And we thought Facebook was big...

Skype now has 521 million users, a 41% increase over the previous quarter (April-June '09), TechCrunch reports. "That’s a stunning 40 million new registered users in the past three months," it adds. This is not just Internet telephony used for free or incredibly on the cheap by people all over the world. Oprah uses Skype all the time for and on her TV show. Here's her page explaining (and promoting) it – Skype has become one of her sponsors. As for us regular people, TechCrunch continues: "Free Skype-to-Skype minutes grew 74% to 27.7 billion minutes [this past quarter], whereas SkypeOut minutes (which is what members pay for) grew 44% to 3.1 billion minutes."

And we thought Facebook was big...

Skype now has 521 million users, a 41% increase over the previous quarter (April-June '09), TechCrunch reports. "That’s a stunning 40 million new registered users in the past three months," it adds. This is not just Internet telephony used for free or incredibly on the cheap by people all over the world. Oprah uses Skype all the time for and on her TV show. Here's her page explaining (and promoting) it – Skype has become one of her sponsors. As for us regular people, TechCrunch continues: "Free Skype-to-Skype minutes grew 74% to 27.7 billion minutes [this past quarter], whereas SkypeOut minutes (which is what members pay for) grew 44% to 3.1 billion minutes."

Europe's amazing Internet-safety work

Last week I had the great good fortune of participating in Safer Internet Forum 2009 in Luxembourg. What a fantastic experience, connecting with online-safety experts representing the 27 EU member countries plus Malaysia, Brazil, and New Zealand. I spoke on "Online Safety 3.0" and felt right at home (imagine how confirming it is to have colleagues from Bulgaria and Slovenia come up afterwards and say how much they could relate!). The Forum included teen panelists (aged 14-18) from 26 of the 27 countries.

This year's focus was "Promoting Online Safety in Schools." Here are highlights – things I heard from presenters over the four days of Forum and INSAFE meetings (INSAFE coordinates the European Commission's network of Safer Internet Centres, one in each member country):

POV is key: "What adults see as risks, young people see as opportunities - there's no easy line between risk and opportunity"; "what we want young people to grow up to be is resilient; the only way for that to happen is for them to encounter risk," suggesting that the need is for adults to support their development process; Internet safety is part of media literacy, part of the wider media picture – we need to enable them to make constructive, critical judgments in context." – from Prof. Sonia Livingstone of the London School of Economics & Political Science and lead author of the huge, ongoing pan-European EUKidsOnline comparative research project

"We must not be afraid to learn along with our kids." – from Prof. Gianna Cappello at U. of Palermo, Italy

Sound familiar?: "Both parents and students look to school for Internet safety advice, while schools struggle to take on this agenda," Livingstone of the UK said. Teen participants echoed this throughout the day they were with us (schools' struggle with the Net-safety-ed needs).

A way to think about school: Elisabetta Pupuzza of Safer Internet Centre Italy said, "We need to think of schools not just as places but as educational agencies and contexts of relationships."

Holistic approach needed. A representative from Germany said, "We need a Media Blueprint for schools – one that takes an integrative approach, not merely teach cybersafety, but rather cybersafety as part of a complete range: technology skills, media skills, and life skills." I spoke, too, about the need to teach and model life literacy, as teachers have always done (this is why Net-safety ed, if we can even call it that much longer, is naturally integrated into all subjects, pre-K-12). And Janice Richardson, head of Europe's INSAFE network, told me they work on promoting "social literacy," which almost says it all (you can see we're all seeking the best terminology).

Embedded & contextualized. UK representative Karl Hopwood also called for embedded Net-safety ed, and a colleague from the same country said students need context, need to be shown how social technologies affect them, and on the same panel a Slovenian representative agreed, saying that this means every teacher teaching appropriate use whenever appropriate throughout the day (perhaps like working with books and other traditional media?). Slovenia is teaching safe Net use, ethics, privacy, etc. through all elementary-school subjects and grades.

Even more on this: "We can't possibly include one more subject in school – the only way to teach this [new] media literacy is to integrate it throughout the curriculum," said a representative from Luxembourg's Ministry of Education. He said his country is now rolling out Net-safety ed in all primary schools, having just begun distribution of a manual to all primary school teachers: "It's modular, adapted to the needs on the ground, in classrooms." To make sure it's adopted well, teachers will take a basic training class, and if something comes up in school, teachers can contact the trainer to help them deal with situations in a flexible way. "We've found we don't need to teach the technologies, we need to teach how to work with them well," he added.

Simply digital citizenship. New Zealand defines "Internet safety" as digital citizenship. Period. Full stop. Netsafe for all New Zealanders and Hector's World for 2-to-9-year-olds focus "developing caring and capable digital citizens – and transforming the culture of a school to implement these technologies in meaningful ways," including in "the early childhood sector," which in NZ includes homes and noncompulsory preschool.

Kids want communication. "Youth are looking for ways to communicate more and better with their parents and teachers about their Internet use," said mental health expert Pauline Ostner from Sweden.

Adult fears push kids away. In Portugal, the Safer Internet Centre works directly with the Ministry of Education and tells schools that they must not invite law enforcement to speak to parents on Internet safety without the Safer Internet Centre there too; the representative said that it's vital not to scare parents. Portugal now teaches Internet security and citizenship from the 5th-grade level.

Not about technology: An educator from Italy said that, when regular teachers are resistant to technology, Net safety is left to school IT people and then becomes a technical issue, which is not good. This was echoed by panelists from the UK and Cypress (one solution that occurs to me is programs like the US's GenYes, where students teach technology to teachers!).

Clever videos. Saw clips of some great safety-awareness videos at Norway's Dubestemmer.no about how "information sticks to you through both space [school and beyond] and time [later in life]." Don't miss this one presenting a fairly uncomfortable student-parent-teacher conference (with English subtitles). ["Dubestermmer" means "You Decide" in Norwegian.] The presenter told us digital literacy is a basic skill required in all Norwegian schools.

Peer mentoring: Finland has a 40-year-old "peer-support" program that operates in 90% of Finnish schools which has folded Net use into its student2student mentoring; its 750 adult instructors train the country's 14,000 "peer students" each year; middle school students give Net-safety lessons in primary schools.

Social-networking educators. "We're introducing Ning for teachers' social networking nationwide," said a speaker from the Austrian Education Ministry. She said all of Austria's schools already use the open-source virtual-learning environment Moodle.

Social Web's mobile too: Mobile carriers Vodafone (UK-based) and Orange Spain have recently launched Web-based parents' guides to the technologies youth use. I didn't hear many other references during the four days to safety on the mobile social Web.

Not one-size-fits-all. Over the four days, I didn't hear much about different levels of online risk prevention and education, which we're beginning to think about here in the US because of the research showing that not all youth are equally at risk. There was absolutely no evidence at the Forum of scary online-safety messaging, all of it seems firmly research-based. I did hear experts calling for more academic evaluation of Net-safety messaging and programs, a need that has been identified here in the US too.

There is no question in my mind that more dialogue and collaboration between the US and Europe would be good for all, especially youth.

Projects I'd love to see happen in the US:

1. For parents: As in the Netherlands, a "Cyberparent" program, training a parent or group of Cyberparents or Techparents in every school, possibly associated with PTOs and PTAs, working with the school and peer-mentoring fellow parents
2. For schools: A pilot project supported by the US Department of Education, with a half-dozen school districts around the country implementing a holistic Tech Skills, Media Skills, and Life Skills program pre-K-12 (an idea I got while on a panel with a representative from UK education-technology agency Becta)
3. For students: A nationwide school-based peer-mentoring program like Finland's (mentioned above).

Related links

The EC's page on the Safer Internet Programme, including a map of participating countries and a list of countries showing whether they have helplines and hotlines (for reporting Net crimes to law enforcement) as well as Net-safety education centers. The hotlines work along the lines of the US's CyberTipline.com and Canada's Cybertip.ca. Mexico just this year launched its own helpline (Europe has 20 helplines).

INSAFE coordinates Europe's network of Safer Internet Centres.

Almost all of the Safer Internet Centres have Youth Panels of 14-to-18-year-olds. The panels' sizes "vary between 6 to 28 participants," according to the EC site. The Czech Republic's has 6 members, Germany's 9, Bulgaria's 25, and Finland's 28. Meeting frequency varies too, of course. Cyprus's "meets once a month, and adults are not allowed to take part in their discussions." In Germany and Finland, the youth panels meeting 2-3 weeks. "In the Netherlands, the Czech Republic, Bulgaria, Latvia, Slovenia, and Denmark the panels meet 3-5 times a year."

Virtual Halloween, real fun

Curious about how Halloween is celebrated virtually? WeeWorld.com's some 30 million WeeMees (registered users), who take the holiday pretty seriously, offer some examples. WeeWorld says that about 60% of all virtual goods purchased and "the vast majority of the gifts being given" in-world this month are Halloween-related (market researcher In-Stat predicts the total revenue in virtual worlds – driven primarily by the sale of virtual goods – will exceed $3 billion by 2012). "The most popular costumes for WeeMees this season are a cute witch for girls and a Saw-inspired mask for boys [see the home page for examples]. WeeMees can have pets, or Cweetures, and there are special limited-edition ones available only at Halloween time. "WeeMees are also: decorating their rooms with animated zombies, skeletons, pumpkins and more; sending branded gifts, getting movie-themed gear and watching the premier of the movie Cirque du Freak: The Vampire's Assistant. Then there's the ever-popular costume contest and a haunted house. Meanwhile, "WeeMees are trying not to get 'tricked' this year by their friends, e.g. being turned into a pumpkin or toilet papered."

Net stimulates the brain: Study

A study presented this month at the Society for Neuroscience found that Internet training "could potentially enhance brain function and cognition in older adults," ScienceDaily.com reports. Researchers at University California, Los Angeles, worked with two groups of "neurologically normal volunteers between the ages of 55 and 78." Everything else being pretty equal, one group was made up of regular Internet users, the other had very little online experience. The latter group "performed Web searches while undergoing functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scans, which recorded the subtle brain-circuitry changes experienced during this activity." After training and just seven days of an hour a day of Web research over a period of two weeks, the newly Net-savvy group "were able to trigger key centers in the brain that control decision-making and complex reasoning," displaying "brain activation patterns very similar to those seen in the group of savvy Internet users." Here's a host of coverage.

iPhone app for teen's location

Called iCurfew, it's aimed at getting teens and parents collaborating. "This app builds trust," writes Vanessa Van Petten of RadicalParenting.com. "iCurfew is an easy way for kids and parents to check-in with each other remotely." With this 99-cent app, the young person sends a link to a Google Map showing his or her current location to the parent's email address. "Kids can add their own message on pick up time, change of plans, etc." Any software that promotes parent-child communication is software that runs compatibly with the most important filter there is: the one that runs in kids' heads!

MySpace's focus on music

MySpace Music announced further expansion this week. Computerworld says the site's adding music features "in a bid to reinvent itself," but you certainly can't believe everything you read about social networking; music has been a core community for MySpace since the beginning. Its music channel's traffic has grown 1,017% since its relaunch in September 2008. But here's some of the new stuff Computerworld mentions: "a massive collection of music videos" (from MySpace's record-label partners); "a new Video Search Tab"; and an Artist Dashboard. "The dashboard is designed to give bands and singers with MySpace profile analytics on who is listening to their music and how they're interacting with it," Computerworld reports. In fact, MySpace is in an entirely different space from Facebook and other social network sites now, its CEO, Owen Van Natta, announced at a conference this week, according to a great post at the ReadWriteWeb blog. MySpace always was as much a self-expression tool as a social one, while Facebook has always been a social utility (now with plenty of extras). See also "MySpace: Entertainment hub that tweets," "MySpace's metamorphosis," and "MySpace's PR problem."

Tools & sites aimed at better kid time online

There seems to be this firewall between kids' products that kids like and kids' products that parents like. It's rare and amazing when that wall collapses, but I think what helps is when the product, while passing parental muster, is just plain useful to kids.

Kid-friendly online utilities

Children's Web browser Kidzui meets those criteria – after all, kids need to browse the Web, and a lot of parents want them to do so in a kid-friendly environment. Kidzui is a very large "online playground," with more than 2 million kid-appropriate sites to browse. I wrote about this and some other great parent-approved services last fall, but now Kidzui has added another kid-friendly utility – one of those social-media tools like Twitter, Facebook, or good o' email that users of all ages didn't know they needed till they tried it or till all the VIPs in their lives used it. For kids, the utility is a site for viewing and sharing videos, a very social experience. Kidzui's is called ZuiTube. ZuiTube claims to have the biggest collection of child-appropriate videos in existence; it doesn't say how many but that those videos are found in "6,000 channels," which should keep kids safely entertained for a while. ZuiTube and Kidzui were *very* briefly reviewed at CNET recently.

2 brand-new 'products': FaceChipz, WonderRotunda.com

One is social, the other educational. FaceChipz may get the nod from tweens partly because it's very attractively packaged and partly because it's a rarity: a social site (not a virtual world, which is more common) for people under 13. [If you're under Facebook or MySpace's minimum age (13), and your parents aren't, like many parents, looking the other way where your online social networking's concerned, you have few options; two somewhat similar options are YourSphere.com, which checks parents registering their kids against a sex-offender database, and MySecretCircle.com, which sells accompanying security hardware for $24.99.] For kids, the trick with these products is going to be luring their friends who are, right or wrong, already in Facebook or MySpace into this very closed, safe (in terms of adults gaining access, not necessarily peer harassment) social options with them.

FaceChipz, just launched in beta, describes itself as "Facebook with training wheels." As its president, George Zaloom, put it in an email, "For the kids, we tried to make the site fun and the chips collectable. For the parents we tried to make the site SAFE and the chips affordable." The chips themselves come in $4.99 packs of 5 sold at ToysRUs and in the FaceChipz site. Users register the chips online with the code on the back of the chip, then give them to their friends. Once the chip recipient registers its code, giver and receiver are linked and the code becomes invalid for anyone else (so it can't be used again by anyone creepy). The more chips kids buy, the more friends they can add or points they earn toward virtual goods in the site. After they register, their parents have to verify them so the site complies with the US's Children's Online Privacy Protection Act. To verify, all that's required is a $1 fee paid once by credit card (no proof of guardianship is required).

There's a brand-new educational virtual world out there, WonderRotunda.com, that may turn out to please both parent and child. It's a good sign that Washington Post tech writer Mike Musgrove tested it on his eight-year-old, who told his dad, "I think this is educational" but then actually stuck around "to explore the virtual theme park, intrigued by the prospect of winning and spending the game's 'wonder dollars' to buy virtual food and loot with which to decorate his virtual treehouse," Musgrove writes. He, the 8-year-old, doesn’t care that CommonSenseMedia.org gave the site 5 stars, but another good sign was that eMarketer senior analyst and parent of a 6- and 8-year-old really liked it too. Maybe her kids did as well? Musgrove doesn't say.

The Post reporter does say that WonderRotunda was created by a concerned dad who wanted to create an alternative to Club Penguin and Webkinz for his daughter and her peers (ClubPenguin.com is more social, and so is Webkinz.com, with the added element of trading in "real world" stuffed animals).

It seems that's the other divide at the pre-tween level (around ages 5-9): Either they're interacting with the site (as in KidThing.com and WonderRotunda in ways designed to enrich or educate) or they're interacting with peers (socializing and playing games) in an environment run by companies that usually moderate and/or restrict communication for users' protection. The very popular Poptropica.com, by Pearson Education's Family Education Network, tries to straddle that divide by being both fun and educational (check out what Undercover Mom says about it: Part 1 and Part 2).
I'm rooting for these companies that work hard to meet the exacting standards of kids as well as parents! Let me know if your kids like them - and about other virtual worlds, videogames, and blogging services that work for under-13s at your house (via anne[at]netfamilynews.org).

Related links

Help with YouTube safety: As the world's 4th-most-visited site on the Web, YouTube is a fact of life in most households. Marian Merritt, parent and Symantec's Net-safety advocate, recently wrote up some meaty advice for families that also, importantly, raises some parental awareness.

Google is YouTube's parent, and here's is Google's own advice for "Making YouTube a safer place"

Recommended sites for tween girls from Connect with Your Teens blogger and parent Jennifer Wagner.

'Social Media in Plain English'

Maybe if for a moment people thought about social media as *social ice cream,* the whole concept would seem a little less daunting. To see what on earth I mean, watch a little 3:44 minute video explanation of what social media are all about by the professional explainers at CommonCraft.com. And while we're on the subject of plain English, also check out a clear, comprehensive resource from the UK that was put together with a lot of input from parents themselves: Vodafone's Parents' Guide. It runs the gamut, explaining everything from blogs, Twitter, and social networking to Net-based telephony and Bluetooth – primer-style. Then it runs through the risks in a levelheaded way, explaining what's involved and where to get help. Some of the resources even come from the US, so it's not like this "plain English" from the UK doesn't translate! Parents, you may also want to tell your child's teacher about another UK-based resource with partners from all over the Western world: Teachtoday.eu.

Homework day at Wolfram Alpha: Today!

Does Wolfram Alpha sound a little cerebral to you? It does to me, but, well, it is! But it also can act as a plain-old search engine that's especially useful for K-12 (and beyond) homework help. Homework help on steroids, you might say. It's also a "computational knowledge engine," Today, October 21, is Wolfram Alpha Homework Day, a "live interactive Web event [that's bringing] together students and educators from across the [US] to solve your toughest assignments," the site says. I watched the 12-min. explanation of how it works (here) and was pretty amazed. In addition to serious help with math, physics, chemistry, etc. calculations, it also helps with questions around biology, geology, geography, astronomy, and history. A couple of examples in the latter group: the gray wolf's kingdom, phylum, class, order, genus, and species and the nutritional value of a mocha latte (lots more examples here ). Nothing ambitious about all this: The knowledge engine "aims to make the world's collective knowledge more accessible and useable." Check it out.

Felony online harassment: TX teen charged

A 16-year-old girl has been charged under a new Texas law that criminalizes online harassment. The law, H.B. 2003, states that "a person commits a third-degree felony if the person posts one or more messages on a social networking site [or via instant messaging or text-messaging by phone] with the intent to harm, defraud, intimidate or threaten another person," KHOU-TV in Houston reports. Not much detail was available on the case KHOU added, but police said that "the harassment went on for a few months and involved a dispute over a boy."

Sweeping parental-control product for phones

Tell me if you can possibly think of a feature not covered in this new parental-control app for Windows, Symbian, and BlackBerry phones (but especially Windows ones, its creators say). It's actually a little chilling, if a parent were to try to use MyKidIsSafe surreptitiously (though kids would probably figure it out). Features include Text Message Monitoring (scans for approximately 1,500 "words," "slang," and "lingo" and copies parent); Safe List (people ok to call child); GPS Tracking for child's physical location; Geo-Fencing (monitors to see if child leaves set physical boundaries and sends alert – maybe he'd "forget" to take their phone with them?); Kid Arrival (parent notified via email or text when child comes within 500 feet of her destination); Speeding Notification (alerts parent when child is driving fast); Cyberbullying & Predator Monitor (notes an excessive umber of calls/texts from a single person, whom parents can add to block list, but I'm not sure how it distinguishes between gabby friend and strange adult); Time Restrictions for phone use; Restrict Calls and Texting While Driving (now, this is cool); and Sexting Alert (claims to scan images on Windows and Symbian phones for nudity). There's not much more detail on these and other features in the 5+ minute infomercial at YouTube.

In an email, I asked the company's CEO, Jay Lacny, if they include in their marketing the importance of talking with one's kids about all these features if used. He responded, "Yes, that is the most important thing. We really don’t like the term 'Parental Controls' but have yet to come up with a fresher word. This is engaging your kids and the need to know to be a caring parent. Kids will be exposed to alcohol, drugs, sex unless you live by yourself in the wilderness. We don't want to tell parents how to parent but need to give them the “data.... Parents can spend years instilling their belief systems into a child and have them broken by peer pressure. It’s difficult to have parents wake up to this." Do you agree? How many of this tool's features would you use, and which would you find most useful (or not)? Pls post a comment here or email me via anne[at]netfamilynews.org.

How MIT gets blogs, marketing & students

Maybe it's that reality is more interesting than fiction? At least reality seems to be a lot more interesting to high school students shopping for colleges and universities. MIT figured that out five years ago. The New York Times reports that MIT hires some of its upperclassman students to blog about life at the Institute for marketing purposes. One such blogger, senior Cristen Chinea has her days when she feels out of place at MIT (e.g., after sleeping through part of a Star Wars marathon, the Times says), but she basically just loves the place. Dozens of other schools, too – including Amherst, Bates, Carleton, Colby, Vassar, Wellesley, and Yale – are similarly linking to highlighted student blogs from their home pages, the Times adds, but none "match the first-hand narratives and direct interaction with current students" that MIT's bloggers have achieved (they get "$10 an hour for up to four hours a week" for their efforts). The bloggers "have different majors, ethnicities, residence halls and, particularly, writing styles. Some post weekly or more; others disappear for months. " But they're celebrities to their high-schooler readers, much sought-out during Campus Preview Weekend. Maybe another trend?: celebrity, as well as marketing, that's real.

Privacy on the social Web: Varying views

Our kids - the people who've never known life without the Internet - do think about their online privacy, and social technologies are actually giving them "greater control over their information," writes Heather West at the Center for Democracy and Technology in a Wired blog. She makes an important point about privacy in the new media environment that I think those of us who grew up in the mass-media era need to think about: We think of privacy in a binary way, as "the ability to conceal information from others" – public or private. Period. Internet natives think of privacy as the ability to control how they share information, and to do so in a nuanced way.

West cites two studies showing this, then writes, more anecdotally (and interestingly): "Gone are the days where my friends could see everything I posted on my Facebook page. Now, I am given the opportunity to choose not only what content is public, but who has access to that content. This includes privacy control for photo albums, status updates, and personal information. Truth be told, I am much less comfortable with social sites that do not give me this level of freedom."

[In this context, it's probably worth mentioning the finding that – despite all the online-safety warnings not to share personal info online – "sharing personal information, either by posting or actively sending it to someone online, is not by itself significantly associated with increased odds of online interpersonal victimization," published in the February 2007 issue of Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine. Rather, the researchers found, it's aggressive behavior online that significantly increases risk.]

Privacy in 6 social sitess

In other important privacy news, Canada's Office of the Privacy Commissioner recently unveiled a study that looks into privacy protections in six social network sites: Facebook, Hi5, LinkedIn, LiveJournal, MySpace, and Skyrock.

"These sites were selected based on popularity, but also to facilitate the efficacy of the final product by providing an appropriate breadth and diversity to the analysis," the report said. Aimed at user education more than industry regulation, it does a "comparative analysis" in each of these categories: registration information (e.g., here), real identities vs. pseudonyms, privacy controls, photo tagging, accessibility of user info to others, advertising, data retention, account deletion, third-party applications, and collection of non-user personal information.

The report refers often to the March '08 "Report and Guidance on Privacy in Social Network Services – Rome Memorandum," building on the work of the International Working Group on Data Protection in Telecommunications (see this PDF file) spearheaded by data-protection commissioners in a number of countries.

Related links

A fascinating project at MIT bears out how the societal discussion about privacy needs to get more granular and social-media specific. "Project Gaydar" found that "who we are can be revealed by, and even defined by, who our friends are.... The ability to connect with other people who have something in common is part of the power of social networks, but also a possible pitfall. If our friends reveal who we are, that challenges a conception of privacy built on the notion that there are things we tell, and things we don’t," the Boston Globe reports. There's a lot in the article, too, about the state of research being done in social network sites.

A view from another generation - that of Andrea DiMaio in the Gartner Blog Network. Note the interesting comment below it about how, "in a world awash in information," as it is now, "a paradoxical effect is that many people know far less than they did before."

The Pew/Internet Project's December 2007 teen-online-privacy findings (the latest available).

1 billion videos viewed (a day)

That's what co-founder and CEO Chad Hurley said as he marked the third anniversary of YouTube's acquisition by Google, the San Jose Mercury News reports. He added that YouTube is seeing more demand for longer format videos, meaning movies and TV shows. "In August, for example, YouTube said it would add clips from Time Warner programming such as 'Gossip Girl' and 'The Ellen DeGeneres Show'. The deal allowed Time Warner to set up individual channels and sell ads to accompany the clips, with YouTube taking a share of the revenue." But just as important as figuring out the revenue stream, I think, is the need for this giant, unwieldy, all-thing-to-all-users site to figure out how to foster more of a sense of community (or communities) which adds a measure of security and well-being and protects both the community and its users from abuse as users feel they're stakeholders in community well-being. Call it inside-out online safety.

UK teachers union chief: Un-ban cellphones in school

The head of Britain's largest head teachers' union said it's time to rethink the banning of cellphones at school. "Schools should be harnessing the fantastic educational opportunity children carry around in their pockets, instead of banning the phones with their cameras, voice recorders and internet access," The Guardian cites Mick Brookes, general secretary of the National Association of Head Teachers, as saying. As in the US, schools in the UK cite the potential abuses of the technology – and the need to protect children from them – as the reason for the mobile-phone ban most of them impose. However, educational technology consultant David Whyley told The Guardian that, "in schools where children were provided with handheld computers with phone and Internet access to use in lessons, teachers have reported very little misuse. His program, Learning2Go, has been in place for five years at 18 primary and secondary schools in Wolverhampton, the paper adds. See also "From 'digital disconnect' to mobile learning."

Fledgling star reporters in kids' virtual worlds

The people who help protect kids in virtual worlds have noticed an interesting trend: More and more kids are posting news, cheats (workarounds), and pictures from their favorite online worlds and games in their own blogs. "Essentially, the kids act as reporters for the virtual world by taking screenshots of parties and events in addition to reporting on various issues," writes Chase Straight in the blog of Metaverse Mod Squad, a virtual-world moderation company. It adds that these young bloggers – who are, in effect, co-creators or -producers of these worlds – are also skilled in creating and posting videos from in-world (or "machinima"), including music videos and tutorials or how-to's for in-world activity. "Some kid bloggers have developed such a large following that emerging virtual world sites have entered into financial partnerships with them in order to reach their fanbase. Their star power and celebrity status have inspired other children to create blogs of their own, hoping to attract the same level of readership." [See also "Top 8 workarounds of kid virtual-world users" and our "Undercover Mom" series by NFN contributor Sharon Duke Estroff.]

UK online youth study on 'hybrid lives': Not

A new survey that 75% of 16-to-24-year-old Britons "couldn't live" without the Internet, the BBC reports. Published by the nonprofit organization YouthNet and presented in Parliament today, it also found that 80% of respondents use the Web to seek advice. "About one-third added that they felt no need to talk to a person face to face about their problems because of the resources available online," according to the BBC, and "76% of the survey group thought the Internet was a safe place 'as long as you know what you're doing'." The BBC cited the view of Open University psychologist Graham Brown that those who do know what they're doing are generally those who grew up with the Net." The reporters covering the story at both the BBC and the Daily Mail indicate they hadn't heard the term "digital natives" before, suggesting that the study's author, Professor Michael Hulme of Lancaster University, coined it, instead of author Marc Prensky, who first used the phrase in 2001. But what really troubles me is a characterization of youth that the Daily Mail attributed to the YouthNet report: that they're leading "hybrid lives," which suggests two separate, very different lives online and offline. Anyone with a young Facebook user at their house or who follows the growing bodies of both social-media and online-risk research knows that's not the case, except possibly for some at-risk youth engaged in anti-social behavior. For the vast majority of children and teens, online socializing is a reflection of what's going on in the rest of their lives. I hope that's what they heard in Parliament.

Studying with social media

A pediatrician who follows social-media research! How cool is that?! Concerning the effects on young people of large amounts of time in and multitasking with digital media, parent Perri Klass, M.D., cites researchers as saying that, basically, the jury's still out. She refers to pediatrics professor Dimitri Christakis at the University of Washington saying that young people may have some advantages in the new-media space because they're coming of age in it. "So I decided to test my digital-immigrant biases," Klass writes in the New York Times, "which tell me that no one can study effectively while watching, listening, surfing, messaging, against my professional experience, which tells me that medical students who don’t study effectively can’t learn the huge and complex body of material they have to master, and will therefore not pass their frequent tests." She asked her medical-student son and classmates about their study habits. Definitely read the piece to find out what she learned – and there's some great advice, too, from a psychologist she talked to, for parents worried about their kids' "terrible" study habits. Because we all, as a society, have so much to learn about the effects of growing up online, I wish all pediatricians could be as informed and open-minded about social media. They could help parents calmly apply the good parenting sense they already have and stay a little open-minded too. That, in turn, will keep parent-child communication lines open, one of the best Internet protections around. [And BTW, there are some things we do know from the research, at least about informal learning in social media (we put those in "Online Safety 3.0."]

Media literacy of UK youth: Study

Nearly a third (32%) of British 12-to-15-year-olds think Web search engines rank and display sites by "truthfulness," The Telegraph reports, citing UK regulator Ofcom's 2009 interim Children's Media Literacy report. It adds that "philosophers will note that the finding raises interesting moral and epistemological questions about what the children thought would happen if they searched for 'god exists' or 'abortion is wrong'." I doubt the figures would be much different on this side of the Pond, and it does appear kids, parents, and educators have their work cut out for them where media literacy's concerned. In other findings in the 46-page report, the Telegraph points to "a small but cynical minority" (14%) of survey respondents think the Web sites with top rankings "paid to be at the top of the list"; "the large majority of parents said they trust their children to use the Internet safely – especially boys between 12 and 15" (87%) ... however, almost half" use filtering software in the home; 69% of teen respondents restrict access to their social-network profiles, up from 59% last year; and "in general parents are more concerned about the effect of the Internet on their children than they are about mobile phones, television, computer games, or radio." And this is just the traditional kind of media literacy – about what's read, downloaded, and consumed. Now we need to know more about what kids are thinking about what they post, upload, and produce!

Also have a look at my proposed definition of "digital literacy and citizenship"; and here's The Register's coverage of the Ofcom report.

Huge growth in texting, mobile Web access

Just in the first half of this year, people sent 740 billion text messages over the US cellphone networks, according to CTIA, the wireless industry's trade association. That's 4.1 billion a day and nearly double the number (385 billion) for the first half of 2008. Photo and other media sharing has grown even more. CTIA's semi-annual survey found that "more than 10.3 billion MMS messages were reported for the first half of 2009, up from 4.7 billion in mid-year 2008." That spelled a 31% increase in revenue from data (non-voice) for the industry over the first half of 2008. In fact, there's growth every which way you look. Users: There were 276 million cellphone users this past January through June, up 14 million. Minutes: 1.1 trillion, or 6.4 billion a day. Revenues: $76 billion for the wireless industry in those six months. ["MMS" stands for "multimedia message service" and "SMS" for "short message service," now just "texting."] Here's Washington tech pundit Adam Thierer's blog post on the survey. [See also "Teen drivers: Take a 'text stop'" and "House rules for texting."]

Web access over mobile phones is showing big growth, too – in fact, the mobile Web is overtaking the fixed one, internationally. "More people are using cell phones and other portable devices for high-speed Web access than are signing up for fixed line [computer] subscriptions to the Net," according to report from the International Telecommunications Union cited in the San Jose Mercury News. It projects 600 million mobile broadband subscriptions by the end of this year, compared to 500 million "fixed line subscriptions," a 50% increase for mobile over the past year.

Posting pix: How cautious should we be?

The other day I was talking to a psychologist who described a time when he was driving into a busy 4-way intersection on a highway frontage road – one of the craziest intersections I've ever heard described. He came to a stop, he said, and suddenly found he just couldn't take his foot off the brake, paralyzed by a voice in his head saying, "Be careful. Don't move. Don't get in that driver's way. Careful!" He said it was then that he realized he'd heard those words countless times as a child, and that they'd become almost a mantra in his head, making him overly cautious as an adult. For him the solution, he realized, was simply to go forward, make that move. He has since been much more decisive, he said, and – as he related this experience – I was thinking about the similar messages kids and parents are getting from so many directions about young people's Internet use. Of course we want them to be safe, but we don't want to clip their wings altogether. This article at AnnArbor.com offers that perspective – it's one of the few I've seen in the news media questioning the message that posting pictures in parenting and family blogs is highly risky. For more on both sides of this, see "Violating our kids' privacy" and "Online privacy: Photos out of control."

Virtual world shakeout?

That's what MediaWeek says, but it's referring to those associated with traditional media, such as MTV's virtual worlds tied to "the hit series Laguna Beach and The Hills." It adds that "the CW quietly shut down its two-year-old Gossip Girl-themed virtual world a few months ago." But Club Penguin, Stardoll, and Gaia Online seem to be unaffected. MediaWeek points to an interesting question from a media executive – "if one story [as in one TV show's storyline] is big enough" to sustain a whole (virtual) world. Maybe not. Maybe it takes a whole lot of stories: those of all its users! [For some VW population numbers, see this.]

How to avoid being phished

You may've seen news this week about Hotmail, Yahoo Mail, and Gmail users' having their email addresses and passwords compromised in a huge phishing scam. The BBC reported seeing "two lists that detail more than 30,000 names and passwords." A phishing scam usually involves an email from what looks like a legitimate business telling you that you need to do something like "click here to confirm your account info"; clicking there takes the victim to an illegitimate (or criminal) site that steals your info. "There are simple ways to avoid becoming a victim or being further victimized," writes ConnectSafely co-director Larry Magid in CNET. He lists some tips that might be good to share with everyone at your house or school, looking for the "s" in "https://" that stands for "secure server," and not clicking but instead accessing your account by typing the URL of the company or bank in the email directly into your browser window, then logging in to see if there's a real update or instruction to customers. Also check out ConnectSafely's tips for creating strong passwords.

FTC's new campaign about ads for kids

Not only is the Federal Trade Commission reviewing advertising aimed at children in the coming year, it's looking at "Internet-selling techniques" and teaching kids how to think critically about them, MediaPost reports. The full program will also include reviews of "food marketing to children and adults" and "green marketing and privacy matters and better coordination with sister agencies, especially the Food and Drug Administration." In the mix will be some media-literacy teaching tools for 8-to-12-year-olds. The campaign will include "in-school and library programs aimed at teaching kids how to recognize and analyze advertising," among them a game for Web and cellphone and curricula developed with Scholastic magazine that teach "why, where, and how commercial messages are constructed and placed."

Social Web growth: Fresh data

The latest growth figures for social networking from comScore are neatly presented in a chart next to USATODAY's article on the subject (which I blogged about here). Though the chart doesn't say, I'm assuming these are all US numbers because they're in USATODAY. Anyway, at a glance...

The percentage of all Net users (all ages) using social network sites has grown from 69.6% a year ago to 77% this past August.

The total number of Internet users was 189.1 million in July 2008 and is 195.5 million now.

The total number of online social networkers in July '08 was 128.5 million, up to 147.6 million this past July.

Net safety: How social networks can be protective

Hmm. It's arresting to think about what Stewart Wolf, M.D. – discovered and presented at medical conferences, as told by Malcolm Gladwell in Outliers – in the context of social media and online safety today. Back in the 1950s, he found a community in Pennsylvania statistically very free of the No. 1 medical concern of the time, heart disease, and looked into what was going on there. When Wolf presented his research, he found that his skeptical colleagues "weren't thinking about health in terms of community [emphasis Gladwell's]." Now sub in (online) "safety" for "health": "Wolf and [his co-researcher, sociologist John] Bruhn had to convince the medical establishment to think about health and heart attacks in an entirely new way: they had to get them to realize that they wouldn't be able to understand why someone was healthy if all they did was think about an individual's personal choices or actions in isolation. They had to look beyond the individual. They had to understand the culture he or she was a part of, and who their friends and families were...."

Now add the online piece
A child's (anybody's) safety and wellbeing have a lot to do with his community offline and online, since the research shows that our online social networks are largely our offline ones.

Almost echoing Dr. Wolf, USATODAY reports that, "for the most part, being part of a social network is good for you.... For example, a study in this month's Scientific American Mind finds that social support and social networking offer benefits, from additional resilience to greater life satisfaction to reducing the risk of health problems. Other studies in the past two years have found that feeling like a part of a larger group helps in stroke recovery and memory retention and boosts overall well-being." And the co-authors of a new book, Connected: The Surprising Power of Our Social Networks and How They Shape Our Lives, report that so much of what we think of as individual, e.g., body shape, politics, happiness, are really "collective phenomena."

About peer groups, not technology
The USATODAY piece is balanced, pointing to author and Iowa State University prof. Michael Bugeja's concern that we're not looking at online social networks enough from a computer-science perspective. But what we're addressing in the field of youth online safety is much more about young people's interests, social groups, and home and school environments than about computer science – as pointed out in last year's Internet Safety Technical Task Force review of Net-safety research through last year.

The studies in the USATODAY article that look at community are more helpful to moving the youth-risk discussion forward, suggesting that we consider three things: the impact of an individual's community (online and offline) on his or her well-being; how the individual affects the community; and how the community functions and addresses problems for its members (as a group of people, not a site or technology).

The guild effect
On that third item, author and USC media professor Henry Jenkins made the point at our Online Safety & Technology Task Force meeting in Washington this month that online communities themselves tend to shape members' behavior to protective effect, e.g., through social norming or influencing, behavior modeling, and peer pressure or ostracism. Educators who play World of Warcraft tell me this community self-regulation certainly happens in the "guilds" of that massively multiplayer online game.

So when we work in the field of youth online safety, it might be helpful to think about young people, its intended beneficiaries, in context – as participants in their online/offline communities rather than potential victims, as we have so much in the past. As for those communities: there may be times when outside intervention (from, say, friends, parents, or Customer Service) is necessary but other times when a little time is needed to allow the community itself to sort out how to deal with antisocial behavior. The other piece that needs more consideration is how to encourage youth to develop a "guild effect" in their online environments, so they're invested in the wellbeing of the community and fellow members, as well as themselves.

From interest-driven to friendship-driven
Not that they aren't already doing this. "Kids play socially.... We're growing a bunch of people who see what they do as social and collaborative and as part of joining communities," said author and Arizona State University literacy studies professor James Paul Gee in an interview with PBS Frontline for "Digital Nation." He talks about how young people quite naturally function in "teams," where "everybody is an expert in something but they know how to integrate their expertise with everybody else's; they know how to understand the other person's expertise so they can pull off an action together in a complicated world."

What this suggests to me is that "the guild effect" (safe, civil behavior as a social norm) kicks in quite naturally in "interest-driven" social networking, one of the two forms of social networking described in last year's study from the Digital Youth Project (see "*Serious* informal learning"). The question is, how can the guild effect be just as effective in "friendship-driven" social networking and across the entire social Web, fixed and mobile? I think this may be the central question for online safety going forward.

'Red-light district' makes virtual world safer

San Francisco-based Linden Lab, which runs Second Life, has sequestered adult content and activity in the virtual world onto a new continent called "Zindra." Residents of the virtual world have to verify that they're adults before they can search for anything on Zindra or go there (here's the page that explains how the age verification process works). The entire "world" is now classified as either "Adult," "Mature," or "PG." As Linden Lab explains these, "Adult" is what most of us think of as adult content or activity – sexually-themed or explicit, inappropriate for minors. "Mature" seems to be more about the shopping and socializing, or non-serious, side of virtual life, where there's nothing really inappropriate for kids to see but also where grownups don't particularly want to mix it up with 13-to-17-year-olds (who themselves would probably prefer Teen Second Life for socializing). Linden Lab describes the "Mature" classification this way: "Social and dance clubs, bars, stores and malls, galleries, music venues, beaches, parks (and other spaces for socializing, creating, and learning) all support a Mature designation so long as they don't host publicly promoted adult activities or content." "PG," obviously, is for everyone – the label for all educational and business activity (virtual classes, meetings, talks, etc., where only time zones are a barrier for gatherings of people planet-wide).

"The other day, when I logged back in after quite a few weeks," writes digital-media maven Chris Abraham in AdAge.com about checking back in after all this happened, "Second Life told me so in so many words that if I want to party, I need to explicitly commit myself to that lifestyle; otherwise, I had better just be happy with PG-13. Second Life didn't kick out the brothels and porno theaters, it just put them on a different plane of existence." All of which makes high school classes and other educational programs (see links below) in Second Life much safer and more feasible now (e.g., this from ABC News Brooklyn on science class in Second Life).

For visual aids, here's a 3 min. video interview with Second Life creator Philip Rosedale with little clips from in-world and a PG13-rated look at Zindra (on its opening day, 7/4/09).

Related links

Machinima of Rochester Institute of Technology's virtual campus in Second Life (machinima is video taken in-world, so it looks like animated film)

"US Holocaust Museum in Second Life"

"The Virtual Alamo" museum in Second Life

A video at Teachers.tv in the UK about student projects in and with virtual worlds and my post about it

"School & social media"

"Young practitioners of social-media literacy"

Net-safety task force update

The Online Safety & Technology Working Group, the first such national-level task force of the Obama administration, is well into the 12 months' work the law that formed it asked us to do (here's the text of the Protecting Children in the 21st Century Act signed into law last fall). ConnectSafely.org co-director Larry Magid, who leads the subcommittee about online-safety education, just published a summary of last week's meeting in CBSNEWS.com – our second meeting (the first, kick-off, meeting was last June). [Disclosure: I am a co-chair of the Working Group.]

Anti-gay harassment tougher on middle-schoolers

"For many gay youth, middle school is more survival than learning – one parent of a gay teenager I spent time with likened her child’s middle school to a 'war zone',” wrote Benoit Denizet-Lewis in the New York Times Magazine. He told of a middle school counselor in Maine who says anti-gay language is embedded in middle-school culture, and – because more LGBT [lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender] students are coming out in younger ages – schools are "playing catchup to try to keep them safe." These observations were borne out in a new study from GLSEN (Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network) showing that middle-school-level "LGBT students are significantly more likely to face hostile school climates than high school LGBT students, yet have less access to school resources and support." Some key numbers from the study: 91% of LGBT middle-school students and 86% of high school students surveyed had been verbally harassed because of their sexual orientation; 59% of LGBT m.s. students and 43% of h.s. students had experienced physical harassment because of their sexual orientation; and 39% of LGBT m.s. students and 20% of h.s. students had been assaulted in school because of their sexual orientation. See also "When Teenagers Question Their Sexuality", a Q&A in the Times's "Consults" blog" with psychiatrist Jeffrey Fishberger of the Trevor Project, which runs a national 24-hour crisis and suicide hot line for LGBT youth.

Google's Wave: All things to all users?

It's most often called a communication and collaboration tool. Google says it's email if it were invented today, the Christian Science Monitor reports. The Wall Street Journal says "it blends elements of email, wikis, instant messaging and social networking." Computerworld zooms in on the social-networking part and cites the view of one analyst saying it will present Facebook with serious competition. Computerworld exhibits both predictable skepticism and realism where it says that Wave will be dealing with the "problem of 'good enough'.... People think whatever network they're using now is good enough so why bother switching and making sure all their friends and family members switch, as well?" Why realism? Social Web users tend to add tools more than switch to them for the very reason that, if all their friends are in one service (such as MySpace or Facebook), they're unlikely to leave - it's hard to get all your friends and relatives to move on en masse.

MySpace: Entertainment hub that tweets

MySpace is taking steps in two directions, both solidifying its entertainment focus and expanding its social-media offerings. According to CNET, it "plans to launch a new video service sometime in the next several months with the help of sister site Hulu," in which MySpace parent News Corp owns a significant stake. The first step will be an overhaul of MySpace Video, adding more "feature films, TV shows, and music videos," CNET adds. On the social front, MySpace is syncing up with Twitter, TechCrunch reports. So – like Facebook users – MySpace members can opt to have their MySpace status updates automatically shared with all their Twitter followers (Twitter's version of MySpace "friends") and vice versa. "A couple weeks ago, AOL made its AIM lifestream go both ways with Twitter (and Facebook) as well. So we are definitely seeing a trend here," TechCrunch adds. Also on the social side, ConnectSafely.org's Larry Magid reports in CNET that the Department of Justice now has a MySpace profile partly to drive traffic to its new Justice.gov site" but also apparently to provide "unmoderated forum where users can comment and 'interact with the Department in entirely new ways'." [See also my "MySpace's metamorphosis?" this past August.]