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.]

Cellphone: A kid's other computer

If they don't already, parents need to know that owning a cellphone is more and more like owning a computer. Because, though they fit in zippered little compartments in our kids' backpacks, 3G phones or "smart phones" are full-blown Net-connected computers (unless you have your mobile carrier turn off Web browsing). So they're entertainment and social devices and a way for scammers to trick you into subscribing to this or that long-term "service" as much as a way for Mom or Dad to keep tabs on kids' whereabouts – and "about half" of US kids aged 12+ have cellphones, reports Alina Tugend in the New York Times, citing Yankee Group research (for better figures, see my later post with Pew/Internet's latest on teen cellphone ownership). "Many parents – and I include myself in this category," Alina writes, "keep a (somewhat) careful eye on television, computer and video game use. But we didn’t really take into account cellphones, since at least until recently, phones were intended, well, pretty much for calling people." She offers some advice from a pediatrician on family cellphone policy, including the most basic tip that limits need to be set. When things slide a bit, here's a solution Tugend, a mom herself, has arrived at: "Next time I observe my children overly focused on their cells, I’ll send them a text message: 'Put the phone away'." [See also "House rules for teen texting."]

Texting & teen sleep deprivation

Sleep specialists are concerned about teens keeping cellphones on all night, right by their beds and under their pillows – because of "how important sleep is to their developing brains," the Charlotte Observer reports. It tells of a 17-year-old in California was getting "near-debilitating migraine headaches throughout the day." The first thing her doctor checked was her eyes. No problem. Then a CAT scan. "It came back clear." He was stumped. What finally came to light was that she slept with her phone at bedside "just in case a friend called or text-messaged her in the middle of the night. Sometimes, she said, she would receive calls or messages as late as 3 a.m. – and she would wake right up to call or text right back." The article doesn't say, but I hope the prescription was that the teen turn off her phone at night. Other problems specialists cite as resulting from sleep deprivation: "impaired concentration, weakened immune systems, crankiness, increased use of nicotine or caffeine and hyperactive behavior often misconstrued as attention deficit hyperactivity disorder." And one other added by Dr. Carolyn Hart at the Presbyterian Center for Sleep Disorders: a decline in school performance and risky driving while drowsy. [See also "House rules for teen texting."]

Texting + driving = bad news: Study

We all instinctively knew this, but now data has finally been released: People who text while driving are 23 times more likely to crash than "nondistracted drivers," CNET reports, citing new findings from the Virginia Tech Transportation Institute. But the researchers didn't just look at texting. Mounting cameras inside vehicles, "they studied where drivers' eyes were looking as they did various things, such as texting, dialing a cell phone, talking on a phone, and reaching for an object. Not surprisingly, the numbers showed that the tasks that took people's eyes off the road caused the greatest amount of danger." The average eyes-off-the-road time for texting was 4.6 seconds – time enough to "travel the length of a football field at 55 mph." Talking on a cellphone, on the other hand, presumably with eyes on the road, increased the chance of crashing 1.3 times - that's talking, not dialing, of course. See CNET for more interesting findings. Here's the New York Times's coverage.

Surfing by phone: Significant growth

Seems it's only a matter of time before Americans are accessing the Net via phones as much as on computers. And certainly, Web access is coming to the cellphone of a kid near you! A just-released survey by the Pew/Internet Project found that 56% of US adults have accessed the Internet wirelessly - via laptop, mobile device, game console, or MP3 player, and about a third (32%) have used a cellphone to access the Net "for emailing, instant-messaging, or information-seeking." That figure for phone-based access is up one-third since December 2007, "when 24% of Americans had ever used the Internet on a mobile device." On a typical day, Pew adds 19% of Americans use the Net from their phones - 73% growth over 16 months.

Cellphones in class: New study on cheating

On average, US teens send and receive more than 2,000 text messages a month, according to Nielsen figures, and a new study sponsored by Common Sense Media found that - despite many school policies to the contrary - a quarter of those texts are sent and received during class! Common Sense zoomed in on the opportunities this represents for cheating on texts, pointing to these key findings: 26% of students surveyed have stored notes on a cellphone to access during a test, 41% of the students surveyed say doing so is cheating and a 'serious offense'," and 23% don't think it's cheating; 25% of students have texted friends about answers during tests, 45% says this is "cheating and a serious offense," and 20% say it’s not cheating at all; 36% "say that downloading a paper from the Internet to turn in is not a serious cheating offense" and 19% say it isn’t cheating at all. "The results of this poll show a great need for a national discussion on digital ethics," Common Sense says in its press release. Hear, hear! There is no question a national discussion on digital ethics is needed - has been needed for some time - but not just with regard to cheating and plagiarism. What needs to be understood nationwide (worldwide, actually) is that ethics and the respect and civility associated therewith is protective as well. Ethics is protective of individuals and the communities - online communities and school communities - in which they function. And not just legally protective. Ethics, civility, respect, and citizenship mitigate aggression toward and disrespect for individual and collective rights and responsibilities. That is another national discussion we need to have, I feel.

But back to the important academics question. The other side of this needing to be addressed is what testing should look like in the digital age. As my ConnectSafely co-director Larry Magid writes in the San Jose Mercury News today, "Cheating is cheating regardless of whether you use technology or old-fashioned paper notes. But in addition to admonishing kids about why it's wrong to cheat, perhaps it's also time to rethink what it means to evaluate students in the age of the Internet and omnipresent mobile devices." Here's the San Francisco Chronicle on the Common Sense study, mentioning the organization's great new work in media literacy). [Here's my earlier post on the Nielsen teen-texting figure.]

Phone bans don't work: Oz expert

After two girls were suspended from Ascham School - a boarding school for girls in an eastern suburb of Sydney - for harassing fellow students, "the school sent a letter to parents urging them to take their children's mobile phones away from them at night to try and stop abusive messages circulating," ABC News Australia reports. But ABC talked with the general manager of Kids Helpline, a free phone counseling service for Australians 5-25, who said that she's "wary about confiscating phones and warns parents they need to be careful not to alienate their children too much." She said bans can work against the victims as much as against the bullies. She told ABC that the victims could go "further inside themselves," which makes it tougher for caregivers and school officials to know what's going on with them, and "13- and 14-year-olds like the girls involved at Ascham are the most likely to be affected."

The role of betrayal in sexting

Well put: "A brokered trust leads to broken trust when those photos are sent into the ether," writes Ellen Goodman in a column about sexting in the Boston Globe. The vast majority of those naked photos are sent to romantic partners, experts say, with "a guy saying, 'You don't trust me? You won't send me a naked picture?'" And what happens later that can lead to serious psychological and legal trouble (the wider sharing of those photos) is often about betrayed trust. Little of this is new - photography (remember Polaroids at parties?), brokered and betrayed trust in relationships, sexism (betrayed girls get called sluts while the betrayer gets to go ruin someone else's reputation). What is new is the *extra* unintended exposure (party Polaroids could possibly be obtained, ripped up, and tossed). That exposure is mostly bad. Goodman led with the bad part - high-profile cases of teens being subjected to truly nasty peer behavior or overzealous prosecutors or both (Vermont, Utah, and Ohio are all trying to reduce the possibility of criminal charges for sexting, the Globe reports). But the one ray of light is that there's a national discussion about the need to "Trust but verify," adjust laws and apply them appropriately, and "raise the social penalty for being a certified creep."

Cellphones in the classroom

The cellphone industry says that, in promoting mobile learning, it's making a similar pitch as that of computer makers to educators since the 1980s, the New York Times reports. "The only difference now between smartphones and laptops, they say, is that cellphones are smaller, cheaper and more coveted by students." Cellphones are now computers. Mobile carriers point to an industry-funded "study of four North Carolina schools in low-income neighborhoods, where 9th- and 10th-grade math students were given high-end cellphones running Microsoft’s Windows Mobile software and special programs meant to help them with their algebra studies. The students used the phones for a variety of tasks, including recording themselves solving problems and posting the videos to a private social networking site, where classmates could watch. The study found that students with the phones performed 25% better on the end-of-the-year algebra exam than did students without the devices in similar classes." A huge factor, according to the teacher who administered the program, was her students' excitement about having the phones, which "made them collaborate and focus on their studies, even outside of school hours" - though it was tough for her to spend her evening hours monitoring the students' text messaging for program violations. See also "Mobile devices 'key to 21st-century learning'" about a study from the Joan Ganz Cooney Center.]

Cellphones = wireless connected computers

Landlines may be going away (see CNET), but don't think of cellphones merely as their replacement for voice communications - at least not if you're a parent. Because to get a better handle on how young people use phones, think of them as "the world's most ubiquitous computers," as the New York Times put it recently, adding that there are 4 billion mobile phones in use worldwide right now. The social network sites certainly get it. MySpace "has seen its mobile user base grow by 400% from last year, and now nearly 20 million users access the site through [mobile] phones," InformationWeek reports, and Facebook "is also looking to expand its mobile presence and is reportedly in talks with Nokia and Motorola for tighter integration into handsets." (BTW, on the landline subject, CNET reported that 17.5% of US households depended solely on cellphones for their phone communications during the first half of 2008, up from 13.6% a year earlier.)

Kids as inadvertent child pornographers

To sometimes tragic effect, that is what the usually impulsive, unthinking behavior behind sexting can lead to: child child pornographers. "A growing number of teens are ending up in serious trouble for sending racy photos with their cellphones. Police have investigated more than two dozen teens in at least six states this year for sending nude images of themselves in cellphone text messages, which can bring a charge of distributing child pornography," USATODAY reports. The National Center for Missing & Exploited Children told USATODAY that, of the 2,100 children it has identified as victims of online porn, a quarter of them "initially sent the images themselves" - photos that can end up mixed in with adult-produced child-abuse images circulating online (Austrian police just reported breaking up a child porn ring operating in 170 countries, the International Herald Tribune reports). Two teens 15 and 18 were recently charged with soliciting and possessing child porn with the intent to distribute after seeking nude pictures from three other kids, one in elementary school, USATODAY adds. This is why I feel critical thinking - about what they send and upload as much as what they receive and download - is essential to youth online safety going forward. Have your kids either read this item or the full USATODAY piece, and they'll probably think twice about being manipulated or impulsive in this way and may even help a friend avoid being so. [See also "Social media literacy: The new Internet safety," "Teen suicide over sexting," and a number of other NFN items on sexting.]

Americans' cellphone texting costs

Both a US senator and a business professor writing about him in the New York Times found it a challenge recently to get to the bottom of cellphone texting's costs to customers vs. their costs to the cellphone carriers, given that the amount of texting Americans do has grown ten-fold in the past three years. Sen. Herb Kohl (D-Wisc.), chairman of the Senate antitrust subcommittee, was curious about why the cost of individual text messages (not unlimited plans) had doubled between 2005 and '08, and - when he asked the carriers - they spoke "at length about pricing plans without getting around to the costs of conveying text messages." Those costs did not go up anywhere near proportionately to the volume increase of text messages. The way the professor/commentator put it in the Times, "Customers with unlimited plans, like diners bringing a healthy appetite to an all-you-can-eat cafeteria, might think they’re getting the best out of the arrangement. But the carriers, unlike the cafeteria owners, can provide unlimited quantities of “food” at virtually no cost to themselves — so long as it is served in bite-sized portions [e.g., 160 characters per text]."

Japan's cellphone novels

Are they the soap operas of the digital age, Japanese-style? [Maybe some American kid will break the gender barrier of Japan's cellphone novels and write the sci-fi version of Huck Finn's adventures on his cellphone. How 'bout it, English teachers?! Though maybe not till US cellphone companies make unlimited texting cheaper!)]

Anyway, they're serial text messages - sometimes 20 screens or 10,000 words a day - posted by mobile phone to a blogging site. Cumulatively, they become full-blown romance novels that, in book format, would be several hundred pages long. The best of them do become published books. By the end of last year, cellphone novels "held four of the top five positions on [Japan's] literary best-seller list," The New Yorker reports. [Though there is some controversy in Japan over the use of that word "literary," some argue that the world-famous Tale of Genji, written more than 1,000 years ago, was the original cellphone novel.] Maho i-Land (meaning "Magic Island"), "is the largest cellphone-novel site" with 1 million+ titles. Besides the potential readership and - possibly - income, part of the appeal for their writers may be that they can be written in bed (hmm, think about that too, English teachers). ReadWriteWeb.com reports that the site - kind of a literary version of Blogger.com - "provides tools for people to write their own mobile phone novels." US versions of Magic Island, both in beta, are Quillpill.com and textnovel.com, according to The New Yorker.

Interestingly, they're not hurting book sales; they've added a whole new genre, printed in gray or colored text and left to right on the page, as on a phone screen, according to The New Yorker (which adds that 82% of Japanese 10-to-29-year-olds have their own cellphones). One mobile novel (or keitai shousetsu) publisher speculated for ReadWriteWeb that the book versions are like "keepsakes" for the blog readers, many of whom had posted suggestions and critiques to the novel bloggers and "end up feeling as if they had a hand in helping craft the novel."

The stories they tell are strangely at the same time empowering to their writers and demeaning of women (the latter because so culturally conservative: depicting women "suffering passively, the victims of their emotions and their physiology; [yet] true love prevails"). The market for this is seemingly bottomless. The moral of one best-seller-cum-box-office smash hit: "not that sex leads to all kinds of pain, and so should be avoided, but that sex leads to all kinds of pain, and pain is at the center of a woman's life."

Two more of many fascinating cultural and literary notes in The New Yorker piece: 1) the anti-fame attitude and m.o. of even the most popular authors, shy of posting photos of themselves with their content (which is "consistent with the ethos of the Japanese Internet"); and 2) "In the classic iteration, the novels, written by and for young women, purport to be autobiographical and revolve around true love, or, rather, the obstacles to it that have always stood at the core of romantic fiction: pregnancy, miscarriage, abortion, rape, rivals and triangles, incurable disease. The novels are set in the provinces - the undifferentiated swaths of rice fields, chain stores, and fast-food restaurants that are everywhere Tokyo is not—and the characters tend to be middle and lower middle class. Specifically, they are Yankees, a term with obscure linguistic origins (having something to do with 1950s America and greaser style) which connotes rebellious truants - the boys on motorcycles, the girls in jersey dresses, with bleached hair and rhinestone-encrusted mobile phones." I used to see this greaser look among some of the thousands of young people who gathered at Hachiko in Shibuya weekend evenings when I lived there even back in the late '80s.

It'll be interesting to see how much cellphone authorship takes off on this side of the Pacific - a mainstream or vertical interest like anime? We've seen teen bloggers become book authors, so why not teen texters? And will this be done in the classroom, along with podcasts, wikis, social networking, blogs, and virtual worlds? I'll keep you posted on what turns up!

Do cellphone novels repel or intrigue you? Post in the forum or email your thoughts to anne[at]netfamilynews.org!

13-year-old detained on child-porn charges

The Texas boy was one of an unspecified number of kids at his middle school who received a nude picture of another student on his cellphone, Dallas-area station WFAA reports. The 8th-grade girl in the photo had taken the picture of herself and sent it to "multiple guys," another female student told WFAA. So far, the boy is the only recipient who has been charged. "Police and the school district are not discussing actions against any of the other students," according to WFAA. The boy was "arrested Monday and suspended from school," then "spent the night in a juvenile detention center." The report does not say why the boy was singled or who informed the police. I'll let you know if any more info on this disturbing story emerges.

Felony charges for teen nude-photo sharer

A 15-year-old girl in Ohio has been arrested and charged for "taking nude cell phone photos of herself and sending them to high school classmates," Foxnews.com reports. "On Monday, she entered denials to juvenile charges of illegal use of a minor in nudity-oriented material and possession of criminal tools. A spokeswoman for the Ohio attorney general's office says an adult convicted of the child pornography charge would have to register as a sexual offender, but a judge would have flexibility on the matter with a convicted juvenile." A prosecutor told Fox News that authorities are also considering charging students who received the photos. The girl spent the weekend in jail, the Arizona Republic reports. [Thanks to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children for pointing out this story.]

Where do these parents come from?!

This mom seems to have gone to the Lori Drew school of parenting. "Police are investigating whether an Elgin [Ill.] woman used nude photos of her daughter's 13-year-old ex-boyfriend as blackmail to get the two back together," the Chicago area's Daily Herald reports. As of yesterday (10/6), charges hadn't been filed, but the police say they're "actively pursuing counts of intimidation, harassment and child pornography possession." The investigation began when the boy's parents complained about receiving "hundreds of threatening emails and text messages" after the breakup. "The parents told police their son admitted he and the girl had taken naked photos of themselves while dating, sharing them with each other with their cell phones," according to the Daily Herald. "The parents said that after the breakup the girl's mother told the boy she'd tell his parents about the images of him and post them online unless the youngsters started seeing each other again." She also allegedly created an email account the kids could use unbeknownst to the boy's parents. A small but growing category of online-safety risk: parents. [Thanks to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children for pointing this story out.]

Texting in traffic - careful, people!

A California lawmaker is proposing legislation that bans text messaging while driving, and "federal investigators are looking at the role that a train engineer’s text-messaging might have played [in California last month] in the country’s most deadly commuter rail accident in four decades," the New York Times reports. Texting is getting increasing scrutiny as a dangerous activity for multitasking. "Though there are no official casualty statistics, there is much anecdotal evidence that the number of fatal accidents stemming from texting while driving, crossing the street or engaging in other activities is on the rise."

Teen uber-texters

You do know that American cellphone users send more text messages than they make calls on those phones, right? That was the case almost a year ago. "Since then, the average subscriber’s volume of text messages has shot upward by 64%, while the average number of calls has dropped slightly," the New York Times reports, citing Nielsen Mobile data. But forget about all that. It's the teen-texting data that really makes heads spin: 13-to-17-year-olds send or receive 1,742 messages a month. (It's downhill from there - 18-to-24-year-olds average a mere 790 a month.) The Times adds that "a separate study of teenagers with cellphones by Harris Interactive found that 42% of them claim that they can write text messages while blindfolded."

Mobile Web's arrived

"The mobile Web is here, and it's huge," reports Chris O'Brien in the San Jose Mercury News. This from a reporter who started covering telecommunications in 1999 and heard at countless mobile industry trade shows that "next year is when the mobile Internet really takes off." As evidence, sure there's the iPhone nearing its goal of selling 10 million unites, the coming new, non-business-y versions of the BlackBerry, Google's new Android OS for mobile phones, and the "countless developers rushing to build new applications" for phones. "But more than anything, my recognition of this moment is based on personal experience." He got the BlackBerry curve and "I've been completely shocked at how indispensable it's become and how it's changed the way I work and communicate," and he's not a gadget freak and this isn't his first BlackBerry. This one's his mobile computer, where he manages all his email in odd moments, reads his news, comments on friends' profiles, sends his Twitter tweets, posts to his blog, snaps and sends loads of pictures, and - through GPS-enabled software called Telenav - finds the nearest ATM or coffee spot wherever he is. Add game-playing, which is not on Chris's list, and you're looking at how our kids use phones. Good filtering between their ears is increasingly the best online-safety "application." See also "Tweens are into phones", with Nielsen Mobile research showing that 26% of US 8-to-12-year-olds owning cellphones (46% using them) and 77% of US 13-to-17-year-olds owning them.

Cellphones for social status: Teen survey

A nationwide survey of US teens found that they feel "cell phones have become a vital part of their identities," CNET reports, citing the survey of 2,000 13-to-19-year-olds by Harris Interactive and sponsored by CTIA, US cellphone carriers' trade association. "They also believe that they can gauge a peer's popularity or status by the phone he or she uses." Phones outrank jewelry, watches, and shoes as social-status signs, teens said. About 80% of teens carry a cell phone, double the percentage in 2004, and "almost half" having one is 'key' to their social lives. Other key findings: Respondents said they spend almost the same amount of time texting as talking, and 47% said their social life "would end or be worsened" if they could no longer text; 57% "credit mobility for improving their quality of life; 52% view phones as a new form of entertainment; 80% say their phone provides a sense of security while on the go, confirming the cellphone has become their mobile safety net when needing a ride (79%), getting important information (51%), or just helping out someone in trouble (35%). As for social mapping: "Ironically, while only one in five (18%) teens care to pinpoint the location of their family and friends via their cell phone, 36% hate the idea of a cell phone feature allowing others to know their exact location." Here's the study press release.

Microblogging: Heads up

It might be interesting to ask your kids if they're Twittering these days ("microblogging" is the generic term if they're using a service other than early entrant Twitter). Microblogging is basically a blow-by-blow account of one's life, sent via phone or Web site. Kind of hard for some non-digital natives to imagine doing ("so very narcissistic" is the dismissal I've heard, or "why would my friends care if I'm at such-and-such a conference or the grocery store?"). Well, some adults and a lot more young people do want to know and share up-to-the-minute activities and thoughts. It's a form of intimacy and presence that express highly connected friendship, manifest in Facebook newsfeeds and prolific phone texting (for a bit more on intimacy, see "Fictionalizing their profiles"). However, as with all technologies, there's a potential downside along with the upsides, and youth don't always think about the former. "There is the risk that teens could use microblogs to reveal personal information or engage in a relationship with someone whose intentions are less than honorable," writes my co-director at ConnectSafely, Larry Magid in Yahoo!Parents. "By default, Twitter messages can be seen by anyone, so if you want privacy you need to go into Settings and click 'Protect my updates' to make sure only people you approve can see what you type. Otherwise anyone can 'follow' you and see what you enter." Please see his piece for more on this. See also "The text version of hanging out" and "Do you Twitter?"

'Friending' against school policy

It's against school policy in Mississippi's Lamar County Public School District for teachers and students to text each other or to be "friends" in social-networking sites. "Both texting and social networking have too many gray areas that could lead to misunderstanding and downright trouble," the Hattiesburg American reports. The policy's being considered in other Mississippi school districts as well. This reminds me of a case of teacher-to-student sexual exploitation involving texting in the news this past year (sorry I can't find the link at the moment). I'd like to hear your thoughts on the validity of this school policy - in comments here or, ideally, in the ConnectSafely.org forum.

Dealing with cellphone spam

Are your children getting text-message spam on their cellphones (or are you) - those annoying messages that you can't delete without opening them and that you, not the sender, pay for? Well, there's hope, or help, rather, David Pogue at the New York Times reports. AT&T and Verizon Wireless let you block spam messages. Sprint and T-Mobile "don't go quite as far," Pogue writes, "but they do offer some text-spam filtering options." In his Circuits column, he explains how cellphone spamming works and where to find each cellphone company's spam controls. See also Forbes on "Cellphone Addiction" (more about grownups, though).

Do you Twitter?

Given that lots of kids are converting parents from talking to texting, Twitter may be around the corner for you. If you've heard people at your house use the word "twitter" in association with technology and think it's yet another frivolous temptation for chronic multitaskers (as I did when a friend said she was swamped by tweets at a conference), there's a mind-changing story in the San Jose Mercury News for you. In it the mere twittering (or "texting") of the word "Arrested" on his cellphone to "a wide circle of friends in the United States and to the mostly leftist, anti-government bloggers in Egypt who are the subject of his graduate journalism project" got a University of California, Berkeley, student out of an Egyptian jail within 24 hours. But there are more mundane reasons to use this technology that's like group texting on the fly or push micro-moblogging (broadcasting mini blog posts on your phone to your contact list): keeping in touch with your family during the odd free moment on a business trip, spontaneously sharing your reaction to (and getting fast feedback on) a comment in a conference, sending a link or new contact info to a bunch of friends all at once, etc., etc. It'd be interesting to get a bunch of teenagers in a room and ask them if they use it in addition to IM-ing and social networking. Here's "How Twitter Works" at howstuffworks.com and another Twitter primer that I was tipped off to by my friends at the California Technology Assistance Project. Meanwhile, here's a slightly snide view of Twitter in a Wired blog, and - this just in! - Twitter's popularity seems to have caused some service disruption, and CNET looks into it in "Can't live without Twitter? Don't believe the hype."

'Running l8, luv, mom'

Kids are seeing texts like that from their parents more and more, the Washington Post reports. "Parental text messaging is outstripping the growth rate among younger generations. In the past two years, use of texting among people 45-54 increased 130%, the Post added, citing M:Metrics research - compared to a mere 41% increase among people 13-17. Apparently, it starts with k2k (kid-to-kid), then it's k2p (k2parent), followed by p2p (not file-sharing but rather parents texting each other to coordinate kid drop-offs and pick-ups and possibly other errands). And now it's even s2p and s2k: "Schools have caught on. Fairfax County and Montgomery County send automatic text-message alerts for weather-related school closures and other emergencies." If you want to learn texting lingo fast (some phones offer a menu of phrases), check with your cellphone carriers; it's quite possible Sprint, Verizon, etc. has a guide for parents and others getting up to speed quickly. Web resources include Lingo2word.com and netlingo.com.

'Grooming' by phone too

Online safety news that appeals to fears is counter-productive, so I hope the US news media will approach cellphone safety more intelligently than they did predation on the Web. But, as with the Web, parents do need to be aware of the downsides to this other very useful communications tech too. CNN reports that, according to law enforcement, cellphones were used by a teacher and 14-year-old student in a case in which she allegedly developed the relationship with and had sex with the boy on school grounds. So many of us get our kids cellphones so we know where they are and they can call us when they need us. Certainly we will and should keep doing that, but we need to know there are other uses for those phones, from very rare uses such as the case above to teen pranks and bullying that can be very destructive in their own way. "A New York mom, who requested anonymity because her kids don't know about her surveillance, said she uses software to regularly check her children's e-mail and online activity on the home computer. But she also gave her kids cell phones that have texting and photographic capability. Asked why she doesn't scrutinize the phone the same way she snoops on the computer," she told CNN she hadn't really thought about it. Just something to think about and discuss with our kids. A discussion point might be "How to recognize grooming." The CNN article also goes into the subject of "grooming" - predators' insidious process of gaining a child's confidence overtime, citing the work of Betsy Ramsey, who "has spent 20 years working with child and female victims and chairs the DeKalb County Domestic Violence Task Force in Georgia."

Fresh data on phone-based porn

"Revenues from mobile 'adult services' are set to approach $3.5 billion by 2010," reports VNUNET in the UK. It's citing new findings by Juniper Research, which says the growth "will be fuelled by increasing adoption of streamed video and video chat" on phones and "a sharp rise" in the use of "3G" or smart phones that are really Net-connected computers more than mere communications devices. A lot of that new revenue will come from North America because it's an "underdeveloped" market for phone-based pornography, compared to Europe. And eastern European consumption "is rising at a higher rate than previously anticipated." Cellphone service providers are reluctant to provide the content in North America, VNUNET reports, but the Web on phones is another whole platform for porn operators. in the adoption of 3G services. But analysts say that the most popular content is "graphic amateur content." That would be the user-produced kind, not the "professional" kind. What worries me is the kids who share risqué or sexually explicit video of themselves via the Web or phone - the devastating impact this can have on their lives if the content is made public (see "Teens' child porn convictions upheld"). Here are some tips in ConnectSafely.org for safe video-sharing.

Mobile Web: We're on the cusp

There has been a whole lot of media hype about the mobile Web. So much so that smart reporters are now writing reality checks (see the New York Times). But with the iPhone's arrival, Google's plans for the FCC's looming 700 Mhz spectrum auction, and an announcement this week from Verizon Wireless, we really do seem to be at an important crossroads. eWeek reports that "the mobile industry is shifting into Internet gear." Business Week reports that Verizon Wireless's move "to let customers use a broader range of cell phones and wireless features on its network was greeted by many observers as a stunning about-face." And the Baltimore Sun offers the big picture on what this means for all of us, including our kids - upsides and downsides, of course. For one thing, I think it means phones really will be access points to the Internet. Which means that parents and educators either will need to need to apply rules and "parental controls" to more devices and access points or will need increasingly to help young people develop their internal filters - critical thinking and content and behavior online.

Cellphone safety

There are entertainment “thumb jocks” (videogamers) and then there are the communications ones, including cellphone texters at your house. Teens love texting, I think partly because of the extra privacy this silent form of communication affords them and partly because it can be 24x7 (see “Teen dating abuse”). They also love the growing number of features cellphones have, so they can snap and share photos, swap tunes and videos, customize with skins and ringtones, access social-networking profiles, and (with the GPS technology that new phones have) pinpoint their fellow texters’ physical locations - as well as text and talk with each other. More and more, reports Larry Magid in CBSNEWS.com, a cellphone is “really a personal computer for your pocket with all the benefits and dangers of PCs.” Therein lies the heads-up for parents, and Larry – who is also publisher of SafeKids.com and my co-director at BlogSafety.com – offers, in this article, the full complement of parental considerations where young cellphone users are concerned, from costs to carriers to content.