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Advancing digital literacy in the US

07-Feb-12

There is little consensus on the definition of “digital literacy.” One participant on a panel about it here at a Safer Internet Day conference in Moscow threw everything into the definition – media literacy, online safety, computer literacy, etc. Wikipedia basically defines it as “the ability to locate, organize, understand, evaluate, and analyze information using digital technology,” suggesting those skills constitute digital citizenship (see this). Definitions hardly matter as long as the elements are in place, but when digital-literacy education is only about information, not expression and behavior, it doesn’t improve anyone’s Internet safety in today’s user-driven social media environment.

Several digital literacy projects that do address current safety issues and marked Safer Internet Day today are worth mentioning. I’ve been a participant in two, so I’m biased but even so think they express advanced digital-literacy thinking:

ConnectSafely.org, which I run with Larry Magid, was a partner with Google, Common Sense Media, and the National Consumers League in developing ThinkB4U.com. As Google describes it, “together we are tackling some of
the biggest learning curves thrown at the average user in a fun and interactive way.” With video snapshots of a stereotypical North American family’s digital ups and down – scenarios that users can choose to complete for positive or negative outcomes and pick up on important digital life lessons – parents, educators, and students are encouraged to think before they share, click, multi-task, post, chat, respond, and buy online and on mobile phones.

A whole coalition of international companies and nonprofits led by TrendMicro launched this year’s award-winning “What’s Your Story” video contest for the third year running. What’s digitally literate about this is that it’s learning by doing for student video producers. There’s a $10,000 grand prize for the winning entry. “Trend Micro is introducing new categories in the U.S. and Canada that challenge anyone 13 and older, including teachers with their classrooms, to create videos that offer thoughtful and compelling solutions to… 1) Take action against bullying: How would you help a friend being bullied online? 2) Keep a good rep online: What’s the right way to share? And 3) Be cell smart: How can someone new to cell phones use it wisely?

Marking the day here in Moscow with us is a third digital literacy project that was founded in 2003 by Daniel Kent when he was in middle school: NetLiteracy.org. He recently wrote in the Huffington Post, “On October 12, 2011, FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski first announced Connect to Compete, a national program to promote broadband adoption and digital literacy. It’s a big step in the right direction. The Chairman then continued: “building on a big idea developed in the National Broadband Plan, we’re proposing to work with America’s schools and public libraries to launch a Digital Literacy Corps to help promote and teach digital literacy.” Net Literacy aims to be the kernel of that program. Based in Indiana, the all-student-volunteer digital-literacy nonprofit organization claims to have benefitted 150,000 people older than them (senior citizens) and younger than them by teaching them about the Net and digital technology. Its student participants teach, provide teachers with tech support, and refurbish computers for school and community computer labs. All this sounds like a very viable National Digital Literacy Corps kernel to me!

Related links

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Teens flocking to Twitter for privacy?

06-Feb-12

Now that so many parents are on Facebook, teens are defying predictions and adding Twitter to their social toolboxes, according to an article at MSNBC. The number of teens using Twitter has doubled in the past two years, to 16% of 12-to-17-year-olds last July (the latest data available), the article cites the Pew Internet & American Life Project as finding. “Teens tout the ease of use and the ability to send the equivalent of a text message to a circle of friends, often a smaller one than they have on crowded Facebook accounts. They can have multiple accounts and don’t have to use their real names. They also can follow their favorite celebrities,” MSNBC reports. Self-promotion is not their primary motivation for going on Twitter, the article says (contrary to what I hear a lot of adults say about Twitter use in general (on the contrary, see this about Twitter for growing one’s PLN). But the evidence that teens are taking to Twitter more to get away from parental monitoring elsewhere seems purely anecdotal in this article. It doesn’t come from the Pew research cited or its authors. Pew’s Twitter-use figure is only a little higher for 18-to-29-year-olds, now: 20%. Check out the article for point and counterpoint between two scholars on teen privacy. I’m biased toward the view of Alice Marwick, PhD, at Microsoft Research. [See this for the latest data on teens and texting.]

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Obama administration’s e-textbook push

03-Feb-12

It’s not just a cost-cutting measure, apparently and thankfully. In an effort to get “every US school to accelerate the transition to digital textbooks,” the Obama administration is asking states to “modify the textbook adoption process” so that K-12 schools can use taxpayer funding that used to go paper textbooks to purchase Kindles, iPads, and other devices and the software that goes on them, USATODAY reports. Federal Communications Commission Chairman Julius Genachowski and Education Secretary Arne Duncan say that these kinds of connected devices “help students learn more efficiently and give teachers real-time information on how well kids understand material.” I wholeheartedly agree but would add that it would get 19th-century-style education closer to relevancy to students who have never known life without digital media. According to the article, critics say there are no “magic bullets,” including iPads, but if kids love using iPads (which topped so many holiday wish lists this past season), then maybe learning the core curriculum with them will be more fun for them. So are they criticizing the potential for fun?!

It’s as if Apple planned all this. “Two weeks ago, Apple declared its intention to be at the head of the class, with the unveiling of the iBooks 2 for iPad app and the iBooks textbooks that are the first to exploit the app,” USATODAY reports. [See also "Mobile learning gathering momentum" and this on 1-iPad-per-student programs.]

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NEW! The 2012 edition of ‘A Parents’ Guide to Facebook

02-Feb-12

I am pleased to announce that we at ConnectSafely.org have just released the 2012 edition of our Parents’ Guide to Facebook. It’s already being translated into Arabic and Spanish. Since Release 1.0 of the Guide a little over a year ago (this one is a full 2.0), Facebook has made a lot of changes – including Timeline (the page formerly known as “profile”), more and more “in-line privacy controls” (i.e., pick your audience as you post), and Social Reporting (see this). So the pressure was on for us to get this revision out not long after the first release! Why all the changes? Well, the explanation seems to lie in Facebook’s corporate philosophy. According to my Parents’ Guide co-author Larry Magid in his Forbes.com coverage of Facebook’s IPO this week, CEO Mark Zuckerberg wrote about “the Hacker Way” in his letter to prospective investors, saying that “hackers believe that something can always be better, and that nothing is ever complete. They just have to go fix it – often in the face of people who say it’s impossible or are content with the status quo.” Interestingly, Larry’s own son Will, a fantastic musician, said something very similar from a nightclub stage last week. He said that a song is never done. It’s always being added to as it’s played time and again by different artists. So those of us who follow and document the work of creative people – whether they write code, music or poetry – just have to stay on our toes!

We’ve gotten thousands of requests for paper booklets over the past year, and – thanks to our generous supporter Trend Micro – we’ve been able to fulfill most of those requests. And it looks like we’ll be able to do that again this year. Meanwhile, check out the PDF version and tell us what you think (via admin[at]connectsafely.org).

Filed in Parenting, Privacy, children's privacy, consumer privacy, data protection, data security | Tagged , , , , , , | Comments (0) »

Facebook’s IPO not just a business story, of course

01-Feb-12

With its clever lede – “It sure pays to have friends” – the New York Times reported a story that goes way beyond business, even though it is indeed a big business story: “Facebook, the vast online social network, took its first step toward becoming a publicly traded company on Wednesday as it filed to sell shares on the stock market.” The Times adds that Facebook is “on track to be the largest Internet initial public offering – trumping Google’s in 2004 or Netscape’s nearly a decade before that.”

But some other numbers point to the bigger social story, the one in which Facebook’s IPO is just one part (I’ll get to the numbers in a minute). Other parts include last year’s Arab Spring (including what’s happening in Syria right now) and what happened with the Stop Online Privacy Act in this country, week before last. It’s the story of our radically changed global media environment – the one that’s shrinking our world (by enabling us to participate in as well as watch developments far from us, as they happen in real time) and slowly, over time, redistributing power, with more and more citizen journalists and producers, joined by citizen lobbyists a couple of weeks ago, and probably soon citizen regulators (see this). The instant mass communication and distribution enabled by tools like Facebook and mobile phones is the enabling part of the story. And Facebook’s non-dollar – people – numbers provide evidence: 843 million users worldwide, 483 million of them accessing the site each day, uploading 250 million photos a day. Each month, users collectively add 30 billion pieces of content (comments, photos, videos, etc.) to the site. And those don’t represent content as we’ve always known it. It’s the content of our lives. It’s the moment-by-moment collective self-expression of a growing proportion of humanity. As a whole, that content is like a living thing. It’s certainly constantly moving and changing. All of which adds up to something with which the entities or forces of control in the world can’t really know how to contend. As part of the generation that straddles what media used to be (mass media) and what it is now (social media), I will always have a certain sense of amazement at all of this. Anyway, so this is a history lesson, a media story, a story of social change, an education story, a technology story … I guess just a human story.

More people numbers in Facebook’s S1 document:

  • Growth in the past year: A 39% increase of monthly active Facebook users (MAUs) to 608 million between Dec. 31, 2010 and the same day of ‘11. As for daily active users, the increase was 48% (to 327 million) over the same period.
  • Mobile use: Last December, Facebook had more than 425 million MAUs using mobile products (such as the iPhone and Android Facebook apps).
  • An everyday thing: 360 million Facebook users were active “at least six out of the last seven days,” Facebook reports.
  • FB friends: 101 billion friend connections by this past New Year’s Eve
  • A whole lot of “likes”: FB users posted 2.7 billion likes and comments a day during the last quarter of 2011.

Related links

  • CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s statement in Facebook’s S1 filing tying the site’s constant changes to “The Hacker Way” in my ConnectSafely.org co-director Larry Magid’s article on the IPO at Forbes.com – hmm, the tao of hacking?
  • A link to and more info on Facebook’s S1 in what amounts to a sidebar to Larry’s article
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State anti-bullying law to be reworked

01-Feb-12

New Jersey’s stepped-up bullying prevention law has been deemed unconstitutional not for its spirit but for its cost. It was the state’s Council on Local Mandates that ruled the law – the “Anti-Bullying Bill of Rights,” which “was seen as one of the toughest in the nation” – unconstitutional as an unfunded mandate, the Tri-Boro Patch reports. The legislation’s lead sponsor, Assemblywoman Valerie Vainieri Huttle, said she and her co-sponsors would “try to find a way” to make the law work, and the state School Boards Association said it would “welcome the opportunity to work with the state to design a process that has adequate state financial support and doesn’t divert resources from other critical programs.” The Patch added that “the anti-bullying law was sparked by the 2010 suicide of a Rutgers University freshman whose roommate allegedly used a webcam to video him with another man. Recent coverage of that complex story can be found in The New Yorker and Out.com.

According to the Cyberbullying Research Center, 48 US states and the District of Columbia now have laws that address bullying in school, 38 of them (not DC) including “electronic harassment” and 14 of those 38 specifically referring to “cyberbullying” (Montana and South Dakota are the only two states that don’t at least require schools to have a policy concerning bullying). However – as you can see in this New Jersey story – it’s not easy for lawmakers to find the right balance and language, when, as a society, we still struggle over the definition of “bullying” now in a social media environment to which social norms and spatial boundaries (such as on- or off-campus) haven’t yet caught up (see “What I’ve learned so far” about that). The hope is that – beyond funding their mandates – lawmakers increasingly will ground their efforts in the latest national-level research about bullying and cyberbullying, such as that of the Cyberbullying Research Center, the Crimes Against Children Research Center, and other scholars I often cite in this blog.

Related links

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The downside of social media convenience

31-Jan-12

Some people think of it as the dark side of using social media: potential oversharing. Things can indeed get dark, if we get so fixated on the darkness that we can’t see or learn about the alternatives. Better to get informed and act on that information! Mashable does a great job of showing how oversharing can happen using different kinds of applications in Facebook – e.g., what songs you’re listened to, recipes you’ve tried, FB profiles you’ve visited, where you go running (offline!), and what your plans are this coming weekend.

Facebook users can certainly opt out of apps altogether but, “should you choose not to share with apps at all, they are [all] taken away from you,” Mashable reports, and I’ll add that you can lose some Facebook functionality in the process (more on the latter in a minute). “If you want to use some [apps] but limit their functionality, you have to carefully customize your privacy settings in order to ensure your information is used appropriately. With the Open Graph, which can push any information to your Facebook page without explicit permission each time, [customizing your app settings] becomes more of an imperative,” Mashable adds. [About that "Open Graph": FB introduced it a couple of years as a platform that "allows sites and apps to share information about users in order to tailor offers, features and services to each one's interests and tastes," Mashable explained back then.]

Gain something, lose something

As for losing functionality, here’s what Facebook says happens when you totally opt out of apps: “You may lose all existing Platform information and settings you’ve saved and friends won’t be able to interact with you using any apps or websites, and this cannot be recovered.” So customizing may be a better way to go for many Facebook users. “Does it have to be this hard?” some may ask. Well, yes, for now, if you choose to be a Facebook user and do that typical social-media practice of sharing interests with your contacts in FB.

If you don’t opt out of apps entirely, go here (when logged in) to see a full list of apps you’ve adopted on Facebook, then you can edit your privacy settings app by app. [It's easy to forget because, authorizing an app is usually part of some interaction with some person or content, not usually a discrete action in its own right, so it's good to check every now and then.]

‘Auto-sharing’ your info

Meanwhile, the Washington Post reports that Facebook just started supporting 60 new auto-sharing apps, among them Ticketmaster, Foodily (for recipe-swapping foodies), and TripAdvisor. What that means is, when you use these apps, they automatically share info about that usage with your friends – on your timeline (the feature formerly known as “profile”) and their news feeds. For example, if you use Spotify the music app (an early auto-sharing partner of FB’s), the “news” that you listened to a song appears on your timeline and in news feeds. You don’t have to put that info into you status update window manually (whew!–such trouble that was!). But you can stop it from doing that any time by going to your app list and editing what Spotify can do. [Here's Facebook's blog post about the new auto-sharing apps.]

Related links

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Picturing social media in school

31-Jan-12

Not all infographics are equal. Some play it a little fast and loose with source data in the interest of grabbing eyeballs – watching out for that is a good lesson in media literacy. But this one from ASCD represents data from Pew/Internet, Project Tomorrow, National School Boards Assoc., and other credible sources. It says social media is “where students live”; “how they want to learn”; “where they want [to find] teachers and experts”; and where their parents, friends, college recruiters, and prospective employers are. It also says students see it as an “overhyped danger.” (Hear, hear! See our “Online Safety 3.0″ at ConnectSafely.org.) As for schools, the infographic says they see social media as “damaging,” “a distraction,” “a haven for bullying,” and “hard to monitor.” And if monitoring’s one of school’s goals, that will not get any easier. The infographic leads with the statement that the mobile Web – the one that schools can’t really control which students carry around in their pockets all day – will replace wired Internet access by 2015 (if so, we’re catching up with India, where the Web on feature – non-smart – phones is huge). This data snapshot goes with ASCD’s report “Can Social Media and School Policies Be Friends?”, which recommends that “all schools move toward embracing social media, while enacting policies that require responsible use” and dispels six myths about CIPA requirements under which schools and districts are laboring (CIPA is the Children’s Internet Protection Act, the US federal law that sets the requirements for schools and libraries to receive federal “e-rate” funding for Internet connectivity).

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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.

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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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