The case of the password-requiring coach

A coach requiring a team member's Facebook password is a serious problem all by itself. But this coach used that password to read private messages and then kick the team member off the squad for profanity Coach Tommie Hill found in the private message. I'm referring to a case in Pearl, Miss., cited in eSchoolNews. The student was nominated for a team spirit award "for the previous year, but the coaches said she did not deserve the honor. [She] also did not take certain academic courses because the cheerleading coaches taught them." The student and her family are now suing the coach and school for $100 million "for what the suit claims are violations of Jackson's right to privacy and freedom of speech."

What's wrong with this picture on the privacy front? Viewing students' public profiles is fine simply because they're public. But in terms of protecting one's identity, privacy, and intellectual property, sharing passwords is one of the most risky behaviors in the online risk spectrum (see ConnectSafely's password tips). I'm stating the obvious in saying that teachers, coaches, and other adult mentors should be modeling safe, ethical behavior, not the opposite. What Coach Hill's behavior teaches students to do is set up a network of "G-rated" profiles and give her those passwords to avoid any repercussions from the "real" profiles – or set up "real life" profiles in another social network site. If not these, then there are other workarounds. CNN Live covered a similar story involving a private school in Georgia, interviewing a few of us bloggers about it. For more on how adults, for their own sake too, could model better behavior in social media, see this at Forbes.

25 billion+ videos viewed

That was just this past August in the US, according to comScore's latest figures - yet another online video-viewing record. More than 10 billion of those views were on Google sites, with YouTube representing 99% of Google video traffic. In terms of people, "161 million US Internet users watched online video during the month, the largest audience ever recorded," comScore Video Metrix reports. The rest of August's Top 5 video-sharing locations were Microsoft Sites, Viacom Digital, Hulu, and Fox Interactive (MySpace). Now, for a little context, check out Clive Thompson in Wired on "How YouTube Changes the Way We Think" (and converse).

Youth, adults & the social-media shift

No wonder adults, born and raised in the 20th century's mass-media environment are struggling to wrap our brains around current media conditions – and what "Net safety" should look like under them. We're in the middle of a Gutenberg Press-style media shift, multiplied by 3. Author and media pundit Clay Shirky talks about the four previous media shifts that "qualify for the term revolutionary," all of which were either a) asynchronous one-to-many or b) realtime, one-to-one "conversations." They were 1) that Gutenberg-enabled first shift to mass media (text) more than 5.5 centuries ago; 2) then real-time, two-way or conversational media (telegraph/text, then telephone/audio); 3) then recorded mass-distributed media other than text (photos, sound, film); then 4) the one-to-many mass media we grew up with, recorded and sent through the air (radio and TV).

Media shift on steroids
The Internet, Shirky said in his talk last June, does two revolutionary things, but I'd say three. Shirky's two are: 1) blends real-time two-way conversation and one-to-many mass media to create real-time, many-to-many media or conversations and 2) is the distribution platform or pipe for all other media as well. The third piece is implied in Shirky's first one, but I think it's so significant or even radical, especially where online youth are concerned, that it deserves to be highlighted: the "many" in realtime, many-to-many media are the producers, marketers, and distributors as well as the consumers of media now. Anyone can be any of the above now, and many active social-media users are often all the above simultaneously. What determines the size of "viewership" is not control of the distribution channels so much as viewers' attraction to the content and desire to help spread the word (these days, though, often it's a hybrid of both conventional and new-media conditions, e.g., singer Susan Boyle's success on both the "Britain's Got Talent" TV show and YouTube).

E.g., the new 'TV'
University of Southern California media professor Henry Jenkins zooms in on just one medium, television, in a fascinating piece at the Huffington Post about how it is not just something watched on TV sets anymore and how it's distributed as much by social networks (real-life social circles) as by broadcast networks. And he gives lots of examples of transmedia properties (TV shows' own videogames, comic books, podcasts, and Web series). As I read, I thought of Japan's cellphone novels: serial novels "written" via cellphone, one screen at a time, the best of which go from blogs to books and probably eventually old-style TV shows and movies.

Big adjustment for adults
But just as interesting about this media revolution is the way we adults are handling it vis. our kids. I think youth use digital social media more fluidly because they're experimenters, and digital media are experimental – they require active not passive use. To really make these media work for you, you don't just take delivery; you need to experiment, play, produce, and collaboratively mess around with music, text, video, blogs, sites, games, virtual environments, and all the devices they're on – which is really fun and compelling for youth. Maybe because "our" media are much less demanding, we grew up thinking of them as mere entertainment, and we project that view a lot onto our children's media experience. We're binary in our thinking: we somehow think they're either working or playing, and we trivialize or even fear and block their use of media.

Our one-way, top-down media also had relatively few companies producing them and controlling their distribution, with government regulating those companies. So at a recent meeting on Capitol Hill, I noted that some of us adults think that problems in today's media can simply be fixed by people in authority (parents, companies, regulators, etc.), and distribution of bad stuff, e.g. adult content (which is no longer produced and distributed only by companies or only by adults), on all these dispersed, multi-directional media can be controlled or blocked at the "source." But now the source – whether or good or bad content – is often a kid. As for professionally produced media, certainly government can still regulate some of it, but only media produced or mass-distributed by responsible companies, aka conventional media – not the media that parents are generally most concerned about.

Media companies ≠ media producers
Youth produce all kinds of media, most of it ok, neutral, or constructive, some nasty, less of it unethical, and even less illegal. It's complex, like their lives, not given to simple characterizations - see the New York Times's commentary on a New Jersey high school's "slut list," a case in which teen behavior around social status, gender, and sexuality deserves more consideration than the media through which those behaviors are acted out. What youth do communicate and produce in digital media largely mirrors their real-world social lives, though they often fictionalize and sometimes exaggerate parts of them (see "Fictionalizing their profiles").

That deep, rich, disturbing picture is, for many of us, harder to look at than the professionally produced, regulated images of our past. But in many ways it's good that this reflection, communication, and production are much more exposed than ever before – so people can conduct research, parent better, consider technical and other protections, and find ways to help young people respect and protect themselves. Two things are certain: Government can't regulate the producers of the new media environment, and 2) those producers' ears will tune out media-safety messages coming from the media environment of their parents.

Related links

An example of a mass-distributed, many-to-many video conversation in YouTube: MadV's "One World" (see Clive Thompson in Wired)

"School & social media"

"Online Safety 3.0: Empowering & Protecting Youth"

"How teens use social network sites"

"*Serious* informal learning"

From 'chalk 'n' talk' to learning by doing

You know how middle and secondary school (probably in most countries) divide students' days into subjects? Well, there's a new public school in New York City that divides the schoolday into four 90-minute blocks devoted to the study of “domains,” The Economist reports. They're called things like "Codeworlds (a combination of mathematics and English), Being, Space and Place (English and social studies), The Way Things Work (maths and science) and Sports for the Mind (game design and digital literacy)." The domains, which could be called "courses" and conclude "with a two-week examination called a 'Boss Level' – a common phrase in videogame parlance" – are also videogames. Like courses, they have units of "study," which in this case is clearly a mashup of learning and play. "In one of the units of Being, Space and Place, for example, pupils take on the role of an ancient Spartan who has to assess Athenian strengths and recommend a course of action. In doing so, they learn bits of history, geography and public policy."

The school is called Quest to Learn, and it draws its inspiration from three sources, New York's Bank Street School for Children, the MacArthur Foundation-funded Digital Youth Project I've written a lot about (see particularly "*Serious* informal learning"), and the work of the University of Wisconsin's James Gee, author of "What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy."

The school might draw further inspiration from the new study from the Joan Ganz Cooney Center, "Game Changer: Investing in Digital Play to Advance Children's Learning and Health," which shows how "increased national investment in research-based digital games might play a cost-effective and transformative role and provides comprehensive actions steps for media industry, government, philanthropy, and academia to harness the appeal of digital games to improve children’s health and learning.

Related links

"Supreme Decision," is the debut game of former Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor's new site, OurCourts.org, with games for teaching middle school students about the US Constitution and courts. The game site's backed by the Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law at Arizona State University and Georgetown University, according to eSchoolNews. "Though she didn’t get a computer until she was in her 40s, and she doesn’t have a Facebook or Twitter account, O’Connor believes using technology is the way to teach students about the Constitution and inspire a renewed commitment to civics education in US schools."

See also my summer posts, "The power of play" and "Play, Part 2."

Teen sexting conviction upheld

The teenager, Jorge Canal, was an 18-year-old high school student at the time of the incident in 2005. His misdemeanor conviction for sending sexually explicit photos to a 14-year-old student in his school was upheld by the Iowa Supreme Court, USATODAY reports. The two students "had known each other as friends for roughly a year, according to the ruling. The girl, identified by initials C.E., testified that she asked [him] to send the photo three or four times, as a joke, and not to excite any feelings." The judge in his original trial "granted him a deferred judgment with a $250 fine and one year of probation," but he was required to register as a sex offender. The National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC) has just released its "Policy Statement on Sexting," which asks questions including, "Was the distribution of the photos done with no malicious regard or desire to harm another, or was it the result of malicious intent by one or more senders?"; "What was the intent behind the production of the photos, on a severity scale ranging from a benign reason to supporting a separate and malicious criminal purpose?"; and "Will prosecution achieve a result which addresses the larger problem of 'sexting' adequately?" There isn't much guidance associated with the potential answers to those questions, but they're important questions. This was not the reporting process in the case above, but all students need to know that schools are required by state laws to report sexting incidents to law enforcement when they become aware of them, and NCMEC says in its statement that federal law requires it to refer all sexting reports it receives through its CyberTipline(.com) "to the appropriate law-enforcement agency for investigation. NCMEC does not determine whether photos are actual child pornography or a violation of any laws. [See also ConnectSafely.org's Tips to Prevent Sexting.]

Adult & kid judges picked Dizzywood

Dizzywood, a virtual world for kids aged 8-12, has won the 2009 NAPPA Gold award in the software, Web site, and videogame category, Parenthood.com reports, which administers the awards. Both adult experts and a team of children of appropriate ages for the products and services participated in the review process, seeking "the most entertaining, appealing, safe, educational and age-appropriate products." Previous winners in the category include UK-based Moshi Monsters, Club Penguin, and Whyville.net, according to Parenthood.com (NAPPA stands for National Parenting Publications Awards). I'm excited about Dizzywood's award because of a pilot digital-citizenship project Bel Aire Elementary School conducted with Dizzywood. Principal Patti Purcell told me she felt students needed a "space" they could actually practice what they learned in character education, which has long been part of the Tiburon, Calif., school's curriculum (for more on this, see the 4th paragraph of my original post about Bel Aire and Dizzywood here. [See also NetFamilyNews contributor Sharon Duke Estroff's series, Undercover Mom in Virtual worlds.]

A call to action on eating disorder sites

Britain's Royal College of Psychiatrists called for "urgent action" to protect online youth vulnerable to pro-eating-disorder Web sites, the BBC reports. It says the number of such sites has "soared with the growth of social networking," and the government's year-old Child Internet Safety Council should expand its definition of harmful sites to include those promoting anorexia (pro-ana) and bulimia (pro-mia). The BBC cited one eating-disorder charity as saying it welcomes the Royal College's position but banning pro-ED sites doesn't get to the root of the problem.

The other issue is that social networking complicates the issue. Not only is this not just about Web sites but profiles and pages in social sites and on mobile phone networks, and all of the above based in other countries. Further complexity is evident in the pages, profiles, and sites themselves, which display both pro and con positions at the same time. In a story about the migration from secret sites to social-network ones, Newsweek cites the view of Dr. Steven Crawford at the Center for Eating Disorders in Baltimore, who "sees the openness of the Facebook site as part of its appeal. Increasing numbers of teenage patients at the center are joining Facebook groups that proclaim their disorders to the world, which Crawford believes is a means of adolescent rebellion." Dartmouth Prof. Marcia Herrin, author of several books on the subject, "finds the public nature of the discussions of anorexia on Facebook encouraging, because it shows that teens are less afraid of confronting eating disorders," Newsweek adds. Facebook says it actively searches for and deletes pro-ED groups because, in supporting self-harm, they violate its terms of use.

This past June, Liz Jones, a columnist for the Daily Mail in the UK, wrote about her 40-year battle with anorexia and a normal-eating experiment she conducted for three weeks. It's just one person's story but maybe sheds some light: "I found the gnawing, tight knot that is always in my stomach – fear of life, work, boys, social interaction – was quietened when I starved it.... I might not have been good at anything else – relationships, sport, conversation – but I have been really good at being thin.... That's the thing about being a borderline anorexic: it makes you feel superior, clean, morally unimpeachable. It isn't a whole lot of fun, endlessly disappointing friends who invite you for lunch. My spartan lifestyle ... has kept me tiny, but it has also isolated me.... I'd rather be thin than happy or healthy." [See also my 2007 interview with "Hannah" about her anorexic friend and "Sarah's Death at 19 Left Her Family Struggling to Understand the Power of an Eating Disorder" in the Washington Post last spring.]

Thin avatar, thinner self?

Virtual world "residents" and their parents know what avatars are: An in-world representative of you. In Second Life, though some users have more than one avatar, most avatars are quite human-looking versions of users. It depends on the world quite a bit. In ClubPenguin, they're, well, penguins. In a lot of kids' virtual worlds, the avatars are cartoon-y humans with big eyes and heads. In videogames, there's a huge range of virtual selves, from human-like to fantasy creatures with special powers.

I'm telling you all this because a new study indicates that people's avatars can be aspirational or motivational, at least in terms of appearance. It found that "creating a thin and physically fit online avatar may encourage people to become healthier and more physically fit in real life," Triangle Business Journal reports. The study, by RTI International, found that that "80% of respondents who reported high levels of physical activity for their avatars also reported participating in high levels of physical activity in their real lives." The article appeared in the August issue of the Journal of Virtual Worlds Research.

Teenage brain: Fresh perspective

For a long time, most adults have assumed that teens take risks and act impulsively because their brains aren't fully developed. It's the explanation we hear a lot for their "immaturity." And although some very reputable publishers have reported on the "teenage brain" - e.g., PBS Frontline, Harvard Magazine, and the National Institute of Mental Health – one academic researcher I know even calls this "pop science." Well, a new study at Emory University really reinforces the pop-science perspective and could end up turning the developing-brain theory upside down. It found that "the brains of teens who behave dangerously are more like adult brains than are those of their more cautious peers," Scientific American reports. At least two observations undermine the theory that the impulse-control, executive part of the brain develops later than the emotional part, it says: "First, American-style teen turmoil is absent in more than 100 cultures around the world, suggesting that such mayhem is not biologically inevitable. Second, the brain itself changes in response to experiences, raising the question of whether adolescent brain characteristics are the cause of teen tumult or rather the result of lifestyle and experiences." Certainly nothing's completely clear yet, but the term "teenage brain" already feels dated and a little disrespectful.

How mobile is Facebook?

"Sixty-five million people regularly use mobile devices to access Facebook, making it one of the largest mobile services in the world," Forbes reports. It adds that mobile users are "twice as active or 'engaged'" with their Facebook accounts than Web-only users. The social site's definitely making mobile a priority, with its updated iPhone app and new apps for Nokia phones, phones running Google's Android operating system, and Palm's WebOS - all in the last month. Facebook has also "played a central role in the launch of Motorola's new smart phone, the Cliq."

Online-safety ed, Swedish-style

The Swedish Media Council recently unveiled three 30-second animated videos designed to be distributed "virally" by the human peers of their star, "Eddy." He's "an impulsive teenage boy who tries out typical online behavior in the physical world," and he's meant to get youth thinking about why people act differently online. It's interesting to see what's rising to the top as the most salient concerns in many countries. See if you think the videos address them effectively (feel free to comment). Here are their links and descriptions: "'Eddie's blog' illustrates how easy it is to forget that online publication of texts and photos usually are available to everyone and not only the people they were intended for." "'Eddie comments' ... demonstrates that the illusion of anonymity on the Internet sometimes has a negative effect on people’s behavior. 'Eddie signs up' points out that signing up on a social networking site or registering as a user for a service usually entails giving away rights or approving that the information submitted can be used in other contexts." Here's the Swedish Media Council's site.

Why anti-bullying laws aren't working

Forty-four states have laws against bullying, but they're largely ineffective, according to an article in Education Week. The tragic suicide of 11-year-old Jaheem Herrera in the Atlanta area last spring (see this) was a prime illustration, since "Georgia's law has one of the largest gaps between what it requires of [school] districts and the tools it gives them for meeting those requirements," the article reports. "The state doesn't collect data specifically on bullying occurrences, despite legislation that promises to strip state funding from schools failing to take action after three instances involving a bully." One of the key problems, says Tucson, Ariz., attorney Michael Tully in his blog, is that the laws "have no teeth." They require schools " to adopt bullying prevention policies, but do not include any remedy for students and parents should the school not comply," Tully later wrote in an email to me. And in his blog, he wrote, "Until these statutes include a private cause of action — something schools will fight against vigorously [lobbying to keep it out of laws] — bullying prevention efforts will continue to be a 'paper tiger'." As for state laws concerning cyberbullying, here's the picture from the National Conference of State Legislatures.

Web community moderator to the rescue

There's help on the social Web. Lloyd Mann, a volunteer moderator for DiabetesDaily.com, a support community on the Web, appears to have saved the life of one of the site's users, the Cleveland Plain Dealer reports. Another user noticed some disturbing posts and contacted the moderator. "Mann communicated with the troubled poster and said the messages were enough to convince him that [the poster] was serious." He and the man who got him involved worked together to figure out the poster's location and contacted the police. For privacy reasons, the police told Mann they couldn't confirm attempted suicide but said the person was ok and Mann had had reason to be worried. See also "Facebook friend saves suicidal teen," "The social Web's 'Lifeline'" about MySpace's role, and last spring's "Summit for saving lives."

Great Net-safety guide for girls

The attractively packaged, straightforward advice in "A Smart Girl's Guide to the Internet" is just fine for boys, too, but ... oh well, at least girls will benefit from it. (Is there a boys' version of American Girl's "smart girl's guides"?) The guide has lots of what the publishing biz calls "entry points" – quizzes, bullet points, subheads, short sentences and chapters, and bright, colorful graphics. But the best part for a parent is that it's written by mom, syndicated columnist, online-safety advocate, and PluggedInParent.com blogger Sharon Cindrich. Sharon delivers in the tech-parenting area. She knows the research (both the risk-prevention and social-media kinds), sticks to the facts, and provides a calm, rational voice in a subject area fraught with hype and misinformation. The book (96 pp., $9.95) is aimed at girls 9-12. Here's its page at AmericanGirl.com.

*Good* news involving swine flu

There just may be an upside to the swine flu: It may be the cause of more educators becoming comfortable with using interactive technology (aka social media) in the classroom. With the message that its wiki-like online collaboration tool, Office Live Workspace, can help keep classes on track if schools close for flu outbreaks, Microsoft "has launched a how-to Web site that walks teachers through the steps of setting up accounts for their classes on ... the free Web service," the Associated Press reports. Pretty much like Wikispaces.com, Google Sites, and Wetpaint's Wikis in Education, the service can be used by teachers to post assignments and handouts so that students can work on the assignments individually or collaboratively from home. According to eSchoolNews, Microsoft and other companies, such as Pearson Education, are responding to a call by Education Secretary Arne Duncan "to help keep home-bound students sick with the H1N1 flu virus connected to school."

Voice chat for Facebook users

The social utility's some 300 million users will soon be able to download a plug-in and talk to each other out loud. This news is not just about Facebook; it reflects a trend. Online chat may never move away from text entirely, but voice chat's footprint is definitely growing. "The new technology is not being offered by Facebook itself," CNET reports. "Instead, it's from Vivox, a Boston-based company that provides the integrated voice service for virtual worlds like Second Life and EVE Online, and which already has more than 15 million users worldwide. For Facebook users, it means being able to talk one-on-one with people on their friends lists as well as to participate in large group discussions. It also might add an audio component to some of their Facebook apps, including games: Vivox "is making its technology available to any third-party Facebook application developer," CNET adds. I use this technology on Monday nights to hear (and discuss) presentations by educators ¬– fellow members of the International Society of Technology in Education – as (my avatar) Anny Khandr in Second Life. [See also "Facebook makes money, tops $300 million users" in the Washington Post.]

*Updated* dig-lit definition (already!)

Connecticut-based youth officer Det. Frank Dannahey, valuable member of ConnectSafely.org's advisory board, sent me some excellent feedback on that last post, along the lines of: what about some reference to "digital"?! Minor oversight ;-) . So added two more lines to the definition:

Critical thinking and ethical choices
about
the content and impact
on
oneself, others, and one's community
of
what one sees, says, and produces
with
digital media, devices, and technologies.

You could also end with "in online environments," as Detective Dannahey suggested. The only reason why I changed that is because I hesitate to draw a solid line between online and offline, perpetuating that simplistic binary way we adults think. Young people make little distinction between online and offline – they just socialize, produce, participate, etc. – and citizenship and media literacy are protective and empowering in any environment. Anyway, thank you, Frank! So let's go with this one (or send more edits!). Collaboration is good.

A definition of digital literacy & citizenship

I pulled this out of my last post to see what you think about this as a working definition for a digital literacy that includes citizenship – the behavioral element that's part of using social media. Tell me what you think:

Critical thinking and ethical choices
about
the content and impact
on
oneself, others, and one's community
of
what one sees, says, and produces
with
media, devices, and technologies.

[If you're reading this separately, out of the context of my blog-stream, I later added the last two lines, thanks to feedback from a colleague.]

I've been thinking about this all year, seeing 1) a big overlap between new media literacy and digital citizenship (because media has a behavioral component now, and digital citizenship by definition includes media) and 2) a blend of the two as the lion's share of online safety for young people who are not so-called "at risk youth" – since the research shows that aggressive behavior online more than doubles a child's risk of being victimized. So mindful use of digital media and devices and good citizenship online are protective as well as empowering. [For background, mile markers in the thinking process were "Social media literacy" last February, "A new online safety" and "Why technopanics are bad" last April, and our ConnectSafely call to action, "Online Safety 3.0," this month.] Your feedback here, in the ConnectSafely forum, or in email (anne[at]netfamilynews.org) would be appreciated.

Students' own guidelines for blogging

The tips in this Tech & Learning blog are "only" meant to be guidelines for student blogging, but clearly they also teach digital citizenship and new media literacy – critical thinking about the content and impact of what one sees, says, and does on self, others, and community. For example, here are three of them: 1) "Only post things that you would want everyone (in school, at home, in other countries) to know. Ask yourself: Is this something I want everyone to see?" 7) "Treat other people the way you want to be treated. Ask yourself: Would I want someone to say this to me?" and 9) "Only post information that you can verify is true (no gossiping). Ask yourself: Is this inappropriate, immature or bullying?" The questions at the end of each are designed to help students personalize the guidelines. What's even more impressive about these pointers is that they were developed by 3rd, 4th, and 5th graders, and Kim Cofino – the writer of this blog post and a tech educator at the International School in Bangkok – and her fellow teachers found that they worked just as well at the middle and high school levels. Kim writes: "Being able to start this conversation with our middle school teachers using resources developed by 3rd, 4th and 5th grade students, clearly demonstrates that even our younger students really do understand both the power and the responsibilities of communicating to a global audience." [See this for more on new-media literacy).

Social sites, videogames can up IQs: UK researchers

Well, it depends on the social-networking service, actually. Psychologist Tracy Alloway at the University of Stirling in Scotland "told the British Research Association that Facebook brings about educational benefits because it requires users to exercise their working memory – their ability, in other words, to store and manipulate information," the Education Week blog reports and, according to The Telegraph, "playing video war games [strategy games, in other words] and solving Sudoku may have the same effect as keeping up to date with Facebook." Dr. Alloway's research team developed a "working memory training program" called "JungleMemory." After two months in the program, a group of "slow-learning" students aged 11-14 in the Durham area "saw 10 point improvements in IQ, literacy, and numeracy tests," and some who were at the bottom of their class at the beginning finished the program near the top, according to The Telegraph. Twitter, text messaging, YouTube, and TV don't produce the same results because they're mostly about short bursts of info that recipients don't have to store, process, and repackage, apparently. It isn't black and white, though, I think it's important to point out. It's not about specific sites or technologies so much as the brain activity involved in using them. Collaboratively producing and sharing a video on YouTube or writing a cellphone novel with text messages as writers do in Japan, would have entirely different effects from passively watching a video or quickly exchanging burst of info on a mobile phone. Here's coverage in the UK's IBTimes, and here's the last story on Facebook & grades that got a lot of coverage.

Teen drivers: Take a 'text stop'

That's the suggestion Det. Frank Dannahey, a longtime youth division officer who has a lot of experience with the texting-while-driving issue, gives teen drivers he knows. "Just like a rest stop on the highway, you could pull over, get a latte, and text yourself silly!!", he wrote.

Following the news that people who text on their cellphones while driving are 23 times more likely to crash than "nondistracted drivers" (see this earlier post), Detective Dannahey and other members of a great group of researchers and children's advocates recently had an email discussion about how to educate teens on this subject. One suggested that training include the gauge-your-distraction game written up in the New York Times recently. Another that teens be shown the very graphic, frightening accident video out of the UK that has been circulating the Net lately (and can be found, with a caveat, at the bottom of ConnectSafely.org co-director Larry Magid's CNET post on the subject).

But I appreciated the tip from Dannahey combined with some wisdom from other discussants particularly in response to the graphic video suggestion. Patti Agatston, a counselor in the Cobb County (Ga.) School District, wrote that "those of us who work in the prevention field have learned that smashed up cars in front of high schools during red ribbon week and ... have had little impact in changing youth behavior. I have been in an audience where a health practitioner showed actual car crash slides with dead bodies and actually heard kids cheer. (Remember - they are often desensitized to violence and have watched many slasher movies, so the effect is not always as intended.)"

Stan Davis of Stop Bullying Now in Maine said that we do need to come up with "new ways to deal with [young people's] fear of being out of touch.... Just saying 'don't do it!' is not much help.... The other elements of success involve peers communicating a norm in a positive way, portrayal of the positive rather than the risky behaviors in media, and activities that give teens a chance to practice the safe behaviors and thus develop self-efficacy about them."

At face value, handing the phone to a "designated texter" in the car would seem like a good idea, but Detective Dannahey cautioned against training kids to pass their phones around. The person at the other end might feel misled about who the texter at the other end is. Even if meant as a joke, impersonation can lead to hurt feelings. And it can be abused, as we know happens in social network sites. Bad things can happen when kids pass around personal communication devices and the passwords into them. Passwords, especially, need to be private (see our tips for creating strong passwords). I loved this suggestion from psychologist Elizabeth Englander, who directs the Massachusetts Aggression Reduction Center in Bridgewater, Mass., that we teach our kids: "Rule your phone, don’t let your phone [or your friends] rule you."

While we're on the subject, ArsTechnica.com reports that the Governors Highway Safety Association is now proposing banning texting while driving.

US's first Net-addiction center

The Internet addiction center, called ReSTART, is in Fall City, Washington, about 30 miles east of Seattle. It offers a $14,000, 45-day program designed to help people (six at a time) end their addictions to "pathological computer use, which can include obsessive use of video games, texting, Facebook, eBay, Twitter and any other time-killers brought courtesy of technology," according to an article in the Washington Post. The founders, therapists, say they've been helping patients with Net addiction for years on an out-patient basis. "Internet addiction is not recognized as a separate disorder by the American Psychiatric Association, and treatment is not generally covered by insurance. But there are many such treatment centers in China, South Korea and Taiwan - where Internet addiction is taken very seriously - and many psychiatric experts say it is clear that Internet addiction is real and harmful," according to the article. Some sources say obsessive use of technologies is a sign of other disorders such as depression, anxiety, or "social phobic symptoms," issues that "make it hard for them to live a full, balanced life and deal face-to-face with other people."

YouTube now No. 4 on the Web

Online video is just huge and growing. YouTube is now the fourth most visited site on the Web, globally, according to Mashable.com, citing comScore figures for this past July. YouTube had 120.3 million viewers in July, over one-third of the US population, and in that one month, they watched 8.9 million videos. "What may be more shocking is the average number of videos per viewer: 134.9. That’s nearly five YouTube videos per day." Here's The Guardian on how peace recently broke out between YouTube and the music industry. And here's TheJournal.com on how one teacher made the case for using YouTube at school.

comScore: Teens flocking to Twitter now

"As the Twitter audience has mushroomed in recent months – to 21 million US visitors in July 2009 – the younger age groups are the ones flooding in the fastest," the comScore blog says about the micro-blogging service. In fact, people under 35 are "fueling Twitter's continued growth," with July usage spread evenly among the 12-17, 18-24, and 25-34 age categories, blogger Andrew Lipsman shows very visually with his growth charts.

President Obama to US students: Practice new-media literacy

Work hard to find and pursue your unique contribution was the basic message I heard the President tell American students this week – what I think the US's founding fathers and mothers meant by "pursuit of happiness" in their historical context. More to the point for NetFamilyNews and its readers, though, was something he said in the Q&A session with students after his 19-min. speech at Wakefield High School in Arlington, Va., that Reuters zoomed in on: that they need to be careful about what they post in social network sites because what they upload "could come back to haunt them in later life," according to Reuters. "The presidential words of advice follow recent studies that suggest US employers are increasingly turning to sites such as Facebook and News Corp's MySpace to conduct background checks on job applicants."

You could say that the President of the United States is promoting new-media literacy – the kind of media literacy that employs critical thinking about what we say, upload, and produce online and with digital media as much as what we see, download, and consume. I use "new-media literacy" interchangeably with "social-media literacy" (see this post), but really we're also talking about a new kind of media literacy (unhyphenated) that employs all the old media-literacy skills while embracing new (interactive, multidirectional) media delivered on multiple devices and platforms; the old one-to-many mass media still exist, are definitely in the mix, but we are not truly media literate any more if we are mindful only of what we're consuming. Media use is behavioral now, too, right? I'm glad that smart student asked Obama "for some advice on becoming US president." Social media are a factor now, and the new media literacy is protective of reputations, prospects, friendships, and safety, as well as good for social and cognitive development.

UK youth want online-privacy advice

Ofcom, the UK's communications-industry regulator, found that 54% of UK 11-to-16-year-olds want more advice about online privacy. In other findings, 28% believe "information is needed on how to keep security information such as passwords and PIN numbers safe"; 22% "want more information on how to avoid inappropriate content online"; and 20% "want more advice on how to deal with cyberbullying." They're saying this even though nearly 75% of 7-to-16-year-olds "say they have received some information about staying safe online" (23% "say no-one has talked to them about online safety). Meanwhile, Ofcom's US counterpart, the FCC, is looking at the possibility of a universal rating system for Americans, covering TV, videogames, and mobile phones, DigitalMediaWire.com reports - a somewhat limited sense of "universal," to my mind. The Entertainment Software Rating Board, provider of videogame ratings, says universal ratings would only confuse consumers, as well as violate the First Amendment, DMW adds. [Here's Bloomberg's coverage.]

More on sex-offender registry flaws

California's sex-offender registry is growing much faster than the number of law enforcement people who can monitor the people on it, the Wall Street Journal reports. Not all offenders on the list pose the same level of risk, and law enforcement people say that much more helpful than a list of every possible level of offender on it would be one listing only the highest-risk offenders. "California's sex-offender registry has ballooned to more than 90,000 people now from about 45,000 in 1994," the Journal reports, adding that a December study of some 20,000 RSOs on parole found that only "9% posed a 'high risk' of reoffending, and 29% posed a 'moderate-high' to 'high' risk." Meanwhile, "law-enforcement officials and academics say vast resources are spent monitoring nonviolent offenders rather than keeping closer tabs on more-dangerous ones."

In "Prevention of childhood sexual abuse," soon to be published in The Future of Children, David Finkelhor refers to sex-offender registries as representing one of the main strategies our society has for preventing abuse and points to its flaws. It's "based on an overly stereotyped characterization of sexual abusers as pedophiles, guileful strangers who prey on children in public and other easy-access environments and who are at high risk to re-offend once caught. In reality," says the director of the University of New Hampshire's Crimes Against Children Research Center, "the population is much more diverse. Most sexual abusers are not strangers or pedophiles; many (about a third) are themselves juveniles. Many have relatively low risks for re-offending once caught." Dr. Finkelhor adds that possibly the greatest shortcoming of current "offender management" efforts is that "only a small percentage of new offenders have a prior sex offense record" that would have put them in sex-offender registries. As if to confirm the findings in the Wall Street Journal piece above, Finkelhor "recommends using law enforcement resources to catch more undetected offenders and concentrating intensive management efforts on those at highest risk to re-offend." This preview of Finkelhor's article is at CALCASA.org. [See also my earlier post about a recent report on this in The Economist.]

Echometrix: Monitoring *and* selling kids' chat

With its Sentry Parental Control Software, Echometrix sells what kids say online in the name of protecting them. Once installed, Sentry – like other products in its category – monitors kids online activity and communications for risky speech and behavior and sends parents alerts upon detection. What isn't like most other such products is how the company packages the kid communications (in aggregate) into a product it sells to marketers, reports ConnectSafely.com's Larry Magid in CBSNEWS.com. Echometrix CEO Jeffrey Greene, told Larry that "the company doesn't collect or report the names or any identifying information about the children" but "says that it delivers the unsolicited raw conversations in real time. It gives marketers immediate, unique information about what teens are saying in their own words." Here's how Echometrix describes itself in its blog: "a leading developer of opinion mining and sentiment analysis applications for user-generated digital social media content with specialty industry focus. We have specialized in delivering brand metrics, real-time business intelligence and consumer market research for the teenage consumer segment." See a detailed commentary on this in Amy Jussel's Shaping Youth blog. And here's the story in Yahoo Tech news .

From 'digital disconnect' to mobile learning

The real disconnect is not the one between parents and kids (that I wrote about last week). "It's the gap between how students learn and how they live! They really want to end that divide," according to Project Tomorrow, the Irvine, Calif.-based nonprofit organization that runs the annual nationwide Speak Up study.

And the disconnect is "alive and well ... and growing," was the finding of the latest Speak Up, which surveyed 281,500 students, 29,644 teachers, 3,114 administrators, 21,309 parents, and 4,379 schools in 868 districts in all 50 states and some in other English-speaking countries. "Students say they 'step back in time' when they enter the school building each morning - despite overwhelming agreement among parents, teachers and principals that the effective implementation of technology in schools is crucial to student success," Project Tomorrow says in its release of last fall's survey.

Cellphones everywhere
The Speak Up study found that about 77% of students in grades 9-12 have mobile phones (55% have access to laptops), indicating that leveraging that installed base by teaching with cellphones would be economical in terms of both time and money.

"Cell phones can be powerful computers. They can do just about everything laptops can do for a fraction of the price. And many students are bringing them to school anyway," says University of Michigan education professor Elliot Soloway.

Still, barriers to adoption remain, including adult biases against technology for "serious" use; a diversity of cellphone products in the marketplace; phones' physical features (screen size, battery life, etc.); and schools' fears about student distraction and lack of responsibility toward the equipment, according to the 2009 Joan Ganz Cooney Center study "Pockets of Potential" (here's my post on the report).

Responsible use the norm
About that last and crucial barrier, though, school districts that do incorporate cellphones and other handheld devices into classroom work find that student engagement and responsible use are actually the norm.

North Carolina math teacher Suzette Kliwer said her students are so eager to use phones in an educational setting that irresponsible use of them has not been a problem. She was one of several educators presenting their districts' experience in a recent Project Tomorrow Webinar on mobile learning. Jeff Billings, an Arizona school district's director of technology, echoed that: "When you engage students and put a pro who can guide them on the instruction piece, good things happen," he said.

How they're teaching with phones
"The mobile device is a case of digital tools at your disposal. It can provide an ultra-portable portfolio" of teacher's and students' work, said David Whyley of Learning2Go, the UK's four-year-old "largest collaborative mobile learning project," focusing on the British equivalent of grades K-6.

A recent story in USATODAY tells how Ohio students in grades 3-5 work with handheld devices. Using educational apps created by GoKnow!, a company co-founded by University of Michigan professor Elliot Soloway, they take and draw pictures, keep journals, write essays, work in spelling, and do math. "Students took the phones on a museum field trip where they took photos, uploaded them to a server where the teacher could view the assignment and wrote blurbs about what they saw," the article says.

Tech coordinator and middle school teacher Samantha Morra in New Jersey put together a program for classroom iPod Touches with which students store, produce, organize, share, and access media such as podcasts and videos, access sources on the Web, take quizzes, work with flashcards, and discuss and collaborate in different configurations of users: one on one with their teacher, in small groups, and as a class. "Students devour engaging, customized curricula when it’s delivered on the iPod. Phones are a familiar and essential part of their lives now, Morra emailed me.

How can ed add value to tech?
Which points to a question I think we all need to be asking: "It is not a question of whether these technologies add value somehow to education, but the reverse, can education add value to the communications and information technologies of our present day world, and its future?" That's from Ira Socol at Michigan State University, a comment he wrote in Saskatchewan tech educator Dean Shareski's blog, IdeasandThoughts.org. Think about how education has added value to the book! (See "School & social media: Uber big picture.")

Here's how students themselves told Project Tomorrow they want to use mobile devices to support learning: for communications (email teachers and classmates and access personal Web sites); collaborations (projects and calendars); creativity (create/share documents, videos, educational games); and productivity (research, downloads, and to get alerts and reminders).

Why mobile learning?
In its "Pockets of Potential" review of mobile learning projects in eight countries (schools in some countries are way ahead of this whole discussion), the Cooney Center lists "5 key opportunities in mobile learning." It...

1. Encourages “anywhere, anytime” learning - learning in a real-world context and bridging home, school and other environments.
2. Reaches underserved children - low-cost devices and tech many children already have, especially in disadvantaged communities & developing countries.
3. Improves 21st-century social interactions - fostering constructive and constructivist (collaborative) use
4. Fits with diverse learning environments - highly accessible communication and content-delivery devices
5. Enables personalized learning experiences for diverse student populations and learning styles.

Back in 2006, kicking off the multiyear, MacArthur Foundation-funded, $50 million Digital Youth Project, media professor Henry Jenkins wrote, "Educators must work together to ensure that every American young person has access to the skills and experiences needed to become a full participant, can articulate their understanding of how media shapes perceptions, and has been socialized into the emerging ethical standards that should shape their practices as media makers and participants in online communities." (my post on Jenkins's paper back then).

Related links

CellphonesinLearning.com, a site by author and learning technologies doctoral student Liz Kolb at the University of Michigan – her book is Toys to Tools: Connecting Student Cell Phones to Education

mLearnopedia.com, created by mobile learning consultant Judy Brown, formerly of the University of Wisconsin

Project K-Nect - a Qualcomm-funded program being implemented in some North Carolina public schools as "a supplemental resource for secondary at-risk students to focus on increasing their math skills through the use of smartphones" (here's the students' blog)

"Where phones in class are ok" at Inside Higher Ed

"Learning curve: Cellphone as teacher" in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution

"WCSA Mobile Learning K-12," a presentation by Judy Brown in SlideShare

For an online-safety perspective on the gap between young people's formal and informal learning with digital meeting, see "Online Safety 3.0: Empowering and Protecting Youth."

Project Tomorrow wasn't the first research group to flag the digital disconnect. As I mentioned last week, Pew/Internet first wrote about in a 2002 report.

This past summer, Tech & Learning published retailer Wirefly's "Top 10 cellphones for students," looking at affordability, popularity and functionality.

Sexting: The peer pressure factor

This scenario – true story in Arizona, actually – is probably not uncommon, so good for parent-child discussion. A 13-year-old student's cellphone gets confiscated because she's caught using it in class. Her mom shortly gets a call from the school police officer saying the phone has the nude photo of a boy on it. The phone is returned to the mom, who then finds text messages from the boy on it "asking her daughter to send him nude pictures of herself. She had refused, but he was persistent: 'I sent you one. Don't you like me?'" This was a boy she did like, her mother told the Arizona Republic, wondering how long it would've been before she gave in. It's a volatile mix: kids' normal desire to be liked and accepted, as this mom put it, peer pressure, and digital media. That's dicey enough, but add child-pornography laws into the mix, with arrests and charges for production and distribution, and the impact of adolescent behavior can be earth-shattering for kids and their families. In another story in the same article, a 12-year-old student "faced criminal charges after she snapped a lewd photo of herself using a classmate's cellphone and sent the image to other students as a prank." Fortunately, she was suspended from school, not prosecuted. Gina Durbin, director of student-support services in the Cave Creek Unified School District, suggests to parents that they "tell their children to lock their phones when not in use and not to loan them to anyone." Good advice. At least that lowers the chances of getting blamed for someone else's sexting prank.

In related news, two 13-year-old boys in Tucson face charges of "use of a telephone to offend, harass or intimidate" for passing around a nude photo of a 13-year-old girl with their cellphones, the Arizona Daily Star reports. They're misdemeanor charges "because in all likelihood, the teens were not aware of the implications of their actions, officials said."

Calling all student videographers!

The buzz has already started for President Obama's announcement of the "I Am What I Learn" video contest. I saw a couple of my favorite educators tweeting about it just now and want you to know too: "On September 8, the US Department of Education will ask students to respond to the President’s Back to School challenge by creating videos, up to two minutes in length, describing the steps they will take to improve their education and the role education will play in fulfilling their dreams," the DOE says on its placeholder page. Here's the White House's info page. Hmm, will schools will have to stop blocking YouTube now? For great examples of already-completed student video projects, see "Young practitioners of social-media literacy" (doing homework the dog just can't eat!).

Violating our kids' privacy

Kids aren't the only people who need to think before they post, but the latter half of that sentence is an oversimplification, of course. New York Times columnist Lisa Belkin brings new meaning to the phrase "Protecting Your Child's Privacy" in her Motherlode column this week. Where's the line between "exploiting [a child's] pain" – as one teenage subject of his parent's published memoir put it – and blogging about your parental struggles (or joys) with that child in the public blogosphere? Belkin asks: "At what point do parents lose their right to their children’s tales? When do things stop being something that happened to 'me' and start being something that happened to 'them,' and therefore not 'mine' to tell?" There is no blanket answer to those questions, partly because the answers are highly individual and the surrounding conditions change (kids grow up; they can become mortified teenagers). Also, as Belkin points out, the questions didn't first arise with blogs and social network sites – or even the Web or newsgroups or email. At the core of Belkin's post is the story of a mom who felt she had to un-adopt a child after 18 months and wrote about it. Some detractors "scoured everything she has written in the past, finding a post that used the boy’s real name and country of origin, and circulating it around the Internet" and then, after the mom deleted as many references as she could think of, they "found old cached versions," Belkin writes. The questions are age-old, but there are some differences now: e.g., the Web as both permanent, public, searchable archive and - sometimes - amplifier (see also "The Net effect" and "Online privacy: Photos out of control").

Videogames' mental-health benefits researched

The Washington Post leads its article with the story about a longtime depression patient who plays videogames for relief when she can't sleep. She liked the game Bejeweled so much that she called its makers, PopCap Games. They were surprised about the benefits she cited and decided to fund some research, being done at the psychophysiology lab and biofeedback clinic at East Carolina University in Greenville, N.C., some of which has been published in the Annual Review of Cybertherapy and Telemedicine. Researchers are looking into "the idea that depression and other disorders - as well as everyday stress and worry - involve systematic patterns of thought and self-doubt, and that games can distract people and put them in a different mental zone. You don't have to play with a computer or an Xbox 360 to notice the effect: Anyone who has used a crossword puzzle or Sudoku game to decompress after a difficult day recognizes the idea." They're looking at benefits not only for depression sufferers but also people in high-stress (and sustained stress) occupations such as soldiers, correctional officers, and hospital staff - people always on the alert who find it difficult to "switch off." [See also "The power of play" and "Play, Part 2."]

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

Kindness and mindfulness, really. Those two approaches to the Internet as well as life are both attractive and protective. "Attractive to others, maybe, but protective?" your kids might ask. Yes. Because aggressive behavior online more than doubles the aggressor's risk of being victimized, researchers have found (see Archives of Pediatrics). Mindfulness covers both alertness and critical thinking - about what's going out via connected devices as much as what's coming in, whether to/from peers, advertisers, or strangers, as well as about how much and how we're involved in it all. Hemanshu Nigam, a dad and MySpace and News Corp's chief security officer, wrote about the kindness part this week, zooming in some important "how-tos" for social networkers: how to "post with respect, comment with kindness, and update with empathy." Help your kids remember how protective – of them, their friends, and their online experience – this approach is.

As for how we approach the online experience (as well as online friends), the other day I wrote about the 24/7 connection to friends and the drama that both the collective and the constant connection (texting, updating, commenting, chatting, etc.) seem to generate and perpetuate (see No. 2 in this post). If the scene is important to them (and it probably is) and they feel the need to stay very engaged, then here's one way to think about it from youth adviser Annie Fox, which also picks up on the kindness issue: "Don't Add to the Garbage." MIT sociologist Sherry Turkle wrote: "Tethered life is complex; it is helpful to measure our thrilling new networks against what they may be doing to us as people" (see her article "Can You Hear Me Now?" in Forbes last year.

Fleeing Facebook?

Bear with me, because this is a long sentence, but: It stands to reason that, if your social life is represented online and that online representation is hosted by a corporation, then it follows that there'd be a certain "commercialization and corporate regulation of [the part of your] personal and social life" that's represented in its site. Don't you think? Why am I bringing this up? Because New York Times columnist Virginia Heffernan in the Times Magazine reports that she "asked around"; found that "a small but noticeable group [of users] are fleeing" Facebook; one of the more ostentatious fleers is Leif Harmsen; and his biggest beef is that "commercialization and corporate regulation" of one's social life that social networking represents. Heffernan writes about waves of Facebook disillusionment, the third one being made up of people "bored with it, obscurely sore or just somehow creeped out - though the numbers don't exactly indicate a large exodus (nearly 88 million US visitors in July, she cites comScore as finding). I think these people she's referring to are all Gen X-ers and Baby boomers. It does feel a little voyeuristic or a bit much, maybe, if you 1) did not grow up with social media necessarily hosted by social-media companies and 2) don't have real reasons for social networking, such as keeping up with distant friends, playing online games with distant friends, finding long-lost friends, managing an alumni association, monitoring your kids' social lives, marketing your cause or business, or professional networking. I'm not saying youth all have specific purposes in using social sites, but adults seem to need purposes for them to feel useful - because they "got along just fine without them before." See what I mean?

Real questions for a search engine

This stopped me in my tracks: The No. 1 question kids ask at AskKids.com is "What is love?" Ask reports. I was glad to find, upon doing that search myself in the children's edition of this natural-language search engine, this first result: "The definition of love is a deep, tender, ineffable feeling of affection and solicitude toward a person, such as that arising from kinship, recognition of attractive qualities, or a sense of underlying oneness..." from the American Heritage Dictionary. (The No. 2 question kids ask? "Where can I find ideas for a science project?") The No. 1 parenting question at Ask.com could almost be considered a flipside of kids' top one: "How can I help my child deal with a bully?" The rest of the parental Top 5 are “How can I help my child like school?”, “How do I keep my child safe on the Internet?”, “How should my child deal with peer pressure?", and “What immunizations will my child need for school?”, respectively. If, instead of just clicking on "Search" on the home page, you click on "Lots of Answers" above it, you apparently get a slightly different set of results - based more on authority than popularity (Ask's people say its algorithms look for sources such as "education sites, accredited institutions, newspapers, etc." and "relevancy to the question").