One year ago this month, its 3rd-through-6th grader designers launched the fifth and final iteration of Escape to Morrow, an open source digital game they designed in Minecraft for Minecraft players. The five iterations – including writing and rewriting backstories, creating maps, finding mods (Minecraft modifications out on the Web) and producing the trailer – took a year of work in summer camp, … [Read more...] about For digital summer camp, kid-source a game (or play this one!)
Social Media
The real goal of unplugging
I love the parenthetical in the headline of "Five Ways to Break Your Kids’ Screen Addiction (and Yours, Too)," by Yahoo family tech columnist Dan Tynan. Because – if there's such a thing as screen addiction and it's not just something fashionable to (anxiously) joke about – what we model for our kids in our own use of phone and other screens has huge influence on them. [You've probably seen videos … [Read more...] about The real goal of unplugging
FB privacy & the social media ‘collective unconscious’ (so far)
Some people read Facebook's near 180-degree change in how new users experience privacy as a response to pressure from privacy advocates and policymakers. I don't think so. It's largely a response to something even more powerful: changes in how users are using social media – all kinds of social media, not just Facebook. We're seeing a lot of the changes right in our own experiences and … [Read more...] about FB privacy & the social media ‘collective unconscious’ (so far)
Kik Messenger’s smart new safety features
Kik Messenger, which claims to be the US's 7th most popular social app and ranks even higher in some other countries, today released a new version that gives its 120 million+ users more control over who can text them. Over the past year, its creators at Waterloo, Ontario-based Kik Interactive noticed the app has become "the leading cross-app messenger," they claimed. That means that people who … [Read more...] about Kik Messenger’s smart new safety features
Our kids’ privacy & a White House report on ‘big data’
Referring to a new report from the White House that she contributed to, social media scholar danah boyd points out how impossibly simplistic it is to view "big data" as either all good or all bad. I'm thankful for the balance it struck in its findings on big data in education between the tremendous opportunities it represents for students and educators and the risks to student privacy. It … [Read more...] about Our kids’ privacy & a White House report on ‘big data’