FTC's new campaign about ads for kids

Not only is the Federal Trade Commission reviewing advertising aimed at children in the coming year, it's looking at "Internet-selling techniques" and teaching kids how to think critically about them, MediaPost reports. The full program will also include reviews of "food marketing to children and adults" and "green marketing and privacy matters and better coordination with sister agencies, especially the Food and Drug Administration." In the mix will be some media-literacy teaching tools for 8-to-12-year-olds. The campaign will include "in-school and library programs aimed at teaching kids how to recognize and analyze advertising," among them a game for Web and cellphone and curricula developed with Scholastic magazine that teach "why, where, and how commercial messages are constructed and placed."

Drive-by downloads & kids' media literacy

Current events and computer security increasingly have a lot in common. Put top news stories like the death of Michael Jackson and Web surfing habits into family discussions or dinner-table chat, and it's win-win for everybody. Kids gain a little in media literacy, and family computers avoid infection. "How can that be?" you might ask. More and more Web sites – including those of the best media companies and nonprofit organizations – are getting hacked and "booby-trapped," the San Jose Mercury News reports. "A human isn't required to click on an email link or to agree to install any software. Instead, the sites automatically download software onto visitors' computers" - called "drive-by downloads." Where do big news stories or Michael Jackson come in? Cybercriminals target the sites that get the most traffic. Computer security firm TrendMicro tells us that "this past week, we did see a lot of cybercriminal activity designed to take advantage of the rush to the Web, and search for information and posting of tributes to Michael Jackson. We tend to see this a lot for celebrities and big events (elections, Olympics, you name it). Where the people go, so do the pickpockets." A particularly egregious recent example - specifically targeting kids - happened on the discussion boards for Neopets; FoxNews reports. It's called social engineering: "The ploy is simply using normal human behavior (curiosity + rushing to the Web to popular places for info) against people," TrendMicro adds. Users click around unthinkingly. "It's like driving by an accident - our urge to satisfy our curiosity actually could put us in danger ourselves on the road." Drive-by downloads = valuable new-media-literacy lessons. Mindful surfing, downloading, and uploading can be taught again and again in different ways, with the top news stories as talking points and teachable moments.

Young practitioners of social media literacy!

What do you get when you cross Greek mythology with a media literacy class on paid political advertising? Well, if you're media literacy teacher Marianne Malmstrom, you get 30-sec. video ads about kicking various lesser gods off Olympus that end with "I am Zeus, and I approve of this message" (see "The Dog Ate My Homework" project at the Elisabeth Morrow School in Englewood, N.J.). This is media literacy education 2.0. It can take many forms, but this approach teaches critical thinking about media messages by having students create their own messages collaboratively, using social media - in this case, the Second Life virtual world. Malmstrom's students created avatars, wrote scripts, and "filmed" and edited machinima (like video screenshots, or "movies" of what's happening in a virtual world). Check out the first ad on that page (it's only 30-some seconds). Also don't miss this 5:46 video, "No Future Left Behind," created by multiple stars at Suffern Middle in Suffern, N.Y., with the help of tech and media teacher Peggy Sheehy. It's a keynote presentation for the Net Generation Education Project involving 10 schools. The students were asked about how education was preparing them for the future, and their collective answer is an appeal to us adults to allow them to learn in school the way they already are on the Internet, as social media practitioners and producers and as fluent "information hunter-gatherers," as MIT media professor Henry Jenkins put it. "Education really needs an upgrade," the first line of the students' video goes.

*Social* media literacy: The new Internet safety

In talks and sound bytes over the past year, I've been saying that - for the vast majority of online youth - digital citizenship is the new Internet safety. And indeed digital citizenship is HUGE, for the very reason that behaving aggressively online more than doubles the risk of being victimized (see "Good citizens in virtual worlds, too"). Still, that's really only the half of it. Media literacy is the other half. I haven't been saying that "digital citizenship + media literacy = online safety 2.0" because it's such a mouthful, and it's important to keep things simple and focused. But media literacy is huge too, because critical thinking about incoming ad messages, compliments, group think, etc. is protective against manipulation and harm.

Now it's time for a remix. Old media literacy is about what we consume, read, or download. We still need that - more than we ever have in this fast-paced age of information overload. But on the participatory Web of social producing and creative networking we also need social media literacy. I have spent some time in and been influenced by NewMediaLiteracies.org, the work of MIT media professor Henry Jenkins, colleagues and students, building on Jenkins's foundational 2006 white paper, "Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture" (see also my coverage of it in '06).

If you watch the video on NewMediaLiteracies.org's home page or look at the basic skills of new media literacy, I think you too will see that digital citizenship is there - perhaps partly under "Negotiation" ("the ability to travel across diverse communities, discerning and respecting multiple perspectives, and grasping and following alternative norms") and partly under "Collective Intelligence" ("the ability to pool knowledge and compare notes with others toward a common goal"). But maybe it should be its own skill. Doesn't it make sense to fold it in there?

More importantly, I think the critical skill, "Judgment" ("the ability to evaluate the reliability and credibility of different information sources"), needs to be redefined. That's the old media literacy definition. Critical thinking on the participatory Web needs to be about what we upload, post, produce, and behave like as much as what we download, read, watch, and passively consume. If social media literacy involves that kind of critical judgment, as well as digital citizenship (a first stab at a definition might be: the ability to function, act, communicate, and collaborate in community appropriately, civilly, ethically, and productively), then I propose that....

Social media literacy = online safety 2.0

Or am I being too reductionist? Do you prefer:

Digital citizenship + social media literacy = online safety 2.0?

Please weigh in, with a comment here or in the ConnectSafely forum or via email: anne(at)netfamilynews.org.

Related links

I really like the Center for Media Literacy's vision for 21st-century literacy - "the ability to communicate competently in all media forms as well as to access, understand, analyze, evaluate and participate with powerful images, words and sounds that make up our contemporary mass media culture" - but, coming from an online-safety perspective, I think the definition needs to go beyond competency to include social media literacy, ethics, and NewMediaLiteracies.org's list of skills.

From the Byron Review, quoted the other day in a Telegraph blog's "Teenagers online": "Research is beginning to reveal that people act differently on the internet and can alter their moral code, in part because of the lack of gate-keepers and the absence in some cases of the visual cues from others that we all use to moderate our interactions with each other. This is potentially more complex for children and young people who are still trying to establish the social rules of the offline world and lack the critical evaluation skills to either be able to interpret incoming information or make appropriate judgments about how to behave online." Exactly!

Professor Jenkins's barriers to full participation in the participatory culture, which parents and teachers can help youth overcome: Besides simply not being able to participate because of lack of Internet access ("The Participation Gap"), they are "The Transparency Problem" ("the challenges young people face in learning to see clearly the ways that media shape perceptions of the world") and "The Ethics Challenge" ("the breakdown of traditional forms of professional training and socialization that might prepare young people for their increasingly public roles as media makers and community participants") - see "Participation: Key opp for our kids."

Internet = 'giant popularity contest'

The social Web is, in essence, a huge popularity context, Digital Natives blogger Sarah Zhang points out, with even Google search rankings based on how many people visit and link to the sites in your search results. We can't afford to assume "that what is popular is also most worthy" or we stand to miss a whole lot of quality material that hasn't yet hit the public radar. Sarah writes about how people and organizations try to game the system to appear to have widespread grassroots popularity ("astroturfing") - and also how Web users can often tell and be put off by said. But how can we and our children assess the quality of the information we're seeking? That's where media literacy comes in - why it's so important and why its top practitioners, librarians, are so important in the current and enduring information glut. But media literacy is not only about content we consume. It's also about intelligently handling communication and behavior via email, IM, phone texts, or one's profile) - what's going out as well as what's coming in. Constantly reworking the algorithms is great, but critical thinking is essential.

9 parts of digital citizenship

These make complete sense ("complete" as in comprehensive, too). The nine elements grew out of a three-year PhD dissertation project by educator Mike Ribble at Kansas State University. Mike defines "digital citizenship" as "the norms of appropriate, responsible behavior with regard to technology use." The nine elements are Digital Etiquette (I think I'd use the broader term "ethics," which includes standards of conduct); Digital Communication; Digital Literacy (sub-categories might be media literacy and behavioral critical thinking); Digital Access ("full electronic participation in society," Mike writes, but I'm not sure "electronic" is the best word); Digital Commerce; Digital Law ("electronic responsibility for actions and deeds" - I'd delete "electronic" and include taking responsibility for a basic understanding of digital law); Digital Rights & Responsibilities ("those freedoms extended to everyone in a digital world"); Digital Health & Wellness ("physical and psychological well-being in a digital technology world"); and Digital Security (self- and collaborative protection of one's data and equipment). [Ribble describes all of these in great depth on that page.] I think twice wherever anybody puts "electronic" or "digital" in front of "communication," "ethics," etc. because of the disappearing distinction between digital behavior and the real-life kind, certainly as young people experience it. Hey, ethics is ethics, right? [Thanks to Anne Bubnic of the California Technology Assistance Project for pointing this page out.]

Another kind of filtering needed too

Apple retail stores aren't the only places employing tech "geniuses." Libraries are too. The Internet has turned out to be a "major tool" not only for patrons but librarians as well, saving space, making library resources accessible at home, and bringing more patrons to the library, Michigan's Saginaw News reports. Research that the Saginaw News cites indicates patrons are figuring out that librarians are better than anyone at information filtering. "With their training, librarians are more adept than the average citizen at using search engines to locate and decipher reliable data. [Librarian Gail] Parsons notes her experience helps her discern valid sources and recognize biases." The need for those filtering skills has never been greater - not only for being good scholars and media consumers but also for safe, productive use of technology (phones, the Web, virtual worlds, videogames, media players, etc.). Parents and educators, too, play vital roles in this filtering education. Media-literacy teaching at home and school can be aimed at critical thinking not only about 1) incoming information but also about 2) incoming communication - from everybody, friends or not. It also needs to move beyond what's coming in to include 3) outgoing behavior and communication from a child, via text, images, voice, and video (see "Good citizens in virtual worlds, too"). About Nos. 2 and 3, children can be taught to ask themselves questions like: What's this person really saying to me - is this a form of manipulation? Am I being fair to this person if I IM this about him - would I want him to say this about me? Should I send a photo around with this person in it if I don't have her permission? Will posting this video of me possibly embarrass me in the future if I can't take it down and someone could copy and repost it anytime?

A case for critical thinking

This didn't come up when we were in school! Which is why it's important for us parents to know about it: Photoshopped news photos for propaganda and many other purposes. Nikki Leon at the Harvard Berkman Center's Digital Natives site recently blogged about a photo of missiles in Iran having been altered apparently for political purposes. "The picture, a view of three test missiles launching, was altered to include four (hiding one that failed)," she writes. After mentioning that the photo was used by prominent news outlets (e.g., the BBC, L.A. Times, etc.), she asked the good question of what this means for young Net users. She concludes that "incidents like this week’s explosive photoshoppery are a reminder that students need to be taught how to evaluate online material just as they are encouraged to assess historical print sources [because] ... it is likely that propaganda of this variety will be produced with greater skill and distributed with greater frequency. It is up to teachers, parents, and Digital Natives themselves to ensure that young people will be critical enough to demand the truth." In fact, a friend and teacher in Los Angeles recently told me, "our job is no longer to put information into kids' heads, since they already know more than we do. Our job is more to help them filter and manage it all."

We're all becoming Net-trained info-gatherers

Apparently we're all becoming the rapid-fire, uncritical information hunter-gatherers we had thought only our children were. Yes, they're the digital natives but, according to a new study out of the UK, the Internet is "training" all of us to approach information this way, which may mean we all have to work extra hard now to think more critically and analytically. A just-released longitudinal study from University College London found that, "although young people demonstrate an apparent ease and familiarity with computers, they rely heavily on search engines, view rather than read and do not possess the critical and analytical skills to assess the information that they find on the Web," its press release. Titled "Information Behaviour of the Researcher of the Future," the study also found that the research behaviors "commonly associated with younger users – impatience in search and navigation and zero tolerance for any delay in satisfying their information needs – are now becoming the norm for all age groups." A longitudinal study tracks its subject over a period of time, and this was a "virtual longitudinal study" - see p. 6 of its pdf version for an explanation. This one was commissioned by the British Library and the Joint Information Systems Committee to get a handle on "the changing needs of researchers and other users." Thanks to tech educator Anne Bubnic in for pointing this study out.

Teens info-swamped too

A head school librarian suggests that our digitally literate teens are no different from any of us as we slog through our collective information overload. "These kids manage to survive by bushwhacking through the muddle – while seamlessly dealing with an email, a Word document, or a 50-page PDF from the scholarly database JSTOR," writes Thomas Washington of the Potomac School in McLean, Va., in the Christian Science Monitor. "It's taken them just a few years to arrive at the same conclusion that I've reached after a lifetime of sustained reading: The pursuit of knowledge in the age of information overload is less about a process of acquisition than about proficiency in tossing stuff out." In other words, we're *all* reading less in-depth and filtering more. This is good in some ways - because, if Mr. Washington's right, teens are quite naturally, or by necessity, developing the critical thinking that will not only help them cope with the info flood, but also to maintain a safe skepticism not only about what's communicated to them online, but what they choose to communicate and upload themselves. Let's help them consciously cultivate that filtering capability!

Young adults biggest library users: Study

Americans 18-30 are public libraries' biggest fans. "And people are going to libraries not only for the Internet-enabled computers there but also for library reference books, newspapers and magazines," reports the Associated Press, citing a new study by the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and the Pew Internet & American Life Project. Pew/Internet director Lee Rainie told the AP that this age group is the generation that saw libraries going from book repositories to "information hubs," with database-accessing computers alongside reference bookshelves. Still, the findings were a surprise after an authoritative Benton Foundation report 10 years ago, which said 18-to-24-year-olds were the people least likely to view libraries as important. "That generation [now 28-34 in age] now uses libraries to solve problems at half the rate as the current 18-30 set, the new study found," the AP reports, adding that in the 10-year time period since the Benton report, library Internet access "has grown from about 44% of public libraries to more than 99%." But I suspect increased library connectivity is only part of the explanation. Internet literacy does not spell media literacy. My theory is that media literacy and critical thinking are needed in proportion to Net literacy. In other words, the more access young people (and all of us) have to information the more they need guidance from experts in media literacy, or information navigation (aka librarians).

Ethics & media literacy: Facebook in their yearbooks

Students at a Washington, D.C.-area high school found some of their Facebook photos published in their school’s yearbook, the Washington Post reports. There were pictures of everything from tailgate-party drinking to cellphone portraits to silly antics among friends. “Desperate and crunched for time, yearbook staffers resorted to filling pages with photographs downloaded from student Facebook pages. They did it largely without the permission of students and without crediting photographers.” The Post writer suggests the incident illustrates “how complacent the denizens of Internet vanity sites have become” about sharing their private lives. Maybe so. I think this just points to another piece of the cyberethics training that’s needed – the media-literacy piece. This piece of the training deals with issues like cut ‘n’ paste plagiarism and copyright theft. Here’s coverage from the Student Press Law Center.

Libraries as teen hangouts

Teens love creating and sharing digital media, and so it follows that teens increasingly love hanging out at the library, according to DailyHerald.com. Fourteen-year-old Liz and her friends love getting together, it reports, at the West Chicago Public Library, where they play video and board games, go online, and read. As media – books, movies, periodicals, etc. – get more digital, so do libraries, and “the library of the future, leaders say, will be a one-stop shop, offering community-center elements, including more hangout and group meeting spots, as well as tech elements such as training classes, Webcasts and downloadable video games.” Already, the Daily Herald says, 40% of all the Naperville (Ill.) Public Library’s checkouts are “non-book items,” including DVDs and CDs. Hopefully, in these locuses of media literacy, critical thinking - about online behavior, sources, copyrights, etc. - will become a norm in digital-media users' online lives.

Teen news editor

His screenname is Gracenotes and, “after his homework is done,” he works on cleaning up breaking news stories on Wikipedia for six hours at a shot, the New York Times reports. We all know how popular Wikipedia has become as a source for term-paper research (the Times article takes you behind the scenes at Wikipedia so you can see how viable this actually is, as long as other sources are in the mix). Wikipedia has also become a very viable news source, the Times article illustrates. It’s like compressed real-time news, a blend of encyclopedic summarizing that keeps up with news as it breaks. Its writers’ sources are usually the wire services (e.g., AP and Reuters) in Yahoo and Google News, and the difference is a “constantly rewritten, constantly updated” summary of a breaking story (as in Wikipedia) vs. “a chronological series of articles, each reflecting new developments” (as with conventional news on paper and the Web). Gracenotes and his fellow editors expand and correct a one-liner “stub” (almost like a headline) that someone posts about a breaking story (such as the Virginia Tech shootings). They almost compete for the greatest accuracy and “N.P.O.V.” (“’neutral point of view,’ one of Wikipedia’s Five Pillars,” the Times reports. Note this comment at the article’s end, something very impressive to a baby-boomer journalist: “The Wikipedians, most of them born in the information age, have tasked themselves with weeding [the current culture of proud] subjectivity not just out of one another’s discourse but also out of their own. They may not be able to do any actual reporting from their bedrooms or dorm rooms or hotel rooms, but they can police bias, and they do it with a passion that’s no less impressive for its occasional excess of piety. Who taught them this? It’s a mystery; but they are teaching it to one another.”