Literacy for a digital age: Transliteracy or what?
Digital literacy educator Diana Graber is crowdsourcing a media literacy curriculum for 8th-graders at Journey School in southern California. It’s Year 3 of the school’s CyberCivics program that...
View ArticleA suspension of disbelief needed
Sidebar to my post below, “Literacy for a digital age” In talks he gives, media professor Henry Jenkins, often refers to the advice Peter Parker, aka Spiderman, gets from his Uncle Ben: “With great...
View ArticleKids & teens not only ok, but smart!: Study
This article was originally published June 12, 2012, then my service’s server crashed, losing months of data. So reposting 9/29/12. Now for the good news in the youth part of a report from Ottawa-based...
View ArticlePersonal ‘brand management’ for social literacy
This article was originally published April 12, 2012, then my service’s server crashed, losing months of data. So reposting 10/18/12. The cynical way to say it might be that we’re all our own best spin...
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Mining Minecraft, Part 2: Brilliance when students drive the learning
Building in efficiency: 5th grade student “Snowkit” (her Minecraft screenname) designed and built this “quarry,” which she explains is “a huge machine that digs for you.” Guest post by Marianne...
View ArticleFor families: ‘Digital detox’ vs connecting mindfully
It takes a lot more than “digital sabbaths” to become grounded, but it sounds like the creators of Camp Grounded in northern California get that. I think. As described by writer Matt Haber in the New...
View ArticleAddendum: What about CIPA?
US educators may wonder if schools can adopt the model I’m proposing above and still be compliant with the Children’s Internet Protection Act (CIPA). Here’s my answer: If you’re asking “What about...
View ArticleAggregated extortion, digital footprints’ dark side & second chances
This is the chilling side of the digital footprint (something that everybody has) – chilling because the takeaway seems to be that nobody can make a mistake anymore. Web sites with names like...
View ArticleA Connecticut school to its students: ‘We trust you’
Pure inspiration – both the message in the video and the wonderful student (and staff) faces and voices in all their diversity. To see what I mean, take a 2-minute break and go to this page, scroll...
View ArticleWhen kids are skilled navigators of our networked world
We all – young people and everybody who works with them – are learning what that looks like: skilled navigation of a networked world. We’re also working out what the skills are, how to teach them and...
View Article‘Save the Universe’: Clear space for learning
Last week, Part 1 about the “whitewater-kayaking kind of learning needed today”; here, in Part 2, a great example: An alternative headline might be: “A bucket of bricks for learning,” but I’ll get to...
View ArticleThe videogame discourse: Default to open-mindedness!
My heart sinks when I see uncritical thinking in commentaries from Internet safety advocates about the media young people love – thinking that defaults (and contributes to a society-level default) to...
View ArticleSocial media major factor in teens’ social & sex lives: Australia study
With its 5th national study of Australian teens’ sexual attitudes, behaviors and health since 1992, La Trobe University for the first time took a careful look at social media’s role in their social and...
View ArticleLeadership in bullying prevention and so much more
We need to prevent and solve bullying. No question. But we also need to encourage and empower our children with the knowledge that most kids don’t bully, that bullying is not normative – that, in fact,...
View ArticleThe next version of ‘Internet safety': A look under the hood
“Under the bonnet,” colleagues across the Atlantic and Down Under would probably say. I put it that way because this post is a bit more e-safety geeky than usual. Parents and caregivers who don’t geek...
View ArticleOf parenting & a class called ‘Wasting Time on the Internet’
One of the central stereotypes of (or maybe urban legends about) us, our tech and our time is people filling every free or empty moment doing something on a screen – texting, playing a game, posting a...
View ArticleTwo 2014 anniversaries that say reams about our kids’ futures
We don’t want to let 2014 slip away without marking two anniversaries that are very important to our children: those of an invention and a convention. This year was the 25th anniversary of Tim...
View Article‘State of the Union’& the student part of student privacy protection
There’s a lot of confusion in the air about student data privacy, and some widely quoted words about it from President Obama in his address Tuesday night didn’t help (but I suspect his speechwriters...
View ArticleMySpace’s nonexistence greatly exaggerated
MySpace is alive and well and apparently never lost its core group of users, music fans. More than 50 million people visited what many people think of as the original social network service this past...
View Article‘Disconnected': Crucial book for closing the ‘ethics gap’ online
I don’t know about the millions of people in developing countries going online for the first time with mobile phones but, here in the developed world, something strange happened when we moved onto the...
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