Online Safety & Efficacy: Research Milestones
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A talk about 15+ years of Internet safety education (highlighting what are, for me, the key milestones in the US, Canadian and European youth-online-risk and social-media research literature), given March 19, 2013, in Sydney, Australia, at the World Congress on Family Law & Children's Rights. My subtitle: Helping our children navigate the unmapped whitewater of a networked world AND grow up at the same time!
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Online Safety & Efficacy: Research Milestones
- 1. Safety and Efficacy (Helping our children navigate the unmapped whitewater of a networked world and grow up at the same time!) Anne Collier Co-director, ConnectSafely.org Founder & writer, NetFamilyNews.org
- 2. The joy of The joy of learning learning Samsung Tomorrow how to cook how to cook Samsung Tomorrow
- 3. Learning knife safety in the Learning knife safety in the process of learning how to cook process of learning how to cook Yoshiyasu Nishikawa Yoshiyasu Nishikawa
- 4. This is the Internet now HuffingtonPost.com
- 5. “By using this, you consent…” In participatory media, we all – users, governments, corporations – find ourselves signatories to a new social contract drawn up by the media shift.
- 9. James Paul Gee James Paul Gee
- 10. Working (and playing) in cross-functional teams Working (and playing) in cross-functional teams
- 12. Zora Ball Zora Ball Harambee Instit. of Science & Technology
- 14. NO
- 15. SCARING PEOPLE DOESN’T WORK
- 16. Things are looking up, actually. David Finkelhor David Finkelhor
- 17. We need to lose the… We need to lose the… ‘JUVENOIA’ Mark Robinson
- 18. What goes around comes around online too. What goes around comes around online too. Dave Pijuan-Nomura
- 19. RECOMMENDED TO CONGRESS RECOMMENDED TO CONGRESS Digital citizenship instruction as a national priority Digital citizenship instruction as a national priority
- 21. Digital Citizenship: The ethics piece from Harvard’s GoodPlay Project • Consequence thinking – Impact on oneself (the focus of Online Safety field’s first 15+ yrs) • Moral thinking –Impact on one’s relationships • Ethical thinking –Impact on everybody Citizenship in user-driven, social media communities not possible if focused solely on impacts for individuals.
- 22. “To be relevant to young people, its supposed beneficiaries, Net safety needs to… • Respect youth agency • Embrace the media they love • Use social media in instruction • Address the positive reasons for digital safety & literacy.”
- 23. Can’t possibly be one-size-fits-all Can’t possibly be one-size-fits-all David Kelly David Kelly
- 24. Ben Heine A child’s psychosocial makeup and A child’s psychosocial makeup and home and school environments are better predictors of home and school environments are better predictors of online risk than any technology a child uses. online risk than any technology a child uses.
- 25. MEDIA EMBEDDED (in everyday life, not snow)
- 26. LEVELS OF PREVENTION LEVELS OF PREVENTION Primary: Citizenship & literacy (digital, media, social literacy) – all students & grade levels, all appropriate subjects, ideally in digital environments Secondary: more focused, situational prevention e.g., bullying, sexting; taught by experts as needed Tertiary: prevention and intervention for at risk youth; training in social media for the professionals who provide care
- 28. THE POWER OF SOCIAL NORMS THE POWER OF SOCIAL NORMS The POWER of ‘social norming’ Source: Craig & Perkins, Hobart and William Smith Colleges 2008
- 29. ‘Opportunity & risk go hand-in-hand.’ ‘Opportunity & risk go hand-in-hand.’ ‘Risk must be distinguished from harm.’ ‘Risk must be distinguished from harm.’
- 31. IN THEIR OWN WORDS IN THEIR OWN WORDS
- 32. What are they doing in social media?! Hanging out Getting involved/social activism Learning social norms Mentoring and being mentored Exploring identity Collaborating on school projects Self-presentation Taking & sharing photos Seeking validation Journaling Risk assessment Producing & editing video Keeping in touch with Sharing/producing music distant friends Developing apps & writing code Playing games Watching YouTube videos Playing jokes Pursuing interests Watching TV
- 33. 2 types of social networking 2 types of social networking ...on all devices, fixed and mobile: • Friendship-driven (84% of 15-25 YOs in a qualitative study at Harvard School of Education) • Interest-driven (80% involved in “at least one such online community”)
- 34. Social Social networking’s networking’s progression progression • Hanging out – casual socializing • Messing around – social tinkering, with info, ideas, media, tech • Geeking out – professional tech & media use, e.g., like that of artists, musicians, videographers, code writers
- 35. What online safety can learn from game design What online safety can learn from game design
- 37. To summarize… In the unmapped whitewater of this networked world, our kids need us to… • Clear space for learning on the fly • Be fact-based, not fear- based • Find, respect, build on their competencies • Learn as much as teach • Understand their world (one world all mashed up) • Life literacy as vital as digital literacy Kneale Quayle
- 38. Sam Antonio Sam Antonio
- 39. Thank you! Anne Collier anne@connectsafely.org NetFamilyNews.org
Notas do Editor
- What this talk is about (not criminal law)… Safety in digital media is more like safety in cooking. There are dangers, certainly, but we take cooking classes and in the process learn safety around knives and stoves, which the vast majority of learners come to use safely and efficiently. We don't take special knife safety classes.
- Safety needs to be learned in context and for enriching outcomes so that it's actually learned because it increases the learner's competency in an activity about which he or she is passionate.
- The context part of the talk – the Internet we’re experiencing now. More about our humanity than our technology.
- Power, regulation, safety, privacy – all our social constructs – are becoming more distributed and shared, bottom-up as much as top-down. In effect, a new social contract has been “drawn up” by the media shift we’re experiencing. We’re all signatories, and we’re experiencing its conditions in media to start with, but the conditions too are becoming more distributed. * The BBC’s experience with this: http://www.bbc.co.uk/journalism/blog/2010/07/ugc-five-years-on.shtml * New international layer of cooperative privacy enforcement: http://www.netfamilynews.org/new-international-layer-of-privacy-cooperation-enforcement * Anti-social media companies becoming obsolete http://www.netfamilynews.org/anti-social-media-companies-will-be-obsolete * SOPA & citizenship in a digital age http://www.netfamilynews.org/sopa-citizenship-in-a-digital-age * Digital citizenship insights from several years of Internet governance conferences: Notes from the IGF http://www.netfamilynews.org/digital-citizenship-in-process-notes-from-the-baku-igf and IGF Nairobi http://www.netfamilynews.org/digital-citizenship-reality-check-notes-from-nairobis-igf * "Digital citizenship reality check: Notes from Nairobi's IGF"</a>, IGF Vilnius and why digital citizenship needs to be crowd-sourced: http://www.netfamilynews.org/next-step-crowd-source-digital-citizenship * The goal for digital citizenship instruction http://www.netfamilynews.org/?p=29268 * PBS Frontline’ s ‘Digital Nation’: Presenting our generation with a crucial choice http://www.netfamilynews.org/?p=28721 * Net safety: How social networks can be protective (on what I call the protective “guild effect” that industry can help foster) http://www.netfamilynews.org/?p=28617
- Well-known New York Times writer Tom Friedman writes that, in the past decade, "the world went from connected to hyperconnected in a way that is impacting every job, industry and school…. People need to leverage all the new digital tools not just to FIND a job, but to invent one or reinvent one." Link to Friedman ref: http://www.netfamilynews.org/thoughts-on-social-media-time-outs-for-all-ages
- Nicholas Negroponte, who co-founded the MIT Media Lab, calls "the digital world … a world where competition, labor and leadership are less important than collaboration, creativity and networks.” From his review of the book Race Against the Machine : http://www.amazon.com/Race-Against-The-Machine-ebook/dp/B005WTR4ZI http://www.netfamilynews.org/6-year-old-self-taught-pre-readers-tablet-users-in-ethiopia
- Prof. Henry Jenkins at the U. of S. Calif. put it, they are avid information hunter-gatherers… and they are doing a great deal of learning on their own outside of school. They are … developmentally … experiential learners, social explorers, experimenters, risk assessors, collaborators. Jenkins and the Media Literacies Project he founded collaborated with the GoodPlay Project at the Harvard School of Education in the development of a free, Creative Commons-licensed digital citizenship and ethics curriculum: “Our Space” <http://www.newmedialiteracies.org/our-space-being-a-responsible-citizen-of-the-digital-world/>. http://www.netfamilynews.org/do-no-harm-message-to-educators-parents http://www.netfamilynews.org/2008/11/serious-informal-learning-online-youth.html
- Prof. James Paul Gee at Ariz. State U. told a TV interviewer that "we're growing a bunch of people who see what they do as social and collaborative and as parts of joining online communities." [SLIDE10] They naturally work and play in what the business world calls "cross-functional teams," "where everybody on the team is an absolute expert in something, but they know how to integrate their expertise with everybody else's … so they can pull off an action together in a complicated world … a very important way of being in the world in the 21st century…. And kids are ready for this world," he said. http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/digitalnation/learning/schools/how-video-games-can-help.html?play
- http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/digitalnation/learning/schools/how-video-games-can-help.html?play
- There's the story of the 19-year-old who scoops the NYT and all the other professional news outlets on the latest news about Apple products. http://www.businessinsider.com/mark-gurman-the-freshman-who-breaks-all-the-apple-news-2013-2
- And the 7-year-old who developed her own mobile app using the Bootstrap programming language. As one reporter put it, "No pressure, baby geniuses, but there's an entire world for you to save. Please hurry.” http://www.netfamilynews.org/app-developed-by-a-7-year-old-at-school
- Here are key research milestones in North America and Europe that have led me to this conclusion ….
- After over a decade, with millions of dollars spent on developing and marketing hundreds of Internet safety programs, researchers who surveyed all those programs concluded 18 mos. ago that, despite their successful marketing and uptake by schools, "right now, we have no information that Internet safety programs work. Or which ones are most likely to work." By work, we mean changed online behavior, of course. So virtually all online-safety instruction in the US over at least 15 years was not evidence-based. What we know it accomplished was a generation of children growing up believing things like … the Internet is riddled with predators. I've heard middle-schoolers who have neither had any experience of online predation nor KNEW anybody who had echoing back misinformation they'd heard from well-meaning law enforcement people in school assemblies. http://unh.edu/ccrc/pdf/fosi_whitepaper_increasingyouthsafety_d9.pdf
- Fear-based messaging rarely works, and a great deal of Internet safety messaging has been aimed at scaring people about the Internet. Here's when fear appeals do work, a Canadian study found: When the fear appeal is relevant to the listener and actionable – when the listener feels there's something he or she can do about it. Very little of the scary messaging about the Internet seems to be relevant to youth. However, even if the message about a threat IS relevant to listeners, if they feel unable to address it, the “boomerang effect” kicks in: What happens is, they ignore or mock the message, become angry at its source, deny they're at risk, or even increase the risky behavior in question. What DOES work, David Finkelhor at the U of NH's CCRC said in a talk a couple of years ago, is to 1) use clear, actionable messages such as "fasten your seatbelts," 2) incorporate Internet safety “into broader education programs about personal safety, sex education and decisionmaking … where we actually have some evidence-based models, and 3) “Focus on generic skills that improve both online and offline health and safety” – for example, “refusal skills (learning how to say no) and bystander skills (learning the best ways to help somebody being hurt). And speaking of fear … U. of Toronto, 2000 http://www.thcu.ca/infoandresources/publications/fear%20appeals%20-%20web%20version.pdf See also: “ Technopanics, Threat Inflation, and the Danger of an Information Technology Precautionary Principle ” (http://purl.umn.edu/144225), by Adam Thierer, senior research fellow at the Mercatus Center at George Mason Univ.
- In 2010, Dr. Finkelhor who had seen his research misrepresented in the news media for a decade, coined the term "juvenoia”…
- He gave a talk and wrote a paper about it, defining "juvenoia" as "the exaggerated fear of the influence of social change [including the Internet] on youth." In the talk and paper, he pointed to more than a dozen youth social problem indicators in my country, with national data (not his own) showing notable decreases between 1992 and 2010, the very period in which the Web was born and grew up. He said school violence, juvenile crime, the teen suicide rate, depression, substance abuse, the number of kids targeted by hate speech, teen pregnancy, and bullying are all down, some significantly down. Even sexual exploitation of minors – the fear that fueled our predator panic in 2006 and '07 – is down … dramatically, in fact – 58% between '92 and 2008, the latest national data available … contrary to what so many adults have been led to believe. The only two problems that increased were obesity and the no. of children living below the poverty line. David wasn't in any way suggesting that the Internet was the cause of these improvements, but the numbers show clearly that the Internet has not increased youth risk. All links provided in these 2 posts: http://www.netfamilynews.org/juvenoia-part-1-why-internet-fear-is-overrated http://www.netfamilynews.org/net-related-juvenoia-part-2-so-why-are-we-afraid
- A medical journal confirms the Golden Rule, also known in other cultural traditions as the ethic of reciprocity. A 2007 article published in Archives of Pediatrics showed that aggressive behavior online can more than double the aggressor's risk online. We could see that – in spite of the predator panic and the perfect storm of parental concern development (MySpace's exponential growth, the fact that it came out of nowhere for parents, the huge story it represented and ignorant reporters, the popular TV show "To Catch a Predator," and a mid-term election) – young users were NOT just potential victims online. We now have research evidence that their own behaviors have much do with their safety and that of their peers and communities. Archives of Pediatrics, 2007: http://archpedi.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?articleid=569592 About a report in Pediatrics in Jan. of this year: http://www.netfamilynews.org/important-granularity-on-net-risk-for-teens-study
- This was the beginning of a long investigation into digital citizenship that culminated in recommending, in a 2010 report to the US Congress by a task force I co-chaired, that digital instruction – in the core curriculum, pre-school through high school – be a national priority. Because of the agency, civic engagement, and social literacy it represents. Unfortunately, many adults reduce citizenship to just good behavior online – being good citizens, or practicing good netiquette. So "digital citizenship" becomes a top-down thing, something imposed, which is NOT citizenship, and kids see it as just "online safety repackaged" – which jeopardizes its relevance to them (something we need to be alert to) if we want it to have any traction. [ I suggest we get young people who might be interested in it involved and trained in the global Internet governance discussion – a REAL digital citizenship challenge (as in authentic or “real world” learning.] http://www.ntia.doc.gov/legacy/reports/2010/OSTWG_Final_Report_060410.pdf My post about it: http://www.netfamilynews.org/ostwg-report-why-a-living-internet
- I just mentioned the problem of representing youth always as potential victims – we need to think about the impact on THEM, especially when – in THIS media environment, that really isn't true. Some researchers at Harvard's School of Education got a feel for that impact. In a study of 15-to-25-year-olds looking at digital ethics, they heard this sobering comment from one young respondent: “Most of the time when people see something online, their main reaction is to laugh because most of the stuff on the Internet you have no sway over at all, so you just laugh and move on.” That, said Carrie James, the Harvard GoodPlay Project’s research director, sums up “two sentiments we heard from a lot of young people”: 1) “the Internet is simply for fun” (therefore inconsequential, we're telling them, a waste of time, just entertainment), and 2) “they feel a lack of efficacy online – if they see something unsettling they tend to ignore because they don’t feel they can change anything online.” What if, instead of consistent messaging from adults that youth are potential victims of online dangers, they heard that they are stakeholders in their own and each other's wellbeing online, active agents for change and the social good? As Prof. Henry Jenkins reported to our task force in 2009, we have left them largely on their own in new media, instead of working with them to leverage its powers for good and theirs.
- This slide shows what the Harvard School of Education’ s GoodPlay Project under Prof. Howard Gardner has found – three levels of ethical thinking that map to the stages of moral development. Gardner felt that, with the Internet, young people were thrown into a new environment that had no adult guidance or social norms. They were on their own, and he saw a need for us all to understand how they were thinking and behaving there in terms of ethics. What GoodPlay is finding is that the vast majority of online kids are at the consequence-thinking level – what Internet safety has taught them: only to think about the consequences to oneself – 1 reason why Net safety instruction is ineffective; consequence thinking isn’ t sufficiently protective. This is why we need digital citizenship ( or just citizenship ) training: to model and teach behavior that factors in consequences to peers and community. It’ s also why we need to teach WITH social media in school, so children have opps to practice good citizenship online, with teacher’s guidance.
- In a milestone we published ourselves in 2009, this is the question we challenged the field to think about in "Online Safety 3.0: Empowering and Protecting Youth." As Prof. Henry Jenkins reported to the government-appointed task force in 2009, we have left young people largely on their own in new media. We have represented social media (multiplayer online games, virtual worlds, social network sites, blogs, vlogs, texting, etc.) as dangerous or a waste of their time instead of ourselves learning about new media and working with our children to leverage the media in which they love to work and play for efficacy and success in a networked world (OSTWG report to Congress mentioned above: http://www.ntia.doc.gov/legacy/reports/2010/OSTWG_Final_Report_060410.pdf ). http://os3.connectsafely.org
- Another important finding was in the report of an earlier task force I served on – one assembled by 49 state attorneys general for a year's discussion at Harvard's Berkman Center. Our research committee conducted a review of all the N. Amer. and European youth-online-risk literature through 2008 and documented the crucial finding that Internet safety isn't one-size-fits-all – though for years it had been aimed at all youth equally. We reported that not all youth are equally at risk online; those most at risk online are the young people most at risk offline – so-called "at-risk" or vulnerable youth; and another very important finding…
- … that a child's psychosocial makeup and home and school environments are better predictors of online risk than any technology a child uses. Social media is very much a reflection of everyday life and sociality. So our experiences in and with social media is as individual as our lives are. ISTTF report: http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/pubrelease/isttf/ Article just this year in the medical journal Pediatrics confirming: http://www.netfamilynews.org/important-granularity-on-net-risk-for-teens-study
- So we have research evidence of what kids have been demonstrating for us since the middle of the last decade: that "online" is not some new unknown thing separate from everyday life for which parents and other adults have no preparation or training. To young people especially, it's just life – not the all of it but certainly embedded in it. So the context of what happens in Tumblr or Facebook or on a phone is not a Web site or app. The context, for most kids, is school life – around which almost all their waking hours revolve. Real-world conflict rarely gets resolved by Web sites. Our parents didn't go to the phone company when arguments happened in phone conversations when we were kids. What we see in a Web site is just a freeze frame of something happening in their lives. The implication of this – for school officials, parents, etc. – is that we don’t actually need special training to know how to deal with things that come up between kids. To the extent that we've ever known how to address, for example, bullying incidents, we know how to address cyberbullying ones. We focus on the kids, not the technology. That could take an investigation, certainly some sensitivity, maybe some computer forensics, but – as always – it's best to start with the people involved and work out from there, not reflexively call law enforcement, as is often done in my country … because, most of the time, crime is not involved. Get kids to help with the technology before calling the cops – so we can minimize kids' exposure to law enforcement.
- Because not all young ppl are equally at risk online, we now know that Online Safety needs a layered approach. We need to adopt the public health field’ s LEVELS OF PREVENTION. PRIMARY means baseline, universal instruction, pre-K through 12, in what is protective of ALL young people: good citizenship online as well as offline and media literacy that teaches critical thinking in new as well as traditional media – about what is posted, texted, shared, and uploaded as much as what is read, consumed, and downloaded. We have always taught good citizenship and media literacy; now we embrace new media too. We know this is protective in the new media environment, because researchers have found that aggressive behavior online increases the aggressor’ s risk online. So civil, mindful behavior are protective in all environments. SECONDARY : More specialized or targeted prevention - mentoring (incl peer) & support for specific risky behaviors, such as bullying, self-destructive behavior, etc., that is reinforced online. SEC. also utilizes “teachable movements,” when incidents in school occur (bullying, sexting, fights staged for YouTube, etc.), or perhaps annual anti-bullying empathy training for all students – a special assembly or unit in health class, when students learn about the law concerning transmitting sexually explicit images of minors. TERTIARY : Prevention AND intervention for youth with established patterns of risk behaviors. So the risk-prevention specialists, school counselors, social-service workers, and mental healthcare practitioners who work w/ at-risk youth already ... need to incorporate social media into their prevention and intervention work. [All this in a report that hasn’t been widely disseminated – so a research milestone without broad update as of yet.] http://www.ntia.doc.gov/legacy/reports/2010/OSTWG_Final_Report_060410.pdf
- The public conversation about cyberbullying has, importantly, gotten us all to revisit bullying. So we've had some helpful clarification in recent research, about what constitutes bullying and cyberbullying and best practices for addressing them – even as the public has been subjected to scary misinformation about a "bullying epidemic." We now know that bullying & cyberbullying are a subset of peer victimization – and that not every insult or fit of anger or stupid prank online is bullying. Also, kids don't use the term "cyberbullying," except as so-called authorities have incorrectly taught them to. In our country they tend to use the term "drama," danah boyd and other social media researchers have taught us, because it gives them a sense of emotional detachment from and power over social aggression. In my work over the past 18 months with the Born This Way Foundation, it became clear that widespread application of social-emotional learning or social literacy – learning how to detect and manage one's emotions and function well in community – is a key component of bullying prevention. If we could incorporate into all pre-K-through 12 schools in the US the evaluated SEL programs we have in our country, we would go FAR in preventing social cruelty online and offline. [As for the nos., Dr. Michele Ybarra told the American Psychological Association conference that only 15-17% of young people are affected by cyberbullying each year; in Europe, that figure is 6%, according to EU Kids Online. And in the US, physical bullying is still more prevalent but, according to the latest available data, decreased 7% between 2003 and 2008, to 15% of US 2-to-17-year-olds.] http://www.netfamilynews.org/kids-deserve-the-truth-about-cyberbullying
- Because perception affects – actually predicts – reality… Two profs. at Hobart/William Smith in upstate NY found that “t he most common (and erroneous) perception among students in the schools they studied – the perception – not the reality – is that most kids engage in and support bullying.” The reality at those NJ public schools (and all schools) is that most kids DON’T bully. This perception, the professors found, is highly predictive that bullying will happen. The perception “was more predictive than the actual school norms” in those schools, they said. So look at the chart for what happened between 2006 and 2008 in schools in N.J. (hard to see, but all you really need to see is the red and blue lines. Blue is the perception; red represents actual bullying behavior. The schools’ intervention programs, showing students that “kids in our school don’t bully” changed the perception and brought bullying incidents way down. Cyberbullying expert Sameer Hinduja, a prof. at FL Atlantic U.( & co-dir. of the Cyberbullying Research Center) wrote that... “ Schools must work to create a climate in which responsible use of Facebook ... Is ‘what we do around here’ and ‘just how it is at our school and with our students.’ This can occur by focusing attention on the majority of youth who do utilize computers and cell phones in acceptable ways” (http://cyberbullying.us/blog/social-norms-and-cyberbullying-among-students.html) http://www.socialnorms.org/CaseStudies/casestudies.php http://www.ou.edu/judicial/pae/pdf/iv/b/IVBiiSocialNormingTheory.pdf http://www.youthhealthsafety.org/bullying.htm “ Assessing Bullying in New Jersey Secondary Schools: Applying the Social Norms Model to Adolescent Violence”: Profs. David W. Craig and Wesley Perkins, Hobart and William Smith Colleges 2008 http://www.youthhealthsafety.org/BullyNJweb.pdf
- In my country, the two words "risk" and "harm" are used interchangeably in Net Safety messaging – as if they're synonyms. In fact, in mid-2011, EU Kids Online said in its second report after six years of surveying more than 25,000 9-to-16-year-olds in 25 countries, you can't have opportunity without risk. The authors write that “risk must be distinguished from harm. As with riding a bike or crossing the road, everyday activities online carry a risk of harm, but this harm is far from inevitable – indeed, it is fairly rare.” http://www.netfamilynews.org/from-europe-top-10-online-risk-myths
- And here is vital protection for the vast majority of young people – the internal kind. And interestingly, it doesn't come without risk. In a milestone report published just last month, the EU researchers also said that “Risk and resilience go hand in hand, as resilience can only develop through exposure to risks or stressful events. Consequently, as children learn how to adequately cope with (online) adversities, they develop (online) resilience." The authors put "online" in parentheses in both cases, meaning that the same is true for offline adversity and resilience development. "Children must explore and encounter some risk to learn and gain resilience,” the authors said in an earlier EU Kids Online report. The report that only "12% of 9-to-16-year-olds (and 8% of their parents) say they themselves have been upset by something online in the past year." This indicates high levels of resilience. http://www.netfamilynews.org/study-on-long-neglected-factor-in-net-safety-resilience
- And how much have our own fears affected not only children's online experiences but also our research agenda? The latest report from EU Kids Online reflects that important question. The authors write, “Adult society (parents, teachers, policy makers and the media) has shaped the policy agenda for understanding online risk and managing internet safety…. Most research has sought standardised descriptions of risk as measured in survey questionnaires; and most has asked children about risks that worry adults rather than discovering what concerns children themselves." One of the authors, Elisabeth Staksrud, an associate professor at University of Oslo, has a new book out on just this issue. She wrote to me: "I have been very worried of the limited idea of children often presented in risk-discussions - children are someone things happen to – thus all 'worries' are content related or stranger danger. I am so much more worried about the e.g. 19% of 14-16 year old girls who visit "pro-anorexia sites" or the 5% of 11-16 year olds who visit websites on how to commit suicide, or the 7% that go to self-harm sites (like cutting-sites)…. But dealing with these issues requires a different way of thinking about children, about risk and about protection." Elisabeth has just published her book on this: Children in the Online World: Risk, Regulation, Rights http://www.ashgate.com/default.aspx?page=4824&title_id=10746&edition_id=22263&calcTitle=1 "In Their Own Words: What Bothers Children Online” http://www2.lse.ac.uk/media@lse/research/EUKidsOnline/EU%20Kids%20III/Reports/Intheirownwords020213.pdf http://www.netfamilynews.org/online-risk-in-kids-own-words-a-research-milestone
- This is only a partial list of activities and behaviors occurring on the social Web. Young people were not just social networking, but social producing and creative networking, not just playing games & navigating virtual worlds but conducting meetings, negotiating, strategizing, community building, learning economics.... In World of Warcraft, educators who play the game tell me players are analyzing statistics and probabilities, learning how to save currency, how to budget, do marketing, and explore supply & demand. So they’ re learning in the fields of economics, math, sociology, diplomacy, and business. They’re also doing a lot of strategic thinking in collaboration. In his book The Element: how finding your passion changes everything, Sir Ken Robinson describes how many people – artists, writers, scientists, etc. – find their way & find success when they find their tribe , or community of shared interest. There, they find validation, feedback, supportive friends to test their ideas on, a safe place to experiment – all this is what young people are finding thru social media before they grow up, outside of school. But also: they find comfort, support, validation (good and bad) – a risk-prevention expert in MA: “In our research we asked kids if they go online when they feel lonely or depressed or anxious, and many said YES, and when we asked if it made them feel better, most said YES, IT DOES. So [SN] may be a mild form of self-treatment or relief from other difficulties in life.” http://www.amazon.com/MySpace-Unraveled-What-safely-ebook/dp/B004SHD44A
- And 2006 was when the $50m, MacArthur Foundation-funded Digital Youth Project kicked off. It was a 3-year qualitative study by more than two dozen researchers of social media use by a diverse selection of young people at home, in school, and in after-school programs. They discovered, there were actually two kinds of youth social networking – the friendship-driven kind we were all fairly familiar with and nervous about, and the interest-driven kind, where young people were pursuing their interests and passions in and with digital media in creative and professional ways well before leaving school. Hanging Out, Messing Around & Geeking Out: Kids Living & Learning with New Media , MIT Press (2009) <http://mitpress.mit.edu/catalog/item/default.asp?ttype=2&tid=11889>
- They also noticed a kind of progression of social media use that was reflected in the title of the MIT Press book that documented their work: Hanging Out, Messing Around, and Geeking Out: Kids Living & Learning with New Media a kind of taxonomy of it too. “ Youth engage in peer-based, self-directed learning online. In both friendship-driven and interest-driven online activity, youth create and navigate new forms of expression and rules for social behavior. By exploring new interests, tinkering, and ‘ messing around’ with new forms of media, they acquire various forms of technical and media literacy. Through trial and error, youth add new media skills to their repertoire, such as how to create a video or game, or customize their MySpace page. Teens then share their creations and receive feedback from others online. By its immediacy and breadth of information, the digital world lowers barriers to self-directed learning. Some youth ‘geek out’ and dive into a topic or talent. Contrary to popular images, geeking out is highly social and engaged, although usually not driven primarily by local friendships. Youth turn instead to specialized knowledge groups of both teens and adults from around the country or world, with the goal of improving their craft and gaining reputation among expert peers. While adults participate, they are not automatically the resident experts by virtue of their age. Geeking out in many respects erases the traditional markers of status and authority” (Digital Youth Project summary http://digitalyouth.ischool.berkeley.edu/files/report/digitalyouth-TwoPageSummary.pdf) [A 2010 post of mine about a German study on youth in social media: http://www.netfamilynews.org/the-net-to-youth-no-big-deal]
- And if the Internet safety field wants to learn how to motivate and help change behavior, it could take a cue from game design. At a conference at University of WI last June, Prof. Scott Nicholson at Syracuse U. described what he learned when he took a year off from teaching to study motivation at MIT: that what motivates people are agency, relevancy, and competency (we've seen the same elements in digital ethics and social norms research too now!). In Internet safety, I would add another element: participation , which allows for the practice that brings competency. I've also learned from game designers that the social behaviors in a game or community are partly determined by the way the community is designed – not just by the terms of use but also by the atmospheric conditions and game mechanics, as designers call them. This presents a tremendous opportunity for the industry to work even harder to create healthy conditions within their products and services. http://www.netfamilynews.org/what-net-safety-can-learn-from-digital-game-design Game designer Erin Hoffman's comment to my "guild effect" post, 10/09: http://www.netfamilynews.org/net-safety-how-social-networks-can-be-protective
- Canada's premier digital and media literacy organization continues to turn up evidence of how SMART digital natives are. It's latest milestone, the results of a 2-year qualitative study, found plenty of resilience in dealing with "creepy adults" – kids "almost universally limit online interactions with them; see chatrooms as dangerous; recognize the need to unplug at times; view the Internet as a "fully monitored space" now, but parental monitoring as "the price of admission"; and have good anti-cyberbullying strategies but are disdainful of school anti-bullying programs. There were similar findings by a new study that I'm sure you know of by scholars at the U. of W. Sydney, who wrote that “Young people make good use of the online security controls and privacy settings that are available and are particularly savvy about how to stay safe when using social networking sites,” and in a more conventionally administered study by psychologist Larry Rosen at Cal State U. See also Third, Spry and Locke: “Enhancing parents’ practice and knowledge of online safety: A research report on intergenerational ‘Living Lab’ experiment” http://www.academia.edu/2512474/Enhancing_parents_knowledge_and_practice_of_online_safety_A_research_report_on_an_intergenerational_Living_Lab_experiment http://www.netfamilynews.org/tech-parenting-smarts-from-teens-australian-study
- So where do these milestones leave us? A good place, if we really factor hard-won research findings into our work with young people, the most intrepid navigators of this unmapped whitewater of a networked world. My teacher friends show me what a joy it is to find our course through digital media with our children – bring out their strengths and build on them as well as offer guidance and learn along with them – at home, in the classroom, in digital environments…. http://os3.connectsafely.org Respectful safety tips available free for downloading and printing out, left-hand side of this page: http://www.connectsafely.org/safety-tips-and-advice.html
- … this way, if we work from the kid-out rather than the news headlines in, we can help make the learning more relevant and meaningful to our children. We're helping them develop the filtering and navigation software between their ears that will not only protect them all their lives but also help them become effective, successful navigators of life wherever it's lived. Because, even though it’s called the digital age, it’s much more about our humanity than our technology. See also: “What does ‘safe’ really look like in a digital age?” <http://www.netfamilynews.org/what-does-safe-really-look-like-in-a-digital-age>
- Questions?