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Dear Subscribers:

You, like us, have probably had questions about how much time little children should spend on computers and the Internet. Not much research has been done yet on this pioneering question. PBS kids has gleaned a little, having worked with 1-4-year-olds in preparation for their just-relaunched Teletubbies Web pages. We enjoyed talking with them about it, and in this issue you'll hear what they learned.

Next week the newsletter will be on summer vacation. You'll see us in your In Box again on August 25. Until then, here's our lineup this second week of August:


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Families that listen together...

In his Family Tech column this week, SafeKids.com's Larry Magid tells fellow parents how to use the Web to learn about - and take interest in - the music their kids are listening to. He suggests, and links to, sites where parents can read lyrics, learn about artists, and sample songs.

Tell us of your experience with teens and online music - via feedback@netfamilynews.org. We love to hear from you and share your expertise - because parents are often each other's best experts on kids in cyberspace.

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The littlest Web surfers

There's something kind of magical about watching our children actually interact with TV friends on the Web. Those of us who grew up with "Captain Kangaroo" and "Romper Room" - in black 'n' white, no less - never dreamed of clicking on Tom Terrific and making him say hi to us or feed Manfred the Dog - on demand.

Now the littlest Web surfers can do just that, playing with their Teletubbies friends on their own terms. PBS Kids has just relaunched the Teletubbies part of its Web site, after "the most extensive testing and research the Public Broadcasting Service has ever done in connection with a children's online destination."

Hearing that, we thought it would be interesting to find out what they learned about 1-4-year-old Web users, a subject about which we suspect everybody - on both the publisher and the household ends - has a lot to learn! We spoke with Michelle Miller, manager of PBS Kids Online, and got some first insights into the toddler surfing scene (one that Michelle acknowledges is not without controversy).

Michelle told us the research was in the form of parent-child focus groups - three groups of 10 1-4-year-olds, each with a mom or dad. The research was conducted with someone trained in child psychology, who, among other things, could interpret young children's body language so that Michelle and her colleagues could understand the children's reactions to what was going on on their computer screens. All of the children had had some experience with computers, mostly with CD-ROMs. At most half had been on the Web (usually those with big brothers or sisters who had been), Michelle told us. All had seen Teletubbies on TV.

"We just watched what the children did - how they reacted to the prototypes we'd developed," Michelle said. "It's not research to determine the long-term effects of computer use on toddlers. It was just anecdotal, but when you watch 30 kids and see 27 react in the exact same way, you learn something."

They had a lot of fun, too, she told us, "especially seeing a three-year-old walk into the room, pull out a chair, climb up, sit down, and put his hands on the mouse, ready to go. He actually right-clicked on the mouse to change the wallpaper on the desktop!" She explained that the moderator had been asking his mom a couple of followup questions, and "while they were talking I guess he got sort of bored. He told the moderator, 'I don't like this [wallpaper] - can I change it?' His mom told him, 'I guess so,' though we could tell she didn't know what he meant." So he went ahead and redecorated his computer desktop. When the moderator asked, Michelle told us, the mom said, "I have no idea what he just did." (Sound at all familiar, people?!)

That was just one child out of 30. "It did show us that it all depended on what a child's experience has been," Michelle said. "To me, it seemed the kids were not limited by their inherent physical capabilities. Those who'd been on a computer before and had big sisters or brothers could very easily navigate around - find a spot to point to, click on it, and get where they wanted to go. Others the same age couldn't do those things. What's interesting is, there's not as much difference between a 3-year-old and and a 5- or 6-year old as we thought, just factoring in motor skills. If a child couldn't do something it wasn't because physically there was no way - it was just that they hadn't experienced it before."

Some questions they started out with - like, How easy or difficult is it for a child to use a mouse to click on something on a Web page? - were tossed out immediately. It was immediately clear that clicking on something was not a problem, Michelle said, though "click and drag" with a mouse was a little harder for some kids.

For the one-year-olds, "we created a key-stroke activity on every page," Michelle told us. "If they just hit any key on the keyboard, something would happen. They thought that was the neatest thing to see something happen when they hit those funny-looking buttons. They certainly understood cause and effect and that if they hit a key something would happen. The older the child, the more she can be expected to click and drag. There were several 3-year-olds who knew how to do that."

We asked Michelle what they took away from this experience overall….

"The important overriding thing we noticed is that children seem fully confident that they can interact with a computer. We didn't notice any hesitation or fear, Michelle told us; rather they were absorbed by the experience. "They were concentrating, and they were also having a good time." By contrast, she said, in a bit of understatement, "adults don't always look so confident or relaxed." She also noted that this pre-reading age group "becomes less confident when faced with words on the screen. So we designed it so that there are no words on the kids portion of the screen. They're only in the gray area only to provide the guidance adults need to help kids with the site [the site's designed to be a parent/child experience]. When we asked them if they saw the words in the gray area, the kids didn't even notice them.

"We're not trying to get them to read," Michelle added. The Teletubbies area is meant to help its little visitors "learn how to listen, build their curiosity, and expand their imaginations."

Were all your parents receptive to having a toddler on the Net? we asked Michelle.

"Definitely," she told us. "That was interesting, too. We asked if they wanted to direct or if they felt the kids could do it on their own. Most said, 'If he needs my help, I'll help' or 'If she wants to be independent, I think that's great.' They really didn't express strong feelings that the kids had to be on their laps. They'd tell us, 'I get them started on a site I consider safe, then I'd go and wash the dishes.' " When we asked about online safety (kids running into inappropriate material in other sites), Michelle's answer made sense to us: "There's not much danger of their surfing out of the site - parents were more concerned about the kids crashing their computers. Kids can really only look at one screen - they can't deal with much [Web site] hierarchy." What we divined is that online safety becomes an issue when kids have longer attention spans, can read, grasp the abstract, want to explore beyond what's in front of them, and don't care to be dependent on mom, dad, or teacher's guidance.

We asked Michelle if they'd heard criticism about kids on computers at such a young age, and she said yes, definitely. Their response, we think, says something about society as a whole:

"We don't know what the long-term impact is for children this young using computers. I think a crucial step in finding out is to have some type of example that at least tries to be age-appropriate - something a toddler could use that's safe for him. Then, with some examples like this, we can embark on really studying the emotional, physical, and cognitive impact on these children of playing on the Internet. At least it's a step toward giving them something they can actually use. As parents have told us, there's just nothing out there."

As for the 30 small surfers they worked with directly, "These kids were more confident, happy, and relaxed after reacting with the site - they came out of their shells, they were talking with their parents, saying, 'Look, Mom, did you see that?' In the small test we did, we definitely didn't get an impression that this was causing kids to become less social or confident," which is a worry some adults have about the impact of computer use on kids.

PBS has come full-circle, in fact. Michelle told us Teletubbies on TV got the same sort of question when it was first broadcast - was it appropriate for 1-3-year-olds to be watching TV? "The fact was, they were watching," Michelle said, "so it might be good to give them something age-appropriate to watch."

We asked her what's next for PBS Kids on the Web. A lot, we found out. Michelle's already hard at work on new test-cases for children who never knew life without an Internet. She's working on the joint-TV+Web launches of "Bookworm Bunch," "Kaillou," and "Clifford the Big Red Dog" - all for pre-schoolers, all next month!

We'd love to hear your comments! If any of you have been on the Web with a toddler or pre-schooler, do tell us about the experience.

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Web News Briefs

  1. Filtering not a science yet

    Apparently, a lot of parents know that, since a recent Annenberg Public Policy survey of online families shows that only 31% of parents use any kind of filtering (software or service) for home Internet use. MSNBC cites the study in a story this week, "Filtering porn? Maybe, maybe not". The story goes into the positives and negatives - chief of which, probably, is the fact that kids often know how to get around the filter, either by disabling the software or logging onto a friend's unfiltered Internet service. In a sidebar, "Kids will find it", MSNBC has kids' own comments on Internet porn and how they and their parents are dealing with its accessibility. Our thanks to subscriber Roger in Illinois for pointing us to this story.

    And for a view of what kids - with fast-connection access - might soon be exposed to on the Internet, see MSNBC's story "Sultans of Smut".

  2. Email misconceptions

    We're all becoming more aware that email is not a very private form of communication. So avid email-ers are getting smarter about how they use it, but it doesn't hurt to get some details. Wired News has provided "The Seven Most Common Misconceptions About E-mail".

  3. Move over, Harry Potter

    The fourth Harry Potter book isn't the only fantasy-entertainment hit this summer. A computer game about wizards and sorcerers called Diablo II has surpassed $50 million in sales so far this season, the New York Times reports. Fortunately for some of us parents, it's not another "Doom." Though there's violence, the game is in the third person (so the player is more observer than perpetrator), the violence isn't very graphic, and players seems to like the character-development component. Diablo II has received the equivalent of an "R" rating from the Entertainment Software Rating Board. But the game is seen by some people as a solution to the other criticism computer games often get - that they have an isolating influence on children "It is Diablo II, not 'Harry Potter'," the Times reports, "that gives young people worldwide the opportunity to interact with each other in real time over the Internet, solving problems and battling monsters together."

  4. Privacy facts

    The American Bar Association has prepared a clearly written Q&A about privacy on the Internet. You can find "Facts About Privacy and Cyberspace" at GigaLaw.com. Among the questions answered in the section on children's privacy are: How do Web sites gather information about children? Are there any laws regulating this? What special risks do Internet chat rooms pose for children? How can parents protect their children online?

    Meanwhile, there's an example of what an e-tailer can do with users' personal information in a Wired News story this week about Toysrus.com. "As customers browsed and shopped at the toy retailer, third-party data-analysis firm Coremetrics was sucking name, address, and shopping cart information," Wired reports, and this practice was not mentioned in Toysrus.com's privacy disclosures. (In other Toysrus.com news this week, CNET reports that the toy e-tailer is combining forces with Amazon.com just in time for the coming holiday shopping season.)

  5. Earth's digital divide

    Nearly a third of "global consumers" now own a computer, and nearly one in five went online in the past month, according to a new study by Roper Starch Worldwide (cited by Cyberatlas. However, the study also found that "the digital divide between developed countries and developing countries is only modestly closing." The data, from 30,000 face-to-face interviews with 1,000 consumers (ages 13 to 65) in 30 countries, "is projectable to 1.39 billion people," Roper says. The biggest regional jump in PC ownership, not surprisingly, happened in developed Asia, where 55% of consumers have computers. North America came in second place, at 51%.

    To zoom in on the global digital divide (and one man's effort to chip away at it), check out this New York Times story about connecting Cambodian villages to the Internet.

  6. Downloads for college students

    As college students haul their laptops back to school, ZDNet has pulled together a college of free software just for them. The collection includes a "Student Survival Kit" and a software "day-planner" for busy college life.

    A lot of students may be downloading that software. According to research cited in Web Trend Watch, 53% of freshmen plan to take a computer with them to college, 33% anticipate using Web site message boards for class discussion, 21% also plan to interact with other students and professors via a Web site, and the Internet is now the most widely used research tool for college students (85%). Another study, by market researchers Greenfield Online (cited by Cyberatlas, found that 31% of college students consider themselves "Internet dependent."

  7. E-gear in high school

    Then there are the two types of e-gear that go back to school with North American high school students this year: learning aids like graphing calculators and pocket translators and extracurricular electronics like CD players, cell phones, and pagers. Nothing new to many of us parents and teachers, but fun reading: The New York Times reports on what the well-equipped student carries around in his/her backpack these days.

  8. More Net numbers

    The Columbia Journalism Review has pulled together some "hard numbers" on Internet use and size.

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That does it for this week. Have a great weekend!

Sincerely,

Net Family News

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