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Dear Subscribers:

It's been a great year! Thank you for being a part of this increasingly important community of active, caring participants in the online lives of kids. We've learned even more about you from this year's Subscriber Survey - results below. We so appreciate your sharing your perspectives with us. This will be our last issue of 1999; we'll be back in your emailboxes January 7, 2000. Until then, we wish you the brightest and gentlest of holiday times.

Our lineup this week:

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All about you

We learned so much as we pored over the results of Net Family News's first-annual subscriber survey. The 10% response rate alone - a remarkable one by polling standards, especially given all the questions we asked you! - told us you're a very committed group of people. Seventy-three percent of you have concerns about children's online safety and privacy (19% of respondents said they have none), and 66% have concerns about kids shopping online (20% don't). And after all, the kids we're talking about belong to you: Fifty-two percent of you are moms, 21% dads, 8% grandmothers, 5% grandfathers, and 4% aunts or uncles.

As for that other major demand on your time, you cited 34 different occupations, and more than a quarter of you are educators.

We were delighted to discover that this newsletter arrives in email boxes all over the world. Just the 10% who responded to the survey live in more than a dozen countries on six continents, including 45 states and provinces in North America.

Your responses to our Net filtering questions were very interesting. Thirty-nine percent of respondents said they use no online-safety tools, often citing parental supervision as their method of choice; 23% said they use AOL Parental Controls, 13% server-based filtering (e.g., FamilyClick.com, Dotsafe.com, This.com). [See a USAToday roundup on this type of filtering.]

Only 9% of you use client- or home-computer-based filtering, citing Net Nanny, Guard Dog (privacy-protection software), Crossing Guard at Crosswalk.com, Surf Monkey, Cyber Sentinel, and KiddoNet.

We also discovered that our subscribers are fairly conservative in just one area: how you feel about filtering in public places. Your response would make Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) happy, given his efforts to have filtering software installed on all e-rate-funded computers in school and libraries. In response to our question, "Do you believe there should be filtering on computers that children use in schools, libraries, and other public spaces?", 68% said "yes," 11% "no," and 23% "it depends."

Family Net-Use Policies

Most telling of all were the family Net-use rules and policies you sent us. They reflect your humor, good sense, wisdom, and love for your kids. They deserve to be shared, so we've included a sampler.

Fifty percent of respondents said, yes, they have family online-safety rules or a policy on using the Internet (25% of respondents checked "no"). The most widely used rules were about supervision and personal information:

  1. Thirty-six percent of respondents who have family policies have the rule that there is no Net use without a parent a) at home or b) "in the same room." Under the online-safety tools question, many respondents stated that real-time, shoulder-to-shoulder parental supervision is a much better "tool" than filtering software or electronic parental controls, the reason they gave for not choosing electronic online-safety options.
  2. Twenty-two percent of families with policies tell their children that no personal information is to be given out online - no exceptions.

As for what those policies include, some of the following will sound comfortably familiar (do we parents all sound alike sometimes?!):

Back to basics

Here are some really simple ones that look like they're based on some wisdom that dates back a lot farther than the Internet:

A little more detailed

Family policies are good things to hammer out together. Whether "traditional," "non-traditional," nuclear, or extended, families are benefited when members can sit down together, focus on something of interest to everybody, and communicate their individual and family-unit interests and concerns. Hashing over an Internet-use policy is just another opportunity of that sort. It will also make for fewer disputes over who gets online, when, and what for, and it will help keep kids' online times constructive. Once families have policies, depending on how detailed, it's helpful to print them out and tape them on or near their Net-connected computer(s).

We always appreciate hearing about your rules, as well as your family policymaking process. Email us with them anytime via feedback@netfamilynews.org.

School Net-use policies

Some of you who are teachers kindly included in their survey responses links to their schools' Internet acceptable-use policies. Here are several that might be useful to fellow subscribers:

If any of you have comments on these policies or would like to submit one that you've found particularly effective (and why!), do email us.

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While we're on the subject (of school policies)

The New York Times happened upon what it calls "a textbook case of how school systems across the country are dealing with the wide-open world of the Internet." The article, "How Small-Town Standards Can Block a Big City Class," begins with one Bronx high school teacher's delight over a very successful English project involving the Internet (and why it was such a success). Then, the piece continues, Mr. Pultinas's school got filtering. Read what happened when he tried a similar project after that.

The piece considers what happens when schools use these software filters' default settings, based on criteria - set by corporations and interest groups - which may reflect values or needs different from those in the school's community. "Conservative, Bible-Belt communities … are helping to set the standards for what students in more cosmopolitan places like New York are allowed to see," according to the Times. It found anecdotal evidence in Michael Cherry, who - as technical systems administrator for Hory County schools in South Carolina - "is the main arbiter of what is allowed or not allowed on the Internet in the county's schools." Mr. Cherry passes along his recommendations for the sites that should be blocked to Symantec, the company in California that makes I-Gear, which is the filtering software used by Mr. Pultinas's school in the Bronx. So the story has come full-circle!

You'll want to read the article in full. It's useful simply because it raises some important questions about - when filtering tools are used - how they are best used, and about who decides what is filtered. For example, whenever a school board or tech committee chooses to go with a software product's default settings, they are, in effect, giving up control and letting third parties - such as the company that makes the software (and its advisers/customers) - decide what their students can and can't access on the Internet. It would follow that the more the filtering product or service allows for customization in accord with a community's own standards the better. And that's just one issue to consider in this important discourse. Send us your issues and concerns.

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Web News Briefs

  1. Uncle Sam's free lesson plans

    You might call it a "lesson-plan portal." The US Education Department has just unveiled its "Gateway to Educational Materials" (GEM), with "one-stop … access to high-quality lesson plans, curriculum units, and other education resources on the Internet!" According to Wired News, more than 140 state, federal, university-based, and nonprofit organizations supply the materials in this searchable database, all evaluated by GEM. (See our special teacher feature in the Nov. 5 issue for other new Web resources for educators.)

  2. 'Buyer beware'

    If you're still doing holiday shopping on the Web, USAToday has some useful tips for keeping it a good experience. They're in answer to a recent National Consumers League study, which found that consumers are generally more worried about the privacy of their credit card numbers than about fraud, USAToday reports. The survey also showed that nearly a third of shoppers believe retailers' Web sites are screened before they go up on the Internet. The National Consumers League has an Internet Fraud Watch program.

  3. Questioning classroom tech

    For one thing, the newly formed Alliance for Childhood suggests that computers have a restricted role, if any, in elementary school classrooms. But that's a very simplistic view of both the concerns of this group of educators, doctors, and psychologists, and the New York Times piece about it. The alliance, which formed last February and plans to formally incorporate as a nonprofit, is working on a report about children and technology literacy. The draft can be found in the Web site of Internet newsletter NetFuture, where editor and Alliance member Stephen Talbott invites public comment. In Steve's Editor's Note, it's interesting to read how news of the Alliance and its thought-provoking concerns has spread. Founding members of the Alliance can be found on Steve's site. If you do comment on the Alliance's draft, send your comments to us too.

  4. New brand of freedom?

    A new product that keeps Web users' personal information private has been generating some buzz this week. ZDNet reports that anonymity with this new service, Freedom.net, is not free. The pricing scheme is interesting, but users basically pay $50 to cover their tracks. Other anonymous services exist, ZDNet reports, but they typically offer only anonymous e-mail. "Freedom.net goes beyond that. By routing data through the network of servers, [it] allows users to browse the Web, e-mail, chat with others, and monitor what data the computer is sending out, all the while hiding behind one or more pseudonyms." Here's CNET's report.

  5. 'Internet may be stopping global warming'

    Now there's an arresting headline! It refers to a report by the Center for Energy and Climate Solutions (via Nua Internet Surveys) that found the information economy and "the efficiency afforded by the Internet" to be "a major contributing factor" to the decrease in energy consumption. The Center's data showed that, "despite a 9% growth in the economy during 1997 and 1998, energy consumption dropped more than it has in 50 years."

  6. Progress in filtering spam

    Yahoo! just may have made some headway in the battle against spam - junk email, CNET reports. Hotmail's been working on the problem, too, but its "fixes" have gotten low grades from users. Yahoo!, on the other hand, says it's getting positive feedback from users, and CNET corroborated that message with a few Yahoo! email users, who said "the system was successfully sorting the vast majority of spam email into a folder called 'Bulk Email.' " ComputerCurrents.com has a story just on Yahoo!'s efforts.

  7. New site for the disabled

    Business Week has a great review of magazine publisher We Media's site, unveiled this month. Looks like WeMedia.com is the beginnings of a full-blown "affinity portal," with soon-to-be channels called We Kids, We Travel, We Sports, and We Mall (must have that e-commerce element!). This first version has some bugs and has caused some confusion among users, but it's reportedly a good start, offering information on health, finance, jobs, products, assistive technology, services from nonprofit associations, and real estate. Beyond text, there's radio, television, and theater via streaming video. This very readable Business Week column includes recommendations for what the site should do next and mentions a competitor that's about to launch. Here's CNET's more limited report.

  8. For sports fans

    And while we're on "affinity portals," two new sports sites are banking on "die-hard sports audiences ignored by traditional broadcast media," according to CNET. The soon-to-launch Pupule Sports, targeting women, was "founded by two Silicon Valley women … who were frustrated at the wealth of coverage in men's sports but the lack of news for women athletes," CNET says. The site itself explains its name: "Pupule. We learned the word in Hawaii. Loosely translated, it means crazy, nuts, maybe a little compulsive. It's the perfect word for our business because we're crazy about women's sports." Meanwhile, Rivals.com, which focuses more on high school and college football and basketball, just struck a content-sharing deal with professional-sports service FoxSports.

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Major digital-divide resource

Here's an important addendum to our coverage last week. The Benton Foundation has just launched its Digital Divide Network, which continuously tracks - and keeps us posted on - all related news, grants, initiatives, and research.

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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. If you'd like to make a contribution or become a sponsor, please email us or send a check payable to:

Net Family News, Inc.
P.O. Box 1283
Madison, CT 06443

That does it for this year. Have the happiest of holidays!

Sincerely,

Net Family News


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