the next time it happens. She feels this is particularly important with today's technologies because these days it's almost impossible not to have a role, not to be either target, perpetrator or bystander (see this Slate piece by Yale psychology professor Alan Kazdin about the power of the bystander). Cyberbullying situations are very fluid, usually hardwired to the school context, with bullies, victims, and bystanders frequently swapping hats in a 24-7, digitally-enabled school drama that makes it hard to get away and get perspective (see this).

L is "You either lock in or lock out the relationship or friendship with the person you confronted – or you take a vacation from it. With peers, you need to be able to go through the process of asking whether you want to be in this relationship or not and how you want to be in it. As a bystander, you can say to the bully I'm coming to you as a friend (lock in); it would've been easier to say nothing, but I'm saying this to you out of loyalty; as a friend I'm coming to you. To a bully, you might say, 'You've changed, you're blowing me off all the time, bossing me around, ridiculing me, whatever, and it's not getting better, so I need to lock out the friendship or I need to take a break.' [Wiseman reminds always to encourage them to put it in their own words. They just need this structure because this is very difficult to do.]

Perspective-taking good for parents too

"When your kid comes home and tells you something has happened, don't believe that what the child related is 100% truth and there is no other perspective," Wiseman says. "That is their truth. But it's also true that, in a conflict, human nature focuses on what has been done to it, not what it did to others. Two kids will have very different perspectives on what happened." She asks parents who have more than one child if, when something comes up, the two kids don't usually have a difference of opinion about what happened. Nah. ;-) "It's like that at school too. Each child has his own truth."

So "if you go in there [into school], guns blazing, you may find out something more happened, and you're going to be very embarrassed. So it's incumbent upon you" to go in knowing there are other perspectives, say what you need to say, and "finish your story [for school administrators] with 'Is that accurate?' [Repeat: Make sure, after sharing what you heard from your child, you ask the school administrator or the other parents there: "Is that accurate?"] Then really listen." This can make the difference between amplifying the problem and helping to resolve it.

But as important as your behavior is to the outcome for everybody, it's vitally important for your child, who's keenly aware of how you handle the situation. "You're teaching your child how you handle conflict," Wiseman says in the podcast. And Fox points out that "parents are leaders for their kids." She adds that, no matter how much technology is involved in the issue being worked out, "this is not a technology issue; ultimately, it's a parenting issue."

3,000 text messages a month – hmm, might parents have something to do with it?

Wiseman told Fox that her teen advisers say texting "is our primary way we communicate with each other. Yes, we use [social network sites], but texting is faster" (the average is 3,146 text messages a month for 13-to-17-year-olds, Nielsen reported this month). They also tell her that parental communication represents a not-insignificant part of those texts. One girl told Wiseman, "My parents are texting me ... from the time I wake up to the time I go to bed." The girl showed her one of those texts: "Honey, I'm going to the airport to pick up Grandma." Daughter texts back, "Mom, you're driving, stop texting me!" And as, Wiseman watches, the mom continues texting. Maybe, Fox suggests, we parents could check and see what behaviors we're modeling for our kids. Another girl told Wiseman: "My mom sends me pictures of people she finds dressed ridiculously," making snide comments about this or that piece of clothing. Calling this pre-adolescent behavior, Wiseman suggested: "We have to look in the mirror about these things.... We are part of this. It's not just teenagers [dissing others].... "

It'll help, I so agree, "if we really tie [how we deal with their tech use] back to the root issues of how we must be with each other," as Wiseman put it. That, to me, is the core of the cyberbullying solution. "Kids are smart enough to be able to extrapolate, if we teach them the connections ... if we teach them that the way they use technology is just reflective of everything else that we expect of them."

[Readers, everything above is much more compelling when you hear it coming from its sources, so do yourself a favor and listen to the podcast. Next week: behavior and technology at school.]

Related links

"Bullies: They can be stopped, but it takes a village" at Slate – by Yale professor of psychiatry and child psychology Alan Kazdin and Boston College professor Carlo Rotella

Annie Fox's Middle School Confidential: What's Up with My Family? ($9.99, 96 pp.) is comfort food for the mind – a middle-schooler's highly social, overloaded, hormone-challenged, technology-tethered mind. When my 12-year-old saw the pdf review version on my laptop screen when we were sitting on a plane together last fall, it was his idea – not mine – to read through the whole book then and there. That says it all, think! This is solid, respectful, caring advice for kids.

Video: CBS News's Katie Couric interviews Wiseman about children's privacy: "If we don't value their privacy, we're sending a message about respect." Ok if we monitor them surreptitiously? "Sure, but what if you find something you need to talk to them about? It's taking a risk that if you get caught, the kid can focus on the "violation of privacy" instead of on the content of their behavior – they go into self-righteous mode when the focus should be on their risky behavior.

Couric and Wiseman talk about sexting.

Annie Fox's podcast with Rachel Simmons, whose most recent book is The Curse of the Good Girl (here's Simmons's site)

"A different sort of back-to-school tip: Kindness"

The last time I wrote about Fox and Wiseman: "Sexting: New study & the 'Truth or Dare' scenario"

Federal privacy case also about youth safety

There's an interesting conversation going on over at CNET about cellphones as tracking devices, outdated federal privacy law, and phone owners' privacy rights. Reporter Declan McCullagh looks at this crucial moment in the courts – a case to be argued before the Third Circuit Court of Appeal in Philadelphia tomorrow. As I read, I first thought, "Well, cops used to obtain phone records that located where suspects were when they made calls with fixed phones, as well as where the calls were made to. Now they just find out where the mobile phone was, right?" Yes, but, uh, the tracking of geolocation-enabled cellphones (which most mobiles are now), "comes in two forms," McCullagh writes: "police obtaining retrospective data kept by mobile providers for their own billing purposes that may not be very detailed, or prospective data that reveals the minute-by-minute location of a handset or mobile device." It's the "prospective" part that's new and raises even more concerns. If search-and-seizure laws aren't updated so that police need a search warrant to obtain cellphone location data in realtime (which is what this whole discussion's about), Big Brother really can, potentially, track you minute-by-minute now. Then I thought about youth safety. Is there a downside there? Of course not, if we're talking about tracking a kidnapper or his/her victim. But what if a child is trying to get away from an abusive parent, the police don't know about the abuse, and the parent calls the police saying s/he's desperate to find a lost child? There are many what-if scenarios like that. Minors have privacy rights too. Another consideration I'm not seeing in McCullagh's piece is prepaid "disposable" phones not attached to mobile carriers' billing departments and data-storage servers. Will bad guys be using those a whole lot more if the privacy-rights side of this case loses? To be continued.... [Meanwhile, feel free to weigh in on any of this in comments below, via email, or in our forum at ConnectSafely.org.]

YouTube's new tool for kid-safe viewing

More than 33 billion online videos were watched during December and about a third of the them were on YouTube, according to comScore's latest figures. A 2008 study by Nielsen found that YouTube was 2-to-11-year-olds' No. 1 video viewing site (see this). So parents will probably be happy to know that YouTube now has its own filter for sexually explicit or violent content. "While no filter is 100% perfect, Safety Mode is another step in our ongoing desire to give you greater control over the content you see on the site," says the YouTube blog. As their video demo shows, it's easy to activate: Just go to any YouTube page, scroll to the bottom, and click "Safety Mode is off." After clicking On or Off, you can choose either to "Save" or "Save and lock." With the former, Safety Mode is on whenever anybody's uses that browser on that computer until they change that setting (works with a rule that settings don't get changed and obedient kids). "Save and lock" allows you to log into your Google or YouTube account and lock the setting so that it can't be changed in that browser by anyone who doesn't know your password – just as with Google's SafeSearch lock (see this). [See also "Help with cyberbullying on YouTube."]

Student free speech to Supreme Court soon?

It was a big day for student free speech last Thursday, a day that ended with mixed results. One three-judge panel of the Third US Circuit Court decided for a student, and another panel from the same circuit decided against a student, Wired reports. Wired adds that the Supreme Court "has never squarely addressed the parameters of off-campus, online student speech, but might soon. So far, lower courts appear to be guided by a 1969 high court ruling saying student expression may not be suppressed unless school officials reasonably conclude that it will “materially and substantially disrupt the work and discipline of the school.” In one case the judges said that "school officials in Mercer County [Penn.] cannot reach into a family's home and police the Internet. That case also involves a MySpace parody of a principal created by a student at home," the Washington Post reported. In the other case, the judges "upheld the suspension of a Schuylkill County eighth-grader who posted sexually explicit material along with her principal's photograph on a fake MySpace page" – though the dissenting judge "said his colleagues were broadening the school's authority and improperly censoring students." The Post added that "school boards, free-speech advocates and others had been awaiting the rulings for clarity on how far schools can go to control both online speech and offsite behavior," and what they got was the opposite. [See also "Student free speech decision" and my original post on the Avery Doninger case, "Teen name-calling: Federal case" and the ensuing lower-court decision.]

Student free speech to Supreme Court soon?

It was a big day for student free speech last Thursday, a day that ended with mixed results. One three-judge panel of the Third US Circuit Court decided for a student, and another panel from the same circuit decided against a student, Wired reports . Wired adds that the Supreme Court "has never squarely addressed the parameters of off-campus, online student speech, but might soon. So far, lower courts appear to be guided by a 1969 high court ruling saying student expression may not be suppressed unless school officials reasonably conclude that it will “materially and substantially disrupt the work and discipline of the school.” In one case the judges said that "school officials in Mercer County [Penn.] cannot reach into a family's home and police the Internet. That case also involves a MySpace parody of a principal created by a student at home," the Washington Post reported. In the other case, the judges "upheld the suspension of a Schuylkill County eighth-grader who posted sexually explicit material along with her principal's photograph on a fake MySpace page" – though the dissenting judge "said his colleagues were broadening the school's authority and improperly censoring students." The Post added that "school boards, free-speech advocates and others had been awaiting the rulings for clarity on how far schools can go to control both online speech and offsite behavior," and what they got was the opposite. [See also "Student free speech decision" and my original post on the Avery Doninger case, "Teen name-calling: Federal case" and the ensuing lower-court decision.]

Major buzz about Buzz, but not about its safety

Google's Buzz, which it unveiled today, means to make Gmail much more social – adding updates and photo- and video-sharing; turning emailers into Twitter-like "followers"; and making all of that local to you (and you to it) via your cellphone, according to hundreds of news articles including PCWorld's. That last bit concerning geolocation raises some safety concerns, writes ConnectSafely.org co-director Larry Magid in CNET, where he posted an audio interview with Google co-founder Sergey Brin. Writing also in the Huffington Post, he says "Mobile Buzz, which will work initially on the Apple iPhone and Google Android phones," taking advantage of their GPS tech "so that users will not only be able to update their status but their location as well." Of course Buzz will work with Google maps. Will that social pinpointing capability be something people have to consciously turn on? I hope so, because young people don't always stop for safety or privacy reality checks in the rapid-fire back-'n'-forth of teen texting and socializing. But how much will that help even so? These products like Buzz are all just social convenience tools to teens. Teens don't think as much as we do about separate stand-alone products, services, or devices, each with its own privacy policy, set of terms of service. It's all much more of a means to the much more important end of staying connected and maintaining mindshare with peers. That's a challenge when companies just want to throw these various tasks at the lawyers and be done with it. The good news is, Google's integrating all of its Buzz-related products for fixed and mobile use; maybe they'll have integrated safety and privacy too.

Safer Internet Day: Wrong to focus on 5-to-7-year-olds?

I was surprised by the surprise in the voice of a newspaper reporter interviewing me last week, when he asked me to repeat a point about how a youth police officer I know started talking with 4th-graders about online safety. Well, today – the European Union's Safer Internet Day – the UK's awareness campaign is aimed at 5-to-7-year-olds (see The Guardian's coverage). Wouldn't the reporter be surprised about that?! I actually think new-media literacy and mindfulness about how they (we all) treat one another online and offline should be taught to children from the moment they start playing with digital devices. And I'm certainly not alone – I heard many statements to that effect at the Safer Internet Forum in Luxembourg last October (see this).

Yet, Ian Douglas at The Telegraph is saying "Safer Internet day is pitching too young" and says parents need to be the primary audience. Absolutely, they're paramount. But I think there is no primary audience. Safety on the fixed and mobile, user-driven social Web is a multi-stakeholder proposition. Just as the only logical solution to bullying/cyberbullying (there is great overlap between the two) is a whole-school-community one, the same goes for youth safety at the societal level. Everybody's teaching and learning in this multi-directional new media environment, everybody has a say in their own, their friends', and their community's well-being, online and offline piece of the solution: user, family, school, caregivers, teachers, industry, government. And yes, Douglas is right that it's not for young children if Net-safety messaging defaults to the old predator-focused, fear-based, research-ignoring fare we've hopefully moved past. He's wrong if online/offline citizenship and mindfulness are the content of safety education. Meanwhile, two-thirds of 14,000 European children surveyed said their parents "do nothing to encourage them to be safe online," according to a new Microsoft survey cited in the Irish Times. [Here's much more Safer Internet Day coverage. See also "Online Safety 3.0: Empowering & Protecting Youth." I'll be blogging more about the school part of the equation soon.]

Fresh social-Web & Net numbers

If Facebook were a country, it would be the world's third most populous one, after China and India. As for the world's most avid social networkers, Americans are 4th, behind Australians, Britons, and Italians, respectively – The Economist reports in a special report on social networking – followed by users in South Korea, Spain, Brazil, Germany, France, and Japan. The world's most popular social sites are Facebook, Windows Live, MySpace, Chinese portal Baidu, Twitter, Google's social site Orkut (popular in Brazil and India), Hi5, Chinese social site QQ, LinkedIn, and art community site DeviantArt – in that order, based on 10/09 comScore figures and all based in the US unless otherwise indicated. Other big indigenous communities include "Skyrock in France, VKontakte in Russia, and Cyworld in South Korea, as well as numerous smaller social networks that appeal to specific interests such as Muxlim, aimed at the world's Muslims, and ResearchGATE, which connects scientists and researchers." Meanwhile, Nielsen reports that social network sites are the most popular Web destination worldwide, with FB representing 67% of all social site traffic, Mashable.com reports. As for general Internet numbers for 2009, Pingdom.com has some: e.g., 90 trillion emails went out last year (247 billion a day, on average); there were 234 million Web sites as of this past December; and 1.73 Net users as of last September (see that page for more).

Facebook's orders of magnitude of change

In six years Facebook has gone from being a social utility for students of a single northeastern US elite university (a sort of directory+community where Harvard students could find and socialize with each other) to a social utility for nearly 400 million people of multiple ages, languages, and walks of life worldwide (FB passed its sixth birthday last Thursday).

My theory is, that fairly spare original design as a utility made it less flexible for individual users but more flexible for users as a whole – in other words for the changes that going from mere hundreds to hundreds of millions would entail. A pretty bare-bones social utility (like Twitter, too, as opposed to MySpace, which was always more of a self-expression tool than a social utility) is simply a person's social network visualized. [If this makes no sense, pls let me know or post your own theory in comments below.] "In its latest redesign, Facebook is playing up applications, games and search," USATODAY reports. That makes sense to me, because apps and games are one way users can customize their FB experience, and search becomes paramount simply because of the challenge of finding someone among 400 million users – but also grows the tension between those concerned about privacy and those who want to be found by old friends and long-lost relatives. For those concerned about privacy, by the way, here's a very handy how-to article: "The Three Facebook [privacy] Settings Every User Should Check Now": the ones concerning who can see what you share (updates, photos, etc.), who can see your personal info, and who can search for and find your FB profile with Web search engines.

Social norming: *So* key to online safety

I doubt the term "social norming" means much to most people, but it's actually common practice in family life, at school, and on sports teams. It's the culture or behavioral norms we create to teach and model values and ethics for our children – showing up in statements like "we don't say 'hate' in this family" or "we respect the other team." Maybe because it's so second-nature, we don't often think about how powerful social norming can be on the online-safety front. But when the research shows that aggressive behavior online more than doubles the aggressor's risk of being victimized, we need to take this point very seriously. In fact, we need to move past expecting adults to do the modeling to expecting all community members to do so, especially children – help them see that they are key to their own well-being as well as their community's. Professor and cyberbullying researcher Sameer Hinduja puts this in the school context: "How does this relate to reducing online harassment among elementary, middle, and high school students? Social norming has to do with modifying the environment, or culture within a school, so that appropriate behaviors are not only encouraged, but perceived widely to be the norm," he writes in his blog. The same goes for online community. Virtual worlds, multiplayer online games, and social network sites need to foster a culture of civil behavior and citizenship as a vital Net-safety feature of their communities. There has been discussion about the importance of "neighborhood policing" or community self-policing online as well as offline, and I agree. It's vital, and many responsible sites and worlds act quickly on abuse reports. But they need to pair that with social norming to be both preventive and reactive, to provide more complete protection (I call this "the guild effect").

However, as much as we may like it to be, changing the culture is not just up to sites and virtual worlds or schools. It can't be. Because this is a user-driven media environment we're all experiencing now, by definition it's up to all of us, especially the users of a particular virtual world or social site (or classroom, family or neighborhood). So how do we start? As Hinduja puts it, "by focusing attention on the majority of youth who do utilize computers and cellphones in acceptable ways. If I told you that one in five teenagers are cyberbullied, you wouldn’t focus on spreading that fact around your student body. Rather, you would reframe and reconceptualize that research finding, and then create cool and relevant messaging strategies emphasizing that the vast majority of your students [and our children] are using Internet technologies with integrity, discretion, and wisdom, which would hopefully motivate or induce the remainder to get 'on board.' Ideally, the remainder would desire to fit in, would desire to be like everyone else, and would feel an informal compulsion to stop cyberbullying others and start doing the right thing." If we're worried about cyberbullying as a society, we need to get going on this! As Hinduja writes, "Spending too much time painting cyberbullying in alarmist colors may encourage more youth to act in similar ways, since those youth will perceive the act as 'normal' and that 'everyone is doing it'.”

Related links

"Claiming & social norming in social sites"

"Toward fixing teen risky behavior in social sites: Study"

"'21st-century statecraft' at home & school"

"From users to citizens: How to make digital citizenship relevant"

"Social norming & digital citizenship"

"Social norming for risk prevention"

66% of teens text, only 8% tweet: Study

Though adult blogging remains steady, teen blogging has decreased by half since 2006 – from 28% of teens then to 14% now, according to a Pew/Internet report released yesterday. Eleven percent of Americans 30+ maintain a personal blog right now, Pew adds. Blogging by 18-29-year-olds has decreased, too, but not by quite as much: from 24% of that age group in 2007 to 15% now. Social networking continues to grow – 73% of teens use social sites now (compared to 47% of adults), up from 55% in 2006 and 65% last February – but Twitter use among teens is not high. Only 8% of 12-to-17-year-old Net users use Twitter, compared to about a third of 18-to-29-year-olds (the age group that uses Twitter the most). Compare that teen Twitter use to virtual worlds (about the same) and texting (a whopping 66%). Moving from media to devices: 75% of teens and 93% of 18-to-29-year-olds have cellphones. It's not surprising to parents, I think, when Pew says that, "in the past five years, cellphone ownership has become mainstream among even the youngest teens." That's where the biggest growth has been: "Fully 58% of 12-year-olds now own a cellphone, up from just 18% of such teens as recently as 2004."

66% of teens text, only 8% tweet: Study

Though adult blogging remains steady, teen blogging has decreased by half since 2006 – from 28% of teens then to 14% now, according to a Pew/Internet report released yesterday. Eleven percent of Americans 30+ maintain a personal blog right now, Pew adds. Blogging by 18-29-year-olds has decreased, too, but not by quite as much: from 24% of that age group in 2007 to 15% now. Social networking continues to grow – 73% of teens use social sites now (compared to 47% of adults), up from 55% in 2006 and 65% last February – but Twitter use among teens is not high. Only 8% of 12-to-17-year-old Net users use Twitter, compared to about a third of 18-to-29-year-olds (the age group that uses Twitter the most). Compare that teen Twitter use to virtual worlds (about the same) and texting (a whopping 66%). Moving from media to devices: 75% of teens and 93% of 18-to-29-year-olds have cellphones. It's not surprising to parents, I think, when Pew says that, "in the past five years, cellphone ownership has become mainstream among even the youngest teens." That's where the biggest growth has been: "Fully 58% of 12-year-olds now own a cellphone, up from just 18% of such teens as recently as 2004."

Kids' top toy for 2010: iPad?!

Apple may not have thought of it that way, but Children's Technology Review editor (and former teacher) Warren Buckleitner thinks the iPad just may be Toy of the Year, he writes in Gadgetwise at the New York Times . Some of the reasons: Lots of available games and other software already; no controller or mouse ("the screen *is* the controller and it sits in their lap, which works for children (and their grandparents, too, by the way"); that big high-res screen and gorgeous color palette that brings imagery to life; road-trip activity center; and Warren adds "a fair price," but I think parents will be waiting for that $499 starting price to come down – which is not to say there won't be plenty of parent-hounding while they do that waiting. But before anybody succumbs, give it some thought. The iPad also makes the Web very attractive and portable. Basically, it's a very big iPod Touch, which led to lots of family discussions after the recent holidays, when parents realized all of the Web was now in their kids' pockets wherever they went, and they hadn't thought about parental controls before giftwrapping. The iPhone and iTouch's App Store – including all the games and some parental-control apps – will be available for the iPad too. Check out the possibilities before giving 2010's "Toy of the Year" to your child (because the iPad will function very similarly, see "How To Setup Parental Controls on iPhone & iPod Touch" ).

Kids' top toy for 2010: iPad?!

Apple may not have thought of it that way, but Children's Technology Review editor (and former teacher) Warren Buckleitner thinks the iPad just may be Toy of the Year, he writes in Gadgetwise at the New York Times. Some of the reasons: Lots of available games and other software already; no controller or mouse ("the screen *is* the controller and it sits in their lap, which works for children (and their grandparents, too, by the way"); that big high-res screen and gorgeous color palette that brings imagery to life; road-trip activity center; and Warren adds "a fair price," but I think parents will be waiting for that $499 starting price to come down – which is not to say there won't be plenty of parent-hounding while they do that waiting. But before anybody succumbs, give it some thought. The iPad also makes the Web very attractive and portable. Basically, it's a very big iPod Touch, which led to lots of family discussions after the recent holidays, when parents realized all of the Web was now in their kids' pockets wherever they went, and they hadn't thought about parental controls before giftwrapping. The iPhone and iTouch's App Store – including all the games and some parental-control apps – will be available for the iPad too. Check out the possibilities before giving 2010's "Toy of the Year" to your child (because the iPad will function very similarly, see "How To Setup Parental Controls on iPhone & iPod Touch."

What's the deal with Farmville?

If you believe what a few of its 72 million worldwide players told USATODAY, the Facebook-based, virtual-reality social game offers a mild sense of escape, fosters a sort of virtual diligence (about tending one's virtual crops and farm animals), and encourages community and charity toward one's virtual neighbors (neighbors get "points and gold for scaring away pests, fertilizing or feeding chickens" on each other's land). Farmville wasn't always purely positive, of course (see "Social gaming cleaning up its act?"). Farmville's parent, San Francisco-based game developer Zynga, announced last fall it was banishing all "offer advertising" from its games (Farmville fans, have you seen any lately?), but they're something to watch out for in social games – those parasitical little offers that tricked players into ultimately paying "far more for in-game currency than if they just paid [the game itself] cash," TechCrunch reported. Just because Zynga supposedly got rid of it doesn't mean other developers did, so talk with your kids about "free" offers on phones and on the Web. [Meanwhile, SocialTimes.com reports that the BBC is getting into social gaming (looking at the iPhone, Facebook, and Nintendo Wii and DS platforms), having hired a new executive VP of games.]

PBS Frontline's 'Digital Nation': Presenting our generation with a crucial choice

Seems to me, Gever Tully's Tinkering School would be the perfect antidote for all the concern about kids and digital media expressed in PBS Frontline's "Digital Nation" – hands-on problem-solving, lots of tools, collaboratively learning by doing, giving kids time to work the problem, celebrating and analyzing failures, teaching that success is embedded in the process (watch his TED Talk about this). The thing is, so much of that sort of tinkering is being done by kids using the very digital media and technologies that are the focus of our fears. But more on that in a minute.

This time, Frontline, which airs on PBS this Tuesday night, is depicting the personal explorations of Digital Nation's writers themselves, those of Rachel Dretzin and Douglas Rushkoff, both parents. Last time, in 2008's "Growing Up Online," the stories were more those of the documentary's subjects. It's as if Dretzin, the producer of both Growing Up Online and Digital Nation, was shaken by what her reporting turned up in the last project. Thoughtful journalist/anthropologist that she is, she went in-depth and looked at all sides of those teens' stories, presenting the most balanced picture I'd seen anywhere to that point, having interviewed leading social-media researchers such as C.J. Pasco and danah boyd for depth and perspective.

In Digital Nation, at least the preview version I saw this past weekend, it seems the main story is two parents' concerns. We're on a 90-minute journey with them, wending our way through skillfully told vignettes (about everything from a South Korean boy at videogame-addiction camp to the US Army's shopping-mall-based videogame arcade/ recruiting center to a corporation's daily multinational staff meetings in a virtual world) and thought-provoking interviews, again with top academics (e.g., MIT's Sherry Turkle, USC's Henry Jenkins, Arizona State's James Paul Gee, educator Katie Salen, Emory's Mark Bauerlein, author of The Dumbest Generation, and Marc Prensky, who coined the term "digital natives"). Important, if not particularly new, questions are raised – for example, about multitasking, etiquette, addiction, alienation, and the blurring of virtual and real.

Documenting an angst-ridden point in history?

Certainly we hear Rushkoff when he says "we need to know if we're tinkering with something more essential than we realize ... what it means to be a human being." But we also hear from scholars who have been studying that question very closely for years that, with societal and technological change, some things have always been lost and some gained. Prensky says on camera that "we confuse the best ways of doing something once [in our past] with the best ways of doing something forever." That's what so many of us are doing. Perhaps Dretzin and Rushkoff are Everyman, or Everyparent, and Digital Nation is documenting a point in history – here in the middle of this profound media shift Earth is experiencing – when we're fearing and mourning what's being lost a lot more than we're seeking and considering what is being gained.

Did the writers really hear James Paul Gee, when, in their interview with him, he told of how, in virtual worlds and multiplayer games, young people function in teams in which "everybody is an expert in something but they know how to integrate their expertise with everybody else's; they know how to understand the other person's expertise so they can pull off an action together in a complicated world"? That's what happens for home-schooled students and the teacher members of the Cognitive Dissonance guild in World of Warcraft – and with students at school on curriculum-grounded "quests" in an educational virtual world called Quest Atlantis developed by the University of Indiana School of Education.

Did they hear Gee when he said we have two school systems now – traditional school, fixated on delivering content via textbooks, and the informal school system of social media, where kids are problem-solving, researching, producing, etc. on their own because social media are largely blocked from schools?

How about Katie Salen – professor, director of the Center for Transformative Media at Parsons the New School for Design, and executive director of the Institute of Play – when she suggests on the show itself that seeing young people's game-based learning and play only through the lens of our old media environment, where virtual worlds didn't exist, may be somewhat myopic for us and limiting for our children? (See "From chalk 'n' talk to learning by doing" about Quest to Learn, a new school of which the Institute of Play is a founding partner.)

Stick with 'chalk 'n' talk' or open our minds?

For our children's sake, we really need to dig past the legitimate but relentless, visceral, and politically correct questions with which all parents and mass-media natives struggle and seriously consider what these scholars are saying. And not only them! I can't wait to see what Digital Nation's producers come up with next, now that the work of more than two dozen social-media scholars – Hanging Out, Messing Around, and Geeking Out – has been released by MIT Press. It's a mother lode of stories about how young people learn in and with new media.

Which brings me back to tinkering. I got that word from Sylvia Martinez, president of Generation Yes, who presented a workshop about it at Educon, a tech educators' conference, this past weekend. Reading through her past posts about it, in addition to references to Gever Tully, I found a profound 10-minute video interview with John Seely Brown, visiting professor at USC and former director of PARC (Palo Alto Research Center), about using digital technology to bring collaborative "tinkering" back to school. Digital Nation, please look into this next!...

Collaborative tinkering & social capital for kids

In the interview, Brown said: "I think we're moving into quite a different kind of world, one in which change is omnipresent, where we're beginning to find ways to bootstrap our own knowledge, tinker with ideas around us, find things we don't know, ask good questions, and be open to criticism." He calls for peer-based, collaborative learning, "because, from the sharing you begin to see how other kids use what you just created. Kids learn from each other as much as from an authority or mentor."

Brown talks about how to make school responsive to the pace of change and suggests thinking of schools in terms of "distributed communities of practice," which digital-technology learning tools allow. "With these powerful tools with which to craft things, tinkering has really come back big time.... This networked world is an open-source world, where I can make something, pass it back to the community, and have that community do new things with it." This is not just a shift for media or even education, but for identity and self-worth: "In earlier decades, a lot of kids grew up thinking, I am what I'm wearing, how I dress, what my parents own; my identity came from those material possessions. Just maybe we're entering a world where ... a sense of identity starts to get constructed for myself based on what I have done, what I have created, and others have built on, passed on to others, and they have been able to do wondrous things with as well. A whole new sense of reputational capital and social capital is on the move...."

Related links

"digital_nation: life on the virtual frontier" - the show's main page (the full 90-min show can be watched online right now here)

A review of Digital Nation by media professor Henry Jenkins (who appeared in Digital Nation and taught at MIT for 20 years, until moving to USC six months ago) offering a different take on "killer paragraphs" and multitasking MIT students (including his own)

The perspective of Duke University English professor Cathy Davidson, who wrote a book about the 19th-century panic over the destructive effect of novels on children

"PBS documentary questions tech and our future," by ConnectSafely co-director Larry Magid

"Are you an Internet optimist or pessimist?: The great debate over technology's impact on society," by Adam Thierer

Of "Dangerism" at The Tinkering School blog

"Net safety: How social networks can be protective," where I blog about how James Paul Gee's Digital Nation interview got me to thinking about how what I call "the guild effect" – or online community social norming and self-policing – will be an increasingly key element of online safety going forward

Digital Nation interview: My thoughts on parenting our digital-age kids

The reality TV of school: Helping our kids with tech-assisted 24/7 school drama

My review of "Growing Up Online" two years ago – maybe a little biased; it's good I wasn't interviewed for Digital Nation