Summer is here again, and for older children and teens that often means more media use: more Web surfing, more video game playing, more music and more TV. For kids who are old enough to be home alone but not yet working, summer is often an opportunity to plunge into leisure activities that are more moderately indulged in during the school year. As well, the lack of structure can make it very easy to fall into bad media use habits, and young people may wind up spending entire days in front of various screens (sometimes more than one at a time.)

How serious an issue is screen time? A study by the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health found that roughly ten percent of Ontario youth spend at least seven hours per day in front of a computer, TV or game console. According to a 2006 World Health Organization study cited here, Canadian youth engaged in an average of six hours of screen time per day (this rose to seven and a half hours per day on weekends; summer, of course, is essentially a two-month weekend.)

The media activity that probably raises parents’ concern the most is video games. The good news is that your child may be better off playing video games than watching TV: unlike TV viewing, for instance, playing video games is not associated with high blood pressure. As well, a recent study has shown that youth who play certain types of video games – in particular, sports-themed games – are likely to play physical sports as well. Some video game systems, most notably the Nintendo Wii, add a physical dimension to the gameplay itself by requiring the player to move her feet or swing a controller. (Most of Nintendo’s competitors are bringing similar systems to the market.)

That being said, most of the games popular among older children and teens are on systems with standard hands-only controllers (or on computers, such as World of Warcraft,) and there’s no question that long stretches of sedentary game playing are unhealthy. In fact, the negative effects go beyond the game replacing more active pursuits: research has shown that long stretches of being sedentary can cause a variety of health problems even when offset with exercise.

More worrying than the physical effects of excessive game playing are the psychological effects. There has been a lot of talk in the last few years about Internet and video game addiction, but it’s not yet clear if overuse of either genuinely has the characteristics of an addiction. What is clear is that heavy media use can have a variety of negative effects, both on a person’s physical and mental health. Moreover, it may be harder during the summer to notice or recognize the signs of problem media use because of the absence of a normal routine. Generally, video game playing (or Internet use, or nearly any other activity) can be considered problematic when it starts interfering with someone’s normal life, but in summer it can be difficult to define what normal life is – just as someone might spend every waking hour of July and August practicing jump shots or skateboard tricks without it being considered a warning sign, so too might it not be that unusual for someone to devote all their time to mastering a video game or “levelling up” their character in an RPG. Some signs of problem use, though, are still meaningful. For instance, is your child becoming isolated from friends? Are his sleep habits or general health being affected? Does he become depressed and argumentative when unable to play the game? Keep in mind that games, like other hobbies, are supposed to be fun; if a game seems to be making your child unhappy (aside from the occasional frustration over a lost duel or blocked progress) there may well be something wrong.

Even if your child is a social butterfly who’s hardly ever home, though, doesn’t mean that media use isn’t a problem. That’s because for most teens and tweens there is no separation between their online and offline social lives, with physical attendance at dates, parties and get-togethers flowing seamlessly into the online discussion and dissection of them. Checking status updates, tweaking profiles and commenting on photos can be as obsessive as video game playing, with the added problem that it often goes on around the clock. Rather than being isolated from their friends, in this case youth feel like “microcelebrities”  – with everyone in their circle messaging and commenting on everyone else, they may be reluctant to ever turn off the computer or phone.

In either case, parents can use the same strategies to help their kids moderate their media use in summer (and year-round.) The most important of these is simply to set household rules regarding screen time and media use. While parents (and youth) may be sceptical, there is strong evidence that the existence of rules on media use has a positive effect on behaviour. A recent study showed that having consistent rules makes kids less prone to excessive screen time, a finding which echoes MNet’s research showing the positive effects of household rules on online behaviour. You can also set rules by controlling the physical environment in your home: keeping TVs and Internet-capable computers in public spaces and, if necessary, imposing a “cell phone curfew” after which phones and Web-capable devices need to be handed over to you. More broadly, it’s important to talk to your kids about your expectations and concerns relating to their media use, and to listen to them when they talk about their media experiences. Finally, it’s important to model good media use as well – if your iPhone is on the dining room table every night, the message that sends is going to be louder than anything you can say.

On July 7th 2010 Media Awareness Network submitted its discussion paper, Digital Literacy in Canada: From Inclusion to Transformation, to the federal government’s Digital Economy Consultation process. This paper situates digital literacy skills development for all Canadians as the cornerstone of any national plan for the digital economy and calls on the federal government to take a leadership role in supporting solutions that will create citizens who know how to use digital technologies to their fullest and who can think critically about digital content.

The government’s consultation process has been ongoing since May, but this paper has been in the works here for over a year. Why? Because although there’s been a lot of high-level government-led discussion on what Canada should do to remain competitive in a digital world, little has been said up to now about the skills needed by ordinary Canadians – of all ages – to prepare them for working, learning and living in this promising and challenging digital world. Media Awareness Network, along with stakeholders from both the formal and informal education sectors, technology industries, cultural communities and libraries, believes that a much broader approach is needed to cultivate a digitally literate population which in turn will fuel the digital economy.

Luckily for Canada, we have the advantage of being able to build on the considerable research and precedent that has already been established in government initiatives for the digital economy in countries like the UK (Digital Britain), New Zealand (Digital Strategy 2.0), Australia (Future Directions) and the United States (National Broadband Plan: Connecting America). Each has positioned digital literacy as a crucial component for participation, inclusion and innovation in a knowledge economy; each recognizes the acquisition of digital literacy as an “essential life skill” which represents a process of life-long learning that incorporates K-12 and post-secondary education, vocational training, and public awareness.

In its discussion paper, MNet connects Canada’s declining performance in the digital economy with a failure to develop a national strategy that balances investments in technology and infrastructure with investments in skills and knowledge. Infrastructure is not enough: Canadians need to know how to use ICTs to improve the quality of their lives, increase productivity throughout the private and public sectors, develop innovative products and services, and create new media and digital content: but they cannot do this alone. In its submission, MNet argues that maximizing the potential of a digital Canada demands a comprehensive national plan to ensure citizens have the resources to learn how to access, use, understand and create with digital technology. A national “digital literacy strategy” should not only include job training and skills development, but also support throughout K-12 and post-secondary educational systems and public awareness, so citizens can continue to acquire digital literacy skills throughout their life-spans.

It’s clear that being literate in a digital world entails much more than technological proficiency. No single document can encapsulate the many different aspects of information, ICT, media, and critical literacies that being digitally literate entails – not to mention the wide variety of ethical, social, and reflective practices that are embedded in work, learning, leisure, and daily life. But such a document can certainly establish guidelines and foundational standards that can then be built upon move users beyond participation in the digital economy towards the more transformative areas of innovation, constructive social action, and critical and creative thinking. 

The ultimate goal of this submission is to act as a catalyst for the creation of a national strategy for digital literacy that builds on the knowledge, expertise and perspectives of key stakeholders in order to accurately reflect and meet the needs of Canadians. To this end, the discussion paper makes the following recommendations:

1. Immediately create a digital literacy taskforce comprising key stakeholders at all levels of government (both federal and provincial), as well as those representing business and communities across Canada, to develop a cross-jurisdictional blueprint for a National Digital Literacy Strategy.

2. Support the implementation of a national study of students and teachers, to determine, from each of their perspectives, the digital skills that are needed by Canadian children and youth.

3. Within one year host a Digital Literacy Stakeholder Conference that brings together a broader group of stakeholders from all four spheres of implementation to develop and launch a coordinated national strategy focused on strengthening digital literacy in Canada as a fundamental cornerstone of the digital economy strategy and to highlight government digital literacy initiatives.

Canada has clearly recognized the importance of ICTs – as is evident by the significant investments in broadband and wireless network infrastructure that has been made over the past decade. But building networks is not enough. In order to adapt to the challenge of balancing our old economic and educational systems with the new networked, mediated ways of doing business and educating our citizens, the issue for Canadians is no longer if we use digital technology but how well we use it.

We hope that by making the case for digital literacy as part of the government’s consultation process, we can work together to ensure that all Canadians can thrive in a digital Canada and a digital world.

To download the full version of Digital Literacy in Canada: From Inclusion to Transformation, visit http://www.media-awareness.ca/english/corporate/media_kit/reports-publications.cfm.

New York's Gramercy Park is a curious institution: two acres of fenced-in greenspace that is accessible only to those who own the houses surrounding the park. (Non-residents must either stay at the Gramercy Park Hotel or join the Players Club or National Arts Club if they want to visit, and each of these institutions has a limited number of park keys.) Private parks like it are the exception, of course, not the rule: since the days of Frederick Law Olmsted, who campaigned for and designed city parks across North America (Central Park, in New York, and Montreal's Mount Royal Park among them) we have come to expect most of our recreational spaces to be public. Cities and neighbourhoods are routinely rated on both the quantity and quality of their parks, and any suggestion that these services should be cut back always receives violent reactions from taxpayers; playgrounds, too, are public by default.

The near-universality of public parks and playgrounds in our physical spaces makes it all the more striking that the online world contains almost no spaces that are genuinely public. Instead, it is made up almost entirely of spaces that are either overtly or covertly commercial. The latter of these we might term “pseudo-public” spaces, where there is a disconnect between users' perceptions of them as public and their actual private nature.

Before continuing, it would be good to make a clear definition of what is meant by the term public space. To begin with, we might say that a public space is a public service: it does not have to justify its existence by any means other than providing citizens with a place to be. Its status as a public service means that its continued existence is guaranteed: if you move into a neighbourhood with parks and playgrounds, you can expect that they will not be paved over. (The notion of a public service blurs somewhat when we look at services that are considered essential but may be provided by private entities, such as power or telephone service; in these cases, while the government is not providing the service, it does guarantee through regulation that the service will not be discontinued.) Another essential element of public spaces is that they are by default accessible to all: their use is a right that can only be taken away due to misbehaviour, not a privilege that must be bought or earned, and using them involves no special contractual obligations. This also means that people using public spaces do not have to give up any of their other rights, most notably freedom of expression. Finally, it is worth pointing out that public spaces are, by definition, public and not private, and therefore normally free of advertising or other commercial content.

With this definition in hand we can see that few of the online spaces perceived by their users as public are anything of the sort. Perhaps the best example would be Facebook, a site which bills itself as a community and is generally treated as such by its users. It's not hard to see why: it is free to use, and like its competitors it very much feels like “my space” -- users can customize their profiles, organize their own groups and communities and select or even create their own apps (third-party programs that do a variety of things such as games, quizzes and so on.) Facebook has become a focus for civic participation, and users frequently behave as though it were itself a democracy (such as when changes to the Terms of Service were protested in 2009.)

Despite its appearance, though, Facebook is in no way a public space. To begin with, it is owned by a corporation, that is not government regulated, and while there is no direct fee for participating, users pay through being exposed to ads (in the same way that we pay for television.) Moreover, its continued existence is not guaranteed: aside from its contracts with advertisers, there is nothing preventing Facebook from going permanently offline tomorrow. Similarly, to participate in Facebook one must agree to its Terms of Service, which involve giving up rights to privacy, intellectual property, and freedom of expression – and which allow Facebook to terminate a user's account at any time for essentially any reason. (Those terms are also subject to being unilaterally changed by Facebook.) Finally, its dependence on advertising for revenue means that when conflicts arise advertisers will always win out

When viewed through this lens, it becomes clear that nearly everything online that looks like a public space, from Facebook to Hotmail to Google to YouTube, does not meet any reasonable definition of the term. (Perhaps the only exceptions are those sites operated by public broadcasters, such as the CBC or PBS, and donation-funded non-profit organizations such as Wikipedia.) Children's online spaces are, if anything, even less public. MNet's 2005 survey Young Canadians In A Wired World found that the vast majority of sites popular among youth were heavily commercialized, and in the years since that survey was released advertisers have become even more skilful at integrating commercial content into kids' online experiences; for instance, the virtual worlds BarbieGirls and Nicktropolis include brand-related references in the pre-programmed phrases available in their “safe chat” mechanisms.

Considering how attached we are to our offline public spaces, how is it that the absence of public space online has received so little attention? One reason is no doubt due to the ad hoc nature of the Internet: there are no zoning restrictions, not city plans, no directly elected authorities to whom we might appeal. As well, the Internet -- at least once it spread beyond the halls of academe -- has always been commercial: unlike the European and American traditions of a village commons or town square, there is no history of genuinely free space on the Internet. Likely the most significant reason, though, is that so much of the Internet seems free. As noted above, there are few online services for which one pays directly anymore; instead, we pay largely without knowing it, with our attention and our personal data as the currency. Facebook, again, is a good example of what we might call a “commercial commons”: though it is a for-profit enterprise it goes to great lengths to seem like a public space. Google, too, feels like a public service, if not a public space, but it too is beholden to a variety of commercial interests; so too are webmail services such as Hotmail and Gmail.

We get the Internet we deserve, of course, and it's reasonable to say that if no genuinely public equivalents to these sites exist it's because we don't really want them to -- after all, we have a choice to agree to their Terms of Service, which define a space that is unambiguously private.  But the fact that these sites create such a successful illusion of being public spaces or services means that people are all that much more likely to be unaware of the implications of their commercial nature. People rightly object if Canada Post changes the services it offers (as when they made the move to “super-boxes” in rural communities), but they may not be aware that Microsoft is under no obligation to continue providing “free” webmail access through Hotmail.

More importantly, we have to face the fact that not everyone who uses these services is an adult. Facebook allows users to agree to its Terms of Service at thirteen -- five years before someone can legally agree to a contract, in most countries -- and that policy is little-enforced:  a quarter of youth under twelve in the UK have social networking profiles. Moreover, many sites aimed explicitly at children, from Neopets to Club Penguin, make similar efforts to create a sense of being public spaces and communities. If Gramercy Park had been the model for our municipal parks -- if we had to pay to let our children use them, whether directly in money, indirectly through advertising or data collection, or a mixture of both -- would we stand for it? Or would we demand that our governments provide true public spaces where all our children could play?

 

Further reading

To explore these issues further, you can take a look at our sister site Be Web Aware for more information on:

Social networking sites

Virtual worlds

Online advertising

For information on how to talk to youth about public space issues, check out the recent book Watch This Space (to which I contributed)

When Marlene Kane’s sixteen-year-old son Andrew asked her to drive him to the nearby town of Midland last December, she was surprised to hear that he wanted to meet with someone he had met while playing the online game World of Warcraft – and even more surprised to learn that the person he was meeting was a 42-year-old mother of four from Texas. Experts on sexual solicitation of youth online were less shocked however. In fact, for them the only surprising thing was Lauri Price’s sex. Everything else about the scenario – how they made contact, Price’s openness about her age, Andrew’s willingness to meet her, and the lack of deception about her intentions – all fit the evolving picture of how youth are sexually exploited online.

All of this contrasts with the popular image of an “Internet predator,” which over the years has been built up to be similar to the monster in the movie Alien: a pedophile, most likely a man in his forties, who conceals himself within a false Internet identity and uses it to win the trust of a young girl, leading up to an offline meeting which ends in an abduction and rape. Recent research, however – particularly work done by Janis Wolak, David Finkelhor, and Kimberly J. Mitchell of the Crimes against Children Research Center and Family Research Laboratory at the University of New Hampshire and by Michele L. Ybarra of the organization Internet Solutions for Kids – has shown that this picture is almost entirely false.

To begin with, the research has shown that social networking sites such as MySpace and Facebook are not any more dangerous than other online environments. In fact, the only online environment that does correlate to receiving sexual solicitations is chat rooms, and in general online sex offenders rely on tools such as e-mail and instant messaging (IM) to develop relationships with their victims. What these technologies have in common is that they are immediate and intimate – chatrooms and IM, in particular, mimic a live conversation. In this way we might see the movement of youth away from chatrooms to social networking sites as an improvement in terms of their safety from online sexual solicitation. Although the research available does not specifically consider online games as a means of communication, their chat systems resemble chat rooms and IM, in that conversations are carried out in real time and there are relatively few barriers to contacting someone – you can chat with anyone who is on the same “channel,” and channels are generally public.

While it was once thought that posting personal information online was a particularly dangerous activity, the research has shown that it does not, by itself, increase the risk of receiving sexual solicitations. Instead, it is one of a number of behaviours that may be considered risky. The more of these behaviours a youth engages in, the greater the risk of receiving sexual solicitations. In addition to posting personal information, behaviours identified as being risky are include sending personal information to people not known to you, interacting online with people you don’t know, having unknown people on a “buddy” or contact list, talking to unknown people online about sex, seeking out online pornography, being rude or aggressive towards others online, using the Internet to embarrass or harass others, and downloading images from file-sharing programs. It’s important to note that these behaviours are associated with receiving sexual solicitations online, not necessarily the cause of it. Rather, the evidence suggests that engaging in four or more of these behaviours is associated with a general risk-taking attitude that increases the risk that a youth will receive and respond to online solicitations: research has shown that the same youth are risk offline as online. Although we don’t have a full picture of Andrew Kane’s online behaviour, it’s clear that he had engaged in at least two of these behaviours: sending personal information to someone he only knew online and talking about sex online. Like the vast majority of reported victims, he went willingly to his offline meeting: only one of all the cases in the American study involved an abduction, and only one in twenty involved forced sex. (Investigators have remarked that victims often remain loyal to offenders even after the relationship has been brought to light, which can make prosecutions difficult.)

The most unusual thing about the case was the sex genders of the two people involved: nearly all (99%) of those who solicit sex online are male, and 79% of victims are girls; of the 21% who are boys, most are gay or are questioning their sexuality. At 42, her Lauri Price’s age was somewhat unusual: while American research has shown that 60% of offenders are over 25, recent Canadian data found that only about 35% of those accused of “child luring” were over 35. Aside from those, however, Lauri Price was fairly typical of those who solicit sex from youth online. To begin with she was white, as are 84% of online predators; as well, she had no history of violence (like 95% of predators) or prior arrests (79% of offenders studied had no prior record of non-sexual crimes, although unlike Price some did have records of sexual offences.) Most importantly, Price was absolutely typical in that she did not disguise either her identity or her intentions: 80% of offenders are open about their age and 85% make clear their interest in sex with the victim. Moreover Andrew Kane, at 16, was a fairly typical victim: 99% of victims studied were between 13 and 17 years old, and none were younger than 12.

In order to protect young people online we need to understand – and to make them understand – what we are protecting them from. To begin with, we have to be aware that not all children are equally at risk: certain behaviours, such as seeking out sexual material or talking about sex online, and certain other factors, such as being female, being gay or questioning one’s sexuality, or having previously been abused sexually, substantially increase the risk of receiving and responding to online sexual solicitations. As well, we must recognize that offenders do not generally disguise their identities or their intentions but openly attempt to position themselves as potential sexual partners. In a way, the term “predator” is more accurate than we knew: like predators in the animal kingdom, they target the most vulnerable – those young people who are prone to taking risks, particularly in their sexual behaviour; those who are insecure or confused about their sexuality; and those who have already been wounded. Armed with this information, we can learn to watch for warning signs and risky behaviours in our children, we can be candid with them about the kinds of behaviours and material they may encounter online, and we can teach them about the realities of how adults can exploit young people’s inexperience, insecurity and developing sexuality.

MNet Resources

For Teachers

The Safe Passage section on our Web site contains essential tips for teachers on how to teach kids to enjoy the benefits of the Internet while recognizing its potential risks. Many schools, school boards and provinces have also licensed the Web Awareness Workshop series, which includes a workshop version of Safe Passage that covers the same material in greater detail and provides handouts and worksheets.

For Parents

Resources for parents can be found on our recently updated Be Web Aware site, which covers a broad range of topics including online safety and risk-taking. Parents also have their own version of the Safe Passage section of our Web site. Many community groups have also licensed our Parenting the Net Generation workshop which covers many of the issues that arise when young people go online.

This winter the Olympics return to Canada for the first time since the Calgary games of 1988. For many people, the most vivid memories of that Olympiad are the colourful stories of some of the less accomplished athletes, such as British ski jumper Michael “Eddie the Eagle” Edwards and the members of the Jamaican bobsled team. It’s unlikely, though, that there will be any charming underdogs in this year’s Olympiad, as the games become more and more the province of professionals. As audiences and advertising revenues drop, however, will the professionalization of the Games spell their downfall?

The notion that the Olympics are a celebration specifically of amateur sport dates back not to the ancient Greek games, as many believe – the Greeks made no distinction between professional and amateur athletes, and in fact had no word equivalent to “amateur” – but to the founder of the modern Games, Pierre de Coubertin. Greatly influenced by the ethos of the “well-rounded boy” and the “gentleman athlete,” de Coubertin felt that it was important that each nation’s athletes represent the general citizenry, not its professional athletes.

These rules were taken quite seriously for a long time, in some cases more strictly than might seem reasonable: participation in any professional or semi-professional sport was considered grounds for disqualification, as in the case of American athlete Jim Thorpe, who lost his medals for the 1912 pentathlon and decathlon because he had played semi-professional basketball. The rule clearly originated, at least in part, from an aristocratic distaste for anyone who had to work for a living – which explains the general disqualification of Swiss and Austrian ski instructors from the 1936 games. As the 20th Century wore on, however, the rule began to look like an anachronism – in particular because many nations “gamed the system” by supporting full-time “amateur” athletes.

In the 1980s two events dealt a final blow to the amateur ethos. The first was the creation of the so-called “Eddie the Eagle rule”: while audiences had found his relatively poor performance charming and even inspiring, to the International Olympic Committee it was an embarrassment, and a rule was passed that Olympic hopefuls must place in the top 50 competitors and the top 30 per cent in qualifying competitions. Where before it had been possible to go to the Olympics if you competed in a sport that interested few of your countrymen, it was now necessary to be one of the world’s elite athletes. At the same time, the International Basketball Federation abandoned the distinction between amateur and professional athletes in 1989, making it possible for professional basketball players to compete in the Olympics; as a result the American basketball team dominated the event for the next three Olympiads. This may be seen as an opening of the floodgates, as the governing bodies for other sports gradually abandoned the notion of amateur status as well (most notably hockey in 1998.)

A funny thing happened, though, as the Olympics became less averse to people making money from their sport: the Games started making less money themselves. The American network NBC, which bid successfully for the Olympic broadcast rights back in 2003, is expected to lose as much as $200 million on this year’s event. The Olympics, once guaranteed to deliver record ratings and revenues, have been reduced to that status of a “loss leader” that will, at best, draw attention to NBC’s more profitable offerings.

There are a number of reasons for this. Advertising is in a slump worldwide as a result of the recession, and many advertisers are moving more of their money to new media rather than traditional outlets such as print and television. At the same time, it does seem that the Olympics have lost some of their lustre. The increasing professionalism of the Games may have something to do with that: after all, if the Olympic Games are simply professional sports, why watch them instead of the professional leagues? The average hockey fan probably has more loyalty to his city’s team than to a Canadian national team that may not feature any of his favourite players – particularly when the Olympics causes a break in the hockey season. A uniformly high level of skill, meanwhile, may be satisfying to watch, but it has little emotional appeal: the travails of the Jamaican bobsled team in the 1988 Olympics became a successful movie, as did the underdog victory of the American hockey team in 1980, but it’s hard to imagine much drama in a film about the 1992 US basketball “Dream Team.”

What’s ironic about the increased professionalization of the Olympics is that it has taken place at the same time as what we might call the rise of the amateur in other fields: thanks to the increased availability of media production tools (such as digital video cameras, home recording equipment and video editing programs) and the advent of distribution channels such as blogs and YouTube, it has never been easier for amateur artists to find an audience. Some of these amateurs, of course, have ambitions to become professionals or semi-professionals; there have been any number of musicians, comedians, film-makers and even journalists whose amateur efforts have either found professional outlets or led to professional work. But what’s more interesting than that is the amateur ethos found in many online communities. As the authors of the recent book Hanging Out, Messing Around, and Geeking Out note, much of the creative work available online is not only done without expectation of material reward but in contexts where it is literally impossible for the creators to get paid for their work: fan fiction, unlicensed subtitling of foreign films (mostly Japanese animation), mashup videos and so on. This is work done truly out of love – which is, of course, the root of the term “amateur.”

Do the Olympics have a future? Perhaps not – it certainly seems likely that the broadcast rights will fetch a substantially smaller sum the next time they are auctioned off. It’s likely that they will continue, out of sheer momentum if nothing else, but there’s little question that their importance will be much diminished. Most likely we will someday look back at them as a symbol, like I Love Lucy or the last episode of M*A*S*H, of a bygone age when everyone watched the same thing – and when we still distinguished between professionals and amateurs, and between producers and consumers.

Safer Internet Day is an annual event, held this year on February 9th, which is observed in nations around the world. This year’s theme is “Think Before You Click.” Here are some MNet resources that teachers and parents can use to children and youth adopt ethical and responsible online habits:

Lessons

Classroom Resources to Counter Cyberbullying (various grade levels)

Free Speech Versus the Internet (Grades 10-12)

Promoting Ethical Behaviour Online (Grades 7-9)

 

Educational Games

Privacy Playground: The First Adventure of the Three CyberPigs (Ages 8-10)

Cybersense and Nonsense: The First Adventure of the Three CyberPigs (Ages 9-12)

Jo Cool or Jo Fool (Grades 6-8)

Passport to the Internet (Grades 4-8) Licensed resource

 

If anyone still doubts that youth need to learn how to evaluate online information, those doubts should have been dispelled by a recent hoax perpetrated by the group called the Yes Men. This group, which has a history of staging fake press conferences, decided to draw attention to Canada's position at the Copenhagen conference on climate change by creating a number of fake Web sites purporting to be, among others, the Copenhagen summit site, the Wall Street Journal, and Environment Canada's site. While it didn't take long for Environment Canada to make a statement exposing the hoax, by that time many journalists had reported the story as fact and the story had been widely distributed by wire services.



If professional journalists can't recognize a hoax of this kind, is it fair to expect students to be able to judge the material they find online? The fact is that there were a number of steps that reporters could have taken, and tools they could have used, to check the accuracy of this story -- steps and tools that are available to anyone.
 
The first thing that should have raised a red flag was the URLs or Web addresses of the sites. The fake Environment Canada site's URL was www.enviro-canada.ca, compared to the real Web address which is www.ec.gc.ca (all Government of Canada Web sites end in "gc.ca.") While a student might not know this (though one would expect a reporter to), one easily available clue that there was something wrong with the URL was the fact that the actual site's URL was listed at the top of the page, under the Environment Canada logo. As well, all of the links on the page (which the Yes Men copied from the actual site for verisimilitude) lead to pages on the real site. In other words, every URL associated with the site except the site's “main page” have the "gc.ca" suffix.

One of the cleverest aspects of the hoax was that it did not rely just on a single fake site to get its message out. To make the story more convincing, the hoaxers created fake sites for the Copenhagen summit, and the Wall Street Journal that reported their story as fact. This shows the dark side of the notion of "reliable sources": many other journalists who covered the story quite likely gave it credence because they thought it had appeared in the Journal, a newspaper with a nearly impeccable reputation. Indeed, when Environment Canada released a statement condemning the hoax and complaining that many news sources had fallen for it, the example they gave (and linked to) was the fake Wall Street Journal story. The Journal site was a very convincing spoof, but again the URL was a clue to its true nature. Here, though, the Yes Men had been particularly clever: they chose to spoof the Journal's Europe page rather than the main page, most likely thinking readers would be less likely to recognize that their URL (www.europe-wsj.com) was not the correct one (www.europe.wsj.com.)



What else might have given these fake sites away? One useful tool is to conduct a link search. While it's easy enough for a spoof site to copy outgoing links, as the Yes Men did on both the Environment Canada and Wall Street Journal sites, it's harder to reproduce the links that lead to a page from other sites. By using the link: operator in a search engine such as Google, we can see that there are no sites linking into www.europe-wsj.com, while more than 3,000 sites link to www.europe.wsj.com. Another valuable tool is the Alexa Web site, which provides statistics on Web site traffic and allows you to determine how long a Web site has been in existence; for instance, the www.enviro-canada.ca site had no traffic whatsoever before December 7th, while the English home page of the Environment Canada Web site has had consistent traffic going back as far as Alexa reports it (though visits naturally spiked in December.) Similarly, the Twitter account that purported to belong to Minister of the Environment Jim Prentice -- with which he apparently confirmed the press release -- only came into being on December 11th. (Twitter should never be considered a reliable source, of course, given how easy it is to create fake accounts.)

None of these steps or tools of course, is of any value if they're not used. What's most important is to develop a healthy skepticism towards every source you might use. In pre-Internet days it may have been enough to check the credentials of a supposed authority; now, as we've seen, the ease of publishing a convincing fake online means you can't even assume that source is who it claims to be. Instead we have to develop habits of mind that will let us spot indications that something is unreliable. One example on the false Environment Canada site would be the fact that the press release is not available in French (an odd oversight, given the Yes Men's otherwise very thorough approach.) A bigger clue is simply the unlikelihood that the Canadian government would reverse its position to that degree on this issue. Of course, this was what made it such a good story, but that's no excuse for not doing the due diligence of investigating your sources.

With the number of media outlets available to us today, and the ease with which people can create and distribute material on the Internet, it's important that all of us develop critical filters and habits of mind. Even for journalists, who are trained to be skeptical, it's easy to cut corners (for instance, assuming that the various fake sites created by the Yes Men corroborated one another.) The time is past when we could trust a news outlet to judge for us whether something is true or not: for good or ill, we all must now learn and exercise the investigative skills of good journalism ourselves.

In the first part of this blog we looked at some of the challenges and barriers facing people with disabilities when it comes to the Internet and other new media. In this final part we turn to possible strategies for making the virtual world fully accessible to all.

Some advances are being made in making new media accessible, though it is largely being done by universities, non-profit organizations and hobbyists rather than the media industry. Mobile ASL (American Sign Language), for instance, is a project at the University of Washington to allow sign language conversations over cell phones. Because North American wireless networks still have a fairly limited bandwidth, special compression techniques are required to be able to carry the real time video needed for sign language. Because the hands and face communicate most of the meaning in ASL, the project lets cameras prioritize the recording of those areas to make the most efficient use of the bandwidth available.

Similarly, the American Federation for the Blind has begun the Cell Phone Accessibility Project  to make it easier for people with vision impairments to use cell phones. In the United States cell phone manufacturers are already required to make them accessible under section 255 of the Telecommunications Act of 1996; the Cell Phone Accessibility Project aims to survey which models of cell phone are not accessible and push for changes to their design. Special software, such as Talks and Mobilespeak, has also been developed to allow visually impaired people to send and receive text messages, but these are currently limited to only a few carrier networks. Unfortunately, this removes the privacy of text messages, which are a major part of their appeal, especially to teens; a few companies have begun to market products such as Samsung’s Touch Messenger phone that allow texting and other cell phone functions using Braille. These products are not yet widely available, however.

The Web Accessibility Initiative  is a project aimed at providing access to the Web to people with disabilities. It provides both Web page developers and designers of browsers such as Firefox and Internet Explorer with information on what issues people with disabilities face while online and techniques for making sites more accessible, such as their Quick Tips to Make Accessible Web Sites They’re also at the forefront of ensuring that new aspects of the Web, such as Web 2.0 and mobile phone browsers, are accessible from the start. Primarily, though, they’re best known for developing the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, which aim to provide an international standard for bringing full accessibility to the Web. One Web site that has made particular efforts to be accessible is BBC News, which has created a special site called Accessible Newsreader that can be navigated with a single click and reads news stories through a computer-generated voice. 
 
Vischeck lets you test how an image or Web site would look to people with different forms of colour blindness. This way programmers and Web page designers can test to see if people with colour blindness will miss any important information. Not only that, but Vischeck includes a utility for “Daltonizing” images, altering them so that people with colour blindness will more fully perceive the contrast between colours.

When it comes to making video games accessible, there are three different approaches. The first is to adapt existing games, such as the modified version of Doom III titled Doom 3C. In this case all of the sounds in the game, such as dialogue with other characters, approaching footsteps and monster noises, have been captioned as they would be in a film or TV show. As well, Reid Kimball, the developer, added a “radar” function that shows players the direction sounds are coming from, allowing them to be used as game cues as they would be by hearing players. (More detailed information is available at the Accessibility Games Web site.)A more recent example is Eelke Folmer’s Blind Hero which will convert the video instructions in Guitar Hero and similar games to a buzzing signal in the different figures of a glove controller.

The second approach is to create games specifically to be played by people with different disabilities. For instance, there is a small market of audio games created for people with visual impairments; these roughly 300 games cover the gamut from adventure to action and even a driving game. These games rely heavily on distinctive sounds to communicate what’s going on, and use stereo speakers or headphones to help you situate things in the game, such as letting you line up a target before shooting. The Audio Games Web site features an archive of downloadable games such as Sonic Invaders, Pacman Talks and both Star Trek and Star Wars games.

For people with a physical disability, the control schemes of video games – which often involve using one or more joysticks, buttons, or a mouse and keyboard – present an insurmountable barrier to play. One Switch Games creates games that are designed to be played with limited motion. Like audio games they tend towards the retro, mimicking simple games such as Space Invaders and Frogger, but they have the production values of modern games. (The Accessible Newsreader site listed above includes links to a number of such games.) One Switch Games and similar organizations also develop alternate controllers for popular game systems such as the Playstation 3 and Xbox 360, but in general game manufacturers are not friendly towards such efforts; Mark Felling, an engineer who founded Broadened Horizons to make new technology more accessible, has said that he has received no help from Microsoft, Sony or Nintendo in his efforts to create accessible controllers.

The third approach is to make games that are as accessible as possible while still appealing to mainstream audiences. There are few examples of games like this so far, but groups such as the Game Accessibility Project provide resources for developers that can help them make each game as accessible as possible to the widest number of people. For instance, captioning is a relatively easy way to make games accessible to people with hearing disabilities, and the option to slow the speed of a game can make it much more accessible to people with physical disabilities. A game studio that has taken up this challenge is Fire Hose Games which created the game AudiOdyssey to be played by sighted and vision-impaired gamers. (This slideshow sets out founder Eitan Glinert’s philosophy towards accessibility in games and his experiences developing AudiOdyssey.) AbleGamers is an example of a site that provides support for gamers with disabilities, with news about accessible gaming and reviews of commercial games based on their accessibility to people with different disabilities.
 
A wider world

It’s important to keep pushing for accessibility in all parts of our society, new media included. Not only do people with disabilities deserve to have access to these experiences, there are a number of ways in which new technologies can improve their lives. For instance the Jitterbug, a cell phone marketed at seniors, can be tremendously useful for people with physical disabilities because of its oversized buttons, large text and option for voice commands. As well, recent research has shown that video games – particularly casual, puzzle-based games such as Tetris – can help children with ADD and ADHD deal with their condition. CapAbility Games, a project at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, is developing computer games designed to teach people who have suffered brain injuries and have a physical disability ways to increase their independence, such as a virtual world that simulates grocery shopping while in a wheelchair. 

With their ability to simulate reality, games can help us make our world more accessible in another way, too: Handigo, a game designed by Handicap International and Ubisoft, shows players what it is like to have different kinds of disabilities; two mini-games show what it is like to navigate the world with impaired vision or in a wheelchair. While these games are somewhat simple, they may just be the beginning of a new era in accessibility awareness. This video, which gives a sense of what it’s like to be schizophrenic, is a bold step in using the simulation tools of new media to further the full integration of persons with disabilities into society. Imagine how much easier it would be for people with disabilities if their teachers, employers, peers and families had some experience of what it’s like to have limited vision or hearing, to have mobility limitations, to be dyslexic or even autistic? Full accessibility is a challenge for us all, and perhaps in time games can be a help and not a hindrance in that challenge.

 

Note: This is the first part of a two-part blog. The second part can be read here.

It’s ironic that as computers and other communications technology have become more accessible to the general public over the last thirty years, they have actually become less accessible to a segment of the population, one to whom access is everything: people with disabilities. More ironic still is that the history of communications technology is intimately tied to the drive to integrate people with disabilities more fully into society. From Alexander Graham Bell, who invented the telephone as a result of his research into hearing loss, to Vinton Cerf, who was hard of hearing and developed the TCP/IP protocol that underlies the Internet to help him communicate better with other engineers, addressing disability has been essential to the development of communications technology. Today, though, many new media and communications technology are produced with little or no thought to accessibility.

No audio: cell phones and media players

Let’s begin with that staple of teenage communication, the cell phone. While landlines have long had accessibility tools for people with hearing impairments, such as the Telecommunications Device for the Deaf or TDD (TTY in Canada), many cell phones are not compatible with these devices. (Voice Over Internet Protocol services have a similar problem.) At the same time, text messages – which are actually a more popular use for cell phones than voice calls among teens  – can neither be sent nor read by people with impaired vision. Those who have any degree of motion-related disability in their hands, from arthritis to cerebral palsy, will find texting or even dialling the tiny buttons found on most cell phones impossible.

MP3 problems such as the iPod raise similar concerns. While it’s obviously not possible to adapt them to the fully deaf, many hearing-impaired people have better hearing in some registers than others. Most MP3 players, though, can only adjust the volume and not bass, treble or even balance between speakers, excluding many potential users with partial hearing. For those with impaired vision, meanwhile, these devices can be nearly impossible to use, with menus of small, non-adjustable text to navigate, most often using buttons that are nearly indistinguishable by touch. The iPod, with its scroll wheel, is particularly inaccessible when it comes to those with motion-related disabilities in their hands.

The virtual staircase: personal computers and the Internet

For many people with disabilities personal computers and the Internet have been a boon, as we’ll see below, offering opportunities to work and socialize in a context where ability is almost irrelevant. As the old command-line operating systems have given way to the graphical user interface of the Macintosh and Windows, and the text-based world of Usenet and BBSes have evolved into the graphics-based World Wide Web, for people with vision impairments and some motion-related disabilities they have actually become less accessible: a recent study of 1,000 Web sites found that 81% failed to reach a minimum standard of accessibility under the guidelines of the World Wide Web Consortium’s Content Accessibility program. None of the sites surveyed reached the highest level of accessibility, and only eight reached the second-highest.

Peter Dworkin, commenting on David Pogue’s blog on the New York Times Web site, noted that computer programming was once a viable career for blind people; now “the whole concept of a graphical user interface (GUI) using a mouse to make gestures and icons to represent files presents an untenable solution for the blind by its very nature.” Similarly, for many people with motion impairments using a keyboard to type commands, though sometimes laborious, was easier than making the very specific movements necessary to control a mouse.

Screen reading software does exist for people with vision impairments, but it has many limitations. To begin with, in most programs and Web pages information is organized visually, so that a sighted person can tell immediately what is important and what is not; a screen reader has no way of doing so and must read every piece of text from the top of the screen to the bottom. As well, graphics are read simply as “graphic” unless programmers and designers have taken the time to add descriptive tags, and buttons are similarly often just labelled “button.”

Although the Web presents fewer barriers for people with hearing impairments, some do exist. The most significant is the general lack of captioning on online games and especially video; neither Hulu nor Netflix have standards for captioning or require content to be captioned (this is especially galling in cases like Hulu, where the same content would be captioned if viewed on TV.) However, this may be changing: YouTube, the Internet's top video site, began captioning its videos in November of this year, using speech-to-text technology to automatically generate the subtitles.

Left on the sidelines: video games

Video games have become one of the most popular forms of recreation for both kids and adults, but they remain largely inaccessible to people with disabilities. The word video may suggest that it’s unlikely that visually impaired people will be able to play them, but this isn’t necessarily the case: Brice Mellen, a teenager who was blind from birth, became widely known for his skills in fighting games such as Mortal Kombat and Soulcalibur. Mellen relied heavily on audio cues to understand what was going on in the game, but not all games feature such cues, and few games are designed with any thought to how a person with a visual impairment might experience it.

For people with hearing impairments, the situation is reversed: many games use audio to communicate key information – dialogue with game characters, hints of what is going on nearby, or even instructions on how to complete game tasks. Unlike movies or television, not many games include closed captioning – Zork: Grand Inquisitor (1997) and Half-Life 2 (2004) are two of the very few examples.

Even a sensory disability that may have less of an impact in daily life, such as colour blindness, can significantly affect how someone experiences a video game. Colour is often very important in distinguishing things such as which side a character is on, whether a door can be opened or not, or even whether or not a particular item will cause instant death.

One reason that little attention has been paid to making video games accessible may be that they are perceived as being entertainment of little value. Recent research, however – most notably the Digital Youth Research Project – has shown that playing video games is an important part of kids’ lives, providing a common topic of conversation. Children and teens with disabilities, if unable to play video games, are left out of this part of youth culture. Moreover, people with disabilities report a variety of positive effects of playing video games such as stress relief, improved concentration and hand-eye co-ordination, learning of important skills and a sense of achievement. Some experts, such as psychiatrist Dr. Carl Arinoldo, suggest that video games may have greater positive effects for people with disabilities who suffer from depression because “with some forms of depression, a person may be very focused on something that clearly amounts to a misperception of reality. So the chance to distance themselves from the perceived negative situation and relax may allow them to think more clearly and consider the situation later in a more realistic manner.” It’s certainly clear that people with disabilities are keen to play those games that are accessible: a recent study shows that one in five players of “casual” games (games which require less time commitment, are generally played online, and usually are free or can be played for a nominal cost) has a disability of some sort. (For comparison, eighteen per cent of the population of the U.S., and 14% of Canadians, have a disability according to census data.)

In our next blog we'll turn to solutions and look at some of the things that are being done to help people with disabilities use and access new media.

On Saturday, September 26, 2009, the US network Nickelodeon did something unusual: it switched itself off. This was in observance of the "Worldwide Day of Play," an event Nickelodeon inaugurated in 2004. The network -- along with its sister channels Noggin, the N, and Nicktoons, and their associated Web sites -- went dark for three hours to encourage its young viewers to "ride a bike, do a dance, kick a ball, skate a board, jump a rope, swing a swing, climb a wall, run a race, do ANYTHING that gets you up and playing!"

While this is certainly a laudable sentiment, it's interesting to take a look at the list of things that kids are told not to do during that time, which includes "read a book," "watch television or movies," "surf the web" and "play video games." This suggests that the Day of Play is somewhat akin to Turnoff Week in its attitude towards media (and, indeed, the Day of Play occurred on the last day of the 2009 Turnoff Week) -- that anything media-related is, by definition, not play, even playing video games. Other efforts to bring back "traditional" play, such as those described in these New York Times articles,  also focus heavily on physical, typically competitive games such as stickball, ringalevio and jump rope.

It’s easy and fairly natural to make this distinction: consuming media has always been seen as a passive activity, in contrast to physical play -- consider the traditional contrast between the "bookworm," or the violin-carrying child off to his music lesson, with the "all-round boy" engaged in physical play. But are play and media really incompatible? For that matter, what exactly is play?

What is play?

This turns out to be one of those questions that is much more complicated than it looks. As children, we are certainly aware of a distinction between those things we do that are "play" and those that are not, but it's difficult to broaden this into a true definition. There is no agreement, for that matter, on why we play: while some varieties of play make evolutionary sense, such as the "rehearsal" play we share with other animals (cats, for example), other kinds of play are harder to justify from an evolutionary standpoint. (A good summary of the leading theories of play can be found here.) Among the few qualities of play that are universally acknowledged are that participants in play share an acknowledgement that they are playing, that play involves activities removed from their normal context, and that play only happens in leisure; in situations of significant stress, such as hunger or other kinds of deprivation, play disappears.

The National Institute of Play  has identified seven types of play, these being:
attunement play (behaviours that build a connection between the player and another person or group)

• body play (motions and activities with no purpose other than to take pleasure in them)
• object play (taking pleasure in the manipulation and observation of objects)
• social play (playing with social roles and hierarchies)
• imaginative and pretend play, storytelling play (distinct from the former because it requires narrative)
• transformative-integrative play (play with ideas, exploring concepts and possibilities.)

The NIP makes the point that adults take part in these activities as much as children: a baseball fan doing "the wave" is engaged in attunement play as much as a baby playing "peekaboo." As well, it should be noted that there is not necessarily a hard and fast line between "play" and "work". Artists, for instance, engage in a sort of "professional play" (and we disdain art that is lacking that feeling of play, calling it "by the numbers" or "hackwork"), while Einstein, as the NIP's Web site points out, was engaged in transformative-integrative play when he performed the famous thought experiments, such as imagining himself riding a beam of light, that led to his theories of relativity.

It's clear, though, that the Day of Play is specifically about physical play. While the decline of outdoor play and the increase in childhood obesity are certainly matters of concern, some experts feel that we've suffered more from a loss of imaginative play. Laura Berk, an Executive Function Researcher at Illinois University, told National Public radio that children have less ability to regulate their behaviour than in the past because they engage in less make-believe play, which requires what's called "private speech": "If we compare preschoolers' activities and the amount of private speech that occurs across them, we find that this self-regulating language is highest during make-believe play. And this type of self-regulating language… has been shown in many studies to be predictive of executive functions." (Indeed, one study summarized here found that sustained imaginative play was one of the only reliable ways of improving children's self-control.) One widely-cited study compared the ability of children in 2001 to stand still with children in the late 1940s, and found that the earlier group was two years ahead (so that a seven-year-old in the 2001 experiment showed the same level of self-control as a five-year-old in the earlier study.)

Media play

Why are kids engaging in less imaginative play? The easy answer is to blame it on the media: children spend more time as passive consumers of movies, TV, video games, YouTube videos and so on, leaving them with no room for imagination. But children in the 1940s consumed plenty of media such as movies, radio and comic books. The screenwriter William Goldman has written of spending entire Saturdays at the movies, by no means an unusual experience, and in many houses the radio was turned on as soon as the children got home from school, broadcasting adventure serials and comedies just as TV does today. This media diet was not absent from children's play, nor did it detract from it: Brian Doyle, whose novel Angel Square is based in part on his own childhood experiences, depicts his heroes re-enacting and elaborating on the stories they saw and heard in the movies and radio. In my own childhood the media certainly played a large role in our imaginative play, but not a limiting one: our Star Wars figures journeyed to places Luke Skywalker never saw and George Lucas never imagined, and our Smurfs were as likely to have adventures drawn from Tolkien or Dungeons and Dragons as from their own comics.

Children have probably always based their play on the media they consumed; where else would classic schoolyard games like "Cops and Robbers" have come from? Certainly children weren't watching policemen chase criminals on their own streets -- but they were watching, hearing, and reading about those stories, directly or second-hand, through the various media of their times. Media play can be seen as a declaration of ownership, of independence, taking the branded entertainments we are sold and warping them into the stories we want to tell.

What's changed is not the role of the media alone but also the decline of unstructured play time, which provides an opportunity for this kind of media appropriation. Two main factors are responsible for this: first, a growing fear over the last thirty years or so that children cannot be safely left to play unsupervised, and a cultural pressure to have children engage in "worthwhile" or "educational" activities rather than unstructured play. (The media is responsible, at least in part, for both of these: the former due to unrealistic depictions of crime, and the latter due to bad science reporting and the relentless advertising of supposedly educational games, videos, and so on, nearly all of which have been shown to have no developmental value -- a toddler gets as much benefit out of wearing a Baby Einstein video as a hat as he does from watching it.) As well, changing patterns in employment -- both an increased number of women working outside the home and longer average work hours for both sexes -- have led to a perception that parents have less time to spend with their children (though in fact Statistics Canada reports the amount of time spent with children is actually on the increase), which may cause parents to enrol their children in organized activities that are seen as being "worth more" than unstructured play.

Play school

What's particularly unfortunate about the decline of unstructured, imaginative play is that it fosters skills that are more important than ever before, and not just the self-control Berk refers to -- though that is surely of importance at a time when our words can be instantly transmitted around the world and may haunt us forever online. In fact, Project New Media Literacies identifies Play as the first of their "Core Media Literacy Skills," defining it as "the capacity to experiment with one’s surroundings as a form of problem solving." Simulation is another, and simulation forms the heart of imaginative play. As children "try on" roles and identities in games as basic as "House"; their understanding of these roles is drawn as much from media as from life -- as is ours.  Appropriation, defined as "the ability to meaningfully sample and remix media content," is explicitly tied to media play: without knowing it, this is what children have been doing for years when they have Barbie marry G.I. Joe or Superman fight Popeye. Another of these new media literacies, Collective Intelligence -- defined as "the ability to pool knowledge and compare notes with others towards a common goal" -- has more in common with imaginative play than it does with more structured activities. In a sport, after all, or other organized or "educational" play, the rules and conventions are already set; there is none of the collaboration and negotiation that's involved in imaginative play, whether or not it's media-related ("We're playing Star Wars, but Jeff and Max both want to play Han Solo." "Well, maybe Han has a long-lost brother…'")

Play day

Of course, Nickelodeon should be praised for encouraging kids to engage in active play (though a cynical soul might note that they typically follow their three-hour "blackout" with marathons of their most popular shows, which adds up to a rather mixed message.) But it's important to get past the simple equation of play with exercise and recognize the value of play for what it is: unstructured time in which we can, if we choose, defy Nickelodeon's commandments and "take a nap," "read a book" or "twiddle your thumbs." So, too, must we abandon the notion that free play is wasted time, that it's only useful if children learn something. Children at play certainly are learning things, but they are doing so in ways that cannot be planned or designed.

Exercises for teachers

• How can we incorporate elements of imaginative play into our classes? What are the key elements (creativity, choice, open-endedness, etc.)?
• Discuss ways in which different media can stimulate types of play.
• Think of ways you can encourage students to appropriate and play creatively with the media products they consume. For example, you might ask students to act out a story where an unlikable media character becomes the hero, or where a character defies his/her stereotyped depiction.
• Take an exercise or assignment and convert it into a play-based activity. What has to be changed? How much of the instructional content has to be sacrificed?
• Try to think of a few opportunities for students to just "play" with your class content. Think about applying this to different subjects. Do some lend themselves more naturally to play? Why?
• Think of ways to incorporate extended imaginative play into your classroom. Encourage your students to stay in the roles they've chosen as long as possible and interact with each other according to those roles. Don't forget the "pre-play" period where you and the students negotiate roles and rules: if students are role-playing numbers or elements, for instance, talk about what those roles will mean, both to the individual student and in relation to one another (for instance, larger numbers might boss smaller numbers around, positive ions might be cheerful and optimistic and look to pair with gloomy negatives, and so on.)
• What are the limitations of play in a classroom setting? When should play activities not be used, and why?

After the controversy surrounding last year's proposed copyright bill C-61, which eventually died on the order table when Parliament was prorogued, the Federal government has decided to hold consultations across Canada before introducing a new version of the bill. While only time will tell how responsive the government will be to the public's submissions, the series of town halls and round tables is definitely a good start in making the process transparent and taking the views of a wide variety of Canadians into account. Below is an expanded version of MNet's submission to the Round Table held in Gatineau, Quebec on July 29th 2009.

The history of the Internet -- and the history of technology in general -- could be described as one big demonstration of the doctrine of unintended consequences: a system designed to help researchers collaborate, and developed to protect military communications in the event of a nuclear war, wound up being used primarily for shopping, socializing and entertainment. The same is true of many of the products and services on the Internet as well. In its early years it was mostly seen as a one-to-many broadcast medium, like TV or radio, but over time it's the more interactive elements that have proven to be most popular, with users producing at least as much online content as professionals.

One such development that may be in its infancy is the relationship between news  gathering and the Internet. So far that relationship has been a largely one-sided one: professional news organizations gather their news the old-fashioned way and then post it to the Internet, where it attracts readers and advertising dollars. Increasingly, though, the Internet is also being used to gather news.  One online service being used for both roles is one that's frequently dismissed as the most trivial, Twitter.

Twitter, as most people likely know by now, is what's known as a "microblogging" service: users post short (140 characters or less) messages called "tweets" which are delivered instantly to anyone who subscribes to, or "follows," their feed. For many critics that character limit exemplifies the pointlessness of Twitter, and it's true that many tweets are trivial, while many more serve as promotional materials, providing links to blog posts or photos. It's also true that, for all its Web 2.0 credentials, Twitter is closer to the broadcast model than many other Internet services, with ten per cent of Twitterers accounting for ninety per cent of tweets. As a result, many have dismissed Twitter as a tool for narcissists or celebrity-stalkers.

The one feature those critics miss -- the thing that has made Twitter so important in both making and gathering the news -- is that it is searchable. Though you only get a feed of messages from people whom you follow, you can also search every public tweet for key words or phrases. To make this easier, tweets on a particular topic are often prefixed with what's called a "hashtag," a word prefixed with the number sign as a sort of label (so a message about Twitter itself would bear the hashtag "#Twitter"). Finally, the Twitter home page shows a constantly updated list of the most discussed phrases, words or hashtags. Because Twitter is updated in real time, it can be used to gather eyewitness accounts, opinions and even photos more quickly than any news outlet could manage.

The use of Twitter for newsgathering first became widely known during the 2008 Mumbai terrorist attacks, when the general chaos of the situation, as well as the limited ability of Western media outlets to cover the attacks first-hand, made it the most reliable source of information about what was going on. Twitter then went on to beat The New York Times on its own turf when a user tweeting from his iPhone broke the story of US Airways flight 1549's crash landing in the Hudson River.

Where Twitter has really come into its own, though, is the protests following the Iranian election. What makes Twitter so important in this situation is the unusual combination of a literate, educated, Internet-connected urban population and a regime that is willing and able to censor its media. Even before the election Iranians turned to the Internet for opportunities to speak out without censorship (Iran has the third-largest number of bloggers of any nation). But the disputed results of the vote, and the rallies that followed, have caused a flood of tweets. Because tweets can be read from a variety of platforms -- the Web site itself, applications that provide a direct Twitter feed, and even cell phones -- it's particularly resistant to censorship, making it an ideal tool for organizing and disseminating information when other media are blocked or state-controlled. As of this writing, "#iranianelection" is the number one topic on Twitter, with more than a thousand tweets being posted every ten minutes.

Watching the feed of all tweets with the #iranianelection tag is an interesting, nearly addictive experience. There's definitely a sense that this is a watershed moment, not only in the history of Iran but in the history of journalism; as one poster put it, "There's a revolution going down. I'll never be able to take the news seriously again, not after seeing what Twitter can do."

It's unclear, though, how much of what's on Twitter is actually news, particularly now that the story has become so widely known. Unlike during the Mumbai attacks, when most of the tweets were coming from the event itself, at this point Iranian Twitterers are probably a minority compared to people from North America and Europe. Many of those are commenting on the events rather than participating, or are piggybacking on the topic to push their own political ideas ("This is what happens when the people are disarmed") or conspiracy theories ("If Israel is ever going to attack and destroy the nuclear facilities, wouldn't now be the premier time due to #iranelection?"). The sheer number of tweets has also left some readers feeling overwhelmed; as one put it, "The tweets in #iranelection are so voluminous, how can you read each one in order to decide which you can trust, which you can't?"

Indeed, credibility is a major issue when using Twitter as a news source: as well as random pranksters (one tried to highjack the discussion to spread a rumour that Apple CEO Steve Jobs had died), there is a suggestion that the Iranian government has begun to use Twitter to spread disinformation instead: one repeated tweet is "DO NOT RT [re-tweet] anything U read from 'NEW' tweeters, gvmt spreading misinfo." Beyond that possibility is the issue that there is virtually no way to confirm anything reported by Twitter: the message "RT Army moving into Tehran against protesters!" appeared dozens if not hundreds of times, often prefaced by the word "confirmed," but there was no way of knowing if it is true. Some users claiming to be Iranian have posted photos, but in this age of Photoshop they add little credibility. To make matters even more confusing, reported efforts by the Iranian government to block access to Twitter have led to calls for all Twitterers to change their time zone settings to Tehran in a sort of "I am Spartacus" manoeuvre, meaning that it's now harder than ever to know where someone is actually posting from.

In this one event, Twitter has shown its strengths, weaknesses and potential as a tool for journalism. Despite the concerns, it's almost certain that the Twitter feed will be a major source of information for almost any event of importance in the future. But at the same time it cannot be taken with any more confidence than an overheard conversation. Perhaps in the future news providers will designate "Twitter reporters" whose job it is to monitor trending topics, search the feed for the information that is most probably relevant and reliable, and co-ordinate with their offline colleagues to confirm what's being reported. In the meantime it falls to news consumers to develop new critical thinking tools for sifting out the truth.

Questions for discussion

• Do you think that Twitter will be an important tool for journalists in the future? Why or why not?
• What might be some ways that you could verify information you learned on Twitter?
• Twitter is unusual among social-networking programs because it is more popular with adults than with teens. Why do you think this is? Do you think it is likely to change? Why or why not?
  

It’s a persistent phenomenon: the faster we move into the future, the more we find it embedded with the bones of the past. Why else, for instance, would we still talk about “dialling” a phone, and later about “hanging it up”? Few people remember the early TV remote controls that worked by sending high-frequency sounds, but we still call remotes “clickers.” We still say “stay tuned,” “CC” (carbon copy) e-mails, “rewind” DVDs, and “post” online messages. Even new media darling YouTube contains an old-media artefact of this kind: the name is obviously meant to make us think of television, the “boob tube,” but few TVs have tubes in them anymore.

These kinds of throwbacks aren’t just linguistic, they’re found in technology as well. Most often these come from a failure to rethink assumptions, or an aesthetic attachment to the old technology – think of the wood paneling found for so long on cars, a relic from the time when a station wagon was really a wagon – but sometimes they are intentional design choices. An amusing example is Betamaxmas, which uses the Web to recreate the experience of watching TV sometime in the early 1980s. The site’s content is made up of old TV shows and commercials, but what sets it apart is the presentation: a rabbit-eared TV sitting in front of a faux wood paneling wall, framed by a Christmas tree and grey cloth couch in the foreground. It’s easy to dismiss the site as nostalgia – and that’s certainly what it is – but what’s interesting here is that the main purpose of the interface is to limit the user’s control. While the content of this site comes from YouTube, the interface is decidedly analog: a genuine “clicker” whose only controls are Channel Up and Down, Volume Up and Down, and Fullscreen (which zooms in on the screen, though the TV remains in frame.)

What is the difference between pressing the button on a remote control (or clicking a cursor on a picture of a button on a remote control) and typing in the search box of YouTube? The answer may be that the former is a tactile experience, albeit a simulated one. Look at all of those old-technology holdovers in our language – how many of them refer to a physical activity such as dialling, rewinding and clicking? As technology becomes increasingly digital, both in the sense that it is entirely computer-based and in the sense that our digits are the only part of our body that interacts with it, we may feel the lack of a tactile connection. More and more, technology is taking tasks that used to be done in the physical world and making them virtual. Consider the progress from the vinyl LP to the CD to the digital music player: from the tactile experience of fitting a needle into the groove (and seeing it skip if something went wrong), to putting a disc into the tray and watching it spin, to the inscrutable workings of a tiny metal and plastic box. Even as recent a technology as the fax has been virtualized: all of the physical properties of the task of faxing – printing a document, placing it in the machine, keying in (dialling?) the fax number, listening to the dial tone and eventual handshake noise, receiving the confirmation and reply on slick, curly paper – have been replaced by a direct computer-to-computer process.

Some new technologies try to incorporate a physical experience. The most successful digital-tactile hybrid is the iPhone, which uses accelerometers to translate actions – tilting, turning or shaking the phone – into digital processes. Some of the most successful apps for the iPhone have been those that directly reproduce tactile experiences: maze games, like those that once filled innumerable car-trip hours, in which a ball is guided through a maze; virtual Zippo lighters for holding up in tribute at rock concerts; and even applications, like the one pictured above, that turn it into a rotary phone. E-book readers, similarly, compete with one another to most fully reproduce the physical experience of reading a book: the Kindle’s “paper” screen, the tactile page-turning feature in Classics app for the iPhone, and the leather cover of the Sony e-Reader.

More evidence that we miss the tactile properties of old technology can be found in books such as The Dangerous Book for Boys and The Mysterious Benedict Society, both of which deny or at least ignore the virtual world. The first of these offers advice on a variety of old-school children’s activities such as building a fire, tying knots and folding paper airplanes; the second, a novel, features young protagonists who employ similar skills to foil an evil plot to brainwash the world’s children through TV. Although The Mysterious Benedict Society is ostensibly set in the present, the Internet is oddly absent: the characters are brought into the action by a classified ad in the newspaper, dictionaries and encyclopedias are consulted when information is needed, and Morse code is used in place of cell phones. Again, nostalgia is undoubtedly a factor here – the former book could easily be titled The Dangerous Book for Dads – but there’s also a genuine longing for a more physical, tactile world.

The irony is that being denied access to that physical world is a big part of what’s driven young people online; as writers such as Anastasia Goodstein and Dr. Tanya Byron have suggested, a lack of unstructured play is due largely to exaggerated fears of the dangers of letting kids go unsupervised – when in fact most parents of young children today grew up at a time when the crime rate was significantly higher. This has made the Internet the only place youth can go to experiment, test their limits and escape adult scrutiny, while parents look at their wired, over-scheduled children and feel pangs of nostalgia for their own days of racing bikes, burning ants with magnifying glasses, skinning knees and occasionally needing booster shots for tetanus.

How will the current generation of children feel about this? Most of the technologies that try to bring a tactile experience into the virtual world – the iPhone, the Wii – are aimed primarily at adults, not kids. Will today’s children eventually feel the lack of the physical in their online lives, or will they simply accept a world experienced only through the eyes, ears and fingertips?

Discussion Questions

• Do you think young people place less importance on a physical experience when using technology for work or play? Why or why not?
• Will technologies that try to bring a physical experience into their interface, such as the iPhone and Wii, be successful with young people or only adults? Why would this approach appeal or not appeal to young people?
• Is the phenomenon of “retro” kids’ books such as The Dangerous Books for Boys and The Mysterious Benedict Society something that appeals to young people, or just their parents?
• Is something important lost when technology becomes completely digital? Why or why not?
  

With the recent spate of marine piracy off the coast of Somalia, culminating in the abduction and rescue of Captain Richard Phillips, it’s a bit disorienting to see the word “piracy” used to refer to, well, pirates. That’s because for the last few decades the word has been much more often applied to those who “pirate” intellectual property such as software, music, and videos. In fact, the use of the word in that context has a surprisingly long history: Daniel Defoe, in 1703, used the term to describe printers who made unauthorized copies of his work.

What’s interesting about the modern use of the word is that it may have either positive or negative connotations, depending on who’s using it: pirates of intellectual property often use the term without apology, as in the case of the Web site Pirate Bay, a well-known source of illegal films, games and music, whose founders were recently convicted of a variety of offenses in their home country of Sweden. Indeed, while copyright infringement has long been called piracy, distributors of copied software were likely the first to self-identify as pirates.

Pirates have always had a bad reputation: taking other people’s possessions by force is never a good way to win friends. While tales of outlaws such as Robin Hood have long been popular, through most of history pirates were only ever depicted as criminals. This may be because outlaws in fiction are typically associated with the lower classes or with subjugated peoples – one person’s outlaw is another’s hero – but pirates, operating at sea, have no loyalty to anyone but themselves and so have no partisans. Freedom from piracy was one of the benefits of life under the Pax Romana, and residents of the British Empire were similarly protected. In fact, to be able to protect one’s merchants from pirates can be seen as one of the tests of statehood.

It was not until the Renaissance that pirates began to have their reputation rehabilitated, with the introduction of privateering. A privateer was a pirate in the service of his country, who only attacked ships belonging to enemy nations – in the eyes of his country’s law not a pirate but a sort of freelance navy. In the colonial conflicts that played out between England, Spain and France, privateers such as Sir Francis Drake won many impressive victories and were celebrated as heroes. Privateers remained an important part of naval forces as late as the American Revolution and the War of 1812. The ability to issue letters of marque, which authorize privateers to act on their nation’s behalf, is actually written into the U.S. Constitution, and former presidential candidate Ron Paul has suggested that they be used to combat the Somali pirates.

This patriotic association led to a more positive portrayal of privateers than of pirates in fiction; meanwhile, as genuine piracy faded it became easier to see the pirate as a romantic figure. Finally, Hollywood cheerfully mixed pirates and privateers together in films such as Captain Blood, whose title character is a genuine pirate but is portrayed as acting in a just cause. Since that time most portrayals of pirates in fiction have either been heroic, in the Errol Flynn mode, or comic, like the title characters in the Gilbert and Sullivan operetta The Pirates of Penzance. (Captain Jack Sparrow, the protagonist of Disney’s recent blockbuster Pirates of the Caribbean movies, is both a heroic and comic pirate by turns.)

Still, into the 1980s to call someone a pirate in real life was unambiguously negative. For instance, when Ace Books published an unauthorized, but not technically pirated, paperback edition of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings in 1965, the accusation of piracy was enough to make them cease publication and pay royalties to Tolkien. But when computers were first brought into the home, with hobbyist kits such as the Altair 8800 and the original Apple, they brought with them an underground sensibility: these early PCs were not the products of corporations but of people like Apple founders Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, both of whom had had been “phone phreaks” dedicated to hacking the telephone system. Most early owners of personal computers were hackers, or at least hobbyists – you had to assemble the Apple I yourself – and there was a shared do-it-yourself attitude to enterprises such as the Homebrew Computer Club, of which both Jobs and Wozniak were members. While buying hardware was a necessity, the notion of paying for software was new and even mildly ridiculous in this culture: programmers had been swapping and sharing their work since the 1960s. As a result, software piracy was endemic from the birth of the personal computer industry (an early issue of the Homebrew Computer Club newsletter, from 1976, contains a letter from a young Bill Gates complaining about the pirating of MS BASIC.)

As software makers struggled to find ways to prevent piracy, overcoming copy protection, or “cracking,” became a recognized skill: early crackers, far from concealing their work or feeling shame over it, trumpeted their achievements in “crack screens” which replaced the launch screens of copied games. Software piracy was justified as a demonstration of skill and a fight to maintain the computer industry’s anti-corporate roots. Unrepentant software pirates clearly saw themselves as privateers, an attitude still found today in groups such as The Pirate Bay, who have expanded to pirating all sorts of content such as music, film and other media that have been digitized.

Maritime piracy had some significant effects on history: as well as its role in ending US isolationism (the United States’ first overseas venture was a war against the Barbary Corsairs who operated off the coast of North Africa, an event commemorated in the Marine Corps' hymn that promises to fight “to the shores of Tripoli.”) it also was important in the early development of international law, with piracy being a major issue on the table at the 1815 Congress of Vienna. Online piracy may have similar effects: nations that are home to the largest producers of intellectual property, such as the United States, have pressured other countries to take tougher stands on copyright violations in the same way that nations were once urged to stop paying tribute to the Barbary Corsairs. For instance, Michael Geist reports  that Canada has been under pressure from the United States to deal with copyright issues through the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement rather than the less punitive World Intellectual Property Organization.

Just as there were disagreements between and within nations about how to deal with pirates, so too has this issue been contentious: a punitive law proposed by French President Nicolas Sarkozy, which would have denied Internet access to anyone caught downloading copyrighted material illegally, was recently defeated in the French parliament. The effects of online piracy, meanwhile, are already being felt on the cultural industries: declines in DVD sales and dramatic drops in music industry profits. As with the Somali pirates, there is little agreement on how to combat online piracy: with force, by making it more difficult, or by finding alternate means of distribution that will be less prone to piracy (computer game developers have largely abandoned PCs in favour of consoles such as the Xbox and Wii, whose cartridge-based hardware make them much harder to pirate.)

How will piracy shape the Internet and the cultural world of the future? Most Internet users, already accustomed to getting their content for free, see little moral dimension in viewing or downloading pirated content. The biggest difficulty facing industry in dealing with online piracy is the lack of public support. Just as some of the Somali pirates have used anti-colonialist rhetoric to justify their actions, claiming that pollution from commercial vessels has made it impossible to fish their coastal waters, groups such as The Pirate Bay have drawn arguments from the free culture movement, a school of thought epitomized by the Creative Commons organization.

Creative Commons, though, is about creating something new from existing material, not just copying it. The pirates, on the other hand, are conflating (in the words of free culture guru Richard Stallman) “free as in speech” with “free as in beer” – couching their desire for free stuff in the ideals of free expression. Large intellectual property owners have contributed to this confusion, lumping pirates in with remixers and those who use copyrighted material incidentally. IP owners are similarly indiscriminate in their attempts to enforce copyright and aim their attacks at any target they can find, such as the parents whose home video of their child dancing was removed from YouTube because a Prince song was playing in the background. With heavy-handed tactics like these, it’s no surprise that pirates win more support than their targets.

Questions for classroom discussion

• Do you think the distinction between pirates and privateers is still meaningful today? Why or why not?
• Is it fair to call copying and distributing other people’s intellectual property (games, music, videos, etc.) “piracy”? Why or why not?
• Some people feel Internet users have become so conditioned to getting things free on the Internet that it would be impossible to get them to reject piracy. Do you think this is true? Why or why not?
• The Free Culture Movement argues that copyright laws are too strict and restrict creativity. How much control should copyright owners have over how their property is used? (For instance, should it be legal to make and distribute a video for a song owned by someone else? If so, under what circumstances?)
• Why do you think pirates have gone from being villains to heroes (or at least sympathetic) characters? Does it reflect changes in our society’s attitude towards law and authority? If so, how have those attitudes changed?

 

With the tremendous success and spread of social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace, along with home-broadcasting sites such as YouTube and Flickr, many people have become concerned about what effect they will have on our attitudes towards privacy. Now a new question has arisen: whether Facebook postings violate the Youth Criminal Justice Act if they identify suspects or victims covered under the act.

The first of two trials for the accused murderers of Stefanie Rengel, who was killed in January of 2008, is about to conclude. Unusually, although both she and those arrested for her murder were under eighteen, her identity has been released to the media. Normally, if a suspect is under eighteen the Youth Criminal Justice Act prohibits the publication of any information that might reveal their identity, including the identity of the victim:

110. (1) Subject to this section, no person shall publish the name of a young person, or any other information related to a young person, if it would identify the young person as a young person dealt with under this Act.

111. (1) Subject to this section, no person shall publish the name of a child or young person, or any other information related to a child or a young person, if it would identify the child or young person as having been a victim of, or as having appeared as a witness in connection with, an offence committed or alleged to have been committed by a young person.

Section 111 does allow the publication of the victim’s name if his or her parents allow it, which Stefanie’s have done. The two accused killers have been referred to in the press only by their initials, as is common practice if the accused is under eighteen. In this case it is little more than a formality, though, because both Stefanie’s name and that of her suspected killers were published more than a year ago – on Facebook.

Against the law?

Opinions differ on whether postings to these Facebook groups – whose audience can vary based on the privacy settings chosen by the group’s creator – would count as publication under the law. It’s an issue nobody seems to be in a hurry to decide: Peel Constable Wayne Patterson, questioned by the Toronto Star, described it as “a good question,” adding “I guess it all boils down to whether Facebook is eventually determined by somebody that it is a publication.” Meanwhile Alain Charette, a spokesperson for the Department of Justice, told the same publication that the YCJA does apply to Facebook, and that “If it’s about a violation, it’s in police hands. If police get knowledge of that, it’s for them to take it from there.”

In fact, this is not the first time the question has been raised of whether online postings count as publications: the Usenet group alt.fan.karla-homolka was blocked by numerous Canadian universities during the Paul Bernardo and Karla Homolka trials in 1993, due to fears that the universities might be violating a gag order against publication of the details of the crimes by allowing access to the group, which carried postings including just such details. No definitive ruling was ever made however, leaving it unclear whether the universities’ fears were well-founded.

A growing problem

The Internet of 1993 reached few enough people that we could afford to leave the question for another day. With sites like Facebook growing at a rate of 250,000 new users a day, though, it has become clear that controlling information – even in cases like the YCJA, where it is done for arguably the best of intentions – has become much more difficult than it once was. The courts are still deciding just how much privacy can be expected on social networking sites; a Toronto judge recently ruled that even posts whose distribution is limited to Friends only must be disclosed if they are relevant to the case. (This ruling actually came from a civil trial, in which postings on the plaintiff’s Facebook page were introduced to counter his claims of having been seriously injured in an accident, but the precedent would apply to criminal cases as well.)

Complicating matters still further is the fact that many of these sites’ users are, themselves, young people: as Martha McKinnon, executive director of Justice for Children and Youth, told the CBC, most Facebook users do not know enough about the law to know that they are breaking it: "Neither the federal nor provincial government have invested any resources into educating the public about why we have these confidence provisions [in the Youth Criminal Justice Act.]"

Facebook itself has taken no official stand on the issue: speaking with relation to a similar case, spokesperson Simon Axten said that existing tools on the site, which allow people to report offensive content or groups, are sufficient. Those complaints, however, are handled by Facebook administrators and are judged on the basis of whether or not the site’s terms of use have been violated; these administrators are unlike to have much knowledge of Canadian law and the YCJA in particular (it is legal to publish the names of accused youths in the US).

So are those Facebook users who posted the identities of the accused breaking the law? To date no charges have been laid, and after a year it seems unlikely that they will be. At the moment we seem to be in an odd situation where respected, responsible news outlets such as the Globe and Mail and Toronto Star have to abide by the law, but Internet postings do not. As seems more and more often to be the case, technology is at least one step ahead of the law.

For Classroom Discussion

• Why does the YCJA protect the identities of young offenders?

• How might it serve the interests of:
   o Young accused
   o Young victims
   o Family of victims or accused
   o Society at large

• Do you agree with these reasons?

• Why might people have chosen to reveal the identities of the victim and the accused on Facebook? Do you agree with those possible reasons?

• What powers should government have to control the publication of information online?    

• Should those powers be greater within the justice system? Why or why not?

• Given that Facebook is an American company, should material it carries be subject to Canadian law? Why or why not?

• Should people be charged for posting information about young offenders or young victims on sites like Facebook? Why or why not?

Classroom Activities

• Have students research (or provide them with background on) the reasoning behind the creation of the Youth Criminal Justice Act, particularly its provisions for identity protection.

• Conduct a debate or town hall meeting on the conflict between the interests of the state and the community in keeping some information private and the right of individuals to publish or read whatever news they wish. (In the town hall meeting version, each side might have several members, representing the different interested parties: the courts, lawyers and youth advocates on the one side, for instance, and broadcasters, civil liberties advocates and Internet companies on the other. Some groups, such as friends of the accused or victim, might well have representatives on each side.)

MNet Resources

Lessons

Perceptions of Youth and Crime (Grades 7-12)

What Students Need to Know about Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy (Grades 5-10)

Free Speech Versus the Internet (Grades 10-12)

 

One of the most noted aspects of the Internet is its anonymity: by and large, people online will treat you as whoever you say you are. In the West, this is often used for mischief or identity play, but in other parts of the world anonymity can have a much more significant and liberating effect.

Perhaps the area most affected in this way is the Middle East. Although this region has been slow to build a digital infrastructure -- the Arabic version of Wikipedia has only 65,000 articles, fewer than the Slovenian version -- people in the Middle East still find ways to get online.

This is particularly true for young people, who, like their peers in the rest of the world, outpace their elders in matters digital. For instance, Iran, where more than half of the population is under 25, has the third-largest number of bloggers in the world (after the United States and China). Under the shadow of a repressive regime, despite the government's attempts to ban high-speed Internet access, blogs and other forms of online communication have become an important source of dissent. This issue is explored in a striking animated film created by students at the Vancouver Film School:

In Egypt, which has a similar proportion of young people, the flashpoint has been Facebook: not because it lets people socialize, but because it helps them organize. In the spring of last year a protest arose against rising food prices. The focus of the protest was a Facebook page that at its peak had 75,000 members. The government cracked down on the protests, arresting one of its organizers, Israa Abdel Fateh, and contemplated banning Facebook (a "Free Israa" group quickly appeared, which gained tens of thousands of members). Of course, many Egyptians use Facebook for socializing as well. For citizens in these countries, for whom both physical travel abroad and access to foreign media is often restricted, the borderless nature of the Internet is its most appealing feature. As Cairo medical student Ahmad Belal told the New York Times, “For Egyptians, the visa procedures for any country are very difficult. You need a visa to visit any country in the world. Facebook and Wikipedia connect us to the outside.”

The Middle Eastern group with the most circumscribed existence, of course, is women. For many, the Internet has opened up an entire world they would not otherwise have access to. Young Bedouin women in Israel, for instance, manage (despite not being connected to an electrical grid) to use Instant Messaging (IM) to socialize with each other and to talk to boys, something that would be entirely forbidden otherwise. The Bedouin are an extremely isolated group -- separated from the mainstream of Israeli society by religion, separated from other Arab Israelis by customs and geography -- and the isolation of their women is even greater. As in many insular communities, reputation is everything; so for women -- particularly young women -- the anonymity offered by the Internet allows them a freedom they would not know otherwise. As Adnan Gharabiya, a Bedouin who studied this phenomenon as part of his thesis, puts it, “In Bedouin society there is rather strict separation of the sexes, and a chat room is the only place where they can talk with members of the opposite sex. It is especially significant for the girls, because their social circle is even smaller, and their freedom of movement is limited. Not all of them can leave their parents’ community. Unlike the boys, girls are not allowed to go to town after classes, or to visit friends. In this respect, technology is very important.” It also serves as a source of information that would otherwise be unobtainable: “Among the family, it is not common to discuss all subjects, primarily when the children are adolescents. In a chat room, you can discuss everything, if you find someone who is receptive.”

Saudi Arabia -- sophisticated, developed and modernized, thanks to oil revenues -- may seem like the utter opposite to the Bedouin communities, but there too young people are using the Internet and other new media to break through traditional barriers. Saudi girls are at least as isolated as those among the Bedouin, although in Saudi Arabia a parallel economy of women-only malls, gyms and boutiques has arisen. For many Saudi girls even the freedom found by Bedouin women online in unimaginable: men may be permissible as Facebook friends, but chatting online is considered as forbidden as speaking face-to-face. Instead, the breakthrough technology here is the cell phone: a popular courting ritual is called "numbering," in which a group of men who spot a car they think has women in it try to drive to within Bluetooth range and transmit their phone numbers. According to the New York Times, many young Saudi men keep love poems loaded on their cell phones to be sent as text messages to any women they may see, a practice which neatly encapsulates the way the country combines the millennial and the medieval. As with the troubadours of the Middle Ages, though, these are flirtations and nothing more: beamed cell numbers and text messages rarely lead to voice conversations, and most marriages still come about by parental arrangement.

As noted above, in many Middle Eastern countries young people make up a plurality or majority of the population. While many of them are not interested in opposing their parents' values, nearly all have enthusiastically adopted new media technologies. Many writers have argued that these technologies promote openness and free expression by their very natures; as the wired generation takes its place in leading these countries, we may have a chance to see if these claims will be borne out.

Discussion questions

• The video "Iran: Nation of Bloggers" suggests that blogs are "the true voice of the new generation." According to the video, what makes blogs appealing to young people as a means of self-expression? Do you think bloggers will be able to have an effect on their society through blogging? Why or why not?
• The New York Times suggests that one reason the Egyptian government cracked down so hard on the Facebook protest was because it was unexpected, the government having little knowledge and experience with the online world. Do you think the "digital divide" between generations is likely to cause more conflict in Middle Eastern countries? Why or why not? If so, in what ways might this conflict play out?
• How is the Internet and other new media changing the experiences of young women in Middle Eastern countries? Do you think this will lead to significant changes in the lives of young women, or will the changes only be on the surface? Why or why not?

Links

• Global Voices is a site that excerpts and links to blogs from around the world. It's searchable by region or topic and is an invaluable guide to the effects of the Internet and other new media on the developing world.
• Digital Natives collects the experiences of young people online around the world. Their article "Unveiling the veil -- on the Web" looks at the some of the issues facing young Muslim women online.
  

Today is Safer Internet Day, an annual international event sponsored by Insafe to promote a safer Internet for children. Recent research on Internet life has shown that the greatest threat to kids online comes from kids themselves, both in the form of risky behaviour and online harassment, or cyber bullying. Cyber bullying can take forms such as harassing e-mails or text messages, social exclusion and spreading private photos and videos, among others, and presents a particular challenge for parents and teachers because it often happens outside the home or classroom. Because the Internet has become an essential part of kids' social lives, cyber bullying can also have more devastating effects as youth feel they have no escape.

To help educators address this issue in their classrooms, Media Awareness Network, with the support of the Canada Gazette, has developed the bilingual lesson series Cyber Bullying: Encouraging ethical online behaviour. The resource give students a better understanding of the ethical and legal implications of cyber bullying, while promoting positive and ethical Internet use. 

Intended to support and enhance school-based anti-bullying and empathy-building programs, Cyber Bullying: Encouraging ethical online behaviour comprises the following lessons:

Introduction to Cyber Bullying: Avatars and Identity
Grades 5-6

With the layering of identity through the use of nicknames and avatars, as well as a sense of anonymity, it is easy for young people to sometimes forget that real people—with real feelings—are at the heart of online conversations. In this lesson, students are provided with opportunities to explore this concept and discuss the importance of using empathy and common sense when talking to others online.

Understanding Cyber Bullying - Virtual vs. Physical Worlds
Grades 7-8

In this lesson, students explore the concept of cyber bullying and learn how the attributes associated with online communication may fuel inappropriate or bullying behaviour. Connections between other contributing factors to bullying—online and offline—are also reinforced as students develop an understanding of the role played by bystanders and the ways in which our own responses may fuel or stop this kind of behaviour. As a class, students establish a class “code of (N)ethics” for online conduct.

Cyber Bullying and the Law
Grades 7-8 and Grades 9-12 (two lessons)

In these lessons, secondary and middle school students learn about and discuss the legal aspects of cyber bullying. They review a variety of hypothetical scenarios and a case study, and consider the seriousness of the situations, who is legally responsible, what action (if any) should be taken and by whom. To determine this, students will seek answers to the following questions: How does cyber bullying differ from offline bullying? What aspects of a cyber bullying case make it a cause for legal action? What determines whether it is a civil or a criminal matter? How should rights to freedom of expression, guaranteed under the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, be balanced against rights to security of person? When and how are schools responsible for cyber bullying cases?

Cyber Bullying and Civic Participation
Grades 7-8

This lesson allows students to explore the concept of civic participation in the creation of Canadian laws through a study of the consultation process found in the Canada Gazette. Students will create their own School Gazette by proposing and discussing rules against cyber bullying at school.

Promoting Ethical Online Behaviour: Our Values and Ethics
Grades 7-9

In this 3-part lesson, students learn about online privacy and ethical behaviour by exploring their digital footprints to better understand how our online interactions may not be as anonymous as we think they are. In Part One, students create a digital map of their Web-based activities and the various characters and personas they assume online. In Part Two, students further assess the privacy and ethics of their online activities by applying their cyber-portraits to a questionnaire and, in Part Three, students look at areas in their virtual lives where they can make improvements.

With all the recent attention focused on stories of teenagers charged with distributing child pornography for taking sexually suggestive pictures of themselves, jobs lost due to Facebook and MySpace entries, and libel suits over blog posts, people are justifiably concerned about the permanence of material posted to the Internet. Many a teacher or parent has had to carefully explain to children or teens that whatever they post online might be seen by people other than the intended audience, and might be out there for a very long time.

A few people, though, are more concerned about the impermanence of the Internet – a medium where almost anything can be copied, deleted, altered or edited almost invisibly.

When you read the newspaper you can expect each article to be the same in the afternoon as it was in the morning, but on the Web no such guarantee is available. This is a particular issue in cases where a Web site tries to fill the same role as a newspaper – or, most notably, an encyclopedia. Wikipedia, which in a brief time has become one of the Web's most widely used services, is perhaps the quintessential "Web 2.0" enterprise: it's an encyclopedia intended to be written and edited by its readers. At the beginning this was more of a conceit than a reality – much of its early content was transcribed from early-20th Century encyclopedias that had fallen into the public domain – but for some time now Wikipedia has had an active and sometimes noisy community of authors and editors. It is largely in this community that the debate over the mutability of Web content has been going on.

Speaking broadly, the Wikipedia community can be broken into two camps on this issue: inclusionists and deletionists. Inclusionists believe that everything that has ever been added to Wikipedia, so long as it is not factually incorrect, should be left there; they point to the site's virtual nature, which allows it to have an unlimited number of "pages," as trumping the usual limitation on what can be included in an encyclopedia. Deletionists, on the other hand, feel that in order to be taken seriously, Wikipedia needs to be kept at least somewhat orderly and relevant, and favour the removal of articles and information they consider to be "trivial." Any Wikipedia user can propose deletion for any article; a debate page is then created where the proposed deletion can be discussed, and after a short time an administrator – administrators are volunteers nominated by other users, not employees – surveys the discussion and makes the final decision.

The inclusionists' battle is a losing one: no matter how many pages they manage to save, others will be deleted. Some have resigned themselves to this fact, but some – unwilling to let even a single article fade into oblivion – have organized a rival venture: Deletionpedia. Unlike Wikipedia, Deletionpedia is not edited by its users; instead it is maintained by a computer program that surveys Wikipedia for imminent deletions and then copies and stores the doomed pages. Unlike Wikipedia, Deletionpedia revels in the trivial: at the time of writing the featured articles on its home page included an early draft of the most recent Indiana Jones movie; a bicycle club in Chennai, India; and "a young bugbear in a Dungeons and Dragons campaign played by the Northland Preparatory Academy Games Club."

Because Wikipedia can be edited by users, there are often more subtle issues than whether a whole page should be deleted or not. Wikipedia pages are constantly mutating: some changes, such as the mistaken statement that Pop-Tarts have been discontinued in Australia, are subtle; others, such as when the entire Pop-Tarts page was replaced with the words NIPPLES AND BROCCOLI!!!!!, are not. Automated editors take care of most of the latter cases, but the subtler ones require human editors.

A recent example of a subtle edit is the case of Jim Prentice, former minister of Industry. Shortly before the controversial bill C-61 (Act to Amend the Copyright Act) was to be tabled, in June of 2008, blogger and law professor Michael Geist discovered a number of edits had been made to Prentice's Wikipedia entry. The changes included removing some language critical of Prentice as well as adding positive material such as stating that he had been "dubbed the unofficial deputy prime minister."

None of this is too different from the usual activity on a Wikipedia entry, and compared to what happens on a Star Trek page it could be considered quite mild. What made it unusual was where the changes came from. In 2007 Virgil Griffith, a graduate student at the California Institute of Technology, created a program called Wikiscanner which tracks Wikipedia edits and shows from which IP address they were made. A wikiscan of the Prentice changes showed that they had been made from computers at the Ministry of Industry. (Whether they were done under Prentice's orders or by over-eager subordinates has never been established.) This fact drew some unwelcome media attention to Prentice at a time when C-61 was already under fire from some quarters, making it feasible that the controversy played some role in Prentice's move to a new ministry in the recent cabinet shuffle.

What's more significant than the attempts to burnish Prentice's online image is the degree to which Prentice and his staff were revealed to be ignorant of the nature of Wikipedia and the Web in general. Beyond their being unaware of Wikiscanner, or the large and active Wikipedia community which polices changes, it seems hard to believe that they thought changing his entry would influence anyone's opinion. Wikipedia editors, and Web users in general, are accustomed to watching for "sock puppets" (dummy accounts used to make it look like others agree with you). The staff at Industry Canada, though, seems to have thought that Wikipedia was actually an encyclopedia – that people would believe whatever they wrote there, because it was in print. Given the recent importance of new media in U.S. politics, the fact that Industry Canada seems to be locked in the pre-Internet age may be the most disturbing thing to come out of this whole story.

Questions for class discussion

• Do you think that the fact that Wikipedia can be edited by its users makes it an unreliable source of information? Why or why not?
• Why is Wikiscanner a useful tool in judging whether material in a Wikipedia entry is reliable? What other tools or techniques could be used to test the reliability of Wikipedia content?
• Do you believe that online information sources such as Wikipedia should be limited to "relevant" topics, like a traditional encyclopedia, or should they include all possible content? Why?

With our own election coming soon, a new crop of Canadian political ads have been launched, and most of them are available online. Efforts to re-brand Stephen Harper have included spots where he, clad in a friendly sweater vest, talks about his love of family; the Liberals, meanwhile, created an uplifting, Reaganesque ad to sell their “Green Shift” policy.

 

 

• Why were players of Star Wars Galaxies upset about the changes in the game?

• Many fans feel like they “own” the properties they watch and play. Why do you think they feel this way? Should fans have any rights of “ownership”? Why or why not?

• Do you have examples of friends or peers who create collaborative media based on copyrighted property? If so, did they seek permission? Do you think that they should? Why or why not?

• Which do you think will be more effective in dealing with user-created media – the collaborationist or the prohibitionist approach? Why?

• Do you think that user-created content will change the relationship between media producers and consumers? If so, how will it change? If not, why not?

• How do you think the spread of digital cameras and camera cell phones might change how the news is made? Will it have different effects on different news media (newspapers, TV, Internet, etc.) or have different effects in different parts of the world? Why?

• Sites like EveryBlock try to let the users filter their own news, deciding what is newsworthy and what is not. Do you think that most people would have a different view of what is newsworthy than the news media does? If all news was user-selected, would it look different from the news today? Why or why not? If so, how would it be different?

• Do you think everyone has a duty to be a journalist? Why or why not?

• Do you think that “citizen journalists” will change journalism? Why or why not? If yes, how will journalism be changed?

• Do you think that journalists should try to be objective, or should they be transparent about their views and agendas? Why? Is it possible to have both objectivity and advocacy in the news? If so, is it desirable?

• Why do you think so many people report that they don’t trust the news media? A Pew Research Center study reported that people who get their news mostly from the Internet are less likely to trust the media; why might this be so? Do you think that an increase in citizen journalism, in any of the forms described above, will make people more or less likely to trust the media? Why or why not?

• Why do you think the question of whether computer code should be “open” or “closed” has aroused such strong opinions? How does this question relate to some of the issues raised around user-created content in DIY Media: Mashups, fan movies, and machinima?

• How successful do you think Front Porch Forum would be in a large city? Why?

• What do you think doctors and medical relationships would think about Patients Like Me? Why?

• How reliable do you consider Wikipedia to be? Why? Does its reliability relate to the way users create and edit content? If so, how?

• Which term do you think is more appropriate to describe the examples discussed in this column, “crowdsourcing” or “open source”? Why? What different messages does each term imply?

• The one case in this column where authorship is fairly clear-cut is Maria Schneider’s Pathetic Geek Stories. Why, when she draws from other people’s experiences, do we consider Schneider the author of her work? What guidelines could we take from this example to help us decide who is the author in other cases?

• Bitstrips makes creating a cartoon very easy – the user does not even have to design original characters if she does not want to. Does this change how we view a Bitstrips cartoon as art? Does automating cartooning in this way devalue cartoons as a medium? What do you think a professional cartoonist might think about Bitstrips?

• Bitstrips has very successfully created a community where sharing of creative work is expected. How successful do you think the Sims Online will be in creating a similar community? Why?

• The Sims Online allows people without much technical skill to create computer games. Do you think the games its users create will be different from commercial computer games? If so, in what ways might they be different and why? If not, why not?

 

Image © Science Museum/Science and Society Picture Library

 

Note: this is the first in a series of blogs looking at the history and future of Web 2.0.

 

         From Facebook pages to viral Barack Obama speeches, the latest boom to hit the media is the rise of user-created content. Services such as Facebook and YouTube have created a new business model: rather than selling content to consumers, as media companies traditionally have done, they provide the means for consumers to make and distribute their own content (or, as an anonymous contributor on bash.org put it, “You make all the content, they get all the revenue.”) The resulting movement, called Web 2.0 by some to distinguish it from the older content-delivery model, has already made fortunes, stealing both employees and the cutting-edge image of companies like Google.

 

         Exactly what user-created content is, however, remains a matter for debate. This is not surprising: with its roots in the 1970s DIY (“Do It Yourself”) culture, which itself sprang from the authenticity-obsessed punk movement, the question of whether or not something is “really” user-created content is bound to be a controversial and political issue. While an opposition to consumerism was an essential part of the early DIY movement, today’s user-created content largely stems from a desire to participate in the creation of consumer culture.

 

         One reason for this is that today’s DIY is a hybrid, born not only from the anti-consumerist movement, but also from computer culture. What makes computer culture unique among media is that, for most of its history, it has consisted largely of user-created content. The earliest computer games, such as Spacewar and Colossal Cave, were amateur products created during slack time on university mainframes and then passed around from lab to lab without hope of profit. Early home computer systems, such as the Apple II, came with programming languages like BASIC installed, which allowed users to create their own programs – the same as if every TV came with a simple video camera. Many games also included “modding” tools, used to create customized content; “Lode Runner,” which allowed users to create their own levels, became one of the most popular games for the Apple II. Unlike other media, then, in computers the line between content creators and consumers was thin-to-nonexistent from the beginning, and nearly all creators started out as fans.

             

         What brought the two parents of user-created content – the DIY movement and computer culture – together was the Internet. While the Bulletin Board Systems of the 1980s had been largely the province of people who identified themselves as computer hobbyists, the introduction of graphic browsers such as Mosaic – and its successor Netscape – made the Internet as user-friendly as Macintosh and Windows had made computers. While the first generation of Internet services tried to make a business of providing content to users, it became clear that users were at least as interested in creating that content themselves.

             

         How much user-created content is actually out there? According to a 2006 Pew Internet and American Life survey, just over one in three Internet users have created some kind of online content, such as an online video, a Web site, a blog or a social networking profile page. (It’s worth noting that Facebook was not open to the general public until September of 2006, too late to be reflected in the study.) There is now enough user-generated content out there to support services devoted to cataloguing, sifting and exploring it, such as Digg, MetaFilter and StumbleUpon.

 

         Neither “Web 2.0” nor “user-created content” are terms with simple definitions. Whether a Facebook profile page, for instance, truly counts as user-created content is a matter of some debate; similarly, YouTube contains as many clips of movies and TV shows as it does material created by its users. Some people feel, as well, that the whole notion of user-created content gives credibility to an outdated division between users and producers. Even the term “Web 2.0” has come under scrutiny, with some calling it nothing but a marketing device, and others saying it simply describes what the Internet has been all along. (Stephen Fry has compared social networking sites to the old “closed” online communities such as Compuserve or America Online.)

         

         What, then, is user-created content? Who is a user, and who is a creator? Ralph Koster, a designer on one of the first massively multiplayer online games, has suggested that all users are creators: even playing a simple video game involves the user in creating a narrative. Koster notes that not all activities require the same amount or level of creative input, but he’s surely right in saying that there are no passive consumers. Even someone watching TV or reading a book is involved in a collaboration with that product’s authors – interpreting characters, anticipating plot events, judging the morality of actions. The key element of user-created content is not the actual content: it is how that content is delivered to an audience that may range from the single digits to the millions. In the next instalment, we’ll look at new genres and media that have their roots in Web 2.0.

 

For Classroom Discussion

 

• What differences do you find between traditional media products (movies, TV shows, etc.) and user-created products? What might be the cause of some of these differences?

 

• Consumerism has been defined as “the theory that an increasing consumption of goods is economically beneficial.” (Princeton Wordnet) If we consider “goods” to include media products, would you say Web 2.0 is mostly consumerist or anti-consumerist? Why might this be so?

 

• What effect do you think the appearance of Web 2.0 will have on more traditional media? Why?

 

• Which kinds of user-created content do you think will be more successful in the long run – those that involve a lot of user involvement (like blogs or videos), or relatively little user involvement (like Facebook profiles)? Why?

• What features do you think a laptop should have to be usable in developing nations? Why?

• Which do you think is more important in a classroom computer, affordability or functionality (what it can do and how well)?

• How are computers used in your school? Do you think they will be used in similar ways in developing nations, or differently? Why? If they would be used differently, how do you think they would be used?
  
  
• Do you think that international developments should give money to support the One Laptop Project Per Child project? If so, why? If not, what do you think should be a higher priority?

• Why might some developing countries have decided the One Laptop Per Child project is not for them? Do you think their reasons are good ones?

• Is it a good thing for developing countries to be connected to the Internet? Why or why not?

2.0

 

The term “Web 2.0” was coined to describe (and, in part, predict) the rise in user-created content on the Net. Recently there have been two stories that show interesting developments in Web 2.0’s evolution: bumps in the road to the anticipated convergence with television, and the rise of 2.0 as alternative journalism.  

 

First is the news that MTV’s user-generated channel MTV Flux is being closed by the parent company after just fifteen months of operation. If one were to imagine a typical audience for Web 2.0 content, it would be MTV’s viewers: the kind of people who have an endless appetite for aspiring popstars singing in their basements, piano-playing cats and tearful teens begging the media to “leave Brittney alone” (to name three of 2007’s most popular videos.) While there might be any number of reasons for MTV Flux’s cancellation, its failure raises the question of whether Web 2.0 might be nearing the end of its adolescence.

 

 

 

Ushahidi.com is another example. Ushahidi means “witness” in Swahili, and Ushahidi.com is a collaborative website – a sort of cross between Wikipedia and Google Earth – in which users can submit reports of events in the current Kenyan crisis. These are organized into categories such as “Riots,” “Property Loss” and the recently-added “Peace Efforts” and marked on a map of Kenya (both road and satellite maps are available.) Says Ory Okolloh, one of the site’s creators:

We believe that the number of deaths being reported by the government, police, and media is grossly underreported. We also don’t think we have a true picture of what is really going on - reports that all of us have heard from family and friends in affected areas suggests that things are much worse than what we have heard in the media.

A common criticism of the Web has been that it caters to the short attention spans supposedly found in the “MTV Generation,” and Web 2.0 sites like YouTube have encouraged that impression. Ushahidi gives us an example of a user-generated site that not only avoids that but hopes to have the opposite effect:

 

Kenyans have demonstrated their capacity for selective amnesia time and time again. When this crisis comes to an end, we don’t want what happened to be swept under the rug in the name of ‘moving forward’ – for us to truly move forward, the truth of what happened needs to be told - Ushahidi is our small way of contributing to that.

 

And that, perhaps, deserves to be on the Internet as much as a piano-playing cat.

 

For Class Discussion

 

Ask students:

 

• MTVFlux was an attempt to put user-created content on TV. Why do you think it failed when presented on TV while user-generated content presented on the Web such as YouTube have been so successful?

 

• Do you think user-generated content will ever be as popular on TV as it is on the Web? Why or why not?

 

• Why do you think the creators of Ushahidi used the Web for their project? What advantages would it have for them over other media?

 

• What issues, problems or concerns can you foresee arising with Ushahidi? How might the creators anticipate or respond to these?

 

Activity

 

• Ask students how the Ushahidi model might be applied to issues in the developed world. Have them imagine or design a site in which user-generated content is used to give people more opportunity to get involved in an issue that concerns them.

PBS’ Frontline will be showing Growing Up Online, an examination of the lives of teenagers on the Net, on Tuesday, January 22. This program will look at the experiences of a generation that has never lived without the Internet, and who increasingly define their identities through their online activities. The filmmakers also look at how parents and teachers are struggling to deal with a generation of young people who seek complete independence and constant stimulation online.

Click here to watch a trailer. You can also read a response to the program by one of its interviewees, Anastasia Goodstein of Ypulse.com.

Each month over half a million Internet users visit our Web site to access our extensive offerings of free media education and Internet literacy resources for educators, teacher-librarians, parents, students and researchers.

It’s always an interesting exercise to look back on our Web stats at the end of the year to see what issues generated the most interest and which resources were the most popular. As always, media violence and representations of women were popular topics, but we also saw an increase in interest in alcohol advertising, Internet literacy and the mechanics of film-making. Finally, our interactive games Privacy Playground, Cybersense and Nonsense and Jo Cool or Jo Fool received consistent traffic throughout the year. 

The following is a listing of the English language pages on our site that consistently received the highest number of hits throughout 2007:

  

 "The public wants entertainment not information."
– William Randolph Hearst

Today, celebrity culture dominates our daily media and social dialogue. It's a 24-hour business, fed by nightly entertainment news programs, cable channels devoted to celebrity, the bustling newsstand business of magazines and the millions of Web sites that keep vigil ever-hopeful of sellable scandal (Paris Hilton Inc., CBC Web site). 

On Sunday, December 16 at 11pm ET/PT, CBC Newsworld presents Paris Hilton Inc. The documentary explores how the surging popularity of entertainment and gossip Web sites is reshaping the media landscape. Paris Hilton Inc., looks at how celebrity scandals and scoops are moving from the pages of the tabloids to mainstream news.

Paris Hilton, Inc can also be viewed online in its entirety on the CBC Web site.

 Also playing: Gamer Revolution

 

CBC Newsworld is replaying the two part series Gamer Revolution. The series looks at the world of computer gaming. Computer games are a global phenomenon and a $25 billion dollar a year industry. According to the series, over 800 million people worldwide are regular players and “tens of millions of people are now spending more time in the virtual world of online games than they are in the real world”. Part one of the series will air Saturday December 15 at 10 pm ET/PT, part two will air the following Saturday.

 

An excerpt from the film is available on the CBC Web site.

 

If you have comments or feedback on these programs or any of the issues raised. Let us know...

 

 

• Research and homework
   
• Online relationships
   
• Inappropriate content
   
• Online marketing
   
• Cyber addiction

• Curriki
  
  Curriki, a play on the words ‘curriculum’ and ‘wiki’, is an online, open-source environment created to support the development and distribution of educational materials. The Web site is designed to ensure the global education community has free access to resources.  
  
  http://www.curriki.org
   
• TeacherTube
  
  TeacherTube is much like YouTube, except it features only instructional and educational videos. The Web site allows educators to post videos that are either professional development or are designed to be instructional aids to support student learning. There is a free-registration process required.   
  
  http://www.teachertube.com/
   
• Café pédagogique
  
  For teachers who are looking for French educational resources, there is Café pédagogique. This Web site is for educators to share best practises and features topics such as designing lessons, evaluation and instruction. 
   
  http://cafe.cmaisonneuve.qc.ca/

• Over 3 million Canadians have uploaded video online and 24% of them have their own page or blog.
    
• 41% downloaded a music file in May 2007, up from 38% from September 2006.
    
• 62% use instant messaging to keep in touch with family and friends. Seventy per cent say that the photos, stories and videos they post online are meant for families and friends.

A recent Google Canada/Media Screen report found that:

• 98% of Canadians are now searching the Internet to purchase products and services and these searches are part of the nearly five hours a day we spend on the Internet.
   
• The average Canadian broadband consumer is younger than those in the U.S., with those aged 18-24 making up 15% of the broadband user population, compared to 9% of the same grouping in the U.S.

• Canada has one of the highest broadband penetration rates in the world and online games represent a more significant portion of the gaming market in Canada than in other regions. In 2006, the online gaming segment constituted 28% of the gaming market in Canada, compared to 21% in Asia Pacific.

• Danah Boyd, Researcher, University of California, Berkeley and Fellow, University of Southern California Annenberg Center for Communications
   
• Dr. David Finkelhor, Director, Crimes against Children Research Center (CCRC), University of New Hampshire
   
• Amanda Lenhart, Senior Research Specialist, Pew Internet & American Life Project
   
• Dr. Michele Ybarra, President, Internet Solutions for Kids

• Prior to its release in 2006, Snakes on a Plane became a hot topic online for movie enthusiasts. Web sites, script excerpts and user-created sound bites popped up online to celebrate the film’s camp value alluded to in the film’s title. Capitalizing on the buzz, New Line Cinema added five days of re-shoots to incorporate fan suggestions. Among the additions was an expletive-rich catch phrase inspired from a user-created audio trailer and homemade song which was part of an online contest for the film.
   
• An online contest was also used to promote the upcoming 2007 summer release of Transformers. Dreamworks challenged people to submit dialogue for the popular character known as Optimum Prime. Visitors to the movie’s Web site then voted for the best phrase. Peter Cullen, the voice of Optimum Prime, recorded the top-10 winning entries. The top three entries where made into ringtones while the winning entry will be used in the film.
   
• In January 2007, the Vancouver-based film company Lionsgate, teamed up with the popular online teen community Habbo to establish virtual focus group testing. Habbo hosted ten animated shorts, based on the Habbo world. The short clips, nicknamed “Habbosodes” were created in a variety of formats by professional animation companies. The more than 70 million members of the Web site had the opportunity to cast their vote on whether or not Lionsgate should extend one of them into a feature length movie.

• Talk to your kids about Facebook. Ask to see their profile and have them guide you through how they add friends. Make sure they have enabled the privacy feature that allows them to restrict access to only people they know.
  
• Explain that they must be extremely careful when posting information about themselves on the site because school administrators, police and potential employees have been known to troll Facebook profiles looking for incriminating or illegal behaviour.
  
• Read through the Terms posted on the site with your kids. The section User Content Posted on the Site explains that the company has the right to use content posted on the site in any way it chooses to.

A student gathering information on the poem “In Flanders Fields” is likely to start his or her research by typing the poem’s title into the Google search engine.

        

The search brings up over 1.4 million links to Web pages. Number eight on the list is a link titled “Remembrance Day” with the address – “www.canadafirst.net/our_heritage/rememberance_day/.” To an unquestioning student, this particular link looks as relevant as any other on the list. An investigation of the host's domain name, “www.canadafirst.net,” reveals a bias in the information.

 

The Web site is for Canada First, an organization that promotes hatred and intolerance by targeting immigrants. With a little research, the user can identify the bias and hateful message promoted on this site. In the top left corner of the Web site’s homepage, the phrase "Canada First" is paired with the text "deport the Illegals." Propaganda and misinformation is throughout the page which includes the text “immigration can kill you.”

 

Click on ‘show extended entry’ for classroom resources on authenticating online information and lessons on online hate.