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Check out our ‘Parents’ Guide to Google+’!

27-Jan-12

I’m tooting our ConnectSafely horn, here, but we had a launch of our own this week: that of our Google+ guide for parents. You can download the PDF at PlusParents.org, or read it chunk by chunk at the Google Safety Center. In it, my co-author and ConnectSafely co-director Larry Magid and I offer you a little context on where this service fits into both the rest of Google and teen social networking in general. We also walk parents through both the service’s basic features and its special protections for people 13-17 who sign up with their real ages. Sprinkled throughout are little parenting tips and privacy pointers for parents of Google+ users. We hope you find it useful and welcome your feedback. Just email admin[at]connectsafely.org.

Filed in Social Media, Social Networking, social Web, social network sites | Tagged , , , | Comments (0) »

Google+ for teens launched

27-Jan-12

Google has just made its Google+ social networking service teen-friendly. What that means is, all the features that some 90 million Google+ users have now – Circles, Hangouts (group videochat), photo-sharing, games, etc. – are available to people under 18 but now with added protections in place. For example, the San Jose Mercury News reports, “Google+ will ask [teens] to confirm a public post before it is shared, to ensure the teen truly wants to share the information with [people] outside their own Circles, the social network’s contacts framework. Only users within a teenager’s Circles can contact them, and if a stranger joins a minor’s Google+ hangout … the teen will be temporarily removed and informed of the person’s presence” so that rejoining the chat is a conscious decision.” There are many others, but I’d like to highlight the teen-specific defaults for info-sharing: birth date and contact information are “Only Me” by default; posts are seen by real-time location info is not attached to posts by default; and info like Gender, “Bragging Rights,” Places lived, Education, Relationship, etc. are “My Circles” by default. A teen’s posts are seen only by people in their circles (to which only they add contacts), and “Who can notify me,” “Who can comment on my public posts,” and “Who can tag me without approval” are also defaulted to their own circle of contacts – their social network.

That’s just a sampler – for a bulleted list of safeguards for teens, see my ConnectSafely co-director Larry Magid’s post about this at Forbes. These protections on top of the this-is-really-me default of the service as a whole make Google+ a very viable social-media option for young people, even from a pretty strict parent’s perspective. With one caveat: Just as with most protections and any services on the social Web, these are not about control. Users choose to go with the defaults – or not. There’s always a workaround even for the strictest safeguards any parent or site might impose, including software that disallows social networking sites altogether. Most young people handle their social media well, but – like all human beings in any part of of life – they can act on impulse and make mistakes (including circumventing the best safety tools and advice). So the best “safety tools” are a moral compass and – as my ConnectSafety co-director put it about 15 years ago – “the filter between one’s ears.”
Here’s a Google blog post about today’s launch and more coverage at VentureBeat and PC Magazine, and here’s our “Parents’ Guide to Google+” at ConnectSafely.org (more on that in my next post).

Disclosure: ConnectSafely, a project of Net Family News, Inc., receives financial support from Google, Facebook, and other large Internet and media companies.

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Surge in kids’ apps: Parents & providers sorting it out

25-Jan-12

I’ve done it, have you? I have a feeling most of us have passed our cellphones back to a kid in the backseat so we could drive in peace while the child (who has been hounding us to let it happen) plays a game app. Of course, increasingly, this is happening with really little kids, because the bigger ones have their own cellphones (“way back” in 2010, Pew/Internet reported that 75% of US 12-to-17-year-olds had their own phones, up from 45% in 2004).

Parents are now awash in options for those mobile games and edutainment, especially parents of the littlest phone users. Not just because there are 500,000+ apps for iPhones and 400,000+ for Android phones, as I reported earlier. But also because “apps for toddlers/preschoolers are the most popular age category (58%) and experienced the greatest growth (23%),” according to the Joan Ganz Cooney Center researchers at Sesame Workshop in their new report, “iLearn II: An Analysis of the Education Category of Apple’s App Store.” The authors even wonder if app developers should “consider potential saturation of this [early education] market.” They found that 72% of the top-selling paid apps in the Education category of the Apple store are for preschool or elementary aged kids, compared to 47% in 2009. Overall, though, “apps are an important and growing medium for providing educational content to children,” the Cooney Center suggests, not just because there are so many but also because they’re so popular with kids.

Confused consumers, fledgling industry

So parents as well as providers (from app developers to publishers) have a similar problem right now. Parents needs to know how to find the best apps for their kids’ purposes and interests, and providers need to figure out how to find the parents who want their apps. There are Apple’s App Store and the Android Marketplace, but only a fraction of what’s available can be featured and thus found. Determining quality is even harder. There are a number of review sites, but who really knows what they’re talking about and how can one tell? If you rely on familiar brands, big ones like Disney, PBS Kids, Pearson are no help, because they’re barely in the mix, reportedly waiting to see how both the business models and the market develop before making big investments.

We’re watching a new growth industry sort it all out, with: few metrics or standards; lots of guesswork about the market; ratings systems of various sorts in the works (see this); multiplying questions about user data privacy; developers seeking advice from the Federal Trade Commission; startups and independent developers trying to figure out how to sustain a business; large companies’ not yet fully engaged; a new industry trade association (ACTonline.org); and predictable calls from lawmakers for regulation.

There’s even an impressive Children’s App Manifesto with some 260 signatures from people in North America, Australia, Asia, and Europe. Its co-author Dan Donahoo in Melbourne, Australia, told me via email that it’s particularly interesting to him (and me too) that it has been signed so far mostly by app developers (but also psychologists, educators, marketers, authors, illustrators, parents, and bloggers). Why is that interesting? It’s a sign that developers are seeking standards of business practice and product quality (in terms of pedagogy and entertainment). They’re also interested in combining forces with parents to find out more about what we and our kids want.

Crowd-sourcing business development

Another sign is the pioneering Moms With Apps, a collaborative of app developers who are also parents “seeking to promote quality apps for kids and family.” They publishe a free app catalog on iTunes. “We are seeing is a more thoughtful approach to design and development for children, especially from independent developers … led by the discussions and community that has built up over at Moms with Apps [who] act in some ways as a type of industry body (but not officially),” Donahoo, who was also a contributor to the Cooney Center report, writes in Wired’s GeekDad blog. I would add that they’re a new, or new millennium, type of industry body that functions like a cross-functional team in a social media environment – like the industry it serves, something to watch.

Reading the Cooney Center’s pioneering report and attending events about mobile apps for kids, I feel like I’m back in the mid-’90s covering Web issues and resources for kids and parents. The Cooney Center report suggests that too – pointing to a similar juncture to the one 45 years ago, when Joan Ganz Cooney founded the Children’s Television Workshop to pioneer the idea that TV could be educational as well as entertaining for children. And this time, too, what’s now called Sesame Workshop has recommendations for a media industry, even though – unlike television in the late ’60s – it’s an industry only just poised to take off. And it’s taking off in a very different media environment: a very social, user-driven one that calls for collective discovery and development like that of Moms With Apps.

ACT, the app industry’s new trade association, says apps are a $7 billion business now and projected to be a $50 billion one in 2015, just three years from now. But it’s as hard for that market – us parents – to find the apps we want for our kids as it is for the developers to find us. Not all apps can make it to the Top 20 or 50 of the giant app stores, and that’s not enough for parents to go on. So is there life beyond the big app stores? Watch this space!

Related links

  • Notable numbers: The last week of 2011 was the largest week for cellphone activations and app downloads ever, with more than 20 million iOS and Android devices activated and 1.2 billion applications downloaded, according to mobile analytics firm Flurry.
  • Other coverage of the Cooney Center report besides Wired’s: “Educational apps for early learners see huge jump” at eSchoolNews and “Apps for preschoolers experience strong growth” at kidscreen.com
  • CommonSenseMedia’s “8 ways to save (and spend) on ‘free’ apps”
  • “The dirty little secret about mobile apps” – how tough it has been for developers to build a business on apps and why in MobileCommerceDaily.com
  • In “Kid apps explode on smartphones and tablets. But are they good for your children?”, the Washington Post pulls together lots of views about parenting, mobile phones, and apps.
  • The National Cybersecurity Alliance’s “Mobile Privacy Tips”
  • “Growth in all facets of US mobile use”
Filed in Mobile, mobile data, mobile games, mobile learning, mobile technology, pedagogy | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments (0) »

Addendum: But isn’t videogame play bad for kids?

20-Jan-12

This is an addendum to my post yesterday, “Why kids love video games & what parents can do about it”….

There has been a lot of legislation written, news stories published, and research conducted about the effects of violent videogames on kids. New laws have consistently been rejected by the courts as unconstitutional, and the research has shown that “a very small number of kids, about 3%, exhibit signs of pathological gaming,” according to the author of a meta-analysis of 33 studies on the subject, Christopher Ferguson, writing for Time. Ferguson, a psychology professor at Texas A&M University, writes that, “even while video game sales have skyrocketed, youth violence plummeted to its lowest levels in 40 years” (he sites US government statistics here). [This contrast between facts and fears reminds me of similar ones in the past, in the areas of online "predators" and cyberbullying. See this.].

Ferguson also points to problems with the early research on violent videogames’ impact. “Most studies used outcome measures that had nothing to do with real-life aggression and failed to control carefully for other important variables, such as family violence, mental health issues or even gender in many studies,” he wrote. “This was something the U.S. Supreme Court recognized when, after considering California’s attempt to ban the sale of VVG [violent videogames] to minors in Brown v. EMA, it stated on June 27, 2011, ‘These studies have been rejected by every court to consider them, and with good reason.’” And current research “has not found that children who play VVG are more violent than other kids, nor harmed in any other identifiable fashion,” Ferguson adds. [For another perspective on violence in videogames, see this from media professor Henry Jenkins at the University of Southern California.]

Filed in Gaming, video game research, videogame law, videogame research, videogame violence | Tagged , , , , | Comments (0) »

Why kids love video games & what parents can do about it

19-Jan-12

Listen. Ask our kids about their in-game experiences, and then listen a lot. It may sound simple and we’ve heard it before, but listening can have powerful effects. This video interview for Kids and Media UK about kids and videogames with University of Bournemouth professor Stephen Heppell, who for more than 30 years has been helping communities and governments in many countries design and redesign school, explains why.

But before Heppell gets to that, see what he tells the interviewer about why kids love videogames so much (I’ve transcribed most of the interview for you so that it’s captured in and searchable as text):

Why they love those games

The interview starts with a lament about how “most of what children do is criticized in the media – demonized sometimes” – and how quick we are to worry that they’ll get addicted to videogames. “I never heard anyone worried about children becoming addicted to books,” Heppell said. So here’s why kids love these games so much:

“Children love immersion, they love to really get their heads into things and stay with them for a long time – stories, games, relationships. They love to be immersed in things, and that’s a really important part of what games brings to all this.”

So where do we come in? “For parents, it’s hugely important that their children can talk about what they’re doing. Too often, I think, the children are playing a game and the parents are somewhere else and have no idea of the complexity of what’s going on there, and I think parents should make a point of talking with their children about what’s happening – [ask] ‘How did you solve that problem? What did you do? What were you expecting?…’

Learning includes reflecting, describing

“Because [our] children are a tight little cycle of iteration. They can look at the screen and they can see something coming toward them, and they think, ‘Gosh, my hypothesis is, the things always move from this side across the screen, so if I hide behind this wall….’ [Then something happens that proves the hypothesis wrong, and] I have to think of a new strategy….’

He’s talking about how experiential learning happens. You have to have the experience, of course, but the other necessary piece is reflection, or articulation – being able to articulate what happened. “In that cycle of observe, question, hypothesize, test,” Heppell says, “they’re problem-solving a lot in games. It’s important for parents to ask them about the problem-solving, because being in that observe-question-hypothesize-test cycle isn’t enough; you need to be able to articulate as well.”

Why is this important?

“Solving problems is important – coping with surprises is important, talking about how you did it is fundamental. So you have to have those [reflection and articulation]. That’s a key role for parents in all this. Parents will never be any good at skateboarding, but there are things you can say about road safety. Teachers will never be any good at skateboarding, but they can talk about [the] physics [of skateboard tricks]. Parents will never be as good as their children at videogames, but they have a key role in all of this, and it’s that role of asking and listening.” But there’s one important caveat, I think: We don’t talk with them *all* the time – not so much that they have no time to play and be immersed in that “cycle of iteration.”

Not just parents, of course, but anybody who cares for and about kids, because those who care are the ones most likely to listen. “Families and parents and grandparents are a key part of learning,” Heppell says, “one of those untapped resources that are going to be so important to us over the next few years.”

Related links: Working from the inside out

  • I’m seeing a trend and a theme as I listen to Heppell. A year ago I wrote about how we figure out children’s online safety from the inside out (the kid out), and now I’m hearing Heppell say that education reform is going to happen that way – from the inside out, from small to big….
  • In this keynote at an education conference in southern Indiana, EVSC eLearning Revolution, Heppell talks about his school design and redesign projects in small towns and communities in China, Norway, Singapore, Denmark, the UK, etc. Successful schools are “all about communities, memberships, collegiality and mutuality. They’re all about small groups of people getting together to transform learning from the bottom up. Whatever happens at the national level almost doesn’t matter, apart from the resourcing, because the innovation that’s driving all this forward is down at the school level, down at the district level, the community level, indeed will be at the family level.”
  • But we can’t forget to be playful: See an earlier post of mine about the protective as well as rewarding powers of play, featuring psychiatrist Stuart Brown.

Readers, this is Part 2 of a two-part series on families and video gaming. Here’s Part 1: “Powerful play: A mom & son in World of Warcraft.”

Filed in Gaming, Parenting, Youth, play | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments (1) »

A class as a team of co-learners

18-Jan-12

…with the focus on the learners, which can certainly include the teacher. This is the conceptual infrastructure, presented in educator Jackie Gerstein’s User-Generated Education blog, for using tech in the classroom. How does it play out? More emphasis on learners and learning, using technology to facilitate that. Starting when a class first meets. Literally – as in everybody really meeting each other. Here’s how Jackie explains it:

Most classes, starting with about middle school, begin the school year with reviewing the content to be covered, expectations regarding grades, and other academic information provided by the teacher or instructor. The human or social element is often disregarded. What is interesting is that most learners enter the classroom wondering who is in the course. They want to know about the teacher and the people in the class not what material is to be covered. What this says to me as an educator is that it all begins with a social connection – between the educator and the learners, and between the learners themselves.

So she starts with icebreakers using cellphones or whatever technology everybody has access to. See her post for specific activities and the apps or programs she has her students use. I love the texting interviews randomly paired students conduct with each other. Then, as with all good experiential learning, class members reflect on what they experienced, through verbal discussion, personal writing, or thoughts “posted on a Sticky Note Board such as Wallwisher or Wifitti,” programs that collectively project students’ contributions onto a whiteboard or their own screens. It’s a great way to co-establish a classroom culture of respect for all future classwork together. Bonus question: You can see the “online safety” piece of this, right? A place of mutual respect and collaboration is a safer space. . [See also "5th graders teaching us about teaching citizenship."]

Filed in Literacy & Citizenship, Risk & Safety, Safety, School & Tech, education technology, mobile learning, pedagogy | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments (0) »

Google’s data-security ed campaign & site

18-Jan-12

This week Google launched an ad campaign and Web site headlined “Good To Know,” according to a report at the Washington Post. Aimed at teaching Net users the basics of protecting their data in our increasingly social media environment, the campaign has ads appearing in “dozens of U.S. newspapers, including The New York Times, USA Today, and The Wall Street Journal, and magazines, including Time and the New Yorker.” People will also see the ads on Web pages and subway billboards in New York and Washington. “The campaign comes as Google and other technology companies face more questions and government pressure on privacy issues,” a Wall Street Journal blog reports. Proponents are calling it a public service, critics a PR campaign. A reviewer at PC World found the site to be a useful aggregation of Google’s online safety and security resources presented with “a fresh, easy-to-follow look and jargon-free writing.” Of course, like any such offering, it doesn’t go so far as to mention competitors’ products, such as alternatives to Google’s Chrome Web browser.

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Teens’ cellphone data use tripled in past year

16-Jan-12

On average, teens exchange 3,417 messages per month, or “seven text messages per waking hour,” Nielsen found in an analysis of data from more than 65,000 cellphone subscribers. Teens have “tripled their data use in the past year,” but “data use across all age groups nearly doubled,” the Washington Post reports in its coverage. “Survey participants ages 13-17 used an average of 90 MB per month in 2010; in 2011, that number jumped 256% to 321 MB.” In the same period of time, data use jumped 147% for users 18-24, 118% for those 25-34 and 133% for 35-to-44-year-olds. When teens were asked why they like texting so much, the said it’s “faster, easier, and more fun” than talking on the phone. I have to agree. But I still talk more than text with my own peers – not out of any kind of altruism, just because that’s what they do, and I have a feeling that’s a factor for people of all ages. We use the tools our friends use. Here’s coverage at MSNBC and an in-depth study by Pew Internet on “Teens, texting and cellphones” in 2010.

Filed in Digital Tech, Mobile, Social Media | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments (0) »

Google’s new social search results: Media literacy opp

14-Jan-12

Google just added to its regular search results the posts, photos, etc. of your social circles, as they appear in Google+ (if you use it), YouTube, and other Google social products*. It’s called “Search, plus Your World.” Even though you and your kids can opt out entirely to get your Google searches back to the general results you’ve always gotten, the move has created a fairly predictable fracas. Some people love it, some hate it. “People do not necessarily want personal information appearing in search results, some said, while other said that Google was unfairly favoring its own social network over competitors like Facebook and Twitter,” according to a New York Times blog. The Gizmodo blog even said it changes the way search works by putting personal (subjective) results before relevancy, or “objective” results – though Google’s top results were always based on the number of people who found them useful. This makes the echo chamber smaller and more front and center, if you let it.

But there’s the key: “if you let it.” First of all, none of this works if you’re not logged in as a Google member, so Google search is basically the same if you aren’t or if you’re logged off. And, as I mentioned above, if you are logged in, Google provides a way to turn it off entirely (my ConnectSafely co-director Larry Magid explains how in a Forbes blog post). But here’s a great media literacy training opp: You can also see what your search results look like both ways – toggle back and forth between social and regular and compare the two, having a little discussion about the differences. You do this by logging into Google (via Gmail, YouTube, or whatever service), then going to Google search and searching for something. In the upper right-hand corner are two icons: a little globe and a little person. Click on the globe and you hide social search results, click on the person and the results from your social circle are on top.

So I don’t see any need for a big kerfuffle about this. You can always use a different search engine (Gizmodo sees this as a big boon for Bing), but I don’t think there’s much of a downside unless for some reason someone wants there to be. There’s that media-literacy training plus to it (to borrow your “plus,” Google) and – if you’re disconcerted about what Google turns up from your Facebook content, this may be a useful reminder to be less public in Facebook, if so desired. Because Google only turns up what’s public in your or your kids’ Facebook activities.

*Subscribers, I uploaded this over the US’s holiday weekend and have since learned that I misread the New York Times blog post cited above, by inferring that Facebook and Twitter results would be included in “Search, plus Your World” (see this thorough post from search analyst Phil Bradley in the UK, pointed out to me by Amy Jussel of ShapingYouth.org (thanks, Amy!). I do feel that focusing on activity in its own products in the social part Google’s search results downgrades the quality of its search product overall, if this is what the company’s doing, but I also believe that 1) Internet users have choices and can vote with their keyboards, 2) this is an excellent media literacy lesson, and 3) this may also be a business opportunity for non-promotional Web search.

Filed in Google, Search, search engines | Tagged , , , , | Comments (0) »