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Social Web privacy: A new kind of social contract we're all signed onto

2010-04-28T10:55:00.005-06:00

1993: In a famous New Yorker cartoon, a dog at a computer says to his canine buddy looking up from the floor, "On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog." Fast-forward 13 years....

2006: "On the Internet, everybody knows you're a dog," declares the subhead to a Michael Kinsley essay in which he wondered at how narcissistic the social Web was (before it became a cliché). Fast-forward only four years this time....

2010: Although Internet industry CEOs have recently declared the death of privacy (see security expert Bruce Schneier's blog), "privacy is not dead," said social media researcher danah boyd in her keynote at the SXSW conference in Austin last month. "People of all ages care deeply about privacy. And they care just as much about privacy online as they do offline.... Wanting privacy is not about needing something to hide. It’s about wanting to maintain control."

Furthermore, boyd said, privacy and publicity are a mashup. Web meets reality. We all intuitively know there are many gradients between totally private and totally public – some people online know you're a dog, some don't; the numbers vary, based on how you use the Web, who you are, and how you live your life. The Web increasingly mirrors all of "real life." Technology didn't just start interacting with user privacy. Remember "Don't tell anyone who calls that your mom and dad aren't home"? "Will I sound too eager if I pick up after one ring?" Or even: "Who will see me reading this radical book?" Buzz, email, Facebook chat, tweets, texts, etc. are used in the contexts of our real-life relationships and situations just as much. Which is why it's absurd to think privacy is dead, or ever will be.

"Think about a cafe that you like to visit," said boyd. Compare your Facebook page to that public space in real life. "There's a possibility that you’ll intersect with all sorts of different people, but there are some people who you believe you are more likely to interact with than others. You have learned that you're more likely to run into your neighbors and you'd be startled if your mother popped in, since she lives 3,000 miles away. You may have even chosen this particular cafe in the hopes of running into that hottie you have a crush on or avoiding your ex who lives in a different part of town. You have also come to understand that physics means that there's a limit on how many people will be in the cafe. Plus, you'd go completely bonkers if, all of a sudden, everyone from your childhood magically appeared at the cafe simultaneously. One coincidence is destabilizing enough; we can't really handle a collapse in the time-space continuum."

The difference between my old landline and book examples and today's media and communications environment is the speed at which we communicate and socialize and the speed at which new technologies and products become available (the latter are digital, so they can be made available to all users simultaneously and globally within seconds). So we need to think carefully and a lot – in proportion to the speed of technological change, I'd say.

Who needs to think carefully and a lot? Everybody involved, together not in silos – users, companies, educators, policymakers. But let's just consider the two most important stakeholders, which – in the current new user-driven media environment – are really parties to a new, global social contract that's emerging right now, one that I think Secretary of State Hillary Clinton spoke to in her 21st-Century Statecraft" speech early this year. Those two parties are:

1. Internet industry, users are unprecedentedly your bread and butter. They supply all the "content" on your services. You need to bake consideration of the privacy and safety impacts of their doing so into your product development. For example, when you mash services up together, such as email and social-network updates, you need to think about how one tool is very private and the other very public. People use them differently. So combining people's email address books and social-network friends lists instantly without preparing them can create a lot of cognitive dissonance and bad will. "In digital worlds, people need to be eased into a situation, to understand how to make sense of the setting," boyd said. Companies need to poll their users or at least do focus groups before they make significant changes to the user experience, and after product or feature release, do more consumer education.

Users & providers are "dance partners." "When you moved from Web1.0 to Web2.0," boyd said to "the technologists in the room," "you moved from thinking about designing and deploying software to creating living code. You learned to dance with your users, to evolve with them." That's a powerful metaphor: Social-media companies and users are dance partners like never before. Users are much more than mere customers or consumers, and they may increasingly exercise that inherent power.

2. Users, we don't need to become conspiracy theorists, but we need to be serious about paying attention to our privacy settings – and go over them each time our favorite social tools announce a new social feature (such as Facebook's just-announced new Like button and Instant Personalization). Consumer awareness and self-protection are essential to exercising our power in a user-driven or participatory media environment.

Parents and teachers, kids know they don't want others to have power over them. Help them see that that's what privacy settings are about – having control over their own information and public image. When it's put this way, they know they don't want to let peers, companies, or anyone else do whatever they want with their info, reputations, and digital creations. You can help them see a) that it's reciprocal: their friends feel the same way – privacy and safety are necessarily collaborative in this media environment (see this); and b) that honoring this new reality is protective to all concerned – oneself, one's friends, one's community, and ultimately society. It's all interconnected and interdependent now. Mindful, collaborative behavior is baseline online and cellphone safety as well as privacy (see "Social norming: *So* key to online safety" and "From users to citizens").

Other key points in boyd's talk:

PII and PEI are intermeshed. We hear a lot about personally identifiable information (PII) but not as much about personally embarrassing information (PEI), which is every bit as important to users. Boyd said: "Because most people are interacting online with people they know, they expect to make PII available. They do so because they want to be found by friends. But they also want to keep PEI hidden, at least to those that might go out of their way to use it maliciously. Unfortunately, it's hard to be visible to some and invisible to others." The reality online as well as offline, she said, is that "when people make information available, they make themselves vulnerable." Product developers need to think about that as much as users.

It's complicated, like life. "Just because something is publicly accessible doesn't mean people want it to be publicized," boyd said. Adults, such as Slate's Kinsley, often conflate the two when they talk about the "solipsistic social Web." They're forgetting to ground social-media use in real life, instead somehow thinking technology is layered on top of life as an add-on. For example, you're "publicly accessible" to others when you're at Starbucks, but you're probably not publicizing your presence, though there are times when you might. You might sometimes use Foursquare so that everybody who follows you on Twitter knows you're there. But the reasons for that aren't necessarily narcissism but maybe rather hoping your local friends notice your shoutout and meet you there or, since Foursquare's a game you play, you may be aiming to become "mayor" of that Starbucks. You're probably not thinking that there's a slim chance a burglar is following you on Twitter and – noting that you're at Starbucks – robs your house, which is why social-media companies need to help educate users about that very slim possibility. Digital media use is about as complicated, changeable, and individual as living.

No magic formula. "Unfortunately, online environments are not nearly as stabilized as offline ones. While the walls in the streets may have ears, digital walls almost always do," boyd said. The environments (Twitter, Facebook, etc.) aren't stable, nor is our use of them. There's little common sense around their use yet, like the old "Don't let anybody know Mom and Dad aren't home" – though most youth privacy features in social network sites (see this). "There's no magical formula ... no easy algorithm to implement. Privacy and publicity are living things.... They are fundamentally processes grounded in needs, desires, and goals, situated in contexts and transformed by technology." Of course some needs and rights haven't changed, such as constitutional and legal ones for Internet users and providers in each country, though laws need to embrace and adjust to new-media conditions.

Because privacy's a living thing that's functioning in a new, rapidly evolving media environment, everyone's a stakeholder in supporting it. We need to 1) stay informed and help our children see the importance of doing so and 2) keep revisiting our privacy settings in light of new conditions. Companies need to keep thinking about the impacts on users of the new conditions, bake that thinking into the products they create, and educate users about new conditions. Policymakers need to understand that 1) users want both privacy and publicity as well as the means to calibrate them and 2) need education as much as tools for intelligent privacy management. And we all need to see that – because of the unstable, collaborative nature of everybody's wellbeing in digital media – privacy and safety are an ongoing negotiation, not a one-size-fits-all, once-and-for-all solution.

So I'd like to hear from you: Do you see it this way too, that a new kind of (multi-party) social contract is now in place, not imposed on us by any single power-holder but by changing conditions in which we are all invested (the social Web, or a user-driven, social/behavioral media environment )? If so, it seems to me that, under this contract, it benefits all parties not only to protect their own interests but to understand those of all other parties and protect them too. Otherwise, misguided "solutions," bad laws and lawsuits, and other signs of dysfunction will continue to distract us from hammering out real solutions together. Sorry to end on such a negative note, but that's what I see. Tell me what you see – via anne[at]netfamilynews.org, in this blog, or in the ConnectSafely forum!

Important related links

"Youth, Privacy & Reputation" by Alice E. Marwick, Diego Murgia, Diaz, John Palfrey, and the Youth and Media Policy Working Group Initiative – a thorough review of research on the subject which has been published in the US, Canada, the UK, and the EU (released 4/12/10)

"How Different are Young Adults from Older Adults When it Comes to Information Privacy Attitudes and Policies?" (released 4/14/10), by Chris Jan Hoofnagle, Jennifer King, Su Li, and Joseph Turow. Their conclusion: "that young-adult Americans have an aspiration for increased privacy even while they participate in an online reality that is optimized to increase their revelation of personal data.... Public policy agendas should therefore not start with the proposition that young adults do not care about privacy and thus do not need regulations and other safeguards. Rather, policy discussions should acknowledge that the current business environment along with other factors sometimes encourages young adults to release personal data in order to enjoy social inclusion even while in their most rational moments they may espouse more conservative norms."

Security expert Bruce Schneier blogging about both of the above 2 surveys

Consumer privacy experts: the Center for Democracy & Technology and the Future of Privacy Forum

"Young Adults Do Care About Online Privacy" in the Washington Post

"Keeping Personal Info Private," one of 8 lessons from Cablevision's "Power to Learn" project for grades 4-8 (thanks to educator Anne Bubnic for pointing this out)

Facebook to meet with Sen. Schumer on privacy

2010-04-27T19:56:00.003-06:00

Facebook's announcements last week about making the Web even more social caught the eye of Sen. Charles Schumer (D-NY), who has since been "publicly pushing the social networking site to change its privacy policy," ComputerWorld reports. In an open letter, a private letter to Facebook, a press conference, and his press release, the senator called on the Federal Trade Commission "to provide industry guidelines for social networking sites and require full disclosure of how sites use private information." Schumer was joined at today's press conference and in signing the private letter by Sens. Michael Bennet (D-CO), Al Franken (D-MN), and Mark Begich (D-AK). ComputerWorld said Facebook had tried to get a meeting with Schumer over the weekend and was successful in setting one up today. The time of the meeting is not disclosed. Here's Advertising Age's coverage, with more from analysts.

Supreme Court to consider CA videogame law

2010-04-27T13:42:00.003-06:00

The Supreme Court will consider whether a 2005 California state law banning the sale of violent videogames to minors is unconstitutional, the San Francisco Chronicle reports. The law would bar the sale of any videogame to anyone under 18 if, the Chronicle says, it "was so violent it was 'patently offensive' according to prevailing community standards for minors, and lacked literary, artistic, political or scientific value." It was never enforced. A federal appeals court in San Francisco last year struck it down on constitutional grounds. "Federal courts have overturned similar laws in Oklahoma, Louisiana, Minnesota, Michigan, Illinois and the cities of St. Louis and Indianapolis," which is probably why the Supreme Court has taken on the California case. Here's Reuters's coverage and a collection of past posts of mine on state laws concerning videogames. [See also: "Fresh debate on effect of violence in videogames" and "Play, Part 2: Violence in videogames."]

What the new Facebook features mean to us users

2010-04-26T08:17:00.007-06:00

Remember how the word "friends" took on new meaning with the advent of social networking? Well, the same thing might be happening to the word "like." You always liked stuff, but now you "Like" it, as in broadcast that you like it, to the world via Facebook – or just to your Facebook friends, depending on how you've set your privacy settings. FB users, right after logging in today, click on "Learn More" in the box FB has at the top of your page explaining all this (its headline is "Connect with your friends on your favorite websites"). I'm talking about the just-announced latest changes at Facebook, the Like button you'll be seeing in more and more sites and blogs around the Web and "instant personalization," which personalizes your experience of Web services like Yelp, based on the info you've shared about yourself in FB.

Some pundits have actually called these developments "Web 3.0" (though we can't forget the mobile part of Web 3.0, I think). The BBC's headline was "Facebook's bid to rule the web as it goes social" – or, if not to rule, at least make it much more social than ever, or make the whole Web a more socially informed experience. And then maybe, as the BBC put it, "unseat Google" (and all FB's other competitors) to boot. For more on what it means to us mere mortals, check out GigaOm's "Your Mom’s Guide to Those Facebook Changes, and How to Block Them," then talk with your kids about checking those privacy settings again – make sure the settings are just the way everybody wants them under these new conditions. ReadWriteWeb.com goes into great detail about how Facebook's latest moves, announced at the F8 developers conference last week , affects its competitors and Web publishers as well as users. Remember that word "Like" I mentioned above? Well, ReadWriteWeb already replaced "click" with "like," where it says that Facebook's intent is "to get users to Like on the site and post a link to Facebook." [See also the Oregon Daily Emerald (at the University of Oregon) on how Facebook "surpassed Google in hits in the U.S. in one week during March of this year, the first time Google has been out of the top spot since it surpassed MySpace in 2007," and the New York Times on new apps and services illustrating the trend that sharing personal details is the whole point.]

This just in!: The Electronic Frontier Foundation has just posted a video and instructions on how FB users can opt out of "instant personalization" in the Web services with which Facebook has struck deals so far: Microsoft Docs, Yelp, and Pandora.

Sexting primer for parents: In case some basics would help

2010-04-23T07:51:00.007-06:00

A lot of sexting numbers have been tossed around the airwaves after four separate national studies. I'd go with the latest (last December) from the Pew Internet & American Life Project: 4% of US 12-to-17-year-olds have sent "sexts," 15% have received one from someone they know (see this for more). Why Pew? Because they focused on the age range and issue of greatest concern due to child-pornography laws in this country: 12-to-17-year-olds and photos – specifically, sexually suggestive nude or semi-nude photos, not sex-related text messages, which other studies included.

It's helpful to remember that there are two sets of concerns, here: legal and social, both deserving of respect.

Legal concerns

First, keep in mind that what can happen legally depends a lot on the jurisdiction you live in and how police and prosecutors are applying the law to this bizarre legal conundrum where a child can be both perpetrator and victim at the same time. For example, students involved in a sexting incident in Perry County, Pa., where Susquenita High School is, received felony charges from their district attorney last year, while students involved in a separate sexting case in neighboring Franklin County, a different jurisdiction, were not prosecuted as felons. There are solid indicators that the tide is turning toward not treating juvenile sexting as a felony crime, but the possibility remains: People involved with creating, sending or even receiving a nude or sexually explicit photo of someone under 18 can be charged with production, distribution, or possession of child pornography.

A spectrum of causes

It's important for adults to keep in mind that sexting can have lots of causes – something that it seems law enforcement is beginning to understand, fortunately. The difference between parents and police is, we start with kids and adolescent behavior; police, rightfully, of course, start from the law. But, in some cases to tragic results, laws haven't caught up with kid behavior in a digital world. Sometimes the law can help, though: for instance if school officials confiscate and search student cellphones in states where a search warrant is required to search a phone as well as a home. The law may apply differently on school grounds, however. [It might be helpful for you or your PTA/PTO to contact your local district attorney and/or school board and find out what the law says about sexting by minors and searching private property, on or off school grounds, in your jurisdiction – just in case.]

The causes of sexting range from developmentally appropriate behaviors like "Truth or Dare" games gone very wrong ("I dare you to send a naked photo of yourself to the boy you like," says one 13-year-old to another at a sleepover – see this) to malicious peer pressure (popular boys pressuring shy girls in a "prank," an incident the mother of one of those shy girls emailed me about (e.g., this) to criminal intent like blackmail (e.g., this). In the Pennsylvania case I blogged about this week, the photo-sharing was all consensual – "among friends" – the girls themselves having taken the photos, I was told. But humiliation did become a factor on the girls' part, sadly; I can only imagine it kicked in very quickly.

The Pew study's "three main scenarios for sexting" are 1) romantic partners sharing images just between the two of them, 2) romantic partners sharing images of themselves outside their relationship (e.g., to show off, get revenge after a fight or breakup, and so on), and 3) the sharing of photo by someone who wants to get involved with the recipient – in a "flirting" or solicitous scenario. Most of this is not criminal behavior. I hope all adults, from schools to parents to police, will come to see that, as we deal with sexting incidents, punishment and prosecution are not the goal, but rather support for any child being victimized and community-wide learning in the areas of critical thinking, ethics, and civility (as well as restoration of order, if needed, so students can get back to being students).

What to tell your kid

What do you tell your child? If a sexting photo gets sent to a kid's phone, in most cases, he or she should just delete it. Certainly tell your child never to forward a "sext." At the very least that's truly mean to and disrespectful of peers; it also amplifies the problem and could potentially be seen as trafficking in child porn. Keep the conversation calm and supportive, get as complete a story as possible, and work through together how to proceed.

If your child came to you, that's great; you want to keep those lines of communication open because he or she may need a lot of love and support. Chances are, you're not the first to hear about the problem, and you need to be able to have as complete a picture as possible to help contain or stop harm to young people, especially the subject(s) of the photos. You may want to talk with the parents of other kids involved, but keep you child part of the process as much as possible. If you're not the first to hear, someone's probably already pretty humiliated, and that's almost certainly enough "punishment" – or better, enough hard lesson learning – for the young people involved. You don't want legal (or criminal) repercussions added on top of that for any child, not in the current legal environment.

By all means, help all kids understand the psychological risks, preferably and if possible before sexting happens, whether they somehow find themselves in disrespectful or abusive relationships or are floating in a "romantic" bubble of denial that says "maybe other people would share these private photos with anyone, but we never would." They must know by now that all digital media can easily be copied and pasted into the permanent searchable archive called the Internet! If not, keep reminding them.

The key social concern

As for the very important social concern: An expert I heard at a conference recently said that, if you peel off all the legal and moral layers in these situations, once photos have been circulated, what you have left is violation of a friend's trust. That's tough for any human being of any age to deal with. Add to that the challenges of teen identity and social development, and these are extremely rough waters for a young person. That's why great care must be taken to support young victims.

This isn't about technology or some new thing under the sun. It's about learning to be respectful of one's self, peers, and community online and offline when surrounded by a pretty sexually charged media environment and tethered by phones and other devices to the 24/7 reality-TV drama of school life.

Related links

To go more in-depth: "Sexting & Youth: Achieving a Rational Response," by Nancy Willard at the Center for Safe & Responsible Internet Use

"We know that for teens the peer network is crucial in terms of their sense of who they are, the communities they build, the people they trust," said University of Texas Prof. S. Craig Watkins in his keynote at the 2010 Digital Media & Learning Conference (at about 45:18 in the video).

"Kids need adults," said Philadelphia high school principal Chris Lehmann. "The world is bewildering.... The flow of information – you know, that drinking-from-the-firehose metaphor, it's happening to kids too. They need people to help them make sense of their world. But to do that we have to be willing to access their world.... If they're willing to let us into that world ... we should go there, and we should help them," Lehmann said in a talk at last month's TEDxNYed conference on the future of education.

ConnectSafely.org's Tips to Prevent Sexting

About the MTV study (released a week or so before Pew's last December), offering important insights on "digital abuse" and sexting

About being tethered to "The Drama" of school life: "Parenting & the digital drama overload" and "Cyberbullying & bullying-related suicides: 1 way to help our digital-age kids"

NY's e-STOP law: Not sure how much it protects

2010-04-22T21:19:00.003-06:00

New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo recently announced that his state's new "e-STOP" law has "resulted in the removal of accounts associated with at least 4,336 registered sex offenders" (RSOs, some of whom had more than one account) from such social network sites as MyLife (formerly Reunion.com – 2,100 accounts), Tagged (950), hi5 (575), BlackPlanet (570), Bebo (542), Flixster (508), Flickr (448), Friendster (271), eSpin (120), Orkut (113), Stickam (109), Buzznet (18), and Fotolog (12). Without providing any detail, in his press release, General Cuomo also called on more than a dozen kid sites to screen for RSOs, among them BarbieGirls, Build-a-Bearville, Club Penguin, Girlsense, Neopets, and Webkinz. I think this announcement represents progress in the form of more granular understanding of the social Web as something hugely larger and more diverse than MySpace and Facebook. But it's not a particularly protective state law in that 1) it can only affect offenders in that state; 2) if lots of states adopt such a law with lots of different reporting procedures to social sites, the burden on sites to do anything with that data becomes greater and greater, which makes cooperation less likely (e-STOP requires offender compliance, not site cooperation, partly because the sites aren't based in New York); and 3) this would be more effective as federal law, in which case it would provide some protection to minors, but only from convicted and registered sex offenders in social sites, not from those who prey on children in real life, where the vast majority of such abuses occur, presumably most going unreported (even a law enforcement officer I spoke with recently said scrubbing social sites of predators doesn't go very far in protecting children).

Susquenita, PA, sexting case: A parent's view

2010-04-22T10:05:00.008-06:00

The day after the above blog post that mentioned the Susquenita sexting case, I heard from the father of one of the eight high school students involved. I'll probably post more perspectives in future, but I'm starting with this one, this week, because 1) I think the perspective of a father – of a teen whose involvement sounds pretty typical of students caught up in such incidents – may be useful to other parents and 2) this is the first case I've seen in the news where school officials are under investigation by a prosecutor for the way they handled the case.

"I am one of the parents involved in this issue," wrote this father of a then-16-year-old. When school administrative staff ["head principal, two assistants, director of curriculum and the possibility of more," he later told me] started their investigation the morning of Sept. 24, 2009, they knew then that they were dealing with students and nude pictures, but they continued this [investigation] all day long before contacting parents and police, even passing these phones around to other staff.... My son was interrogated by the head principal along with the director of curriculum. They called my son a sex offender, told him he would go to prison, and that he would be placed on Megan's [sex offender] list. Then he was contained in the nurse's office for over two hours. Other students were treated basically the same....

"My son along with [seven] other students [three girls and four boys] admitted they had a picture or pictures on their phones, etc. They told school staff who was in the pictures, etc., [but] the staff still went through [the phones].... The principal told us he didn't want to talk to the girl about this issue, saying 'he felt uncomfortable', though he didn't mind viewing her pictures and others' as well." [By the sound of it, the police called in at the end of the school day were the best part of this experience, reportedly respectful and clear about the students' rights and what was and wasn't lawful about the school's investigation – for example, a state trooper told the dad that he would need signed parental consent or a warrant signed by a judge to go through students' cell phones. The law differs from state to state, but that's something parents should ask if they're ever in this position: Do school officials have the legal right to search their children's phones without a warrant on school premises?]

"I have been fighting this battle for these kids since it happened on Sept. 24th," the dad continued. "The district attorney offered a consent decree to all the students, involving probation, fines, and a few classes, and the felony charges were to be expunged when this [process] is completed. However, they still pursued the felony charges [he told me later that it's still not clear the students' records will be completely expunged].... These kids were charged with felonies from a law [meant] to protect minors from adult predators. Pennsylvania doesn't have a teen sexting law, although one is expected to pass soon. There needs to be a change to stop this destruction, not to mention the wrongdoing of the school. My question is, did any adult in this situation, from school to legal system, ever step back to have the best interest of these students at heart? No, they labeled and smeared these kids and families."

When I asked him if there was any malice or bullying involved among the students, he said, "These kids did this willingly, they are friends. Don't get me wrong, I don't condone this, it was stupid, but they were basically keeping this private amongst themselves, meaning no harm.... I couldn't even imagine," he wrote, "being wrongfully charged with the worst type of charge anybody could face: sexual abuse of minors."

All told, these students have experienced public humiliation, arrest (fingerprinting, mug shots, etc.), expulsion hearings before the school board, prosecution as adults, probation, fines, classes, and – as of this writing – the possibility of felony convictions remaining on their records, on top of whatever the students and families have dealt with privately over the past six months. Whatever happened at school last September 24, school officials do not seem to have been a support to them.

Meanwhile, 40 students involved in a sexting incident a week later in the next county over, at Chambersburg High School (involving a different prosecutor), did not receive felony charges (see WGAL.com here and here for background).

"The Pennsylvania District Attorneys Association has pushed legislation that would make sexting a second-degree misdemeanor. If convicted of a felony related to sexting, children can now be forced to register as sex offenders," the Harrisburg Patriot News reported. According to the National Conference of State Legislatures, "In 2009, lawmakers in at least 11 states introduced legislation aimed at 'sexting'." In some of those states, that legislation is aimed at deterring and applying appropriate penalties to teens who engage in sexting, NCSL reports. Let's hope the Pennsylvania legislature passes a teen sexting law soon and that it's retroactive.

Related links

My sexting primer for parents

The best approach for schools to take (see "The goal of any incident investigation" at the bottom)

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

Citizenship & the social Web mirror in our faces 24/7

2010-04-21T18:18:00.001-06:00

I think what A.J. Patrick Liszkiewicz says about citizenship at the beginning and end of a talk (about the social game Farmville, of all things), nails it: He told his audience at State University of New York, Buffalo, that "...democratic citizenship has always been a difficult skill to master.... Citizenship requires cultivation...." At the end of the talk, he adds, "The central task of citizenship is learning how to be good to one another." Exactly. I do think it's that simple and that hard. For *digital* citizenship, you just add the word "online" to the end of that sentence. That's it. Let's do ourselves and our children a favor and not make it one bit more complicated than that.

The thing about this digital age is that it's holding up a very big, society-wide mirror to our faces nearly 24/7, and what we (meaning all of us) see in that mirror of humanity called the social Web is not always pretty. But it's unavoidably in our faces, so we are in effect being forced to think about citizenship – how we treat one another – in school, on phones, in Facebook, in ClubPenguin or WorldofWarcraft, at work, at home, wherever we commune, more than ever before. Because of this mirror in our faces. There are definitely things that need to be fixed at school, at home, in Facebook, but fixing those procedural, policy, and architectural things won't help much if we don't address the behaviors too. The behaviors, good, bad, and neutral, haven't changed all that much (though school bullying has gone down - see this). What's new is that we are being forced to look at them (and the attitudes behind them) so much, and we are overwhelmed, sometimes traumatized, by what we see. What's bad about this reality is that we think technology – the mirror – is creating the problem and keeping us from solving it; what's good is that the need to be good to one another feels more urgent than ever! [As for what Liszkiewicz says about Farmville (as basically the new chain letter) in the bulk of that talk, don't miss it!]

iPhone's safety, privacy extras

2010-04-21T09:12:00.003-06:00

Kudos to Apple for building extra layers of privacy and safety right into the iPhones of users who use apps that reveal their physical location. "Apple has long provided pop-ups that ask users to approve an app's use of location information before that app can get access," reports New York Times computer security blogger Riva Richmond, but there will be more in the iPhone's new operating system (OS 4). "To make it clearer just how often approved apps are collecting data about users’ physical whereabouts, Apple will display an arrow in the status bar at the top of the screen, right next to the battery-life indicator, whenever a user's location is being tracked." This is on top of any safety features provided by the services themselves (e.g., loopt's frequent privacy reminders and Glympse's see-where-I-am-only-for-the-next-30-minutes timeout feature, explained by ReadWriteWeb). As the Times's Richmond writes, we all love being able to find friends and great places to eat with the geolocation technology on all new phones, but we're not so crazy about letting just anybody track us or telling "a frienemy where the party is"!

72% of US teens are daily texters: Study

2010-04-20T10:58:00.004-06:00

For US teens, texting beats social networking by far for daily communication with peers, according to a Pew/Internet Project report released today. Nearly three-quarters (72%, up from 51% in 2006) of US teens send text messages daily, and 88% of teen cellphone users do. "Half of teens send 50 or more text messages a day, or 1,500 texts a month, and one in three send more than 100 texts a day, or more than 3,000 texts a month," Pew says. I compared that "mere" 1/3 sending 3,000+ texts a month to Nielsen's latest numbers, showing all US teen cellphone users sending and receiving 3,146, thinking Pew's sounded more "reasonable." But note that Nielsen's referring to sending or receiving, not just sending. So Pew's 3,000+ figure is pretty amazing. The sending plus receiving figure for one in three teens could be double, or 6,000, since a single text message is usually just part of a conversation or string of messages.

Pew seems to be saying that girls 14-17 own the space: That "entire cohort" averages 100 messages a day (sending), compared to the third of all teen cellphone users. "The youngest teen boys are the most resistant to texting – averaging 20 messages per day," Pew found. As for texting vs. other forms of communication (we now need to make distinctions between purely communicating and entertainment or socializing, where digital devices are concerned): Though texting is No. 1 for communicating with peers, voice calls are No. 1 for doing so with their parents. Where social networking's concerned, Pew says 25% of all teens contact their friends daily via social network site, vs. 54% of all teens who do so via texting. For 15-year-olds, the preferred communication methods with friends fall in this order: texting (54%), talk face-to-face (42%), calling on a cellphone (41%), social network site (40%, and SNSs have features like IM and email), calling via landline (37%), instant messaging (33%), and email (12%).

And communication is obviously not the all of it. Pew reports that teens use cellphones to (good and neutral activities first): "Share stories and photos ... entertain themselves when they are bored (just like adults) ... micro-coordinate their schedules and face-to-face gatherings ... go online to browse, participate in social networks, and check their emails." Some also use cellphones to "cheat on tests and skirt rules at school and with their parents ... send sexts.... Others are sleeping with buzzing phones under their pillows, and some are using their phones to place calls and text while driving." There's so much more to this report, which draws on both a survey and focus groups (quantitative and qualitative information), including chapters on how parents and schools regulate cellphone use, attitudes toward cellphones, and the fact that 84% of teen cellphone users had slept with their phones on or right next to their beds. For some that's because it's their alarm clock, but staying in touch appears to be the biggest reason: "Teens who use their cell phones to text are 42% more likely to sleep with their phones than cell-owning teens who do not text," Pew says. Here's the Washington Post's coverage.

MD case of middle-schooler sharing 'sexts' for $

2010-04-19T11:51:00.005-06:00

Seems kind of like the new "Risky Business" (meaning the 1980s film about the suburban Chicago high school student who turned his house into a weekend brothel to make some money on the side). The digital version of the exploitation – a student selling views of sexy or nude photos of peers, to peers – is less physical but affects more kids and can go on forever (see "The Net effect)." What I'm talking about is a new twist on sexting at an even younger age: a Bethesda, Md., middle school student renting his iPod Touch out to classmates so they can view "images of female classmates and other girls in various states of undress," according to the Washington Post. Pyle Middle School authorities last week turned the investigation over to local police, who are "trying to determine how a middle school boy came to amass such a large collection of provocative images" of 6th-, 7th, and 8th-graders." The Post adds that they want to make sure the girls weren't coerced into sending or posing for the photos, which have reportedly been passed around for months, but neither coercion nor adult involvement seem to be factors so far. The Post links to a message on adolescent development and cellphones Pyle Middle School's principal sent to parents just this month. [For another disturbing angle on the sexting issue, see this report from PennLive.com about school officials in Pennsylvania under investigation for mishandling student sexting photos (thanks to the Center for Safe & Responsible Internet Use for pointing this out.]

What Facebook does with abuse reports

2010-04-16T11:55:00.002-06:00

The head of Facebook's international law enforcement group, Max Kelly, Friday revealed more details than I've seen in the news media on how the site detects bad behavior and content, including criminal activity. On the prevention side, The Guardian reports, "Facebook has developed sophisticated algorithms to monitor its users and detect inappropriate and predatory behaviour, bolstering its latest raft of initiatives to improve the safety of its users." For details on what FB does about that behavior, please see the article, which includes pushback from CEOP but also signs of momentum toward a working rather than adversarial relationship. Only the former will help remove layers and redundancies in abuse reporting, as well as help educate the public on where and how to report what. Historians could probably tell us that it took time for the public to know what to report to 911/999 and, for example, what to report to school authorities, and here the system and education will need to be multinational and multicultural. This is a followup to my post last week about the "panic button" problem.

Embarrasing photos in Facebook: What to do

2010-04-16T08:46:00.003-06:00

Lots of Facebook news this week! There's loads of information in the site's new Safety Center, with sections aimed at teens, parents, educators, and law enforcement. But if you or your child has the specific problem of Facebook "Photos Gone Wild," Common Sense Media has some great tips including one about a little app called Wisk-it that lets a photo poster airbrush out the face of someone who doesn't want to be seen in a photo s/he posted. You'll note that a lot of this reputation management is a negotiation, which is why the last section in CSM's article on the need to "Be respectful" is so important (see "Collaborative reputation protection"). It's a lot easier to get a photo deleted when poster and complainer are cooperating (often the only way, since FB says in the Safety Center that it "cannot make users remove photos that do not violate our Statement of Rights and Responsibilities").

No more free nings

2010-04-15T21:38:00.004-06:00

I saw a lot of sad tweets tonight about Ning's announcement from tech educators I follow on Twitter – educators who created classroom "nings" (mini, user-created social-network sites), professional-development "nings" and activist "nings." Creating a site on Ning will no longer be free, I read in CNET, "free" being just one of the service's attractions to educators (and a whole lot of other people). I remember last fall hearing a speaker at the Safer Internet Forum in Luxembourg say that soon the country's Education Ministry would be introducing Ning for teachers' social networking nationwide (see this), and tonight Steve Hargadon of Elluminate and Classroom 2.0 blogged that Ning has been "a great springboard" for educational networking. Anyway, the news broke yesterday that Ning would be "cutting 40% of its staff and axing its free, ad-supported service," according to CNET. Wrote TechCrunch's Jason Kincaid, to whom someone apparently sent the internal memo about the staff cuts from Ning's CEO (published in full on that page), "I suspect we’ll see quite a few active networks jump to whatever the cheapest premium option is," which may spell more fundraisers at schools lucky enough to have teachers setting up classroom nings! [Here's my first post about Ning three years ago, "Mini-MySpaces: New phase," with a comment from co-founder Marc Andreeson (even better known as co-creator of the first Web browser, Mosaic)!]

Federal court ditches student-free-speech decisions

2010-04-14T12:21:00.002-06:00

Philadelphia's federal appeals court has vacated two key decisions of this past February that served to confuse matters. The 3rd Circuit Court "has decided to discard those conflicting decisions and rehear both cases on June 3," Wired reports. "School officials complained the rulings left them unclear on what legal legs they had to stand on when comes to punishing students for their online, off-campus speech." Wired adds that a larger panel of 13 judges – as opposed to the panels of three in February – will be rehearing arguments in the both cases in June and "the decisions, which are likely to be appealed to the Supreme Court, will govern Pennsylvania, Delaware, New Jersey and the Virgin Islands." Here's my post about the February decisions, also linking to Wired's coverage.

Early iPad safety tips

2010-04-14T11:49:00.003-06:00

It's something to think about – no filtering or other "parental control" tools for a wi-fi-enabled device that can go anywhere a kid can go. I'm referring to the iPad at the moment (because it's so new, there's no such software available for it), but the wi-fi-enabled mobility part is true of most phones that go with kids to school now (I hear a lot of parents didn't think much about parental-control software before they bought kids iPod Touches for last winter's holidays). Norton Internet Safety Advocate Marian Merritt is a mom who did think about her kids connecting to the Net with her new iPad – a lot (a lot in terms of how much they wanted to use it and a lot of thinking on her part about how to keep their use constructive). Basically, all there is for the iPad so far is the filtered search offered by the major search engines. Check out Marian's advice for that under her "Browsing" subhead, and don't miss what she says about video, apps, and security (YouTube's new parental controls don't work for the iPad yet). See also "Potential iPad glitch for families."

Facebook No. 1 in most Asian countries, but...

2010-04-14T10:46:00.002-06:00

...not in India, Japan, South Korea, or Taiwan, where Google's Orkut, Mixi.jp, Cyworld.co.kr, and Wretch.cc are No. 1, respectively (the US version of Cyworld ceased operation this past February). According to comScore's latest Asia-Pacific data (which don't include China), Filipinos are the biggest social networkers in the region, and 50.8 % of the total online population in the region, or 240.3 million people visited a social network site this past February. Nearly 90% of Net users in the Philippines, Australia, and Indonesia engage in social networking, comScore says, and Facebook is No. 1 in all three as well as in Malaysia, Singapore, New Zealand, Hong Kong, and Vietnam.

Facebook: Why a Safety Center, not a 'panic button'

2010-04-13T18:26:00.010-06:00

The Facebook news in the US today was its new expanded Safety Center. The news in Britain was that Facebook "STILL refuses to install [a] 'panic button'" on its pages, as the UK's Daily Mail put it. However, Facebook also announced today that its UK users will "now be able to report unwanted or suspicious contact directly to CEOP [the UK's Child Exploitation & Online Protection Center] and other leading safety and child protection organizations via its own reporting system," as CNN reported, so CEOP has come very close to getting its wish.

But this "panic button" concept is really problematic – and not just because of the word "panic," which suggests brains in crisis mode, with all rational thought switched off. Here's why it's problematic:

A single reporting mechanism doesn't cut it. In the offline world, we call 911 (or in the UK, 999) about crimes and medical emergencies. But the social Web – especially a fairly basic social utility like Facebook – is a mirror of its users' social lives and networks, of a full spectrum of behaviors, mostly good and, when bad, definitely not just criminal bad behavior. So if you just consider the really negative behavior that might lead to an abuse report, research shows that it's bullying, not predation, that would get reported far more often. Is law enforcement designed to deal with noncriminal but bad adolescent behavior? Fortunately, the new system Facebook put in place sends only reports of criminal behavior to CEOP.

Would a "panic button" have helped Ashleigh Hall? CEOP reportedly has said that the British teen whose murderer was convicted last month (see The Guardian) may have lived if such a button had been in place in Facebook. Ashleigh was reportedly communicating with someone who she thought was a boy, and fear didn't seem to be involved at the time of that FB communication. It isn't a factor when a child is being "groomed" online (see this).

A crime not involving panic. Ashleigh's case was far from typical of Net-related sex crimes. Presenting research from law enforcement files on Net-related child sex crime cases, David Finkelor, director of the University of New Hampshire's Crimes Against Children Research Center (CACRC), said in Washington in 2007, "These are not mostly violent sex crimes ... they are criminal seductions that take advantage of common teenage vulnerabilities" and are characterized as statutory rape. "In 73% of the crimes," he continued, "the youth go to meet the offender on multiple occasions for multiple sexual encounters. The law enforcement investigators described the victims as being in love with or feeling a close friendship for the offenders in half the cases that they investigated" (see this for his "Jenna" profile). Panic buttons in social sites do nothing to mitigate this problem.

Largely the wrong location. The Internet, that is. It's important to remember that the vast majority of sexual abusers of children are people they know in real life, not strangers they meet online, much less predators trolling the social Web. In a much-anticipated 2009 update of its research on Internet predators, the CACRC reported, "There was no evidence that online predators were stalking or abducting unsuspecting victims based on information they posted at social networking sites," and we've seen no reports in this country of convicted sex offenders being arrested for violating parole agreements by contacting minors in social sites. [As for non-Internet-related sex crimes, University of California, Berkeley, law professor Franklin Zimring was recently quoted as saying people are "more likely to get struck by lightning than to get raped and murdered by a stranger," The Press-Enterprise in southern California reported last month.]

Facebook actually tested a similar proposal made by New Jersey's then-attorney general, Anne Milgram, a couple of years ago: the test of a "Report Abuse!" icon involving "at least 1.5 million randomly-selected page impressions" for nearly a year (see MSNBC). What FB found (after running the test longer than MSNBC reported up front, a spokesperson told me today) was that the number of abuse reports was "significantly lower" when there was a special icon in a different location from the rest of the reporting links on a page. Third-party buttons and graphics "intimidate and confuse people," Facebook's European policy director Richard Allen told RedOrbit.com. "We think our simple text link, which gives people the option to report abuse to CEOP as well as to the Facebook team, is a far more effective solution."

A button is not enough. Even the host of Britain's "To Catch a Paedophile," Mark Williams-Thomas, a child-protection expert and former detective, said that "the much called-for report-it button alone does not make using social networking sites any safer, but a coordinated approach providing the additional reporting to CEOP is clearly worthwhile, as is a dedicated phone line for law enforcement." The dedicated line he's referring to is similar to one Facebook has for US law enforcement and part of the safety package it announced this week, including the Safety Center mentioned above and 1 billion public-service ad impressions in the site (which CEOP called "a 5 million-pound [or $7.7 million] investment in education and awareness" in its press release, which was not yet online as of this writing).

Having said all that, everybody can thank all parties to this agreement for an important pilot test we all need to watch. Not before in history has there been a service playing host to the visual socializing of 400 million users in multiple countries, much less developing some sort of reporting system for when something in all that socializing goes wrong – the online version of dial-911 or -999 (UK) but for many more kinds of "wrong" (not just the criminal kind). I don't know about CEOP, but our NCMEC has a CyberTipline.com, a sort of online 911 service, and it still tells people to call their local 911 service in emergencies. Physical proximity is still and always will be a factor when people need help – so just what is the role of a global online service, here? We all – social-Web companies, their users of all ages, parents, educators, law enforcement, risk prevention practitioners, psychologists, etc. – need to figure this out together. It just won't work if the onus is placed only on companies', or law enforcement's, or policymakers' shoulders – not in a highly participatory, grassroots-driven media environment.

But for heaven's sake – or even better, for youth's sake – let's please take the "panic" out of this whole important test. It simply doesn't lend itself to the calm, mutually respectful conversations that help youth develop the critical thinking that protects on the social Web. We had our predator panic on this side of the pond starting in 2006. At the Family Online Safety Institute's annual conference in Washington last fall, the Net-safety field declared it over with a strong consensus that scary messaging is not productive. Why? Because it makes young people less inclined to want to come to us for help. They tend to get as far away as possible from scared, overreacting adults; find workarounds that are readily available to them; and then leave us out of the equation right when loving, steady parent-child communication is most needed. The other reason is, even the research shows fear tactics don't work (see "Let's not create a cyberbullying panic" at CNET).

[Disclosure: Facebook is a supporter of a nonprofit project I help run, ConnectSafely.org, but I so hope you've seen in the above that that's not why I've blogged about this issue.]

Related links

"Why technopanics are bad"

Help for teaching digital citizenship

2010-04-12T12:57:00.005-06:00

"The Internet is where children are growing up," the New York Times reports, citing Kaiser Family Foundation research suggesting that they're online or interacting with digital media just about every hour they're not asleep or in school. So it follows that they really need to learn what it means to be good people online as well as in real life.

Or good digital citizens. More and more parents and educators are asking how we teach digital citizenship, and San Francisco-based media-education nonprofit Common Sense Media has been working on an answer to exactly that question. Its solution is an important step forward: a digital literacy and citizenship curriculum for students in grades 5-8, which will be available for free to all schools next fall. It has already been tested in San Francisco, Omaha, and New York, and "Denver, the District of Columbia, Florida, Los Angeles, Maine and Virginia are considering it," according to the Times. The curriculum's based on the work of the Harvard School of Education's GoodPlay Project on digital ethics and, the Times reports, covers five areas: "identity (how do you present yourself online?); privacy (the world can see everything you write); ownership (plagiarism, reproducing creative work); credibility (legitimate sources of information); and community (interacting with others)." Anyone can get a preview of the privacy section in the Common Sense site now and here's an audio interview on the curriculum with Common Sense Media CEO Jim Steyer by ConnectSafely co-director Larry Magid at CNET.

As for what we teach at home, definitely check out the curriculum for family discussions (and to know what schools will be teaching our kids, hopefully). But also keep it really simple. One basic pointer can go a long way, I think: What we have always taught and modeled for our children – things like civility, respect for self and others, and always treating people the way we want to be treated – now goes for the online part of their our lives too. Just be very clear that there's no distinction between online and offline behavior – no hiding behind real or perceived online anonymity or disinhibition! Given that the average young person spends more than 7.5 hours a day socializing in as well as consuming digital media (see this), this is how our parenting embraces the whole child now, don't you think? Feel free to email me your thoughts via anne[at]netfamilynews.org – or post them here or in the ConnectSafely forum.

Related links

How digital citizenship can be protective: on the "guild effect" and increasing everybody's investment in the wellbeing of the community and fellow members, as well as themselves

Citizenship is a verb!: There are all kinds of communities, online and offline. A classroom is a community, so is a wiki, a wrestling team, a Google doc, a social network, and a family. You can't be a citizen without a chance to practice citizenship in the community where you're supposed to be a citizen, I blogged after talking with Sylvia Martinez, president of Generation Yes.

"From users to citizens: How to make digital citizenship relevant" and an afterthought on that

"A definition of digital literacy & citizenship" (I tried to make it simple by fitting it into one sentence, but is it still to complex? Pls comment!)

Educator Anne Bubnic's amazing collection of links to resources on digital citizenship

The new media monsters we've created for our kids

2010-04-09T08:58:00.006-06:00

In adjusting to a media environment very different from the mass-media one we grew up in, we adults have created some monsters. They're large, intimidating "creatures" that threaten the mutually respectful parent-child and educator-student communication that young people want and deserve in this highly participatory, sometimes overwhelming new media environment.

One of the monsters is the "digital native" – the term, not the child. Coined by author Marc Prensky in 2001, the phrase has its usefulness in helping us adults grasp the major media shift we're experiencing and embrace young people's openness to it. But two leading new-media thinkers – Sonia Livingstone of the London School of Economics and Henry Jenkins at the University of Southern California – both have concerns about the phrase becoming too definitive. Why?

'Digital natives' as alien life forms

In February Dr. Livingstone said in a keynote at a University of California, San Diego, conference that all the hype around "digital natives" suggests that new media "brought into being a whole new species, a youth transformed, qualitatively distinct from anything that has gone before, an alien form whose habits it is our task to understand," when what we need to do is think about and work with children in the context of their full life – home, school, friends, media and cultural environments, etc. – in order "to understand what young people do online," not the other way around.

Dr. Jenkins recently wrote, “As a society, we have spent too much time focused on what media are doing to young people and not enough time asking what young people are doing with media.... Despite a tendency to talk of ‘digital natives,’ these young people are not born understanding how to navigate cyberspace and they don't always know the right thing to do as they confront situations that were not part of the childhood world of their parents or educators. Yes, they have acquired great power, yet they ... don't know how to exercise responsibility in this unfamiliar environment."

By viewing kids as alien life forms called "digital natives," we send the message that children don't need tech-, media-, and social-literacy training to navigate the ocean of information at their fingertips 24/7 and the tricky sometimes harsh waters of digital-media-informed adolescent social development. And by focusing on technology instead of children, we create daunting, new-sounding things to fear like "cyberbullying," directing attention away from the good work already being done against bullying as well as cyberbullying by changing school cultures and teaching and modeling empathy, ethics, and citizenship (at school and online). [This is not to say that cyberbullying isn't a problem, but we need to address it calmly and thoughtfully, not fearfully, and in context. There's a lot of overlap between bullying online and what happens offline at school. And for context, see this in MSNBC.com about research showing that the number of youth aged 2-17 who reported being bullied actually declined between 2003 and '08.]

Let's do some social norming by focusing on the social norming that actually does change behavior in positive ways! (For info on social norming, see the last three Related Links below.)

The paralyzing remove-all-risk monster

Another monster we've created: the "ideal" of a risk-free childhood or media experience. The Internet has become for youth "an escape from [the] offline constraints," as Livingstone put it, that we have put on our children out of fear for their safety in public spaces. "We are raising our children in captivity," UK psychologist and Net-safety expert Tanya Byron famously stated. And yet risk can't be deleted online or offline (and experts tell us risk-assessment is a primary task of adolescence). In her research, Livingstone has found that "the online opportunities and risks, as adults define them, go hand in hand – the more children experience of the opportunities, the more also of the risks.... Children do not draw the line where adults do, so these are often the same activity: making new friends or meeting up with strangers; exploring your sexual identity or exposing your private self; remixing new creative forms or plagiarising/breaking copyright."

That's unnerving for parents, but this is even more so: The risk-removal monster eats away at children's healthy development. "To expand their experience and expertise, to build confidence and resilience, children must push against adult-imposed boundaries: identity, intimacy, privacy and vulnerability are all closely related," Livingstone said. So instead of trying to remove risk, we need to allow our children to figure out how to negotiate it – at home and school, in the very media environments (wikis, social sites, Google docs) where they're already presented with those risks and opportunities, as well as the real-world ones.

Livingstone suggests to the authors of Hanging Out, Messing Around, and Geeking Out: Kids Living and Learning with New Media (MIT Press, 2009) that, after "geeking out," they tack on a fourth category addressing youth risk assessment: "Playing with Fire." Why? She says "children are not weirdly motivated to take risks online; they are motivated to explore precisely what adults have forbidden, to experiment with the experiences they know to lie just ahead of them, to take calculated risks to test themselves and show off to others." Checking out sites like ChatRoulette (see this) is "not so very new," Livingstone says, when you think back to the time when "young teenage girls told their parents they are staying at a friend’s house but then dare each other to sleep in the street or park instead. Now they play with fire online. It’s evident even from their screen names – Lolita, sxcbabe, kissmequick."

The extremely busy adult-blinding monster

A third very large monster is our own preoccupation with adult life, perspectives, and goals. We have a very hard time seeing past it to understand and respond appropriately to children's best interests. For example, Livingstone asked the question (only lightly considered at the end of a recent piece in The Economist about "the Net generation") of whether the disappointing apparently shallow civic engagement of youth online is because of a lack of interest on their part OR a boring, top-down, adult approach to engaging them online – see p. 9 of her keynote for examples (an example I can think of is the way we impose our mass-media perspective on their media use – see this on the Kaiser Family Foundation study released in January).

What could guide us around and past this hyperactive monster is the approach to youth taken by the researchers who contributed to Hanging Out, Messing Around, and Geeking Out. In the book's introduction, they write: "Adults often view children in a forward-looking way, in terms of 'ages and stages' of what they will become rather than as complete beings 'with ongoing lives, needs, and desires' ... [and] as active, creative social agents who produce their own unique children's cultures while simultaneously contributing to the production of adult societies."

Viewing youth as active agents and stakeholders in their own, their peers', and their communities' well-being (in or out of media, online and offline) will not only defeat the adult-blinding monster, it’s likely also to increase adult-child communication in a media environment where respectful, informed communication is protective. How so? It opens thought to other perspectives and unconsidered solutions, making it less likely that kids will go "underground" for fear of ignorant overreaction, and encourages youth who are being victimized to seek help from adults they can trust, to name only two highly desirable outcomes. Clarity and communication are more important than ever in an unregulated, user-driven, and uncharted new media environment in which children are children so much more than they're "digital natives."

Related links

On parenting these days: "Parenting & the digital drama overload"

On the media sea change we adults are adapting to: "Youth, adults & the social-media shift"

That Economist piece: "The net generation, unplugged," The Economist found some other scholars who find mass generalizations like "digital natives" unhelpful, including Kansas State professor Mike Wesch, who says that "many of his incoming students have only a superficial familiarity with the digital tools they use regularly.... Only a small fraction of students may count as true digital natives.... The rest are no better or worse at using technology than the rest of the population."

"Let's not create a cyberbullying panic," by ConnectSafely co-director Larry Magid at CNET

"Major obstacle to universal broadband & what can help"

"Social norming: So key to online safety"

"Clicks & Cliques, Part 2: Whole-school response needed"

Teen files harassment charges against mom for Facebook hack

2010-04-08T17:20:00.004-06:00

A 16-year-old in Arkansas claims his mother hacked his Facebook account, changed his password, and posted slanderous comments and personal information about him in his profile, the New York Daily News reports. His mother "claims she was just concerned about her boy's behavior" because he posted that he had driven home at 95 mph when angry at his girlfriend. The boy "lives with his grandmother after mom's nasty divorce," CBS News reports in its coverage of the story. The case could challenge the rights of parents to monitor their children online," according to the Daily News, which adds that "prosecutors won't discuss the case because it involves a minor, but indicated the case fell under the legal definition of harassment on the part of the mother."

Once-popular social site may soon go away

2010-04-07T13:30:00.001-06:00

Bebo, once one of Britain's top 3 social network sites, is likely either to be shut down or sold by AOL, which acquired it two years ago for $850 million, according to numerous news reports. Citing comScore figures, The Guardian reports that "Bebo's global unique visitors in February totalled 12.8 million," down 45% from the February 2009 figures. That's compared to this past February's traffic for Facebook, at 462 million visitors, MySpace (nearly 110 million), and Twitter (69.5 million). The Guardian quotes unnamed sources as saying Bebo's demise had to do with the acquisition by a large company of a startup that was heading into decline. The Wall Street Journal quotes an AOL memo to employees as saying "AOL is not in a position at this time to further fund and support Bebo in pursuing a turnaround in social networking."

Better teen privacy in Google's Buzz

2010-04-06T11:59:00.003-06:00

Google's Buzz, which makes its Gmail much more social, didn't get off to a great start, where kids' privacy was concerned. But Google has made serious strides toward fixing that, and the "Buzz Teen Safety Tips" video it just put on YouTube takes 2 minutes to show you what I mean. If your teens are using Buzz (the minimum age is 13, as with most social Web services), you might watch the video to see if there are privacy features you'd like to talk with your kids about. The five key points are 1) they can choose to make only their first and last name visible on the public profile they have to set up to use Buzz (they don't have to include a photo), 2) whatever they post is not only visible to all their followers but could also appear in Google search results; 3) BUT they can edit and delete their own posts, delete any comments on their posts, and delete comments they've made on other people's posts; 4) Buzz sends them an alert whenever someone starts following them, and they can choose to block that person (it's good to know that Buzz doesn't let the person know if they do block him or her); and 5) they can disable Buzz altogether or hide it in Gmail but still use it on their phones. Here's my last post on Buzz and a little more detail on the subject from my ConnectSafely co-director Larry Magid at CNET.

Lots of underage social networkers

2010-04-02T08:29:00.001-06:00

Thirteen is the minimum age of the world's most popular social network sites, including in the UK, and a quarter of British 8-to-12-year-olds who use the Net at home have profiles on social-network sites, according to study by UK regulator Ofcom. Given similarly high levels of Internet use on both sides of the Pond, I doubt US figures for underage social networkers would be much different (I'm aware of no parallel study done in the US). Ofcom also found that 37% of 5-to-7-year-old home Net users had visited Facebook (but didn't necessarily have a profile). The good news is that 83% of 8-to-12-year-olds with profiles have them set so that only social-site friends can see them, and 4% have profiles that can't be seen at all. "Nine in ten parents of these children who are aware that their child visits social networking sites (93%) also say they check what their child is doing on these types of sites." Here's another important takeaway, pointing to a growing need for solid new-media-literacy training in school: According to The Telegraph's coverage: Among kids 10 and under, "70% of those using blogs or information sites such as Wikipedia believed all, or most, of what they read."

Reachout.com: Substantive help site for teens

2010-04-01T07:55:00.004-06:00

"We Can Help Us" is the welcoming (and welcome) message of a just-launched suicide-prevention campaign created by the US government's Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA), the Inspire USA Foundation, and the Ad Council. It's great that there are press releases and radio and TV spots will hit the wires and airwaves, but even better is ReachOut.com, a welcoming comprehensive Web site with video and text stories from teens and young adults about difficulties that sparked their suicidal thoughts and how they made their way to support and solutions. The site provides tools and channels for helping oneself (with a direct link to the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline and solid information about suicide, depression, self-harm, eating disorders, and much more), helping a friend get help (by understanding the warning signs and knowing who to contact), and helping others (by submitting one's own story). Suicide is preventable, SAMHSA points out. That's why ReachOut.com is such an important step toward moving suicide prevention into social media. With teens sending or receiving more than 1,300 text messages a month, on average, and the vast majority of teens (82%) using social network sites, very often it's peers who are first to see warning signs (see this bit of social-Web history). According to SAMHSA, "suicide is the third leading cause of death among 15-24 year-olds, following unintended injuries and homicide. While suicides account for approximately 1.4% of all deaths in the US annually, they comprise 12% of deaths among this age group. In 2006, 4,189 people between ages 15 and 24 died by suicide. For every youth who died by suicide, it is estimated that 100-200 attempts are made." It's outstanding that SAMHSA and Inspire USA are getting at underlying causes in this way.

Students leery of school cyberbullying actions: What to do

2010-03-31T13:48:00.004-06:00

In light of some egregious cases in the news, we're naturally seeing more and more calls for schools to take action against cyberbullying. Not surprisingly, students are wary of school interventions. "The effectiveness of adult interventions depends a lot 'on context, school culture, climate, as well as the way in which each intervention is carried out,'" we hear from students who've been bullied, according to the Youth Voice Project. And in this week's newsletter feature, students told Dr. Patricia Agatston in the Atlanta area that they felt school intervention "doesn’t really help" and cited a situation where the cyberbullying of a student "got worse" and "more secretive" when administrators intervened. Clearly, if we want students to trust administrative action and help out their peers by reporting cruel behavior, we're going to have to get this right. We need to read past headlines like the Washington Post's "Make strong anti-bullying programs mandatory in schools" to the well-reported content of the article: "Unfortunately, most schools don’t have programs, and many don’t have the ones known to be most effective. Researchers say that the only kind of anti-bullying program with any hope of reducing such behavior involves the entire school community" (I recommend the whole article). There's a reason why students are concerned and a reason why we need to take their concerns seriously: in order to have their necessary involvement in resolving problems and implementing effective solutions. [For more experts on the how-to for schools, see "Clicks, cliques & cyberbullying: Whole school response is key," "Social norming: *So* key to online safety," and "Major obstacle to universal broadband & what can help."]

Student leaders' views on cyberbullying

2010-03-31T08:24:00.007-06:00

The other day, Patricia Agatston – school risk-prevention specialist and co-author of Cyber Bullying Prevention Curriculum for Grades 6-12 and Grades 3-5 – met with 30 student leaders at a high school in the state of Georgia. She asked them for their thoughts on cyberbullying.

"I found this discussion fascinating," she later wrote some colleagues. "I was there to discuss bullying, and we did a role-playing exercise that went pretty well, but when I moved the discussion to cyberbullying, the room just lit up. I was kind of shocked it was such a hot topic. I talk to kids about this fairly often – but something is really happening out there. I would venture to say that, while face-to-face bullying is a big topic in elementary and middle school, the issue of cyberbullying is huge with high schoolers because they have become so much more connected and, Anne, I think what you have written about, this idea of constant access [see bullet #2 in "Related links" below], is what is feeding the flame."

In light of several current news stories about tragic cyberbullying cases, I thought you'd appreciate, as I did, the insights these students offer. Here, published with her permission, are Dr. Agatston's notes from the session (I inserted ellipses between students' responses to keep this post to a manageable length):

Question: How bad is cyberbullying at your school?

"It’s bad ["group consensus," Dr. Agatston wrote].... People can be meaner so much easier now.... It is way more powerful than regular bullying.... There are apps like Formspring[.me] that are easy to access (Facebook is blocked by the school district but Formspring is not), and people use it to anonymously say awful things about one another [Note from Agatston: "This started a heated debate about how some people are just asking for trouble if they participate in Formspring – so, the students said, why would you do that if you knew people could leave hurtful comments about you?" Note from me: Formspring use is a trend; it turned up in a tragic suicide story on Long Island, N.Y., this week. Back to the students:]

Problems with evidence gathering: "People are figuring out how to keep things more private so it is harder to have evidence of the bullying too. People don’t post things as publicly anymore.... You can’t just copy and paste IMs into a document because the administration will say that you could have altered it, or the other parent can say that, so now that cyberbullying is taking place through less visible ways, i.e. texting and IM Chat on Facebook, it is harder to prove." Agatston: "Some debate around ways that you could still have evidence. But the point, I think, is that kids don’t always think to save the chat on Facebook right away, and it is deleted after 24 hours, so evidence is lost, versus comments posted on a wall."

Do you see cyberbullying incidents as just happening all of a sudden, or are they reactions to things that happen in ongoing relationships and between peer groups?

"It's both.... Some start spontaneously online, and some are reactions from relationships among peers at school." [Agatston: "But the consensus of the group was that more of the cyberbullying incidents happened in reaction to things that were happening at school."]

Is there any single best way to deal with a cyberbullying incident from your perspective? What advice for teachers and school administrators on how to handle one? Or is each case pretty different? [Agatston: "These questions led to very lively discussion/debate."]

"It depends on the situation.... Schools should not get involved.... You should try to resolve it yourself.... If that doesn’t work you talk to your parents.... Schools should be the third/last option...." [Agatston: "Much agreement to this statement." Me: This tracks with Project Tomorrow's Speak Up Survey of US students and findings of the Youth Voice Project study I wrote about here.]

Responding to bullies (or not): "You have to act like it doesn’t bother you even though it does.... [Agatston: "One student shared how talking to his parents helped him."]... You have to tell your friends not to respond. It really does make things worse. And then you have now put yourself in a position where you look bad, too, because you said things back. That’s why a lot of kids don’t tell – because they have said bad things back, and so they can’t prove they didn’t do anything wrong, that it was one-sided.... It is harder to deal with cyberbullying than face-to-face bullying. You can stand up to someone face-to-face, and they will back off. If you stand up to someone online, it just escalates things.... You can respond if you think through a thoughtful response, but most kids just react, and that makes it worse."

Could you give examples of how you’ve helped peers work out cyberbullying-related problems?

"Told them to talk to their parents.... Told them not to respond and stay calm...."

Do you think the school should intervene with off-campus cyber-bullying that disrupts school?

"No. [Agatston: "A lot of agreement, here."] It doesn’t really help. Our administrators did a mediation with some girls who were cyberbullying another student. It just got worse. They became more secretive.... [See Rosalind Wiseman's advice to administrators in dealing with socially aggressive students here.] There is not a lot they can do unless you have a copy/clear evidence.... Going to a counselor is better than going to an administrator."

Do you share with adults the negative things you see or experience online?

"No.... Only parents. [Agatston: "Why not?"] If you have responded, it escalates things and you can get blamed. That’s why people don’t tell...."

Do you have any suggestions for prevention of cyberbullying?

"We got these books that went home [they're referring to the Federal Trade Commission's Net Cetera booklet that schools can order for free] – that was a joke; most of the kids flipped through them and threw them in the trash.... Actually, I think some of the students learned something from them – but they didn’t take them home to their parents, which is what they were supposed to do.... Yeah, because their parents would learn some things they were up to and they wouldn’t want them to know. [Agatston: "FYI, this was very funny to me because I was the one who worked with the FTC to get the Net Cetera books sent home with every parent in our district. We knew it was risky sending them home with high school kids, so obviously they never made it home to the parents, but I was intrigued to learn that some kids were reading the information for themselves! Elementary copies made it home and middle school mostly handed out during parent-teacher conference week."]... Assemblies are not effective. [Agatston: "Some debate on this – it depends on the speaker; small group discussions are better than big assemblies, where everyone tunes out – don’t want to be lectured."]... Students need to hear from real people and how it affected them.... It is easier to be a positive defender through technology than it is [to defend peers] face-to-face. "

If you lose access to technology how do you feel?

"Depressed.... Sad.... Angry.... Disconnected.... Isolated.... Lonely.... Lost."

Agatston's conclusions

"The students who participated in this discussion were clearly concerned about online bullying as well as the escalation of conflict through the use of technology. Undoubtedly, some bullying behavior erupts spontaneously online, but the majority of what youth are dealing with is a continuation and escalation of bullying and conflict that occurs when they're connected by social media and the mobile Web all the time. It is discouraging to see that this group of youth leaders does not see adults at school as helpful resources when online bullying and conflict occur. But most do seem willing to go to their parents if they're unable to resolve issues on their own, and a few are willing to approach a school counselor.

"It was helpful to hear their suggestion that prevention activities involving discussions about real cyberbullying situations are a good method for addressing cyberbullying. It's clear students also need tips on 1) how to avoid escalation of conflict online and 2) how to disengage from the social drama of their peer group. While bullying prevention that addresses online behavior is critical, this discussion with some high school student leaders suggests a need to update conflict-resolution training to address online conflict."

Related links

A just-released study of nearly 12,000 US students in grades 5-12 at 25 schools in 12 states across the country: the Youth Voice Project (summarized and linked to here) – offering important insights into bullying victims' own views on what causes bullying, how it affects them, and what does and doesn't work in dealing with it.

"'Recombinant art' & life?: Parenting & the digital drama overload"

"Cyberbullying & bullying-related suicides: 1 way to help our digital-age kids"

"Clicks & cliques: *Really* meaty advice for parents on cyberbullying"

"Clicks, cliques & cyberbullying, Part 2: Whole-school response is key"

9 charged in MA school bullying case

2010-03-30T08:16:00.005-06:00

The felony charges against nine students at South Hadley High School – including stalking, criminal harassment, violating civil rights causing bodily harm, disturbing a school assembly, and statutory rape – follow the suicide of 15-year-old Phoebe Prince in January, the Boston Globe reports. Northwestern District Attorney Elizabeth Scheibel said that the bullying was known to most of the student body and that "certain faculty, staff and administrators of the high school also were alerted to the harassment of Phoebe Prince before her death," according to the Boston Herald. She added that, in reviewing the investigation, her office did consider whether school actions or failure to act amounted to criminal behavior but concluded they did not. "A lack of understanding of harassment associated with teen dating relationships seems to have been prevalent at South Hadley High School. That, in turn, brought an inconsistent interpretation in enforcement in the school’s code of conduct when incidents were observed and reported." The DA said Phoebe's mother spoke to "at least two school staff members" about the harassment her daughter experienced. In an editorial, the Boston Globe said the charges "mark a new seriousness about bullying," and the state legislature has been working hard on a new anti-bullying bill that would provide school administrators with clear direction on how to handle (see my post last week). The New York Times reports that "41 other states have anti-bullying laws of varying strength." [See also "Suicide in South Hadley" at Slate.]

Supremely useful tool for parents: GetParentalControls.org

2010-03-29T17:35:00.004-06:00

Parental-control technology – filtering, monitoring, screen-time controls, etc. – isn't for all families all the time, but it's a valuable part of the parenting toolbox, along with values, regular discussion, rules, rewards, repercussions, etc. There is no easy, one-size-fits-all solution in that mix and, since '97, when I started writing about youth tech, media, and safety, I've heard from a lot of parents who so wish there was – at least in the tech-tools area. It would be nice for parents, but not so nice for kids, who are all about change and individuality even in a single family. But, if not the ultimate parental-control product, how about the ultimate guide to such products? Check out GetParentalControls.org's 2010 Product Guide.

What you get is a tremendous service: at-a-glance comparison-shopping organized in a number of ways: e.g., by kids' ages (up to 7, 8-10, etc.); by type (filtering, monitoring, etc.); by location (at the operating-system, router, or ISP level); by activity (Web browsing, email, IM, search engines, video-sharing, virtual worlds, social networking, etc.); and by device (cellphone, game console, media player, etc.). All cleanly presented with a librarian's appreciation for "accurate, unbiased information." It's the brainchild of David Burt, a former librarian who in 1997 founded the nonprofit Filtering Facts (cited in a US Supreme Court decision in 2003) and now works for Microsoft. Get Parental Controls is the new face of FilteringFacts.org. In an email interview, Burt told me, "I’ve wanted to get back into online-safety activism, and I wanted to find something that would have an impact but wouldn’t be duplicating what others were doing. What set the direction for me was when in June of 2009 I read the PointSmartClickSafe Task Force Recommendations for best practices for child online safety, one of the recommendations really struck me: "The following is a sample of the limitations connected with the purchase, installation, and use of filters: No standardization or benchmark exists to differentiate an excellent from a merely good or mediocre product." [See also this review of NetNanny's monitoring software for cellphones in the Wall Street Journal blog, with insights into the challenge even a trusted brand has offering working controls for teen mobile phone use.]

Empathy training gains ground in schools

2010-03-26T09:55:00.005-06:00

Used to be, if a student behaved badly s/he was sent to the office. Now, at Public School 114 in the South Bronx, a teacher sits down with students and finds out what's wrong. P.S. 114's principal told the New York Times that the school's had workshops run by David Levine, author of Teaching Empathy, since 2006 and has seen the number of fights drop from 1-3 a week to "fewer than three a month." The Times published this story a while ago, but I hope this growth trend is continuing. It's ever more important in the current highly charged climate (see below).

The Times says similar workshops are being held in the high-end community of Scarsdale, N.Y., where one parent feels parents should be attending them too! Eighteen states "require programs to foster core values such as empathy, respect, responsibility and integrity." One such state is California, and "Los Angeles is spending nearly $1 million on a nationally known program for its 147 middle schools called Second Step that teaches impulse control, anger management, and problem solving as well as empathy. The Times gives other examples but adds that some people are questioning "whether such attempts at social engineering are appropriate for the classroom or should remain the purview of parents" and extracurricular programs (and whether there's even enough to teach academics in school). I can understand the question, but all this isn't just addressing "Mean Girls" – it's also addressing cyberbullying. I wonder if these programs are folding online behavior into the discussion. It should be there! If kids don't distinguish much between online and offline, why address social cruelty in one "place" and not the other? I think the need for other-awareness and perspective taking in all aspects of our lives (not just children's) is increasing as – enabled by digital media – the world crowds in on all of us more and more. But what do you think? Feel free to email me via anne[at]netfamilynews.org, comment below, or join the discussion at ConnectSafely.

Cyberbullying & the dark side of 'flash mobs'

2010-03-25T16:25:00.004-06:00

There's something Dark-Ages about Philadelphia's flash mobs – more like the digitally assisted Paris riots of 2005 than the "impromptu pillow fights in New York," as described in today's New York Times, the train-station group dancing in Europe (great example on YouTube here), and the giant, lighthearted Dupont Circle snowball fight I witnessed while stuck in snowbound Washington last month. Philadelphia's have "taken a more aggressive and raucous turn here as hundreds of teenagers have been converging downtown for a ritual that is part bullying, part running of the bulls: sprinting down the block, the teenagers sometimes pause to brawl with one another, assault pedestrians or vandalize property." City officials are considering a curfew, holding parents legally responsible for their kids' behavior, and other measures to get the situation under control the Times adds. Not everyone calls the seemingly spontaneous violence in Philly "flash mobs," and some sources the Times cites say it's due to fewer jobs for youth in a touch economy and "a decline in state money for youth violence prevention programs."

Whatever, this is, it isn't happening in a vacuum. There seems to be an increasingly uncivil, angry tinge to exchanges between people who disagree and members of opposing political parties on Capitol Hill, the airwaves, and online. Is it possible that all these adults publicly modeling disrespectful, degrading behavior are creating a new, very destructive social norm? Could cyberbullying in schools and teens' destructive behavior on city streets have something to do with that? I think so. Experts rightfully alert us to the sexually toxic culture our children are growing up in; they're also growing up in a behaviorally toxic culture and media environment. Media and technology can make mobs grow fast, but they don't create the underlying attitudes. All of which points to the critical and growing need for education in good citizenship, online and offline, and new media literacy (critical thinking not just about content, texts, and comments being consumed or downloaded, but also sent out, posted, produced, and uploaded). [See also "Social norming: So key to online safety."]

MA's hard-fought anti-bullying bill

2010-03-24T08:19:00.001-06:00

Both houses of the Massachusetts legislature have voted unanimously to approve anti-bullying legislation that mandates training for teachers and requires them to report incidents to principals," MassLive.com reports. The legislation also "requires principals to investigate bullying incidents, use appropriate discipline if necessary, notify parents on both sides of the incident, and report to police and prosecutors if a crime is thought to be involved." The legislation follows two young people's tragic suicides in the past year, most recently that of Phoebe Prince, 15, reportedly after being bullied at school and online, and last April that of Carl L. Walker-Hoover, 11, "after what his mother said was continual bullying by classmates," MassLive said. The bill will House and the Senate are expected to create a committee to develop a compromise of the bills approved in each branch. The legislation will now go into committee, where a compromise bill will be hammered out. That will go to each house for a final yes vote before going to the governor for signing.

'Recombinant art,' life?: Parenting & the digital drama overload

2010-03-23T09:22:00.008-06:00

As Moby does with other people's sounds and musical phrases, David Shields does with words, saying that mashing up other people's words (or "recombinant" art) is much more interesting than creating fiction, which is sort of an appropriation of Mark Twain's "reality is stranger [more interesting?] than fiction." "Mr. Shields’s book consists of 618 fragments, including hundreds of quotations taken from other writers like Philip Roth, Joan Didion and Saul Bellow," the New York Times reports. That's a huge contentious subject – copyright, intellectual property, fair use, etc. – important and fascinating, but it's only about content. What about the other part of new media? Moby, Shields, and other mass-media natives are gutsy, but they're focused merely on content at a time when there's a lot more going on in media. Much more interesting for our (parents') purposes is the behavioral part: all the sociality we – especially youth in the pressure-cooker social environment of school life – are constantly observing, appropriating, and mashing up with the help of social digital media.

We are remixing and creating a recombinant reality that is pressing in upon us with the same constancy, volume, and intensity as content is. Can you imagine a time in history when there was ever a greater need for media literacy than there is now, with our children growing up with online+offline, 24/7 exposure to the school, family, local, national, and international dramas of life – but, for them, especially school-related drama? Or a greater demand on all of us, too, for civility, perspective-taking, and respect for self, others, and community? If we can't model these for our children – at home and school, on phones and online – how can we teach them? If we keep fearing and blocking new media, we can't really be there for them in these tricky media waters. As they navigate both adolescence and the new-media space, they need breathers, reality checks, a sense of balance, and guidance (shore leave, buoys, dramamine, and a lighthouse, maybe? Sorry!), by which I mean:

Breathers. Breaks from "peer reality" (which can feel overwhelming) in the form of quiet conversations, hugs, and support in dealing with social-scene overload (aka The Drama) are better, more positive than a negative approach of taking away technology or media. Tech and media don't create drama, people do; rather, tech and media are drama-enhancers, -extenders, and -perpetuators. Restricting the latter can help sometimes, if the goal is helping kids get perspective, but it can also cut them off from friends and situations, when being plugged in has become a social norm for youth.

Reality checks. Our kids deserve reminders every now and then that the tsunami of school life they "wade" into everyday and then bring home on their phones and usually have on their screens while doing homework is not the all of reality: There is much more to life and much more to them. Much more to them than the role they play at school, where it's hard for them totally to be themselves.

Balance. This is pretty intuitive for parents, the need to help kids balance the activities in their lives – social, academic, onscreen, offscreen, etc. But go deeper. With constant exposure to friends' thinking, do kids have enough chances for the reflection and independent thought that help them figure out who they are in relation to it all? In "Always-on/Always-on-you: The Tethered Self," MIT sociologist Sherry Turkle writes, "The anxiety that teens report when they are without their cellphones ... may not speak so much to missing the easy sociability with others but of missing the self that is constituted in these relationships."

Guidance. This is intuitive for parents, too, but how do we offer that guidance? The command-and-control, sage-on-the-stage way, or as guide by the side? In today's media environment, the former simply doesn't work. Am I just being one of those overly permissive parents? No, I'm being realistic. With all the workarounds kids have to restrictions on their digital social tools, it's way too easy for them to break the rules and hack the parental controls. And the research backs me up – see the work of Prof. Sahara Byrne at Cornell University linked to in the third paragraph of "Soft power works better."

Remixing content may lead to "recombinant art," a hybrid of fiction and nonfiction or an alternative altogether. But what about when we add to this recombinant content, constantly coming at us, the online/offline mashup of all the sociality – family, school, local, national, and international – we're also exposed to? I think we increasingly need to be very centered and mindful, very socially and media literate to stay firmly on course in our lives. Especially when some of us are still growing up. Let's be sure to support our children's developing tech literacy, media literacy, and life literacy! They never needed or deserved these skills and our support more.

Related links

"The Digital Skeptic," Washington, D.C.-based technology-policy pundit Adam Thierer's review of Jaron Lanier's You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto

"Clicks & cliques: Really meaty advice for parents"

"*Social* media literacy"

For media-literacy training, the best school libraries help develop filtering of a different sort, the kind that improves with age and goes with them wherever they go

"The age of remixes & mashups"

"Remixes & mashups: Study on fair use"

Growing consensus to handle teen sexting differently

2010-03-22T09:15:00.003-06:00

Great news on the New York Times's front page yesterday: "There is growing consensus among lawyers and legislators," the Times reports, "that the child pornography laws are too blunt an instrument to deal with [naked photo-sharing, or sexting, which the paper describes in a slightly odd way as] an adolescent cyberculture in which all kinds of sexual pictures circulate on sites like MySpace and Facebook." The description left out cellphones, largely the focus of the public discussion about sexting (if not the activity itself). "Last year, Nebraska, Utah and Vermont changed their laws to reduce penalties for teenagers who engage in such activities," the Times continues, "and this year, according to the National Council on State Legislatures, 14 more states are considering legislation that would treat young people who engage in sexting differently from adult pornographers and sexual predators." And last week saw "the first case ever to challenge the constitutionality of prosecuting teens for 'sexting'," Law.com reports. "A unanimous three-judge panel [of the Third Circuit Court of Appeals in Philadelphia] concluded there was no probable cause to bring any charges against the girls who had appeared in various states of undress in photos shared among a group of teens. Missing from the prosecutor's case, the court said, was critical evidence about who exactly had transmitted the images," according to Law.com, which added the court also found that former prosecutor George Skumanick, Jr., had "violated parents' rights by usurping their roles." According to the Times, states are considering various ways to handle sexting by minors – some as a misdemeanor, others as a juvenile offence along the lines of "truancy or running away." Do read the Times piece for legal scholars' views. [Here's my earlier post about the Pennsylvania case.]

What 21st-century learning does/doesn't look like

2010-03-19T08:28:00.002-06:00

This post points to how technology in the classroom is and isn't done properly in the classroom, thanks to teacher Vicki Davis writing in Edutopia and university student Hillary Reinsberg writing in the Huffington Post. Davis talks about helping students (in the first 5 min. of the first day) turn personal Web portals like My Yahoo or iGoogle into their own "personal learning networks" (PLNs) – the new school locker. Her 9th-grade student says the approach "helps me keep things organized. It lets me know when my agenda changes," and Davis adds: "The fact that a ninth grader would talk about her own research agenda gives a glimpse into the power of the PLN; she is using a term here that is often reserved for grad students." How not to do this?: Reinsberg describes in a way that puts me to sleep just reading it: "The lights go dim, eyes begin to shut and the room gets quiet.... Welcome to a college lecture hall in 2010. Too many classes begin the same way: with an often cheesy PowerPoint presentation. The professor hooks up a projector to a computer and spends ninety minutes clicking through a series of slides." Hopefully, that isn't happening in too many middle and high schools! Because integrating 21st-century learning tools doesn't work with the sage-on-the-stage approach, which makes not allowance for the self-directed learning required for a user-driven media environment and participatory culture.

Potential iPad glitch for families

2010-03-18T14:58:00.002-06:00

Blogger Anton Wahlman at TheStreet.com thinks Apple's going to hurt the iPad's family market by not building in multiple user accounts with passwords for each family member (it's not out yet, so we're not completely sure this is the case). He feels the iPad's a lot more like a laptop than a phone, and "you wouldn't let your kids use your laptop under your personal login, with access to your emails, address book, documents, and instant messages," he writes. At CNET, my ConnectSafely co-director writes, "because of its size, price and versatility, the iPad is really a tablet computer and if is going to be used like a computer, it needs to have the same level of security and account control." But I'm not so sure Apple isn't just making it so that parents will want to have their own iPads and buy a family all-purpose one for the coffee table and road trips – IF they can afford them! [Here's my last blog post about the iPad and kids.]

Key US court decision on bullying & school

2010-03-17T12:54:00.003-06:00

This may be a big step forward in US anti-bullying efforts: A recent federal court decision in Michigan sent "a clear message to schools that inaction, or even a simple unwise reaction, is not enough when it comes to dealing with bullies," author and cyberbullying researcher Justin Patchin blogs. The court ordered a Michigan school district to pay $800,000 "to a student who claimed the school did not do enough to protect him from years of bullying," according to the Detroit Free Press. The verdict "puts districts on notice that it's not enough to stop a student from bullying another." Dane Patterson, the victim in the Michigan case, "was in middle school when the bullying began as simple name calling and verbal harassment. It escalated in high school and included being pushed into lockers and at least one incident in 10th grade where he was sexually harassed," Patchin relates. It's not that his school didn't do anything at all about this, it just didn't change a thing. The occasional disciplinary action accomplished nothing, apparently. Patchin cites court records saying that, at one point, a teacher even joined the bullying by asking Dane in front of an entire class how it felt to be hit by a girl. "This is almost unbelievable," Patchin writes. I agree. He goes on to write about what does help, and I've written about it too (see this, but I have to be repetitive because this is so relevant, here: "Because a bully's success depends heavily on context, attempts to prevent bullying should concentrate primarily on changing the context rather than directly addressing the victim's or the bully's behavior," wrote Yale University psychologist Alan Yazdin in Slate.

Fun video contest for Net users (& producers) 13+

2010-03-16T09:09:00.001-06:00

Hey, aspiring filmmakers and video producers (in Canada and the US), here's a project for you: Produce a two-minute video about Internet safety with your videocam, cellphone, or Webcam, and enter it in TrendMicro's "What's Your Story?" contest (you have to be 13 or older). Choose from one of four topics: "Keeping a good rep online" (and avoiding TMI), "Staying clear of unwanted contact" (e.g., dealing with bullies), "Accessing (legal) content that's age-appropriate," and "Keeping the cybercriminals out" (ID theft, scams, phishers, etc.), my ConnectSafely co-director Larry Magid reports at CNET. The grand prize is $10,000 and the deadline is April 30. Humor's just fine. Here's the official site where you can upload your video. Because TrendMicro is one of our supporters, I get to be one of the judges, so have fun!

Major obstacle to universal broadband & what can help

2010-03-15T10:26:00.009-06:00

Last week Chairman Julius Genachowski unveiled the children-and-family part of the FCC's universal broadband plan, designed to enable, among other things, 21st-century education. There's just one problem: Schools have long turned to law enforcement for guidance in informing their communities about youth safety on the Net, broadband or otherwise, and the guidance they're getting scares parents, school officials, and children about using the Internet.

Fear tactics don't work

"Over the last decade, much of the Internet safety material – information still present on many state attorneys general web sites and in instruction material they provide – contains disinformation that creates the fear that young people are at high risk of online sexual predation," writes author Nancy Willard of the Center for Safe & Responsible Internet Use (see the paper for examples), "when the actual research and arrest data indicates the opposite. There is a tendency among law enforcement officials to think that scare tactics are effective in reducing risk behavior. Research has never found this to be so."

That last sentence is important, because Willard footnotes it and links to what the research is showing us about the fear-based approach, as well as how we can get it right and optimize kids' broadband use going forward. The University of Virginia's Social Norms Institute says, "Until recently, the predominant approach in the field of health promotion sought to motivate behavior change by highlighting risk. Sometimes called 'the scare tactic approach' or 'health terrorism,' this method essentially hopes to frighten individuals into positive change by insisting on the negative consequences of certain behaviors. As sociologist H. Wesley Perkins has pointed out, however, this kind of traditional strategy 'has not changed behavior one percent'."

In fact, the scare-tactic approach is doubly problematic: Besides the fact that it fails to change behavior, it also hinders the efforts of visionary educators (who I've talked with, met at conferences, and followed on Twitter) to capitalize on and guide students' use of new media by integrating them into all appropriate subjects, pre-K-12 (for example, a middle school teacher in New Jersey told me, "My students are as afraid of the Internet as their parents are now," and another in New York that a parent of one of her students told members of the school board that she didn't want her child using the Internet with her peers because their parents could get hold of her email address, and "one of those parents could be a predator"). [Willard points to a report released by the FCC in February, "Broadband Adoption and Use in America," showing that 24% of US broadband users and nearly half (46%) of non-broadband users "strongly agree that the Internet is too dangerous for children."]

What does work

What will help youth, 21st-century education, and universal broadband move forward? What has "revolutionized the field of health promotion," according to the UVA Institute: the social-norms approach. "Essentially, the social-norms approach uses a variety of methods to correct negative misperceptions (usually overestimations of use [of alcohol or drugs, it says, so think: overestimations of risky or cruel online behavior like "everybody hates her," "bullying is normal," "everyone shares passwords with friends," etc.]), and to identify, model, and promote the healthy, protective behaviors that are the actual norm in a given population. When properly conducted, it is an evidence-based, data-driven process, and a very cost-effective method of achieving large-scale positive results" (see this on social-norming and Net safety and this on the whole-school approach to bullying). The Institute adds that the social-norms approach has had proven results in "tobacco prevention, seat-belt use, sexual assault prevention, and academic performance."

With the help of the FCC, the FTC, the DOE, and other government departments leading this positive, research-based approach to youth online safety (Chairman Genochowski said last week this will be an interagency effort), as a society, we can lower public resistance to broadband adoption and begin to free up American education to do for children's use of new media what it has long done for their use of books: guide and enrich them (examples here and here). But not only that: School will become more relevant to our highly new-media-engaged kids, and students will become more engaged.

Related links

Willard's books include Cyber-safe Kids, Cyber-savvy Teens: Helping Young People Learn to Use the Internet Safely and Responsibly and Cyberbullying and Cyberthreats: Responding to the Challenge of Online Social Aggression, Threats, and Distress

Here's why a positive approach to youth online safety is the way to go ("Online Safety 3.0: Empowering & Protecting Youth" at ConnectSafely.org).

A mother lode of research findings on how youth use new media can be found in Hanging Out, Messing Around, and Geeking Out: Kids Living and Learning with New Media (MIT Press, 2009). See also "Major study on youth & media: Let's take a closer look" in NFN, 1/21/10.

More on the over-used fear-based approach of the past decade here in NetFamilyNews: "Key crossroads for Net safety: ISTTF report released", "Why technopanics are bad", "'Predator panic'" in May 2006, when I first saw the phrase used, and a collection of my posts about research and news reports on predators

"School filtering & students' workarounds" in NFN

FCC's positive new plan for digital literacy & Net safety

2010-03-12T11:20:00.013-07:00

This morning Elmo of Sesame Street helped Julius Genachowski of the FCC launch the child- and family-empowerment part of the FCC's universal broadband plan (trying to understand Mr. Genachowski's job, Elmo asked, "So you're the chairman of the Funky Chicken Club?"). But before Elmo joined him, the Federal Communications Commission's chairman spoke of the "four pillars" of broadband Internet for US families:

Digital access – "every child should have broadband access," Genachowski said, and one of every 4 kids is missing out. "Anything less than 100% access is not good enough," because "every child must benefit from digital opportunities and do so safely."

Digital literacy "doesn't just mean teaching children basic digital skills" (though that's important, too, he said), "but also teaching children how to think analytically, critically, creatively" and to "teach media literacy." He said that both digital and media literacy skills are particularly critical, given how much time the average child spends a day in and with digital media. "This is not just a good idea," he said, "it's increasingly a job and citizenship requirement"....

Digital citizenship – Genachowski said the FCC plan is not just about giving children access and teaching them how to use the tools, but also teaching them how to be responsible community members, which gives them "the ability to participate in a vibrant digital democracy" (I'd argue in democracy, not just the digital kind; we adults keep thinking in this binary, delineating virtual/real, online/offline, digital/non- way). He also acknowledged the challenges to this effort, including online "anonymity," which masks the impacts of their online behaviors on others.

Safety – The FCC chair mentioned first the risk of online harassment, saying "43% have been cyberbullied, and only 10% have told someone." He also referred to distracted driving and inappropriate advertising. My connection to the event's live video streaming was a little sketchy, so the fact that I didn't hear a reference to "predators" in the mix could've been due to my connection; but his starting with cyberbullying was an important high-level acknowledgement of the findings of the Internet Safety Technical Task Force, which some attorneys general have sought to discredit (see this for examples and a link to the ISTTF report). Schools often turn to law enforcement as their authority on Internet safety, so fears not grounded in research which are generated by senior law enforcement officials and published in their Web sites could be an obstacle to 21st-century learning and universal broadband adoption.

Though the plan is positive, Genachowski acknowledged children's experiences with media certainly aren't always: "Parents are asking themselves whether they should be embracing new technologies or worrying about them. The answer is, we have to do both," he said, as EnterpriseNetworkingPlanet reports.

To help parents and schools, he announced a "digital literacy corps to mobilize thousands of technically-trained youths and adults to train non-adopters," my ConnectSafely co-director Larry Magid reported in CNET; a plan to get public libraries "more broadband capacity"; "a national dialog" in the form of FCC-hosted town meetings around the country; a new section of FCC.gov for kids and parents; and an interagency working group on online safety (something I've been hoping would happen for a while), which certainly includes the Federal Trade Commission and its pioneering work on virtual worlds and free, well-written Netcetera booklet.

"Let's focus on what parents can do" in helping their kids have positive experiences with digital media, "not on what they can't," Genachowski concluded. Exactly, Mr. Chairman. Last July ConnectSafely made exactly that point in "Online Safety 3.0: Empower and Protecting Youth": "To be relevant to young people, its intended beneficiaries, Net safety needs to respect youth agency, embrace the technologies they love, use social media in the instruction process, and address the positive reasons for safe use of social technology. It’s not safety from bad outcomes but safety for positive ones."

Related links

"Multimedia in the Classroom - The Future Is Here" a video in which New Jersey middle school teacher Marianne Malmstrom (as avatar Knowclue Kidd) describes and illustrates what a powerful teaching tool machinima (like animated video, cinema+machine, or moving screen capture) is for young new-media producers and sharers (Generation Video?)

"I Need My Teachers to Learn," a musical plea for 21st-century learning from students' perspective, written, performed, and produced by educator and tech integration specialist Kevin Honeycutt in Hutchinson, Ks. (thanks to California educator Anne Bubnic for pointing it out)

"'21st-century statecraft' at home and school"," which I blogged because inspired by Secretary of State Clinton's vision for Internet freedom and call for creating "norms of behavior among states." She got me thinking about how we need to start here at home, in homes and classrooms, promoting and modeling norms of good behavior online as well as offline, something that the FCC, FTC, and Department of Education are now addressing!

"How to teach Net safety, ethics, security? Blend them in!"

The full text of Chairman Genachowski's speech today.

More evidence student anti-gay bullying is rampant

2010-03-12T10:29:00.001-07:00

More than half of self-identified gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender (GLBT) 11-to-22-year-olds surveyed said they'd been cyberbullied in the past 30 days, Futurity.org reports. The study, by Iowa State University researchers Warren Blumenfeld and Robyn Cooper, "appears in the LGBT-themed issue of the International Journal of Critical Pedagogy, being released March 15," Futurity adds. It was an online survey of "444 junior high, high school, and college students between the ages of 11 and 22–including 350 self-identified non-heterosexual subjects" (here's an audio interview at CNET by ConnectSafely co-director Larry Magid with Dr. Blumenfield). An earlier study by the Gay, Lesbian & Straight Education Network and Harris Interactive I blogged about found that LGBT youth are "up to four times more likely to attempt suicide than their heterosexual peers." I have to repeat the profound words of New York Times columnist Charles Blow after two children's suicides last year which reportedly involved anti-gay bullying: "Children can’t see their budding lives through the long lens of wisdom - the wisdom that benefits from years passed, hurdles overcome, strength summoned, resilience realized, selves discovered and accepted, hearts broken but mended and love experienced in the fullest, truest majesty that the word deserves. For them, the weight of ridicule and ostracism can feel crushing and without the possibility of reprieve." [See also my blog post "Cyberbullying better defined."]

Meanwhile, preliminary results of another bullying project of researchers at the University of Ottawa and McMaster University show "that bullying can produce signs of stress, cognitive deficits and mental-health problems," the Toronto Globe & Mail reports. Lead researcher Tracy Vaillancourt said her team knows brains under bullying conditions are functionally different (act differently) but doesn't yet know if there's a structural difference, and to find out they'll do brain scanning of 70 victims they've been following for five years. Vaillancourt "says she hopes her work will legitimize the plight of children who are bullied, and encourage parents, teachers and school boards to take the problem more seriously."

Net access a basic human right: Study

2010-03-11T10:00:00.004-07:00

The US's Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is not alone in saying everybody should have broadband Internet access. The UK government has promised to deliver universal broadband by 2012, and the EU is also committed to providing universal access via broadband. In fact, basic Net access is coming to be seen as a fundamental human right. "Almost four in five people around the world believe that access to the Internet is a fundamental right," the BBC reports, citing a survey of more than 27,000 people in 26 countries. The BBC said its survey found that 87% of internet users view Net access this way, and 70% of non-users do. "International bodies such as the UN are also pushing for universal net access," the BBC adds, pointing also to Dr. Hamadoun Toure, secretary-general of the International Telecommunication Union, as saying the Net is now basic infrastructure, such as "roads, waste [removal] and water" because the ability to participate is essential in a "knowledge society." How about you – do you see Net access (among many other things, of course) as a basic right for everybody? Pls comment here or in the ConnectSafely forum. Meanwhile, "the internet is among a record 237 individuals and organisations nominated for this year's Nobel Peace Prize," the BBC reports in a separate article, beating last year's record of 205 nominations. [See also "UN Child Rights Convention: How about online rights?"]

How Americans 13+ use their cellphones

2010-03-10T11:22:00.002-07:00

Text messaging is by far the No. 1 activity of US mobile phone users aged 13 and up, according to the latest figures from comScore. Though talking on the phone isn't even on the list (presumably all cellphone users do that), comScore's January figures show that 63.5% of mobile subscribers send text messages. The other mobile activities on the list are "Used browser" (28.6%), "Played games" (21.7%), "Used downloaded apps" (19.8%), "Access social network site or blog" (17.1%), and "Listened to music" (12.8%). Social networking by phone was the biggest growth area between last October and January, at 3.3% growth over the three months.

Can the social Web be policed?

2010-03-09T13:55:00.004-07:00

In "Cyber-bullying cases put heat on Google, Facebook," Reuters points to increasing signs around the world that people want to hold social-media companies responsible for their users' behavior. "The Internet was built on freedom of expression. Society wants someone held accountable when that freedom is abused. And major Internet companies like Google and Facebook are finding themselves caught between those ideals," it reports. Back before social networking, when people harassed or fought merely over the phone, people didn't hold phone companies accountable for settling the disputes. In the US, the Communications Decency Act extended that "safe haven" to Internet service providers, and courts have included social-media companies in that category ever since.

Here's the view from Australia, where the Sydney Morning Herald reports some cruel defacement of tribute pages in Facebook have gotten Prime Minister Kevin Rudd to consider "appointing an online ombudsman to deal with social networking issues." [Maybe that's where we're headed: countries having ombudsmen able to decide if complaints in their countries should be "escalated" to their specially appointed contacts at social sites at home and abroad? But what about sleazy social-media operations that fly under the radar or refuse to deal?]

Certainly it's understandable that people expect more from social network sites than they do from phone companies because bullying is more public and harder to take back, but is the expectation logical? That's an honest question, not a rhetorical one (please comment here or in the ConnectSafely forum), because what does not seem to be different in this new media environment is how arguments and bad behavior get resolved: by the people involved. It may take time with complaints sent from among tens and in some cases hundreds of millions of users, but fake defaming profiles and hate groups do get deleted by reputable social network sites like MySpace and Facebook. Deleting the visible representation of bullying behavior, however, doesn't change much. Bullies can put up new fake profiles as quickly as – often more quickly than – the original ones can be taken down.

Of course we should expect companies to be responsible and take such action, but can we reasonably blame them if doing so has no effect on the underlying behavior? What court cases like the one in Italy against Google executives for an awful bullying video on YouTube that the court felt wasn't taken down fast enough (see the article in the Washington Post above) illustrate are: humanity's struggle to wrap its collective brain around a new, truly global, user-driven medium where the "content" is not just social but behavioral – and the full spectrum of human behavior at that.

If you do, please comment, but I know of no real solution to social cruelty on the social Web as yet except a concerted effort on the part of the portion of humanity that cares to adjust to this strange, sometimes scary new media environment by adjusting our thinking and behavior. That includes teaching children from the earliest age, at home and school, social literacy as well as tech and media literacy (social literacy involves citizenship, civility, ethics, and critical thinking about what they upload as much as download) – as well as modeling them for our children. Can it be that universal, multi-generational behavior modification is not just an ideal, but the only logical goal? What am I missing, here?

Cellphones & school: A great mix

2010-03-09T11:35:00.007-07:00

Today, two views on mobile learning: that of an 18-year-old social entrepreneur and school-reform activist in Georgia and that of a research guest-blogging at O'Reilly's Radar....

If you have any doubts about mobile learning at school, I have two suggestions: 1) Take about 5 minutes to watch college freshman Travis Allen of Fayetteville, Ga., demonstrate how iPhones can be used in school, from classroom applications to keeping track of homework to student-teacher-parent communications in a video on YouTube, and 2) check out the iSchool Initiative, a nonprofit organization Allen founded as a "partnership of students, teachers, school administrators, and software application developers" designed to help all parties "comprehend each others' needs" and help students themselves advocate for the intelligent use of technology at school.

It all started, Allen says in his blog, when his parents got him an iPod Touch for Christmas of 2008. Now at Kennesaw State University, he says the Initiative has "three primary objectives: raising awareness for the technological needs of the classroom, providing collaborative research on the use of technology in the classroom, and guiding schools in the implementation of this technology." He's not alone. See, for example, this tutorial on YouTube from Radford University in Virginia showing teachers step-by-step how to create a quiz on the iPod Touch so the class can take the quiz and together go over the results in the same class.

Why cellphones, not textbooks?

Qualcomm has been looking into just that question, funding field research such as Project K-Nect in rural North Carolina, where remedial math on iPod Touches has helped students increase proficient by 30%. Writing in Radar, Marie Bjerede, Qualcomm's vice president of wireless education technology, says the project has turned up four reasons why it helps to teach with cellphones:

1. Multimedia in their hands. Each set of math problems starts with a little animated video showing how to work the problem. "You could theorize that this context prepares the student to understand the subsequent text-based problem better. You could also theorize that watching a Flash animation is more engaging (or just plain fun)," Bjerede writes.
2. Instruction is personalized. So "students need to compare solutions" not answers. "How did you get that" replaces "what did you get?"
3. Collaborative math. "Students are asked to record their solutions on a shared blog and are encouraged to both post and comment. Over time, a learning community has emerged that crosses classrooms and schools and adds the kind of human interaction that an isolated, individual drill (be it textbook or digital) lacks and that a single teacher is unlikely to have the bandwidth to provide to each student."
4. Unanticipated participation: "Students who don't like to raise their hands use the devices to ask questions or participate in collaborative problem solving [with blogging and instant messaging]. There appears to be something democratizing about having a 'back channel' as part of the learning environment."

Related links

A teacher's iPod Touch proposal (to her school tech director) is linked to in this blog post about her – Sonya Woloshen, a new teacher who uses mobile and other technologies in the classroom but whose focus is on "the meaningful engagement of students ... learning transferable skills and teaching each other as they learned," writes blogger and Vancouver, B.C. vice-principal David Truss. Here's another educator's blog post about Sonya, including a video interview with her about teaching with students' "Personally Owned Devices" (PODs) – Hey, it's 2010. They're in their pockets! Sonya says. And stop with the excuses, like, "They don't all have one." They don't all have to; they can share in class; they have splitters that allow five to listen at the same time!

Touchscreen phone data: Gartner says the market for touchscreen phones like the iPhone, Droid, and Nexus One will nearly double this year. It says the worldwide market "will surpass 362.7 million units in 2010, a 96.8 percent increase from 2009 sales of 184.3 million units," and they'll account for 58% of mobile device sales worldwide "and more than 80% in developed markets such as North America and Western Europe."

"The three important lessons banning cellphones teaches kids" in The Innovative Educator blog

Two important studies on this from the Joan Ganz Cooney Center in New York: "Pockets of Potential: Using Mobile Technologies to Promote Children's Learning" and "The Digital Promise: Transforming Learning with Innovative Uses of Technology."

My last feature on this at the beginning of this school year: "From digital disconnect to mobile learning," linking to some important data and mobile-learning projects and drawing from compelling research by Project Tomorrow

Drivers, don't text!: New campaign

2010-03-08T12:00:00.003-07:00

With its "Txtng & Drivng ... It Can Wait" project, AT&T just joined Verizon Wireless in campaigning to stop the practice of texting while driving. AT&T's campaign, aimed at teens, is using "television, radio, print, the Internet, shopping malls, even the protective 'clings' over the front of new cellphones, to target young drivers," USATODAY reports. Verizon Wireless launched its "Don't Text and Drive" campaign last year. Persuading drivers not to text may take time. USATODAY cites the view of Peter Kissinger of the AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety, saying that the national Click It or Ticket seat belt campaign worked "because it has a law generally accepted by the public, a visible enforcement component and a big public awareness effort." USATODAY adds that, in 2008, the latest figures available from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, "5,870 people died and more than a half-million were hurt in crashes involving a distracted or inattentive driver," and "young, inexperienced drivers are disproportionately represented among these drivers." US 13-to-17-year-olds send or receive an average of 3,146 texts a month, or 10 an hour, on average, for every hour they're not either sleeping or in school, according to Nielsen numbers I recently blogged about. Let's hope that includes every hour that 16- and 17-year-olds aren't driving.

Fresh debate on effects of violence in videogames

2010-03-05T16:45:00.004-07:00

The long debate over whether violent videogames increase violent thinking and behavior in players has heated up as the result of a study published in this month's issue of Psychological Bulletin. A Washington Post blog does a great job of presenting both sides of this latest iteration, represented by the study's authors, led by psychologist Craig Anderson at Iowa State University, and the researchers who are the main objects of the study's criticism: Christopher Ferguson and John Kilburn of the department of behavioral applied science and criminal justice at Texas A&M International University. Anderson's study analyzed previous studies of 130,000 male and female players of various ages in the US, Europe, and Japan. In an accompanying commentary in Psychological Bulletin, Ferguson and Kilburn write that the study shows a bias in the studies it selected for review and "found only a weak connection between violent video gaming and violent thoughts and deeds." Check out the article for some other important views on the subject, including that of Cheryl K. Olson and Lawrence Kutner, co-founders and directors of the Harvard Medical School Center for Mental Health and Media, who "studied real children and families in real situations" and published their results in the 2008 study "Grand Theft Childhood," which I blogged about here. [See also "Play, Part 2: Violence in videogames" last July and "Videogames & aggression: New study" about an early stage of Anderson's research.]

Kids experiencing less bullying, sexual assault: Study

2010-03-04T16:16:00.002-07:00

Schools, keep up the good work! A new national study by the Crimes Against Children Research Center found that bullying, sexual assault, and other violence against US children ages 2-17 "declined substantially" between 2003 and 2008, the University of New Hampshire's CACRC reports. The study's lead author, David Finkelhor, credits schools' and other prevention efforts to reduce bullying and sexual assault as part of the explanation for the declines, though adding that "children's victimization is still shockingly high." In the past year, physical bullying decreased from 22% of youth to 15%, and sexual assault from 3.3% to 2%, the CACRC study found. Certainly we all have more work to do – and not just schools: The authors "did not find declines in physical abuse and neglect by caregivers, but [they] did find a decline in psychological abuse. Thefts of children’s property also declined, but robbery was one of the few offenses to show an increase." This page at the UNH site has a link to the full study, "Trends in Childhood Violence and Abuse Exposure," in Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine. Here's coverage today in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution; thanks to Cobb County School District risk-prevention specialist Patti Agatston in the Atlanta area for pointing the Journal-Constitution article out. Later added: the Wall Street Journal's coverage.

Students on bullying: Important study

2010-03-03T17:22:00.003-07:00

Having someone, especially a peer, really listen and be there for them seems to help bullying victims more than anything, according to students themselves. A new study of nearly 12,000 US students in grades 5-12 offers important insights into bullying victims' own views on what causes bullying, how it affects them, and what does and doesn't work in dealing with it. The students, surveyed by the Youth Voice Project, represent 25 schools in 12 states across the US.

The Project's authors, Stan Davis and Charisse Nixon, PhD, write that about a fifth of respondents (22%) reported regular victimization (two or more times a month), and that victimization was broken down this way: Of those 22%, 46% characterized the harassment as mild ("bothered me only a little"); 36% moderate ("bothered me quite a bit"); 11% severe ("I had or have trouble eating, sleeping, or enjoying myself because of what happened to me"); and 7% very severe ("I felt or feel unsafe and threatened because of what happened to me"). So the study extrapolated that 13% of the US's student population, or about 7 million students, are experiencing moderate-to-very-severe mistreatment by peers.

Who's being victimized: Middle school needs particular attention, since "the majority of traumatized students are in grades 6-8." Other characteristics: 54% are female, 42% male; about 6% of "traumatized students" (being moderately-to-very-severely mistreated) reported receiving special education assistance, and 10% "reported having some form of a physical disability." Ethnicity: The majority of "traumatized students" (moderate-to-very severe) described themselves as White, followed by Hispanic American and then Multi-Racial; 32% reported eligibility for free or reduced lunch; 9% of them had immigrated to the US within the past two years.

What bullies focus on: Look at what the results say about the importance of teaching tolerance, empathy, perspective-taking: "Looks" was the focus of 55% of moderate-to-very-severe mistreatment and "Body Shape" of 37%. The next highest focus was "Race," at 16%; "Sexual Orientation" and "Family Income" came next at 14% and 13%, respectively.

Make it safe to report: A higher percentage than I usually see (42%) say they report their moderate-to-very-severe mistreatment to an adult at school, but that's still less than half. So the authors write that it's "important to identify safe ways for students to communicate with adults at school about their negative peer interactions."

What helps most: Being heard and acknowledged seems to help victims more than most responses by both adults and peers. Adults first: The top three responses (to victims) "likely to lead to things getting better for the student than to things getting worse" were "listened to me," "gave me advice," and "checked in with me afterwards to see if the behavior stopped." Coming in at a noticeably distant 4th, interestingly, was "kept up increased adult supervision for some time." As for responses from peers (including friends), the top three were "Spent time with me," "Talked to me," and "Helped me get away." The authors add that "positive peer actions were strikingly more likely to be rated more helpful than were positive self actions or positive adult actions."

There are so many more really substantive insights in this report (and future ones Davis and Nixon are planning) that I truly recommend that you read it. But here are three key takeaways:

1. What victims are often advised - e.g., "tell the person how you feel," "walk away," "tell the person to stop," "pretend it doesn't bother you" – "made things worse much more often than they made things better."
2. The effectiveness of adult interventions depends a lot "on context, school culture, climate, as well as the way in which each intervention is carried out."
3. "Our students report that asking for and getting emotional support and a sense of connection has helped them the most among all the strategies we compared."

Related links

"Clicks & cliques: Really meaty advice for parents on cyberbullying"

"Clicks, cliques & cyberbullying, Part 2: Whole-school response is key"

"Cyberbullying & bullying-related suicides: 1 way to help our digital-age kids": What many bullying and cyberbullying cases seem to have in common is "the 24/7, non-stop nature of the harassment the teens faced – the tech-enabled constant drama of school life turning into 24/7 cruelty.... [They] indicate an urgent need for all of us to help our children come up for air, to maintain some perspective about the 'alternate reality' of school life, especially in the middle-school years."

"Social norming: So key to online safety"

"Bystanders can help when bullying happens"

How to teach Net safety, ethics, security? Blend them in!

2010-03-02T09:26:00.005-07:00

US K-12 students aren't getting adequate instruction in "cyberethics, cybersafety, and cybersecurity," according to a just-released study sponsored by the National Cybersecurity Alliance and Microsoft released today. The survey, of more than 1,000 teachers, 400 administrators, and 200 tech coordinators, found that – although over 90% of administrators, teachers, and tech coordinators support teaching these topics in school – only 35% of teachers and just over half of school administrators say the topics are required in their curriculum. A bit of pass-the-buck thinking turned up in the results too – 72% of teachers said parents bear most of the responsibility for teaching these topics (51% of administrators say teachers do). They're both partly right; it's everybody's responsibility, the experts say (see this). But the thing is, most teachers are already teaching online safety (which includes ethics) and may not even know it. More on that in a moment....

The filtering hurdle

The biggest hurdle to Net-safety instruction may actually be school filters! Note this statement in the study's press release: "The survey also found a high reliance on shielding students instead of teaching behaviors for safe and secure Internet use. More than 90% of schools have built up digital defenses, such as filtering and blocking social network sites...." Then note UK education watchdog Ofsted's finding just last month – that schools using extensive or "locked down" filtering "were less effective in helping [students] to learn how to use new technologies safely." If schools could just teach a lot of what they've always taught, folding digital media in with traditional media (aka books, pencils, etc.), the academic ethics and citizenship they've always "taught" (hopefully modeled and encouraged) will naturally include "cyberethics," for example.

Citizenship is a verb!

A classroom is a community, as is a blog, a team, or the group of people working together on a Google Doc. How do participants/"citizens" treat one another in those various communities as well as in the classroom one? You can't *be* a citizen without a chance to practice citizenship in the community where you're supposed to be a citizen. The same goes for the digital sort; today's social media give us a whole array of opportunities to practice citizenship in online communities.

"Student leadership becomes an engine of citizenship," Sylvia Martinez of GenYes told me in a phone interview recently. I asked her what she meant by student leadership: "It's putting students in charge of something that matters [such as enlisting students to help integrate technology and digital media into the classroom, as GenYes programs do for schools] – giving them responsibility, then watching them, expecting them to do things that show they've accepted the responsibility, and then challenging them to do more," Martinez adds. "It's a cycle. Students are engaged [citizenship as civic engagement – or, in this case, classroom, task, or project engagement] because they're doing something important." So let students help with or run the incorporating of blogs, wikis, Google docs, and nings into class work!

Citizenship is protective

As for "cybersafety," that too is practiced naturally when people are thinking about citizenship (and ethics!) online and offline. How can I say that? Because the research shows that peer harassment and cyberbullying represent the most common risk to students, and aggressive behavior more than doubles the aggressor's risk of being victimized; so civility, respect for others, and citizenship represent the lion's share of safety online for students. [As for the predation risk, which is extremely low for students who are not already deemed "at risk youth," the research shows (see this), the don't-talk-to-strangers-online message and associated fears have gotten through to kids during several years of technopanic; a teacher in New Jersey recently told me that her middle school students are just as afraid of predators as their parents are.]

Media literacy – critical thinking about behavior as well as information in a blog, wiki, Ning, or virtual world – supports citizenship and safety, as students learn to think critically about the motives behind and accuracy of info, comments, photos, text messages, etc. they download and upload, whether the source is a friend, advertiser, or stranger. This is not rocket science!

Students involved in tech integration can also model and help teach good computer and network security practices – that third C in the study mentioned above, Cybersecurity. This, too, is an aspect of good citizenship: protecting our passwords, not being tricked by phishers and other manipulators, and knowing what's needed to protect our computers and networks. Critical thinking is key here, too, because social engineering, or manipulation, is a basic component of phishing and malicious hacking.

Basic ingredients, with or without a recipe

This kind of "online safety" education – learning to behave civilly and ethically online and offline and to respect one's own and others' passwords, identities, and intellectual and physical property at home and school – is not only protective, it's *relevant* to students because they enable all of us to function effectively in a 21st-century media environment.

Martinez told me that half the schools GenYes works with say they don't want a cybercurriculum, and about half very definitely do. So, hey, if any schools do want formal curricula or lesson plans for "cybersafety, cybersecurity, and cybercitizenship," there is no better material than Cybersmart's. Just don't let those big words make you think that this is all about new technology, some sort of add-on to students' life or education, or anything that we haven't all been thinking about and working on together for a very long time!

Related link

You only need one: educator Anne Bubnic's 2.5 pages of "digital citizenship" links, starting here.

Helping kids gain from adversity: Inspiration for parents, teachers

2010-03-01T09:13:00.004-07:00

I just listened to Aimee Mullins's just-posted TED Talk of last October and thought to myself anyone who loves teaching, young people, and the power of the human spirit would resonate with this. Aimee is an actor, athlete, and model (full bio here) who has not merely overcome and pushed through the adversity of being born without fibula, or shin bones, but used that adversity to find and bring out her in-born potential. She talks about not long ago bumping into the OB-GYN who delivered her in her home town in Pennsylvania and hearing about how, because of her career, he tells his medical students, "In my experience, unless repeatedly told otherwise and if given just a modicum of support, if left to their own devices, a child will achieve." She adds, "If we can change the current paradigm from one of achieving normalcy to achieving ability or potency, we can release the power of so many more children and invite them to engage their rare and valuable abilities with the community" – the abilities each child has. She later adds something I think my friend Lenore Skenazy over at FreeRangeKids.com, kindred spirit Tanya Byron in the UK, and a whole lot of other parents would appreciate: "Our responsibility is not simply shielding those we care for from adversity but preparing them to meet it well."

Mullins says something important about technology and social networking too (which I feel would resonate with the authors of Hanging Out, Messing Around, and Geeking Out). After reading the dictionary definition of "disability" to the audience, she said: "Our language hasn't allowed us to get caught up with the changes in our society, many of which have been brought about by technology." She lists some examples, among them "social-networking platforms [which] allow people to self-identify, to claim their own description of themselves so they can go align with global groups of their own choosing." Think about this in light of bullying and cyberbullying, where kids identified by others as "handicapped" in any way are often the targets. Social media can help remove or at least delay the labels bullies exploit, giving children some much-needed space and peace for identity exploration. Mullins puts it so eloquently: "Maybe technology is revealing more clearly to us now what has always been a truth: that everyone has something rare and powerful to offer our society and that the human ability to adapt is our greatest asset." Don't miss the talk, including the lines Mullins quotes from a 14th Persian poet at the end.

Unruly schoolbus gets Wi-Fi, calms down

2010-02-25T14:21:00.001-07:00

Clearly, what goes around comes around. I used to do homework on the schoolbus (we won't go into how long ago), and now – since so much homework involves the Internet, apparently – students can now do homework on schoolbuses. IF they're Wi-Fi-enabled, of course. And the Internet's presence, interestingly, on the bus seems to be having a calming effect – see "Wi-Fi Turns Rowdy Bus Into Rolling Study Hall" in the New York Times. "Behavioral problems [offline ones, anyway] have virtually disappeared," it adds, since a school in Vail, Ariz., "mounted a mobile Internet router to bus No. 92's sheet-metal frame." Now they're going to have to train bus drivers in digital citizenship instruction too!

Foursquare & other geolocation apps: For young adults, not kids

2010-02-24T13:42:00.008-07:00

More and more, I'm seeing tweets about people becoming mayors of coffee shops in my Twitter stream. They're playing Foursquare on their phones, which pushes their "checkins" or location disclosures out to their Twitter followers. Foursquare is part cellphone social-mapping game, part Yelp (another way to find food, drink, or friends using your phone's geolocation technology). "A large number of foursquare users send their checkins to Twitter and/or Facebook, and therefore make their location available to an audience much larger than just their foursquare friends," says Foursquare. It's not for everybody. Someone over at eModeration in the UK (a company that helps keep kids safe in virtual worlds) thinks it's kind of dumb. It's really not for children. But there's a safer way to play it, if they insist. If yours do, ask them not to use their real photo; you don't want them identified by their photo in shops or restaurants where they "check in." They can just post a face shot of their avatar or dog or favorite cartoon character in their profile. One of the appeals for kids (young and old) is that, like kids' virtual worlds that sell real-world plush toys, Foursquare has real-world objects that serve as awards or "nerd merit badges" representing "the virtual achievements you get for checking in to places using Foursquare," Mashable reports. In other words, you get points for showing up at your favorite Starbucks, points which can add up to becoming its "mayor."

This morning I testified at a US House of Representatives joint-subcommittee hearing on "The Collection and Use of Location Information for Commercial Purposes" – the privacy and safety implications of just this sort of technology. There definitely seemed to be a consensus in the hearing room that consumer privacy law needs to be updated and that, to be effective over the long term, the updating shouldn't focus on any single technology. I completely agree with that because the people who used to have control over how cellphone users' location information is used – the mobile carriers – no longer always do. More and more, control is spread out across the spectrum: carrier, operating system provider (e.g., Apple, Google, Microsoft), app developer, and consumer (because, with apps like Foursquare, we're disclosing our own location). It's all becoming a mashup - which is why parents need to know that all these apps on iPhones and iPod Touches allow kids to share their location.

So – if your child's phone is on a family plan behind your password with, say, AT&T or Verizon Wireless, and if you don't use the parental control that blocks app downloads (something to consider if they're not telling you what they download) – it's a good idea periodically to check what apps your kids have on their phones and ask them what these apps do. If they share your child's location with anyone besides you, you'll want to have a conversation about who's on their contact list. Make sure it's only friends they know in "real life." Certainly all this goes, too, for iPod Touches, which are not on family cellphone plans. As for Google Buzz, which is both phone- and computer-based, see my post on that; parents will want to help their kids see the value of making their conversations "private," or just among friends, which points to a negotiation: All participants in the conversation need to agree that it's just for them and adjust privacy features accordingly.

[BTW, Foursquare isn't the only location-based cellphone app. Others are Brightkite and Whrrl (see this blog post); Gowalla, which isn't a social game (see this blog post); and the cellphone service loopt, which is becoming more app-like (see Mashable.com).]

Did school spy on student? FBI investigating

2010-02-23T07:29:00.004-07:00

A Philadelphia-area family has filed a lawsuit against their child's school district for spying on students using Webcams on a school-supplied laptops inside students' homes, and the FBI is investigating, the Washington Post reports. "The FBI will explore whether Lower Merion School District officials broke any federal wiretap or computer-intrusion laws." The district supplies laptops to all 2,300 students at its two high schools, the Post added. At CNET, ConnectSafely's Larry Magid blogged that the remote Webcam monitoring (which the district said is now disabled) was a security measure activated only by the district's security and technology department when a laptop had been reported missing or stolen. "The tracking-security feature was limited to taking a still image of the operator and the operator's screen," Magid reported. The Post article says the district has acknowledged that Webcams had been activated "42 times in the past 14 months," and the activations had helped the school find 18 of the 42 missing computers. But the issue that led to the lawsuit so far doesn't seem to be theft-related. "According to the suit, Harriton vice principal Lindy Matsko told Blake on Nov. 11 that the school [one of the district's two high schools] thought he was 'engaged in improper behavior in his home.' She allegedly cited as evidence a photograph 'embedded' in his school-issued laptop," according to the Post. This is pretty chilling behavior on the part of school officials. "The case shows how even well-intentioned plans can go awry if officials fail to understand the technology and its potential consequences," the Post cites privacy experts as saying. Compromising images from inside a student's bedroom could fall into the hands of rogue school staff or otherwise be spread across the Internet, they said." For anyone worried about being watched remotely through their Webcam, here's some clarity in another piece by Larry Magid at CNET.

Google Buzz & kids' privacy

2010-02-22T13:43:00.004-07:00

Because Buzz is brand-new and a hybrid of Gmail, micro-blogging, cellphone social mapping, and social networking, we're all at the early stages of figuring out its implications for kids – a lot of whom use Gmail. Yesterday Charlene Li, a mom and well-known social-media-industry analyst, blogged that she had discovered her 9-year-old daughter was using and really enjoying Buzz. Using it from her computer (people can also use Buzz on Apple iPhones and Google Android phones), the child had had one conversation on it with her friends. The problem was that the kids didn't know their conversation was public. Li wrote that "the easiest thing to do as a parent is to simply disable Buzz, meaning that the Google profile and all followers are deleted – permanently" (go to the bottom of your child's Gmail page and click "turn off Buzz," which will take you to where you can disable it). But because Li's daughter enjoyed Buzz so much, she seems open to "managing groups, privacy settings, etc." so her child can continue using the service. "We’ll give it a try," she writes, "but unless her friends also keep the conversation private, it will all be for naught." Ensuring that with all the other kids and their parents could be quite a project. Privacy is now a collective effort – by users too, not just providers (see "Collaborative reputation protection").

Last summer Google agreed, in response to a complaint by one of the FTC's "safe harbors" (organizations that help it enforce the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act, or COPPA), to require a birth date at registration to Gmail and, if a user indicates he or she is under 13, a session cookie to block the user from re-registering with an earlier birthdate. That's a start, but what this issue points to is the impact on children's privacy of combining social-media products within companies and connecting them across networks such as Facebook Connect. Perhaps the FTC's forthcoming review of COPPA rules and enforcement will address this emerging issue. But we feel the brilliant software engineers and project managers who develop these products need to wear their parent hats more, companies need to be thinking through children's privacy from the earliest developmental stages, and industry best practices need special sections or clauses addressing child privacy and safety. [See also "Google Buzz isn't exactly humming along" in the Wall Street Journal; "Does Google Buzz violate COPPA?" by Marquette University law Prof. Bruce Boyden (the jury's still out, he indicates); and my post at Buzz's launch, "Major buzz about Buzz, but not about its safety."]

Haiti: Texting, social Web connecting survivors with help

2010-02-22T07:40:00.003-07:00

Struggling earthquake survivors in Haiti can now text for help. "Countless volunteers" receiving the messages, the US State Department, the Pentagon, aid organizations, and Haiti's leading cellphone carrier make up an emergency contact network for Haitians seeking aid, the New York Times reports. The story leads with the experience of Coast Guard volunteer and Chicago tech firm owner Ryan Bank, who told the Times he's received more than 18,000 messages. Some volunteers monitor Facebook and Twitter postings for information indicating where supplies are needed. Messages through the network have "helped identify a tent city that the American military and relief workers were previously unaware of." To get the word out, the mobile carrier in Haiti sent "the distress code number – 4636 – to every cellphone on the Haitian network. Word of the program also went out on local Haitian radio stations." Text messaging was still possible even with damage done from fallen cell towers.

How much teens text: Latest data

2010-02-19T15:23:00.003-07:00

US 13-to-17-year-olds send or receive "an average of 3,146 texts a month each" – an average of 10 text messages an hour for every hour they're not either sleeping or in school, MarketingVox.com reports, citing the latest Nielsen figures. For 9-to-12-year-olds, the average is 1,146 texts a month or four an hour. The teen figure was for third quarter 2009, the tween one for the fourth quarter. Compare those youth numbers to the average number of monthly texts for all mobile users: 500. As for methodology, in its blog post about these findings, Nielsen reports that it "analyzes more than 40,000 mobile bills every month to determine what consumers actually are spending their money on."

Clicks, cliques & cyberbullying, Part 2: Whole-school response is key

2010-02-18T09:49:00.006-07:00

Cyberbullying is a serious problem that, according to research, is the most common online risk for young people, affecting about a third of US 13-to-17-year-olds, and has led to some tragic student suicides. Schools and courts are struggling to figure out how to deal with student behavior that occurs off school grounds but can have such a disruptive, sometimes destructive, effect on school.

All the discussion about the legal and First Amendment issues seems to be missing a key factor that points to how to handle cyberbullying: the media environment with which all these incidents are directly associated. The Internet, especially to youth, is now a) collegial or social/behavioral in nature and b) mirrors "real world" life and conditions – it's not something in addition to student or school life. Bullying online is not a whole new problem for schools and courts to deal with. It's a reflection of student relationships, and the bullying's context is largely the life of the school community, not the Internet (or cellphones or any other devices).

Cyberbullying prevention/intervention take a village too

"Because a bully's success depends heavily on context" – write Yale psychology professor Alan Yazdin and his co-author Carlo Rotella at Boston College in "Bullies: They can be stopped, but it takes a village" at Slate.com – "attempts to prevent bullying should concentrate primarily on changing the context rather than directly addressing the victim's or the bully's behavior." That, they add, involves "the entire school, including administration, teachers, and peers."

Author and educator Rosalind Wiseman agrees. In a 55-min. podcast interview she gave fellow educator and author Annie Fox, Wiseman recently said that dealing with cyberbullying "really speaks to a school's culture of dignity....

"Don't do a 45-minute assembly on cyberbullying," Wiseman said. "It's a waste of time. Have a faculty meeting, and then have a parent meeting, and tell the students this is what you're doing – not just a bullying assembly. Tell them 'we understand that this is about the whole culture of the school, and as part of that culture, you have to participate in this as well.'" Slightly tongue in cheek, Wiseman adds that this will increase "the chance of students believing you're not completely full of it."

Quick fixes don't exist

Schools will probably get plenty of eye-rolling and "whatever's" from the more socially aggressive students, but gradually things can turn around – particularly if there's disciplinary backup. [Note the word "backup": discipline is not the goal, but rather restoration of order – more on this below.] For example, when talking with a student suspected of having been the bully in an incident, the end of the conversation could go something like:

"I know we're on the same page, here: You're a person of honor, so I'm taking you on your word that this won't happen again. But you need to be clear that, if you walk out of here and, as a result of this meeting, the life of the target in any way becomes more difficult, then we are in a whole different situation – a whole different level of the problem. You need to be clear that, if that happens, you're taking a very big chance."

That conversation could also include the following. "I hope and expect that you'll be talking with your parents about this, because I'm going to be calling them within 24 hours." Wiseman tells teachers and administrators that of course the kids will talk to their parents, offering their own spin on the situation. "So it's very important to say to the parent, 'I wanted to include you from the beginning, that is why I talked with your child. I fully expected [him or her] to speak to you immediately and now I'm following up so we can work together and have this be a learning opportunity – a teachable moment – for your child."

Turning incidents into 'teachable moments'

Those words are crucial: "learning opportunity," "teachable moment." They are stepping stones on the way to building the school's "culture of dignity," as Wiseman put. Because it's merely logical that a one-time, sage-on-the-stage assembly will accomplish very little. It's also logical that involving all players and skill sets – students, parents, teachers, administrators, and counselors – creates the conditions for changing the school's culture (see this). The school is, in fact, creating a new social norm – as Elizabeth Englander, director of the Massachusetts Aggression Reduction Center and an adviser to state legislators working on bullying-education legislation, told Emily Bazelon at Slate.com – where the whole school community looks down on dissing, flaming, mean gossiping, and other social cruelty, hopefully including students' parents. The Slate piece links to some great resources for school strategizing. For example, here's a sexting investigation protocol from the Center for Safe & Responsible Internet Use offering the spectrum of sexting causes and intentions enabling school staff to ask students intelligent questions.

When an interdisciplinary group of us were working on that protocol, authored by Nancy Willard, it occurred to me that, because it lays out the spectrum of sexting's causes, it'll help school officials see why it's essential that schools not just reflexively hand off investigations to law enforcement (whose involvement some state laws require).

The goal of any incident investigation

"The immediate goal of the investigation is not discipline [and certainly not expediency] but rather support for the targeted student(s) [who may be experiencing psychological harm], and restoration of order. The ultimate goal is to create a learning opportunity for all involved. The learning opportunity should be on-the-spot, as well as school and community-wide, and focus on the areas of critical thinking, mindful decision-making, perspective-taking, and citizenship." That's a statement a couple of us worked up because we feel it's so important for everybody to understand that, in the social-media age, we can only change behavior – in schools and online communities – together, as "a village."

Here's Part 1 of this 2-part series: "Clicks & cliques: Really meaty advice for parents on cyberbullying".

Related links

In another Massachusetts incident, last week Boston-area police charged three students with identity theft reportedly for creating a fake Facebook profile and posting mean comments about a peer. In an editorial last Saturday (2/13), the Boston Globe applauded the police "for taking aggressive action against cyberbullying when so many others have failed to do so." There's the sad reality: that too often the "authority figure" taking over is the police. Law enforcement is only one piece of the multidisciplinary team that should be in place in schools and ready to step in when something comes up. The other essential roles are principal and counselor/psychologist.

"Cyberbullying better defined" – with links to two national studies showing that about one-third of teens

Finding of the Harvard Berkman Center's 2008 Internet Safety & Technical Task Force: "Bullying and harassment, most often by peers, are the most frequent threats that minors face, both online and offline" (p. 4 of Executive Summary)

The Fox-Wiseman podcast

ConnectSafely.org's Tips to Help Stop Cyberbullying

One family's tech policy

2010-02-18T09:33:00.003-07:00

One last gem from the Fox-Wiseman podcast that I blogged about last week in "Clicks & cliques" and that, if it isn't already, should be searchable on the Web as text. Toward the end of the interview, Fox asks Wiseman to share her own family technology policy (Wiseman's kids are 6 and 8). Here it is:

"Technology can be really fun to use, and it gives us incredible access to the world, but it is a privilege not a right, and because it is a privilege, you have the responsibility to use it ethically. What using technology ethically looks like to me is that you never use it to humiliate, embarrass ... or misrepresent yourself or someone else, never use a password without the person's permission, never share embarrassing information or photos of others, put someone down, or compromise yourself by sending pictures of yourself naked, half-naked or in your underwear. Remember that it is so easy for things to get out of control. You know it, I know it. So I reserve the right to check your online life, from texting to your Facebook page, and if I see that you're violating the terms of our agreement, I'll take your technology away until you can earn my trust back. This is my unbreakable, unshakeable law."

See also: "'Soft power' works better: Parenting social Web users."

Kids' virtual world that plants real trees

2010-02-17T07:27:00.003-07:00

Arbopals is a children's virtual world with very real environmental impact. During its just-launched beta test phase, the Toronto-based virtual world's nonprofit partners in more than 20 countries will plant a tree for each of the first 1,000 users who sign up (so far, kids in 43 countries have) – because "the UN says that to compensate for the damage we have all done to the environment, we should be planting '14 billion trees every year for 10 consecutive years'," Arbopals says on its home page. [Disclosure: I'm a member of the virtual world's Advisory Council.] Aimed at children aged 5-10, the beta site and world (called Arboria) at this point have games, a store, and the Arbopedia, a searchable encyclopedia "designed to complement school curricula." Here, too, is the world's YouTube channel, featuring Arbopals characters Treesa and Forrest. The site is expected to launch right before Earth Day, April 22. [In other recent NFN coverage, see "Moderator wisdom" and "Virtual world news update."]

Virtual goods growth market

2010-02-17T07:19:00.002-07:00

Players of the social game Farmville sent 500 million Valentines over 48 hours this past weekend, the Gigaom blog reported. The valentines were free, but players pay for a lot of other virtual goods. Engage Digital Media recently released 2009 figures for "virtual goods-related investments," showing that "more than $1.38 billion was invested in 87 virtual goods-related companies," triple 2008's figure. In a more in-depth story, the BBC reported that most of the virtual economy's momentum is in social games, not so much social network sites (though some social games, such as Farmville, are found on social-network sites). "In Asia, sales are already around the $5 billion mark and rapidly growing." The BBC piece describes how this economy works.

ChatRoulette: Heads up, parents!

2010-02-15T22:43:00.004-07:00

"If I were still an unpopular 12-year-old, my first ChatRoulette session might have crushed me for a year instead of just an hour," writes Sam Anderson in New York magazine in the mildest possible description of a site that Brad Stone of the New York Times just discovered was created by a 17-year-old in Moscow. It's a video site that "brings you face-to-face, via webcam, with an endless stream of random strangers all over the world," Anderson writes. Comments from email correspondents of mine confirm what he writes that about 10% of the videos that stream past are of naked males not just sitting in front of their Webcams. Stone writes, "Parents, keep your children far, far away." Anderson adds, "There's no way to manage the experience.... It’s the Wild West: a stupid, profound, thrilling, disgusting, totally lawless boom" with a powerful curiosity factor. And there are serious privacy issues, he adds. Because once you click "Play" on the home page, your computer's Webcam is activated, and you are among those streaming across other ChatRoulette players' screens, with any one of them able to grab a shot of your face and whatever else is within the frame of your Webcam.

Another heads-up: ChatRoulette's not only going viral (300 users in December, 10,000 by end of January, now 20,000 any given night), it's a group thing (hopefully not the new "Truth or Dare" or "Spin the Bottle"). When a friend came over to experience it with him, Anderson reports "the experience was different ... easier to laugh off. We ended up staying on, talking and dancing, connecting and disconnecting, for four hours." As voyeuristic as it might've felt, it wasn't all "shock porn," he writes. "We chatted with Pratt students in Bed-Stuy, with a man inexplicably sitting on his toilet, with a kid waving a gun and a knife, and with a guy who went to my wife’s old high school in California. We saw Chinese kids in computer cafés and English kids drinking beer.... We talked for half an hour with a 28-year-old tech writer from San Francisco." And another email correspondent of mine just heard over the weekend that ChatRoulette is being played by "some of our middle schoolers in [the US state of] Georgia." There may shortly be a spike in Web-filtering sales!

School filters & students' workarounds

2010-02-15T09:43:00.004-07:00

Not surprisingly, students seem to agree with Ofsted – though perhaps sometimes for different reasons ;-) – that "locked down" filtering at school isn't the best (see this about Ofsted's report). "Many young people are using 'proxy servers' to get round their schools' internet security systems, " the BBC reports, adding that students' use of these free school-filtering workarounds is on the rise. "It sounds like an obscure, techy area of computing that only geeks would know about. But when we asked pupils in one secondary school classroom who had heard of proxy servers, every hand went up." School filters can block access to known proxy sites, but there are so many and new ones pop up so constantly that it's almost impossible for the school systems to keep up. What most students aren't aware of, the BBC reports, is the security risks associated with some of these proxy sites. Some of them send Trojan software that installs monitoring applications on the computer a student's using which captures passwords and other keystrokes. For a US version of this story, see a commentary in the Washington Post last summer. Of course, the ultimate workaround is a mobile phone or wi-fi-equipped handheld device like the iPod Touch with a Web browser, and – despite school bans – their numbers are growing probably proportionately to overall smart-phone market growth. Banning phones in school is about as effective as the Ofsted report found rigid or "locked down" filtering to be. Instead, schools should embrace and teach with these devices and technologies so students can learn and practice wise use (see "From digital disconnect to mobile learning"). That helps develop the 24/7 cognitive "filter" in their heads that improves with practice and is as flexible as their use of technology is (see this).

More online freedom for students=lower risk: UK watchdog

2010-02-13T09:11:00.010-07:00

Students who are "given a greater degree of freedom to surf the Internet at school are less vulnerable to online dangers in the long-term," the BBC reports, citing a just-released study by Ofsted, the British government's education watchdog found. Ofsted looked at the state of online safety in 37 schools for students aged 5-18, finding that five of the schools had outstanding Net-safety conditions and instruction. The five shared some interesting characteristics: They had a whole-school-community approach to student Net safety, and they had "managed" rather than "locked down" systems for filtering and other safety measures. "'Managed' systems," Ofsted explains, "have fewer inaccessible sites than "locked down" systems and so require pupils to take responsibility themselves for using new technologies safely. Although the 13 schools which used 'locked down' systems kept their pupils safe while in school, such systems were less effective in helping them to learn how to use new technologies safely." The weakest area was Net-safety training for school staff, the report said. "Most training provided was 'one size fits all' and therefore did not always meet needs. There was very little evidence of schools drawing systematically on the views and concerns of pupils, their families or governors in identifying priorities for such training."

What Ofsted seems to be saying is that teaching students the critical thinking skills of media literacy ultimately lowers risk. The schools rated "outstanding" in online safety all had managed systems whereby "pupils were helped, from a very early age, to assess the risk of accessing sites. For example, at the elementary level in one of the top 5 schools, students are taught to ask themselves these questions:

"Who wrote the material on this site?"

"Is the information on it likely to be accurate or could it be altered by anybody?"

"If others click onto the site, can I be sure that they are who they say
they are?", and

"What information about myself should I not give out on the site?"

We would add a key 5th question for full social-Web safety (or "Online Safety 3.0"): "What impact will the information (photo, video, etc.) I give out on this site (or cellphone) have on my friends and my community?" We at ConnectSafely feel this question is essential because the preceding four excellent questions deal only with the impact of the info uploaded on the student himself/herself and, to move forward, we need all to understand that online well-being and safety in today's social new-media environment is, by definition, a collaboration – ideally starting in elementary school and broadening outward as a child matures. Interestingly, too, based on the research, posting negative or harassing info about others also increases risk to oneself (see this). [A pdf version of the full report can be downloaded from Ofsted's site here.]

Clicks & cliques: Really meaty advice for parents on cyberbullying

2010-02-12T10:06:00.003-07:00

Annie Fox's recent 55-min. interview with fellow educator and author Rosalind Wiseman at FamilyConfidential.com is a must-listen for parents, educators – anyone who has anything to do with teens and digital media. It has a lot to say about working through tough situations like sexting or cyberbullying incidents with young people in a candid, respectful way and, in the process, helping them understand the rights and responsibilities of being human beings as well as technology users. It's such great stuff that I felt key points of this podcast should be searchable on the Web as text and got Annie's permission to quote and paraphrase at length (hopefully accurately!). Because it's a long podcast, I'm splitting this into two parts (which are still long – apologies, but they're important!) – this week's focus is parenting; next week's on school, adding more sources.

Both Fox and Wiseman have new books out which I highly recommend: the third book of Fox's Middle School Confidential series for tweens, this one subtitled "What's Up With My Family?", and the re-release of Wiseman's best-selling Queen Bees & Wannabes with a new chapter on the role of technology in teen life. [Here's Fox's blog post about the interview.]

Moral compasses needed for navigating cyberspace

About a quarter of the way through the podcast, Wiseman talks about how she hears what many of us hear from teens: that people have always been mean to each other –cyberbullying isn't anything different from what we've dealt with in the past. So, they ask, what's the big deal?

"The minute somebody says that," Wiseman says, "that is the minute when critically thinking people stop and say, 'Why?!' Because if it involves the degradation of other people – especially if it's done for the entertainment of other people like bystanders – then that is a problem, and that is a tradition that needs to be challenged immediately."

Wiseman says to Fox that, when that comes up with teens, she tells them, "If you are going to be someone who has self-agency in the world, if you in your own way believe you have an obligation for yourself and others to live in the world with dignity, and that you have a moral compass, if you want that ability, then you have to be able to challenge the things that are 'normal' but are not right....

"I think the role of adults," Wiseman adds, "is to pierce this bubble that all of this [mean behavior] is normal now. Children think it's happening so much that [they'll tell you] that they didn't think it was wrong, and it's our role to say, 'No, actually it's not ok, and you're completely in your right to be upset about it." When they say that, teens are reflecting a culture – both online and offline, at home and at school, involving adults as well as kids – in which there has been too much acceptance of flaming, dissing, gossiping about people we know and don't know – too much negative social norming that has got to be addressed (see this about the vital role of positive social norming).

Wiseman's 'SEAL Strategy'

So when teenagers are upset about something mean a peer has said or done to them online or offline, we can calmly help them think through what happened, how they feel about it, and what they're going to do about it. One approach, Wiseman's framework for that conversation, is what she calls the "SEAL strategy" – part of the "Owning Up" curriculum she uses to help educators teach students to "own up and take responsibility for unethical behavior." When doing this strategizing, parents and kids of course plug in their own situation and words. [Don't worry if the strategy seems to be about prepping for a confrontation between bully and victim if that's not what you and your child had in mind. The conversation itself is valuable. It's designed to help the child, if not completely take back control of the situation, at least mentally work her way out of victimization mode.]

Prepping for the conversation

But before we get to S-E-A-L – around 18 min. into the podcast – Rosalind talks about why it's so important for parents to handle this calmly and respectfully:

"As a parent, what I want you to say to your child is [something like], 'I'm so sorry this happened to you; thank you SO much for coming and telling me' ... because your kid is taking a risk to tell you about this. Most of the time they think that going to an adult will make it worse [which is why research shows only 10% of teens report cyberbullying to their parents (see this)]. THEN you say, 'and together we're going to work on this, we are going to think through how we can do this so you can feel that you've got some control over a situation where your control has been taken away from you."

And if we're lucky enough that they do come to us, Wiseman says, a lot of times we'll hear them say, "'I'm going to tell you, but you have to promise not to do or say anything about it.' That might seem to make sense [right then, when you so want to know what she's dealing with], so you may want to agree at first, but if your kid then tells you something you have to do something about, you have to break a promise.... So instead you say, 'I really can't make that promise. I'd love to, but we may have to find somebody who knows more about taking care of the problem than I do.... But what I will promise you is that if we do need to bring someone in, you will never be surprised by their involvement – you won't walk into a room and be surprised. I can promise that. We'll work this through together.' Because," Wiseman says, "you [the parent] taking over robs them of the control they need to have to be able to face the bully."

S-E-A-L

As you sit down with your child, "say, 'I'm going to give you a structure that's going to help you think through the really bad feelings in your stomach and put them into words for yourself before you go and talk to someone else,'" Wiseman says, "'because how many times have you had the experience where you're really, really mad at somebody and know exactly what you're going to say to the person, and then you get in front of the person and you totally lose your words? This is going to be a way for you to have a better chance of that not happening, so you can be calm and have as much control as possible in the situation.'"

S means you "stop and think when and where, now or later, publicly or privately" you will confront the person face-to-face (usually pretty short in public, longer in private). I think it's important to note, here, that Wiseman's saying the young person is doing this neither to be the bully's best friend nor to destroy somebody. "It's not a zero-sum game."

E is about how "you explain exactly what you don't like and exactly what you want." Not something vague like, "you're being mean to me," but "when you stole my password, you know I've had the same one since 6th grade and you used it to send an embarrassing message to my entire contact list making it look as if it was me. I hate that; it was beyond embarrassing to me." Then the teen explains exactly what she wants, regardless of whether or not the kid is likely to do it, something like: "I'm asking you to send a message to all those people saying you sent that other message, that it wasn't me. I'm going to be sending that message to everybody, but I'm asking you to have the courage and integrity to do it yourself." Wiseman explains that, in this confrontation, the targeted child is not asking to be treated with dignity, is not appealing to the bully's sympathy. She is being clear that dignity "is something I deserve because it's what everybody deserves."

A is really two As – for "affirm" and "acknowledge or admit ("some kids like 'acknowledge,' some 'admit'"). They're about rights and responsibilities. "The first A is to affirm your right and everybody's right to walk down the school hallway or be in this world without being treated like dirt." As for responsibilities, this parent-child conversation is providing your child some space in which she can ask herself, 'Is it possible that I contributed in some way to the dynamic that I'm now dealing with? What are my responsibilities to other people and have I respected those responsibilities?" Wiseman adds that this is sometimes the hard part for parents – asking their own child about her role in the situation, but it's essential, she says, if we want our kids to have the ability to put on the brakes the next time it happens. She feels this is particularly important with today's technologies because these days it's almost impossible not to have a role, not to be either target, perpetrator or bystander (see this Slate piece by Yale psychology professor Alan Kazdin about the power of the bystander). Cyberbullying situations are very fluid, usually hardwired to the school context, with bullies, victims, and bystanders frequently swapping hats in a 24-7, digitally-enabled school drama that makes it hard to get away and get perspective (see this).

L is "You either lock in or lock out the relationship or friendship with the person you confronted – or you take a vacation from it. With peers, you need to be able to go through the process of asking whether you want to be in this relationship or not and how you want to be in it. As a bystander, you can say to the bully I'm coming to you as a friend (lock in); it would've been easier to say nothing, but I'm saying this to you out of loyalty; as a friend I'm coming to you. To a bully, you might say, 'You've changed, you're blowing me off all the time, bossing me around, ridiculing me, whatever, and it's not getting better, so I need to lock out the friendship or I need to take a break.' [Wiseman reminds always to encourage them to put it in their own words. They just need this structure because this is very difficult to do.]

Perspective-taking good for parents too

"When your kid comes home and tells you something has happened, don't believe that what the child related is 100% truth and there is no other perspective," Wiseman says. "That is their truth. But it's also true that, in a conflict, human nature focuses on what has been done to it, not what it did to others. Two kids will have very different perspectives on what happened." She asks parents who have more than one child if, when something comes up, the two kids don't usually have a difference of opinion about what happened. Nah. ;-) "It's like that at school too. Each child has his own truth."

So "if you go in there [into school], guns blazing, you may find out something more happened, and you're going to be very embarrassed. So it's incumbent upon you" to go in knowing there are other perspectives, say what you need to say, and "finish your story [for school administrators] with 'Is that accurate?' [Repeat: Make sure, after sharing what you heard from your child, you ask the school administrator or the other parents there: "Is that accurate?"] Then really listen." This can make the difference between amplifying the problem and helping to resolve it.

But as important as your behavior is to the outcome for everybody, it's vitally important for your child, who's keenly aware of how you handle the situation. "You're teaching your child how you handle conflict," Wiseman says in the podcast. And Fox points out that "parents are leaders for their kids." She adds that, no matter how much technology is involved in the issue being worked out, "this is not a technology issue; ultimately, it's a parenting issue."

3,000 text messages a month – hmm, might parents have something to do with it?

Wiseman told Fox that her teen advisers say texting "is our primary way we communicate with each other. Yes, we use [social network sites], but texting is faster" (the average is 3,146 text messages a month for 13-to-17-year-olds, Nielsen reported this month). They also tell her that parental communication represents a not-insignificant part of those texts. One girl told Wiseman, "My parents are texting me ... from the time I wake up to the time I go to bed." The girl showed her one of those texts: "Honey, I'm going to the airport to pick up Grandma." Daughter texts back, "Mom, you're driving, stop texting me!" And as, Wiseman watches, the mom continues texting. Maybe, Fox suggests, we parents could check and see what behaviors we're modeling for our kids. Another girl told Wiseman: "My mom sends me pictures of people she finds dressed ridiculously," making snide comments about this or that piece of clothing. Calling this pre-adolescent behavior, Wiseman suggested: "We have to look in the mirror about these things.... We are part of this. It's not just teenagers [dissing others].... "

It'll help, I so agree, "if we really tie [how we deal with their tech use] back to the root issues of how we must be with each other," as Wiseman put it. That, to me, is the core of the cyberbullying solution. "Kids are smart enough to be able to extrapolate, if we teach them the connections ... if we teach them that the way they use technology is just reflective of everything else that we expect of them."

[Readers, everything above is much more compelling when you hear it coming from its sources, so do yourself a favor and listen to the podcast. Next week: behavior and technology at school.]

Related links

"Bullies: They can be stopped, but it takes a village" at Slate – by Yale professor of psychiatry and child psychology Alan Kazdin and Boston College professor Carlo Rotella

Annie Fox's Middle School Confidential: What's Up with My Family? ($9.99, 96 pp.) is comfort food for the mind – a middle-schooler's highly social, overloaded, hormone-challenged, technology-tethered mind. When my 12-year-old saw the pdf review version on my laptop screen when we were sitting on a plane together last fall, it was his idea – not mine – to read through the whole book then and there. That says it all, think! This is solid, respectful, caring advice for kids.

Video: CBS News's Katie Couric interviews Wiseman about children's privacy: "If we don't value their privacy, we're sending a message about respect." Ok if we monitor them surreptitiously? "Sure, but what if you find something you need to talk to them about? It's taking a risk that if you get caught, the kid can focus on the "violation of privacy" instead of on the content of their behavior – they go into self-righteous mode when the focus should be on their risky behavior.

Couric and Wiseman talk about sexting.

Annie Fox's podcast with Rachel Simmons, whose most recent book is The Curse of the Good Girl (here's Simmons's site)

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

The last time I wrote about Fox and Wiseman: "Sexting: New study & the 'Truth or Dare' scenario"

Federal privacy case also about youth safety

2010-02-11T11:39:00.005-07:00

There's an interesting conversation going on over at CNET about cellphones as tracking devices, outdated federal privacy law, and phone owners' privacy rights. Reporter Declan McCullagh looks at this crucial moment in the courts – a case to be argued before the Third Circuit Court of Appeal in Philadelphia tomorrow. As I read, I first thought, "Well, cops used to obtain phone records that located where suspects were when they made calls with fixed phones, as well as where the calls were made to. Now they just find out where the mobile phone was, right?" Yes, but, uh, the tracking of geolocation-enabled cellphones (which most mobiles are now), "comes in two forms," McCullagh writes: "police obtaining retrospective data kept by mobile providers for their own billing purposes that may not be very detailed, or prospective data that reveals the minute-by-minute location of a handset or mobile device." It's the "prospective" part that's new and raises even more concerns. If search-and-seizure laws aren't updated so that police need a search warrant to obtain cellphone location data in realtime (which is what this whole discussion's about), Big Brother really can, potentially, track you minute-by-minute now. Then I thought about youth safety. Is there a downside there? Of course not, if we're talking about tracking a kidnapper or his/her victim. But what if a child is trying to get away from an abusive parent, the police don't know about the abuse, and the parent calls the police saying s/he's desperate to find a lost child? There are many what-if scenarios like that. Minors have privacy rights too. Another consideration I'm not seeing in McCullagh's piece is prepaid "disposable" phones not attached to mobile carriers' billing departments and data-storage servers. Will bad guys be using those a whole lot more if the privacy-rights side of this case loses? To be continued.... [Meanwhile, feel free to weigh in on any of this in comments below, via email, or in our forum at ConnectSafely.org.]

YouTube's new tool for kid-safe viewing

2010-02-11T08:36:00.005-07:00

More than 33 billion online videos were watched during December and about a third of the them were on YouTube, according to comScore's latest figures. A 2008 study by Nielsen found that YouTube was 2-to-11-year-olds' No. 1 video viewing site (see this). So parents will probably be happy to know that YouTube now has its own filter for sexually explicit or violent content. "While no filter is 100% perfect, Safety Mode is another step in our ongoing desire to give you greater control over the content you see on the site," says the YouTube blog. As their video demo shows, it's easy to activate: Just go to any YouTube page, scroll to the bottom, and click "Safety Mode is off." After clicking On or Off, you can choose either to "Save" or "Save and lock." With the former, Safety Mode is on whenever anybody's uses that browser on that computer until they change that setting (works with a rule that settings don't get changed and obedient kids). "Save and lock" allows you to log into your Google or YouTube account and lock the setting so that it can't be changed in that browser by anyone who doesn't know your password – just as with Google's SafeSearch lock (see this). [See also "Help with cyberbullying on YouTube."]

Student free speech to Supreme Court soon?

2010-02-10T17:48:00.001-07:00

It was a big day for student free speech last Thursday, a day that ended with mixed results. One three-judge panel of the Third US Circuit Court decided for a student, and another panel from the same circuit decided against a student, Wired reports. Wired adds that the Supreme Court "has never squarely addressed the parameters of off-campus, online student speech, but might soon. So far, lower courts appear to be guided by a 1969 high court ruling saying student expression may not be suppressed unless school officials reasonably conclude that it will “materially and substantially disrupt the work and discipline of the school.” In one case the judges said that "school officials in Mercer County [Penn.] cannot reach into a family's home and police the Internet. That case also involves a MySpace parody of a principal created by a student at home," the Washington Post reported. In the other case, the judges "upheld the suspension of a Schuylkill County eighth-grader who posted sexually explicit material along with her principal's photograph on a fake MySpace page" – though the dissenting judge "said his colleagues were broadening the school's authority and improperly censoring students." The Post added that "school boards, free-speech advocates and others had been awaiting the rulings for clarity on how far schools can go to control both online speech and offsite behavior," and what they got was the opposite. [See also "Student free speech decision" and my original post on the Avery Doninger case, "Teen name-calling: Federal case" and the ensuing lower-court decision.]

Major buzz about Buzz, but not about its safety

2010-02-09T16:12:00.004-07:00

Google's Buzz, which it unveiled today, means to make Gmail much more social – adding updates and photo- and video-sharing; turning emailers into Twitter-like "followers"; and making all of that local to you (and you to it) via your cellphone, according to hundreds of news articles including PCWorld's. That last bit concerning geolocation raises some safety concerns, writes ConnectSafely.org co-director Larry Magid in CNET, where he posted an audio interview with Google co-founder Sergey Brin. Writing also in the Huffington Post, he says "Mobile Buzz, which will work initially on the Apple iPhone and Google Android phones," taking advantage of their GPS tech "so that users will not only be able to update their status but their location as well." Of course Buzz will work with Google maps. Will that social pinpointing capability be something people have to consciously turn on? I hope so, because young people don't always stop for safety or privacy reality checks in the rapid-fire back-'n'-forth of teen texting and socializing. But how much will that help even so? These products like Buzz are all just social convenience tools to teens. Teens don't think as much as we do about separate stand-alone products, services, or devices, each with its own privacy policy, set of terms of service. It's all much more of a means to the much more important end of staying connected and maintaining mindshare with peers. That's a challenge when companies just want to throw these various tasks at the lawyers and be done with it. The good news is, Google's integrating all of its Buzz-related products for fixed and mobile use; maybe they'll have integrated safety and privacy too.

Safer Internet Day: Wrong to focus on 5-to-7-year-olds?

2010-02-09T12:47:00.005-07:00

I was surprised by the surprise in the voice of a newspaper reporter interviewing me last week, when he asked me to repeat a point about how a youth police officer I know started talking with 4th-graders about online safety. Well, today – the European Union's Safer Internet Day – the UK's awareness campaign is aimed at 5-to-7-year-olds (see The Guardian's coverage). Wouldn't the reporter be surprised about that?! I actually think new-media literacy and mindfulness about how they (we all) treat one another online and offline should be taught to children from the moment they start playing with digital devices. And I'm certainly not alone – I heard many statements to that effect at the Safer Internet Forum in Luxembourg last October (see this).

Yet, Ian Douglas at The Telegraph is saying "Safer Internet day is pitching too young" and says parents need to be the primary audience. Absolutely, they're paramount. But I think there is no primary audience. Safety on the fixed and mobile, user-driven social Web is a multi-stakeholder proposition. Just as the only logical solution to bullying/cyberbullying (there is great overlap between the two) is a whole-school-community one, the same goes for youth safety at the societal level. Everybody's teaching and learning in this multi-directional new media environment, everybody has a say in their own, their friends', and their community's well-being, online and offline piece of the solution: user, family, school, caregivers, teachers, industry, government. And yes, Douglas is right that it's not for young children if Net-safety messaging defaults to the old predator-focused, fear-based, research-ignoring fare we've hopefully moved past. He's wrong if online/offline citizenship and mindfulness are the content of safety education. Meanwhile, two-thirds of 14,000 European children surveyed said their parents "do nothing to encourage them to be safe online," according to a new Microsoft survey cited in the Irish Times. [Here's much more Safer Internet Day coverage. See also "Online Safety 3.0: Empowering & Protecting Youth." I'll be blogging more about the school part of the equation soon.]

Fresh social-Web & Net numbers

2010-02-08T12:48:00.003-07:00

If Facebook were a country, it would be the world's third most populous one, after China and India. As for the world's most avid social networkers, Americans are 4th, behind Australians, Britons, and Italians, respectively – The Economist reports in a special report on social networking – followed by users in South Korea, Spain, Brazil, Germany, France, and Japan. The world's most popular social sites are Facebook, Windows Live, MySpace, Chinese portal Baidu, Twitter, Google's social site Orkut (popular in Brazil and India), Hi5, Chinese social site QQ, LinkedIn, and art community site DeviantArt – in that order, based on 10/09 comScore figures and all based in the US unless otherwise indicated. Other big indigenous communities include "Skyrock in France, VKontakte in Russia, and Cyworld in South Korea, as well as numerous smaller social networks that appeal to specific interests such as Muxlim, aimed at the world's Muslims, and ResearchGATE, which connects scientists and researchers." Meanwhile, Nielsen reports that social network sites are the most popular Web destination worldwide, with FB representing 67% of all social site traffic, Mashable.com reports. As for general Internet numbers for 2009, Pingdom.com has some: e.g., 90 trillion emails went out last year (247 billion a day, on average); there were 234 million Web sites as of this past December; and 1.73 Net users as of last September (see that page for more).

Facebook's orders of magnitude of change

2010-02-08T10:47:00.003-07:00

In six years Facebook has gone from being a social utility for students of a single northeastern US elite university (a sort of directory+community where Harvard students could find and socialize with each other) to a social utility for nearly 400 million people of multiple ages, languages, and walks of life worldwide (FB passed its sixth birthday last Thursday).

My theory is, that fairly spare original design as a utility made it less flexible for individual users but more flexible for users as a whole – in other words for the changes that going from mere hundreds to hundreds of millions would entail. A pretty bare-bones social utility (like Twitter, too, as opposed to MySpace, which was always more of a self-expression tool than a social utility) is simply a person's social network visualized. [If this makes no sense, pls let me know or post your own theory in comments below.] "In its latest redesign, Facebook is playing up applications, games and search," USATODAY reports. That makes sense to me, because apps and games are one way users can customize their FB experience, and search becomes paramount simply because of the challenge of finding someone among 400 million users – but also grows the tension between those concerned about privacy and those who want to be found by old friends and long-lost relatives. For those concerned about privacy, by the way, here's a very handy how-to article: "The Three Facebook [privacy] Settings Every User Should Check Now": the ones concerning who can see what you share (updates, photos, etc.), who can see your personal info, and who can search for and find your FB profile with Web search engines.

Social norming: So key to online safety

2010-02-05T13:18:00.005-07:00

I doubt the term "social norming" means much to most people, but it's actually common practice in family life, at school, and on sports teams. It's the culture or behavioral norms we create to teach and model values and ethics for our children – showing up in statements like "we don't say 'hate' in this family" or "we respect the other team." Maybe because it's so second-nature, we don't often think about how powerful social norming can be on the online-safety front. But when the research shows that aggressive behavior online more than doubles the aggressor's risk of being victimized, we need to take this point very seriously. In fact, we need to move past expecting adults to do the modeling to expecting all community members to do so, especially children – help them see that they are key to their own well-being as well as their community's. Professor and cyberbullying researcher Sameer Hinduja puts this in the school context: "How does this relate to reducing online harassment among elementary, middle, and high school students? Social norming has to do with modifying the environment, or culture within a school, so that appropriate behaviors are not only encouraged, but perceived widely to be the norm," he writes in his blog. The same goes for online community. Virtual worlds, multiplayer online games, and social network sites need to foster a culture of civil behavior and citizenship as a vital Net-safety feature of their communities. There has been discussion about the importance of "neighborhood policing" or community self-policing online as well as offline, and I agree. It's vital, and many responsible sites and worlds act quickly on abuse reports. But they need to pair that with social norming to be both preventive and reactive, to provide more complete protection (I call this "the guild effect").

However, as much as we may like it to be, changing the culture is not just up to sites and virtual worlds or schools. It can't be. Because this is a user-driven media environment we're all experiencing now, by definition it's up to all of us, especially the users of a particular virtual world or social site (or classroom, family or neighborhood). So how do we start? As Hinduja puts it, "by focusing attention on the majority of youth who do utilize computers and cellphones in acceptable ways. If I told you that one in five teenagers are cyberbullied, you wouldn’t focus on spreading that fact around your student body. Rather, you would reframe and reconceptualize that research finding, and then create cool and relevant messaging strategies emphasizing that the vast majority of your students [and our children] are using Internet technologies with integrity, discretion, and wisdom, which would hopefully motivate or induce the remainder to get 'on board.' Ideally, the remainder would desire to fit in, would desire to be like everyone else, and would feel an informal compulsion to stop cyberbullying others and start doing the right thing." If we're worried about cyberbullying as a society, we need to get going on this! As Hinduja writes, "Spending too much time painting cyberbullying in alarmist colors may encourage more youth to act in similar ways, since those youth will perceive the act as 'normal' and that 'everyone is doing it'.”

Related links

"Claiming & social norming in social sites"

"Toward fixing teen risky behavior in social sites: Study"

"'21st-century statecraft' at home & school"

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

"Social norming & digital citizenship"

"Social norming for risk prevention"

66% of teens text, only 8% tweet: Study

2010-02-04T05:42:00.002-07:00

Though adult blogging remains steady, teen blogging has decreased by half since 2006 – from 28% of teens then to 14% now, according to a Pew/Internet report released yesterday. Eleven percent of Americans 30+ maintain a personal blog right now, Pew adds. Blogging by 18-29-year-olds has decreased, too, but not by quite as much: from 24% of that age group in 2007 to 15% now. Social networking continues to grow – 73% of teens use social sites now (compared to 47% of adults), up from 55% in 2006 and 65% last February – but Twitter use among teens is not high. Only 8% of 12-to-17-year-old Net users use Twitter, compared to about a third of 18-to-29-year-olds (the age group that uses Twitter the most). Compare that teen Twitter use to virtual worlds (about the same) and texting (a whopping 66%). Moving from media to devices: 75% of teens and 93% of 18-to-29-year-olds have cellphones. It's not surprising to parents, I think, when Pew says that, "in the past five years, cellphone ownership has become mainstream among even the youngest teens." That's where the biggest growth has been: "Fully 58% of 12-year-olds now own a cellphone, up from just 18% of such teens as recently as 2004."

Kids' top toy for 2010: iPad?!

2010-02-03T09:33:00.002-07:00

Apple may not have thought of it that way, but Children's Technology Review editor (and former teacher) Warren Buckleitner thinks the iPad just may be Toy of the Year, he writes in Gadgetwise at the New York Times. Some of the reasons: Lots of available games and other software already; no controller or mouse ("the screen *is* the controller and it sits in their lap, which works for children (and their grandparents, too, by the way"); that big high-res screen and gorgeous color palette that brings imagery to life; road-trip activity center; and Warren adds "a fair price," but I think parents will be waiting for that $499 starting price to come down – which is not to say there won't be plenty of parent-hounding while they do that waiting. But before anybody succumbs, give it some thought. The iPad also makes the Web very attractive and portable. Basically, it's a very big iPod Touch, which led to lots of family discussions after the recent holidays, when parents realized all of the Web was now in their kids' pockets wherever they went, and they hadn't thought about parental controls before giftwrapping. The iPhone and iTouch's App Store – including all the games and some parental-control apps – will be available for the iPad too. Check out the possibilities before giving 2010's "Toy of the Year" to your child (because the iPad will function very similarly, see "How To Setup Parental Controls on iPhone & iPod Touch."

What's the deal with Farmville?

2010-02-02T07:43:00.002-07:00

If you believe what a few of its 72 million worldwide players told USATODAY, the Facebook-based, virtual-reality social game offers a mild sense of escape, fosters a sort of virtual diligence (about tending one's virtual crops and farm animals), and encourages community and charity toward one's virtual neighbors (neighbors get "points and gold for scaring away pests, fertilizing or feeding chickens" on each other's land). Farmville wasn't always purely positive, of course (see "Social gaming cleaning up its act?"). Farmville's parent, San Francisco-based game developer Zynga, announced last fall it was banishing all "offer advertising" from its games (Farmville fans, have you seen any lately?), but they're something to watch out for in social games – those parasitical little offers that tricked players into ultimately paying "far more for in-game currency than if they just paid [the game itself] cash," TechCrunch reported. Just because Zynga supposedly got rid of it doesn't mean other developers did, so talk with your kids about "free" offers on phones and on the Web. [Meanwhile, SocialTimes.com reports that the BBC is getting into social gaming (looking at the iPhone, Facebook, and Nintendo Wii and DS platforms), having hired a new executive VP of games.]

PBS Frontline's 'Digital Nation': Presenting our generation with a crucial choice

2010-02-01T09:00:00.011-07:00

Seems to me, Gever Tully's Tinkering School would be the perfect antidote for all the concern about kids and digital media expressed in PBS Frontline's "Digital Nation" – hands-on problem-solving, lots of tools, collaboratively learning by doing, giving kids time to work the problem, celebrating and analyzing failures, teaching that success is embedded in the process (watch his TED Talk about this). The thing is, so much of that sort of tinkering is being done by kids using the very digital media and technologies that are the focus of our fears. But more on that in a minute.

This time, Frontline, which airs on PBS this Tuesday night, is depicting the personal explorations of Digital Nation's writers themselves, those of Rachel Dretzin and Douglas Rushkoff, both parents. Last time, in 2008's "Growing Up Online," the stories were more those of the documentary's subjects. It's as if Dretzin, the producer of both Growing Up Online and Digital Nation, was shaken by what her reporting turned up in the last project. Thoughtful journalist/anthropologist that she is, she went in-depth and looked at all sides of those teens' stories, presenting the most balanced picture I'd seen anywhere to that point, having interviewed leading social-media researchers such as C.J. Pasco and danah boyd for depth and perspective.

In Digital Nation, at least the preview version I saw this past weekend, it seems the main story is two parents' concerns. We're on a 90-minute journey with them, wending our way through skillfully told vignettes (about everything from a South Korean boy at videogame-addiction camp to the US Army's shopping-mall-based videogame arcade/ recruiting center to a corporation's daily multinational staff meetings in a virtual world) and thought-provoking interviews, again with top academics (e.g., MIT's Sherry Turkle, USC's Henry Jenkins, Arizona State's James Paul Gee, educator Katie Salen, Emory's Mark Bauerlein, author of The Dumbest Generation, and Marc Prensky, who coined the term "digital natives"). Important, if not particularly new, questions are raised – for example, about multitasking, etiquette, addiction, alienation, and the blurring of virtual and real.

Documenting an angst-ridden point in history?

Certainly we hear Rushkoff when he says "we need to know if we're tinkering with something more essential than we realize ... what it means to be a human being." But we also hear from scholars who have been studying that question very closely for years that, with societal and technological change, some things have always been lost and some gained. Prensky says on camera that "we confuse the best ways of doing something once [in our past] with the best ways of doing something forever." That's what so many of us are doing. Perhaps Dretzin and Rushkoff are Everyman, or Everyparent, and Digital Nation is documenting a point in history – here in the middle of this profound media shift Earth is experiencing – when we're fearing and mourning what's being lost a lot more than we're seeking and considering what is being gained.

Did the writers really hear James Paul Gee, when, in their interview with him, he told of how, in virtual worlds and multiplayer games, young people function in teams in which "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"? That's what happens for home-schooled students and the teacher members of the Cognitive Dissonance guild in World of Warcraft – and with students at school on curriculum-grounded "quests" in an educational virtual world called Quest Atlantis developed by the University of Indiana School of Education.

Did they hear Gee when he said we have two school systems now – traditional school, fixated on delivering content via textbooks, and the informal school system of social media, where kids are problem-solving, researching, producing, etc. on their own because social media are largely blocked from schools?

How about Katie Salen – professor, director of the Center for Transformative Media at Parsons the New School for Design, and executive director of the Institute of Play – when she suggests on the show itself that seeing young people's game-based learning and play only through the lens of our old media environment, where virtual worlds didn't exist, may be somewhat myopic for us and limiting for our children? (See "From chalk 'n' talk to learning by doing" about Quest to Learn, a new school of which the Institute of Play is a founding partner.)

Stick with 'chalk 'n' talk' or open our minds?

For our children's sake, we really need to dig past the legitimate but relentless, visceral, and politically correct questions with which all parents and mass-media natives struggle and seriously consider what these scholars are saying. And not only them! I can't wait to see what Digital Nation's producers come up with next, now that the work of more than two dozen social-media scholars – Hanging Out, Messing Around, and Geeking Out – has been released by MIT Press. It's a mother lode of stories about how young people learn in and with new media.

Which brings me back to tinkering. I got that word from Sylvia Martinez, president of Generation Yes, who presented a workshop about it at Educon, a tech educators' conference, this past weekend. Reading through her past posts about it, in addition to references to Gever Tully, I found a profound 10-minute video interview with John Seely Brown, visiting professor at USC and former director of PARC (Palo Alto Research Center), about using digital technology to bring collaborative "tinkering" back to school. Digital Nation, please look into this next!...

Collaborative tinkering & social capital for kids

In the interview, Brown said: "I think we're moving into quite a different kind of world, one in which change is omnipresent, where we're beginning to find ways to bootstrap our own knowledge, tinker with ideas around us, find things we don't know, ask good questions, and be open to criticism." He calls for peer-based, collaborative learning, "because, from the sharing you begin to see how other kids use what you just created. Kids learn from each other as much as from an authority or mentor."

Brown talks about how to make school responsive to the pace of change and suggests thinking of schools in terms of "distributed communities of practice," which digital-technology learning tools allow. "With these powerful tools with which to craft things, tinkering has really come back big time.... This networked world is an open-source world, where I can make something, pass it back to the community, and have that community do new things with it." This is not just a shift for media or even education, but for identity and self-worth: "In earlier decades, a lot of kids grew up thinking, I am what I'm wearing, how I dress, what my parents own; my identity came from those material possessions. Just maybe we're entering a world where ... a sense of identity starts to get constructed for myself based on what I have done, what I have created, and others have built on, passed on to others, and they have been able to do wondrous things with as well. A whole new sense of reputational capital and social capital is on the move...."

Related links

"digital_nation: life on the virtual frontier" - the show's main page (the full 90-min show can be watched online right now here)

A review of Digital Nation by media professor Henry Jenkins (who appeared in Digital Nation and taught at MIT for 20 years, until moving to USC six months ago) offering a different take on "killer paragraphs" and multitasking MIT students (including his own)

The perspective of Duke University English professor Cathy Davidson, who wrote a book about the 19th-century panic over the destructive effect of novels on children

"PBS documentary questions tech and our future," by ConnectSafely co-director Larry Magid

"Are you an Internet optimist or pessimist?: The great debate over technology's impact on society," by Adam Thierer

Of "Dangerism" at The Tinkering School blog

"Net safety: How social networks can be protective," where I blog about how James Paul Gee's Digital Nation interview got me to thinking about how what I call "the guild effect" – or online community social norming and self-policing – will be an increasingly key element of online safety going forward

Digital Nation interview: My thoughts on parenting our digital-age kids

The reality TV of school: Helping our kids with tech-assisted 24/7 school drama

My review of "Growing Up Online" two years ago – maybe a little biased; it's good I wasn't interviewed for Digital Nation

Collaborative reputation protection

2010-01-29T18:52:00.005-07:00

"The 'Protecting Reputations Online' video should be mandatory viewing for students," wrote/tweeted Bernajean Porter, an educator I admire, in Twitter this week. So I watched it (it's just under 3 minutes) – and was reminded of how collaborative reputation protection is these days. Because "digital" means social, young people are not acting all by themselves in a vacuum – they're sharing text, photos, and videos and, through them, talking about themselves and each other. That's the most important point in the video, I think: that there's a mutual dependency on and responsibility for each other's good name and reputation in social media. We truly are in this together – not just peers, but parents, educators, all of us. Nobody's operating in a vacuum in today's media. Tell your kids: "Your friends affect your reputation – you need their help in maintaining it and vice versa." Here are reputation-management tips and just-released research from Microsoft, and youth-specific resources from the American School Counselor Association and iKeepSafe.org.

MN mom expects $0 penalty for file-sharing

2010-01-28T09:22:00.005-07:00

It has been a big news week for file-sharers, music fans, and copyright lawyers. Days after a judge reduced the file-sharing penalty for Minnesota mother of four Jammie Thomas-Rasset from $1.92 million to about $54,000, the recording industry offered to settle for $25,000, but Thomas-Rasset turned the offer down, CNET reports. "Sibley and Camara had already said that they planned to challenge even the lowered amount set by the court. Sibley told CNET last week they have always sought a $0 award." US District Judge Michael Davis had said earlier in his ruling that "the $1.92 million fine ... was 'monstrous and shocking'," the San Jose Mercury News reported. "Davis wrote in his ruling he would have liked to reduce it further but was limited in doing so. He said the new penalty is still 'significant and harsh'," but he denied Thomas-Rasset's request for a new trial. The $1.92 million in damages awarded the RIAA last summer "are eight times more than Thomas-Rasset ... was ordered to pay the first time she faced six record companies in court on claims that she downloaded more than 1,700 songs," the Minneapolis Star-Tribune reported last summer. "The judge granted a retrial after deciding that he had wrongly instructed the jury." The Star-Tribune added that, of the more than 30,000 suits brought by the RIAA against alleged file-sharers, Thomas-Rasset's was the only one to go to a jury trial, much less two such trials. Meanwhile, here's a thoughtful "letter" from a professional musician to a mom worried about her son's file-sharing, among other things distinguishing between privacy and file-sharing, and The Guardian recently declared "The strange death of illegal downloading." [See also a New Yorker interview with Radiohead's Jonny Greenwood on the "MP3 generation."]

'Sext education': US- and Canada-based resources

2010-01-27T16:29:00.005-07:00

Citing new US figures showing that two-thirds of 8-to-18-year-olds own cellphones, Canada's CBC points to a new Web site designed to educate people about texting – textED.ca – "set up by the Canadian Centre for Child Protection, in partnership with Canadian Wireless Telecommunications Association." The CBC says it includes "sext ed," but I don't see much in the site specifically about photo-sharing, and there – slightly frustratingly – isn't a search box in the site that allowed me to search for "sext ed." But for parents there's an "acronictionary" with abbreviations and acronyms often used in text messages, and for kids there's a "Need help now" form, which they can fill out and which promises to get back to senders within 24 hours. From here in the US, PC Magazine's John Dvorak offers 7 reputation-protection tips that "can save your kids – and you – from a lifetime of online embarrassment" (offline too!). They cover everything from Twitter and Facebook to blogging and vlogging to video chat on Stickam (take special note of that last genre, parents – not a good place for kids in online stealth mode). See also ConnectSafely.org's "sext ed" and "Sexting: New study & the 'Truth or Dare' scenario." As for anti-sexting legislation, here's a commentary from Nancy Willard of the Center for Safe & Responsible Internet Use offering ways to adjust laws so as to help rather than harm youth.

[The new US data the CBC refers to is from the just-released Kaiser Family Foundation study I blogged about and linked to in "Major study on youth & media: Let's take a closer look."]

Sexism in sexting case?

2010-01-27T11:14:00.003-07:00

A federal court of appeals in Philadelphia is expected soon to decide the first case about the criminal prosecution of teens for sexting. One side – that of George Skumanick, who in 2006 was district attorney for Pennsylvania's Wyoming County – argued that the DA "was trying to protect the teens from themselves and potential child predators." The other side, the ACLU, argued that "the prosecutor cannot accuse the girls of being pornographers under the guise of protecting them from pornographers," the Philadelphia Inquirer reported. Two of the photos involved depicted two 12-year-old girls in their underwear; a third photo in a separate situation, depicted a 16-year-old girl nude from the waist up. [In this case's first trial, in March 2009, US District Judge James M. Munley "sided with the ACLU and issued an injunction that blocked Skumanick from bringing charges, declaring that the photographs were not child pornography under Pennsylvania law," Law.com reports.] After learning that the photos were circulating, the school confiscated some phones and turned them over to the DA's office. "Interestingly, none of the classmates who distributed the photos received letters from Skumanick. Only the girls who appeared in the photos were threatened with child porn charges," writes the ACLU in its blog. "If the DA did in fact regard these photos as pornographic, why not file distribution charges against the boys? A clue may be found in their argument before the 3rd Circuit. In narrating the case, their attorney explained how, after the girls were photographed, 'high school boys did as high school boys will do, and traded the photos among themselves'.

"The boys who traded the photos bear no responsibility and require no re-education," the ACLU blogger writes, referring to a letter Skumanick sent the girls' parents threatening prosecution if the girls didn't take a "five-week re-education program of his own design, which included topics like 'what it means to be a girl in today's society'." Only the girls were threatened with felony charges and sex-offender registration. It was one of the Third Circuit judges who raised "the central question" of the case, the blogger concluded: During arguments, Judge Thomas L. Ambro said, "Should we allow the state to force children, by threat of prosecution, to attend a session espousing the views of one particular government official on what it means to be a girl?"

Cyberbullying & bullying-related suicides: 1 way to help our digital-age kids

2010-01-26T10:46:00.008-07:00

How do we help our children maintain some detachment from the drama, sometimes cruelty, of school life? This, I think, is the central question of online safety, if not child development, in the digital age. It has just become national news that 15-year-old Phoebe Prince of South Hadley, Mass., and very recently of western Ireland, committed suicide January 14 because of fellow students' social cruelty online and offline, in and out of school, according to ABC News and the Boston Herald. Last month the country learned of 13-year-old Florida student Hope Witsell's suicide last fall (I posted about that in ConnectSafely's forum here).

Detachment from 'The Drama'

Each of these cases is highly individual, but what they all seem to have in common is the 24/7, non-stop nature of the harassment the teens faced – the tech-enabled constant drama of school life turning into 24/7 cruelty. Phoebe's and Hope's tragedies indicate an urgent need for all of us to help our children come up for air, to maintain some perspective about the "alternate reality" of school life, especially in the middle-school years.

Technology mustn't be the focus of either blame or solution development because it's not the source of the problem; social cruelty is. But technology – if not used with a sense of perspective or balance – can "tether" a child to the cruel behavior. I get that word from MIT sociologist Sherry Turkle, who refers to today's communications tools (the social Web, cellphones, etc.) as "tethering technologies" in her paper about "The Tethered Self." She discusses how they remove us from our physical surroundings. I think their constant use can also affect our sense of context psychologically too – everybody's, not just kids', but adolescents have a lot to deal with just developmentally, so perspective can be extra helpful to them.

We hear a lot that we need to think about the implications of giving our children mobile devices that make them as available to their peers as they are to us. But let's look at one of the implications: Kids' and their peers' moment-by-moment mood changes, blow-by-blow gossip, and good and bad behavior mutually accessible as long as their communications devices are on. In other words, constant drama – often heightened by kids who enjoy fueling it, whether for entertainment, as a prank, or out of malice.

How we can help

What we don't hear enough is that there are ways we – parents, school personnel, police, and policymakers – can help our kids and teens. We can help them...

Get perspective and maybe a little mental detachment from peers as well as "the drama"

Do the identity exploration that's a key task of adolescence as themselves," as individuals, and not only or always in relation to their peers

Have a little time for reflection

Realize the importance of self-respect and know they have our respect.

In other words, we can help them to be able – when needed – psychologically to disengage just so they can think straight and actually see that their life is not that drama at school or online, and they are never the person any bullies could ever make them out to be.

Tampa-area schools are discussing (I think much-needed) parent-notification rules, the Tampa Tribune reports and Massachusetts lawmakers are "stepping up efforts to pass an anti-bullying measure," the Boston Globe reports. These are important pieces of the puzzle, but I hope that school officials, legislators, and parents 1) don't create policy and law based solely on the worst tragedies and 2) do help children learn how to maintain perspective, self-respect, and respect for others amid the info and behavioral overload of the digital age. This is the protective nature of social-media literacy and citizenship – the new online safety.

Related links

Whether or not they all make sense for your family, at least some of Marian Merritt's 7 household tech-use rules (at the bottom of her post) can help parents help kids keep "The Drama" under control. Merritt, Norton's Internet Safety Advocate, is blogging about the Kaiser Family Foundation study on US 8-to-18-year-olds' media use – I posted about it here.

Youth (and parent) mentor Annie Fox helps a girl having suicidal thoughts: "For teens: What can I do about these rumors?"

How the social Web helps stop suicide (in The Daily Beast) and an example of suicide averted, thanks to social networking

The National Suicide Prevention Lifeline says peers are the best source of referrals to the Lifeline, usually via social network sites, especially MySpace – not a toll-free phone number – but that number is 1-800-273-TALK. The Lifeline coordinates the work of more than 100 toll-free help centers around the US, getting calls and cases to the center nearest the person needing help, and help not just for suicidal crisis, but depression, domestic violence, and all sorts of needs (more people need to know about that).

"Online Safety 3.0: Empowering & Protecting Youth"

ConnectSafely.org's "Tips to Help Stop Sexting"

China requires filtering in schools

2010-01-25T09:49:00.004-07:00

Perhaps a sign that there are more and more computers in the schools of this giant developing country that has more Internet users than the US has population, China is now requiring Net-filtering in schools. "According to the Ministry of Education, local education departments and schools should guide students in different age groups to 'properly handle cyber world' and encourage them to report any suspicious websites" as part of its anti-porn campaign, DigitalJournal.com reports. The basic difference between this development in China and the US's school filtering is a law passed in 2000 (the Children's Internet Protection Act, or CIPA) that required schools receiving federal "e-rate" technology subsidies to employ filtering. I was surprised that the Chinese government, well-known for its Net censorship skills (when my family was traveling there in 2008, we couldn't access our travel blog on what was then a very new blogging service called Vox.com), was only now instituting school filtering – which is why I think this is more a sign of better tech and other resources in Chinese schools than an oversight on the government's part. China may be "catching up" on the sexting front too: Digital Journal cites China's Xinhua news service as reporting that "China Mobile, the nation's largest mobile network carrier, said sending mobile porn, either through photos or messages, could have the phone number revoked permanently." As for those Net-use numbers, the San Jose Mercury News reports that China has 384 million Internet users. "The number of people going online by mobile phone rose 106% [last year] to 233 million" (8% of whom access the Net only by phone).

Help with cyberbullying on YouTube

2010-01-25T08:03:00.005-07:00

Say you're 15, care greatly about a particular environmental cause, and use your YouTube account to vlog (video blog) about it in an earnest way that triggers some really nasty comments on your page. What do you do? YouTube has some tips it blogged with just that scenario in mind, linking to the National Crime Prevention Council's new anti-cyberbullying campaign, Circle of Respect, which came up with the scenario and illustrates it here. The tips are good, basically saying: 1) Delete the comments and consider blocking the user; 2) Report hate speech (comments on race, gender, or disability); 3) If physical threats (which are illegal) are involved, talk with a trusted adult about whether to call 911; and last but far from least: 4) Be respectful yourself – treating others with civility is protective. I base that on a finding published in Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine in 2007: that aggressive behavior online more than doubles the aggressor's risk of victimization. For a much more thorough guide to parenting in the video age, see kid-tech expert Warren Buckleitner in the New York Times. [Meanwhile, the Italian government is getting considerable flak for proposing new Web-video rules that would require users to get clearance from the Communications Ministry before uploading their videos to sites like YouTube, The Standard reports.]

Related links

Our "Top 10 Safety Tips for Video-Sharing" at ConnectSafely.org

"Parents face a new frontier: Setting electronic limits," with some individual family strategies in the Washington Post

Why "soft power" parenting works better here in NetFamilyNews.

Texting good 4 spelling & reading: Study

2010-01-22T07:45:00.004-07:00

In a study of students' texting habits, the British Academy British Academy found no support for the "negative media and public speculation" around young people's texting. In fact, the Wall Street Journal reports, "the kids who used more 'textisms' – abbreviations such as “plz” (please) and “l8ter” (later) [shouldn't that be "l8er"?] – showed higher scores on some spelling, phonetics, reading comprehension and other English language competency tests." The study's authors are Coventry University psychology Profs. Beverly Plester and Clare Wood. In three separate studies of groups of 60-90 8-to-12-year-olds, they found, among other things, that 1) "the proportions of textisms that kids used in their sentence translations was positively linked to verbal reasoning; the more textspeak kids used, the higher their test scores" and 2) "the younger the age at which the kids had received mobile phones, the better their ability to read words and identify patterns of sound in speech." [See also "Major study on youth & media: Let's take a closer look"]

28 students suspended for cyberbullying

2010-01-22T07:29:00.001-07:00

A Seattle middle school recently suspended 28 students for involvement in a Facebook page that put down another student, the Seattle Times reported. I'm not sure what suspension does to stop cyberbullying, but I was glad to read that 1) the hate page probably wasn't on Facebook for more than 24 hours and that 2) "school staff talked with [the suspended students] and their parents, and the principal plans to hold assemblies for students and meetings for parents to discuss appropriate and safe Internet use." Here's UPI's coverage. [See also "School cyberbully wins free-speech case" and "The power of play: Cyberbullying solution?".]

'21st-century statecraft' at home & school

2010-01-21T09:53:00.005-07:00

Live on the Web, I was just listening to Sec. of State Hillary Clinton's call for 21st-century statecraft (as well as the need to protect free expression online) and couldn't help but think about how much we need to respect, teach, and model good citizenship at home and school (here and in every country) – using the media kids use and love – in order to realize Secretary Clinton's vision for Internet freedom. She spoke of the need to "create norms of behavior among states." Absolutely, but we need to start here at home, promoting and modeling norms of good behavior online and in homes and classrooms using the social (behavioral) media and technologies where so much kid behavior occurs now. I just reviewed a major study, the Kaiser Family Foundation's, about how much youth are using media, and while some are appalled at the time spent with media, are they thinking about how so much of that usage is outside of school, because we block social media and cellphones from school – leaving young people completely on their own to work out social norms? What a missed opportunity! Secretary Clinton also called on us to focus on the needs of youth. Doing so must include understanding how they use media, not just how much. Let's begin now consciously to model and teach the good digital as well as real-world citizenship and "statecraft" that will be protections to free speech, our countries, and most especially our children – at school, in virtual worlds, and all the other places where they spend time. [See also "Digital risk, digital citizenship" and "From users to citizens."]