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January 4, 2002

Dear Subscribers:

Warmest wishes for a Happy New Year to all of you! Here's our lineup for these first few days of '02:


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Family Tech: Focus on 2002

  1. Trends to watch

    They're not brand-new but they're increasingly hot topics, where kids-and-technology is concerned:

    • High-speed Internet access at home
    • Kids using cell/mobile phones
    • Efforts to protect online kids with laws

    These are three trends SafeKids.com's Larry Magid points to in his latest Family Tech column for the San Jose Mercury News as "likely to shape the way families interact with technology" in 2002.

    "Despite the well-publicized failures within the industry, broadband to the home experienced major growth in 2001," Larry writes, citing Nielsen/Net Ratings figures showing a 90% increase this past November over the same month in 2000. The New York Times last week cited Yankee Group figures showing that 10.7 million US households now have broadband (DSL or cable modem) Net access, representing about 16% of all online households - up from 5.6 million homes a year ago. (The Hartford Courant this week suggested there's another side to this story - people who prefer dialup access.)

    The implications for online families? "Parents need to be on guard whenever their kids are using the PC," Larry writes, "because, by default with broadband, all machines on the network are always online. Unlike dialup, you won't hear the modem noises or see lights on your extension phone indicating the line is in use."

    Both parents and educators will find that the growth of high-speed access at home also says something about children's expectations for and behavior patterns on the Internet. It means greater expectations for fast, responsive Internet research at home and school and decreasing tolerance for slow downloads, whether they be Web pages or music or video files. It also may say something about patience in general - in life as well as in media consumption - but that's another story. At school, anyway, the Internet is most useful when it's a convenient tool used as proficiently as a text or reference book, with as much guidance from teachers and librarians - a means to an end (learning), not itself an end or a slow, tedious process (we'd like to hear your thinking on this - via feedback@netfamilynews.org).

    Looking at the cell phones trend, Larry cites Yankee Group figures showing that 36% of US teens had cell phones in 2000, a number expected to jump to 68% by 2005 (he adds that about 80% of Scandinavian kids already have mobile phones). He cites some implications in his column, but - thinking ahead and as a parent - he also notes: "By the end of 2002, some families might be getting their hands on 3G high-bandwidth mobile phones that add additional services, including high-speed Web surfing and streaming audio and video - just when you thought you had some semblance of control over what your kids do online."

    As for Trend No. 3, Larry writes that "there will be plenty of litigation this year regarding kids and the Internet." Top of the list is the US Supreme Court's decision (expected by the end of its current term in June or early July) on the fate of the Child Online Protection Act of 1998, which sits right at the intersection of protecting children and promoting free speech (see our coverage 11/30). Besides COPA, "numerous state and federal acts will be debated," Larry writes, "on issues such as unsolicited 'spam' email, including the seemingly unending stream of sexually explicit messages that find their way into children's mailboxes." And that's just in the United States - we'll also be following legislation and litigation in other countries where online kids are concerned.

  2. Smart New Year's resolutions

    These resolutions at GetNetWise.org are really a template for wise family Internet practices. There are resolutions for parents as well as for kids on this one-page document, and the latter include some of the most important online-safety rules for children (here's a complete list at SafeKids.com).

    GetNetWise.org also has a "Families Online Together" page, linking to recommended Web sites for kids aged 2-4, 4-7, 7-10, 10-12, 12-14, and 14-17. Following each set of links is online-safety advice relevant to each age group.

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A subscriber writes: High-speed Net service struggles

Subscriber, teacher, and tech consultant Anne in California emailed us this week about holiday-time tech issues in her neck of the woods. We thought the following paragraph might be interesting to anyone dealing with the customer shuffleboard game that broadband Internet companies have been undertaking in recent weeks (here's a ZDNet story painting the bigger picture):

"I have a couple of clients who lost their cable modem accounts when Excite went belly-up. AT&T took over the accounts but the service is painfully slow. People are starting to revert back to dial-up modems. It turns out that AT&T put together a broadband network in three weeks time. And ready-or-not, they rolled it out. It takes just under two hours to get through to their second level of tech support. And those people are no help at all. They offer non-corrective 'solutions' that are really red herrings meant to distract you from the fact that THEY (not the consumer!) are the source of the problem. They have tech people working on the problem 24 hours a day. But for the 850,000 consumers who lost service and don't have local DSL options, there's nothing to do but wait it out. It does not put people in a good mood."

Editor's note: We always welcome your personal stories with technology (and especially kids using it!) - at home or school. Email them to us any time.

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Web News Briefs

  1. Young online pirates

    This trend is significant, growing, and increasingly needing to be addressed - by parents and teachers, shoulder-to-shoulder with our online kids. Online piracy - illegal trading of video games, computer software, music, and movies - is going on all the time, and its "perpetrators" are regular, well-meaning Internet-using kids in homes and schools everywhere. They just haven't gotten many chances to discuss ethics in ways that are relevant to their online activities.

    "America's rush to the online world has created an enormous population of ever-younger computer pirates," reports the New York Times. The Times piece describes both "small time" and large-scale piracy, with kids using technologies like instant-messaging and Internet relay chat (IRC, chat tech that's non-Web-based) to find out where to trade "wares" - usually for fun rather than profit, which to many kids means piracy is "ok." One computer science professor quoted in the piece suggested that recent piracy-crackdown raids on college campuses would teach few lessons to young people who have long used peer-to-peer software like Napster to trade MP3 music files. To them, games, movies, and software are just logical next steps. Don't miss the Times article's example of small-time piracy in the "warez" IRC channel, where "the searching and trading for wares goes on day and night."

    [For more on this, see our 4/01 piece, "Kids & Net ethics", and a new book on the subject, "Ethics, Etiquette and Safety for the 21st Century Student," by Dr. Nancy Willard of the Responsible Netizen Project at the University of Oregon. Nancy is quoted in the above Times piece and was the subject of a two-part series we ran last fall: 9/28 and 10/5.]

  2. Child porn spam on increase

    Unsolicited email advertising child pornography is on the rise, reports SiliconValley.com, citing information from the US National Center for Missing & Exploited Children and US Customs. The emails, many of them from Russia and former East Bloc countries, "haven't been well publicized and have been vastly underreported by recipients, say law enforcement officials." SiliconValley.com adds that sending this type of spam is a felony punishable by up to 10 years in prison. Any emails advertising child pornography (sexually explicit images of children) can be reported to the National Center through its phone (1-800-843-5678) or Web CyberTipline.

    On the subject of spam in general, here's a useful ZDNet article on why "unsubscribe" so rarely works, when email marketers even bother to provide such a mechanism.

  3. Tech & the new ed law

    Supporters of education technology were "generally satisfied" with the just-passed US federal education bill, Wired News reports. But they are concerned about some provisions in the bill - the "No Child Left Behind Act," as the Bush administration calls it - that may make it easier to take money away from technology. In a more sweeping article, the New York Times last week looked back on cyberlaw in general for 2001, asking prominent law professors to pick out the most important developments.

    And while we're on the subject, here's the New York Times's David Pogue on the 2001 tech stuff that went to "that great Circuit City in the sky."

  4. 'Religion surfers'

    Twenty-eight million Americans have used the Net "to get religious and spiritual information and connect with others on their faith journeys," says the Pew Internet & American Life Project in a report it released just before Christmas. "Cyberfaith: How Americans Pursue Religion Online" also reported these key findings:

    • More people have gotten religious or spiritual information online than have gambled online, used Web auction sites, traded stocks online, placed phone calls on the Internet, done online banking, or used Internet-based dating services.
    • More than 3 million people a day get religious or spiritual material, up from 2 million in the previous year.
    • After the September 11 terror attacks 41% of Net users, many of whom had never considered themselves online spiritual seekers, said they sent or received email prayer requests; 23% of users turned to online sources to get information about Islam ("presumably most of them considered this to be information-gathering activity rather than spiritual activity"); and 7% of users contributed to relief charities online.
    • 67% of "Religion Surfers" have accessed information on their own faith and 50% have sought information on other faiths.


  5. Online safety ads in UK movie theaters

    Film theaters in the United Kingdom have begun screening "hard-hitting ads" that warn children about Internet pedophiles, CNET reports. The $2.18 million (1.5 million pound) government-funded "thinkuknow" campaign sends kids the basic message that people online may not be who they say they are. CNET adds that "the Internet Taskforce on Child Protection, chaired by [Home Office Minister Beverley] Hughes, recently commissioned an investigation into children's attitudes toward Internet safety. It made the unnerving discovery that most young people see the Internet as 'safe'; they also think themselves to be in control because they are Net savvy and can turn the computer off if confronted with an unpleasant situation."

  6. Ed + tech = toys

    Is it a winning formula for kids too - or mostly for marketers? That's the question the New York Times considers in "Toy Story: Looking for Lessons", which takes a hard look at the incredible success of LeapPad, "an electronic talking book [by young toy company LeapFrog] that some analysts say is even outselling Harry Potter merchandise." The Times piece includes critics' concern that "the electronic learning aids are part of a larger trend in which parents are pushing small children into structured lessons at the expense of imaginative play time." A Times commentary of last week could be a sidebar to this piece: It suggests that if kids can learn imaginary languages with toys like Furby (the piece explains how they do), why couldn't they learn real ones?

    As for edutainment on computers, here's a useful piece the Times ran recently that reviews 10 new and old software programs that "reach a balance between education and entertainment." At the top, writer and teacher Alice Keim offers her criteria for software that makes the grade. A more comprehensive resource along these lines is the bimonthly magazine Children's Software Revue.

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

Sincerely,

Anne Collier, Editor

Net Family News


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