Teens' definition of writing...

...does not include all the texting, IMing, blogging, and commenting they're constantly doing online, and yet they're writing *all the time as they compose phone text messages, IMs, blog posts, and comments in social-networking sites. This disconnect between what they're doing and their perception of it is a very interesting finding from a new study by the Pew Internet & American Life Project. Why does the disconnect matter? Because there's a debate going on among adults - parents, educators, etc. - about whether all this writing is hurting their formal writing and, just as importantly, Pew says in its description of the report, "because teens believe good writing is an essential skill for success and that more writing instruction at school would help them." The study "looks at teens’ basic definition of writing, explores the various kinds of writing they do, seeks their assessment about what impact e-communication has on their writing, and probes for their guidance about how writing instruction might be improved." Meanwhile, any writer will tell you that the two most important activities for aspiring professional writers are writing a lot and reading a lot. Here's coverage from The Times of London and CNET.

Teens' definition of writing...

...does not include all the texting, IMing, blogging, and commenting they're constantly doing online, and yet they're writing all the time as they compose phone text messages, IMs, blog posts, and comments in social-networking sites. This disconnect between what they're doing and their perception of it is a very interesting finding from a new study by the Pew Internet & American Life Project. Why does the disconnect matter? Because there's a debate going on among adults - parents, educators, etc. - about whether all this writing is hurting their formal writing and, just as importantly, Pew says in its description of the report, "because teens believe good writing is an essential skill for success and that more writing instruction at school would help them." The study "looks at teens’ basic definition of writing, explores the various kinds of writing they do, seeks their assessment about what impact e-communication has on their writing, and probes for their guidance about how writing instruction might be improved." Meanwhile, any writer will tell you that the two most important activities for aspiring professional writers are writing a lot and reading a lot. Here's coverage from The Times of London and CNET.

'Grand Theft Childhood'?

The release this week of the latest version of Grand Theft Auto (IV) sparks a new flood of headlines about 1) how the hot videogame industry is headed for the stratosphere (USATODAY) and 2) videogame violence. Interestingly, a $1.5 million study by two Harvard Medical School professors funded by the US Justice Department found that the connection between violent videogame play and violent videogame players "may be more tenuous than previously thought," the Harvard Crimson reports. The study resulted in a new book by Profs. Cheryl Olson and Lawrence Kutner, Grand Theft Childhood, which says "videogames do not affect all children equally." The Crimson adds that "Olson said that gaming - including playing 'M'-rated games - is such a widespread teenage phenomenon that it should not be considered abnormal." What is abnormal, the authors suggest, is excessive videogame play. They advise a balance of gaming and other activities. A thoughtful post about Kutner and Olson's research in the OpenEducation.net blog suggests that parents play with their kids as "a great way to keep the conversation going and help you navigate the game. Parents may initially find the skills and dexterity very challenging but abandonment is not the answer." Why? Well, for one thing, the study cites the view of Michael Jellinek, M.D., professor of pediatrics and psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and chief of child and adolescent psychiatry at Massachusetts General Hospital, "that a parent’s awkwardness 'can be used to your advantage when it comes to strengthening relationships with your children'.” Here's the Chicago Tribune's meaty coverage of the swirl around GTA IV's release, Chicago-style.

Chat, Webcams used to trick teen girls

A Canadian man could get a life sentence for allegedly tricking or coercing at least 12 teenaged girls, one as young as 14, to pose nude for him in front of a Webcam, The Register reports. Daniel Lesiewicz, 27, of the Montreal area, "was arrested in March and charged with possession and production of child pornography, uttering threats and extortion." The Quebec police have since added further charges, "including multiple counts of luring a child, and unauthorized use of a computer." He reportedly created a profile of a fictional girl and used it to befriend other girls in chat rooms and persuade them to pose nude in front of Webcams on their computers. Once he had screen shots of those, apparently, he'd threaten the girls that he'd post them online if they didn't provide more. Further confirmation that warning bells should go off wherever Webcams and chatrooms, separately or together, are used by minors. On the former, maybe wait till they go off to college and hope they're used only for seeing and talking with family and offline friends. Many new computers have built in Webcams, so parents might consider disabling them. Also key, though, is teens' developing critical thinking, which will protect them better than any technological filter or "parental control," neither of which can possibly follow them around online or off. To help them develop that mental filter, talk about how people online aren't always who they say they are. A couple of other discussion aids might be "How social influencing works" and "How to recognize grooming."

Young teachers: *Not* thinking about privacy

In that last item I linked to a National Public Radio report about how more thought is going into online privacy on the part of teen and 20-something social networkers (see just below). The story didn't say they were being more private but that they were considering their options a lot more (though 66% of teen social networkers do use privacy controls, Pew/Internet has found - see this). Well, this story in the Washington Post detailing some of the more raunchy content on some young school teachers' social-networking profiles conflicts with NPR's. What surprised me most was just how unthinking the Post's 22-something sources were about how public their intimate photos and sarcastic comments were. It's kind of today's version of "not reading the directions" - so many thought only their friends could see a profile that was actually open to and searchable by "the more than 525,000 members of the Washington, D.C., network. Anyone can join any geographic network." What they also need to know comes from a lawyer with National Teachers Association (teachers' union). The Post cites him as saying that "if teachers claim free speech protection under the First Amendment ... the US Supreme Court recently ruled that governments can fire employees if their speech harmed the workplace's mission and function."

Teen social networkers: Thinking about privacy

For a good reality check on teens' privacy online and how they handle it, don't miss this report by National Public Radio's Laura Sydell. Parents may not be comfortable with what kids put online, but at least they can take comfort that most teens who use social sites take advantage of privacy controls and the young people Sydell spoke with are really thinking about the issue, not just blithely putting stuff out there. As they should be, and this is why parents need to continue encourage their kids to think critically in this way: Privacy conditions are constantly changing on them, with that gray area between ethical and unethical use of their information growing (see ArsTechnica). An example from Slashdot: "Because Facebook allows users to 'tag' photos with the names of friends, it is possible for third-party apps to distribute photos that a user might only want to be seen by their inner circle of friends."

Teen social networkers: Thinking about privacy

For a good reality check on teens' privacy online and how they handle it, don't miss this report by National Public Radio's Laura Sydell. Parents may not be comfortable with what kids put online, but at least they can take comfort that most teens who use social sites take advantage of privacy controls and the young people Sydell spoke with are really thinking about the issue, not just blithely putting stuff out there. As they should be, and this is why parents need to continue encourage their kids to think critically in this way: Privacy conditions are constantly changing on them, with that gray area between ethical and unethical use of their information growing (see ArsTechnica). An example from Slashdot: "Because Facebook allows users to 'tag' photos with the names of friends, it is possible for third-party apps to distribute photos that a user might only want to be seen by their inner circle of friends."

Why schools, parents need to fight cyberbullying together

Maybe it's obvious, but for anyone who's not sure the line between school grounds and what happens at home should be crossed, here's the view of a UK researcher who has been following the rise of cyberbullying closely:

"We know from research that bullying puts the emotional wellbeing and educational achievement of pupils at risk and has a significant and lasting negative impact upon children’s lives. In addition, it impacts on truancy, exclusions, participation in further or higher education and the incidence of self-harm and suicide," writes Dr. Denise Carter at the University of Hull in TeachingExpertise.com.

Why a home-school joint effort? Because this problem is not about technology or even behavior and discipline alone. One of Dr. Carter's findings in a survey she conducted was young people's "lack of life experience to deal with these issues on an emotional, psychological and social level." Young people gain life experience wherever they are - at home, at school, and everywhere in between - and adults in these learning environments know that there is no cookie-cutter way all children develop their street smarts or life literacy.

We know, too, that removing risk is not the solution to cyberbullying. It's teaching youth to "anticipate, recognize, and deal with risks as and when they arise," Carter writes. She also refers to their need to develop emotional resilience, as in helping them internalize that "this is not the end of the world," "I won't let this get to me," "I don't need to react," "there is more to me and my life than these people and what they're doing." These very basic concepts I'm tossing out as suggestions are mine, not Dr. Carter's - she may not agree - but they do illustrate her point that because life literacy is the solution, both problem and solution obliterate any boundary between home and school and deeply affect academic learning and success.

I'd add one more essential element: teaching citizenship, or social behavior. Our consumers or students of anti-cyberbullying education are not just potential victims or potential bullies (one can turn into the other in a matter of seconds on the Net); they're participants. In effect, they're stakeholders in their own well-being and education as well as their peers'; aggressive behavior hurts them as well as others because it can come right back at them and then create a downward spiral within the peer group and beyond (see also this article in the Archive of Pediatrics). So the cyberbullying curriculum necessarily includes life literacy and citizenship. For a lighter but thoughtful take on cybercitizenship ed, see Vanessa Van Petten's "13 holy cybercitizen laws." [Thanks to California tech educator Anne Bubnic for pointing Dr. Carter's article out.]

Related links

"Another Teen Beating Videotape, This One in Indiana"

"Police think Indiana teen beating inspired by Lakeland [Fla.] case"

Tennessee fight video: "Two Southwind Middle School girls were suspended Monday after their locker room fight was posted on the Internet," reports the Commercial Appeal in the Memphis area.

"Video Beating Stokes Debate Over Fame, Violence" in TechNewsWorld.com.

Second Life at school?

Some high school teachers see virtual worlds more as virtual classrooms. "Second Life pioneer Peggy Sheehy, a New York teacher whose school district owns six islands on a private estate in Second Life, said virtual worlds should be seen as part of the repertoire of tools that can be used to engage this new generation of students," the Houston Chronicle reports. "Over the past two years, Sheehy's students have used Second Life avatars to examine body image issues, build amusement parks and re-enact Civil War battles." Using virtual worlds, students participate more freely because they do so as avatars they create. Students can "speak" (in little bubbles of text) more freely under that veil of anonymity and no one's more popular than anyone else. Of course, like the Internet, virtual worlds for everybody can have "places" inappropriate for students, so to win over a large number of teachers, schools, and districts, there may need to be online "worlds" designed specifically for school. Meanwhile, some researchers see virtual worlds as a way to learn more about how the real world works, as places where social scientists can do a bit of modeling, the Christian Science Monitor reports.

Do you Twitter?

Given that lots of kids are converting parents from talking to texting, Twitter may be around the corner for you. If you've heard people at your house use the word "twitter" in association with technology and think it's yet another frivolous temptation for chronic multitaskers (as I did when a friend said she was swamped by tweets at a conference), there's a mind-changing story in the San Jose Mercury News for you. In it the mere twittering (or "texting") of the word "Arrested" on his cellphone to "a wide circle of friends in the United States and to the mostly leftist, anti-government bloggers in Egypt who are the subject of his graduate journalism project" got a University of California, Berkeley, student out of an Egyptian jail within 24 hours. But there are more mundane reasons to use this technology that's like group texting on the fly or push micro-moblogging (broadcasting mini blog posts on your phone to your contact list): keeping in touch with your family during the odd free moment on a business trip, spontaneously sharing your reaction to (and getting fast feedback on) a comment in a conference, sending a link or new contact info to a bunch of friends all at once, etc., etc. It'd be interesting to get a bunch of teenagers in a room and ask them if they use it in addition to IM-ing and social networking. Here's "How Twitter Works" at howstuffworks.com and another Twitter primer that I was tipped off to by my friends at the California Technology Assistance Project. Meanwhile, here's a slightly snide view of Twitter in a Wired blog, and - this just in! - Twitter's popularity seems to have caused some service disruption, and CNET looks into it in "Can't live without Twitter? Don't believe the hype."

French legislation against pro-thin promotion

A bill that has passed the French legislature's lower house and goes to the Senate soon is going after all media promoting eating disorders, including pro-anorexia Web sites, the Los Angeles Times reports. Forbes reports that "France has several laws in place to regulate modeling agencies, including requiring underage models to have regular health check-ups." Regulating the domestic fashion industry, advertising, and conventional media is one thing, but Web sites are more problematic, not just because they're based all over the world. Another significant problem is, it would be awfully hard for courts and law enforcement to know what to do about Web sites in which both anorexics and those trying to help them have blogs and profiles. . ">Adam Thierer of the TechLiberation blog has another interesting argument against the regulation of Web sites: "Wouldn't we better off engaging these pro-ana people and websites directly? That is, don’t ban them or drive them underground, but instead go directly to those sites ourselves and engage in a discussion about what most of us would regard as unhealthy lifestyles." See also "Eating disorders & the social Web" and "Online eating disorder communities."

Number of child porn sites down

For the first time since it has been keeping count, the UK-based Internet Watch Foundation reports that "the number of Web sites hosting child pornography has fallen," Australian IT reports. The number has gone from 3,052 in 2006 to 2,755 last year, according to the latest figures available from IWF. Most of these child-abuse sites are based in Russia and the US, it added. The nonprofit organization says it hopes that this fact and "the analysis and intelligence behind the numbers" will result in further international cooperation in fighting this abuse. The most horrifying numbers from the IWF were: "about 10% of the victims photographed were less than two years old, with a third between three and six years old. Some 37% were aged between 7 and 10 years old, 18% were between 11 and 15 years old, with 2% between 16 and 17 years old."

New guide to videogame parental controls

The videogame ratings board and Parent Teacher Association have teamed up to help parents get a better handle on videogame safety. They've published a free parents' guide to both the ratings system and the parental controls on game consoles, including step-by-step instructions for the controls' settings on PLAYSTATION 3, the Nintendo Wii, Xbox 360, and PSP, as well as the game controls in the Windows Vista operating system. You'll also find advice from "GamerDad" Andrew Bub about online gaming and a family discussion guide with talking points. "The booklets were distributed to all 26,000 PTAs, and are available in both English and Spanish on both the ESRB and PTA web sites," according to the organizations' press release (there's a link right to the guide from the presser).

Kids posing online as pedophiles

This is an important heads-up if parents are worried about predators contacting their children online. The "predators" could be other kids playing pranks or being cyberbullies, because anybody can pose as just about anybody else online. Apparently that's happening in southwestern England, where police are saying "children as young as 10 may be posing as predatory paedophiles" on social-networking sites "to frighten boys and girls they have fallen out with," The Guardian reports. It adds that "as many as nine youngsters" were targeted in this way in Bebo and MSN. The police "initially believed a local man was trying to groom the children" (see "How to recognize grooming") but "a member of the public has come forward and told them that youngsters are trying to settle playground disputes by posing as a paedophile to frighten their rivals." For examples of more "conventional" cyberbullying, see this story in the Flint (Mich.) Journal.

'Running l8, luv, mom'

Kids are seeing texts like that from their parents more and more, the Washington Post reports. "Parental text messaging is outstripping the growth rate among younger generations. In the past two years, use of texting among people 45-54 increased 130%, the Post added, citing M:Metrics research - compared to a mere 41% increase among people 13-17. Apparently, it starts with k2k (kid-to-kid), then it's k2p (k2parent), followed by p2p (not file-sharing but rather parents texting each other to coordinate kid drop-offs and pick-ups and possibly other errands). And now it's even s2p and s2k: "Schools have caught on. Fairfax County and Montgomery County send automatic text-message alerts for weather-related school closures and other emergencies." If you want to learn texting lingo fast (some phones offer a menu of phrases), check with your cellphone carriers; it's quite possible Sprint, Verizon, etc. has a guide for parents and others getting up to speed quickly. Web resources include Lingo2word.com and netlingo.com.

UK government's guidelines for social sites

As I mentioned last week, two milestone documents out of the UK have just been released, one a 200-page report requested by Prime Minister Gordon Brown and called "The Byron Review" , and the other a set of guidelines for social-networking-service best practices issued by the Home Office itself . Both have worldwide relevance not just because they're about a worldwide medium that's universally popular with youth but also one that allows for ever increasing interaction, social action, and collaborative media-producing and -sharing on an international level. I took a look at the Byron report last week . This week:

UK Home Office's guidance for social-networking sites

The guidelines are surprisingly digestible for a document coming from a government. The actual "Recommendations for Good Practice" are only about eight pages long (see p. 24), and they also come in convenient checklist form (p. 60). The whole report can be downloaded here .

1. Positives

* Congrats in order. Everyone involved in these guidelines should be congratulated for the milestone the document represents. Consensus-building on this subject among commercial services, government agencies, child-online-safety advocates, and law enforcement in a medium still so little understood - the social Web - has proven to be difficult in my own country.

* Based on solid research. For a practical understanding of a teen's-eye-view of Net use, don't miss "Children's Use of the Internet," p. 14, based on the research of Sonia Livingstone and colleagues (she is a social psychology professor at the London School of Economics & Political Science). Showing the difficulty of reaching child-online-safety consensus, she writes that "views on young people's development are often polarised." On the one hand, "children are seen as vulnerable, undergoing a crucial but fragile process of cognitive and social development to which technology poses a risk by introducing potential harms into the social conditions for development and necessitating, in turn, a protectionist regulatory environment." The other view holds that "children are competent and creative agents in their own right, whose ‘media-savvy’ skills tend to be underestimated by the adults around them, with the consequence that society may fail to provide a sufficiently rich environment for them." I agree with her that "finding a position that recognises both characteristics is important." [See also "Children and the Internet," Appendix B, p. 46, which is just over 4 pages in length, and all the great footnotes and appendix material referring to great work from many researchers.]

* Something for everybody. The full document covers a lot of ground for audiences with all degrees of understanding - from defining social networking to considering why it's popular with youth to covering online bullying, self-harm, sexual exploitation, Webcams, and where criminal law comes in.

* "Disinhibition" understood. Guideline 9.4 reflects what we know of this online condition that allows "space" between bully and victim as a contributing factor to cyberbullying. It suggests that sites inform users that they are not as anonymous as they may think and employ IP address and identifying technology to track users. I'd go further and recommend that sites explain to users in their online-safety pages, in as much detail as feasible (without giving information away to malicious hackers), how their real-life identities can be found. It's the kind of meaty information that's meaningful to adolescents and shows respect for their intelligence. [To great effect, a school in Philadelphia brought in a computer-forensics police officer to demonstrate the lack of real anonymity to an entire student body.]

* Practical. The guidance reflects an understanding that a narrow focus on social networking is impractical as young people's self-expression and socializing flow freely from offline to online and back and among multiple devices that can increasingly be used anywhere.

* Not just social networking. In spotlighting chatrooms and Webcams as trouble spots, the guidance reflects the understanding that young people's socializing flows freely from device to device and between various technologies - as both technology and kids develop - and social sites aren't the only place where socializing happens for good or bad. For example, this significant finding about Webcams: "Recent research conducted in Holland by the My Child Online Foundation in 2006, involving 10,900 participants between the ages of 13 and 19, reveals that 47% of girls who responded to the survey, said they had received unwanted requests to do something sexual in front of a webcam – although only 2% actually did so."

* Adding "teeth": Because teens' profiles usually reflect a major investment of time and emotion on their part, it's important to have consequences for violations of Terms of Service, so this is good: "Provide warnings to users about uploading photos to their profile, for example: ‘Photos may not contain nudity, violent or offensive material, or copyrighted images. If you violate these terms, your account may be deleted'" (5.3 on p. 27).

2. Neutrals and negatives

* Based on where young Britons do most of their social networking (MySpace, Bebo, and Facebook), there's a certain irony to the fact that another government's guidelines are aimed largely at a group of companies based in the US. That's not to say this is true in countries where English isn't the primary language (though California-based Orkut, Hi5, and Friendster are huge in Brazil, Thailand, and the Philippines, respectively), but safety on the social Web clearly has to be an international effort going forward.

* Only the beginning. The guidelines are a great base to build on but don't indicate an understanding of the full range of abuse in social sites, where it comes from or actually occurs, and how hard it is to control - for example, how abuse reports can themselves be abuse ("prank" abuse reports that themselves are harassment of a user by the person "reporting" the abuse) and how some content cannot be moderated or pre-viewed by the service provider because it's from malicious hackers or in third-party sites marketing x-rated content (see "Mother-son digital divide bridged" below). The guidelines need to go further in acknowledging that the users themselves are not the only source of some of the inappropriate content in social-networking sites. Increasingly, third parties are finding ways to socially engineer or hack their messages, images, and software code into users' profiles, blogs, bulletins, and IMs in social-networking sites.

* "He said, she said." The term "imposter profile" doesn't come up in the guidance, and this is a huge problem for the social sites, which - if responsible enough to take on the task - have to figure out if a profile is fact or fiction (even basic, non-abusive profiles created by people about themselves have plenty of fiction in them) and if the person behind it is real, fictitious, or malicious. How bad it makes its subject look can be one measure, but that sort of analysis is usually pretty subjective, and chasing down facts is at best time-consuming, if not impossible when the site involves millions of profiles. Even in a court of law, when the accused and the victim are physically present, it's hard to distinguish fact from fiction. Society has not even begun to understand the complexities of coping with online harassment.

* Privacy not all good. The premise that privacy in social-networking sites for children is good seems to be unqualified. To say it isn't always sounds like heresy, when we constantly hear "don't post personal info online," but it's only *mostly* good because privacy tools can also be a barrier to parents', researchers', and law enforcement's efforts to monitor children's activities. Too, posting personal information online is a fact of life for teenagers, and research released over a year ago suggested a new approach to this subject (see this article in the Archive of Pediatrics ).

* More on mobiles needed. Best-practice thinking obviously needs to match the fluidity and mobility of young people's socializing in terms of devices, technologies, and location. Under "GPS and Location Services," the guidance says that mobile "customers are very sensitive about giving away their location. Only those services that carefully respect customers’ rights to protect their privacy will be successful." This is not necessarily true about teenage customers. Given where adolescents are in their brain development (acknowledge on p. 15 of the guidance under "US Perspective" but also treated thoroughly in the Byron Review ), special care will need to be given to how minors use GPS technology for socializing with their friends.

* In the "back office." The guidance is light on addressing what needs to happen in social-networking sites' customer-service departments after abuse reports come in - response time, how various types of reports are responded to, proportion of customer-service staff devoted to youth protection, what gets elevated to law enforcement, etc. This needs to be looked at more closely going forward.

Related links

* Proposed UK law: The other part of this work by the Home Office is a new law that would require convicted sex offenders to provide their email addresses to law enforcement, "who will take these and send them to social-networking sites for blacklisting," iBLS.com reports . Failure to comply could result in five years' imprisonment if Parliament passes the law.
* Under the minimum: Just about half (49%) of the UK's 8-to-17-year-olds have an online profile, and some 27% of 8-to-11-year-olds (all below the minimum age of every social site I know of) who are aware of social networking sites and have Net access have an online profile, according to a just-released study by Ofcom, Britain's communications and broadcasting regulator cited by inthenews.co.uk .
* "Home Office calls for better security on social networking sites"
http://technology.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/tech_and_web/article3667347.ece
"Social networks: Will the government crack down?"
* "Facebook, MySpace to carry 999 link"
* "Social networking safety plan unveiled"
* "Pedophiles forced to register email addresses"
* "Children flock to social networks"

UK government's guidelines for social sites

As I mentioned last week, two milestone documents out of the UK have just been released, one a 200-page report requested by Prime Minister Gordon Brown and called "The Byron Review," and the other a set of guidelines for social-networking-service best practices issued by the Home Office itself . Both have worldwide relevance not just because they're about a worldwide medium that's universally popular with youth but also one that allows for ever increasing interaction, social action, and collaborative media-producing and -sharing on an international level. I took a look at the Byron report last week. This week:

UK Home Office's guidance for social-networking sites

The guidelines are surprisingly digestible for a document coming from a government. The actual "Recommendations for Good Practice" are only about eight pages long (see p. 24), and they also come in convenient checklist form (p. 60). The whole report can be downloaded here.

1. Positives

Congrats in order. Everyone involved in these guidelines should be congratulated for the milestone the document represents. Consensus-building on this subject among commercial services, government agencies, child-online-safety advocates, and law enforcement in a medium still so little understood - the social Web - has proven to be difficult in my own country.

Based on solid research. For a practical understanding of a teen's-eye-view of Net use, don't miss "Children's Use of the Internet," p. 14, based on the research of Sonia Livingstone and colleagues (she is a social psychology professor at the London School of Economics & Political Science). Showing the difficulty of reaching child-online-safety consensus, she writes that "views on young people's development are often polarised." On the one hand, "children are seen as vulnerable, undergoing a crucial but fragile process of cognitive and social development to which technology poses a risk by introducing potential harms into the social conditions for development and necessitating, in turn, a protectionist regulatory environment." The other view holds that "children are competent and creative agents in their own right, whose ‘media-savvy’ skills tend to be underestimated by the adults around them, with the consequence that society may fail to provide a sufficiently rich environment for them." I agree with her that "finding a position that recognises both characteristics is important." [See also "Children and the Internet," Appendix B, p. 46, which is just over 4 pages in length, and all the great footnotes and appendix material referring to great work from many researchers.]

Something for everybody. The full document covers a lot of ground for audiences with all degrees of understanding - from defining social networking to considering why it's popular with youth to covering online bullying, self-harm, sexual exploitation, Webcams, and where criminal law comes in.

"Disinhibition" understood. Guideline 9.4 reflects what we know of this online condition that allows "space" between bully and victim as a contributing factor to cyberbullying. It suggests that sites inform users that they are not as anonymous as they may think and employ IP address and identifying technology to track users. I'd go further and recommend that sites explain to users in their online-safety pages, in as much detail as feasible (without giving information away to malicious hackers), how their real-life identities can be found. It's the kind of meaty information that's meaningful to adolescents and shows respect for their intelligence. [To great effect, a school in Philadelphia brought in a computer-forensics police officer to demonstrate the lack of real anonymity to an entire student body.]

Practical. The guidance reflects an understanding that a narrow focus on social networking is impractical as young people's self-expression and socializing flow freely from offline to online and back and among multiple devices that can increasingly be used anywhere.

Not just social networking. In spotlighting chatrooms and Webcams as trouble spots, the guidance reflects the understanding that young people's socializing flows freely from device to device and between various technologies - as both technology and kids develop - and social sites aren't the only place where socializing happens for good or bad. For example, this significant finding about Webcams: "Recent research conducted in Holland by the My Child Online Foundation in 2006, involving 10,900 participants between the ages of 13 and 19, reveals that 47% of girls who responded to the survey, said they had received unwanted requests to do something sexual in front of a webcam – although only 2% actually did so."

Adding "teeth": Because teens' profiles usually reflect a major investment of time and emotion on their part, it's important to have consequences for violations of Terms of Service, so this is good: "Provide warnings to users about uploading photos to their profile, for example: ‘Photos may not contain nudity, violent or offensive material, or copyrighted images. If you violate these terms, your account may be deleted'" (5.3 on p. 27).

2. Neutrals and negatives

A bit of irony. Based on where young Britons do most of their social networking (MySpace, Bebo, and Facebook), there's a certain irony to the fact that another government's guidelines are aimed largely at a group of companies based in the US. That's not to say this is true in countries where English isn't the primary language (though California-based Orkut, Hi5, and Friendster are huge in Brazil, Thailand, and the Philippines, respectively), but safety on the social Web clearly has to be an international effort going forward.

Only the beginning. The guidelines are a great base to build on but don't indicate an understanding of the full range of abuse in social sites, where it comes from or actually occurs, and how hard it is to control - for example, how abuse reports can themselves be abuse ("prank" abuse reports that themselves are harassment of a user by the person "reporting" the abuse) and how some content cannot be moderated or pre-viewed by the service provider because it's from malicious hackers or in third-party sites marketing x-rated content (see "Mother-son digital divide bridged" below). The guidelines need to go further in acknowledging that the users themselves are not the only source of some of the inappropriate content in social-networking sites. Increasingly, third parties are finding ways to socially engineer or hack their messages, images, and software code into users' profiles, blogs, bulletins, and IMs in social-networking sites.

"He said, she said." The term "imposter profile" doesn't come up in the guidance, and this is a huge problem for the social sites, which - if responsible enough to take on the task - have to figure out if a profile is fact or fiction (even basic, non-abusive profiles created by people about themselves have plenty of fiction in them) and if the person behind it is real, fictitious, or malicious. How bad it makes its subject look can be one measure, but that sort of analysis is usually pretty subjective, and chasing down facts is at best time-consuming, if not impossible when the site involves millions of profiles. Even in a court of law, when the accused and the victim are physically present, it's hard to distinguish fact from fiction. Society has not even begun to understand the complexities of coping with online harassment.

Privacy not all good. The premise that privacy in social-networking sites for children is good seems to be unqualified. To say it isn't always sounds like heresy, when we constantly hear "don't post personal info online," but it's only mostly good because privacy tools can also be a barrier to parents', researchers', and law enforcement's efforts to monitor children's activities. Too, posting personal information online is a fact of life for teenagers, and research released over a year ago suggested a new approach to this subject (see this article in the Archive of Pediatrics).

More on mobiles needed. Best-practice thinking obviously needs to match the fluidity and mobility of young people's socializing in terms of devices, technologies, and location. Under "GPS and Location Services," the guidance says that mobile "customers are very sensitive about giving away their location. Only those services that carefully respect customers’ rights to protect their privacy will be successful." This is not necessarily true about teenage customers. Given where adolescents are in their brain development (acknowledged on p. 15 of the guidance under "US Perspective" but also treated thoroughly in the Byron Review - see this), special care will need to be given to how minors use GPS technology for socializing with their friends.

In the "back office." The guidance is light on addressing what needs to happen in social-networking sites' customer-service departments after abuse reports come in - response time, how various types of reports are responded to, proportion of customer-service staff devoted to youth protection, what gets elevated to law enforcement, etc. This needs to be looked at more closely going forward.

Related links

Proposed UK law: The other part of this work by the Home Office is a new law that would require convicted sex offenders to provide their email addresses to law enforcement, "who will take these and send them to social-networking sites for blacklisting," iBLS.com reports. Failure to comply could result in five years' imprisonment if Parliament passes the law.

Under the minimum: Just about half (49%) of the UK's 8-to-17-year-olds have an online profile, and some 27% of 8-to-11-year-olds (all below the minimum age of every social site I know of) who are aware of social networking sites and have Net access have an online profile, according to a just-released study by Ofcom, Britain's communications and broadcasting regulator cited by inthenews.co.uk.

"Home Office calls for better security on social networking sites" in the Times of London

"Social networks: Will the government crack down?" from the BBC

"Facebook, MySpace to carry 999 link" in The Telegraph

"Social networking safety plan unveiled" in The Guardian

"Pedophiles forced to register email addresses" at VNUNET.com

"Children flock to social networks" from the BBC.

Mother-son digital divide bridged

A recent discussion in ConnectSafely.org that illustrates what's still missing in best-practice guidance: dealing with the third-party code and hacks that, increasingly, are jeopardizing users' computers (and maybe sometimes their relationships with their parents!). This exchange also illustrates how parents' tech illiteracy can widen the parent-child digital divide referred to in the Byron report (see Part 1 last week). Parents need to know that the links and inappropriate content and messages they sometimes see in their children's profiles and blogs aren't necessarily created and shared by their kids.....

The mother, "WorriedMum," posted this in the forum:

"I am writing this because yesterday I have seen on my 13-year-old son's Hi5 page. Under the 'about me' section there is a link to [a site called] 'sexplaycam' with a picture of a naked woman. I went to the site and saw that you have to register to become a member of, now I am worried my son has joined this site. I asked my son if he'd put the link there and he said he had no idea it was there and went on his profile and deleted it. I know it is awful, but I am still suspicious. I also have Hi5, and the 'about me' parts, etc., can only be filled in by the person who owns the profile, right? But he swears he didn't know it was there and it must have been put there by someone else. So anyone out there with technical knowledge, please tell me if this kind of thing is possible."

We forwarded this question to our contact at Hi5, who explained:

"This was a spam attack on Hi5 members. A hacker inserted malicious code into profiles that either were 'phished' for email and password or clicked a link on a spam profile. We patched the vulnerability last Wednesday and will be cleaning out the innocent member profiles."

WorriedMum's response: "Thank you so much everyone for your help. I'm sure you can understand that at first it looked very bad to me, but I didn't want to accuse my son or tell him off before I was sure. Good thing I didn't now. Thanks again."

Former bullies help fight bullying

Here's a concept: Have former bullies star in a film to educate teens about bullying. That's the idea behind "The Stories of Us," a 25-minute film that's fiction but looks more like a documentary to some educators, who are showing it in American schools, the Chicago Tribune reports. Teens wrote, acted in, and produced it. One of them, McKenzie Bonnett, was bullied in 5th grade and then - when her parents were getting a divorce and she feared a brother would be deployed in Iraq - she started bullying other girls, she told the Trib. Another US anti-bullying education film starring teens is "Adina's Deck," created by Stanford University graduate student Debbie Heimowitz (see this item). In the UK, a film called "Let's Fight It Together" produced by Childnet International is picking up steam in Britain. In Australia, Brainstorm Productions presents live performances in elementary, middle, and secondary schools about bullying, aggression, harassment, and similar topics.

Love-sick teen not convicted

For posting comments such as "I love you," "we need to be together," and "I will never stop trying to talk to you" in a 14-year-old girl's MySpace profile, an 18-year-old man was charged by New York state prosecutors with "aggravated harassment and endangering the welfare of a child," a Wired News blog reports. But a New York City criminal court disagreed with the charge. In his ruling, Judge Michael Gerstein wrote that, "when teenagers fall in love, as song lyrics and studies show, they are more likely to exhibit almost manic behaviors, take risks, act compulsively, and sometimes pursue, with reckless abandon, the objects of their affection. While the actions of a love-struck teenager may well be foolish, reckless, or otherwise acts which might not be expected from a mature adult, they are not, without more, elevated to crimes." Internet law blogger Declan McCullagh added that the New York law also violates the First Amendment, which "protects against even annoying speech," and New York State's constitution.

Computer security sea change & youth

You know that old argument about Mac vs. PC security? Well, it really is an old argument now. Computer security really isn't about what operating system your computer has anymore. Now it's really about 1) what browser you use and where you go online, and 2) how smart you are (or your child is) about protecting passwords and financial information online (social engineering), CNET reports. "Lots of people who may already be nervous around computers often just do whatever the computer [or email or Web site] tells them to do," CNET says. That's called social engineering. But children, who are most definitely not nervous around computers, can be gullible too when they get messages like "check out this video" or "click here to find out how to start your modeling career." For adults, it's also tempting to click somewhere to "update their bank account information." There are also event-oriented and seasonal scams, e.g., the Olympics and filing tax returns. "The problem for the security industry is that even if Microsoft, Mozilla, Apple, and Opera all make the most secure browser ever, it still won't prevent things like phishing scams [such as the above]. Along with skepticism about advertising, gossip, and flattery in emails, IMs, and social sites, children need to be alerted to casual messages like the above that may really seem like they're from friends or acquaintances. Knowing how social engineering works can go a long way toward protecting both children and computers (both of which contain large amounts of confidential information!).

New tech helps detect child porn

The long-suffering image analysts at the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children must have one of the hardest, most emotionally draining jobs there is. Fortunately, it just got a little easier with the help of image-detection technology developed by Google, ConnectSafely.com co-director Larry Magid reports at CBSNEWS.com. The software eases dependence on an analyst's memory by scanning and detecting patterns that the analyst highlights in a photo - "a calendar on the wall, a logo on a T-shirt, a prominent tattoo or perhaps the pattern of the carpet" - in a database of child-abuse images. What's so sophisticated about this technology, apparently, is its flexibility. It "will work even if the images are modified, if a photo has been changed from color to black and white, or if the pattern is at a different angle or position in the photo or video. It can also pick out a single pattern in a video, even if it's a compilation of many shorter videos."

We're all becoming Net-trained info-gatherers

Apparently we're all becoming the rapid-fire, uncritical information hunter-gatherers we had thought only our children were. Yes, they're the digital natives but, according to a new study out of the UK, the Internet is "training" all of us to approach information this way, which may mean we all have to work extra hard now to think more critically and analytically. A just-released longitudinal study from University College London found that, "although young people demonstrate an apparent ease and familiarity with computers, they rely heavily on search engines, view rather than read and do not possess the critical and analytical skills to assess the information that they find on the Web," its press release. Titled "Information Behaviour of the Researcher of the Future," the study also found that the research behaviors "commonly associated with younger users – impatience in search and navigation and zero tolerance for any delay in satisfying their information needs – are now becoming the norm for all age groups." A longitudinal study tracks its subject over a period of time, and this was a "virtual longitudinal study" - see p. 6 of its pdf version for an explanation. This one was commissioned by the British Library and the Joint Information Systems Committee to get a handle on "the changing needs of researchers and other users." Thanks to tech educator Anne Bubnic in for pointing this study out.

UK: 2 valuable views on Net safety, Part 1

Two milestone documents out of the UK - one a 200-page report requested by Prime Minister Gordon Brown and called "The Byron Review" after its lead author, clinical psychologist and TV personality, Dr. Tanya Brown, and the other a set of guidelines for social-networking-service best practices issued by the Home Office itself - have just been released. With the exception of references to British law and government, both are relevant wherever young people are online, including in the US, where we haven't yet been able to come up with a consensus on best practices (even though the world's most popular social sites are US-based) and haven't seen a comprehensive Net-safety report since Web 1.0 days (the COPA Commission in 2000 and the "Youth, Pornography, and the Internet" report of 2002). Maybe some contributions like these will emerge from the work of the Internet Safety Task Force that just got started at Harvard's Berkman Center.

This week a look at the Byron report - not a summary, just what I feel is universally relevant and merits highlighting. Next week: the Home Office's guidance.

The Byron Review

Right up front, in her introduction, Dr. Byron says something important about risk and child development: "My Review is about ... [young people's] right to take the risks that form an inherent part of their development by enabling them to play video games and surf the net in a safe and informed way." In focus groups, she listened to young people, thereby "putting them at the heart of this Review - and by replacing emotion with evidence - I hope I have provided some very necessary focus to what is a very necessary debate."

An individual thing. She advises her readers to factor in children's individuality, developmental stages, and what we know about teenage brain development in looking at both the risks and benefits of their Internet and videogame use. In talks, emails, and our ConnectSafely.org forum, I've often suggested to parents that their own children, if communicative, are by far their best sources on what social networking is like, not the news media, because the way they socialize online and off is a reflection of who they are. Social networking is as individual as socializing, and generalizations aren't useful. So it's good to see a psychologist saying: "We need to take into account children’s individual strengths and vulnerabilities, because the factors that can discriminate a ‘beneficial’ from a ‘harmful’ experience online and in video games will often be individual factors in the child.... That means focusing on the child, what we know about how children’s brains develop, how they learn and how they change as they grow up. This is not straightforward" (for more on teenage brains, see point no. 2.29 on p. 35).

The report's balance: "Having considered the evidence, I believe we need to move from a discussion about the media ‘causing’ harm to one which focuses on children and young people, what they bring to technology and how we can use our understanding of how they develop to empower them to manage risks..." (p. 2). To "manage risks" I'd add "manage their own online behavior." In other words, by teaching our children respect, civility and citizenship online as well as off, we improve their chances for safe, constructive, and productive use of the Net and mobile phones.

Kids' risk management. Why "manage" and not remove risks? "Risk taking," Byron says (p. 20), "is part of child development - part of our drive to learn and to succeed. Particularly in adolescence, risk taking is not only a developmental imperative but also a lifestyle choice: it is driven by developments taking place in the brain and it is an important part of identity construction. Taking risks is something children need to do to reach self-actualisation (the process of fully developing ones personal potential...), and most children get pleasure from taking risks." This seems to reflect a growing recognition that the participatory Web + developing adolescent brains = a highly volatile formula (see "The 'Wild West' metaphor" below).

The other digital divide. Byron says the main driver of concerns about youth online risk is the "generational digital divide," the parental anxiety produced by 1) kids being more tech-literate than adults and 2) adults being stuck back in Web 1.0 ("many adults being of the Web 1.0 generation, using the internet to search for information or for shopping while our children are the Web 2.0 generation, using the technology in increasingly sophisticated ways to create and upload their own material" - p. 23). I agree, and it's one reason why we individually and collectively overreact, which can increase youth risk because it breaks down parent-child communication that can help mitigate risky teen behavior and tends to send teens "underground" (see also "Banning doesn't work" below).

Parenting in a risk-averse society. Apparently it's the case on both sides of the Atlantic and a challenge for parents trying not to overreact. Byron writes, "Most parents want to parent their children as well as they can and will take active steps to seek out approaches to enable them to do the best they can for their children. They want to give their children the best start in life by ensuring that they are healthy, happy, cared for and educated. For parents an area of great concern is around harm coming to their child. Indeed such parental anxieties can be fuelled by news stories that contain graphic details about children being abducted, harmed or killed. Some commentators have speculated that increasing parental anxieties are significant factors in the way restrictions are placed on children’s freedoms – for example, in the way children’s play has been significantly curtailed by parents who fear letting them outside. We are creating a parenting atmosphere where there is a 'zero risk' policy. The safety of children should be a central concern for parents and society as a whole. However, our concerns, and our response to those concerns, must be proportionate" (p. 206). Hear, hear! on all the above.

Where the risk actually is. Or rather where it originates: usually in "RL" (real life), not online. The online-safety field is still young, but I'm going to stick my neck out and say that, from what I'm seeing in the research, the term "online safety" may already be obsolete - or necessarily heading toward obsolescence. Why? Because young people make little distinction between online and offline, and the Internet increasingly mirrors "real life" for them and humanity as a whole. Research is also increasingly indicating that the young people most at risk online are those most at risk offline, and we need to get a lot of expertise other than that of online-safety advocates like me into the discussion - for example, the expertise of child-development specialists, pediatricians, social workers, and psychologists. Though risky behaviors and activities are acted out and reinforced online, the Internet is not the problem itself so much as both aggravator (negative) and tool for understanding and helping vulnerable teens (positive).

Banning doesn't work. Nor do other blanket "solutions." My comment just above is reflected in a way I haven't seen articulated before in Chapter 4 of Byron's study (p. 87): "Harmful behaviours are discussed online in a range of different ways, some of which may be more negative for young people to be involved in. However, they may provide an outlet for young people who feel they have no other way to express their feelings. Allowing these discussions to take place in mainstream areas of the internet, where there are responsible content hosts, means that steps can be taken to put them in context.... Banning such content risks driving vulnerable young people away to more obscure sites, where efforts to provide context might not be present."

A flipside to consider. "In fact," Byron continues, "it has been argued that banning such content from mainstream sites might draw attention to harmful behaviours in a way that makes them seem more attractive.... It is also important to remember that if troubled young people are able to discuss their feelings online, it allows us as a society to recognise these issues exist and, as best we can, inform our approach to dealing with them in the offline world."

More on phones, gaming community, etc. I was surprised by several things in the report: 1) that mobile phones didn't have their own chapter - they were mainly in a section about children accessing Web content away from home (for years I've been seeing British media reports about bullying on phones there); 2) that, though online gaming and virtual worlds are rapidly catching up with console gaming in popularity, the Conclusion on videogames risks (p. 154) focused on content and "addiction," not on contact, for example in the Xbox Live community and online worlds and games; and...

The "Wild West" metaphor. The third thing that surprised me was the strange take on this much-used metaphor in the report's Conclusion (p. 206): "The sphere of new media is sometimes described as being like the ‘Wild West’ – a landscape populated by cynical, selfish characters with no regard for the welfare of children." Byron kind of misses the flavor of that lawless, uncontrollable, scary, Darwinian time and place, and - though a virtual "place" - the social Web, with its real-world impact, isn't much different (see this week's awful story about teen bullying in Florida or last year's "extreme cyberbullying" cases in New Zealand or the current "Naked photo-sharing trend" in a number of US states). "Throughout the internet and video games industries, Government and regulators, the law enforcement community, the charitable and voluntary sector, and the world of education and children’s services there are countless individuals committed to supporting children and parents to deal with the risks that new technologies may present." No question about it, nevertheless these cases still come up.

What we can work toward. Helpfully, because the challenges are many, Byron organizes them into three "strategic objectives" for children's online safety on p. 62 of her report:

1. "Reduce availability [of harmful contact and contact to online kids] ... and the conduciveness of platforms to harmful and inappropriate conduct"
2. "Restrict access ... and reduce ... harmful and inappropriate conduct"
3. "Increase resilience: Equip children to deal with exposure to harmful and inappropriate content and contact, and equip parents to help their children deal with these things and parent effectively around incidences of harmful and inappropriate conduct by their children."

We all - parents, Internet companies, advocates, government, law enforcement, researchers - have been working on the first two since the early '90s, and the effort continues, with no end in sight. The third is, through education, the most immediately actionable. It reinforces what some of us have been saying on the US side of the pond for some time: that it's increasingly imperative to help children develop the filter between their ears - critical thinking and media literacy, so they can think not only about what they're reading, seeing, and hearing online and on phones, but also about what they're saying, doing, and uploading.

Related links

The Byron Review (there are links on this page to the full report, the executive summary, and a summary for children and teens, all in pdf format)

"Byron urges social-networking safety code" at The Guardian.

"At a glance: The Byron Review" at the BBC

A commentary at The Independent

A commentary at The Guardian

Microsoft's response at The Telegraph.

US hotline & other new Net-safety resources

A significant development in the online-safety field: Parents in the US now have a toll-free number to call with questions about topics such as social networking, cellphone texting, and virtual worlds. The bilingual hotline (English and Spanish) is sponsored by the Qwest Foundation and operated by the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC) and is available to "paren. The free service started in February 2007 as a Web site - www.netsmartz411.org - where "parents, guardians, children, teens, educators and law enforcement" could type questions into a form and hear back from NCMEC experts within one business day or search a database of online-safety info. The new toll-free hotline number is 1.888.NETS411 (1.888.638.7411). Here's the press release. Two other new resources are a video, with "common sense tips and rules for families" and companion print and Web materials, a joint project of CommonSenseMedia.org and YouTube.com, and SocialNetworkingSafety.com from Bebo.com, a San Francisco-based social-networking site that's particularly popular in the UK, Ireland, Australia, and New Zealand. Here's Bebo on safety at social-networking sites in The Guardian .

School's 'Facebook scandal'

That's the shorthand, but in this New York magazine story about Horace Mann School suggests that students' dissing of teachers in social-networking sites are more about a changing balance of power in the "real world." "Should they be punished? There were, as yet, no rules or codes for how a school should address such issues.... But the questions provoked by the Web postings ran deeper than these. Who should make the rules? In the past, there had been at least a rough assumption that teachers were parental surrogates, authority figures who were charged with making decisions regarding education and discipline, and that the rules governing this kind of behavior were clearly the faculty’s to make." This is a fairly unique school in terms of the wealth of its community, but its "Facebook scandal" is more a symptom - of major social change - than the problem itself. "The students were more aware than ever of where the real power resided. So when the Facebook situation was brought into the open, the teachers found themselves powerless to act, and the students did not passively wait to be disciplined." If you can make it all the way through the politics related, it's an interesting, slightly scary story about how the participatory Web empowers for good or bad.

Online video of teen's beating in FL

A terrible video of six teenaged girls beating a peer has sparked nationwide discussion on where blame should be placed for the behavior and the video, which police said they put on the Web. According to a local paper, The Ledger, the beating was vicious and remorseless and the situation complicated, involving a group of cheerleaders, one of whom (the victim) - reportedly a troubled teen and honor student, who was not living at home and on probation at the time of the incident - allegedly had been trash-talking the other girls in phone text messages and on MySpace. The six other girls retaliated by setting up the 35-minute beating for videotaping with a couple of boys serving as lookouts outside the house where it occurred. They then reportedly either uploaded or linked to the video from profiles in MySpace and YouTube (MySpace and YouTube both told InformationWeek that the footage had not been uploaded to their sites, which could mean it was linked to from elsewhere on the Web). "The girls ... ranged in age from 14 to 17. All have been arrested and charged with felony battery and false imprisonment," according to The Ledger, and doctors are hoping the victim, who was still recovering from a concussion a week after the beating, would fully regain hearing and vision on her left side. MySpace and YouTube are reportedly working with law enforcement on investigations. The local sheriff told The Ledger that "investigators suspect there were as many five video clips of the incident taken by more than one camera," and they'd so far only been able to track down one of them. Here's a discussion NPR aired with bullying expert Rosalind Wiseman, author of Queen Bees and Wannabes.

Virginia's Net-safety first

Virginia is the first US state to require online-safety instruction in its public schools, reports WDBJ 7 TV News in Richmond. The mandate "initially stemmed from concerns about sex offenders preying on children online and a general increase in Internet-based crime." Instruction has already begun. The Associated Press reports that, "nationally, Texas and Illinois are among states that have since passed their own Internet safety education laws, but unlike Virginia they don't make the courses mandatory. It took effect this school year.

Looking for 'great,' not just 'good'

For parents of aspiring software engineers (or just about anyone job seeking in the tech industry, maybe any industry), a commentary in Business Week by serial tech entrepreneur Auren Hoffman spells out how important it's getting (for startups, anyway) to find and keep "great people," not just good ones, and what constitutes the former. Food for thought, anyway - and thinking and discussing is vital filter development for adolescents. Working on the filter in their heads is both protection and good for developing the impulse-control and risk-assessment part of the brain not complete till anybody's early 20s - not to mention good prep for job interviews with people like Hoffman.

Live chat in social sites

It sounds like a cross between Facebook, Second Life, and Habbo Hotel, and it's coming soon to a Facebook profile near you, the New York Times reports. It says there are several products in the works, but one such "turns a flat profile page into a three-dimensional live chat room. Users choose characters to represent themselves from a list of preternaturally handsome avatars ... and proceed to one of a dozen environments, like a gothic urban warehouse or seaside villa. With videogame-like precision, they can then navigate that virtual space, which may feature their Facebook photos hanging from the walls and a YouTube video playing on a widescreen TV. Up to 15 others can choose avatars and enter the same room at the same time for text-based live socializing." When I first read this, I thought, "oh no," because online chatrooms are notorious for virtual sexual encounters and starting points for potential teen victimization. "Characterized by names like 'Single and Looking,' they often devolved into noisy chaos," the Times reports, or worse. That darkside is possible here, too, if avatars can wear risqué clothing or be put into sexual poses, but teens looking for this can find it already on the Web. Here's the latest on Facebook's new instant-messaging feature from CNET.

Netherlands' young phone coaches

It's kind of empowering to know that a lot of adults around the world need help learning about how to operate their cellphones. In New Zealand there's Mobile Mentors, springwise.com reports. But what makes even more sense is an initiative in the Netherlands that's "taking advantage of kids’ innate cell phone proficiency by training them as ‘phone coaches’ and getting them to transfer their skills to older users," springwise also reports. That's kids 12-16, and "the program’s goal is to improve their social skills and self-esteem, and give them access to corporate environments they might otherwise not be exposed to" (parents can do this at home by exchanging their street smarts (or life literacy) for their kids' tech literacy and have an ongoing mutually beneficial education program in place. Thanks to Susan in California for sending me a heads-up about this. About it she wrote: "My son, almost 11, thought this was a super idea. He thinks by the time he is 12 he can have a thriving business. I already use him to program my phone and everything else!"

Cyberbullying: Clarity needed

One of the most surprising things about this bullying story in the New York Times is that the boy is still at the same school in Fayetteville, Ark., after several years of victimization - and now, in the days of full-fledged online schools providing high school degrees. Distance learning is definitely an option for kids, in addition to switching brick-and-mortar schools, but maybe it's not an option for Billy Wolfe, and I'm editorializing.

What's really important to know is how unusual this tragic story is. There are many, many shades of bullying and cyberbullying, we're learning from solid research, and it's important to understand this so that we in no way discount less extreme experiences of bullying young people have.

"Bullying can happen once a week or once a month; it can be an isolated event or something that happens for years; it can be online, offline, or both. It is a varied behavior and it can be upsetting and have psychological impacts across the board; or not. You do not need to be beat up every day and taunted in every environment to be affected," wrote Dr. Michele Ybarra of Internet Solutions for Kids in a recent email to a few of us online-safety advocates.

Here are some brand-new findings from her latest "Growing Up with Media" study of 11-to-16-year-olds....

"School is overwhelmingly the most common environment that kids 11-16 years of age are bullied in," with almost a third of kids saying they've been bullied there. Eleven percent have been bullied online and 10% "in the community (e.g., on the way to and from school)." Six percent have been bullied by cellphone.

Only very small percentages of young people have been bullied monthly or more often - the most, 5%, at school, and 2% have been bullied that often online. Because being bullied monthly or more often is so uncommon, wrote Dr. Ybarra, "you can see how this particular subset of youth is particularly concerning from a health and development perspective."

In other findings, it's heartening to see that almost two-thirds of 11-to-16-year-olds - 63% - "are not bullied anywhere; 17% report being bullied in one environment, 9% in two environments, 5% in three, 2% in four, and a very concerning 3% report being bullied in all five environments assessed" (school, Internet, cellphone, community, and "other").

Michele also sent an important caveat for everyone concerned about cyberbullying: the need to be very clear on what we're talking about: "The term ‘cyberbullying’ (in my opinion) has been mis- and over-used to describe any sort of unwanted or untoward action that occurs online. The definition of bullying is something that happens repeatedly and over time, and is inclusive of an imbalance of power (this is a common definition in the psychology literature). Some of the things that we have heard about that have happened online fit this definition. Others are more akin to ‘harassment’ or ‘defamation’ or other things."

Phones more & more for media-sharing

This was a big week for the mobile phone industry, at least the US one, because of CTIA, the industry's huge trade show. And the biggest story, according to the New York Times, was competition for Apple's iPhone, as touchscreens, Web browsers, and multimedia features appear on more and more cellphones - together! Like the iPhone, these are really becoming media players + mini-computers, as well as communications devices. These little devices are so fun to play and work with - of course for teens too, the earliest adopters (or wannabes) - but it's good to keep in mind that they're also very avid photo- and video-sharers, as well as texters on phones, and there are both upsides and downsides to all this phone-based socializing and media-sharing. Last year, I cited an M:Metrics study finding that 70% of 13-to-17-year-old cellphone users in Europe and the US are creating and sharing content on their phones, photo-sharing being the No. 1 activity. Italian teens lead the way as phone media producers, followed by teens in Spain and the UK (tied for 2nd), then France, Germany, and the US, respectively (see this item). But the US is catching up, and among the positives, we're seeing some negative trends (see "Staging fights for Web video-sharing" and "Naked photo-sharing trend").

Growing gambling problem at college

"Shannon Shorr remembers seeing emails about the dangers of gambling as a freshman at the University of Alabama, Birmingham, in 2003, but he wanted in on the poker boom. He started '$5 house games' with friends and quickly moved into Internet poker," the Christian Science Monitor reports. Lucky for him, his story is more about wins than losses, but he did lose $3,500 early on, which he admitted was an awful lot for a college student. Forty percent of 18-to-22-year-olds gambled monthly last year, it adds. "In a survey of 119 colleges, only 22% had a gambling policy, Harvard researchers found in 2005," but changing because another study, from the National Collegiate Athletic Association, "showed rampant gambling among student athletes." Meanwhile, a hearing about the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act of 2006 was scheduled on Capitol Hill this week, the New York Times "Bits" blog reports.

11-year-old school network admin

A small private school in Arkansas was struggling to keep its network of 60 aging donated computers going on a shoestring budget, so one of its students helped out. "The first thing Jon found as he leapt into the role of network was that he had to map out the network to find out what was on it," NetworkWorld reports. So he simply bought some software that could do that at his local electronics store, and that helped him uncover "an ungodly amount of computer viruses and spam." Then he evaluated some more software and got things into shape. He was also being his mom's knight in shining armor - she was the school librarian and had just had "computer support" added to her duties. Thanks to a poster in Slashdot.org for pointing out this story (the post was in turn pointed out by a researcher colleague in Portugal, Daniel Cardoso - don't you love how information flows online?).

Growing comfort with teen social networking

Americans have a "growing comfort level with young people using Internet technologies such as social networking sites, chat rooms and email," according to a new study from the Congressional Internet Caucus Advisory Committee (CICAC) and 463 Communications. The nationwide survey found that 27.7% of Americans said social networking and chat should be restricted to adults, down from 35.3% of people surveyed in an identical study in 2007. As for access to email, 14.7% said people should be adults in 2007, compared to 2.4% now, and for general Web surfing, the numbers were 17.4% last year and 4.2% now. "Despite an evolving comfort level with youth use of the Internet, the survey revealed significant concerns with social networking technologies. For instance, a significant majority of those surveyed, 63.2%, believed that children under 16 years old should not have use social networking sites and chat rooms," the CICAC reports. Many US-based social-networking sites have a minimum age of 13; MySpace's is 14.

India to ban SNS? April Fool's, maybe

Could be an April Fool's joke on the part of India-based Tech2.com, but the site reports that India's Home Affairs Ministry is considering banning overseas-based social-networking sites and requiring domestic ones to "maintain records of all user activity including 'change of status, profile picture, favorite sitcoms etc.'." Here's the part that's suspicious in comedic terms: "Intelligence operatives are of the belief that Jehadi terror cells could work out a sophisticated system of communication by 'throwing sheep' at each other using a site such as Facebook.com whose servers the Indian government cannot access." Foreign sites such as Google's Orkut, MySpace, Facebook, Bebo, and LinkedIn would be blocked by a government directive to Indian Internet service providers. Popular India-based social sites the story mentions include BigAdda.com, Yaari.com, and Minglebox.com. If all this is serious, other government certainly will be watching to see if this kind of control over the participatory Web is possible, but I have a feeling teen users would find workarounds.

SN profiles: Inaccurate impressions

A University of Texas researcher has found that social-networking profiles don't give very accurate pictures of their owners. "Psychology associate professor Samuel Gosling and collaborator David Evans created You Just Get Me, a Facebook application and Web site, to determine how well people understand each other by looking at a personality profile," reports The Daily Texan at UT. You Just Get Me users answer 40 questions about their personality and then compare their answers to how other users view them. Users rate each other based on first impressions, such as how lazy, ingenious, quiet or rude a person seems." Interestingly but not surprisingly, the researchers also found that the project teaches its subjects something about how well they understand themselves.