Skip to content

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.]

Filed in School & Tech, education technology, mobile learning | Tagged , , , , , , | Comments (0) »

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

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

Filed in Research, Risk, Risk & Safety, bullying, cyberbullying, cyberbullying research | Tagged , , , , , , | Comments (0) »

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

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

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).

Filed in School & Tech, Social Media | Tagged , , , , , | Comments (0) »

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.

Filed in Social Media, Social Networking | Tagged , , , , , , | Comments (0) »

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 (1) »