digital parenting – Page 32 – Media! Tech! Parenting!

Born Digital Author, John Palfrey, Gives Talk

Posted on October 24, 2010 by Marti Weston

Are you thinking about the children and adolescents in your family and how they effortlessly use digital information but don’t always manage it as well as they might?

John Palfrey, Harvard Law Professor and a co-author of Born Digital: Understanding the First Generation of Digital Natives spoke at the University of Washington’s Project Information Literacy (an organization that deserves its own post sometime). Palfrey shared his thoughts on plagiarism, content evaluation, and the role of librarians and teachers. He also pointed out that even in this age of the digital native, plenty of young people around the world do not have enough access to information.

When he spoke about plagiarism in today’s digital world Palfrey commented, “One of the big mistake is to think that “…this time it’s different and then fail to look carefully into what’s really changed and what’s ultimately the same.”

Some Important Points

“Plagiarism is still plagiarism – using someone’s work and passing it off as your own — but we do need to teach students how to deal with the huge amount of digital information at their fingertips”
The concept of remixing information is confusing because a person is allowed to take another person’s work and do things with it, however attributing the work to the original author is paramount.
Digital natives are not all adept as sorting through and evaluating the information they find.

answers to media questions, digital parenting, healthy media images, media literacy, parents and technology

Watch What You Watch – New Media PSA for Girls

Posted on October 22, 2010March 1, 2015 by Marti Weston

A couple of weeks ago a group of media literacy advocates gathered in the Washington, DC area for the Healthy Media for Youth Summit, focusing on the importance of media literacy and the need to address negative female media images. According to a press release, the group “…considered and identified ways to promote media messages that inspire, empower, and engage youth.” Attendees watched the premier of this amazing and engaging public service video announcement.

After you watch the video, pass on the link to parents and teachers who will share it with young people. Any parent with a daughter moving into middle school and adolescence knows how frustrating it is to watch a child interact with unhealthy media images in magazines, movies, television shows, and now spread all over the World Wide Web. Parents of boys have similar concerns, though this particular PSA is aimed at young women and girls.

Continue reading “Watch What You Watch – New Media PSA for Girls” →

digital parenting, online databases, parents and technology, research on the web

Do You Know What Makes a Good Website? Does Your Child Know?

Posted on October 19, 2010March 1, 2015 by Marti Weston

If the information in this post is helpful, you may also want to read my post Staying Ahead With Digital Research.

How can one determine whether or not a website is reliable?

Obviously if the website is part of library resources, students and parents can usually be assured of its quality. However, when a child sits down at a personal home computer, makes a general search on a topic for a school assignment, and begins clicking through results, understanding the characteristics that make a website reliable is critical.

Questions to Help Parents and Children Determine if a Website is Reliable …

Is the site visually interesting with an organized layout?
Does it balance writing with helpful illustrations?
Is the writer qualified to be writing on the subject? How do you know?
Can you identify facts and information about your topic that you already know are accurate
Are the fonts simple, easy to read, and uncluttered?
Is the site updated on a regular basis? How do you know?
Are there irritating pop-ups and/or other distractions. (However be aware that newspapers do have these pop-up windows.)

Kids, Hate Groups, and the Internet: There’s So Much to Encounter!

Posted on October 15, 2010September 21, 2019 by Marti Weston

In today’s digital world groups increasingly troll the Internet, depositing easily available and intriguing materials — music, posters, jokes, cartoons, and stories — whose sole purpose is to introduce growing children to hate. Over recent years this readily available propaganda, designed expressly to appeal to teen sarcasm, edgy humor, and musical preferences, strives to look like any other funny or absurd digital content a student might casually discover. Except that it’s not funny.

It’s also not something for parents to scare. The simple fix is for parents and educators to talk with children, mentoring them, helping them learn to evaluate, guiding them to develop an eagle eye that identifies and filters hateful content — exactly what you teach them to do with any other inappropriate content.

All of us — educators, parents, and especially adolescents — need to know how to recognize this type of information and how to alert others. Hate groups look for vulnerable pre-adolescents and teens from every socioeconomic group. The level of education in a child’s home and an emphasis on values of respect and acceptance may not make a difference if a child, during an especially needy, lonely, or stressful time or through an error in judgment, encounters a clever hate group tactic. Many children are simply attracted by absurdity, laughing at symbols they know little about. That’s also when a group may try, if it has even a bit of personal information, to encourage an adolescent to come back, laugh some more, and maybe even make a friend.

Hate groups have become more active and more visible since President Obama’s 2008 election, but these organizations, some quite small, have courted young people for years. An old, but still relevant Salon Magazine article, Web of Hate, described the problem as it existed on the Internet in 1998, providing a good background. The issue, however, is far more serious today.

The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) spends a considerable amount of its time and money tracking purveyors of hate. Its website features an interactive hate map and also provides first-rate resources that parents, teachers, and religious leaders can use when hateful content surfaces or when it’s necessary to actually fight recruitment tactics. The map, by the way, is an extraordinary teaching tool in itself, but so are the SPLC intelligence files such as this one on the Ku Klux Klan.

Read about the white power racist music industry and some of its recruitment strategies. In an article in the California-based, East Country Magazine, James McElroy, a chairman of the SPLC board comments:

We try to shine a little light on it. Hate is like a fungus under a rock. Shine a light and you can eradicate it.

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digital citizenship, digital parenting, privacy, social networking

More on Facebook Privacy

Posted on October 13, 2010October 13, 2010 by Marti Weston

The blog Techlicious has a great posting on Facebook privacy updates, especially vis-a-vis groups that a user joins. In Facebook Groups and App Dashboard Provide New Privacy Features Josh Kirschner, offers his suggestions about how to set up private groups, and he also writes and embeds a video about the third-party dashboard that Facebook is rolling out.

Best, but not surprising quote, “… assume everything you post could become public at any time.”

When you talk about social networking, texting, and other digital activities with your children, you cannot use the word privacy too much in your conversations.

acceptable use, answers to media questions, cultural changes, digital parenting, interesting research, parents and technology, social media, social networking

Social Networking Researcher, dana boyd, Speaks at Brown University

Posted on October 10, 2010February 27, 2015 by Marti Weston

As the parent of a Brown University alum, I occasionally check the Brown Daily Herald, the engaging student newspaper that kept me connected during years when my child did not necessarily let me know what was happening. By reading the student newspaper I could find out who was speaking at the university, why certain important issues concerned Brown students, and what significant faculty research projects interested me. More importantly during that time, an amazing woman, academic superstar Ruth Simmons, Ph.D., assumed the presidency of the university, and from that moment on, there was never a dull moment, at least from my perspective, anywhere at Brown or in the Daily Herald.

This week I read with some interest a Brown Daily Herald article about the visit of dana boyd (yes, she spells her name with no caps), a Brown alum (’00) who has established a reputation as an astute observer of the social networking culture and the issues that arise from so many of us using one or another of these virtual communication tools. Her research has focused especially on teens and social networking.

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digital parenting, great sites for students, homework, Internet Public Library, parents and technology, research on the web, resources to read, teens and technology

Internet Public Library — Bookmark It!

Posted on October 9, 2010February 28, 2015 by Marti Weston

Parents and teachers are always on the hunt for a reliable Internet site that children can visit time after time and be certain of the quality and reliability of the content. The Internet Public Library (ipl2) fits the bill, a resource that is just as good for adults as it is for children. With a motto of “Information You Can Trust” the IPL2 is a searchable, subject-categorized directory of authoritative websites with links to online texts, newspapers, and other resources. Librarians review everything in the collection.