How Americans 13+ use their cellphones

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.

Cellphones & school: A great mix

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

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.

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

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."]

Texting good 4 spelling & reading: Study

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"]

Haiti mobile-relief update

The Red Cross reports that $22 million had been raised via cellphones for Haiti earthquake relief (about a fifth of the $112 million in total donations), the Washington Post reports. The previous cellphone fundraising record was a mere $400,000.

US's mobile Web: Data snapshot

Here's the picture, courtesy of Nielsen: The number of US mobile phone users aged 13+ right now is 223 million. The number of mobile Web users is 60.7m (up 33% from 2008 and expected to double by the middle of next year). Compare the 60.7 million to the number of active Internet users – some 195 million – and it looks like the number of mobile Web users is about a third of fixed Web users right now. Within 18 months, Nielsen figures there will be three times as many mobile Web users, or about 120 million. An example of mobile Web use is video-viewing on phones. That growth is pretty exponential too: About 7% of cellphone users view video on their phones now (about 15.6 million), growing to a project 90 million by mid-2011. [One more interesting factoid: 21% of US households are cellphone-only now, Nielsen says, meaning no landlines.]

Big sign of increasingly mobile Web

If anyone had any doubts about how big the mobile Web will be, Google's release of its Nexus One phone should erase them. It's part of Google's "careful plan to try to do what few other technology companies have done before: retain its leadership as computing shifts from one generation to the next," the New York Times reports. And this shift is computing, shopping, gaming, info-gathering, communicating, photo-sharing, learning, teaching, producing, etc. on smart phones. Some pundits have been calling this "Web 3.0" (and I'm not sure what else Web 3.0 would look like). According to Nielsen, about 18% of mobile phones were smartphones last year (up from 13% the year before, and a projected 40-50% of mobile phones sold this year will be smart phones. It'll be very interesting to see how much competition Nexus One will give the iPhone, the rival it's clearly going after. Certainly, smart phone manufacturers have the youth market in mind (see this on a hybrid of the netbook and smartphone aimed at teens).

'Teens would ignore texting-while-driving laws'

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

iPod Touches in the classroom

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

Tiny computers, er, phones proliferating

What does this say about kids 'n' tech? Well, what we've been saying for some time: that their social lives, informal learning, media-sharing, social producing, and creative networking are getting increasingly mobile and 24/7. The media- and tech-enabled part of their lives are in their pockets, wherever they are. [It's one reason why they don't wear wristwatches - have you noticed that?] But here's some evidence: Acer – the world's 2nd-largest computer maker after Hewlett-Packard, according to Forbes – is "joining the stampede into mobile phones," where the grass is very green. "Worldwide sales of mobile phones – an estimated 1.1 billion units this year, including 150 million smart phones – far exceed the expected sales of 280 million personal computers." Forbes adds that smart phones earn "gross profit margins of 30% or more, compared with the 3% or 4% for the low-cost computers that compose much of Acer's business." I think this is a solid sign that Web 3.0 – the mobile Web – is here!

Teen texting while driving: Data

A quarter of teen drivers in the US (26%) say they have texted while driving and "half (48%) of all teens ages 12 to 17 say they’ve been a passenger while a driver has texted behind the wheel," the Pew Internet & American Life Project reports. "Boys and girls are equally likely to report texting behind the wheel as well as riding with texting drivers," Pew adds, and the likelihood of riding with drivers who text grows as teens get older. It's not that they don't understand the risks, Pew senior research specialist Amanda Lenhart suggested, it's just that teens' strong desire to stay connected can outweigh safety. Some related data: 75% of all US 12-to-17-year-olds own a cell phone, and 66% use their phones to text; 82% of 16- and 17-year-olds have a cellphone and 76% of them text. [See also: "Teen drivers: Take a text stop."]

Social lives, media in their pockets

If our kids text, 80% of us do too, according to The Nielsen Company. Nielsen doesn't say why, but we all know: Our kids "hear" us better when we text them, and – besides – it's fun to text with them! Here's some more interesting cellphone data from Nielsen:

Phone owners are getting younger: Last year kids typically got their first phone at age 10.1; by the beginning of this year 2009, the phone ownership age "was down to 9.7." Same for borrowing: In 2008, the average age when kids started to borrow a cell phone was 8.6 years"; now it's 8.

How they use phones: 66% of tween phone owners took photos with their phones in the past year; half played pre-installed games; 40% activated the speakerphone feature; 28% filmed a video clip; 24% listened to tunes. We've already seen this reported, but "the average 13-17 year old sends more than 2,000 text messages per month."

Younger phone owners: more than half of 8-year-old owners "used their cell to send text messages in the last 12 months. "That figure soared to 81% for 12-year-old mobile users," with "the vast majority" (90%) of those texts going to friends and family."

Parental controls: More than half of cellphone users' parents don't use parental controls. Among the minority who do, "20% limit the number of calls, texts or instant messages, followed by download limits (17%), talk time or voice minute allocations (16%), mobile website access limits (15%), locator services and restricted in/outgoing number access (13% each), time of day restrictions (11%), and alerts to unauthorized texts, IMs or callers (6% each); 60% of parents "forbid downloads onto their children’s phone for financial and security reasons."

For parents' own views, see also a piece in the Washington Post about when texting becomes nagging; "When Dad banned text messaging" in a New York Times blog; and another mom's view of her kids' texting at TMCnet.com.

Sweeping parental-control product for phones

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

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

How mobile is Facebook?

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

Teen drivers: Take a 'text stop'

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

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

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

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

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

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

From 'digital disconnect' to mobile learning

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Related links

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sexting: The peer pressure factor

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

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

Parental disconnect: Good, bad & increasingly nonexistent?

In "What Parents Don't Know," MediaPost blogger Jack Loechner echoes Common Sense Media's own conclusion from its recent survey: that there's "a continuing disconnect between parents and kids when it comes to kids' digital lives." [Pew/Internet reported a "digital disconnect" in 2002, but between students and their schools, which I plan to write about next week.]

But how different are kids' "digital lives" from their real ones? As far back as the beginning of 2007, Pew/Internet reported that 91% of teens were socializing online with people they see a lot in real life. They're not "social networking"; they're just socializing – online, offline, at school, on phones, on Xbox Live, in virtual worlds, on computers, wherever. And there always has been a developmentally normal disconnect between parents and teens, where the latter's social lives are concerned. We can't and shouldn't know every detail of what they're up to when socializing with peers. They need some privacy, psychologists say – growing degrees of it, as they mature – because it's their job to disconnect from us as they become adults. To mix metaphors horribly, I hope that survey conclusion won't stoke the fires of helicopter parenting.

Teen social lives more visible than ever. Because so much of their socializing is visible on the social Web, parents actually have an historically unprecedented opportunity to know what's going on in their children's social lives (does the appeal of cellphone texting as kids' counter-measure surprise anyone?). Common Sense says that, "as our kids increasingly communicate through social networks, parents are cut out of the process of hearing how and what they say to each other." I'm sure that's true, but it's not the advent of social networking that's cutting them out; it's more because parents aren't engaging with their kids about how they're using social sites and technologies (though this has to be changing, now that research shows half of all Americans now use social network sites - see this USATODAY blog post). The need for parental engagement is probably what Common Sense (an organization I think highly of) is trying to get across, but I suspect many readers "hear" more of a blame-the-technology message.

The two points in Common Sense's conclusion that I think deserve much more attention are these:

1. "Social networks and mobile communication connect our kids to their friends 24/7." We really need to think about the implications of this for our kids. My younger child, my first one "texting-enabled" as he entered middle school (my older one "just" had instant messaging in middle school, which isn't entirely different, but it required a less-mobile computer). I'm observing that, for kids with texting, there just are no breaks from the drama. They're literally inundated with gossip or running commentary on their peers' inner and outer lives. Much more easily than their parents, who only had 2-3 phones in the house and often had to ask to use one, our children can be caught up in and sometimes emotionally carried away by this collective drama, their own school community's on-campus, off-campus, 24-7, highly personalized "reality-TV show." At the very least it can be distracting, and sometimes emotionally overwhelming. It can have tragic consequences it involves bullying. I'd love to have a parent summit where parents, psychologists, educators, school counselors, social workers, and teens who've been there can together think through the implications of 24x7 drama.

2. "When teens communicate either anonymously or through a disguised identity, the doors are left wide open for them not to be held accountable." Yup. We're talking about the impact of online anonymity and the "disinhibition" to which it gives rise (borne out in the "skank blogger" story I blogged about earlier this week, and these were grownups). Our "social intelligence" – ability to see, hear, or intuit the impact of our behavior – is impaired somewhat when we're online and on phones (see "Social intelligence & youth"). What happens when social intelligence goes down while social information goes up (or floods one's mental scene!)? We all need to be talking more about what mitigates disinhibition, which what's behind so much online harassment and bullying: training students in empathy and citizenship; showing them that they're not really anonymous online; helping them (and us) "get" that those are human beings with feelings behind those profile comments, text messages, and avatars; maybe all of the above? [See also "Digital risk, digital citizenship".]

Then there's the media literacy piece to parenting the digitally literate. Right from the start of their exposure to media online and offline, we can show our children how to take what they read with a grain of salt , think about who the source is and what his, her, or its goal or intention might be, etc. YPulse's Anastasia Goodstein models this traditional media literacy in her commentary on the Common Sense study. When you turn the figures upside down, as she did, you get quite a different takeaway from the survey:

"63% of teens said they DO NOT USE social networks to make fun of other students [emphasis Anastasia's]

"87% of teens said they HAVE NOT posted naked or semi-naked photos or videos of themselves.

"76% of teens said they HAVE NOT signed on to someone else's account without permission

"72% of teens HAVE NOT posted personal information that they normally would not have revealed in public."

New media literacy's an ever more important part of parenting (and education) too – the kind that uses and models critical thinking about what we say, produce, and upload as much as what we see, read, and download. That, too, is protective and mitigates disinhibition.

I would love your input on all this. Please comment here or in the ConnectSafely.org forum – or send an email to anne(at)netfamilynews.org.

Related link

"They're Old Enough to Text. Now What?" in which the New York Times's John Biggs looks at what type of texting device is appropriate for what age level - about LeapFrog's Text and Learn, Kajeet, Peek Pronto, and T-Mobile's Sidekick (not the very popular iPhone, interestingly)

Fresh look at teen cellphone use: Pew memo

These aren't even new numbers on teen mobile phone use, and they're still eyebrow-raising. Pew/Internet's researchers looked back over all their data since 2004 in prep for a whole new study they'll release early next year, and – even in early 2008 - 85% of US 16-year-olds had their own cellphones (71% of all teens did). In 2004, 59% of 16-year-olds owned mobile phones. Let's look at Pew's full age spectrum for 2008: 51% of people aged 12, 53% (13), 72% (14), 79% (15), and those aged 17 came in just under 16-year-olds at 84%. The biggest change in cellphone-ownership numbers between 2004 and 2008 was for 12-year-olds: only 18% had phone in '04, compared to 51% last year. That does suggest that mobile users are getting younger and younger. Here's the chart.

As a parent, I thought for sure they were all texting more than talking, but maybe that's only recently (on pins and needles for the new Pew mobile study). [Nielsen Mobile did report last fall that Americans as a whole sent more text messages than made phone calls, starting the first quarter of 2007, according to a New York Times item I blogged about.] In Pew's 2008 numbers, 94% of teens had used their mobile phones to call friends and 76% have sent text messages, about 20% of them sending text messages daily.

But cellphones aren't teens' only social tool, of course. About a quarter (26%) of all teens "send messages (emails, instant messages, group messages) through social-networking sites," Pew says, "and 43% of teens who use social networks send messages daily. Similarly, another 26% of teens send and receive instant messages on a daily basis and 16% send email every day. And beyond social networking, "77% of teens own a game console like an Xbox or a PlayStation, 74% own an iPod or mp3 player," 60% use a desktop or laptop computer, and 55% own a handheld gaming device, Pew reports. [Meanwhile, moms haven't been left in the dusty - they're flocking to smartphones like iPhones and BlackBerries, CNET reports. Smartphones are the fastest-growing category of phones, and "about 14% of all wireless users who identified themselves as mothers said they owned a smartphone," up from 8.3% in the first quarter of 2008, CNET adds, citing Nielsen Mobile figures.]