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April 25, 2012 | 4:15 PM | By

How Should Schools and Parents Be Involved in Kids’ Online Lives?

Flickr:Demos Helsinki

By Matt Levinson

Parents are constantly grappling with how to deal with online privacy issues with their kids. Issues about whether to share passwords to email and social media accounts, whether to filter or monitor Web sites, and how much leeway to give kids of different ages as they experiment with their online identities.

Because kids spend most of their time at school, it’s not unusual when questions about these issues come up at school but have to be dealt with at home — and vice versa.

A recent example presented itself when a parent discovered that her middle-school-age daughter was interested in a social network site called Zorpia, which bills itself as a site to “share unlimited photos, post journals and make friends.” She found out about it by reading her daughter’s email, a policy they had both agreed to.

But after reading a review of the site, the mother was concerned about whether it was too risky to allow her daughter to interact with strangers online. She wrote to the daughter’s school “in the spirit of keeping the school abreast of what is going on off-campus” and with the goal of “educating more parents about the types of sites that exist and what are some good, common-sense ground rules.”

The goal is to maintain open communication, explaining to kids the responsibility that comes along with having an email account.

This incident brings up a few complicated issues, including whether parents should be reading kids’ private emails, and how parents should deal with open social media sites.

But even before addressing those questions, should schools even be involved in this conversation? Is this an issue for each family to sort out among themselves? One of the reverberating effects of online life is the fluidity of the connection between different environments, and with an instance like Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Culture, Facebook, privacy, Social Media, Zorpia
April 23, 2012 | 9:53 AM | By

Budding Writers Benefit from Sharing Their Work Online

Figment

By Kyle Palmer

When Jacob Lewis was growing up, he liked to write “really terrible Stephen King-like fiction stories.” Looking back on those early works, the former managing editor of The New Yorker said he’s glad they never saw the light of day. But for thousands of teenage writers across the country, Lewis has helped do the exact opposite.

The Web site Figment—founded by Lewis and New Yorker staff writer Dana Goodyear in 2010—gives young writers a forum to freely publish their work. The site now boasts more than 220,000 registered users and has stocked a library of more than 350,000 individual pieces, ranging from reflective poetry to multi-chapter novellas.

“We really thought at first that it would be more of a social network site,” Lewis said. “But it has been all about project creation. The amount of new content our users produce is amazing.”

Lewis said Figment users post more than 1,000 new original pieces every week, many of them only a few hundred words representing a large range of genres, from heart-tugging romance to dystopian fantasy.

“It takes a lot of guts to put yourself out there like they have,” Lewis said. “We knew there was a need for this, but we’ve been surprised at the passion and the ownership our users have shown.”

“We just want these young writers to see how empowering it is to be able to share your ideas.”

Similar to Facebook, Figment users—most of whom are between 13 and 24 years old—create a profile and upload their work, giving it a title and picking from a large selection of stock images to use as cover art. Other users can read the pieces online and leave comments and provide feedback.

Not all pieces are read widely, but some works, like Diamonds in the Rough by a user from Wisconsin who goes by the screen name Fish Fingers, have received 130 comments and more than 200 “Hearts” (Figments’ version of Facebook’s Like button).

“Wow! This [story] is beautifully sad!” one user commented about Fish Finger’s work.

“Your similes are impeccably accurate,” wrote another.

“The one negative thing I’d say is that I think it would’ve been better if you had let people figure out the moral for themselves then say what it is at the end of the story,” posted another user. Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Learning Methods, Tech Tools, Figment, Social Media, writing
April 18, 2012 | 11:01 AM | By

Facebook Groups for Schools Raises Concerns

Filckr:Birgerking

By Katrina Schwartz

The explosive growth of online social media sites specifically targeted at schools has compelled Facebook to edge its way back into the fertile ground of college campuses. Last week, the company announced a new feature available only to students and faculty with an active .edu email address, Groups for Schools. It’s billed to be exclusive — even alumni and perspective students aren’t allowed in, limiting the scope of the groups and creating something that approximates the intimacy that was Facebook’s strong suit when it first launched.

Groups for Schools is meant to network students in the same university community for social or extracurricular events, but also includes elements that make it useful as a study tool, like the popular platform Edmodo and a number of other similar sites that have cropped up. It allows students and teachers who are members of a group designated to a particular class, for example, to share comments on a class discussion and reading, as well as to share class materials like notes, assignments and calendars, up to 25 MB.

But just a week into its launch, red flags are already being raised. One of the main concerns that has not been addressed by Facebook is the potential liability that students, faculty, and universities might face for file-sharing through Facebook. Many universities are already cracking down on file-sharing through school-owned Internet networks, and Facebook’s new tool adds yet another Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Tech Tools, Facebook, Group for Schools, Social Media
March 16, 2012 | 11:22 AM | By

Kony 2012: Viral Video Prompts a Teachable Moment

Screenshot of Kony 2012 YouTube Video

By Matt Levinson

Over the past weeks, schools across the country have had the chance to witness the lightning speed with which viral videos can travel around the globe, particularly when young people are involved. The trigger in this instance: Invisible Children, a 30-minute video highlighting the horrors of child abduction and other atrocities perpetrated by the Ugandan warlord Joseph Kony that has drawn more than 100 million hits.

How should schools handle the tidal wave of emotion, euphoria and what some criticize as “clicktivism” that has consumed the interest and attention of students?

I first learned about the video from an eighth-grade student, who described it in vivid detail. I was approached by our Dean of Students, who said a group of sixth-grade girls had stormed his office wanting to know if they could show the video at an assembly and raise money for the group Invisible Children.

Soon after, a sixth grade science teacher wrote me asking for advice about an issue that had arisen in his class: the Kony video. As part of the study on clean, available drinking water, the science teacher showed a short video called Ryan’s Well about a seven-year-old boy from Canada who raised enough money to drill a well for a school in Uganda, an act that then spiraled into the creation of Ryan’s Well Foundation.

During the discussion around Ryan’s Well, a few students in every one of the science teacher’s class eventually led to the Kony 2012 YouTube video. “Needless to say, this was an amazing learning moment for me and the students,” he said.

“Now the pace of change is so incredibly fast, is there enough time for understanding and reflection?”

The science teacher took the opportunity to ask questions and looked into the Invisible Children video. He learned about how videos go viral and he examined the authenticity of the Invisible Children foundation, learning that their practices are not as clean and clear as the students had led him to believe, and the problem with oversimplifying a murky and complicated political conflict.

Most importantly, he contacted his students’ parents to let them know about the buzz around the Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Culture, Learning Methods, Tech Tools, Facebook, Kony 2012, Social Media
February 29, 2012 | 7:00 AM | By

How Tweens Use Digital Media to Develop Their Identities

Flickr: JuliaKoz

The following are excerpts from from “Kids Closer Up: Playing, Learning, and Growing with Digital Media” by Lori Takeuchi, International Journal of Learning and Media, Spring 2011, Vol. 3, No. 2, Pages 37-59. To protect the children’s identities, all names are pseudonyms, and location details have been altered. Read the first post in the series: A Look Inside the Digital Lives of Tweens.

According to some scholars, digital media provide young people with the tools, spaces, and communities to develop the knowledge, skills, dispositions, and social practices needed for full participation in contemporary society as consumers, producers, and civic actors. Surely all children can learn something through their use of digital media. But some of these lessons hold greater value to their present and future lives than others.

Researcher Jackie Marsh argues that virtual worlds like Club Penguin and Webkinz can “offer young children a wide range of opportunities to decode, respond to and create multimodal texts in a playful space, significant activities in a new media age.” She postulates that reading Club Penguin’s newspaper, for example, can help foster children’s reading comprehension skills and that its chat feature provides a fun context for children to practice writing and use text to negotiate, collaborate, and evaluate. If and when more work, play, and learning activities are embedded in virtual worlds, as many predict they will be, current young members of Club Penguin and Webkinz will be prepared to navigate these spaces and communicate as members of online communities. However, whether they actually become better readers and writers—or just fall victim to the Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Culture, Tech Tools, digital media, Joan Ganz Cooney Center, Social Media
February 28, 2012 | 9:58 AM | By

A Look Inside the Digital Lives of Tweens

Getty

The following are excerpts from from “Kids Closer Up: Playing, Learning, and Growing with Digital Media” by Lori Takeuchi, International Journal of Learning and Media, Spring 2011, Vol. 3, No. 2, Pages 37-59. To protect the children’s identities, all names are pseudonyms, and location details have been altered.

While large-scale surveys have documented the types of media to which 5–9-year-olds are devoting increasing amounts of time, we know less about how and why they are using these media and what they might be learning as a result. This research provides rich details on the processes, relationships, and contexts that larger scale studies on children’s media use cannot by examining two 8-year-old girls’ engagement with video games, the Web, mobile devices, and other emerging technologies against the backdrop of family life.

What roles are parents and others playing in their digital media experiences? And how is their engagement with digital media related to family values, relationships with peers and siblings, and what they are doing at school? The case studies illustrate how young children’s access to and interest in technology are shaped by cultural, institutional, interpersonal, and developmental forces and, in turn, how access and interest shape individual learning.

THE MYTH OF THE DIGITAL GENERATION

In the past decade, a host of newspaper and magazine articles, TV news features, and books have attempted to characterize the digital generation and have presented a polarized view of what young people are doing online, behind closed bedroom doors. Headlines vacillate between “Violent video games linked to child aggression” and “Can video-game companies revolutionize teaching in the 21st century?”

Parents are either alarmed or excited by what the Internet, video games, and cell phones can do to—or for—their children. The telephone, radio, and television evoked similar sentiments among previous generations of parents, but some assert that today’s technologies are fundamentally Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Culture, Research, digital media, Social Media