With its fresh, sweeping look at the media lives of US 8-to-18-year-olds, the Kaiser Family Foundation's just-released "Generation M2" is a tremendous service to parents and educators – but also a subtle disservice. The latter, because it looks at kids' and teens' experiences with today's media through the lens of yesterday's, the mass-media culture we adults grew up in. "The story of media in … [Read more...] about Major study on youth & media: Let’s take a closer look
Digital Youth Project
Net safety: How social networks can be protective
Hmm. It's arresting to think about what Stewart Wolf, MD, discovered and presented at medical conferences – as told by Malcolm Gladwell in Outliers – in the context of social media and online safety today. Back in the 1950s, he found a community in Pennsylvania statistically very free of the No. 1 medical concern of the time, heart disease, and looked into what was going on there. When Wolf … [Read more...] about Net safety: How social networks can be protective
Social-networking-style problem solving (& policymaking)
I think, or at least hope, online safety (the whole world, actually) is going in the direction of what New York Times columnist Tom Friedman prescribes for solving most global problems: toward using the social-networking model. "Huh?" you might ask. Right, Friedman didn't call it that. But I see a lot of similarity between his prescription for solution development to the collective way young … [Read more...] about Social-networking-style problem solving (& policymaking)
School & social media: Uber big picture
When I think about how the book, enabled by Gutenberg's press, was pretty controversial back in the day (15th c.) and probably didn't make it into "school" for a while (though it fueled the Renaissance and the Reformation), maybe I understand why there's resistance to using today's media - called social media - in school. But things are moving a little faster these days, and students are actively … [Read more...] about School & social media: Uber big picture
*Serious* informal learning: Key online youth study
Just picture it: Young people sharing their ideas and productions (videos, poems, commentaries, tunes, podcasts), getting nearly immediate feedback from friends near and far. With quick, always available feedback, they can continuously tweak their compositions and thinking. Doing this authentic, literally peer-reviewed, kind of learning is not only exciting and inspiring to a student, artist, … [Read more...] about *Serious* informal learning: Key online youth study