Spotlight on Digital Media And Learning

6.18.10 | The Problems With COPPA: The Children’s Online Privacy and Protection Act (COPPA), which Congress passed in 1998 and which the U.S. Senate and Federal Trade Commission are revisiting this year, is the reason why children under 13 cannot create their own account on Facebook, Gmail, Skype and other online services.

While it had the best of intentions—to ensure that corporations do not collect data on children under 13—social media researcher danah boyd points to multiple problems with its actual enactment in the online world.

First, when parents see the age requirement on a website, they think it is the result of an effort to protect their children, rather than what it really is—an effort to protect their privacy. The intention of the Act was never to prevent children from accessing social networking sites or other online services. It was only meant to get parents’ permission for their participation.

Most companies, however, “took one look at COPPA and decided that the process of getting parental consent was far too onerous so they simply required all participants to be at least 13 years of age.”

While some parents do not want children under 13 using these online services, according to boyd’s research, many parents would prefer the choice to be theirs. Moreover, in many families, children under 13 have very good reasons to be accessing these sites, from keeping in touch with other family members to learning effective digital literacy skills.

Often, parents cite that these tools enable children to connect with extended family; Skype is especially important to immigrant parents who have extended family outside of the US.  Grandparents were most frequently cited as the reason why parents created accounts for their young children.  Many parents will create accounts for children even before they are literate because the value of connecting children to family outweighs the age restriction.  When parents encourage their children to use these services, they send a conflicting message that their kids eventually learn: ignore some age limitations but not others.

Plus: Read the statement that boyd, along with Harvard law professor John Palfrey and Urs Gasser, executive director of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University, submitted to the FTC and Senate: “How COPPA, as Implemented, is Misinterpreted by the Public: A Research Perspective.”

Combining Composition, Social Media: This curriculum change from University of Kentucky caught our attention: Starting in fall 2011, freshmen will be required to take a two-sequence course combining English composition with oral speech and digital media to help students acquire social media skills needed in the workplace.

“Everything from how to compose e-mails and text messages to how to interact with your roommate and manipulate photos for visuals will be discussed,” said Roxanne Mountford, director of the Division of Writing, Rhetoric and Digital Media. “Communication is not based one way — there’s Facebook and YouTube videos now, it’s becoming easier and faster. There’s a broad integration of skills and I think it’s high time to teach this way. This is a 2020 future.”

Global Kids is Hiring: Global Kids, Inc., a New York City based non-profit organization dedicated to transforming urban youth into successful students and global and community leaders, is seeking to fill a full-time staff position: online leadership program associate. Read more about the position, and the application process, which invites applicants to submit a short digital media project—an annotated learning map that reflects all the places where you learn.

Why I Want Students to Blog: Shelly Blake-Plock, who blogs at Teach Paperless, nicely summarizes the power of student blogs by describing some of the 113 entries a freshman student logged during a semester-long class—from class notes and writing assignments (“Is Monarchy More or Less Effective Than Democracy?”) to “Battle of Tours Wiki Source.”

What’s going on here is a case where we’ve got a student who OWNS his blog. We’ve got a student who has turned his blog into a veritable compendium of West Civ that he is going to be able to use as a searchable reference throughout his high school career.

He is going to eat AP Modern Euro for lunch. He is going to own British Literature in his senior year. Because he owns his knowledge. He owns his understanding. And he’s made something authentic: his own personal resource… and a record of the history of his own ideas.

Addressing Fears That Students Lack STEM Skills: Winnie Hu of The New York Times visited a classroom in Glen Rock, N.J., where kindergarten students were trying to build a stronger house to protect the three little pigs against the strong blows of the big, bad wolf. Think voice-activated security, a hidden door—you get the idea.

This activity represents a larger trend pushing students to experience engineering at an earlier age. While a few educators note that teachers have long been creating project-based lessons (like making a robot from lego pieces) and that just building stuff doesn’t necessarily advance knowledge or interest, most participants—from teachers to students to parents—see this new curriculum as a fun and dynamic way to spark interest and set the foundation for development of often deferred and neglected STEM skills.

“We still hear all the time that little kids can’t engineer,” said Christine Cunningham, director of Engineering is Elementary, a program developed at the Museum of Science in Boston that offers ready-made school lessons. “We say they’re born engineers — they naturally want to solve problems — and we tend to educate it out of them.”

What is IBM’s Watson?: Writing in The New York Times Magazine, Clive Thompson describes the wizardry of a new computer that IBM scientists “expect will be the world’s most advanced ‘question answering’ machine, able to understand a question posed in everyday human elocution — ‘natural language,’ as computer scientists call it — and respond with a precise, factual answer. In other words, it must do more than what search engines like Google and Bing do, which is merely point to a document where you might find the answer. It has to pluck out the correct answer itself.”

Watson is a pro at “Jeopardy.” You can play against the supercomputer here.

Plus: Ewan McIntosh on how augmented reality can contribute toward the mantra of “be less helpful” to make learning better.