Schools twittering parents

More and more schools are keeping parents informed via Twitter. “Tweets” - little 140-character messages and updates like phone text messages in a Web site - "about student achievement, homework, school plays and school boards in Georgia and across the nation are being sent to [parents] like breaking news bulletins interrupting network programming," the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports. As of the article's pub date this week (4/29), the Georgia Department of Education had the beginnings of a following, at 62 followers. "Forsyth County Schools, which debuted as the first metro Atlanta public school on Twitter in March, has 300 followers. That’s more eyes glued to its posts than the nation’s largest district, the New York City Department of Education, which only has 220," according to the Journal-Constitution. But - get this - Florida's Broward County School District has a whopping 900 followers, adding new ones at a rate of about 200 a week!

Fewer child-porn sites worldwide

There were 10% fewer Web sites depicting child abuse images last year than in 2007, reports the Internet Watch Foundation, a UK nonprofit organization. However, the child-porn images on these sites are more violent, the IWF adds. Graphic violent images were found in 58% of child-porn sites last year, compared to 47% of the sites the year before. Also extremely concerning is that "24% of the children used in the photographs and videos appear to be 6 years old or younger," the IWF said. According to The Economist, "Self-regulation by Internet authorities and Internet service providers (ISPs) may be having some effect in combatting the worst kinds of online crime.... Although a worrying 1,530 sites were in operation globally, this is somewhat lower than the peak of almost 2,000 in 2006, perhaps because of more effective cooperation from ISPs and better data sharing with international authorities. The IWF notes that domains are often moved around every few days, making it much harder to block them."

Live video streaming from phones

Think mobile Webcam. This is just the sort of tech development that's good for us parents to think about out of the gate: software that turns mere camera phones into videocams, making it that much easier for people to "broadcast" whatever they want live to the Web or another phone. Stephen Balkam of the Family Online Safety Institute blogs about a spectrum of implications in the Huffington Post, but let's zoom in on the part about kids, "the early adopters of all things mobile," Balkam writes. "Parents have bought their teens and tweens mobile phones in the millions to keep in touch with them and, in some cases, track where they are at any given time. Do they realize they've just handed them a mobile production unit for live television? Will this take sexting and cyberbullying to a new and more challenging level?" Great fuel for family discussion!

Zero tolerance = zero intelligence: Juvenile judge

Most schools in the Atlanta area - "and across the nation" - have “zero-tolerance” policies where fighting's considered, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports. But Judge Steven Teske, president of the Council of Juvenile Court Judges of Georgia, told the Journal-Constitution that "zero tolerance is zero intelligence. It’s merely a political response, a knee-jerk reaction and often not put much thought is put into it.” Under that policy, both bully and victim are disciplined and schools don't find out who the primary aggressor and get to the bottom of the problem, which can help change behavior. Aaron Hansen, principal of a middle school in Ely, Nevada, reportedly has had success identifying and working with bullies at his school to change their behavior - see this report at Fox News.

Anti-gay bullying most pervasive

This month two 11-year-olds, Carl Joseph Walker-Hoover of Springfield, Mass., and Jaheem Herrera of DeKalb County, Ga. - neither of whom identified as gay - committed suicide after anti-gay harassment and bullying at school. "Lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and questioning youth are up to four times more likely to attempt suicide than their heterosexual peers," the Salt Lake Tribune reports, adding that "two of the top three reasons secondary school students said their peers were most often bullied at school were actual or perceived sexual orientation and gender expression." The Tribune was citing research by the Gay, Lesbian & Straight Education Network and Harris Interactive. New York Times columnist Charles Blow cites even more data in an eloquent column, "Two Little Boys," where he considers why bullying of any kind, including what Carl and Jaheem endured, is so devastating for kids: "Children can’t see their budding lives through the long lens of wisdom - the wisdom that benefits from years passed, hurdles overcome, strength summoned, resilience realized, selves discovered and accepted, hearts broken but mended and love experienced in the fullest, truest majesty that the word deserves. For them, the weight of ridicule and ostracism can feel crushing and without the possibility of reprieve." GLSEN's latest study, its just-released "Harsh Realities," can be found here.

Being up front about monitoring online kids

I see no point in parents secretly monitoring kids' online activities - except if a parent feels a child is in danger and the child is unwilling to communicate or make a change in those activities and is being secretive him or herself. If those exceptional criteria are met and a child is at risk, surreptitious use of monitor software is very probably necessary. Otherwise, the only kind of monitoring I'd recommend - for the average kid who's not at risk offline and is lucky enough to have engaged parents (the vast majority of online kids) - is open monitoring involving lots of communication and maybe technology. Which is why I like the whole concept of Norton OnlineFamily: It's not just about technology. I'm not aware of any other online-safety or parental-control product or service designed from the ground up around in-person parent-child communication. "OnlineFamily is meant to be completely transparent between parent and child," writes USATODAY's Ed Baig in his review of the product. Also good: It's free till next January. "Symantec isn't committing to a price after that but says a one-year subscription is valued at $60," Baig adds. For video on the product, see Good Morning America.

'Continuous partial attention...'

...leads to "continuous partial empathy"? "Continuous partial attention" is the way some researchers are describing what's happening when people communicate or socialize with social-media tools like Twitter, instant messaging, chat, texting, etc. Fast Company looks at a new report from the Brain and Creativity Institute at USC, which argues that the brain is quick to recognize and empathize when people see physical pain or fear in others but "much slower to recognize and empathize with emotional pain.... What this means is that, in a media environment where our social encounters happen very quickly, we may not be giving our brains a chance to generate appropriate compassion or admiration." I wonder if writer Jamais Cascio (or the researchers, if this is their concern) is factoring in the fact that social-media users usually bring existing "real world" relationships to their social-networking, IM, and Twitter accounts, relationships in which empathy is often already established - that tweets and profile comments are not the all of their relating and socializing. SN comments are more effect than cause of relationships.

But what this does suggest to me is that empathy, citizenship, and anti-bullying training in schools needs to be sure to fold the "continuous partial attention" element of online social networking into instruction. And what we might teach students is consideration - giving consideration as much as being considerate. Referring to what business consultants have been calling the new "attention economy," another Fast Company writer, Richard Kadrey, cautions - wisely, I think - that "what's limited isn't attention, but consideration [emphasis his]. Not just hearing, but listening. Not just seeing a message, but understanding its meaning." I think that goes for the social-media-enabled participatory culture in which our kids are so active. Think about this comment of Kadrey's in the context of teaching new media literacy: "It may be worth considering how we'd structure our digital world if the point wasn't just to 'pay attention' but to 'give consideration'" - perhaps another way to look at both critical thinking and empathy.

Undercover Mom in Stardoll, Part 2: The skinny on virtual paperdolls

By Sharon Duke Estroff

In case there’s any doubt over which is more fun - trying on real clothes at Bloomingdales or trying on virtual clothes at a Stardoll department store - there shouldn’t be. The latter is the hands-down winner.

Having survived recent bathing suit shopping trauma, I found dressing up MattieLu, my Stardoll avatar, to be a little slice of shopping heaven. Every frock I slipped onto my virtual self accented my many assets. As far as minimizing my bodily flaws, completely unnecessary, as I apparently haven’t any.

When I created MattieLu during my personal Stardoll design process, I was given the option of shaping her frame by choosing body size 1, 2, or 3 - one extreme presumably super skinny and the other more curvaceous. Upper and lower bodies are modified separately so I could theoretically create an apple (heavier on top) or pear (heavier below) framed avatar.

I was fleetingly impressed. Stardoll’s overriding shopping theme may be shamelessly materialistic, its retail offerings, more than slightly slutty, but at least this youth website is cognizant of the importance of building healthy body image in kids. At least it’s doing its part to counteract the counterproductive message (sent children’s way by skeletal tween idols and such) that fame, fortune, and happiness are inversely correlated with body fat index.

Nevertheless first impressions can be short lived. Upon alternating my avatars body type number, I recognized virtually no change whatsoever in her frame. Perhaps that option isn’t right now working, I reasoned.

After much closer inspection, however, I did notice a very slight puffing and unpuffing of MattieLu’s frame with my ascension and descension of number choice. (ee screenshots). Still, if this was the extent of body-type variation advocated by Stardoll, I might as well hibernate for the entirety of bathing suit season.

Does Stardoll’s perfectly proportioned avatars indeed foster unhealthy body image in the young girls who create them? Does its scant, midriff-baring couture encourage excessive dieting?

I think the Stardoll club message boards speak for themselves. (Stardoll members who cyberswear they’re at least 13 years old are allowed to join clubs; each club has its own message board where members post questions, suggestions, and free associative ramblings.) A disproportionate number of posts revolve around topics of physical appearance, weight loss and eating disorders. I came across several dozen clubs that are exclusively devoted to such subjects (see screenshot), but I also came upon weight issue posting in presumably unrelated forums like the “Animal Lovers” club.

Finally, there are sure to be those who argue that Stardoll’s pro-emaciation message is really no different than that of Barbie who’s plagued generations of girls with an impossibly perfect vision of female physical beauty. But as a former Barbie junkie and current concerned mom/undercover Stardoll member, I am going to have to differ on that one. Where there was never any question that Barbie was an inanimate plastic plaything, Stardoll essentially eradicates the line between fantasy and reality, immersing kids in its appearance-obsessed virtual world. As an adult, I intellectually grasped that the Stardoll experience is a product of state of the art computer graphics and technology. Still, I found it difficult to remain impervious to its overriding superficial mindset. On the upside, sampling life as a size 0 did inspire me to dust off my treadmill and lay off the Girl Scout cookies for a while.

MattieLu as a No. 1 body type

But No. 2 isn't that different

MattieLu settles on No. 3

Kelly Osbourne, Stardoll-style

Signs of anorexia

Scary advice on a Stardoll message board

For an index of the complete Undercover Mom series to date, please click here.

Why technopanics are bad

Remember the predator panic? It's not over, of course - presentations with titles like "Facebook, the Sex Offenders' Catalog" and "MySpace the Predator's New Playground" (actual titles) are still being given at a time when we need to empower young social media users and their parents, not scare them to death (for more on this, see "A new online safety: The means, not the end").

Now we really need to prevent a sexting panic from developing. I really believe teens themselves will help us end the trend if they're given the facts about current child-porn laws (see "Tips to Prevent Sexting"), which hopefully will undergo revisions, where minors and adolescent behavior are concerned and criminal intent is not (see what's happening in Vermont along these lines).

"But why are technopanics bad, if there's a chance they'll scare people into safe behavior?" you might ask. For one thing because the Internet is ubiquitous, here to stay, a tool of participatory culture and democracy, and youth are its most active, fluent users - its drivers, in many ways. Young people aren't scared of technology. They know all the workarounds if we get scared and try to ban the Net from their lives. They can easily go "underground" (away from home, at friends' houses, public hot spots, using friends' very mobile connected devices, from smartphones to music and game players), which can actually put them at greater risk, because when they're in stealth mode, we're no longer in the equation, and they need us as backup in their online as well as offline lives.

And there are macro-level, national and global, reasons why panics are bad. Here's a list, a draft for which your comments and additions are welcome. Technopanics are bad because they...

Cause fear, which interferes with parent-child communication, which in turn puts kids at greater risk.

Cause schools to fear and block digital media when they need to be teaching constructive use, employing social-technology devices and teaching new media literacy and citizenship throughout the curriculum.

Turn schools into barriers rather than contributors to young people's constructive use.

Increase the irrelevancy of school to active young social-technology users via the sequestering or banning of educational technology and hamstringing some of the most spirited and innovative educators.

Distract parents, educators, policymakers from real risks - including, for example, child-pornography laws that do not cover situations where minors can simultaneously be victim and "perpetrator" and, tragically, become registered sex offenders in cases where there was no criminal intent (e.g., see this).

Reduce the competitiveness of US education among developed countries already effectively employing educational technology and social media in schools (for an international view, see Joan Ganz Cooney Center/Sesame Workshop's "Pockets of Potential: Using Mobile Technologies to Promote Children's Learning").

Reduce the competitiveness of US technology and media businesses practicing good corporate citizenship where youth online safety is concerned.

Lead to bad legislation, which aggravates above outcomes and takes the focus off areas where good laws on the books can be made relevant to current technology use.

Widen the participation gap for youth - technopanics are barriers for children and teens to full, constructive participation in participatory culture and democracy.

What am I missing? Please add to or comment the list - via the ConnectSafely forum, commenting here, or email to anne(at)netfamilynews.org. We are literally all in this together, don't you think?!

Related links

Prof. Henry Jenkins: "Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century," Fall 2006

"Living and Learning with New Media," a summary of findings (qualitative and quantitative) form the MacArthur Foundation-funded Digital Youth Project, by Ito, Mizuko, Heather A. Horst, Matteo Bittanti, danah boyd, Becky Herr-Stephenson, Patricia G. Lange, C.J. Pascoe, and Laura Robinson, Fall 2008.

"Critical Information Studies for a Participatory Culture," Dr. Jenkins's list of factors that block the full achievement of a more participatory society, 4/10/09 post on his blog

The skills of new media literacy

For a bit of history, see my first item on this, "'Predator panic'," in 2006 and "The latest technopanic" last August (before "sexting" was a word), linking to Alice Marwick's definitive paper on moral panics.

"Enhancing Child Safety & Online Technologies," the 12/31/08 report of the Internet Safety Technical Task Force at Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet & Society, and my post about it

"Pennsylvania case study: Social networking risk in context"

New DSi = new iPhone for kids?

That's what the Youth Trends research firm's calling this third version of Nintendo's handheld game player. "The $170 DSi fully embraces the two biggest trends in gaming: customization/personalization and multi-player interactivity," writes its Gen Digital blogger. By customization, the blog's referring to all the little features that are putting the new DSi in competition with the iPod Touch - 2 easy-to-use built-in 0.3 megapixel cameras, photo editing, game downloading, music recording, wi-fi, and Web browsing - features that I think do make the DSi (with its 850 games to choose from and not so many to download yet) just that much more attractive to young gamers. Interestingly, with this device, Nintendo's targeting "women, adults, and non-gamers," according to Wall Street Journal blogger Courtney Banks, but her review makes it sound like those users would much prefer the iPod Touch's better Web and photo-sharing functionality (browsing on the DSi is very slow, she couldn't play video, and "any time I attempted to load Gmail I was greeted with an "insufficient memory error" message).

Sony's new virtual world & parent guide

Is Sony's Free Realms, now in beta testing, a virtual world or a massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG)? The latter is what Sony calls it, but I think it's both. Available online through a Web browser, the free version is more virtual world (with eight environments to choose from) which includes mini games in 14 categories (e.g., cooking, kart racing, mining, demolition derby, and music conducting). The $4.95/mo. version is the MMORPG involving quests and leveling as in the multi-million-player World of Warcraft. With both versions, you choose an avatar or "job." Member jobs sound a bit like some of WoW's - wizard, blacksmith, medic, archer, and warrior; free ones to be available at launch ninja, brawler, chef, miner, kart driver, card duelist, pet trainer, and postman (the game includes trading cards). Both members and free players can buy virtual goods for their avatars through "micro-transactions" with credit cards. Since the game's for all ages (likely starting at age 7 or 8), there are pretty robust-sounding parental controls (if kids are truthful about their ages). If you or your child would like to beta test Free Realms, email me at anne(at)netfamilynews.org, and I'll forward your request. Meanwhile, Sony has just released its "Let the Kids Game" guide for gamers' parents. The free booklet, downloadable here, offers advice for healthy gaming and pulls together third-party research about the positives of videogaming, saying it "can help kids socialize, improve cognitive abilities, and strengthen family ties."

Child protection in virtual worlds

Some 70 million people under 16 will have accounts in virtual worlds by the end of this year, the New York Times reports. That's twice last year's figure, it adds, citing the research of UK virtual world consulting firm K Zero. And there are more than 200 worlds such as Disney's Club Penguin, Cartoon Network's FusionFall, and Helsinki-based Habbo in place, in the planning, or in development, the Times cites Virtual Worlds Management research as showing. The key to keeping all those kids' in-world experiences safe and constructive and this growing business thriving is moderation. There are two kinds: human and technological. Both kinds have to deal with the "continuing game of cat and mouse between the young people and the technology designed to protect them" - such as profanity filters, chat limited to predetermined phrases, and abuse reporting. Please see the article for details on the changing interplay between human moderators and the technology that supports their work. [See also "Top 8 workarounds of kid virtual world users."]

Anti-bullying & -cyberbullying reports, projects

So far this year there have been four suicides in the US because of bullying, writes Chicago mental health examiner Jerilyn Dufresne, marking the suicide of 11-year-old bullying victim Carl Joseph Walker-Hoover in The Examiner. His mother is asking her state government, Massachusetts, to investigate the school Carl attended, MassLive.com reports. The family of a 17-year-old bullying and suicide victim in Ohio is suing their school district for violating the boy's "civil right to safety, as well as the family's 14th Amendment rights to raise and educate Eric [Mohat] in a safe environment," the [northern Ohio] News-Herald reports. In the UK, counselors at BeatBullying, a nonprofit organization, have trained 700 teens to mentor bullying victims in both face-to-face meetings and through a new Web service called CyberMentors, Mirror.co.uk reports. YourCanterbury.co.uk adds that "over the next two years, the new CyberMentors project will be brought to other schools across the country as part of the national peer mentoring pilot announced by the Government." The New York Times recently zoomed in on Scarsdale [N.Y.] Middle School's strong emphasis on empathy training to reduce bullying. It refers to the Character Education Partnership, a nonprofit group in Washington, saying that "18 states - including New York, Florida, Illinois, Nebraska and California - require programs to foster core values such as empathy, respect, responsibility and integrity." Another such approach is the "CAPSULE" anti-bullying instruction program that has been tested in both US and UK schools (see my earlier post). And there's a new children's book out about cyberbullying, Don't Hit Send Just to Fit In. Here's background on US case law where cyberbullying and schools are concerned, from attorney and educator Kathleen Conn in Educational Leadership and London-based Childnet International's wonderful anti-cyberbullying resource (and moving video) at Digizen.org.

Asst. principal tells his own story

Two months after his boss, the principal of Freedom High School in Loudoun County, Va., told him to store a photo of a semi-naked girl on his computer "in case we needed it later," Asst. Principal Ting-Yi Oei was charged with "failure to report suspected child abuse" and put on administrative leave (he hadn't been able to ID the girl because the photo was taken from the neck down). That was last May, he writes in a commentary in the Washington Post. Only this month did his legal ordeal end, with the charges against him thrown out of court, as earlier reported (here's my post). Thought you'd like to get his take on what happened. It's a long story, so I'll leave the details of this latest misapplication of child-porn law in a sexting case to the teller.

'Suddenly Susan' & *social* mass media

If you aren't among the tens of millions of people who've already viewed Susan Boyle's performance on Britain's Got Talent (their American Idol-like talent show), give yourself a nearly 10-minute-long smile and watch her floor the judges and audience with her gorgeous rendition of "I Dreamed a Dream" from Les Miserables. As of this writing, that recording on YouTube has been viewed nearly 34 million times (another version in the top 5 search results for Boyle has been viewed 9+ million times) and is on track to pass the 100 million mark, Mashable reports. More than 3,300 stories about Boyle in news outlets worldwide turned up today in a Google News search. Though this doesn't seem like the kind of story I usually blog about, it actually is: 1) Boyle sang for her mom. This was the first time she could sing since her mother's passing two years ago, The Times reports. 2) Those among her fans who've been bullied need to know that she has been too; she suffered mild brain damage as a baby, had learning disabilities in school, "became a target for bullies ... but found sanctuary in her [large] closeknit, religious family," the Times adds (and probably in her singing talent), all of which appears to have stood her in good stead as she faced visibly skeptical judges and audience members (don't miss watching the metamorphosis on all those faces). 3) Boyle's story is a brilliant example of the new mass media - *social* mass media, when all the online views, tweets, profile comments, blog posts, retweets, and talk show plugs, probably add up to "a bigger audience than the U.S. viewership of the Super Bowl," blogs Time media columnist James Poniewozik. "It also means that more of the power, and the influence over how those moments are received, falls to the excerpters and commentators who reproduce, repost and embed the videos." See also "Suddenly Susan: Singer's Town Is Agog," Washington Post UK correspondent Mary Jordan's online discussion with Post readers about her visit with the singer in her Blackburn, Scotland, home.

Key US study on youth videogame addiction

In what's being described as the US's first nationally representative study on videogame addiction, an Iowa State University researcher found that 88% of the US's 45 million 8-to-18-year-olds play videogames, and 8.5% of them show "multiple signs of behavioral addiction," the Washington Post reports. That means that 3 million young people are either addicted or "'at least have problems of the magnitude' that call for help," the researcher, Douglas Gentile, said. Symptoms include "spending increasing amounts of time and money on videogames to feel the same level of excitement; irritability or restlessness when play is scaled back; escaping problems through play; skipping chores or homework to spend more time at the controller; lying about the length of playing time; and stealing games or money to play more," the Post reports. It's important, I think, to note Gentile's remark that the study doesn't show that videogames are bad or even addictive, but that "some kids use them in a way that is out of balance and harms various other areas of their lives." The research is now in the journal Psychological Science.

Teen social-networking fatigue?

Now that parents are flooding Facebook, might it be losing cachet for teens? The fastest-growing age breakdowns in the past three months were women 55-65 (175.3% growth), 45-54 (165%), and 35-44 (154%), according to InsideFacebook.com (the site also just passed the 200 million mark for users worldwide, the San Jose Mercury News reports). Not that it's a quid pro quo, but people who follow this stuff are wondering if there's a new "place" on the horizon where teens might prefer to hang out - for example, maybe the part of the wireless spectrum that text messaging uses. The indicators of texting's popularity (teens are sending and receiving 2,274 a month, on average, the Washington Post reports) suggest that it may be stealing some of users' Facebook time. But a sudden mass migration is unlikely (people don't just leave social sites - not if their friends don't leave). More likely is that "FB passion among youth is fading," as social media researcher danah boyd observed in Twitter and Facebook the other day.

Responding to that, YPulse founder and youth marketing blogger Anastasia Goodstein wrote in her blog that "it may be that teens aren't necessarily going somewhere else; they’re just spending less time on social networks and more time socializing in real life, texting, etc. That makes sense to me, that Facebook (and for many teens MySpace) will need to move over and make room for the growing number of other tools in their social toolbox - an important one, nonetheless, because it does represent a tool *bundle* (email, real-time chat, asynchronous wall comments, etc.). So it may be kind of naïve and adult to think there has to be a single new place or technology teens will adopt en masse, (though social networking was like that back in 2005, that was then, this is now). [Other noteworthy FB numbers: though no longer the fastest-growing, 18-to-25-year-olds are still the biggest population segment of Facebook by far (43%), parents may be interested to know that 13-to-17-year-olds make up only 12% of the FB population.] There's more on social-networking fatigue, enthusiasm, and ambivalence at Yahoo News. And from the "This just in!" Department: comScore just released data showing that Facebook now accounts for about a third of all online social networking worldwide and 4.1 out of every 100 minutes we all spend online, The Guardian reports.

A new online safety: The means, not the end

We really need to rethink online safety. When you talk with teens in your family or classroom, do you see what I'm seeing: that, because of the predator panic US society has been experiencing and widespread school policy to block social media, they have practically tuned out the term "online safety"? Because it has for so long been equated with "deleting predators" and it can't really help them deal with the complexities of their online/offline social lives, it's in danger of becoming irrelevant to them.

That puts "online safety" in danger of becoming a barrier rather than a support to young people's constructive, enriching use of social media and technologies. If that happens, it also becomes a barrier to their full participation in participatory culture and democracy.

Certainly the social Web itself isn't participatory democracy 2.0; however - witness the prominent role of social network sites in the US's latest presidential election (see just-released Pew/Internet research) - it has clearly become an important tool of participatory democracy and, as such, needs to be part of citizenship and media literacy education in school (to remain relevant to social media's most fluent practitioners - teens - schools cannot afford to discourage or block social media's use). Online and offline citizenship and social media literacy are themselves the lionshare of online-safety education for youth who are not at risk in offline life (more on this below and in "Social media literacy: The new Internet safety").

To help keep school relevant to students, make online safety meaningful to them, make their use of social media more constructive, and close what author and media professor Henry Jenkins calls the participation gap, we need to: 1) put online safety into the context of full, healthy participation and 2) redefine it as freedom from a set of risks that restrict youth from free expression and civic engagement through social technologies and media.

The three forms of safety that enable full participation are:

Physical safety - the one we have focused on the most, freedom from physical harm by predators and bullies

Psychological safety - freedom from cruelty, flaming, and other forms of harassment and cyberbullying involving ex-friends, mean kids, bullies, colleagues, etc. (picture a wise drama teacher whose rule it is that students check all personal judgment/criticism at the door before they engage worry-free in otherwise compromising, goofy warm-up exercises).

Reputational and legal safety - these can overlap with the psychological kind, where, for example, online defamation can harm someone's reputation; they provide for freedom from restriction or repercussion as a result of online communication or production by one's self or others (repercussions ranging from school discipline to loss of employment to criminal charges for sexting).

All of those freedoms - including from physical harm - are fostered when youth receive training in citizenship, ethics, empathy, new media literacy (employing the critical-thinking filter to what one "says," uploads, or produces as much as reads, downloads or consumes). Such training couldn't remove all online risk any more than it could remove all danger from offline life - particularly for at-risk youth. It can't speed up teenage brain development, which necessarily involves risk taking and assessment and continues until their early-to-mid-20s. But it would go way beyond legislation, stranger-danger messages, parental-control technology, or any other-imposed safety measure, because it develops the internal "filter" that is always with them.

These freedoms are not the goal; they are means to achieving it. We need to shift the public discussion from the more negative safety from to the much more positive safety for or toward active civic engagement online and offline as an essential goal of education in a free society (see the impressive array of skills involved in new media literacy at NewMediaLiteracies.org).

Educator and author Will Richardson says it better. Referring to social Web technologies, he recently wrote in ASCD's Educational Leadership magazine that, "for a host of reasons, we're failing to empower kids to use one of the most important technologies for learning that we've ever had. One of the biggest challenges educators face right now is figuring out how to help students create, navigate, and grow the powerful, individualized networks of learning that bloom on the Web and helping them do this effectively, ethically, and safely." Safe, ethical, full participation is also one of the biggest opportunities, as well as challenges, we all - students, educators, parents, policymakers, society itself - face right now.

Readers, please jump in - agree, disagree, edit, augment, or comment here, in our ConnectSafely.org forum, or via email to anne(at)netfamilynews.org!

Related links

As the goal, safety sells youth short. How? Consider the playground metaphor, described by Barry Joseph of Global Kids, a youth-education nonprofit organization in New York asked if safety is all we want from playgrounds for our kids. "What makes a playground safe? Recreational equipment that isn't broken, for example. Barriers to keep out drug dealers or predatory adults. Authority figures to police the space. How would this playground change if it were redesigned to not just keep youth safe but also support their development?"

Prof. Henry Jenkins's list of factors that block "full achievement" of a participatory society, a "partial agenda for media reform from the perspective of participatory culture"

The skills of new media literacy - learn more at the "Learning in a Participatory Culture" conference at MIT on May 2

"Living and Learning with New Media: Summary of Findings from the Digital Youth Project," fall 2008

"Enhancing Child Safety and Online Technologies," the final report of the Internet Safety Technical Task Force, January 2009

"Social media literacy: The new Internet safety" at NFN

Facebook users have lower grades?

"Correlation does not equal causation," the researchers say, but a recent survey of college students found that "Facebook user GPAs were in the 3.0 to 3.5 range on average, compared to 3.5 to 4.0 for non-users," LiveScience.com reports. Online socializing seems to be in the same category as other extracurricular activities, such as sports or music (in the case of music, probably at the same time!). "For instance, students who spend more time enjoying themselves rather than studying might tend to latch onto the nearest distraction, such as Facebook.... Student who work more hours at jobs spend less time on Facebook, while students involved in more extracurricular activities were also more likely to use Facebook." LiveScience also reports that over 85% of undergrads use Facebook, versus 52% of graduate students.

How a family's handling YouTube fame

The two-minute "David After Dentist" video has gotten more than 18 million views since 6-year-old David's dad posted it on YouTube. David is now, in effect, a child star. Chris O'Brien at the San Jose Mercury News talked to David's father about how the effects of this apparently unsought near-instant fame. The original idea was to take a video of David after he'd had a tooth pulled so Mom, who couldn't be there, could see that David "was OK, if a bit loopy. The family found it funny, and put it on [Dad's] Facebook page, where only a limited number of friends and family would be able to view it." More and more people asked to see, so David Sr. posted the video on YouTube and, within three days, it had been viewed 3 million times. Some harsh comments about child exploitation have been posted on their YouTube page, but most have been positive. "They held some family meetings to discuss the phenomenon and asked how he felt ('Like a rock star!' he told them). They established some boundaries and parameters about how they would respond." Now, as a family, they package up "David After Dentist" t-shirts for fans. I wonder if David Jr. will one day join a support group for grown-up child stars. Then again, maybe half the grownup world will be child stars by then - no support groups needed!

Law would decriminalize sexting in VT

Legislation has passed Vermont's Senate and is pending in the House that would decriminalize but not legalize teen sexting. The bill would take child-porn charges off the table in cases where teens send or receive nude images of themselves or peers, Yahoo Tech News reports. The bill wouldn't legalize sexting, but "would carve out an exemption from prosecution for child pornography for 13-to-18-year-olds on either the sending or receiving end of sexting messages, so long as the sender voluntarily transmits an image of himself or herself." Yahoo adds that Vermont prosecutors could "still use laws against lewd and lascivious conduct and against disseminating indecent materials to a minor." The Vermont legislation makes sense for most sexting incidents - those involving impulsive, self-destructive, or "romantic" consensual behavior among peers - but some legal scholars feel serious charges may need to remain an option in cases where malicious or criminal intent's involved. The Yahoo article details criminal charges teens face for sexting in a number of states.

School admin's legal nightmare in sexting case

The story of a high school assistant principal accused of possessing child pornography in a student sexting incident illustrates how unjustly child porn law can be applied. Even in the current "environment of prosecutorial excess, [this] case [of a 60-year-old former Fullbright exchange teacher, Peace Corps volunteer, and 30-year veteran educator] stands out as likely the first to entangle an adult who came in possession of an image that even police admit wasn't pornographic, and who did so simply in the course of doing his job," Wired blogger Kim Zetter reports. He "spent $150,000 and a year of his life defending himself in a ... legal nightmare triggered by a determined county prosecutor and nurtured by a growing hysteria over technology-enabled child porn at America's schools." It's a long, complicated story, so pls go to Zetter's post for the details, but she reports that a Virginia judge finally through the case out of court on March 31.

Teen claims to be Twitter worm creator

A US high school senior in Brooklyn, N.Y., owned up to creating a worm that attacked Twitter over the weekend, PC Magazine reports. Apparently designed to increase traffic to his site, it spread links through some 10,000 tweets, or updates, to Twitter users' pages. CNET reports that among the worm's updates were: "Mikeyy I am done...," "MikeyyMikeyy is done," and "Twitter please fix this, regards Mikeyy." The 17-year-old taking credit for the exploit, Michael Mooney, "told reporters that he created the worm out of boredom and is hoping that it will result in employment from a security firm rather than prosecution," according to PC Magazine. Twitter founder Biz Stone blogged that the worm compromised about 100 accounts, which Twitter later secured.

Undercover Mom in Stardoll, Part 1: Barbie grows up

By Sharon Duke Estroff

Despite my kids’ insistence that I never tell a soul, I’m spilling the truth anyway - I played with Barbies until at least my 13th birthday. And most of my friends did too. We’d spend entire Saturday nights primping our dolls for hot dates with Ken, and showcasing our collections of tiny plastic shoes as if they were precious gems. Now, nearly three decades later, I’m still a girly girl at heart. So it seemed only natural to tap Stardoll.com - a wildly popular “virtual paperdoll community” with nearly 30 million members - as the site of my next Undercover Mom investigation.

Stardoll.com Day 1

It's not that I expected a full-fledged reunion with my old plastic pal. I knew that Stardoll would be its own girl. But I was admittedly stunned by the very grown-up feel of this fashionable virtual world. While I’d pictured Stardolls to be some kind of Barbie/Bratz/Sailor Moon cyberfusion, they were in a different league, altogether.

Unlike the wide-eyed whimsical avatars of many children’s websites, Stardoll avatars seem plucked from the pages of Vogue magazine - sophisticated and edgy; sexy and cool. There are male Stardolls too: some grungy and goateed, others bearing resemblance to Adam Lambert, the metrosexual American Idol contestant - all sporting six-packs and come-hither looks. Sure, Barbie has been criticized for her impossibly perfect proportions and Bratz for their defiant, rebellious streak, but they still manage to maintain a playful childlike quality that is decidedly missing from Stardoll.com.

Puzzled, I began to question my assumption that Stardoll is a Web site for children. Maybe it’s really designed for middle-aged moms wishing to be 20-somethings with too much time on their hands. But then I noticed the SpongeBob SquarePants and Littlest Pet Shop ads flanking the Stardoll homepage and the “about us” page stating that most Stardoll members are girls 7-17, and I second-guessed no more.

Mom Break: In the marketing world it's known as the KGOY (Kids Getting Older Younger). You’ll find it on the racks of stores like Justice (formerly Limited Too) that sell padded bras for 6-year-olds, at the local cinema where 8-year-olds pile in to see Twilight, and in Barbie’s transformation from middle-school staple to toddler toy.
And you’ll find evidence of KGOY in every nook and cranny of Stardoll.com – from the distinctly adult-looking avatars to the mature designer clothes to the sophisticated loft living spaces.

But the silver lining is that Stardoll has made playing with dolls beyond kindergarten once again socially acceptable for 21st-century kids. The same girls who swapped their dolls for cellphones to be cool (but secretly would have traded their last wireless minute for a chance to put on a bona fide Barbie fashion show) can now save face while dressing the Avril Lavigne Stardoll for an imaginary concert or designing a punk-rock prom dress for their grungy avatar. Yes, glaringly imperfect as it might be, Stardoll has in its own way returned a few embers of Girlhood Past to the KGOY generation.

Screenshots

Oh so sophisticated avatars

Decidedly grown-up 7-year-old

"Ken," Stardoll-style

To go "goth"

Very fashionable physicist

Jonas Brothers as Stardolls

For an index of the complete Undercover Mom series to date, please click here.

Wikipedia: A model for digital citizenship training?

When educators and homework helpers think of Wikipedia.org, they probably shake their heads over its monopoly on students' encyclopedia look-ups (see "Victim of Wikipedia: Microsoft to shut down Encarta"). But think of it in a different light: as digital-citizenship teaching tool. A recent commentary in the New York Times compares Wikipedia - with the more than 2.8 million collaboratively edited articles in its English version alone - to a vibrant city, with its population density, high drama, diversity of views, and unpredictability. Like a big city, writer Noam Cohen suggests, one of Wikipedia's "founding principles" is "Assume good faith." How can people do that? Consider this:

"Wikipedia encourages contributors to mimic the basic civility, trust, cultural acceptance and self-organizing qualities familiar to any city dweller. Why don’t people attack each other on the way home? Why do they stay in line at the bank? Why don’t people guffaw at the person with blue hair? The police may be an obvious answer. ["Police," where unruly adolescent behavior is concerned, could be replaced sometimes with "school administrators" or "parents."] But this misses the compact among city dwellers. Since their creation, cities have had to be accepting of strangers - no judgments - and residents learn to be subtly accommodating, outward looking." Good citizens as stakeholders in the smooth functioning and well-being of the community, as signers-on to a kind of social compact. But transparency, or accountability, helps too. Every editorial move an editor makes in Wikipedia is documented and can be looked up at times of controversy. Wikipedia is, of course, a wiki - so just think of the value of wikis to learning all kinds of subjects, including citizenship in real and virtual communities!

'Digital Samaritans' and lost 'n' founds

It's great to see a good news story for a change, so don't miss the one in the New York Times about how more and more people are using social-network and -media sites to get found valuables and critters back to their missing owners (case studies for digital citizenship training?!). New, altruistically minded lost 'n' found Web sites are also popping up, as are some startups who see a business opportunity in all this.

FL teen a registered sex offender for sexting

Teens do not want a late-night fit of anger channeled into a few seconds' worth of clicks on a cellphone to lead to anything close to what happened to Phillip Alpert, who will be in Florida's sex offender registry until he's 43, CNN reports. He told CNN he had just turned 18, he was tired, and it was the middle of the night "when he sent a naked photo of his 16-year-old girlfriend [for 2½ years], a photo she had taken and sent him, to dozens of her friends and family after an argument." Arrested and charged with distributing child pornography, he was later convicted and "sentenced to five years' probation and required by Florida law to register as a sex offender." Please see the CNN article for how US states handle child porn crimes, which - unfortunately, until US policymakers come up with a better idea - is how sexting is dealt with under US state and federal laws. What makes this complicated for law enforcement is, sexting is not always impulsive behavior by teenagers who know nothing about the law. Sometimes it's premeditated and malicious (e.g., bullying) or even criminal (blackmail or sexual abuse), in which case, Catholic U. Prof. Mary Leary and other legal scholars believe prosecution of minors should not be taken off the table (see "Self-produced child porn").

I wonder if it would it help to look at how other countries are dealing with sexting. When a Toronto TV reporter contacted ConnectSafely today, I learned that Canadian child porn law is a little easier on juveniles - more reasonable, I think, even though "sexting" has barely hit the public radar there, he told me. He pointed me to a thoughtful Macleans magazine article, reporting that, in Canada, "it’s not illegal for two teenagers under the age of 18 to carry naked photographs of one another, provided it's [consensual activity and] for private viewing only." It becomes child porn when one of them sends it around, and charges are for that distribution not against the minor who took the photo, according to Maclean. I haven't seen reports on UK law where sexting's concerned, but I noted that "90 children in the UK have been cautioned [presumably by law enforcement people] as a result of posting sexual material of themselves or their underage friends online or on their mobile phones," according to The Daily Mail, which indicates to me that those 90 children weren't arrested and that UK law enforcement may be playing the largely educational role that the realities of adolescent behavior and development demand of law enforcement where sexting's concerned. [For some research-based tips on how to deal with sexting in the US, click here.]

Social media to be required in UK schools?

UK kids may soon be taking a big leap ahead in media-literacy training. A proposed overhaul to Britain's elementary school curriculum - the biggest in a decade - was just leaked, The Guardian reports. The draft does include "traditional areas of learning, including phonics, the chronology of history and mental arithmetic" but also requires British students to be "familiar with blogging, podcasts, Wikipedia and Twitter as sources of information and forms of communication." It divides the curriculum into six core learning areas instead of 13 subjects - a little closer, it seems to me, to what education reformer Sir Ken Robinson proposes .The plans, reportedly written by "Sir Jim Rose, the former [UK regulatory body] Ofsted chief who was appointed by ministers to overhaul the primary school curriculum, and are due to be published next month. Could this have anything to do with Birmingham University's plan to offer a master's in social media, as The Telegraph reports (probably not, but the timing's telling).

Social-media use in US schools: Study

Looking at the findings of social-media researchers, it's clear there's a growing gap between how kids consume information in school and the collaborative, media-rich way they gather and share information everywhere else. Given this, Lightspeed/NetTrekker sponsored some research to take a measure of where schools are with adoption of Web 2.0 tech such as online games, wikis, blogs, and virtual worlds (AKA virtual learning environments). The study found what we'd expect of user-driven media: In schools, too, adoption of these learning tools is from the ground up. Teachers are driving it, and their three top reasons are: to address students’ individual learning needs, engage students, and increase the accessibility of what they're teaching to their digital-native students. The study also found that, in 83% of school districts, very few or no teachers use online social networking for instruction; 40% of districts don't even allow use of social networking (I'm wondering why not Ning-style social sites that teachers create and control themselves?!); but almost half of districts have plans to allow teachers to share their content with Web 2.0 tools such as wikis (like using new-media tools to teach in old-media, top-down fashion, but it's a start). [The study's executive summary can be requested on this page.]

Facebook friend saves suicidal teen

A girl in the US saw a suicidal comment from a UK boy on her Facebook friends list, and within three hours he was found and taken to the hospital for treatment, The Daily Mail reports. "Shortly before 11.30pm [last] Wednesday [the 16-year-old boy] wrote: ‘I’m going away to do something I’ve been thinking about for a while then everyone will find out'." His friend knew the school he went to but not his address, so she told her parents, who contacted the British Embassy in Washington. Police local to the boy "had just a name to go on but narrowed the search to eight addresses in [his] county. Officers were dispatched to each location, and three hours after the boy had filed his Facebook message, he was found at home [conscious] " conscious but suffering the effects of a drug overdose." He has since been released from the hospital and "is recovering at home," The Daily Mail adds. The story bears out what the US's National Suicide Prevention Lifeline told me for a 2007 profile of its work with MySpace and other social sites, that peers are often the first to know when a teen's in trouble, so social network sites are a vital source of referrals to hotlines.

New, holistic anti-bullying program for schools

Parents and educators may be interested in a groundbreaking new approach to anti-bullying instruction. Called "CAPSULE" for "Creating a Peaceful Learning Environment," the program focuses on the entire school community instead of just on aggressive kids and teaches the need to understand rather than react to others, ScienceDaily reports. CAPSULE creates "a climate where feelings [are] labelled and distress acknowledged as legitimate, with the ultimate aim of changing the way the entire school social system views bullying." The program has been tested in nine US elementary schools and the study published in the Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry. "CAPSLE schools were compared with schools receiving no intervention and those using only School Psychiatric Consultation (SPC), where children with the most significant behavioral problems were assessed and referred for counseling." This may sound strange, but this approach reminds me of the kind, intuitive way British elementary school teacher Poppy handled a little bully in her class in the 2008 movie Happy-Go-Lucky. And, if not the CAPSULE program itself, similar listening skills reportedly have been applied by middle school principal Aaron Hansen in Ely, Nevada, Fox News reports.

Webcams: Positive, negative

They're increasingly ubiquitous (many computers come with them built in), and people are using webcams for everything from face-to-face conversations with distant relatives to conducting live television interviews to documenting their love lives. WebProNews reports that Facebook receives some 260,000 video uploads per day, with 155,000 of them from webcams," which works out to about 59.6%. Here's a good example of the technology's upside that doesn't as readily come to mind: The Washington Post tells the story of how using a Webcam allows 7-year-old leukemia patient Becky "to join her first-grade class almost every morning in solving math problems, listening to poetry and working on group projects." She's one of six patients in Georgetown University Hospital's pediatric oncology program who are using a Webcam to keep up with school, and Becky's first-grade teacher told the Post that the Webcam has exceeded her expectations as an academic tool.

Teens' online friends = offline friends: Study

Fresh evidence this week that most teens use the Web to socialize with their "real life" friends - "people they already know rather than strangers who might turn out to be predators," USATODAY reports. A study of students in grades 9-12 by University of California researchers "will be presented at a meeting of the Society of Research in Child Development" this week, and similar findings were "published last year in the Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology." Among the former's key findings: For 44% of youth surveyed, using social network sites "had no effect on their relationship with their friends and 43% said it made them closer; 5% had "friends known only from the Internet."

Sign of the (videogame) times

Actually, it's a sign of the new-media times: A videogame magazine - Game Informer, circ. 3,517,598 - passed up Playboy, Time, Cosmopolitan, Sports Illustrated and came "strikingly close" to People in the readership rankings, BlastMagazine reports, citing BurrellesLuce research. One qualifier (better understood by gamers and GameStop customers): "It must be noted that GameStop is the proprietor of Game Informer and the mag is issued with every pressure- and fear-induced Edge Card sale. Nevertheless, GI is a quality 'zine with an educated staff of writers and hosts a plethora of valuable content."

Now available: Tips to prevent 'sexting'

Hey, readers. Will you help us spread the word and make "sexting" a short-lived trend (by minimizing the number of children being prosecuted!)? We just posted our Tips to Prevent Sexting at ConnectSafely.org. They're based on solid research - conversations with police, prosecutors, and legal scholars at local, state, and federal levels). If we missed or muddied anything, feedback most welcome! In any case, we think that, once they have the facts, teens themselves will help minimize this problem.

Fight videos: The new '15 min. of fame'?

Of fame or infamy? Who knows how many such "brawls" are staged for YouTube, but eSchoolNews reports that growing numbers of students rush to the scene with videocams and phones when they hear "Fight! Fight!", and "some of those videos have been viewed more than a million times." The upside is that school authorities who miss the fight itself can use the YouTube version to ID participants, they told eSchoolNews.

Sexting, the video version

This story illustrates how child porn law applies to a lot more than still photos on phones. Police in Massachusetts are "investigating charges" against three teens who they alleged recorded video of two engage in sex and distributed the video to junior high students, WCBV TV Boston reported. In addition to child-pornography charges, statutory rape and wiretapping charges are being considered, police said (the latter if audio was involved). "Police said the video was taken at a home, not at the school. The alleged victim, a girl under 16, told them she did not realize she was being captured on cell phone. She went to police with her parents when she realized the video was circulating," WCBV added.