Category: In the news

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A decade of decline in online youth victimization

It’s not the headline that’s going to make the national press. Ho hum, young people aren’t perverts or helpless victims. But here’s another slice of non-sensationalistic reality about what parents and teachers SHOULDN’T flip out about…

From the press release – “A new study from the University of New Hampshire Crimes against Children Research Center finds declines in two kinds of youth Internet sexual encounters of great concern to parents: unwanted sexual solicitations and unwanted exposure to pornography. The researchers suspect that greater public awareness may have been, in part, what has helped.

The study found that the percentage of youth receiving unwanted online sexual requests declined from 13 percent in 2005 to 9 percent in 2010. Youth experiencing unwanted pornography exposure declined from 34 percent to 23 percent over the same period.

On the other hand, youth reports of online harassment increased slightly from 2005, up from 9 percent to 11 percent.

The study, “Trends in Youth Internet Victimization: Findings From Three Youth Internet Safety Surveys 2000–2010,” was published today online in the Journal of Adolescent Health. It is based on national surveys of youth ages 10 through 17 conducted in 2000, 2005, and 2010.

“The constant news about Internet dangers may give the impression that all Internet problems have been getting worse for youth but actually that is not the case,” said lead author Lisa Jones, research associate professor of psychology at the UNH Crimes against Children Research Center. “The online environment may be improving.” Jones pointed out that unwanted sexual solicitations are down over 50 percent since 2000, when attention first was drawn to the problem.

“The arrests, the publicity and the education may have tamped down the sexual soliciting online” said author Kimberly Mitchell, research assistant professor of psychology at the UNH Crimes against Children Research Center. ”The more effective safety and screening features incorporated into websites and networks may have helped reduce the unwanted encounters with pornography.”

Jones said harassment may not have fallen because attention to that online problem has been more recent. ”Hopefully, the new focus on online harassment will produce some of the same improvements in this problem that we have seen in sexual solicitations,” she said.

The authors cautioned that unwanted sexual solicitations should not be understood as necessarily communications from adult online predators. Previous research has found that while youth do not know the source of all the unwanted sexual solicitations they receive, when they did know, half were believed to come from other youth.”

Download the PDF – Trends in Youth Internet Victimization: Findings From Three Youth Internet Safety Surveys 2000–2010

And by the way, thanks to the University of New Hampshire Crimes against Children Research Center and the Journal of Adolescent Health for making this publicly available.

Sylvia

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Overhauling Computer Science Education

“Students from elementary school through college are learning on laptops and have access to smartphone apps for virtually everything imaginable, but they are not learning the basic computer-related technology that makes all those gadgets work. Some organizations are partnering with universities to change that.”

THE Journal has run an important article about the efforts to overhaul Computer Science education in the U.S. (Overhauling Computer Science Education – Nov/Dec 2011.)

It’s long been a mystery to me that computer science isn’t being taught in U.S. schools. No, not computer literacy, which is also important, but often stops at the “how to use application x, y, or z” level. Why are we not teaching students how to program, master, and manage the most powerful aspects of the most important invention of the 20th and 21st century?

I believe there are two reasons, both based in fear.

1. Fear that adding a new “science” will take time away from “real” math and science. In my opinion, the US K-12 math and science curriculum has been frozen in time. It’s not relevant or real anymore, and needs a vast overhaul. But there are lots of forces at work to keep the status quo definitions of what kids are taught. And I do mean to draw a distinction between what students are taught and what they learn. For too many young people, what they learn is that math is boring, difficult, and not relevant, and science is about memorizing arcane terms. This is just a shame and waste.

2. Fear that computer science is too hard to teach in K-12. People worry that teachers are already stressed and stretched, that there aren’t enough computer science teachers, and that computer science is just something best left to colleges. That’s just a cop out. There are lots of teachers who learn to teach all kinds of difficult subjects – no one is born ready to teach chemistry or how to play the oboe, but people learn to do it all the time. Plus, there are computer languages and development tools for all ages, and lots of support on the web for people to try them out.

Please read this article – it covers a wide range of options and ideas for adding this very important subject to the lives of young people who deserve a relevant, modern education! Overhauling Computer Science Education

Sylvia

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Infographic: Understanding a Diverse Generation: Youth Civic Engagement in the United States

From the CIRCLE website:

“A new CIRCLE study, “Understanding a Diverse Generation: Youth Civic Engagement in the United States,” shatters stereotypes and dispels conventional myths about the ways in which young people ages 18-29 are involved in the United States political system.

The study from THE CENTER FOR INFORMATION & RESEARCH ON CIVIC LEARNING AND ENGAGEMENT – CIRCLE uses U.S. Census data on young voters from across the United States and compares youth engagement in the 2008 and 2010 election cycles. Despite the over-simplified portrayal of young Americans in the news media, their political engagement is diverse. The study shows that at least three quarters of youth were somehow engaged in their community or in politics in both 2008 and 2010. But they engaged in very different ways. The key finding of the study is that young Americans were divided into six distinct patterns of engagement in recent years. In 2010, the clusters were:

  • The Broadly Engaged (21% of youth) fill many different leadership roles
  • The Political Specialists (18%) are focused on voting and other forms of political activism
  • The Donors (11%) give money but do little else;
  • The Under-Mobilized (14%) were registered to vote in 2010 but did not actually vote or participate actively
  • The Talkers (13%) report discussing political issues and are avid communicators online, but do not take action otherwise
  • The Civically Alienated (23%) hardly engage at all.”

Sylvia

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Drama! Why adult concepts of cyberbullying don’t mesh with teens

It’s an unimaginable tragedy for any person to commit suicide. It’s a family’s worst nightmare and a problem that society must address. In recent months, more and more news stories are surfacing about very young people committing suicide and tying the cause to bullying, especially in online environments – cyberbullying.

Campaigns have started to find ways to reach youth with media and school anti-bullying programs. Of course people want to do the right thing. Of course adults want to help young people. But what really does help?

Alice Marwick and danah boyd, both highly respected social media and youth researchers wrote an op-ed for the New York Times today – Why Cyberbullying Rhetoric Misses the Mark

It’s based on a new paper – The Drama! Teen Conflict, Gossip, and Bullying in Networked Publics

You should read these, both of them. Why? Because the authors talked to teens, and listened. For six years. Across all kinds of kids, all kinds of socio-economic groups and geography. What they heard was that teens do not use the same language as adults. What an adult might label “bullying”, teens call “drama.” And in the paper, the authors distill what that means and how it plays out in real life (both online and off.)

It’s not just a different word for the same thing. The authors listened to youth about the motivation – why would teens engage in drama? What do they get out of it? It’s a fascinating read.

One of the big takeaways for me was the relationship of adult bullying solutions to the issues of youth agency. When we ask young people to accept adult definitions and solutions to the problems of their lives, adults often ignore the fact that this is asking them to put a label on themselves. If you are being bullied and adults tell you “tell an adult”, it’s meant as a friendly, supportive gesture. However, for a young person, that means first accepting that they are a victim. This is a big ask for a young person building their own identity.

I hope you take the time to read both the article and the full paper. They are worth it!

Sylvia

Paper Abstract: While teenage conflict is nothing new, today’s gossip, jokes, and arguments often play out through social media like Formspring, Twitter, and Facebook. Although adults often refer to these practices with the language of “bullying,” teens are more likely to refer to the resultant skirmishes and their digital traces as “drama.” Drama is a performative set of actions distinct from bullying, gossip, and relational aggression, incorporating elements of them but also operating quite distinctly. While drama is not particularly new, networked dynamics reconfigure how drama plays out and what it means to teens in new ways. In this paper, we examine how American teens conceptualize drama, its key components, participant motivations for engaging in it, and its relationship to networked technologies. Drawing on six years of ethnographic fieldwork, we examine what drama means to teenagers and its relationship to visibility and privacy. We argue that the emic use of “drama” allows teens to distance themselves from practices which adults may conceptualize as bullying. As such, they can retain agency – and save face – rather than positioning themselves in a victim narrative. Drama is a gendered process that perpetrates conventional gender norms. It also reflects discourses of celebrity, particularly the mundane interpersonal conflict found on soap operas and reality television. For teens, sites like Facebook allow for similar performances in front of engaged audiences. Understanding how “drama” operates is necessary to recognize teens’ own defenses against the realities of aggression, gossip, and bullying in networked publics.

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Information overload – a historical perspective

Feeling overwhelmed by too much information? What else is new? The amount of digital data available on the Web every day reaches records of mind-boggling proportions—now more than a zettabyte (1021 bytes) and presumably accumulating at an ever-increasing rate, estimated at 30-percent growth per year from 1999 to 2002.

But such figures—often presented as evidence of unprecedented and stress-inducing overload—don’t mean much. After all, it takes only one or two pages of Google hits to overwhelm the average reader. Does it really matter whether there are hundreds or thousands more pages after those?

More important, information overload was experienced long before the appearance of today’s digital gadgets. Complaints about “too many books” echo across the centuries, from when books were papyrus rolls, parchment manuscripts, or hand printed.

Read more of this fascinating article…

It always bothers me when people talk about how information is overloading children today. It just seems like adults projecting their own anxiety onto children. Children have no idea that there is “more” information now, their context is the present. They aren’t overloaded any more than our generation was overloaded the first time we walked into a library. No one ran out screaming “I’ll never read them all!!!”

That’s not to say that children don’t need guidance. But let’s leave our adult neuroses at the door when teaching children about the riches of the Internet.

Sylvia

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Suspension is an adult choice with disastrous consequences

A new study out from the CSG Justice Center, in partnership with the Public Policy Research Institute at Texas A&M University, has released an humongous statewide study of nearly 1 million Texas public secondary school students, followed for at least six years. This is a major, major study with unprecedented depth and breadth.

Breaking Schools’ Rules: A Statewide Study on How School Discipline Relates to Students’ Success and Juvenile Justice Involvement

This study is staggering, and not just for its documentation of the “prison pipeline” that suspension policies create. Not even for the finding that when students are suspended or expelled, the likelihood that they will repeat a grade, not graduate, and/or become involved in the juvenile justice system increases significantly. Or even that African-American students and children with particular educational disabilities who qualify for special education were suspended and expelled at especially high rates.

All those sobering facts pale in comparison to the finding that as the Washington Post story says, “Here’s one myth of school debunked: Harsh discipline is not always a reflection of the students in a particular school. It can be driven by those in charge. In a study of nearly a million Texas children described as an unprecedented look at discipline, researchers found that nearly identical schools suspended and expelled students at very different rates.”

This study shows that suspension isn’t something that is “forced” on schools who have to deal with out-of-control kids and bad communities.

So this is a choice. A choice adults make that has disastrous consequences for children and society. And now, a completely unjustified choice.

Sylvia

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“It’s about student engagement and student empowerment”

student leaders
Students Learn to be Tech Leaders

Mount Airy News – Empowering students through GenYES

After some of the members of the Surry County Schools Board of Education visited a technology conference, they brought back an idea the school system will begin implementing in the fall.

Middle school students in the system will begin the GenYES program developed by Dr. Dennis Harper. The program has been in existence since the late ’90s and has spread across the country and even to four other countries, but Surry County is the first in North Carolina to implement it.

“This caught our eye because it was a student-led type of initiative. It’s something they could take hold of and do on their own,” said Earlie Coe, board chairman. “They had some great success with it.”

The school system believes that this will coincide with the 1:1 laptop initiative that will expand from seventh and eighth grade to the high schools next year. Empowering students to be leaders and valued partners in the school laptop implementation can lead to increased classroom technology integration, greater support for classroom teachers using new technologies and greater understanding and support for program goals, the school officials believe.

“It’s about student engagement and student empowerment. They will become part of the planning, execution and implementation part of our 1:1 initiative. They will learn how to use the software, how to best utilize the laptops in the classroom and help on troubleshooting and minor repairs,” said Jill Reinhardt, director of technology and career and technical education for the school system.

Read more: Mount Airy News – Empowering students through GenYES

Learn more about GenYES

Sylvia

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Panel Finds Few Learning Gains From Testing Movement

Nearly a decade of America’s test-based accountability systems, from “adequate yearly progress” to high school exit exams, have shown little to no positive effect overall on learning and education and have not included enough safeguards against gaming the system, a blue-ribbon committee of the National Academies of Science concludes in a new report.

– Education Week – Panel Finds Few Learning Gains From Testing Movement

So, if this is all about “scientifically based evidence,” the testing will stop, right?

Sylvia

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New! Join the ‘Connect All Schools’ movement

Generation YES is proud to be one of over 80 educational organizations taking part in a new Connect All Schools Initiative, which aims to connect EVERY school in the United States with the world by 2016.

Through the Connect All Schools interactive website, schools share stories using text, photo and video about how they are currently connecting their students to the rest of the world through such activities as student and teacher exchanges, global issues curricula, video-conferences and “Exchanges 2.0,” the use of new media and communications technologies to expand, extend, and deepen international cross-cultural exchanges.

Not seeing the video?
Direct link to YouTube video introduction to “Connect All Schools”

“Despite the importance of global competency and engagement, US teachers are not aware of the many options for introducing their students to global issues, world languages, online international interaction and physical exchanges,” said iEARN-USA Executive Director Ed Gragert, who is spearheading the project. “By reading stories of what schools are already doing, additional teachers across the country can learn about specific examples and work with partner organizations to replicate the successes around the country.”

“Imagine the possibilities for our students to learn WITH the world, instead of just about it,” said Dr. Gragert. “Research has clearly demonstrated that authentic interaction with the world’s students across the curriculum results in enhanced learning, improved test scores and a heightened motivation to learn.”

For more information on this exciting initiative or to share your story, please visit: www.connectallschools.org

Sylvia

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Buzzword alert – Gamification

Have you been gamified yet? Perhaps not a painful as it sounds, gamification is on its way to becoming THE buzzword of 2011. Social media engagement tools such as badges, points, levels, leaderboards, etc are making their way out of hipster apps to every online engagement you can think of. Yes, it all sounds oddly familiar (green stamps, reward cards, etc.) but of course, it’s all NEW NEW NEW, with gurus and pundits claiming that gamification will change the way we live and of course, spend money.

Rick Gibson of Games Investor Consulting is quoted (pretty much everywhere) as saying, “Some analysts estimate that 50% of companies will have ‘gamified’ by 2015. That’s 13.5 million businesses in the U.S. alone. That seems pretty ambitious to me.”

But hey, guess what! Education is actually AHEAD of the gamification movement for once! Educators have listened to the breathless pronouncements about how games are the future of education for years! And guess what else?! It’s pretty much the same hype that is going on right now in business.

For years we’ve seen “educational games” that are merely flash cards and multiple choice tests dressed up in the costume of games. They use the vocabulary and graphics of games but suck out the fun and replace it with content drills. But you get points!… and badges! And as every good educator knows, points and badges are the only reason kids would ever want to learn… right? (Gosh I hope the sarcasm translates there… if not, read Punished By Rewards, or this interview with Alfie Kohn, the books’ author.)

A few game designers are pushing back against the “gamification” of business. In Persuasive Games: Exploitationware, Ian Bogost, a well-known serious game designer, discusses what’s wrong with the idea that you can take “…the easiest way possible to capture some of the fairy dust of games and spread it upon products and services.”

But as he also points out, the difficulty of designing great games is hardly of concern to the marketeers and consultants who will jump on this bandwagon, wring some money out of it, and move on.

Nicholas Lovell writes in Gamification: Hype or Game-Changer? (Wall Street Journal,) “Others argue that gamification at best ignores the unique feelings of fun, learning, joy, flow and discovery that lie at the heart of a game, and at worst is the evil exploitation of human nature by psychological tricks and Pavlovian manipulation.”

Yup, sounds just like most educational games.

The next time you hear that some educational activity should be “gamified” – just ask:

  • Are you talking about adding extrinsic motivation? Why does this experience not have intrinsic motivation?
  • Is the “game” aspect integral to the context of the learning?
  • Would this activity be valuable if it were not “gamified”? If not, why is adding game elements an effective strategy?
  • Is a competitive aspect harmful in any way to some children?
  • Are you labeling children as winners and losers for no apparent reason?
  • Are the game elements the same elements you would consider necessary for real learning? For example, if a game element is a time limit, is there a real reason for speed over accuracy or thoughtfulness?
  • Does the game rely on out of context memorization to “win”?
  • Does the gamification create unintentional incentives to “game the system”, limit risk-taking or avoid challenging problems? For example, to repeat easier exercises just to build up points?

Hopefully as parents and educators see this crass move to “gamify” consumer experiences, it will help make it clearer that gamifying education is just as silly.

Sylvia