toolbar

Dear Subscribers:

A hearty thanks to all of you who have sent in your responses to our Subscriber Survey! For those who haven't yet, just head to our Survey page. Here's our lineup for this first full week of October:

* * * *

Web News Briefs

  1. Distance learning: A reality check

    It's just a working draft and it has only been circulated on education email lists, but a case study illustrating the downside of distance learning (courses over the Internet) is already drawing a lot of attention. Witness the New York Times story on it. Its co-authors, a professor of computer science and a graduate student studying instructional technology at the University of Indiana, have already gotten 60 requests for the draft and been invited to present it at an education conference. And on the anecdotal side, distance learning has a very high-profile skeptic in Supreme Court Justice Ruth Baker Ginsburg. She "touched off a lively discussion among law school professors, law students and others when, during a speech on the history of legal education, she criticized efforts to offer law degrees online," the New York Times reports. Proponents of distance learning say that the electronic approach to taking a college class is so different from traditional coursework that students need to take a class in how to learn online. At Penn State, the class is called "World Campus 101", the Times reports.

    Meanwhile, Microsoft and MIT seem to be bullish on the subject: Microsoft is giving the Massachusetts Institute of Technology $25 million to create "I-Campus," Wired News reports. I-Campus will provide remote access to laboratory instruments, online aid in mentoring and tutoring, tools for global collaboration in engineering design, and Web-based museums (including a Shakespeare archive). Funding will help MIT "design an educational system for the global classroom established last year by MIT and The National University of Singapore. The classroom delivers graduate engineering education across 12 time zones."

  2. Offer for schools: Free filtering

    The announcement looks a little political (with a Sen. John McCain endorsement), but nevertheless the news is noteworthy: A Phoenix, Ariz.-based filtered Internet service provider, Dotsafe, is making the ambitious offer of free filtered service to any public or private elementary, middle, or high school in the US. That includes "personalized e-mail accounts for every student, a school Web page, and the guarantee that there will be no advertising on the portal pages," the Dotsafe press release says. Dotsafe says it expects to accommodate as many as 400,000 schools. We plan to look into this offer further and will keep you posted. Meanwhile, you might find useful a USAToday report on filtered ISPs. If any of you use filtered Internet service (server-based filtering) at home or school, do tell us what you think (via feedback@netfamilynews.org).

  3. Gen X and the 'family'

    You might be interested to note how Gen Xers define family, according to American Demographics magazine. The article includes a statistical snapshot of the 44 million US adults who are between 23 and 34 years of age: what percent are married or divorced, their "financial fitness," and their views about the future. Then there's the one about the baby boomers, the 74.2 million Americans over 50, as American Demographics defines them (we're not sure what those of us between "Gen X" and the "Baby Boom" are called!).

  4. We do like our computers

    Americans now spend more than 1 billion hours on the PC a week, and more than half of that time is spent online. According to a study by Odyssey L.P. reported in CyberAtlas, our total PC use increased by 101 million hours a week between January and July of this year. Among online households an average of 15 hours a week are spent online. Those hours represent a threat to the TV industry, the postal service, long distance telephone companies, and print publications, Odyssey found.

* * * *

'We-commerce'

Teaching kids financial responsibility is very in vogue on the Web these days. It was a hot topic at the Interactive Kids conference we went to in San Francisco a couple of weeks ago. What we've found is that, where children are concerned, e-commerce is very much "we-commerce," to borrow a term from Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen.

E-commerce sites aimed at kids and teens, financial institutions, and even a national non-profit organization are working on improving young people's "financial literacy." We saw the trend coming last May, when we first heard about iCanBuy.com (see our review). When we saw its mission, "to enable kids, teens, and parents to manage money wisely," we thought to ourselves, "Good will with parents is certainly good business for e-commerce companies whose customers do not have their own credit cards!"

In addition to iCanBuy, which says it's now working on screening products sold to kids, two other well-intentioned digital-allowance sites are DoughNET.com and Rocket Cash. They promote financial responsibility to varying degrees. Other sites do an end run around the whole issue. Last week we mentioned how SurfMonkey just links shoppers in its "The Mall" directly to e-retailers like eToys. And Flooz.com keeps it simple, too. When kids want to shop, grownups, aka credit-card holders, can just send them Flooz (digital cash - a bit like a gift certificate). Flooz recipients can spend their digital dollars at e-stores affiliated with Flooz.com. Most of the partner retailers are small, but there are a few well-known ones like Tower Records and Eastern Mountain Sports.

The nonprofit organization we mentioned is the Jump$tart Coalition for Personal Financial Literacy in Washington, D.C. Jump$tart does research on children's literacy in this area and provides K-12 educational materials aimed at having kids learn personal financial management by the time they graduate from high school. We thought you might find it useful to know why they're doing this: "While some believe personal finance should be taught in the home, the reality is that many parents can't - or won't - address this topic with their children. By not including personal finance in their curriculum, school systems are sending millions of young people into the marketplace without any basic skills in personal finance, putting them at high risk of becoming adults who end up over their heads in debt, in bankruptcy court or without adequate savings to retire" (from a press release in the site).

And Boston-based Fleet Bank's FleetKids has a solution in process. FleetKids uses games to teach children about managing a business, handling currency (Kindness Coupons), setting financial goals, establishing a budget, etc. The winners are schools. More than 1,500 schools around the US have enrolled in the Fleet program, FleetKids project manager Cindy Ho told us. Kids sign up to play for their school "team." All points go toward a team total, and prizes are "technology-based rewards" for the school. Fleet apparently finds financial education (of its future customers?) so important that this Web site doesn't even have a complete Profit and Loss Statement" - just the "L" of the P&L, a Fleet executive said at the Interactive Kids conference a couple of weeks ago. Another financial institution, American Eagle Federal Credit Union, sent a marketing manager to the conference to start gathering information for development of a Web site to teach kids all about credit unions. Even the US Mint's site, mostly an e-commerce opp, has game-filled H.I.P. Pocket Change for kids, complete with a "Teachers' Lounge" that has lesson plans like "Charting History with Pennies."

Does all this make you want to log on and start up your child's digital-allowance account? Which, if any, of these resources do you think make sense for kids? Does fiscal responsibility begin at home? Or do you think children should become "financially literate" at school? Email us your own thoughts and experiences.

* * * *

E-shopping intelligence

With holiday shopping looming (or are you an early worm?), we thought it might be helpful to have the latest e-commerce news conveniently glommed into one place:

  1. Privacy protection service

    Now consumers can actually download privacy protection. A startup in San Diego, enonymous.com, has patent-pending technology that it says allows the user to control what personal information s/he gives a Web site. The software will automatically tell a visitor to an e-commerce Web site what the site's privacy practices are like. Then, if the visitor decides to go ahead and shop, s/he can let the enonymous software fill out the transaction or registration form. Enonymous says its software "splits a user's personal data into two pieces" - information that identifies the user, including contact information, and consumer-behavior information that marketers want. The former is kept from marketers; the "harmless" marketing part that doesn't identify a person is made available to marketers. Read about how enonymous fits into the whole privacy debate at SiliconValley.com.

  2. Teens and online shopping

    USAToday conducted a fun experiment that yielded a little anecdotal evidence about teens and shopping. They gave $500 each to four teenagers and told them to go shopping on the Web. Conclusion: Malls aren't going away anytime soon. But read the article to find out what e-stores teens like most (Hint: Look at the catalogs arriving in our mailboxes!).

    Then there's plain-old data. At first glance, it looks like market researchers are seeing a different picture than USAToday: eMarketer reports, via CyberAtlas, that "more than 10 million US teenagers will make a purchase online by the year 2002, a dramatic increase from the estimated 2 million teens that shopped online in 1998 and the projection of 3.9 million for 1999." But the report also shows that - though teens as a group have "significantly greater access to the Web" than adults, they're less likely than adults to actually make purchases online. That social experience at the mall just may be too much fun (or too engrained).

  3. Smart shoppers oughta know

    The New York Times suggests that one way to get our share of all the money being made on Internet stocks is to do all our Christmas shopping on the Web. That, too, a risky proposition, you say? Not if we're armed with information. And that's what the Times article is really about: "Savvy cyberconsumers" can find sites selling all sorts of items at or below cost, and they must also always look for free shipping and other giveaways and promotions. Why? The writer says it's "because use so many Internet companies, and their investors, are so desperate to get big fast that they are almost willing to bribe people to shop with them."

    Here's an example - a site that "aggregates" shoppers to bring down product costs. It's called PeoplePC, and it just launched. According to Wired News, members get a biweekly newsletter announcing the latest bargains (at CDNow, Amazon.com, etc.). A competitor is Accompany.

  4. Just in time for holiday shopping

    Great news for you Apple lovers devastated because you can't afford the G4 "supercomputer" (see our report): In his inimitable way, Steve Jobs has just announced the new iMacs priced below $1,000. The New York Times has the very readable story. For those of us living on the PC side of life, don't forget our report on Dell's great new pricing.

  5. The ultimate big-ticket puchase

    What's fascinating to us about Microsoft's deal with Ford Motor Company is not that they're going to sell cars online. What we like about this story is how it drives home the fact that the Internet is changing business from both the selling and the buying end. The cars people will be buying via this particular site will be built-to-order. Mattel sells customer-designed dolls at Barbie.com. Dell and Compaq sell computers this way. But this is a new order of magnitude. According to the Seattle Times, car shoppers "will select among standard car options, such as color, number of doors and whether or not they want a compact-disc player. Using Microsoft software, Ford will locate an existing car on a dealer lot or order a custom car built." Wired News has a story on the subject, too.

  6. Groceries just a click away?

    In "Grocery wars heat up" in Interactive Week, we learn that competition is such that the online grocers are already trying to differentiate themselves. For example, Priceline, pioneer in name-your-own-price airline tickets, is now letting grocery shoppers haggle over peas and carrots (in a manner of speaking). Nando Times has the story too. The New York Times offers an overview with local flavor - a story about the eight, count 'em eight, online groceries serving New Yorkers who prefer virtual shopping carts to metal ones. The great part about this piece? The writer tried those services and lived to tell about it (one bit of wisdom: perishables are problematic). Have you had online grocery-shopping experiences? Do email us your story.

* * * *

A subscriber writes

Last month we reported on Apple's new "supercomputer," the G4, and asked if any of you found it tempting. Here's what we heard from subscriber Robin in California:

"I use Mac at home and PC at work. I find the offer very attractive and wish I could afford even a relatively affordable Mac G4. Although Windows2000 is starting to approach the level of technology of my obsolete PowerMac, it is still less user friendly and kind of stupid compared to a Mac. The only thing attractive to me about a PC is the cheap price. In this case, I believe you get what you pay for."

* * * *

Share with a Friend!! If you find the newsletter useful, won't you tell your friends and relatives? We would much appreciate your referral.

To subscribe, they can just send an e-mail to subscribe@netfamilynews.org - no need to type anything in the Subject field or the body of the message. We are always happy to hear from potential sponsors and distribution partners as well - via info@netfamilynews.org.

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

Sincerely,

Net Family News


HOME | newsletter | subscribe | links | supporters | about | feedback


Copyright 1999 Net Family News, Inc. | Our Privacy Policy