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Dear Subscribers:

This issue is full of insights into an online child's experience, with "Emily's story" - Part 2 of our profile of a connected (and very Web-wise) family. There is also plenty of context for this one child's experience this week, with the release of several new studies on online kids.

Next week the newsletter will be on vacation. Our next issue will land in your In-box on June 23.

Here's our lineup this first full week of June:


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Profile of a connected family: Emily's story

In Part 1 of "Profile of a connected family" last week, we looked at the family context in which daughter Emily, a sixth grader, uses the Internet. This week the focus is on this intelligent, Web-literate girl whom we very much enjoyed interviewing. Her story illustrates how using the Internet can enrich a child's life - the social, academic, extracurricular, and family parts of it - with the right amount of guidance from informed and engaged parents (and teachers). You'll also see how the Internet is involved in some of the challenges kids face, and you'll get a mother's perspective on all this….

Emily, 12, basically uses the Internet for three things: professional development, research for school, and communicating with her friends. Well, professional development, preteen-style, but more on that later.

First, the part we're all familiar with, because we've been there: If you ever passed notes in school or talked on the phone for hours about what happened in school earlier that day, you'll understand Emily's avid use of email. The Internet is the only thing different about today's communicating teens.

"Now kids seem to use the Internet instead of the phone," Emily told us. Why? we asked. "I guess because it's faster and easier to get a hold of somebody - because everybody is on the Internet now," she explained very patiently. "It's like, in order to be cool you have to be on the Internet. You have to have an email account. The best of the best kids have IM [instant messaging] and everything." Much to her chagrin, Emily doesn't have IM, she told us. Her mother, Jennifer, explained it's because Emily's dad says it messes up their home computer network. But email seems to be working fairly well for Emily: "I guess I spend about an hour a day - maybe not even that much - online. I'd say the majority is checking my email and emailing back and forth with my friends."

We were interested in this idea that emailing is faster than talking on the phone. So we asked Emily if typing wasn't a problem. "No, not for me. All of my friends type really fast - maybe it's a habit." We asked her when she started typing. Her response showed that she sees no distinction between typing and being online: "I really started getting on the Internet maybe two years ago. I didn't start typing much before that."

We asked her whom she communicates with on the Net. "I talk with a lot of my friends." Do you ever "talk" in chat rooms? we asked. "No, I have never gone into a chat room before. I don't prefer chat rooms. You have to have your own log-in name and another password - it's too hard to keep up with." Her mom added: "Actually, she did go into a chat room once, and her comment afterwards was, 'Kids were rude.' Emily explained: "I prefer talking to my friends." Even though you see them everyday? we asked. "Yeah. We see each other at school, but we're not allowed to talk really until lunch. And we're not allowed to talk during class." Sounds familiar!

We asked Emily what else she does on the Net. "A lot of research. In Language Arts, we just finished talking about the Holocaust, and I did a lot of research for my project on the Internet. I went to a search engine and typed in 'children of the Holocaust' and found a child that way. It was very easy to relate to her - she was almost my age."

Does Emily use the Net for entertainment at all? She had a vague memory of something like that: "I remember one time trying to find some music to listen to - I went to WB Jukebox at WB.com. It was fun to see all the kinds of music they had. I guess I went back once or twice."

Do you have any favorite sites? we asked. "I like AskJeeves.com for searching. I like Disney.com - Zoogdisney - and I like CartoonNetwork.com and Discovery.com - especially since I found "Emergency Vets". I just discovered that page, and I'm excited about it. I've sent them two fan emails. I want to be a vet."

Which takes us right to the "professional development" part of Emily's online times. She is already career-planning - in a balanced sort of way. She loves animals and is very focused on preparing for veterinarian school. After that she wants to work at Alameda East Veterinary Hospital in Denver. She told us that's where the Discovery Channels' "Emergency Vets" show is shot, and she likes what she sees there.

She finds expression for that interest in a fun, collaborative way: the Web site she's building with her two best friends. "Because our favorite animal is the dog, we all air our opinions about dogs in the site. All the characters on our Web site are dogs, and they all talk to you. As you're going through the Web site and want to post messages, the dogs will tell you how to do it. We get our pictures of dogs from Art.com, Clipart.com, places like that."

Finally, we asked Emily if she has any Internet-use advice for kids her age, and that question brought up a tough experience she recently went through. Her immediate response to our question was, "If you get a nasty email, share it with your parents. Do something about it - don't just let it sit there."

Her mom, Jennifer, explained that Emily received a series of abusive emails from a boy she'd befriended the year before, when he was new to the school and their neighborhood. "This year," Jennifer told us, "Emily was surprised to see him in a class and they renewed the friendship until - surprise - they both realized they were making new friends. Apparently, his new interest [girl friend] was short-lived, but Emily had started 'going with' another boy, her best friends' brother's friend…" The boy didn't take this development very well, and "they had 'words' a few times at school," Jennifer said, adding that Emily asked him to stop spreading rumors about her. Then feelings were vented on the Internet. Jennifer told us, "I didn't see all the emails in between the 'breakup' and the [last] message [several weeks ago] - I only spot-check her email - but apparently there was also an online argument."

That's what Emily was referring to in her advice to peers. Jennifer told us she met with the boy's parents within an hour of Emily getting the obscene email Jennifer saw. His father had seen a message too, and stiff punishment ensued, including the boy "being required to offer multiple apologies, oral and in writing, to Emily and our family, loss of Internet privileges (except for supervised schoolwork) for at least a year, and being required to withdraw from his exhibition karate team."

Besides going to her mom about it, how had Emily handled the "online argument"? we asked her mom. "Emily has been careful not to discuss it with her friends at school - a challenge for 12-year-olds!," Jennifer told us, "and to simply ignore him and his friends, other than being civil and polite in class." In our interview with Emily, it was clear she had already moved beyond the experience.

Looking back on the experience, Jennifer told us she wanted to add one point that might be helpful to other parents: "In spite of all the talk about filtering and protecting our children, it's not possible to filter e-mail for this kind of thing. For example, this came from a kid we know, so we wouldn't normally be suspicious of her getting email from him. And his subject line was something like "about the other day," not something that could be filtered out.

"The other annoying thing about the situation," she continued, "was that, when I fired off a complaint to GO.com (Emily's ISP with free email accounts), I was told they wouldn't do anything, and I had to complain to MSN's Hotmail.com (the boy's ISP). [Unlike Go.com,] my own fee-based ISP, Mindspring/Earthlink, traces those kinds of complaints back through the chain to the sender's ISP, relieving the receiver/consumer from that burden." Something to consider when kids want to sign up for free email accounts.

The consumer, ultimately, is the parent, regardless of who gets the email: "Parent involvement is essential at home," Jennifer told us. "At school, the importance is teacher supervision and 'helpful coaching' - teachable moments - which this [experience of Emily's] was."

If you'd like to share your own family's Internet experiences, we'd love to hear about them - via feedback@netfamilynews.org. It's our theory that - because this is one part of parenting that we didn't inherit from our own parents and grandparents - today's parents are often each other's best experts in the online part of childraising. Add your thoughts to this growing pool of wisdom and - with your permission - we'll put them in the newsletter for everyone's benefit.

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The big picture: Kids online in 2000

Whatever numbers you believe, the latest ones certainly indicate that kids are fueling the Internet explosion. Polling firm Grunwald Associates reached that conclusion with their just-released study, finding that 25 million 2-17-year-olds are online in the US right now, up from 8 million in '97. That's in an Associated Press piece in Newsbytes.com.

Several other recent studies are covered in an article in TheStandard.com:

Looking at the school population, 80% of 10-to-17-year-olds say they access the Net at school. Seventy percent of those kids say they use the Web at least once a week from home or school, and 35% report using the Net almost every day. On average, they spend nearly seven hours a month online, three hours less than adults do.

And Canada's online kids have their own brand-new study, which shows that a whopping 85%, or 2 million, of Canada's 2.4 million teens, are active Internet users. That's according to a study by Youth Culture, Inc., reported in eMarketer.com. And, while American teens say they're online seven hours a month (of course in a different study, by Nielsen/NetRatings), Canadian teens are online 9.3 hours a week - and 33% of those surveyed say they watch less television, thanks to time spent online.

For the very important view from their parents, see "Canadian parents' views" below in Web News Briefs.

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Web News Briefs

  1. Online sex & kids: New study

    About one in five 10-17-year-olds surveyed said they've received a sexual solicitation or approach via the Internet in the past year, according to a study released this week by the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC). Another key finding was that one in four of the children surveyed said they've had unwanted exposure to pictures of naked people or people having sex in the past year. The findings "suggest that the seamy side of the Internet spills into the lives of an uncomfortably large number of youth, and relatively few families or young people do much about it," says the report's introduction, adding, however, that "nothing in this report contradicts the increasingly well-documented fact that youth and their families are excited about the Internet and its possibilities. They are voting for the Internet with their fingers and pocketbooks, even as they are aware of some of its drawbacks."

    The study, entitled "Online Victimization: A Report on the Nation's Youth," is an important contribution to the public discourse about the Internet's impact on kids. It calls for "private and public initiatives to raise awareness and provide solutions," including strategies that reduce the amount of offensive behavior toward kids, help shield them from it, and give them the tools they need to deal with both the behavior and its consequences. The full report can be downloaded (in PDF format) by clicking on its title right near the top of the NCMEC's home page. The key findings are on p. 9 of the report.

  2. Online safety: 1st COPA hearing

    The COPA Commission held its first hearings this week. "COPA" is short for the Child Online Protection Act, passed by the US Congress in October 1998. Most of the law was put on hold by a federal judge shortly after it was passed (because it potentially violates the First Amendment), but the part that did go into effect was the COPA Commission. The 19 commissioners (from academia, government, advocacy, and the Internet industry) are charged with "identifying technological or other methods that will help reduce access by minors to material that is harmful to minors on the Internet."

    The Commission's report is due to Congress by Nov. 30, and this week commissioners listened to testimony on online-safety Web resources for parents, age-verification technologies, and whether or not there should be a new .xxx top-level domain, giving sexually explicit content on the Web a separate designation. Wired News reports on testimony by Sen. Joseph Lieberman (D) of Connecticut, who says adult sites should be segregated into a .xxx "red light district."

    SafeKids.com's Larry Magid was one of the witnesses who testified on resources for parents. Here's Larry's testimony, which makes some interesting points about the difference between online safety and morality and the importance of parental supervision (do we hear a cheer from Emily's mother, Jennifer?!). For a few more details and links on the non-Commission part of COPA, here's the last time we "checked in on COPA".

  3. Canadian parents' views

    Of nearly 1,100 Canadian families surveyed recently, 73% say they have Net access at home, and 86% of those connected families say their children use the Internet. That's according to a just-released study by the Media Awareness Network near Ottawa. What do those kids do while online? Mostly schoolwork (65%), surveyed parents said, followed by information searching (31%), game-playing (29%), instant messaging and chat (28% each), email (active use - 18%), and "meet friends" (15%).

    And Canadian parents think children's Net use is important - 80% said "they think the Internet is the way of the future, and that if they and their family are not online, they will be left behind." On the other side of that equation, 19% said they think the Internet is more trouble than it's worth.

    There were many more interesting "key findings," including how much Canadian parents feel they should be involved in their kids' online activities and their views on how best to keep kids' online experience safe and constructive.

  4. Commerce still bullish on the Net

    The digital economy has arrived, says the third-annual US Commerce Department report on the economic impact of technology and the Internet. The first two reports referred to the digital economy as "emerging"; this year that word's been deleted. In fact, according to the New York Times, the report says that information technology is "the No. 1 driver of the American economy." One key finding for students preparing for careers was: "The average salary for high-tech jobs is $58,000 a year, 85% higher than the average for the private sector as a whole."

    Of interest to all of us Net users: The number of people with Net access worldwide increased 78% in the past year to 304 million - a hundred-fold increase since 1994. See the Times article for more interesting findings by the Commerce Department.

    Another new study - by the Center for Research on Electronic Commerce at the University of Texas-Austin - showed that the "Web economy" doubled in 1999. That report is from the Associated Press, via CompuServe.

  5. Parent-to-teacher email

    The Internet is heightening parents' expectations for parent-teacher communication, and teachers are working through this new development. According to the New York Times, some educators are trying to figure out how to fit this extra work into already busy schedules, others think it's a wonderful development. There are some great ideas and real-world experience in this article for both teachers and parents.

  6. New trend in Net search

    Internet search seems to be moving into a new phase (or two). Last week we reported on WebBrain.com, blending human judgment with technology (a trend in Net filtering, too) and InfraSearch, which is taking Net search in a whole new direction. It's the same direction that Napster has taken music search: Net users get to search one other's hard drives, not just Web sites. Another brand-new service, Pointera, announced this week, turns this category of search into a trend. (As if we're not overwhelmed with what we find with search engines already!) According to Wired News, Pointera will allow users to search one another's hard drives for all kinds of files - songs, movies, Web pages, text documents, etc. Pointera's calling its technology a "sharing engine" instead of a search engine. It'll be fun to see if they've coined a new Internet term!

  7. Next wave for gaming?

    For those of you with online gamers in your house, here's some (perhaps unsettling) news: There's new technology that lets players thrash each other verbally while they do so virtually in the game. According to Wired News, a downloadable (for free) bit of software called Socket "combines instant messaging capabilities with file sharing similar to Napster [allowing kids to access each other's hard drives], and game collaboration that lets [players] find each other." Wired says Socket also allows family members to share digital photos across the Net, but it's really focusing on gaming.

  8. MS: Impact of the breakup

    We weren't going to include the Microsoft ruling mostly because it's everywhere else, but we appreciated a clearheaded editorial we found in ZDNet. It included a couple of interesting predictions, including the view that MS stock will rebound but now has a ceiling (unbridled growth is a thing of the past now) and the view that the fun has only begun for Microsoft's competitors. It's also fun to get fellow readers' views (in "Talkback") right at the bottom of the story. To be fair to those who are really following this, here are a few other versions of the story: ABCNEWS.com on what happens next; the Seattle Times, taking the temperature of the appeals court that gets the case next; and Newsbytes.com with a view from Congress.

    Finally, insights into the reasoning behind Judge Jackson's decision: In what the Wall Street Journal called "an extraordinary interview," Judge Jackson told the Journal that, during testimony, Microsoft had a credibility problem that certainly didn't help its case. That story's at ZDNet. And the New York Times offers insights from a variety of perspectives.

* * * *

Computer camp

From the "Better-Late-Than-Never Department"…. For parents who have not yet solidified kids' summer schedules and would like to see a little technology ed the mix, we suggest you have a look at ACE.

One thing we like about ACE (American Computer Experience) is that it's so accessible. The company runs one-week summer tech camps at more than 80 universities in North America and six in England, so parents have both overnight- and day-camp options. Obviously, the latter option is less expensive. The other thing we like is ACE's effort to make technology more accessible to girls (with eight US camps just for them), who need a leg up in that area (see our report, "Getting girls into Computing").

The camps are for kids 7-16 at all levels of tech know-how. They can take courses in safe, responsible use of the Internet; programming in computer languages such as BASIC, C++, JavaScript, and Dynamic HTML; computer graphics, sound, music, and video or photo editing; and the ever-popular subject of gaming applications.

If you and your kids have a favorite computer camp, please tell us about it. With your permission, we'll publish your recommendation.

* * * *

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That does it for this week. Have a great weekend!

Sincerely,

Net Family News

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