Facebook’s new digital-citizenship research grants

Facebook has committed $200,000 to fund “world-class research” at universities and nonprofit organizations that “highlights trends associated with Digital Citizenship, broadly, with an initial focus on bullying prevention,” according to Facebook’s blog post. Researchers, you have about a month – till midnight, California time, on Monday, Sept. 12 – to apply for $25,000-50,000 grants. Topics of interest are “online and offline bullying trends, bullying prevention strategies, the role of parents and educators in developing solutions, and messages and outreach strategies to kids to address bullying,” Facebook says. Bullying prevention is a worthy subject, but I hope this doesn’t send the message that it’s the all of digital citizenship, which is empowering as well as protective. For more on how to apply see the blog post. For more on the program’s subject, see “The goal for digital citizenship: Turn it into a verb!,” “Why digital citizenship’s a hot topic (gobally),” and my latest: “Next step: Crowd-source digital citizenship.”