The media shift & the TX textbook revolution

Not everybody's idea of a national news story, but an example of the media sea change we're experiencing: "In a historic shift," Texas – the US's second-biggest textbook "customer" with a multi-billion-dollar textbook budget and highly centralized curriculum development and textbook purchasing that has been in place since 1918 – is broadening its definition of "book," the Texas Tribune reported recently. Part of the definition now seems to be "a living reservoir of content, freely edited and updated by educators and beamed to the classrooms, homes and handhelds of students statewide," and some of the budget will go to laptops and e-readers. Leading up to this development, the Tribune cites three fundamental shifts of power and money: "from the State Board of Education to the Commissioner of the Texas Education Agency; from three major textbook conglomerates to a broad array of computer hardware and digital content providers; and from the state to school districts." The bottom line: School districts in Texas will actually be getting some of the state budget to make their own decisions on content, curriculum, and delivery tools, it appears. One of the top three textbook adoption states (the others being California and Florida) is acting like one-size-fits-all doesn't fit well with the way children learn, socialize, or use technology (see "Online Safety 3.0" for the Net-safety piece of that). For a bit more context: "Most states allow local school districts to buy their own instructional materials, in print or otherwise," according to the Tribune; but 22, the so-called adoption states, don't. Texas, Florida, and California together have more students than the other 19 combined, but "none has held the reigns of curriculum and money so tightly as Texas," the Tribune reports. As for book-content delivery devices – "e-readers" like Amazon's Kindle – sales are growing. According to The Economist, there are about 5 million out in the world right now, and "double that amount will be sold in 2010, according to iSuppli, a market-research firm. Apple, with its record of improving upon existing technologies and triggering mass adoption, is expected to shake up the business by launching a tablet-style computer which would make an ideal e-reader in 2010." The article's a little old, but some more great background on textbooks can be found at Edutopia.

'Smartbooks' (more than netbooks) aimed at teens

They're different, Forbes points out, though the names of the devices are very new, and "smartbooks" haven't even hit store shelves yet. The jury's out on whether teens will want the latter, but marketers have been plans for the teen market. Qualcomm and Sharp "expect at least a dozen smartbooks incorporating their chips to debut in early 2010." Here's the theoretical difference: "Smartbooks will be more affordable than netbooks, with prices as low as $199. Unlike netbooks, which resemble laptop computers with their hinged or 'clamshell' shape," smartbooks will be flat and tablet-shaped. One market went to Savannah College of Art & Design graduate students to help refine the product, Forbes reports. The design students said teens want "intuitive, trendy and powerful devices that become extensions of themselves" and help them "keep up with their hectic lives at a low price point." Sounds like good advice that, if taken, might materialize into a hybrid between laptops and cellphones that might actually become a trend, fellow parents.

Celebrity news, holidays & malware

Families certainly don't need computer hassles during the holidays, but this highly social time is right when everybody needs to be a little extra alert to social engineering. Here's what social engineering looks like this week, at the convergence of last-minute holiday distractions and the sudden death of a young actor, Brittany Murphy. "As a young star in movies that were highly popular with a younger audience, Brittany may currently be the search engine topic of choice among your own children," writes Trend Micro's Net-safety activist Lynette Owens in her blog. "Regardless of whether or not you knew who she was or how much talent you thought she had, many people are crowding on the internet to find out more about her and what lead to her death." So what happens? "Alongside the stories about Brittany in a Google search, researchers at Trend Micro found links to hoax Web sites purporting to offer information about her death.... If you clicked on these links you would see a pop-up message telling you that your computer has been infected with a virus and you need to scan it immediately." Select "ok," and you get a screen saying your system's being scanned. Once the fake scan is "done," you get another screen prompting you to download free security software. Click "ok" again, and the intruder opens a door in your system that can give the source of this scam control of it.

Another scam this year is offers of "free" versions of the film Avatar. In its security blog, Symantec says "there are literally hundreds of ... scam sites and pages trying to cash in on the hype around this new film. All of these sites are offering full free downloads or streaming videos of this new film.... Some are collecting email addresses, others are trying to get you fill in surveys, IQ tests, and so on that will eventually ask you to enter in your mobile phone number, which will sign you up for some unwanted and subscription-based, premium-rate services," among other potential problems.

YouTube, Facebook & friends' videos

YouTube's getting a little more social with Facebook. It's a little buggy as yet, CNET reports, but "YouTube is pushing its Facebook Connect integration further by allowing its users to see the videos that their friends share on Facebook. YouTube users had previously been able to find their Facebook friends on YouTube as well as update their Facebook profile with their various actions from the site." This certainly makes sense. Here's YouTube's version of the story. There's a screenshot of what the integration looks like in Facebook in the CNET article.

'Soft power' works better: Parenting social Web users

We're in quite a fix, we parents, over this "sexting" phenomenon. On the one hand, sexting "is causing growing concern among parents," HealthDay cites a University of Michigan survey as finding. On the other, "the real problem sets in when grownups get involved," writes DailyBeast.com columnist Conor Friedersdorf, pointing to the evidence: "In most cases, teens who conceal their sexting from authority figures suffer negligible adverse consequences.... Perversely, however, tragic stories that begin with 'sexting' are all too frequent when principals, police officers, or district attorneys get involved. The two known suicides attributed to 'sexting' actually resulted from adults who exacerbated, rather than stopped, the abhorrent 'slut-shaming' that peers callously directed at girls whose naked photos were spread around school; and authority figures in at least six states charge less troubled teens who send naked pictures of themselves with distributing child pornography!" [And I can't resist quoting where Friedersdorf goes with this child-porn-law point: "Should technology ever permit humans to download our brains' mental images to a hard drive, every last teenager in America will wind up prohibited from living within 10,000 feet of themselves" – but maybe quite a few adults too, no?]

I think he's right. Whether or not you agree that sexting is digitally exacerbated normative adolescent behavior, I hope you agree that adults need to tread very lightly or at least carefully in these situations, with child-pornography law a factor (see ConnectSafely's tips). But forget about school policy and law enforcement for a second and just think about parenting: Certainly we need to apply our values to our parenting and, if those values call for it, try to mitigate the sexualized media environment surrounding us all, but it's best to spread that teaching and parenting out over time and not allow ourselves to be so shocked by what we're seeing as to react in ways that send kids into determined resistance, "underground" online, where our values probably don't have much influence at all.

Cornell University assistant professor Sahara Byrne, while presenting a survey of parents and kids about online-safety strategies at the Harvard Berkman Center last week, found all kinds of evidence that "the more angry kids are, the more they're going to try to restore their freedom" – or assert it. That's why sudden changes in parenting style like overreaction or anger, banning technology (which to a teen can be like banning a whole social life), or suddenly installing monitoring software can have unintended, sometimes risky effects and workarounds.

So we're not really in such a fix, fellow parents. We just need to mindful of the concerns we have and channel them wisely. Trying to make our children avoid risk altogether can be riskier than being consistent about "our family's values," letting them do developmentally appropriate adolescent risk assessment, and being there for them when stuff comes up. I love how parent and media professor Henry Jenkins says it – that we need to "watch their backs rather than snoop over their shoulders."

Related links

"Sahara Byrne: Parents, Kids & Online Safety" in the blog of Prof. John Palfrey, co-director of Harvard Unviersity's Berkman Center for Internet & Society

Latest data (from Pew/Internet last week): "Sexting: New study & the 'Truth or Dare' scenario"

Prof. Sahara Byrne's presentation on parenting & online safety (I'll be posting more on this)

"Online Safety 3.0: Empowering and Protecting Youth"

ConnectSafely's tips to prevent bad effects from teens sexting

Teens taking Facebook breaks together

I think it's not so much taking a break from technology as it is from high school drama – though social networking does make it easy to have the drama in their faces 24/7, if they allow it to. The New York Times tells of two high school juniors in San Francisco who, "by mutual agreement," allow themselves to log on to Facebook only the first Saturday of each month. "The two are among the many teenagers, especially girls, who are recognizing the huge distraction Facebook presents – the hours it consumes every day, to say nothing of the toll it takes during finals and college applications, according to parents, teachers and the students themselves," the Times reports. Some deactivate their accounts, others form support group (not Facebook groups!) to help each other stay away. The Times cites the view of a psychologist and "Internet addiction" center director that Facebook's just like any other addiction. I'm no psychologist, but I do think it might be partly the real-life reality TV of school life that's addictive. On p. 2 of the article, the view of educator and author Rachel Simmons seems to agree when she refers to how hard it can be for teens to turn away from the sort of ticker tape of their social circle represented by Facebook's News Feed when they're "obsessed" with where they stand in that "social landscape." I'm impressed with the initiative they're taking (are they feeling that reflection time is healthy and acting on that?). But I wonder if, by creating agreements and forming support groups they're any less tethered to each other (see MIT sociologist Sherry Turkle's "Always-On/Always-On-You: The Tethered Self") and using technology that much less. Do they not need texting and talking on mobile phones to maintain pacts and check up on each other? Still, I'm sure there are some adults just as addicted to drama who could take a queue from these high school students.

'Teens would ignore texting-while-driving laws'

With texting up 10-fold over the past three years and as momentum for a nationwide law against texting while driving builds, there are indicators that the driver demographic that texts the most would benefit the least. "Already 19 states and the District of Columbia ban texting by all drivers, while 9 others prohibit it by young drivers," Reuters reports, but "at least one major study has found that, with mobile devices now central to their lives, young people often ignore laws against using cell phones or texting in the car." Police say such a law would be tough to enforce for the mere fact that they can't see the phones when drivers are texting. "The California Highway Patrol has handed out nearly 163,000 tickets to drivers talking on hand-held phones since mid-2008" partly because the phone is at the ear and can be seen through the window. When texting, drivers' phones are in their laps, out of sight. Reuters talked to four teens in the Phoenix area, where there has a ban on texting while driving since 2007. Three of them "admitted texting while driving and a fourth said he had stopped only after his cousin caused a serious traffic accident while sending a message." Parents, at least be sure you never text your teens while driving; I recently heard an interview in which a teenager said that even when she texts her mom to stop texting her while driving because it's unsafe, her mom won't stop!

School cyberbully wins free-speech case

This week the Los Angeles Times told the story of an 8th grader who walked into her school counselor's office in tears, saying she just couldn't go to class. Another girl had posted a humiliating video about her in a video site and the targeted girl was sure half the school's 8th-grade class had seen it. After much discussion among school, district, and district lawyers, the school suspended the video's producer for a couple of days. She and her dad, a lawyer, sued the school for violating her free-speech rights, and a federal court in L.A. decided in favor of the degrading video's producer, saying that, by suspending the girl for her video, "the school had gone too far," the L.A. Times reports. In his 60-page opinion, US District Judge Stephen V. Wilson wrote that, "to allow the School to cast this wide a net and suspend a student simply because another student takes offense to their speech, without any evidence that such speech caused a substantial disruption of the school’s activities, runs afoul of Tinker" (referring to the widely cited 1969 case Tinker v. DesMoines Independent Community School District). This was "a disturbing decision in a cyberbullying case," says Nancy Willard, director of the Center for Safe & Responsible Internet Use, because the court placed too much emphasis on whether evidence could predict physical harm and substantial disruption, was dismissive of emotional harm to students, and failed to consider the video's impact on the victim's own "educational performance and right to feel secure at school, and thus her right to receive an education." She argues that, "in addition to the substantial disruption test, Tinker held that a school may regulate student speech that interferes with the 'the school’s work or [collides] with the rights of other students to be secure and be let alone'."

I couldn't agree more. Children who are being bullied online and offline need to be able to seek relief at school, especially when - for some children – school is the first line of defense. And schools have got to be able to intervene in cases where individual students are experiencing psychological as well as physical harm. But Willard says it much better than I can: "Research has consistently revealed that these incidents can be exceptionally emotionally traumatic and frequently are related to school failure, school avoidance, violence at school - and sometimes youth suicide. To protect the well-being of youth, school officials must have the authority to respond to these incidents and, if justified, remove offending students from school for a period of time." If we can get to that point, then maybe the discussion about cyberbullying can be less about avoiding litigation and more about helping kids. Here's Willard's analysis of J.C. v. Beverly Hills Unified School District, "There is No Constitutional Right to Cyberbully."

Oz to filter criminal content

The Australian government is forging ahead with nationwide filtering "despite widespread criticism that it will strangle free speech and is doomed to fail," reports Agence France Press reports. However, it looks as if all that will be blocked is "Web sites containing criminal content" or child pornography, according to the BBC, the kind of filtering that has been in place in the UK for some time. "Blacklisted sites would be determined by an independent classification body via a 'public complaint' process," Australia's communications minister, Stephen Conroy. [I last posted about filtering in Oz in July.]

More public Facebook => more careful selves (I hope)

Don’t miss Julia Anguin's Wall Street Journal blog post about how "friending" has gone from knowing what the kid three rows back thinks about the latest celeb news to a popularity contest to, now with Twitter, a "talent show" among "followers" (who are much less complicated than "friends") – or how "to prove your intellectual prowess in 140 characters or less. But where she's going with all this, really, is the bottom line of Facebook's privacy changes. It's not a particularly new bottom line, just a more-so-than-ever one: "I will also remove the vestiges of my private life from Facebook and make sure I never post anything that I wouldn't want my parents, employer, next-door neighbor or future employer to see. You'd be smart to do the same. We'll need to treat this increasingly public version of Facebook with the same hard-headedness that we treat Twitter: as a place to broadcast, but not a place for vulnerability.... Not a place for intimacy with friends." Parents, talk with your kids about this! Anguin's piece is a great talking point. [For advice on how to hide that Friend List from Everyone, see this from ConnectSafely.org's Larry Magid, and for last week's news, see "Facebook's privacy changes" last week, when the company said these changes "have no impact" on how FB makes money.]

After I posted this, the New York Times reported that the Electronic Privacy Information Center and 10 other consumer privacy organizations filed a complaint with the FTC that Facebook's latest privacy changes "violate user expectations, diminish user privacy, and contradict Facebook’s own representations." Paramount to us at ConnectSafely.org is that Facebook ensure that the friend lists of users under 18 be hidden from public view by default.

Sexting: New study & the 'Truth or Dare' scenario

Three up-to-the-minute developments – fresh data on sexting from Pew/Internet, an important podcast about technology & developmental behavior among teens, and a summit held by the National District Attorneys Association and the National Center for the Prevention of Child Abuse – offer important insights....

1. 4% of US teens have sent 'sext' messages

It's a significantly lower figure than two previous national studies, which arrived at 10% and 9% for youth who had sent sext messages (see links below). The Pew Internet & American Life Project today released a survey finding that only 4% of US 12-to-17-year-olds had sent a sexually suggestive nude or semi-nude photo or video of themselves via cellphone, and 15% had received one on their mobile from someone they know personally. The explanation for the lower figures may be that Pew focused solely on images on cellphones, not on text either via phones or other electronic means. "We chose this strategy because the policy community and advocates are primarily concerned with the legality of sharing images and because the mobile phone is increasingly the locus of teens’ personal, and seemingly private communication," Pew says in its report. In other key findings....

There was no gender difference in the sending of sexting images – boys and girls were equally engaged.

"Older teens are much more likely to send and receive these images."

More intense users of cellphones are more likely to receive sext images.

18% of teen cellphone owners with unlimited texting plans have received such images compared with 8% of teens on limited plans and 3% of teens who pay per message.

The teens who pay their own phone bills are more likely to send “sexts”: 17% of those who pay for their phones had done so, while 3% of teens who don't pay for their phones or pay for a portion of the cost had.

With the University of Michigan, Pew conducted six followup focus groups this fall with middle and high school students in three cities. The focus groups showed that "these images are shared as a part of or instead of sexual activity, or as a way of starting or maintaining a relationship with a significant other. And they are also passed along to friends for their entertainment value, as a joke or for fun," said the study's author, Amanda Lenhart.

[Here are links to my posts on previous sexting surveys, the MTV/AP study early this month and a Harris Interactive study for Cox/NCMEC last june.]

2. Digitally 'enhanced' Truth or Dare

It can sound a little clinical when researchers or law enforcement talk about sexting, so let's look at one scenario at the middle school level – which ideally has everybody (girls, boys, and parents) thinking about cellphone-"enabled" sleepovers.

Remember that classic adolescent game of "Truth or Dare"? Well, in a recent "Family Confidential" podcast with educator and author Annie Fox, author of Queen Bees and Wannabes Rosalind Wiseman told Fox, "When we were growing up and even just five years ago, if girls in the 6th, 7th and 8th grade [had] ... a sleepover and played the Truth or Dare game – a classic thing you'd do when you were in middle school, a lot of the dares being about testing what you were thinking about, your sexuality, about coming into your sexuality; it's developmentally appropriate. But back then, if you'd do something in the dare category, not many people would see it and it would have a limited life-span. But now, this school year, Truth or Dare for 7th and 8th graders can include, 'I dare you to take a picture of yourself naked and send it to the boy you like,' and of course that boy will forward it to everybody he knows.

"This developmentally appropriate moment," says Wiseman, "has become a huge weapon to humiliate a girl forever, in her mind ... so the impact and the ability to degrade people's ability to go through their sexual development in an appropriately uncomfortable but comfortable way is lost when we have these kinds of things happen." [That's at about 13:40 in the MP3 version of Fox's podcast.]

But we're not just talking about victims, of course. Later in the podcast (26:05), Fox comes back to this sexting situation, as she and Wiseman are talking about how these dares and other developmental tests and risk-taking "really go both ways," Wiseman said. These situations are very fluid and have tech-enhanced ripple effects.

Fox said, "The girl who was humiliated pushed Send." Rosalind agreed: "Yes she did, she needs to think about what was motivating her to capitulate – we have to talk about that that if we want the child to be able to stop it the next time it happens.... She also needs to think about why she was unable to hold her ground and wants attention from boys in a particular way. Why is that? It's partly that, for a girl growing up in this culture, the culture says that's how you get attention from boys, but this is an opportunity for reflection about the cost of doing that."

Scenarios like this can be great talking points for calm, supportive, nonconfrontational discussion at home and school about all kinds of issues: at school, the legal and psychological costs of caving to peer pressure and forgetting to treat self and others with respect; at home, whether our kids have felt or observed that kind of focused pressure from peers; how they handled it; how they'd like to be able to handle it; whether they'd feel comfortable coming to us about it and what their conditions for doing so would be; where technology comes into play (literally) and what we can do about it in specific situations; and so on. [A similar scenario played out in Indiana a few months ago (see "Students sue school for social Web-related discipline").]

3. The law enforcement piece

Social media researcher Sameer Hinduja told Slate.com after the just-ended meeting of the National District Attorneys Association that participants were "clamoring for research on who's most likely to be an offender, or a victim, what are the contributing factors, what are the consequences." Certainly more research is needed, but look at those terms "offenders" and "victims" in light of the snap-and-send "Truth or Dare" scene. Can the children at that sleepover reasonably be frozen in time as either "offender" or "victim"? Do you, too, see a disconnect between 7th-graders engaged in casual, developmental risk-taking and what the law requires of police and prosecutors, and sometimes schools, handling "cases"?

I hope against hope for two things: that 1) except in cases involving criminal intent, law enforcement can play an educational rather than prosecutorial role where sexting by minors is concerned (helping middle and high school students understand related law) and that 2) there will be more calm, respectful communication between parents and kids, between schools and families, and within whole school communities about all aspects of this issue. There is nothing to be gained and a great deal to be lost from dealing with sexting strictly as a legal issue. How can schools fear litigation less? How can we all acknowledge multiple perspectives? It may take time, but if we can collectively focus on respectful communication and effective prevention as well as response, maybe we'll have fewer sexting and cyberbullying "cases" develop. As difficult as this may be, youth and society will gain from the conscious, collaborative effort.

Please see Dr. Hinduja's own blog post about the summit (organized by National District Attorneys Association and the National Center for the Prevention of Child Abuse), where he, too, recommends "multidisciplinary prevention and response."

Related links

"Sexting as a form of relationship currency" is an important insight from the Pew study that the GetNetWise.org blog zooms in on.

This week the Virginia Crime Commission decided against recommending any changes in state child pornography laws in light of “sexting” by teens, with Commission Vice-Chair David Albo saying that "a well-intended change could prove to be 'a roadmap for freaks' on how to skirt the law," the Richmond Times-Dispatch reports. Vermont, on the other hand, revised state child-pornography law last summer so that "minors caught sexting would not be charged with a felony and forced to register as sex offenders" (see my post).

CNN's coverage of the Pew study - interesting that, in headline, it went for 15% of teens have received sext messages rather than 4% have sent

Audio interview with Pew/Internet's Amanda Lenhart on teens & sexting at Public Radio International

A bit more on peer pressure & sexting at NetFamilyNews

See also our tips for parents about sexting at ConnectSafely.org and Common Sense Media's video advice.

iPod Touches in the classroom

The Salisbury Post tells the story of how a school district in North Carolina got its start with mobile devices in the classroom – in this case, iPod Touches narrower than "a deck of cards," weighing a little over 4 ounces, and putting "the complete works of Shakespeare, movies, a dictionary, thesaurus and encyclopedia, SAT preparation materials, the Declaration of Independence, the U.S. Constitution, USA Today, the Weather Channel and educational games" in the palms of North Rowan High School freshmen's hands. What I found especially interesting in the story the possibility of a spatial element to improving student engagement. One student told writer Maggie Blackwell that it really helps when what's being taught isn't across the room, it's right in his hand, and when it's "right here," there's less distraction, more ownership. The ownership part of that comes from the district tech director, Phil Hardin, who told Blackwell it's not about putting technology in students' hands ("that way, they would just be spectators," he said) but rather how they learn with it and demonstrate that learning (so that they come to "own the knowledge"). They use the iTouches to do research, listen to podcast book reviews, play educational games such as "Word Warp" during class transitions, etc. "One of the first projects the teachers developed spanned all subjects. Students learned about philosophers in history and science. They talked about Euclid and Pythagoras in math and Julius Caesar in English." Everything the students needed was available through the iTouches. Maybe attendance is a measure of student engagement: "In the month since iPods were introduced, absences have dropped 4.6%," Blackwell reports. Tardies have also dropped. The devices are configured to work only on the class network. [See also "From 'digital disconnect' to mobile learning."]

'Claiming' & social norming in social sites

When she found that about half of teens' social media posts "refer to drinking, sex, or violence," University of Wisconsin pediatrics professor Megan Moreno wondered how much of those posts were just claims, USNews.com reports. She still wonders – hard data is hard to gather – but she "thinks some of it is, some is nonsense, and some is a 'gesture of intention'," where someone might be thinking about partying more and is "testing the waters by putting up pictures or writing about it." What she does know, though, she says, is that these posts have a negative "social norming" effect on peers and young children. "Kids do think that what they see on social media sites is real, and the younger they are, the more they believe it. That's important, because teenagers are powerfully influenced by the behavior of their peers." Here's a useful flag for parents and educators and a great new-media-literacy lesson for younger kids: Peers' posts could be more claim than reality, and thinking critically about the posts of people they know is a great step toward exercising similar critical judgment about what's reported in the overall media environment, from blogs to TV news. [See also "Fictionalizing their profiles."]

FTC's milestone report on virtual worlds

This is pioneering stuff on the part of the US government. The Federal Trade Commission today sent to Congress its close study of 27 online virtual worlds – 14 for children under 13 and 13 aimed at teens and adults – looking at the level of sexually explicit and violent content and what the VWs were doing to protect children from it. I think it's important for parents to keep in mind when reading the study or just the highlights here that "content" in virtual worlds means user-generated content (which is why, in "Online Safety 3.0," we put so much stress on viewing children as stakeholders in their own well-being online and teaching them to be good citizens in their online and offline communities). Here are some key findings:

The FTC found at least one instance of either sexually or violently explicit content in 19 of the 27 worlds – heavy (sex or violence) in five of them, moderate in four, and "only a low amount in the remaining 10 worlds in which explicit content was found."

Of the 14 VWs for kids under 13, 7 contained no explicit content, 1 had a moderate amount, and 6 had a low amount.

Nearly all the explicit content found in the kids' VWs "appeared in the form of text posted in chat rooms, on message boards, or in discussion forums."

The Commission found more explicit content in VWs aimed at teens or adults, finding it in 12 of the 13 in this category, with a heavy amount in 5 of them, moderate in 3, and a low amount in 4 of the 13.

Not just text: Half the explicit content found in the teen- and adult-oriented virtual worlds was text-based, while the other half appeared as graphics, occasionally with accompanying audio.

The report goes into measures these 27 VWs surveyed take to keep minors away from explicit content, including "age screens" designed to keep minors from registering below a site's minimum age (what the FTC calls "only a threshold measure"); "adults only" sections requiring subscriptions or age verifications (see "'Red-light district' makes virtual world safer"); abuse reporting and other flagging of inappropriate content; human moderation; and some filtering technology. "The report recommends that parents and children become better educated about online virtual worlds" and that virtual-world "operators should ensure that they have mechanisms in place to limit youth exposure to explicit content in their online virtual worlds." In the two pages of Appendix A (of the full, 23-page report + appendices), you'll find a chart of all the virtual worlds the FTC reviewed. [See also my VW news roundup last week and "200 virtual worlds for kids."]

This is a great start. As purely user-driven media, virtual worlds are a frontier for research on online behavior. The FTC was charged by Congress "merely" with determining the level of harmful content, not behavior – I really think because adults continue to think in a binary, either-or way about extremely fluid environments that are mashups of content and behavior. Where is it really just one or the other, what is "content" in social media, and how do we define "harmful"? We also need to define "virtual worlds." Some of these properties are largely avatar chat, some are games (with quests), some are worlds with games but not quests in them. Still, we've got some great talking points and very useful data to build on.

Students on digital activism, citizenship

Parents and educators interested in what 21st-century learning and "Online Safety 3.0" look like should take a look at "Three Years of Digital Activism," a 15-min. video collection of projects by middle and high school students participating in the Camilla, Ga.-based Digiteens project. This is the new, digitally-enabled project-based (and "passion-based," as lead teacher Vicki Davis puts it) learning. Included is a section about driving while texting, called "Dangerously Connected," reporting that people who text while driving are 4 times more likely to injure themselves than drivers who aren't texting, and 37% of all car accidents are caused by driving while texting (DWT), compared to 14% of accidents from driving under the influence (DUI). See also a 20-min video presentation by a humanities teachers and a library services director about a successful 6th-grade project using "Web 2.0 tools." [See also "Online Safety 3.0."]

Facebook's privacy changes

Facebook has been known to make a few waves when it announces changes to privacy features, so it's probably hoping that, now with more than 350 million users, the latest changes won't make a tsunami. This week's redesign, which has been in the works since last summer, is meant to both simplify things and give users more control – "more granular control over who can see individual pieces of content while making some basic profile information available to everyone," as ConnectSafely's Larry Magid put it in his CNET blog. [Facebook's three levels of privacy are "Friends," "Friends of Friends," and "Everyone." Parents will want to know that, for users under 18, "Everyone" means at most Friends and Networks, not everyone at all.]

As for what's entailed: Everybody will eventually experience a little "wizard" window that'll pop up and say they have to configure their settings (if they've already done so, they can keep their current ones, and the wizard will show you what they are). Having seen the process, I can say it's very easy – if it seems annoying, only a small annoyance. All in all, the changes – straight from the horse's mouth – are:

A limited amount of profile info publicly available for all users (name, profile photo, gender, current city, Facebook networks, friend list, and Page affiliations)

Simplified Privacy Settings page

The three basic levels of privacy mentioned above

Apps and Facebook Connect sites can access publicly available info as soon as you interact with them (but they have to ask permission for additional info you haven't made publicly available)

Regional networks are going away (they were more viable as a privacy tool in an earlier "era" when Facebook had millions, not hundreds of millions, of users).

Facebook says these changes "have no impact" on the site's advertising system or how it makes money. For the company's own thinking behind the changes, see Facebook's Ana Muller's blog post here, and pls see Larry's CNET piece for much more detail than I have here. In related news, ConnectSafely.org has been appointed to Facebook's new Safety Advisory Board. Here's CNN's coverage.

Net-safety leadership: UK Council unveils strategy

Where dealing with children's online safety is concerned, the UK continues to impress. Clearly it was no easy task, but on the recommendation of psychologist, professor, TV personality, parent, and author of the Prime Minister Brown-appointed Byron Review Tanya Byron, the September 2008-launched UK Council for Child Internet Safety – made up of a staggering 140+ companies, organizations, and individuals – this week released its first safety strategy: "Click Clever Click Safe." A lot of the executive summary is music to my ears. Here's what I read:

Safety in context - safety's role not only in protecting but also enabling children's full, healthy participation in participatory society (I would only add: as active good citizens, not just digital ones, and stakeholders in their own well-being and that of their communities online and offline)

Safety takes a village (maybe even more than raising a child does), requiring the expertise of all stakeholders: chief among them youth, but also parents, educators, the Internet industry, mental-health and risk-prevention practitioners, law enforcement, policymakers, and clergy – many of these skill sets are represented on the Council. And hear, hear!: "By working together, learning from one another’s experience and reinforcing one another’s messages we can achieve more than the toughest legislation, the biggest company or the most caring charity ever could alone."

The child-protection village is global. Again, hear, hear!: The Strategy says, "We need to make links between international, national and local efforts to help children.... Work done here must be done with and alongside international efforts to improve child online safety."

Practical intelligence: How little have I seen this level of realism in our news media: "As in the offline world, we can never keep children completely safe, and this is not about imposing unnecessary restrictions that undermine the Internet’s benefits," the Strategy states. I would only add this bit of practical intelligence: that all forms of safety need to be addressed and, hopefully seen eventually to be children's rights and responsibilities online. The forms of safety are physical, psychological, legal, reputational, and personal (identity and property).

Clearly, we have kindred spirits across the Atlantic (see some similar thinking in ConnectSafely's"Online Safety 3.0: Empowering & Protecting Youth"). But what we all need to consider adding, now, to our work on both sides of the Pond, I feel, is a *layered* approach to online safety education, mapped to the need and the audience and based on the research showing that not all youth are equally at risk, and the young people most at risk online are those most at risk offline....

One thing I'd add: Levels of Net-safety ed needed

A logical way to organize Net-safety education is to map it to the levels of prevention which the risk-prevention community has adapted from disease prevention, I realized in talking with risk-prevention practitioner Patti Agatston of the Atlanta area's Cobb County School District. In a conversation started by Nancy Willard of the Center for Safe & Responsible Internet Use, it dawned on me that this tiered approach is exactly what online-safety ed needs as well – and I hope colleagues agree. The levels are simply:

Primary: Not "primary" as in school but as in universal – tangible prevention in the form of new-media literacy and citizenship (as mentioned above), taught pre-K-12, throughout the curriculum (based on research published in Archives of Pediatrics that youth who engage in aggressive behavior are more than twice as likely to be victimized, indicating that critical thinking and civility are preventive if not protective).

Secondary: More focused prevention education aimed at mitigating cyberbullying, sexting, cutting, anorexia, substance abuse, etc. represented or reinforced online as well as offline. This level of prevention can also be applied to specific events or incidents that need to be turned into "teachable moments" at school, either with a whole-school approach or in working with focused groups of students – e.g., a unit in health class about the psychological and legal implications of sexting.

Tertiary: Prevention AND intervention for the minority of youth who already have established patterns of risky behaviors disrupting their lives. At this level, the risk-prevention practitioners themselves need the training – in social media use – so they can fold this knowledge into their work with young people.

Key take-aways: School, industry, child services

As for the headlines in the UK, the most common was that, starting in September 2011, it'll be compulsory in British schools for kids aged 5+ to be taught Internet safety (see The Telegraph's). I hope the universal education piece will evolve quickly to new media literacy and citizenship (online and offline), which by definition include the critical thinking about potentially harmful incoming messages from mean peers, adult strangers, and all sorts of manipulators as well as harmful outgoing messages from young stakeholders in constructive community at school and home and online.

The strategy calls on the Internet industry to move beyond the self-regulation it had apparently hoped for. According to the Times Online, "child safety campaigners have been locked in months of tortuous negotiations with internet industry leaders over what companies could do to make children safer. The industry has agreed [to] a range of new requirements, such as offering parents more rigorous privacy settings which, for example, include a secret password," including "reluctant agreement ... to have progress on safety assessed independently by one of the big consultancy firms."

And for everybody who works with children, the 140-member Council pledges that: "In England and Wales by March 2010 we will include online safety in the ‘Common Core’ of skills and knowledge for people who work with children and work to make sure this is reflected in qualifications for people who work with children." The next step is to teach the same experts (mentioned in the Tertiary level above) how to function easily in the media environments youth love (texting, virtual worlds, online games, social network sites, etc.). A clinical psychologist I met in Mexico City couldn't get an extremely shy teenage boy to talk with him until he went to see the boy in World of Warcraft, where the latter felt comfortable to talk with him; then the boy was able to talk with the psychologist in his office. I heard a similar story from a Texas mother, who was able to keep in touch with her college-student son once they played World or Warcraft together on Sunday afternoons (he at his distant college and she at home).

Some key data in the report

The Strategy reported that...

99% of British 8-to-17-year-olds have access to the Net.

76% of young people say the Internet means their friends are there whenever they need them.

18% of children have come across harmful or inappropriate content online

50% of children encountering harmful or inappropriate content say they did something about it.

82% of children say their school has taught them how to use the internet safely.

67% of parents have rules for their children’s internet usage.

33% say their parents don’t really know what they do on the internet.

79% of UK parents say they talk to their children about online safety, but only 52% of children agree.

Related links

The indispensable multi-year, pan-European online-youth research at "EU Kids Online," based at the London School of Economics and funded by the EC's Safer Internet Programme

"From users to citizens: How to make digital citizenship relevant"

"Social norming & digital citizenship"

Proposed definition of digital literacy and citizenship"

"Europe's amazing Internet-safety work"

"Net safety: How social networks can be protective"

"Social media literacy: The new Internet safety"

Quest Atlantis, VWs & academic situational awareness

In a virtual world, science students can be scientists. In Quest Atlantis, students explore scientific problems or quests, so that – in addition to learning scientific content on quests – they find themselves in situations where they have to put that new knowledge to actual use. In other words they're being scientists, not just learning science. What a "science class"! Prof. Sasha Barab, one of the creators of the Quest Atlantis educational virtual world at the University of Indiana School of Education, calls this "transformational play," reports Cindy Richards at the MacArthur Foundation's "Spotlight on Digital Media and Learning." Maybe also transformational learning? [BTW, I love the term "situational awareness," feeling it has so many applications - social, academic, developmental (parenting) - online and offline. Online – like digital citizenship and media literacy – it's protective as well as promotive of academic success. Just as in Quest Atlantis, you learn what it's like actually to be a scientist or environmentalist, in social network sites you can learn what's it's like to be a good friend online and offline – what words, photo-tagging, or behavior has the potential to support or hurt others. We think about situational awareness a lot at our house. For example, some language that's common in Xbox Live is not at all appropriate in other situations, including at ice hockey practice! Developing the awareness that can make that distinction has a lot of athletic and social benefits!]

Virtual-world news update

A lot of news about virtual worlds has crossed my laptop lately, so – since this is a big growth sector of cyberspace (with the global VW population growing from 186.5 million now to 638 million by 2015, according to Strategy Analytics) – I thought I'd package it up for you....

1. Avatar PR

Now (if not yesterday or last year) is a good time to fold avatars into family discussion about reputations and self-representation online. Even if your child's favorite avatar is waddling around in Club Penguin, it would be good to ask to see the penguin, if you haven't already, talk about that penguin's favorite activities in-world, how many friends it has, and what sorts of things they do together. Why am I telling you all this? Early lessons in social Web spin control – not to mention early prep for the business world.

By the end of 2013, 70% of businesses will have behavior and dress code policies for employees whose online avatars represent their organization," Virtual World News reports. Gartner recently published "Avatars in the Enterprise: Six Guidelines to Enable Success," CNET reports.

As for the littlest VW citizens, Virtual Worlds News recently reported that, at 27% growth between now and 2015, children aged 5-9 are the biggest growth sector of a global virtual world population (which itself will grow from 186 million to 640 million by 2015). VW News was citing Strategy Analytics figures. For insights into day-to-day life in a teen virtual world, check out this YPulse interview with Gaia Online's Joe Hyrkin.

2. Two new arrivals

Israel-based Shidonni.com where kids 4-10 draw and animate their own animal avatars, which can then be turned into real stuffed animals! There's a bit of a Webkinz model, but this is much more appealing to kids because they're the producers. Here's coverage at Virtual Worlds News.

Omaha, Nebraska-based KidCommand.com for 7-to-12-year-olds is a virtual world that aims to teach kids and tweens about the real world so they can help make it better. The company, Green Bein' Productions, Inc., wants to team up with other organizations that work to empower kids (e.g., schools, after-school programs, scouting). Here's Virtual Worlds News.

3. Second Life's booming economy

On average, users of virtual world Second Life spend 100 minutes in-world per visit, adding up to more than 1 billion hours so far, PC World reports. Even more interesting, though, is the virtual world's very real economy. "The equivalent of more than US$1 billion has been transacted between residents in Second Life, who purchase virtual goods and services from one another." The in-world economy grew 54% year-over-year (between third quarter 2008 and third quarter this year), Virtual Worlds News reported more recently. This is a multinational economy: "Users from the United States accounted for 37% of the economy, followed by Germany and Italy at 8% each, France at 7%, and the UK at 5%." Here's a list of dozens of businesses that have a presence in Second Life – in retail, manufacturing, technology, travel, real estate, finance, communications, etc. (I couldn't find anything more recent than this, but I doubt the number has gone down.)

4. Avatars in MySpace

MySpace, which has always been as much a self-expression tool as a social utility is expanding those self-expression features. In an arrangement with the newly profitable teen virtual world Meez Nation, MySpace users can now create avatars, Ad Week reports (CNET mentioned Meez's profitable status).

Meez and MySpace have music and other media sharing in common, Meez CEO John Cahill said in an interview with YPulse. "Our users watch popular videos together, listen and dance to music together, and we're always offering new virtual goods and "Roomz" tied to events like Halloween, for example. See YPulse for more.

5. Virtual worlds in the movies

Hollywood's all over it – not so much making money in virtual worlds as telling stories about them, the San Jose Mercury News reports. There's Second Skin (which I blogged about here), recently released Gamer and Surrogate, James Cameron's Avatar in December, and next year's Tron Legacy from Disney and Christopher Nolan's Inception. [See also "'Red-light district' makes virtual world safer."]

Related link

KZERO, a virtual worlds research and consulting firm in the UK, has a slide show showing more than 10 dozen companies marketing in virtual worlds (with screen shots of their locations) here. [They put out great resources but are not great at returning press calls.]

New study on 'digital abuse' & youth

New national sexting numbers that have sparked headlines all over the Web about higher-than-ever sexting rates among US youth actually show that 90% have not sent naked photos to someone. Sammy, a San Francisco 16-year-old cited in the Associated Press's coverage and one of the 10% of youth who have sent "sexts," told the AP that he probably wouldn't do it again knowing that sexting could bring felony charges. I think all the above says a lot about the importance of 1) educating teens about this (see ConnectSafely's tips for starters ) 2) reporting surveys accurately, and 3) applying some critical thinking to breaking news. [In CNET's coverage, ConnectSafely.org co-director Larry Magid points out that the MTV/AP study of 1,247 14-to-24-year-olds "confirms what many Internet safety experts have been saying for the past several months: Young people are far more likely to experience problems online from their peers or from their own indiscretions than from adult predators."]

Here are some highlights from the AP/MTV survey:

The 50% figure you may've seen in some headlines refers to the percentage of youth who have experienced "digital abuse from the mild to the extreme," including spreading lies, violation of trust, and digital disrespect.

30% have been involved in some type of naked photo-sharing.

10% have actually sent sexting photos, females more than males (13% vs. 9%, respectively)

45% of sexually active youth report being involved with sexting.

Young people have complex views of sexting, calling it everything from "hot" and "trusting" to "uncomfortable" and "slutty," and those who don't engage in it calling it "gross," "uncomfortable," and "stupid."

In the "dating abuse" area, 22% say their significant others check up on them too often (see other interesting data in that category).

76% say digital abuse is a serious problem for people their age

51% "say they have thought about the idea that things they post online could come back to hurt them"; and only 25% have given at least some thought to the idea that what they post could get them in trouble with the police and 28% in trouble at school.

There's lots more interesting data, so please click to the pdf summary at AThinLine.org for more.

Not just digital natives & immigrants!

It makes sense that news media reports about how youth use technology are both produced and consumed through adult lenses. Many news reporters grew up in a very different (mass media) environment, as did a lot of parents, educators, and other news consumers. So we're seeing and participating in a distorted picture of social media and how youth use them if we're viewing young people's use through the traditional news media and our own mass-media lenses. While our children are playing, learning, and socializing with what, to them, is like a new toy or convenience tool, we are slowly grasping the social, economic, policy, educational, etc. implications of a major media shift.

Still, even though there is a generational divide between those who grew up with mass media and those growing up with networked media (realtime, multidirectional, user-produced, etc.), a new paper in FirstMonday, "The digital melting pot: Bridging the digital native-immigrant divide," suggests that it's best not to take the metaphor too far. I agree. Digital immigrants/natives is a huge generalization: among other things, it fails to acknowledge how very individual media and tech use is for people of all ages. It also, by definition, says "the immigrant can never become a native, which may serve to excuse individuals without tech skills" from even trying to gain them and understand new media from the inside, according to the paper's author, Sharon Stoerger. She prefers the term "digital melting pot" because it "refers to the blending of individuals who speak with different technology tongues.... The focus of the melting pot is on the diverse set of technological capabilities individuals actually have, as well as the digital skills they might gain through experience." Two years ago, Prof. Henry Jenkins (then at MIT, now at USC) used the term "digital multi-culturalism," writing in his blog that "I worry that the [digital natives/immigrant] metaphor may be ... implying that young people are better off without us and thus justifying decisions not to adjust educational practices to create a space where young and old might be able to learn from each other."

NY predators deleted from Facebook, MySpace

The state of New York has made it easier for social network sites that work with it to deleted sex offenders registered in that state. New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo this week announced that two sites that do use the state's database to check for predators, MySpace and Facebook, have purged the profiles of more than 3,500 sex offenders - "Facebook was able to identify and disable the accounts of 2,782 registered sex offenders" and MySpace 1,796 accounts, ConnectSafely.org co-director Larry Magid reports in CNET. New York has a law that "bans many registered offenders from using social-networking sites while on parole or probation and requires all registered offenders to disclose their email addresses, screen names, and 'other Internet identifiers.' That data is provided to social-networking sites to run against their rolls" (some states just fax over a list, Facebook says, making it difficult to identify the offenders in sites with hundreds of million profiles). MySpace says there has never been a case reported of a registered sex offender deleted from the site being prosecuted for illegal contact on the site. Cuomo praised both sites for their work in this area, adding that many other social network sites are slow to cooperate. "As always, it's important to put this news into perspective," Magid writes. "It only involves registered sex offenders, which of course,is a good start, but it only includes people who have been caught and convicted. And, while the companies do their best to ferret out registered offenders who try to hide their identity, there is no way to know how many people succeed in eluding them. Also, we know of very few children who have been sexually molested by someone they met on social-networking sites or any Internet sites. The vast majority of child sex abuse victims know the offender from the real world.... And, based on conversations with security officials at social-networking companies, I am not aware of any cases where a registered sex offender has been convicted of using the site to aid in harming a child he or she met on that site."

'What's print?': Navigating the media shift

Tech educator Bud Hunt in northern Colorado looks at what "print" means now in the context of requiring students doing research to look a little deeper than the top five-or-so search results in Google. Is a newspaper article a "print source" now that newspapers are on the Web, along with magazines, encyclopedias, and full-blown research studies? He asks them for primary sources now.

BTW, I point out a lot of stories that illustrate the giant media shift we're experiencing. I think that's important to do because we adults need to understand how our kids' media environment is very different from the one we grew up in. I feel we need to understand that so we can be patient with ourselves, understand why we're so unsettled by digital media tools such as social networking, be open to the emerging positives of social media, and see what hasn't changed. And what hasn't changed? The need for the life literacy that caring adults have always shared with youth. One word for that kind of literacy is "parenting"; some other terms for it are "wisdom" and "street smarts." There's a new inter-dependency that I think is lovely: They need our street smarts, we need their tech smarts. Working from that inter-dependency can teach all parties involved good things like self-respect, mutual respect, and collaboration.

But back to life literacy (a subset of it is the social literacy needed online as well as offline): I'm seeing others saying similar things about its vital role. At the recent Safer Internet Forum in Luxembourg, a representative from Germany's Education Ministry pointed to the need for what I'd call the 3-legged stool of the new online (and offline) safety: "technology skills, media skills, and life skills." I think the reason why Swedish psychologist Pauline Ostner said at the same Forum that "youth are looking for ways to communicate more and better with their parents and teachers about their Internet use" is because they're trying to make sense of it all – what's happening in the social drama of adolescence mirrored or even amplified online. I think if we want to parent and teach kids, we can't afford not to understand this media shift and work with our kids to figure out together what it all means and how to navigate adolescence as well as social media and technologies. But I'd love to get your thoughts on this – pls comment here or email me via anne[at]netfamilynews.org.

'How to bully-proof yourself on Facebook'

Here are some great social-networking-specific tips from Facebook's director of public policy, Europe. There's just one key point missing, I think, because of the 2007 finding that "youth who engage in online aggressive behavior by making rude or nasty comments or frequently embarrassing others are more than twice as likely to report online interpersonal victimization" (see "Digital risk, digital citizenship" and Archives of Pediatrics). That essential tip is: "Be nice." Kindness is contagious too (check out the last three anti-cyberbullying tips at ConnectSafely.org). [See also "A different sort of back-to-school tip: Kindness."]

Peer mentors fight bullying

From the Good Idea Department: In a program called "CyberMentors," London-based nonprofit Beatbullying is training students 18-25 to mentor younger students online in dealing with bullying, the BBC reports. "Under the scheme, senior cyber-mentors, who all come from colleges or universities, support the work of younger cyber-mentors" right in social network sites. The BBC doesn't say, but presumably there will be a marketing campaign that lets young people know how they can contact mentors through MySpace or Facebook. CompuTeach.co.uk cites figures from the UK's Anti-Bullying Alliance showing that "around 20% of schoolchildren aged 10-11 have been bullied on the Internet within the last year." Here's a review of the concept from US cyberbullying expert and professor Sameer Hinduja, who also blogged recently about how to help youth suffering from Asperger's Syndrome in cyberbullying situations. [See also Professor Hinduja's amazing collection of resources on cyberbullying; "'Cyberbullying' better defined"; "A new, holistic anti-bullying program for schools"; and, for more on peer mentoring, my "Social norming & digital citizenship."]