Pop culture

It's official: The Internet hates the Olympics

I've already written about how the International Olympic Committee tries to cleanse all unauthorized references to its logos, the word "Olympics," and attendant innocent words like "Games" and "Winter" and "2010." And I wrote about the endless Olympic Internet spoilers, thanks to NBC's incredibly asinine scheduling. But the longer they're on, the more chances the IOC gets to act like jack-booted thugs and the more chances NBC gets to blow coverage both online and on TV, until I think we've all come to the same, inescapable conclusion: the … Read more

Kidzui creates a new online environment for kids

Kidzui is a new web browser designed for kids ages 3 to 12 years old. Rather than operating from a filtering mindset, Kidzui is trying to build the internet for kids from the ground up. Content is reviewed by an editorial staff of teachers and parents, running 24/7 and adding new content each day.

The site launched yesterday and my 8-year-old beta tester had a great time exploring the Kidzui environment. The "stickiest" features of the site involved creating a "Zui" avatar, which collects points as kids browse and rate videos, photos and other content. … Read more

'Ask GamerDad' answers parents' video game questions

Video games have been around long enough now that we can see a new trend developing--gamer parents. These parents have been playing games themselves for years, and look forward to playing games with their kids as a way to spend time together as a family.

The new "Ask GamerDad" column on the video game guide side What They Play brings this perspective to video game reviews and advice. Whether or not you are a gamer parent yourself, this point of view can be another useful resource when considering games for your kids.

In this week's column, "… Read more

Gossip site JuicyCampus.com faces student backlash

The law doesn't seem to have caught up with the evolving concept of online defamation yet, so internet service providers and websites are generally not responsible for the content that their users post. There are many valid reasons for that legal approach, but the website JuicyCampus.com stretches the credibility of this concept. The website's sole reason for existence is to serve as a portal for anonymous gossip, spreading rumor, sexual defamation, homophobia, anti-Semitism, and racism at colleges across the country.

In the era of cyberbullying tragedies, it's depressing to think that a site like this passes … Read more

Profs compete for students' attention

"...Nobody is in the room. The professor is just another open browser window, 1 of 10." --UNC graduate student on the distracted classroom experience

Immersion in online technology and media has fundamentally changed the way our minds work, the way we gather information and split our attention. It may be harder than ever for educators to avoid coming across like the monotonous economics teacher in Ferris Bueller's Day Off. I taught high school 10 years ago, and in many ways I am thankful that I was teaching in the era before networked laptops.

I was a talented teacher, but let's face it, when you are trying to convince 16-year-olds that they really are interested in learning chemistry at 8:30 in the morning, it helps to have a captive audience.

Now teachers face new pressures: competing for their students' attention inside the classroom, and presenting material in a way that resembles the variety of mass media that teens consume on average more than 40 hours a week.… Read more

Developing story: MySpace security breaches

What's more worrisome than a public MySpace page? A page that the user only thinks is private. I was just alerted to several stories by Kevin Poulsen of Wired News that publicize recent security breaches on MySpace.

Poulsen reported on January 17 about a MySpace Bug that leaks "private" teen photos to voyeurs. He wrote, "A backdoor in MySpace's architecture allows anyone who's interested to see the photographs of some users with private profiles--including those under 16--despite assurances from MySpace that those pictures can only be seen by people on a user's friends list. Info about the backdoor has been circulating on message boards for months."

These message boards include self-described groups of "pedos" who hacked into underage-girls' private MySpace profiles. According to Poulsen, one poster reported successfully pilfering photos from a randomly chosen 14-year-old girl, "It worked and I was shown her pictures. Now lets see some naked sluts."

On January 18, Poulsen updated the story to say that the next day, MySpace quietly fixed that back-door bug, without publicly acknowledging the problem, even though users' profiles had been vulnerable for months. … Read more

'Frontline' on 'Growing Up Online'

When PBS's Frontline reported on "Growing Up Online" this week, it called the gulf between kids who grew up with technology and their parents "the greatest generation gap since rock 'n' roll." That's a bitter pill to swallow for adults in their '30s and '40s who have been involved in computers for 20-plus years, but I have to say I agree with their assessment. Maybe we kicked it old school with Pong and the Atari 2600. Or we had a Commodore 64 or a Macintosh with a whopping 512K of memory. We may have even written code since we were teens ourselves, but that's nothing compared to growing up with ubiquitous access to cell phones, media, and social networking.

Producer Caitlin McNally describes this shift in thinking that exists even between her, as a twentysomething, and the teens she interviewed:

Despite the research we did, I don't think I was prepared when we started talking to kids for the extent to which the Internet and other electronic communication has permeated all aspects of being a teenager. Almost every kid expressed the utter importance of being connected with friends all the time and how unthinkable a life without that connection would be. I think a lot of kids were bemused by our list of questions about 'life online,' because they don't sit around thinking about the Internet in their lives. It's just there, always, another tool for them to use or place for them to go.

… Read more

Karaoke for literacy

Wonderful things can happen when you are open to unexpected possibilities. That's one lesson I take from the story that starts with a software program called Singing Coach. Carlo Franzblau had wanted to learn to sing since he was an off-key teenager with musical theater aspirations. In 2000 he developed Singing Coach, software with an American-Idol-in-training vibe. Users sing karaoke-style into a microphone and the software tells them whether their pitch is too high, too low, or in tune.

While performing quality-control tests on Singing Coach, Franzblau received some unexpected feedback: one of the first testers was a middle school student named Ashleigh who happened to be a struggling reader, and her mother reported that the singing software was improving her daughter's reading.

Franzblau pursued this unexpected finding with gusto. He teamed up with literacy professor Dr. Susan Homan at the University of South Florida to conduct a research study to see if Ashleigh's finding represented a genuine effect. Dr. Homan found that struggling readers benefited greatly from the program, raising their test scores by more than a whole grade level after nine weeks of training with the singing program, which has been redeveloped specifically as a reading intervention called "Tune In to Reading." The kids who used Tune In To Reading sustained their gain, continuing to make progress six months later even when they were not using the program.… Read more

WhatTheyPlay.com gives parents the scoop on video games

There's a contradiction in our approach to kids and electronic media: we want parents to supervise their kids and guide their appropriate use of games and media, and at the same time we talk about kids being "digital natives" who understand the gaming world much better than many parents do.

Let's face it, kids can spend hours talking to each other about the latest gadget or video game, and it is a challenge for parents to catch up. Most video game reviews discuss a game from the player's point of view without giving parents the details they need to judge whether a particular game is appropriate for their child. (I frequently encounter the same problem with movie reviews for kids' films. I am usually not that concerned about how "good" a kids' movie is, but I want to know the details behind a movie's PG-13 rating. Yet that information is rarely provided.)

A new Web site called WhatTheyPlay.com fills in this information gap. The site launched in November and already features a well-populated catalog of game reviews. Now parents can get the details beyond ESRB ratings, with objective reviews and user comments, to decide for themselves whether they want to bring a game home for their family.… Read more