Wii-related 'parental challenges'

A California mom was "lucky" enough this past fall to walk into a toy store right after a fresh shipment of Nintendo Wii consoles had been received. So she bought one for her child as a gift, only too soon to discover some "hidden costs." "Be prepared for "post-Wii stress disorder," she wrote in the Los Gatos Weekly Times. In the last four paragraphs of her story, she suggests how parents of Wii players can prepare themselves (including if they get hooked themselves).

Oral culture online

You know how most communication, story-telling, and history used to be oral? Well, with social networking, humanity may be coming full circle. "Academic researchers are starting to [explore] the parallels between online social networks and tribal societies," the New York Times reports. "In the collective patter of profile-surfing, messaging and 'friending,' they see the resurgence of ancient patterns of oral communication. The growth of social networks - and the Internet as a whole - stems largely from an outpouring of expression that often feels more like 'talking' than writing: blog posts, comments, homemade videos and, lately, an outpouring of epigrammatic one-liners broadcast using services like Twitter and Facebook status updates." The Times tells of cultural anthropology Prof. Michael Wesch at Kansas State University who at one time lived with a tribe in Papua New Guinea, "studying how people forge social relationships in a purely oral culture." Dr. Wesch "applies the same ethnographic research methods to the rites and rituals of Facebook users."

The social Web Petri dish

Social-networking sites are important Petri dishes. By studying the social Web, researchers are learning a lot about how people interact - not just about how they do so now and online but about human interaction in general. In fact, research in social-networking sites "may be more accurate than personal information offered elsewhere online, such as chat room profiles, because [it's] based in real-world relationships that originate in confined communities like campuses," reports the New York Times, referring to a UCLA- and Harvard-based study of 1,700 Facebook users in the junior class of one northeastern US college. One of the things they're looking at: "weak ties," those between, say, two classmates or people who meet at a big party. "Weak ties are significant, scholars say, because they are likely to provide people with new perspectives and opportunities that they might not get from close friends and family." According to the Times, "social scientists at Indiana, Northwestern, Pennsylvania State, Tufts, the University of Texas and other institutions are mining Facebook to test traditional theories in their fields about relationships, identity, self-esteem, popularity, collective action, race and political engagement. The Washington Post recently ran a gossipy piece about the fledgling social-media research community which got some reaction in the academic blogosphere (e.g., ), but it does name a number of the individual researchers and projects working on the social Web right now. Back to the Harvard-UCLA project: An important concept they're exploring is "triadic closure," "first put forth by the pioneering German sociologist Georg Simmel … whether one’s friends are also friends of one another. If this seems trivial, consider that a study in 2004 in The American Journal of Public Health suggested that adolescent girls who are socially isolated and whose friends are not friends with one another experienced more suicidal thoughts."

Politician's profile deleted

It was Liberal Democrat Steve Webb, a British member of Parliament, whose Facebook page was deleted after someone sent in an abuse report calling it an imposter profile. Soon there was a Facebook group called "Steve Webb is Real!", CNET reports. His profile was shortly reinstated, to the satisfaction of his 2,500 Facebook friends and constitutents. But what's interesting about all this is that on the social Web it's sometimes as hard to prove there's a real person behind a profile as it is to prove there isn't. [See also "Extreme cyberbullying: US case comes to light."]

New features afoot at MySpace

MySpace plans to be people's dashboard for navigating cyberspace, USATODAY reports - the place "where they can check in on the activities of friends, peruse email, get the latest on news and weather, and post their favorite photos and videos." To deal with the growing threat Facebook represents to MySpace, USATODAY says, the latter is projecting itself as a place for self-expression rather than being the social "utility" it says Facebook is (Facebook declined comment for the story). There are 6 million bands registered on MySpace, USATODAY adds. Other plans for 2008 include: giving members "the option of creating multiple profiles tailored to friends, family and business associates. A channel with Oberon Media, a maker of multiplayer games, is in the works for the first half of 2008. MySpace unveiled a service that lets MySpace members make free Internet phone calls through Skype (EBAY). And it just unfurled Transmissions, a program that lets musicians showcase music on their pages and sell performance videos," according to the article. With more members than the population of Mexico and local versions in 22 countries and territories outside the US, MySpace also continues its international expansion, planning to open offices and "launch custom sites in India, Russia, Poland, South Korea, and Turkey, the Zooped blog reports. For example, in India, where Net speeds are comparatively slow, a less bandwidth-greedy version is in the works. In South Korea, where blogging is hugely popular, MySpace will be more of a blogging site than in the US (though blogging is part of the US MySpace experience). Meanwhile, Facebook is growing fast internationally too - see Zooped for some comScore figures it cites.

Controversial 'Cool Girl' game in Oz

Is it a way for "cool girl" wannabes to vent their frustrations, does it teach them to bully, or does it simply entertain? Those are the questions reportedly surrounding a new mobile-phone game in Australia that's drawing international attention. Called "Coolest Girl in School," the game - quite an anomaly because designed specifically for girls - "invites young players to 'lie, bitch, and flirt your way to the top of the high school ladder'," reports Sydney-based SmartHouse magazine. It went on sale last week and the Australian Family Association called for it to be banned. The game was designed by Adelaide-based developers Holly Owen of Champagne for the Ladies and Karyn Lanthois of Kukan Studio, who said they were surprised by the pre-release international attention.

Australia's very connected families

Ninety percent of Australian families with children are online, up from 7% in 2005, reports Australian IT, citing new findings from the Australian Communications and Media Authority, Three-quarters (76%) of those online families have broadband connections. The study also found that "most Australian families with children older than eight now have three televisions, three mobile phones, a gaming console, and Internet access," and 98% own a computer. Oz's 15-to-17-year-olds spend on average an hour and 15 minutes a day online, and 42% have posted content to social-networking sites. As for TV, it has diminished in importance in Australia too, but 20% of Australian children have TV sets in their bedrooms now (up from 8% in 1995), and that compares to 70% of UK kids and 75% of US kids, according to the report. "The vast majority of [Australian] parents say their children's media consumption is fairly easy to control."

Oz union's Facebook profile

The Australian Workers Union is marketing itself to youth by establishing a presence in Facebook, Australian IT reports. Though union leaders say its profile will get more sophisticated, for now "users can add the ‘Proud AWU Supporter’ application to their profile pages to obtain the organisation's latest news feeds." Version 2.0 will let users "interact directly" with the union, which says it wants to differentiate itself from most unions, which "generally ignore new forms of communication."

Musicians' view of teen social networking

Come enter, here's my world
Closed off from pain and cold
Come enter, come inside
A secret place of light
'Cause in this world I'm rid of you,
You can't get through

Those are lyrics from a song entitled "Digital Deceit" by Netherlands-based band After Forever. A rare artistic depiction of teen social networking, it's part of a concept CD "about a family with serious issues," wrote researcher Daniel Cardoso in an email to me. Most of this song represents the voice of the daughter, who is "taking refuge in her Internet persona," said Daniel. You may recognize the other voice in the lyrics, that of the adults around her….

Stop dreaming and wake up
Your silly world is not what's real
This world of fake friends
and computers - digital deceit

What struck me immediately about the teenage voice in this song is how it resonates with the latest research in the US about the teens who are most vulnerable to exploitation on the social Web (see "Profile of a teen online victim"): Online "I'm beautiful and all my friends would say the same … the queen of her own world … another me, not someone insecure and strange / My father's will in here, it doesn't mean a thing / And I don't fear his violent rage" (here's a video of After Forever performing the song in YouTube). By the end of the story, however, this teen sounds too grounded to move toward victimization (for more on this CD as a whole, click to this sidebar on my server).

I was fortunate to have met Daniel Cardoso at an online-safety conference held in Lisbon last week by MiudosSegurosNa.net (Portugal's pioneering online-safety organization) and sponsored by Portugal Telecom. The conference was an unprecedented opportunity for the country's biggest Internet provider, children's advocates, research community, law enforcement, and government to compare notes on an important subject. Daniel is a researcher as well as Webmaster for EUKidsOnline Portugal, directed by Prof. Cristina Ponte at the New University of Lisbon (EU Kids Online is a huge ongoing research project involving research in 24 countries).

If you're wondering about After Forever's music, the band itself says it's hard to categorize. In its MySpace profile, it says it "has never pinned itself strictly on any given style. They have the obvious combination of metal and classical themes, but can just as easily implement rock, pop, industrial and progressive styles into their songs." The songs I've heard on this concept CD (including this other, climactic, one), sound like rock opera to me, maybe partly because they're part of a story.

Daniel kindly sent more info on the CD - Invisible Circles - as a whole. You'll find it and lyrics of "Digital Deceit" here.

'Teens rule the Web'

That was just one (the Washington Post's) of an interesting range of headlines about the latest Pew Internet & American Life study about US 12-to-17-year-olds online. The Post's reporter blogged about how "teens continue to lead the pack in creating content on the Web." The San Jose Mercury News reported that "More teens move their social lives online." The Associated Press and USATODAY took the boy-bites-dog angle - that good, ol'-fashioned (land-line) phones and face-to-face conversation are still valued by US teens communicating with friends. Internet News zoomed in on the "super-communicators" part: "Representing 28% of teenagers, super-communicators are those kids who use every technology to communicate that is available to them, including landlines and cell phones, social-networking sites, text messaging, instant messaging and, as a last resort, email." The study was picked up internationally, of course, including in Mumbai, India, at the TechShout blog. Here are some key findings:

"Publishing" as conversing: 41% of teens who are on social networks said that they routinely use those sites to send messages to their friends. When teens blog, post videos, etc., they're "looking to start a conversation as much as they are trying to promote their own creative output," Internet News reports.

Privacy - 66% of teens with social-networking profiles limit access to their pages; 77% of those who post photos "restrict access at least some of the time." Pew's study released earlier this week found that adults are less concerned about privacy protection than teens.

64% of online teens in general "engage in at least one type of content creation," up from 57% in 2004.

"Girls dominate most elements of content creation," according to Pew/Internet.

Blogs, girls; videos, boys - 28% of online teens have created a blog (up from 19% in 2004), and almost all of the new ones are girls'; while 19% of online teen boys had posted video, compared to 10% of girls.

27% manage their own Web site.

39% post photos, videos, and other artistic content; 54% of girls and 40% of boys have posted photos.

Kid videogame picks & pans

Just a quick heads-up for any last-minute shopping: CNET has a "18 top game picks: The DOs and DON'Ts of games for kids." The guide includes screen shots so you can see what the games look like, and it offers "nine games you can count on for your child, and nine you should shy away from (or keep for yourself)." They're all good games, just not all child-appropriate, CNET adds. There is one "don't" concerning hardware rather than a game, on the very last page: the Xbox 360 headset. "The premise: This simple headset plugs into your Xbox 360 controller and enables voice chat over Xbox Live and compatible games. The good: Lets your kids talk to other people over Xbox Live. The bad: Lets your kids talk to other people over Xbox Live." See also "Support for young videogamers."

Public wi-fi's risks

If you're traveling for the holidays, be careful when you use wi-fi hotspots in public places. "Few things expose your [computer] to greater security risks than latching onto a public Wi-Fi service," USATODAY reports. "Computer criminals can 'sniff' the traffic in a cafe, or set up a fake hot spot that you might innocently log into. When that happens, watch out: Everything you type goes directly to the host computer, known as an 'evil twin'." The "twin is ready to grab passwords, financial info, etc. Some retailers with wireless service are now advertising secure connectivity, which really helps. If you log on and see "https" instead of "http," your connecting is also probably secure. USATODAY has a sidebar with other tips.

Parents speaking 'txt'?

This is probably not news to you: Many technologically challenged parents are being introduced to the world of texting by their children, the Denver Post reports. "Statistics point emphatically to kids and young adults under 25 driving the tidal surge in text messaging - up fourfold in the past two years to almost 30 billion messages a month," the Post cites wireless industry figures as showing. But I love the basic message of the article, that "the process of young people instructing their parents can be gratifying for both." It tells of an Arizona computer services company advising parents that it's fun to surprise your kids by sending them an out-of-the-blue message like, "I love you" or "What would you like for dinner?" Meanwhile, it looks like 2007 is the year when Americans will have spent more on cellphones than on landlines, the Associated Press reports.

Be wary of e-cards!

Warning: Those "holiday e-greetings" you and your kids find in your email in-boxes may not all be from friends. "E-cards can spread cheer, cheesy humor, and, unfortunately, computer viruses," the Christian Science Monitor reports. "Spammers and hackers continually shift their strategies to match the calendar. And this time of year, they often hide behind season's greetings." The temptation to click on a friendly greeting is called social engineering. The Monitor quotes a Trend Micro expert as saying that the most successful email virus ever had the subject line "I LOVE YOU." One thing people should always do is check to see if the email has the name of the person sending you the greeting and that you know the person! Check out the article's sidebar for other tips for malicious e-card avoidance.

Very public binge drinking

When CNN contacted a 22-year-old university business major about a video she posted of herself drunk she took it down, saying the interview request made her realize anyone could see it, CNN reports. She's a member of a Facebook group with more than 172,000 members called "Thirty Reasons Girls Should Call it a Night," which has a page linking to 5,000 photos of drunk college students - many of them extremely humiliating (CNN describes some of them). And many of the photos "are accompanied by full names and the colleges the women attend, apparently without much concern that parents, or potential employers, will take a look." I hope it doesn't take a call from a news reporter for it to occur to other group members that the images and videos they post could be harmful to future prospects! Forty percent of US college students binge drink, reports CNN, citing a 2007 report by the Center on Alcohol and Substance Abuse.

Half of us search for ourselves...

…or someone else in Web search engines, according to the latest study by the Pew Internet & American Life Project. The exact figures are 47% searching for ourselves, up from 22% in 2002, and 53% searching for others. The findings "reflect how people are sharing more and more of their lives on the Internet, as well as how Web 2.0 sites such as YouTube, Flickr, Facebook and MySpace are encouraging users to post their home videos, photographs and personal profiles online, including data ranging from their favorite movies to their cell phone number," the San Francisco Chronicle reports. In other findings, some 36% of us have searched for someone we've lost touch with and 9% have "dug up information on someone they were dating." In its coverage, the Associated Press reports that teens are "more likely than adults to restrict who can see their profiles … contrary to conventional wisdom." In other findings, some 36% of us have searched for someone we've lost touch with and 9% have "dug up information on someone they were dating," according to the Chronicle. Note that 60% of us are not worried about how much information about us is online, sixty-one percent "have not felt compelled to limit it," and 38% use privacy controls. The Pew/Internet study - "Digital Footprints: Online identity management and search in the age of transparency" - is here.

Euro social networking

Lots of news this week about European social networking, with headlines about Bebo, Piczo, Facebook, and Bahu. Piczo, reportedly the UK's 4th-largest social-networking site, is going mobile, The Guardian reports. The site will allow users "to post photos, videos and messages from their phones to their profile pages." [The Times of London reported that "British adults are more frequent users of social networking sites than any of their European counterparts," with 40% of Britons using them compared with 17% of adults in France, 12% in Germany, and 22% in Italy.] France-based Bahu.com Bahu.com, a social site started by students for high school students across Europe, just received its first round of funding, it announced. "Bahu now counts over 300,000 members, and counted 2 million unique visitors in November." San Francisco-based Bebo, meanwhile, just announced its plans to "join forces with Poland’s leading media company Agora to deliver a content-rich social-networking experience to the Polish online audience. It's particularly appropriate to mention European developments this week because of the signing Thursday of the Treaty of Lisbon, the European Union's reform treaty, at Lisbon's Jerónimos Monastery (see this in the Associated Press and this commentary in The Guardian).

Schools' sex-offender detection tech

The national sex-offender database is being put to another use in some of the US's public schools. The Washington Post describes a new computerized security system being put in place in the Prince William County School District, Virginia's second-largest. The system, called "The Raptor" "scans government-issued identification cards and checks them against a database of listings of 460,000 sex offenders from across the country." Designed by a Texas company, it's now in some 4,000 US schools, the Post reports. "In many cases, the security programs can also store parental custody information and tabulate parent volunteer hours." Some parents think it's a lot faster than waiting in line to sign in. But some immigrant-rights organizations worry about possible privacy violation, though school officials say IDs will only be checked against sex-offender registries. "Signs are being placed at schools' front desks to advise visitors that they can show an ID other than a U.S.-issued driver's license, such as foreign driver's license, a passport, a green card or a reentry permit."

Fresh data on phone-based porn

"Revenues from mobile 'adult services' are set to approach $3.5 billion by 2010," reports VNUNET in the UK. It's citing new findings by Juniper Research, which says the growth "will be fuelled by increasing adoption of streamed video and video chat" on phones and "a sharp rise" in the use of "3G" or smart phones that are really Net-connected computers more than mere communications devices. A lot of that new revenue will come from North America because it's an "underdeveloped" market for phone-based pornography, compared to Europe. And eastern European consumption "is rising at a higher rate than previously anticipated." Cellphone service providers are reluctant to provide the content in North America, VNUNET reports, but the Web on phones is another whole platform for porn operators. in the adoption of 3G services. But analysts say that the most popular content is "graphic amateur content." That would be the user-produced kind, not the "professional" kind. What worries me is the kids who share risqué or sexually explicit video of themselves via the Web or phone - the devastating impact this can have on their lives if the content is made public (see "Teens' child porn convictions upheld"). Here are some tips in ConnectSafely.org for safe video-sharing.

Penthouse's social sites

If you check your child's browser history, you probably don't want to find any of the social-networking sites Penthouse has just acquired. Even though the adult content industry says all the homemade x-rated videos on the user-produced Web have hurt its business, Penthouse Media is bullish, the New York Times reports. Penthouse has invested $500 million in Various Inc., which has more than 2 dozen sites, the "most popular Web site [being] adultfriendfinder, which describes itself as a personals community for swingers and sex. But Various owns a variety of other social networks like Italianfriendfinder.com, gradfinder.com and bigchurch.com, which offers to help users 'meet people who share the same spiritual beliefs as you'.”

Disney's UK kids portal

Disney says it's about to launch a site for UK children and tweens. Disney.co.uk will be a portal pulling together the company's assets (including social networking) for kids, Reuters reports. "At its heart [is] a feature called Disney Xtreme Digital" in which users can "customize multimedia content simultaneously while watching and sharing videos, messages, music, and games." It'll be interesting to see what is meant by "social networking," but Reuters says "online parental-protection measures are wrapped into the site, along with functionality that prompts children to use Disney-proposed online-chat phrases that have an emphasis on being polite while also using language that can reflect whether the user is looking at content focused on pirates or princesses."

The teenage brain & the social Web

Two articles about the teenage brain and juvenile crime have a message for the way we think about the youth-driven social Web. "The teenage brain, Laurence Steinberg says, is like a car with a good accelerator but a weak brake. With powerful impulses under poor control, the likely result is a crash," reports the Associated Press (it's in the Chicago-area Daily Herald). He's a psychology professor at Temple University referring to researchers' growing understanding that the frontal lobe, or executive part, of the brain isn't fully developed until people's early to mid 20s. That understanding should have an impact on criminal sentencing of minors, many experts argue, but it also says something about what society worldwide is seeing on the teenage part of the social Web. Identity exploration and risk assessment, experts tell us, is part of adolescent brain development. It always has been offline, but now a lot of it is on display before adults' very eyes on the Web. Awareness of teen behavior can be a little unnerving for adults and - again - always has been, but concern multiplies when 1) the adult observer doesn't fully understand the medium; 2) teen behavioral norms, as always, different from adults'; and 3) the views, behaviors, and images of entire social networks are on display and instantly accessible to adults (a "super public," as social-media researcher danah boyd calls it). Teens by definition take and assess risk, but this does not mean they don't sometimes need someone "in the car" with them to help engage the brakes. [The other AP story was in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area's Pioneer Press. See also the National Institute for Mental Health's "Teenage brain: A work in progress."]

Videogame 'Report Card' for 2007

Because "videogames" includes the word "games," there are still some parents who don't take videogames seriously enough, said David Walsh of the National Institute on Media and the Family this week. So parents got a "C" on the organization's 12th-annual "Video Game Report Card" (see p. 12 of the 26-page document). The videogames rating board, the ESRB, got a B- for its education efforts; the ratings themselves got a C+ (for "not being based on all of games' content and code, locked or unlocked," the latter meaning gamers' ability to modify the content); the game industry got a C; and the big national retailers got a D for not enforcing the ratings at point of purchase. "The institute conducted 58 sting operations and found almost half the time, children as young as 12, could buy games rated M for 'mature' - intended for kids 17 and older," ABC News reports. For holiday game shoppers, see p. 14 of the institute's report for lists of 10 recommended games and 10 "games to avoid for your children and teens." Other resources include the ESRB's ratings site, where you can search for a game title on somebody's wish list, the Washington Post's "Holiday Videogame Guide," a transcript of Post game columnist Mike Musgrove's
chat with readers on this year's videogames, and WhatTheyPlay.com's game reviews for parents. Here, too, is the Associated Press's coverage on the "Report Card."

Facebook apologizes about ads

Facebook seems to prefer to ask for users' forgiveness rather than permission. A "humbled [Facebook] CEO Mark Zuckerberg issued a statement apologizing for the way his company rolled out the Beacon ad platform," Internet News reports. He said that now users could bow out of the program entirely, "bowing to pressure from privacy advocates and many Facebook users." More than 50,000 of them had signed a petition initiated by MoveOn.org which demanded that Facebook not broadcast information about users' purchases on other Web sites without their permission, the Financial Times reports. Internet News added that "Facebook’s retreat marks the second time it has been forced to make changes to a new technology because of privacy concerns. Last year, users protested after it introduced 'News Feed,' which allowed users to keep track of their friends’ actions on the site." Here's the New York Times's coverage.

Mobile Web: We're on the cusp

There has been a whole lot of media hype about the mobile Web. So much so that smart reporters are now writing reality checks (see the New York Times). But with the iPhone's arrival, Google's plans for the FCC's looming 700 Mhz spectrum auction, and an announcement this week from Verizon Wireless, we really do seem to be at an important crossroads. eWeek reports that "the mobile industry is shifting into Internet gear." Business Week reports that Verizon Wireless's move "to let customers use a broader range of cell phones and wireless features on its network was greeted by many observers as a stunning about-face." And the Baltimore Sun offers the big picture on what this means for all of us, including our kids - upsides and downsides, of course. For one thing, I think it means phones really will be access points to the Internet. Which means that parents and educators either will need to need to apply rules and "parental controls" to more devices and access points or will need increasingly to help young people develop their internal filters - critical thinking and content and behavior online.

Cellphone etiquette

I think you will appreciate, as I did, these fundamentals for working with young cellphone users on the best ways and places to use those phones. They're from author and parenting specialist Jan Faull. She looks at where to talk, when to talk, and the example we grownup cellphone users are setting for them. Here are a couple more pointers I would add: 1) Know when and how much your child is using his mobile - for talking and texting (the latter being silent, so harder to get a handle on) - and establish boundaries. 2) Know what else she's using her phone for (photo-sharing? video-uploading?) and talk about the implications for her and other people in what's being shared. See also ConnectSafely.org's "Cellphone Safety Tips" and this on a study about the role of cellphones in "teen dating abuse" and what parents know about it.

Cellphone college class in Japan

Japan's degree-granting Cyber University, the country's only all-Internet university, just started offering a class people can take on their phones, the Associated Press reports. For classes on personal computers, the lecture appears on the screen as text and images, and a video of the lecturer appears in a smaller window in the corner. "The cellphone version, which pops up as streaming video on the handset's tiny screen," just displays the PowerPoint, and you can hear the lecturer through the phone's speaker. More than 1,800 students are enrolled in Cyber University, which says lecturer attendance is at 86%. "Whether students play the lecture downloads to the end can be monitored by the university digitally," officials told the AP. Meanwhile, "half of Japan's top-10 selling works of fiction in the first six months of the year were composed [by their authors] on the tiny handset of a mobile phone," after which they're turned into books, the Sydney Morning Herald reports.

ClubPenguin members can give to charity

Parents of penguins probably already know that gold coins are earned by playing games in the site. With them, penguins can now not only feed and care for their puffles, and buy surfboards, etc. They can give to charity, the Associated Press and the in-site Penguin Times report (I like that my 10-year-old started reading that paper unbeknownst to me). "Starting Dec. 14 and running through Dec. 24, kids can choose to donate their virtual money to support the environment, children's health or children's education. The company will then split $1 million real dollars among three charities, including the World Wildlife Fund, the Elizabeth Glaser Pediatric AIDS Foundation and Free The Children." This started before ClubPenguin was acquired by Disney, according to the AP. "The Canadian website donated a little more than $30 million to charity after Disney agreed to pay $350 million for the company earlier this year."

Student 'tech sherpas'

Senior Jayson in a Freeport, Me., school district "says he wants teachers to see that technology isn't as hard as they might think." He's a "tech sherpa" for his high school, a group of students that support the district IT department, help teachers with classroom tech, and earn credit in the process, the Christian Science Monitor reports. "This fall the group also launched a weekly live Web-stream show called 'The Tech Curve,' in which students field questions about various Internet teaching tools and the new Mac laptops that the state is issuing to high school teachers (see www.nokomiswarriorbroadcasting.com)." Each year an organization in Olympia, Wash., called Generation YES helps about 200 schools to set up the curricula behind the tech-sherpa program, the Monitor adds. This is the kind of tech-training program that empowers youth as well as educators. The program in Maine is clearly a confidence builder for the "sherpas," who also learn patience and diplomacy in working with adults. "They're relating to people, not just computers," working collaboratively to solve real problems. The school's tech coordinator told the Monitor that "the most valuable assignments he can give are 'authentic' tasks – of real use to the school or the community."

Teen 'cybercrime kingpin' arrested

The 18-year-old New Zealander's screenname is "AKILL," and he is the alleged head "of an international cyber crime network accused of infiltrating 1.3 million computers" and stealing $20+ million from victims' bank accounts, the Associated Press reports. "Working with the FBI and police in the Netherlands, New Zealand police raided" his house in Hamilton and took him and several computers in custody. His arrest was part of an international crackdown on criminal hackers who hack or social-engineer their way into large numbers of computers, install malicious software, and take control of the machines, turning them into "zombies." The zombie computers become part of large networks (or "botnets") of computers that can launch denial-of-service attacks on large Web commercial Web sites, extort, manipulate stocks, etc. "Eight people have been indicted, pleaded guilty or have been convicted since the investigation started in June."

Toddler tech, er, 'toys'

The toy business is getting out of toys, the New York Times reports. Toy manufacturers and retailers think toddlers want tech devices, not toys, because they want to emulate Mom and Dad with the real thing, not "fake" phones, music players, and computers - of concern to some educators and pediatricians. We can see for ourselves, though: "Consider the 'hottest toys' list on Amazon.com, which includes the Easy Link Internet Launch Pad from Fisher-Price (to help children surf on 'preschool-appropriate Web sites') and the Smart Cycle, an exercise bike connected to a video game…. Inside the Toys 'R' Us, the shelves near the store’s front were brimming with toys with a high-tech twist." It's good news for the toy biz because toy sales have been flat, and this is a growth area.