I've recently partnered with Facebook and co-authors Linda Phillips and Dr. BJ Fogg to write the Facebook for Educators Guide!
The guide is also available in Spanish, Portuguese and German.
Lee Rainie, Director of the Pew Internet and the American Life Project, recently spoke at the annual conference of the National Religious Broadcasters.
This talk will focus on the media habits of Millennials and GenX and how their patterns of gathering and creating information are different in the digital age.
Teens don't tweet, will never tweet - too public, too many older users. Not cool.
That's been the prediction for a while now, born of numbers showing that fewer than one in 10 teens were using Twitter early on.
But then their parents, grandparents, neighbors, parents' friends and anyone in-between started friending them on Facebook, the social networking site of choice for many – and a curious thing began to happen.
Suddenly, their space wasn't just theirs anymore. So more young people have started shifting to Twitter, almost hiding in plain sight.
"I love twitter, it's the only thing I have to myself ... cause my parents don't have one," Britteny Praznik, a 17-year-old who lives outside Milwaukee, gleefully tweeted recently.
"Facebook is like shouting into a crowd. Twitter is like speaking into a room."
While she still has a Facebook account, she joined Twitter last summer, after more people at her high school did the same. "It just sort of caught on," she says.
Teens tout the ease of use and the ability to send the equivalent of a text message to a circle of friends, often a smaller one than they have on crowded Facebook accounts.
They can have multiple accounts and don't have to use their real names. They also can follow their favorite celebrities and, for those interested in doing so, use Twitter as a soapbox.
The world has become increasingly “flat,” as Tom Friedman has shown. Thanks to massive improvements in communications and transportation, virtually any place on earth can be connected to markets anywhere else on earth and can become globally competitive.
It is unlikely that sufficient resources will be available to build enough new campuses to meet the growing global demand for higher education—at least not the sort of campuses that we have traditionally built for colleges and universities.
Nor is it likely that the current methods of teaching and learning will suffice to prepare students for the lives that they will lead in the twenty-first century.
John Seely Brown is a Visiting Scholar and Advisor to the Provost at the University of Southern California (USC) and Independent Co-Chairman of a New Deloitte Research Center.
He is the former Chief Scientist of Xerox and Director of its Palo Alto Research Center (PARC). Many of his publications and presentations are on his website (http://www.johnseelybrown.com).
Richard P. Adler is a Research Affiliate at the Institute for the Future in Palo Alto and Principal of People & Technology, a research and consulting firm in Cupertino, California.
This is protected under the following Creative Commons License.
Quick. Tell me the age of the average game player. 12? 15? 17? Nope.
According to a new report from the Entertainment Software Association (ESA), the average game player age is 37.
Even more surprising is the finding that in 2011, 29% of gamers were over the age of 50. In all, 72% of American households play computer of video games.
Here are some other interesting stats from the 2011 Essential Facts About the Computer & Video Game Industry report released by ESA on the demographics of video game players.
You can read the full executive summary after the jump.
Parents & Games
"Kids play video games for fun with the goal of progressing to the next level and eventually conquering the oppoent, whether that's another player or the computer.
What's more, the social aspect--sharing tactics, experience and explanations--help cemet what they've learned." ~ James Paul Glee, author of What Video Games Have to Teach us About Learning and Literacy
Top Four Reasons Parents Play with Their Kids
Video Games and Parental Controls
Gender & Gamer Demographics
"There are games now for pretty much every age, every demographic." ~ Jesse Schell, professor of entertainment technology at Carnegie Mellon University
How Gamers Play
"Gaming is productive. It produces positive emotion, stronger social relationships, a sense of accomplishment, and for players who are a part of a game community, a chance to build a sense of purpose." ~ Jane McGonigal, PhD. author of Reality is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World
Ryan Seacrest, known in Hollywood circles as the busiest (and nicest) man in showbiz and host of American Idol, has launched the Ryan Seacrest Foundation (RSF).
The mission of the Ryan Seacrest Foundation (RSF) is to enhance the quality of life for seriously ill and injured children through unique programs that utilize multimedia and interactive platforms to enlighten, entertain and educate.
RSF’s first initiative is to build broadcast media centers, named THE VOICE, within pediatric hospitals for children to explore the creative realms of radio, television and new media as well as contribute positively to the healing process.
The Voice media centers have already opened in Atlanta and Philadelphia, with plans to eventually build up to 10 of the broadcast centers at pediatric hospitals around the country.
In addition, RSF will also reach out to the community and involve students from local journalism schools, colleges and universities to provide them with the opportunity to gain first hand experience in broadcasting, programming and operating a multimedia center.
There's lots of research in the educational media space on how the use of multimedia, social and digital technologies allows young people see themselves as an active participant, in the pilot's seat or director's chair, as they chart new connections between diverse and often unpredictable worlds of knowledge.
This is especially important for children who are critically ill. They spend so much time in the hospital letting doctors, nurses and other medical techs deciding what and when they do just about anything.
To be critically ill means giving up control. A lot of control. 'The Voice' project is important because it's the only part of a child's stay in the hospital where they--not the doctors or nurses--are in control.
They get to decide what song to play. They get to decide what button to push. Most importantly, it's a part of their day that doesn't revolve around heavy life threatening decisions, medicines, needles or any of the hard work of being a patient.
It's just fun. And that's the best medicine of all.
Connect with the Seacrest Foundation on Twitter and Facebook
Significant numbers of children are breaking the rules by setting up their own profiles on social networking sites such as Facebook, finds a new EU Kids Online study.
The report, Social Networking, Age and Privacy, found that 38 per cent of 9-12-year-olds use social networking sites, with one in five of the age group having a profile on Facebook, even though the network sets a minimum age of 13 to join.
"Since children often lie about their age to join 'forbidden' sites it would be more practical to identify younger users and to target them with easy-to-use protective measures."
Researchers who carried out the EU Kids Online survey of 25,000 young people across Europe say it shows that age restrictions are only partially effective and that a growing number of children are taking online risks.
A quarter of children on social networking sites have their profile set to ‘public’. One fifth of children whose profile is public display their address and/or phone number, twice as many as for those with private profiles.
Professor Sonia Livingstone from the London School of Economics and Political Science, who directs the project, said: ‘It seems clear that children are moving to Facebook – this is now the most popular site in 17 of the 25 countries we surveyed. Many providers try to restrict their users to 13-year-olds and above but we can see that this is not effective.’
Especially younger children are less likely to use privacy options and to understand the safety features that are available. According to the report, across the 25 European countries surveyed, 57 per cent of children (aged 9 to 16) use Facebook as their sole or main social networking site. This ranges from 98 per cent in Cyprus, to only two per cent in Poland.
The findings raise the possibility that removing age restrictions from social network sites might be the most effective way of improving online safety as the rules have the consequence of driving kids’ social networking underground.
Among other findings, the survey shows that almost one in six 9-12-year-olds, and one in three 13-16s, have 100 or more online contacts. Around a quarter of SMS users communicate online with people who have no connection to their offline lives, including one fifth of 9-12 year olds across all SMS (and one quarter of younger Facebook users).
Key findings of the report:
On Tuesday, April 19 (9:30 am PST) Facebook Live will host a live discussion focused on Facebook’s latest efforts to keep people safe online. This is going to be a great event that highlights the tools that Facebook offers parents, teachers and kids to protect themselevs online.
Hear from a members of the Facebook Safety Team and safety educators Larry Magid, Co-director of ConnectSafely.com, and Linda Fogg Phillips, Co-Author of Facebook for Parents and Facebook for Educators.
The event will also highlight several new initatives (nope, I can't tell you! But they are really slick!) including the project that I've been working on Facebook for Educators.
A few months ago Facebook asked BJ Fogg, Director of the Persuasive Technology Lab at Stanford University and Linda Fogg-Phillips, author of Facebook for Parents and an expert on parenting in the digital age and myself to collaborate on the Facebook for Educators project.
You'll hear more about that during the Facebook Safety event on Tuesday, but it's been a really exciting project to work on.
The team at Facebook are really committed to providing everyone, but especially teens and young adults, with a safe and secure experience when they are interacting on the world's biggest social network.
So be sure to tune in on Tuesday to get the latest news on Facebook's efforts to keep everyone safe online.
John Tulenko of Learning Matters, which produces education stories for the NewsHour, reports on a North Carolina school district switching from textbooks to all-digital learning materials.
My favorite quote is this piece comes from Mark Edwards, Superientendent of Schools in Mooresville, North Carolina:
"For years we would tell students "We will prepare you for your future." But their experience in school didn't have much to do (with the future).
I would say it would be the same to say "We are going to prepare you for driving a car, so get on this horse." And the kids say "That doesn't make sense, i'm not going to be riding a horse."
Watch the full episode. See more PBS NewsHour.
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Header Artwork by BT Livermore
Social Icons Courtesy of Davide Di Cillo
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