What a year it has been for child online safety, right?! There was the adoption of General Comment 25, bringing all things digital into the global Convention on the Rights of the Child; the draft Online Safety Bill and Parliament’s response in the UK; the release of Australia’s eSafety Commissioner’s Safety by Design for the tech industry and investors; the Age Appropriate Design Code coming into … [Read more...] about Online safety for 2022: 8 things we need to see
Social Media
9 things that make viral hoaxes challenging
Remember “Blue Whale”? Almost five years ago, when I was getting to the bottom of that murky hoax, it wasn’t yet understood as one. It was being called a “suicide game,” and those two words were scaring parents around the world, literally. I was looking all over the Web for reliable sources and found my best one – still one of the world’s top experts on the subject, I believe – to be Georgi … [Read more...] about 9 things that make viral hoaxes challenging
The metaverse and the Meta part
I hadn’t read Snow Crash. So I first learned about the metaverse in 2008, right after returning from a family trip around the world and a few months before Barack Obama was elected President for the first time. I was a little disoriented coming back to America after 10 months in many other countries, especially during an election year, and it didn’t help that I was attending my very first ISTE … [Read more...] about The metaverse and the Meta part
Take-aways from the ‘Facebook Files’
What a week it has been, right? At least for those of us who follow and/or use social media. There was the naming of whistleblower Frances Haugen on “60 Minutes” Sunday night, US time; the hours-long outage of all of Facebook’s products Monday; Haugen’s testimony on Capitol Hill Tuesday, a report that hackers were offering for sale 1.5 billion people’s public data they scraped from Facebook; and … [Read more...] about Take-aways from the ‘Facebook Files’
New game to help middle schoolers be media literacy masters
It’s definitely not your typical American high school – not the one in “Agents of Influence.” But high school is the backdrop, which is smart for a media literacy videogame aimed at middle schoolers, right? Especially a sketchy, slightly dystopian fictional one like “Virginia Hall High,” in which the game is set. First, the school occupies what used to be the HQ of “the Omni-Directional … [Read more...] about New game to help middle schoolers be media literacy masters