Scholastic.com: a step in the right direction

CNN reports on Scholastic.com’s Parent Activity Center (PAC), “a new “go to” play space at scholastic.com where parents and their young children ages newborn to eight-years-old can play and learn together.”

From the CNN article:

“Kids are starting to go online as early as the age two, and just as a parent would hold their child’s hand to cross the street, parents and their young child should be exploring Web sites together,” said Seth Radwell, President of eScholastic, a division of Scholastic, the global children’s publishing, education and media company. “The new Parent Activity Center on Scholastic.com has something for the whole family — fun games and activities that children will love and expert advice that parents need.”

This new site is a useful technological tool for parents to effectively manage their children’s relationship with the internet – a need I described in earlier blog posts.  It will be interesting to see how far this goes, in particular, I am curious as to whether or not PAC integrates into different school’s curricula.

Problems with Educational Filtering

A good blog post by David Burt reminds us of two facts: first, current internet filtering often excludes valuable information, second, the educational content filtering space is highly fragmented.  Is it possible that a white list approach may help solve both of these problems?  On first glance, a whitelist approach to filtering would seem to exacerbate the first problem – if blacklisting sites restricts the educational potential of the internet, then wouldn’t whitelist, which excludes much of the internet altogether be even worse?

Maybe not.  With whitelisting, credible, appropriate sites that might contain red flag words would be permitted despite the fact that they have red flag words.  Also, we have to ask: Is knowledge realy so diverse that a whitelist approach is unworkable, i.e. is the array of knowledge to be accessed by the average child so wide it cannot be anticipated by adult experts on childhood education and cognitive development?

Where’s the mouse?

From a month-old article by Clay Shirky, author of Here Comes Everybody:

I was having dinner with a group of friends about a month ago, and one of them was talking about sitting with his four-year-old daughter watching a DVD. And in the middle of the movie, apropos nothing, she jumps up off the couch and runs around behind the screen. That seems like a cute moment. Maybe she’s going back there to see if Dora is really back there or whatever. But that wasn’t what she was doing. She started rooting around in the cables. And her dad said, “What you doing?” And she stuck her head out from behind the screen and said, “Looking for the mouse.”

Here’s something four-year-olds know: A screen that ships without a mouse ships broken. Here’s something four-year-olds know: Media that’s targeted at you but doesn’t include you may not be worth sitting still for. Those are things that make me believe that this is a one-way change. Because four year olds, the people who are soaking most deeply in the current environment, who won’t have to go through the trauma that I have to go through of trying to unlearn a childhood spent watching Gilligan’s Island, they just assume that media includes consuming, producing and sharing.

I think this story and Shirky’s comments make it clear how children have radically different expectations than their parents.  In some ways, children have difficulty accessing information online (c.f. Myth of the Google Generation), but in other ways they have a better understanding of what the future holds, namely, they understand that media is just data and data can be manipulated and not just passively consumed – many adults still have a hard time wrapping their heads around this simply fact.

Educational 3D Virtual World

Knowledge Adventure, an educational software company, releases new 3D virtual world software today and  plans to start selling an online version in July, according to this article.

Knowledge Adventure is not a start-up, but is a spin-out from Vivendi and has deep experience and expertise in the area of educational software.  In the CNET article CEO David Lord states:

“We are very skilled at building software products for kids, with immersive 3D play, gaming, and adventure-based learning. (This new software) is not a hangout place–it’s an immersive environment,”

However, children face dangers in using these new virtual worlds, in the same article a child advocate claims:

“For example, kids as young as 5 or 6 years have been known to use virtual worlds as a way to “cyber bully” peers, she said. And they’ll figure out how to do it within the parameters of the environment. A child might name a virtual room after another child that he or she wants to ridicule, e.g., “Mary is fat.”"

However, JumpStart alleviates this problem by providing a platform for parental participation:

JumpStart’s preschool software is heavy on participation from parents–and it will be the same when the company introduces its online component in July, Lord said. For example, parents can upload family photos into the virtual world, or send messages to their child in the world.

The idea of accelerated learning in a virtual world could help revolutionize education, especially if it empowers busy families to get their pre-schoolers learning before they start school.  Educational software has had only limited appeal so far, in part because it is often based on text (along with some colorful images thrown-in), but improved graphics makes enriched 3D media environments possible and tying these environments into an online social world could create a platform for learning beyond the boundaries of school and family.

Parents skeptical about social value of new media

According to a new poll by advocacy group Common Sense Media, 75% of parents believe digital media skills are important for their kids to know, but parents expressed skepticism about the social value of the internet:

From Common Sense Media’s press release:

• 67 percent of parents said they did not think the Web helped teach their kids how to communicate.
• 87 percent of parents said they did not believe the Web helped their kids learn how to work with others.
• Three out of four parents do not believe the Web can teach kids to be responsible in their communities.

These results demonstrate that parents believe digital know-how is necessary but does not lead to better social outcomes (in terms of communication, teamwork, and community).  I happen to agree with the parents given the current state of the social internet, but I think there is potential exists to make the internet a facilitator of social engagement.

However, there are major problems that need to be addressed.  These problems fall into two categories:

1) The current social internet is simply not as secure and safe as parents would like.  Overcoming this is a key challenge and must be met by schools, non-profits, and entrepreneurs.  Most current filtering software does not seriously confront the challenges presented by the social internet.

2) The current social internet is not optimally structured for the way children’s brains work.  The social internet is heavily dependent upon the user’s brain being able to understand the internet in abstract terms – e.g. social networks as social graphs.  Most cognitively developed adults and adolescents do this automatically, so it’s not an issue for them, but children’s minds often understand things in concrete terms – hence they do not automatically understand that the social internet is a mere abstraction of the real world, i.e. a “map” of the real social world, not the “territory” itself.  This is why some children find it difficult to interact effectively with the internet (the ide that kids are net savvy is, in fact, a myth).

Facebook promises new safeguards

Facebook has worked with states Attorneys General to develop new safeguards that promise to protect children from predators and cyberbullying.

From the article in the South-Florida Sun-Sentinel:

“The changes include banning convicted sex offenders from the site, limiting older users’ ability to search online for subscribers under 18 and building a task force seeking ways to better verify users’ ages and identities.

Among other changes, Facebook has agreed to:

– Ensure companies offering services on its site comply with its safety and privacy guidelines.

– Keep tobacco and alcohol ads from users too young to purchase those products.

– Remove groups whose comments or images suggest they involve incest, pedophilia, bullying or other inappropriate content.

– Send warning messages when a child is in danger of giving personal information to an adult.

– Review users’ profiles when they ask to change their age, ensuring the update is legitimate and notintended to let adults masquerade as children.”

This raises some questions;

1) Why were states Attorneys General involved?  Why didn’t Facebook implement these common-sense solutions from the get-go? As a Facebook user I don’t see these new features as in any way onerous.

2) What are Texas’s reservations about this?  TX is the only state not to sign on to this, so it seems that TX is being difficult, but maybe their concerns are legitimate especially in light of the fact that it has taken months for the Attorneys General and Facebook to reach an agreement.

3) To what extent do major internet players prioritize child safety and educational concerns?  It seems that there is room for improvement in this area.

British non-profit produces child-friendly guides to the internet

Childnet International, a British non-profit, has created several useful resources for parents which help parents navigate the perils and opportunities of the internet.

Perhaps the most useful resource offered by Childnet is “Know IT All” for parents, which is also available as a CD-ROM.  Childnet states that Know IT All for Parents “has been designed to help parents get the most out of the Internet and mobile phone for themselves and their children.”

Several parents I have talked with have desired a resource guide like this.  I am not aware of such a comprehensive guide (it also discusses mobile applications) being produced by a U.S. institution, but the need is clearly there.

According to this article, Childnet discovered that in distributing their resource guide, the two most important things were earning the parents’ trust and ensuring the guide was easily understood.  Here are two quotes from the article addressing each point:

On trust:

“Carrick-Davies also found it was important that the resource be made available free through a trusted source. The best solution was to distribute a CD-ROM through schools.”

and a Childnet executive comments on ease of use:

“One of the important things we learned was that parents wanted information in a digestible format. The last thing they wanted was more leaflets. We knew that an interactive resource where parents could learn about the internet through a variety of media was the best method.”

New Study Exposes Problems with Childrens’ Internet Sites

A new study from Consumer Reports WebWatch and the Mediatech Foundation suggests that the unregulated commercialization of the internet is having a deleterious effect on kids’ online experience.  The study can be found online at: http://www.consumerwebwatch.org/pdfs/kidsonline.pdf.

A summary of the reports results can be found here.  Here’s a quote from the summary:

“We believe parents need a more complete picture of the Web sites where their young children are spending an increasing amount of time,” said Beau Brendler, director of Consumer Reports WebWatch. “One test family spent $1,316 in a year on stuffed animals on a single site. Some sites play for profit on a child’s emotions to the degree we saw begging, tantrums and even tears in the videos.”

This study underscores the importance of the recommendations in the articles discussed in the previous two posts from today and Monday.  We are starting to see the need for more direct parental involvement in their children’s internet use.  It is no longer just about only protecting kids from obscene content, but also about managing their overall interaction with the online world which is changing more rapidly than most parents realize, especially in the Web 2.0 space.

How parents can take their kids back from new media

Here’s another article on how parents can manage their kids’ relationship with new media technologies: Parents can take their kids back from media.

Like the article I posted on Monday, this article lists concrete steps parents can take to make better use of online media:

1.Set clear expectations for acceptable media, based on your family values.

2.Monitor usage. Be sure to praise and reward appropriate use, and promptly punish violations.

3.Participate in exploring the possibilities of our multimedia world with your children.

The article also cites two source of information for parents who are bewildered by the array of online threats: www.mediafamily.org and www.commonsensemedia.org.

Overall, some of these suggestions overlap with the ones mentioned in article I blogged about on Monday.  This seems to suggests that there is a possibility for an emerging consensus about “best practices” in managing children’s internet usage.  As parents and teachers become more aware of the dangers and opportunities presented by the internet, I hope there will pay greater attention to the experts, such as the psychologists who wrote the articles I mentioned today and on Monday.

One possible solution is the creation of an international standard for “child-friendly” media.  Such a standard could be applied to technology products and services such as web sites, software and hardware and would require that the product or service have a basic level of parental control and filtering.  Just as important the standard could require that the parental control features be easily integrated across different media platforms, making it easier for parents to manage all of their children’s technology “relationships” from a central source.

Improving parent’s technology relationship with their children…

The following quote is from an article in the SF Chronicle about the need for parents to improve the “technology relationship” with their children:

Parents need to build a better technology relationship with their children. Analog adults must get tech-friendly and curious about their children’s desire for digital fame. This requires parents wrapping their minds around the good and the bad of kids’ striving for fame in these days of social network sites, reality television, cell-phone cameras and self-broadcasting.

This is really one of the best articles on how parents need to navigate the minefield that is the internet.  It even gives five concrete action steps parents can take in collaborating with their kids to help manage their children’s relationships with the internet:

1. Ask Before Uploading

2. If It Is That Good, Then It Will Still Be That Good In The Morning

3. Organize And Digitize Family Videos And Pictures

4. Family Internet Night

5. Know The Audience And Set Limited Engagements

For more on these steps see the original article.

Of course, a major problem parents face is the time constraints inherent in learning about technology and then spending the time with their children to improve their relationship with emerging communication technologies.  It represents a double learning curve for parents who are not already tech-savvy: first, they need to learn the technology (which their children are quickly learning from their peers), second, the parents need to learn how to manage the relationship to new technologies.

The goal of the Deriv project is to develop new solutions that will help parents shrink this double learning curve by creating novel technologies that empower parents to more efficiently manage their children’s relationship with technology.