foe romeo

For what the turtles do, you don't need live ones

From Sherry Turkle's 'dangerous idea' for Edge's question centre 2006:

At the entrance to the exhibit is a turtle from the Galapagos Islands, a seminal object in the development of evolutionary theory. The turtle rests in its cage, utterly still. "They could have used a robot," comments my daughter. It was a shame to bring the turtle all this way and put it in a cage for a performance that draws so little on the turtle's "aliveness." I am startled by her comments, both solicitous of the imprisoned turtle because it is alive and unconcerned by its authenticity. The museum has been advertising these turtles as wonders, curiosities, marvels — among the plastic models of life at the museum, here is the life that Darwin saw. I begin to talk with others at the exhibit, parents and children. It is Thanksgiving weekend. The line is long, the crowd frozen in place. My question, "Do you care that the turtle is alive?" is welcome diversion. A ten year old girl would prefer a robot turtle because aliveness comes with aesthetic inconvenience: "Its water looks dirty. Gross." More usually, the votes for the robots echo my daughter's sentiment that in this setting, aliveness doesn't seem worth the trouble. A twelve-year-old girl opines: "For what the turtles do, you didn't have to have the live ones." Her father looks at her, uncomprehending: "But the point is that they are real, that's the whole point."

Turkle goes on to surmise that the value of the original/authentic/alive thing is in decline.

Her subsequent thoughts about virtual creatures and robots are particularly interesting for owners of Nintendogs.

I call these creatures... "relational artifacts." Their ability to inspire relationship is not based on their intelligence or consciousness, but on their ability to push certain "Darwinian" buttons in people (making eye contact, for example) that make people respond as though they were in relationship. For me, relational artifacts are the new uncanny in our computer culture — as Freud once put it, the long familiar taking a form that is strangely unfamiliar. As such, they confront us with new questions.

(See also a mostly unrelated essay by Christoper Allen about our 'junk relationships' with TV characters, Belongingness and Para-Social Relationships.)

Girlguiding as a serious game

While researching around playful knowledge networks for teens, I discovered that Girlguiding describes itself as a serious game these days:

What is Guiding?

Guiding is a game - with a purpose. It provides opportunities for girls and young women to be challenged by new adventures and experiences and achieve a sense of pride in accomplishment and teaches them to understand and learn about the world, its people and cultures.

Makes sense. There are lots of basic game design patterns evident in Girlguiding: from learning by doing, to levelling up, trading, socialising, and collecting...

Pictures pilfered from here.

Girlguiding UK is also piloting a piece of safer social software: a moderated discussion forum carefully limited to Girl Guides and Girlguiding staff.

It can't be long before they get into alternative reality gaming - it's a perfect fit. (Ditto for the Scouts and Duke of Edinburgh Award.)

IM and the future of language

Handy notes from Pasta & Vinegar on IM and the future of language:

Adolescents have long been a source of linguistic and behavioral novelty. Teens often use spoken language to express small-group identity. It is hardly surprising to find many of them experimenting with a new linguistic medium (such as IM) to complement the identity construction they achieve through speech, clothing, or hair style. (…) Our research suggests that IM conversations serve largely pragmatic information-sharing and social-communication functions rather than providing contexts for establishing or maintaining group identity. Moreover, college students often eschew brevity. Our data contains few abbreviations or acronyms (…) IM conversations are not always instant. (…) The most important effect of IM on language turns out to be not stylized vocabulary or grammar but the control seasoned users feel they have over their communication networks.

Full paper by Naomi Baron, Viewpoint: Instant messaging and the future of language, Communications of the ACM, Volume 48 ,  Issue 7  (July 2005).

Transparent classroom

NYU journalism instructor, Jefferson Flanders, on the internet-enabled classroom:

The late Nobel Prize-winning economist Herbert Simon had it right: the verb “to know” used to mean having information stored in one’s memory – and it now means having access to that information and knowing how to use it. Maintaining the instructor’s authoritative “sage on the stage” role will grow more difficult. Instead, teachers at all levels will increasingly be called on to help students navigate this Alexandrine-like Web library and a new informational literacy will be needed, with an emphasis on judgment, synthesis, clear thinking, and what author Robert McHenry calls a “genial skepticism” about the veracity and quality of the information a mouse-click away.

Inside Higher Ed: Toward a Transparent Classroom (via Creative Generalist).

Donald A. Norman: In Defense of Cheating

I can't quote from this enough:

...In real life, asking others for help is not only permitted, it is encouraged. Why not rethink the entire purpose of our examination system? We should be encouraging students to learn how to use all possible resources to come up with effective answers to important problems. Students should be encouraged to ask others for help, and they should also be taught to give full credit to those others...

Consider this: in many ways, the behavior we call cheating in schools is exactly the behavior we desire in the real world. Think about it. What behavior do we call cheating in the school system? Asking others for help, copying answers, copying papers.

Most of these activities are better called networking or cooperative work...

In a system where copying is punished, the student feels compelled to lie. Suppose that copying were encouraged ­ honest copying, where the source must be revealed. And suppose that both the copier and the originator of the material were rewarded, the originator for their contribution and the copier for knowing where to seek the information. This would reinforce the correct behaviors, minimize deceit, and encourage cooperativeness...

From ACM Ubiquity (via Pasta and vinegar)

My teenage identity activists

About a year ago now, MSN UK implemented a change that prevented people from finding profiles of under-18s, unless they knew their direct screen name. I wrote about it at the time and since then my blog has been used intermittently as an alternative member directory.  Here's a sample:

i have any 1 got msn if u have plz give me ur addy and we will have fun chatting i am 14 and i am a girl from wales
Posted by: sophie at February 9, 2005 07:26 PM

joke i am 12
Posted by: sophie at February 9, 2005 07:28 PM

dani give me ur msn addy and we can chat and eny body else if they want is every 1 here send me ur addys plz plz plz plz plz
Posted by: sophie at February 9, 2005 07:30 PM

hia am so brd at da mo n ardli any1 is on msn im 14 n am a gal xxxx add me if u wnt
Posted by: alex at March 24, 2005 06:15 PM

hi do u want to talk
Posted by: suzanne at April 8, 2005 02:19 PM

I'd been deleting the personal information as it's posted but that felt a bit too mean, so now I've decided just switch comments off on that post.

Uncanny toys

When I first came to understand RFID, at the Digital ID World conference in 2003, I became excited about how it could be used to create things that tell you stories. I was mostly thinking about books and other items that people collect, and some way of communicating the lifecycle, or social life, of those collectables. What I didn't think about at all, and certainly wouldn't have expected to see so soon, was RFID's use in mass-market toys. WorldChanging reports on two new toys that bring the uncanny world of animate toys closer:

Naoru-kun, a new doll by Bandai... speaks 150 phrases and responds when it's shaken hands, hugged, petted, etc. But when Naoru-kun gets sick, kids have to use one of the items including "syringe," "candy" and "medicine." The doll reads RFID tags embedded in these items and responds accordingly.

Little Tikes has a series of toy kitchens full of interactive technology. The MagiCook Kitchen, for example, comes with pretend food embedded with electronic tags that can be read by sensors on the stovetop which then respond with the appropriate comment.

Freud taught us that "children do not distinguish at all sharply between living and inanimate objects" and that "children have no fear of their dolls coming to life, they may even desire it", so seemingly animate toys make a lot of sense. Do you think they're more likely to be broken by children following that "first metaphysical stirring" described by Charles Baudelaire in The Philosophy of Toys:

The child twists and turns his toy, he scratches it, shakes it, bangs it against the wall, throws it on the ground. From time to time, he forces it to resume its mechanical motions, sometimes backwards. Its marvellous life comes to a stop. The child... finally prises it open... But where is its soul?

See also:

near near future: When objects refuse to interact with their users

textually.org on StuffBak: uniquely numbered labels for portable items that could get lost

Bruce Sterling on 'spime', in Wired magazine

Adaptive Path: User Expectations in a World of Smart Devices

Posted at 03:25 PM in Children and teens, Collecting, Identities for things, Mimicry, Toys | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack

New toy aesthetics

In its lead up to the New York Toy Fair, which starts today, the New York Times has a feature about age compression in the toy industry: Gadget or Plaything? Let a Child Decide. It's not news that toys are incorporating more advanced electronics than before, or that children are aspiring to own gadgets - like mobile phones and the iPod - rather than toys; what is really interesting is how this is influencing toy aesthetics:

So compelling is the desire for high-technology products that some toymakers are not only creating more technologically advanced products, but also giving them a less toylike look. Razor USA's electric-powered bikes and scooters - the Dirt Rocket for boys and the Pocket Mod for girls... look like scaled-down versions of adult-size models...

Even colors of toys, many point out, are being recast to reflect a greater emphasis on technology. There are likely to be more gray, white and silver finishes in this year's Toy Fair, a departure from the traditional bright primary colors.

"Kids are very trendy," Ms. Rice [the Toy Industry Association specialist] said, so a toy "has to have style, it has to have a techno-feel, look sleek and have the right colors."

(See also the edgier versions of the classic Looney Tunes characters for the new series, Loonatics, set in 2772.)

So, as increasingly infantilised adults seek more teeny, blob-like, playful devices, their children are trying to get their hands on pared down, stylish electronics. Result: toy-gadget hybrids.

In a similar report on age compression in the toy industry, written in 2002, Dorothy G. Singer, a senior research scientist at Yale University's department of psychiatry, argued against the move from playthings to electronics:

Many tech toys and CD-ROM games squelch kids' capacity for imaginative play, she said, in part by limiting the way they think, producing what she calls 'convergent thinking.'

'You have to answer the way the computer wants you to,' Singer said. But 'when a child plays with dolls, blocks or Legos, they can be anything, anyone, go anywhere -- their imagination soars.'

In related news, Hasbro has developed a new gaming console for three to seven year olds, which is similar to EyeToy but with educational games based on popular animated children's TV shows like SpongeBob SquarePants.

"It's definitely an attractive target area for growth given that kids are becoming tech savvy much earlier," said [entertainment industry analyst] Anita Frazier... "Educational toys account for 50 percent of all toy sales to kids aged five years or under. This is a category where parents make the primary purchase decision, not the kids. It's definitely a hot area for toymakers."

[... According to] Jim Silver, an industry analyst and publisher of the Toy Book and Toy Wishes magazines, "The difference between ION and other electronic learning systems like LeapFrog's Leappad is that this is a game that makes kids move, play and learn all at the same time."

Posted at 01:55 PM in Children and teens, Toys | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack

18 February 2005

How to tell if your teenager is a h4x0r

Continuing in the paranoid 'How to tell if your teenager is...' tradition, Microsoft has produced A parent's primer to computer slang (via The Register):

The first series is of particular concern, as their use could be an indicator that your teenager is involved in the theft of intellectual property, particularly licensed software.

Leet words possibly indicating illegal activity:

"warez" or "w4r3z": Illegally copied software available for download.

"h4x": Read as "hacks," or what a computer hacker does.

"sploitz" (short for exploits): Vulnerabilities in computer software used by hackers.

"pwn": A typo-deliberate version of own, a slang term that means to dominate. This could also be spelled "0\/\/n3d" or "pwn3d," among other variations. Online video game bullies or "griefers" often use this term.

See also: The RIAA's Are Your Kids Breaking the Law When They Log On? Downloading Music and Movies May Be Easy and Fun, But Not When It's Illegal

Posted at 06:07 PM in Children and teens | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

26 January 2005

LiveJournal for under-13s

I probably wouldn't have ended up posting this if I hadn't read Anil Dash's recent The Social Impacts of Software Choices post. But I did and so I am. In his post, Anil argued that:

The choices all of us make when creating software, or when finding new ways to use it, are selecting for certain behaviors. This has a tremendous number of implications, despite the fact that the effects are very hard to predict and even harder to change once they've begun.

It's Anil's recognition of this that makes me hopeful that Six Apart might look into the LiveJournal experience for under-13s.

When Six Apart acquired LiveJournal they very quietly made a major change to the terms of use... They allowed under-13s to sign up for a journal, with parental permission.

What happened to my account? It seems like it was suspended?

If LiveJournal has conflicting info about your age in your account (it appears different in two places) you need to authorize your account to prove you're over 13 or have your parents' permission to keep a LiveJournal. In the past we did not allow anyone under the age of 13 to have a LiveJournal. Now you can have one even if you are under 13 but because of Federal Law you must get your parents' permission.

Brad, on 2005-01-05

Now, we already know that LiveJournal's users are mostly in their teens and twenties, and even at the time of its acquistion LiveJournal had 33,060 13 year olds - which in reality means 33,060 '13-and-under year olds'.

The world's youngest videblogger, 11 year-old Dylan, for example, uses a 13-and-over service (Blogger). It's no surprise she made it through the sign up process, though, when you see the helpful feedback on the form ;-)

But as far as I know, LiveJournal is the first major weblog/journalling service to open its service to kids. Which is kind of exciting.

I was hugely disappointed, though, to see that while Six Apart and LiveJournal had implemented the required-by-law parental permission verification, they had done nothing to improve the safety and/or internet literacy of the children they were now allowing to sign up for a journal. So, there is absolutely no safety advice, and parents are exited from the set up process before the child fills in their personal information. And this form encourages users to share their personal information, asking all of the same questions it does of older users (e.g. location), and with all of the same careless defaults. Not only does it default to show your email address and IM details, it actually explains that you should keep this option enabled:

Show your contact information

You should keep this option enabled. This allows people to contact you by showing your e-mail address and instant messaging details on your User Information page.

Similarly, on a service that already has 268 'add-me' communities, and seemingly no proactive moderation, users with free accounts can't see the friends of their friends; instead they're recommended to search for people based on their interest or "at random". This introduces a risk for younger girls who - while being focused on belonging and popularity, and 'collecting friends' - would actually opt for friends of friends rather than strangers if they could (as they have with their IM lists).

Now, LiveJournal has a 'get out' in their privacy policy, in that they say they're "not directed at children under 13 years of age but... recognize that with proper adult supervision some parents might permit their children to visit LiveJournal.com" but while this is legally correct, it shifts too much of the burden to parents, when most children consider themselves the internet experts in the home, and the majority of kids with home access report mostly using the internet alone.

Defaults matter. Most people will - at least initially - go with the service's choices, especially when they're couched as a recommendation. Children in particular have a very casual approach to identity management, so, at the very least, journals for children should have privacy- and safety- friendly defaults.

In Blogger for example, you have to explicitly choose to set up a profile and all of its defaults are privacy friendly. There's also really clear, user-friendly design and understandable help text. When you're handing over your personal information, you do so under a 'Privacy' header and when you type in information to share, it's really clear how it will be used, e.g. "If checked, your first and last name will appear on your profile."

So, a small development request for Six Apart... Take advantage of the fact that you're now more likely to know who your child users are, and use privacy- and safety- friendly defaults for them (at least). Maybe include some contextual help, especially when you're asking for personal information. And given that you're sending an email to their parents anyway, why not include a little more information about what a LiveJournal is? Not all parents are as tech-savvy as Dylan's dad.

This is all really consistent with Mena's understanding that weblogging is evolving from a publishing model to communication with smaller audiences of friends and family. And it's probably also necessary to prevent the kind of moral panic that errupted around chat a couple of years ago. But maybe it's already too late for that...

See also: My talk at last year's ETech, where I considered how we might ensure children’s safety while letting them have expressive identities in social software.

Posted at 07:37 PM in Children and teens | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

24 January 2005

Everything else is proofreading

Philip Pullman on play:

The most valuable attitude we can help children adopt - the one that, among other things, helps them to write and read with most fluency and effectiveness and enjoyment - I can best characterise by the word playful.

It begins with nursery rhymes and nonsense poems, with clapping games and finger play and simple songs and picture books. It goes on to consist of fooling about with the stuff the world is made of: with sounds, and with shapes and colours, and with clay and paper and wood and metal, and with language. Fooling about, playing with it, pushing it this way and that, turning it sideways, painting it different colours, looking at it from the back, putting one thing on top of another, asking silly questions, mixing things up, making absurd comparisons, discovering unexpected similarities, making pretty patterns, and all the time saying "Supposing ... I wonder ... What if ... "

...It's when we do this foolish, time-consuming, romantic, quixotic, childlike thing called play that we are most practical, most useful, and most firmly grounded in reality, because the world itself is the most unlikely of places, and it works in the oddest of ways, and we won't make any sense of it by doing what everybody else has done before us. It's when we fool about with the stuff the world is made of that we make the most valuable discoveries, we create the most lasting beauty, we discover the most profound truths. The youngest children can do it, and the greatest artists, the greatest scientists do it all the time. Everything else is proofreading.

Posted at 09:04 AM in Children and teens, Learning, Play | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBack

28 December 2004

They're baa-ack!

Once again, we can amuse ourselves with a play test of the gaming classics with the class of now: Child's Play Part II. The kids are still hugely unimpressed with the graphics -

EGM: Do you feel like you're in the middle of the Star Wars universe?
Everybody: No.
Parker: It feels like we're in some barely 3D universe.
Bobby: Maybe it feels like we're in the Star Wars universe where you can't see that well.

- but seem to be developing an appreciation for 'retro' games (The Legend of Zelda, in particular, comes off OK):

Garret: These graphics were actually cutting edge.
Bobby: If I could go back in time, I'd get a copy of Pong and this.

I suspect this is because many of the classics are now being recycled on their mobiles (Bobby: "I've played this on my cell phone.").

And parents can relax, too, because the kids seem to have no trouble distinguishing their games from reality:

EGM: So girls don't think [Link's] a hunk?
Rachel: No.
Dillon: Gosh no.
Rachel: I like actual humans better than videogame characters.

(via The Shifted Librarian)

Posted at 09:42 AM in Children and teens, Games | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

29 November 2004

Softer wins

When you play Monopoly or Risk or Sorry! there is always someone crowing in triumph while others quietly sulk in defeat. But Richard Tait, 40, founded Cranium in 1998 with the opposite idea: to produce games ''where everyone has a chance to shine,'' a phrase he repeats like a mantra in every conversation. Tait designs games that no single player can dominate; at some point, every player will be the hero. ''And then they have that moment of glow, that moment of shine, that moment where everyone celebrates them,'' he says, speaking practically in the cadence of a preacher. That makes the games particularly appealing to young children, who can be unhinged by the sting of losing. And for parents, it means that playtime is unlikely to end in tantrums. You can win a Cranium game, but no one really cares. It is, as one Cranium designer delicately puts it, ''a softer win.''

From The New York Times: The Play's the Thing, via Blackbeltjones

How do they achieve this?  Firstly, every game has multiple components, each one challenging a different skill (see Howard Gardner's theory of ''multiple intelligences'). Secondly, the game design process builds out from ''moment engineering'', "imagining the paroxysm of triumph each player ought to feel at least once in the game and using that as their goal post."

Based on my own play experiences, I'd say the same approach has been taken by the designers of the party games EyeToy and Wario Ware. There is obviously something about designing for groups of people who will be in the same living room that results in more sociable solutions. (Or at least solutions that are more appealing to this tantrum-throwing casual gamer.)

See also: Mike Kuniavsky's Extending a Technique: Group Personas.

Posted at 12:07 PM in Children and teens, Games | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBack

22 October 2004

A creative generation

While the latest report in the LSE's UK Children Go Online series looks primarily at civic engagement, I found some of the marginal observations more interesting.

Despite the frequently-reported death of email, 72% of 9-19 year olds in the UK who use the internet at least once a week send and receive email, while only 55% use IM (this increases to 87% and 72% respectively for 16-17 year olds, though).

And 78% of 9-15 year olds play games online.

Even more interestingly, the study found that 17% of young people have sent pictures or stories to a website and "online creativity can be encouraged through the very experience of using the internet." That is, the more time kids spend online, the more likely they are to produce their own content. And interaction breeds interaction. Does that mean we can safely assume that as internet usage increases its media timeshare, more and more people will become creative producers as well as consumers?

And does online game play in particular have any connection to this increased propensity to create? Nathan Combs recently suggested in his Socially Charged Software post that multiplayer games have a "MODder dimension", where "content is more than just accumulated and integrated, it is the product of collaboration and a shared value system of production: from inspiration through validation." (See Habbo Hotel's fan sites, for example.)

Maybe this is all obvious but I tend to be suspicious of the obvious so it's interesting to see some supporting statistical analysis.

Posted at 01:54 PM in Children and teens | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

03 October 2004

Living dolls

Ernst Jentsch, On the Psychology of the Uncanny (1906):

Among all the psychical uncertainties that can become an original cause of the uncanny feeling, there is one in particular that is able to develop a fairly regular, powerful and very general effect: namely, doubt as to whether an apparently living being is animate and, conversely, doubt as to whether a lifeless object may not in fact be animate - and more precisely, when this doubt only makes itself felt obscurely in one's consciousness. The mood lasts until these doubts are resolved and then usually makes way for another kind of feeling.

Sigmund Freud, The Uncanny (1925):

We remember that in their early games children do not distinguish at all sharply between living and inanimate objects, and that they are especially fond of treating their dolls like live people. In fact, I have occasionally heard a woman patient declare that even at the age of eight she had still been convinced that her dolls would be certain to come to life if she were to look at them in a particular, extremely concentrated, way... But, curiously enough... the idea of a 'living doll' excites no fear at all; children have no fear of their dolls coming to life, they may even desire it. The source of uncanny feelings would not, therefore, be an infantile fear in this case, but rather an infantile wish or even merely an infantile belief.

Charles Baudelaire, The Philosophy of Toys, quoted in Gaby Wood's Living Dolls: A Magical History of the Quest for Mechanical Life:

I cannot blame this infantile mania, it is the first metaphysical stirring. When this desire has become fixed in the child's brain, it fills his fingers and nails with an extraordinary agility and strength. The child twists and turns his toy, he scratches it, shakes it, bangs it against the wall, throws it on the ground. From time to time, he forces it to resume its mechanical motions, sometimes backwards. Its marvellous life comes to a stop. The child... finally prises it open... But where is its soul?

See also Wikipedia's entry for the Uncanny Valley, the gap of repulsive response aroused by a robot with appearance and motion between a "barely-human" and "fully human" entity.

Posted at 01:13 PM in Children and teens | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

14 July 2004

The inauthentic subject

Iona Opie admires the spontaneous and natural and is put off by self-consciousness. She is especially irritated by a girl named Lisa, who appears to be what might be called an inauthentic subject. Lisa, Mrs Opie remarks, is a "damned nuisance. It is 'Miss, watch this!' all the time. She showed me several boring sequences with a ball today... She invents these things especially for me, so that I will write them down. I am sure she would not play them otherwise."

From 'Boys and Girls Come Out to Play: Children's Games' in Boys and Girls Forever: Children's Classics from Cinderella to Harry Potter. (This chapter is a review of two classic texts about children's play: Iona Opie's The People in the Playground and Barrie Thorne's Gender Play: Girls and Boys in School.)

Posted at 08:12 AM in Children and teens | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Magic words

The anonymous verses that are passed down from one child to another often seem trivial if not irrational, but some of them are full of meaning. They are more than just a kind of primitive art: they are also primitive magic. Children are ritualists; they believe in the power of certain gestures and words. Oaths and promises are binding: charms influence events; counting-out rhymes call upon the powers of fate. Even the simplest verse can have an almost magical effect. The child who is taunted with the rhyme "April fool's gone past / You're the biggest fool at last" may - as I know from experience - feel contaminated with stupidity until he or she has shouted back the magical counterspell: "Sticks and stones / May break my bones / But words will never hurt me."

From 'Poetry by and for Children' in Boys and Girls Forever: Children's Classics from Cinderella to Harry Potter

Posted at 08:04 AM in Children and teens, Naming, Nonsense | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack

13 July 2004

Playing at learning

NESTA Futurelab's literature review in games and learning includes Marc Prensky's summary of the new approaches to learning taken by young people:

Twitch speed vs conventional speed

Parallel processing vs linear processing

Graphics first vs text first

Random access vs step by step

Connected vs standalone

Active vs passive

Play vs work

Payoff vs patience

Fantasy vs reality

Technology as friend vs technology as foe

Posted at 11:49 AM in Children and teens | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack

04 July 2004

You're not going to like this

The anti-adult colours of orange and green won by default, not because the kids loved the colour. They actually had no strong reactions either way, but in this new kid universe, these colours said to grown-ups, "You're not going to like this and that's alright with us!"

The green of the palette became the viscera. It represents the slime and the goop and all those things you can't do on TV or anywhere else for that matter! Orange became the ruling colour in the actual identity and it was perfect - perfect because it was ownable. In the early 1980s no one was using orange.

Jan Craige Singer on the development of the Nickelodeon logo in the 1980s, from Brenda Laurel's excellent Design Research: Methods and Perspectives (thanks Celia).

Posted at 02:29 PM in Children and teens | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

03 July 2004

'Digital generations'

The Centre for the Study of Children, Youth and Media's upcoming conference, Digital Generations: Children, Young People & New Media, has a fantastic line up, including:

Sonia Livingstone on The Regulation of New Media in the Home

Henry Jenkins on The War of Effects and Meanings: Rethinking the Video Game Violence Debate

Mizuko Ito on Technologies of the Childhood Imagination

It's in London, 26-29 July.

Posted at 01:21 PM in Children and teens | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

30 June 2004

RSS for kids

We've been busy adding RSS feeds all over Yahoo! We had previously released Yahooligans! Joke of the Day. Today, Ask Earl (a daily question and answer for kids) is available too. In Education, we now have Word of the Day and SAT Tip of the Day available. More to come soon!

Reported on Jeff Boulter's Weblog (via The Shifted Librarian).

I find this fascinating, particularly because most sites for children are rammed with things that move, squeak and leap out. How well will RSS go down? It seems that Yahooligans has done something of a controlled released of RSS, so they must have been getting positive feedback.

And this interview last year with a senior producer at Yahooligans suggests there is an appetite for just the info:

The one thing that we have that none of our competitors really have in the kids space is our search and directory, which is what Yahooligans! started with. It's a comprehensive listing of Web sites. We have a team of editors, they're all former educators, and they go out and look at Web sites, they make sure they're safe, fun and appropriate for kids, and they add them to the giant database.

After Games and Animals, it's probably the third most popular area. A lot of that usage is probably driven by, we think, teachers. It's very hard for teachers in the classroom to send their kids in the Web. I used to be a former teacher, and students, whether intentionally or unintentionally, can get in trouble pretty quickly by searching on the Web. Yahooligans!, because it's more of a database than a free-for-all on the Web, it's only going to search sites that we've already pre-screened and said are appropriate.

Interestingly, RSS also has the potential to route around some of the personal information issues that come with collecting and using email addresses.

Somewhat related: CBBC launched its child-friendly search last month. And before that they launched CBBC newsround headlines to mobile phones (with a whole category dedicated to news about animals).

What next? I think there's a lot of potential for giving child-safe news, search and directories the RSS treatment. Many parents only let their children navigate to sites they've already bookmarked together. Perhaps a daily stream of sites recently added to CBBC Search and the Yahooligans directory, combined with quality news sources (National Geographic Kids, CBBC newsround...), would give kids that much more to explore. Combine this with a facility for their parents, teachers and friends to bookmark their own finds (a kind of semi-private del.icio.us), and you've got an information-rich, safe, social space for children.

Posted at 10:12 AM in Children and teens | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBack

29 June 2004

BBC's new manifesto

The BBC has released its vision for the future and manifesto for action. As well as confirming the BBC's commitment to its creative archive, digital curriculum and content-on-demand initiatives, it also clearly defines public service broadcasting as:

Supporting informed citizenship

Enriching UK culture and creativity

Extending learning opportunities

Connecting communities

Supporting the UK's role in the world

I am personally very pleased to see that a lot of the BBC's hard thinking about child safety and internet literacy has been formalised as a commitment within the 'revolution in learning' strand:

Take a lead in media literacy and safety on the internet; launch KidsSafe, a series of practical tools and initiatives designed to make the internet a safer place for children.

Finally, it is refreshing to see the BBC commit itself to more openness and partnerships.

(Hopefully the BBC will be able to share more widely some of its recent research in the KidsSafe area, in particular the 'Children's Digital Lives: Scenarios to 2014' that I worked on with Hannah McBain.)

You can download the full BBC manifesto and send them your feedback.

Maybe if things blew up?

What today's kids think of Tetris - and the other classic games you grew up with (from Electronic Gaming Monthly, via Wonderland):

Tim: Which button do I press to make the blocks explode?

EGM: Sorry, they don't explode.

Becky: This is boring. Maybe if it had characters and stuff and different levels, it would be OK. If things blew up or something or...

Sheldon: If there were bombs.

Becky: Yeah, or special bricks. Like, if a yellow brick touched a red brick it would blow up and you'd have to start over.

John: Why haven't I won yet? I've paired up so many of the same color.

EGM: Don't worry about colors.

John: I just lined up six of the same color. Why didn't they blow up?

EGM: Nothing blows up.

See also: ALIEN GAMES: Do all-girl design teams create space learning games that are more appealing to other girls than products designed by all boy teams? (via vesterblog)

CBBC's child-friendly search

CBBC Search is a "UK-focused search tool for 6-12 year olds", which returns CBBC content (including stories from newsround) and a selection of pre-approved BBC sites and external websites. All CBBC recommended sites protect children's personal information: "No site should reveal personal information about you that would enable people to ascertain who and where you are." And any message boards are moderated. (Via textually.org)

Too young for TV - not!

Woman's Hour takes on the debate about the impact TV and new media usage has on the development of language and social skills.

In the programme Ragdoll founder and creative director Anne Wood draws a nice distinction between functional and creative literacy but most of all I was intrigued by her explanation of the controversy surrounding Teletubbies when it first launched:

"The fact that children can have a conversation with the screen that an adult may not understand frightens a lot of people... [With Teletubbies] there was no adult mediating the conversation the programme was having with the child."

(See also my earlier post, Too young for TV.)

I must say, in defence of the panic around the Teletubbies, that the idea of a home with a friendly vacuum cleaner (the Noo-noo) to clean up after you is frankly shocking, and no doubt responsible for the development and adoption of the Roomba ;-)

Breaking the law

The SAFT project has reported that "when children take charge and try to protect their online privacy, key businesses and official organisations fail to help them."

SAFT has monitored the use of a claims engine they and SITAS developed to help Norwegian children find out how public and commercial entities use their personal information. According to the EU's data protection regulation, organisations are legally obliged to answer the forms generated by this tool. However, the results of SAFT's follow-up survey are scandalous.

"Only 4 out of 10 bothered to answer us," is the conclusion the participating students come to. After the 30 day grace period stipulated by law, 3 out of 7 political parties (the three parties currently in government), didn't answer. The same applied to half of the governmental oversight bodies. Neither TV companies nor mobile operators answered. And some of the organisations contacted went as far as to be rude and condescending about the claims, in addition to breaking the law by not complying. The Data Inspectorate, which is given a special responsibility for this particular law, forgot to include the answer itself in their reply.

"We should be ashamed of ourselves, all of us," says SAFT Project Director Elisabeth Staksrud. "We put quite a high amount of pressure on the children not to divulge their personal information on the internet, but when they themselves take charge, the rest of us fail spectacularly."

"Few things do more damage than to unwittingly teach students that laws and rights don't apply to them. It only amplifies the notion that other rules applies to the Internet than the rest of society," is the conclusion from SITAS' Are Vegard Haug.

It is no wonder then, that SAFT's survey found 70% of the students state that they don't think or know that the same laws apply to the Internet as the rest of society.

In the same month, the RIAA sent out their Are Your Kids Breaking the Law When They Log On? Downloading Music and Movies May Be Easy and Fun, But Not When It's Illegal advisory (see Boing Boing). This campaign is as hilariously misguided as it is offensive. Not only do they encourage parents to "check on their kids' activities online" and install parental controls on their computer, they also helpfully suggest that they give them money to spend on legal downloads:

GIVE THEM AN OPTION TO LISTEN TO OBTAIN DIGITAL CONTENT LEGALLY. It's not enough to say you can't download; you've got to tell them what they can do. You can consider giving them an entertainment allowance to spend on a legal site like iTunes or Rhapsody or a movie site like Movielink.com.

This advisory is offensive because it's masquerading as child safety advice and misguided because it won't work. Not only because, as they say themselves, "83 percent of teens, aged 13 to 17, found downloading free music was morally acceptable" but also because most parents don't know what their children do online; parental controls don't work and are unpopular with both children and their parents; children know the rules but don't necessarily follow them; most parents want to respect their children's privacy and accept that they'll break some rules as a necessary part of growing up; and the majority of children are more tech savvy than their parents and very good at routing around blockages. (See SAFT's What children do online and the LSE's Children Go Online for a detailed look at this parent-child dynamic.)

Most parental concerns about the internet are focused on protecting their children from threats like online grooming and pornographic spam and they're unlikely to focus too much energy on protecting other people's copyright. Especially when their other main concern is around cost. Everything costs parents money these days (even child safety) and many of the rules or constraints they try to impose on their children's digital interactions are focused on cost (e.g. time limits, not using the red button, PAYG accounts). The thought of their children accessing free stuff is probably more of a relief than a concern.

And how can children be expected to respect the rights of companies when they don't get any respect back?

Very different end games

Why study Rome when you can build it?: Henry Jenkins on 'serious games' in education. See also the Water Cooler Games wrap up of the Education Arcade at E3.

The tug of newfangled slot machines: Slot machine manufacturers design games primarily for women over 55 with lots of time and disposable income, and draw them in with a cynical mix of multiple small payouts, the near miss, 'smart sounds', celebrity-led nostalgia and the pleasures of not thinking. "Unlike table games, which are played in groups, slots are played in isolation, and therefore they lack the same safeguards social situations provide."

Too young for TV

A recent study of 1,345 children reported on BBC News concluded that children under two should not be allowed to watch any television because it can rewire the brain, increasing their chances of suffering attention problems later in life. Children who watched the most television were more likely to have problems with concentration, impulsive behaviour and restlessness and were more easily confused.

See also: Camille Paglia's Magic of Images and Linda Stone on continuous partial attention

'Self-teaching'

Small-scale copying of internet essay material for coursework is a valid form of 'self-teaching', according to Dr Ellie Johnson Searle, the director of the UK's Joint Council for Qualifications:

"Pupils can change the language and grammar and put it into their own words, but if they are going to that sort of effort they are essentially self-teaching and are learning the subject anyway.

"They would not be able to make extensive alterations without an understanding of the subject."

From BBC News (via Demos)

Now MSN's member directory had to go...

MSN UK has "temporarily closed access to the MSN Member Directory". The Register contacted Microsoft's press office and was given this statement:

"While MSN Member Directory does not allow people to directly search for profiles of MSN Members by age for age groups under age 20, it does currently allow searching for MSN user profiles using other criteria, with results that may include people under 20.

"While we have not received any reports of this capability being exploited, MSN has shut down the Member Directory in the UK as a preventative measure, based on that local market's request.

"In the April timeframe, MSN will deliver a global solution that will prevent people from finding profiles of MSN members under age 18, unless they know their direct screen name.

"This will help to further deliver a more secure online experience for children by ensuring that their details cannot be accessed in the MSN Member Directory."

While I think the new contact model they're proposing for under-18s is a good move, I do wonder why MSN has such a dramatically under-prepared holding page in place, when the flaws in their member search can't be a shock discovery. Martin Belam described the obvious problem very well shortly after MSN closed its UK chat rooms last year and started promoting its IM product as a "safe way of communicating".

I attended a focus group with parents last month and learnt that while almost all of them banned chat for their children, they were convinced that IM only allowed their kids to talk to their real-life friends. However, for teenage girls, IM contact lists are another way of confirming popularity; the more 'friends' the better (see BuddyZoo for an application built around this kind of popularity contest). While girls don't often trawl the directory looking for new contacts, they are very keen to add friends of friends.

Perhaps this mismatch between parental belief and child behaviour was becoming increasingly untenable for MSN in the UK?

See also: The UK Home Office's Taskforce for Child Protection on the Internet

Update: The promised change has been implemented and profiles for under-18s can't be accessed via the Member Directory. They're still easily accessed via the MSN Groups service, though, and members joining a new group have a profile that defaults to display full email address. I wonder why MSN UK bothered? It's not like someone trying to find under-18s wouldn't be able to make a quick guess about what groups they'd be interested in.

A tech mum who wants both safety and freedom for her child online

Liz Lawley has written a personal account of her concerns about her child's use of the internet, that covers everything from rules about sharing personal information, to the hurt of discovering a group blog about parents, and the risks of new friends:

I walked into the room where he was typing the other day, and he quickly closed the IM window. My parental radar kicked in immediately. “Who were you talking to?” I asked. “Just a friend,” he answered, intentionally vague. We eyed each other. I told him I really needed to know who it was, but that I didn’t have to see what was being written. “Was it someone I know?” “No.” “Who was it?” “He’s a kid that T (a neighborhood friend) met online. He’s 13.”

WHOOP! WHOOP! WHOOP! (That’s the sound of the all-hands-on-deck alarm that went off in my head.)

“We had a deal,” I said. “IM only with people you already know in person, and not with anyone Dad or I haven’t approved to put on your buddy list.”

He protested, telling me that he could tell this was a nice kid, that he was smart enough not to reveal any personal information via IM, that obviously I didn’t trust him or think he was smart. To no avail in this case—I’m not willing to budge on this rule, and I made that clear. But I’m deeply concerned—we had the rule in place, and he broke it. How do I know it won’t happen again?

...I'm hoping that better solutions for children’s use of technology begin to emerge. A kids’ IM client that I can configure in terms of access, for example. An easy to install and configure weblog client that lets me approve posts before they go live. Varying levels of access that i can allow or remove, depending on each child’s activities and maturity. I wish I saw more work happening in this space, though I understand that COPPA makes it difficult.

Liz's concerns are the exact same parental worries that I'm trying to address in my current research project for the BBC (with Hannah). And most of the solutions I'm slowly edging towards are about facilitating a type of parental involvement that leaves space for children's privacy. Much of our recent work has been directed towards learning where the boundaries lie: when does parental monitoring cross the line from being something that makes children feel looked-after and safe, to something that feels like having their pockets searched? This is a very difficult balance to strike, and I think we need to learn from some of the ways parents mediate their children’s contacts and communications in everyday – mostly offline – life.

Another guiding principle has been to take some of the intervention burden away from parents. They shouldn't have to install monitoring or filtering software; instead service providers should find sociable solutions to their problems.

I am at the draft proposal stage, and would love to hear any ideas that tech parents - like Liz - have to share.

Risks of safety education

"I would certainly be worried about the gender issue in relation to how one views the internet in the UK. Girls' preferred activities, like communication and social interaction, are seen as a bad thing while what boys do - playing games and things like that - is OK.

And I think that creates potential for a gendered digital divide. So even though one tries to bridge the gap, what's being done with internet safety advice could be making the gap even wider."

From a recent conversation with Elisabeth Staksrud, Project Coordinator for SAFT . (You can see some of the UK's chat safety initiatives here, here, here and here.)

I was reminded of Elisabeth's observation when I saw the press release for Computer Club For Girls, a (pilot) scheme to help schools run girls-only computer clubs for 10 to 13-year-olds:

Terry Watts, e-skills UK chief operating officer, says: "Our research showed that the way girls were introduced to computers was off-putting. Boys tend to want to pull things apart and find out how they work, whereas girls are much more interested in what you can do with computers. We asked girls what would make computing attractive and discovered that if you set appealing targets, girls will move all kinds of obstacles to try and achieve them."

The clubs encourage girls to use ICT creatively and help them develop career skills, such as communication and teamwork. One current theme is celebrity culture, with activities ranging from designing a website for a pop group to creating an Autocue script for a television interview. Girls hone their skills in video and sound editing and learn to use professional software, which might otherwise be too expensive for schools.

This pilot is very promising - fanzines! (I used to work on an INXS fanzine when I was about 12) - but so far it seems to be shying away from those two very stigmatised but hugely popular online activities for girls: pilfering pictures (computer club girls choose from the limited set that is made available to them) and writing or conversation (computer club girls drag and drop pre-written text).

Lately I've been wondering if girls' SMS/IM/chat text-based proficiencies could be subtlety guided towards coding...

See also: The Centre for the Study of Children, Youth and Media's Girls, digital technology and popular culture: from play to practice

Question answerer

Stewart has created a new blog dedicated to his accidental career as a question answerer:

In June 2003, I wrote something about instant messaging that included the words "question" and "answerer". In November of that year, a young girl trying to finish her homework searched for "instant message question answerer", found the piece I had written, and IM'd me, looking for some answers.

The transcripts are delightful, with Stewart alternately helpful and combative. I particularly enjoyed his safety advice to Littlemotivride:

Littlemotivride: i don't really live there

Littlemotivride: i can't even spell it

Littlemotivride: i would never tell anybody my real name

sylloge: Good thinking

sylloge: If you tell people your true name, they can steal your soul

sylloge: I read about that once

More please!

Oh, and kids... if you find Stewart a bit snarky or reluctant to answer your question - and you really need to get your homework done - you can always Ask a Librarian. They have a more limited range than Stewart, though:

We can only handle questions to which a documented factual answer exists. Hypothetical questions and requests to undertake original research are beyond the scope of Ask a Librarian. We won't analyse an issue, guess an answer or give opinions. We deal only in documented matters of fact.

Pester power

As Jonathan Attwood, SwapitShop’s CEO, explains, children have tremendous economic influence via their parents, who purchase endless quantities of toys, food, and entertainment on their behalf. Yet kids themselves generally have very little ready cash. Guiding their economic influence is big business, and marketeers constantly strive to “incent” (i.e., bribe) kids to demand the games, TV programs, and sugary snacks that they sell.

Attwood finds huge inefficiencies—and hence opportunities—in the ways that these incentives are currently meted out. Inserting a Spider-Man figure in every box of Frosted Flakes costs millions, he explains, and of course many children may not like Spider-Man, or action figures at all. His solution: give kids Swapits, a virtual currency redeemable for merchandise on the SwapitShop Web site. Swapits are distributed as coded numbers printed on coupons or product packages. Printing 100 Swapits on the inside flap of a cereal box costs next to nothing, says Attwood, and kids can get things they actually want....

The site began with another idea, though, that it continues to promote. Kids can also obtain Swapits by auctioning off toys, CDs, Pokémon cards, and other closet clutter to obtain something more desirable: hence the “swap” moniker. Children post descriptions of items for auction on SwapitShop’s site. When a bidder has won an item, the seller mails it to SwapitShop, which forwards it to the buyer. Sellers, meanwhile, redeem their Swapits for new or auctioned items on the Web site.

From Mind the Gap in the Technology Review (subscription required).

Swapped items are sent with direct marketing literature and SwapitShop has also assembled a market research panel of kids paid in Swapits.

The SwapitShop model seems very exploitative to me, and might also miss the point. I can understand why kids nag their parents to buy a cereal that that has random collectibles in the box; I'm less certain that they will turn that pester power on Swapits. Why ask for 10 Swapits when you could just as easily ask for 10 pounds sterling - either in cash or on your Splash Plastic? I also wonder about the value of their market research, given the problems of research with 'professional respondents'.

I do love the swap facility of the site, though.

LiveJournal now produces FOAF

So LiveJournal, a journals service primarily used by young people is now auto-generating FOAF. My LiveJournal FOAF file contains all of my interests, my friends, my URL and date of birth! I didn't request this and wasn't notified of the update. I know that LiveJournal is probably doing this with the best of intentions - in the same spirit as their decision to publish LiveJournal statistics - but I have some concerns about the auto-generation of FOAF for younger users. Do we really want to give their details away more freely, or allow new services to build around the friend lists they've built within the semi-private environment of LiveJournal?

ETech: Social software for children

My talk focused on the findings of the BBC identity group’s qualitative research and usability testing with children and teens. I shared insights into Jessica and Jake's approaches to identity management, friendship and group membership, with the view to inform actual product development work in this area.

While the purpose of my talk was to stimulate interest in the question: How can we ensure children’s safety while letting them have expressive identities in social software?, I also gave some of my own opinions about the appropriateness - or not - of existing social software, and speculated about some positive future directions that wikis and weblogs could take (e.g. using RSS syndication to involve parents in the moderation of social spaces for children). I then very briefly presented my work-in-progress on a site for children who collect things (design-only so far) - WikiWorm. Thanks to Matt for his design work and Deborah for her delightfully wriggly worm logo.

My motivation is to ensure that children continue to have the right to be present in public; to enjoy the benefits of social software and the good social capital it can generate, and to have a public voice. Digital spaces are particularly important given the social context in the UK, where a child playing freely outside is less common and teens don’t feel welcome in public space.

My presentation (with additional notes) is now available for download - sorry for the delay. Many other ETech 2004 presentations are available on the O'Reilly conference site and session notes are on their wiki. There is also talk of a ConConUK, which I'll definitely make it to if it's on the 23rd.

I hope to share some of my emerging thoughts about this year's conference here, as soon as they've emerged ;-)

Safety in Toontown

A vexing problem for us was how to build an MMORPG that was safe for children, without giving up the essential communication features that are required to support a community. We foc