I'm not a big fan of young kids on Facebook either, but I do think that having a "safe" social network for the under-13 crowd would be good, and because of it's ubiquity, Facebook isn't it.
I'd prefer something owned and operated by the schools themselves. I've had a feature in Appleseed for a while now which lets you block or allow social networking domains based on regular expressions.
In the US, since all schools get a domain, a junior high in Wisconsin could block all domains except *.k12.wi.us, so that only other students could connect.
A portable, federated, school-based social network might be an interesting end-run around the data lock-in problem.
You could pitch the solution as a sort of portal-with-social-network-features to the school (something they're all keen to have) and you'd wind up with a huge userbase and a steady stream of profiles that want to port-out or echo-out from their school-based service each and every year. And, as even large schools are tiny on an internet-scale, scaling problems are vastly simplified.
Then each outside service that wanted to be able to take these profiles in, or allow a link between an in-school profile and one of their profiles (so Sue's uploads to the photography club make it to the flickr stream their parents can subscribe to), would essentially be signing on to a common data format and interchange protocol.
"I'd prefer something owned and operated by the schools themselves."
I strongly disagree. Part of the point of these things would be to not be the school, to emphatically not be the school. My BBS days would have been much less interesting if everything had to be sanitized for school authority consumption.
At some point children are no longer in school. It would be nice if they have some miniscule amount of experience in being in a not-school environment, what with that making up the majority of their lives. If schools are anything they are already too large, in terms of the footprint they leave on our children's lives.
After a certain age, yes, I know I appreciated the freedom of BBS's when I was a teenager as well.
But up to around 13, building your social network around your classmates makes sense. And the ability to exclude older children, and non-students, as well as be able to monitor their activity also makes sense. There isn't the strong need for privacy when you're nine than there is when you're 14.
In fact, there has already been legal drama with schools objecting to what students write about their classes and teachers and seeking to punish them for it. I agree, affiliation with the school system is a liability, not a benefit.
Older students would have their school profile, and their non-school profile, just like they have their school email address, and their non-school one. It's really not much different.
As to the litigiousness of school administrators around free speech issues, that's something that will have to be worked out with social networking whether schools run their own networks or not.
But when you're dealing with the pre-teenager crowd, I don't think it's as much of a legal issue.
The teachers at my kids schools don't all use their school email accounts. None of the students I know of do. No, not super interested in waiting for the schools to figure this out, or helping to push them there. I don't know why this should have anything to do with schools; in fact, getting outside the little social circles inside a school is one of the major wins to this.
Yes, for the younger side of the tween set. There's an unfilled gap, though, between Club Penguin and Facebook, at least according to my eldest daughter, who went on Facebook the minute she turned 13, literally-- she sat there with the form filled out, the mouse hovered over the "submit" button as the clock struck midnight. For her, Club Penguin lost its shine around age 11, and I was a hard-ass in terms of sticking to the Facebook TOS-- according to her, all of her friends were already on Facebook, and I tend to believe her, as it took her less than 18 hours to rack up more "friends" than I have.
I'm 17 and grew up on Halo CE with xchat back around 2001 to 2003. A large portion of my teenage years (and most of my friends') was spent on Halo 2 as well...4chan was all the rage 2005-2008. Early 2008 until now it's been supplanted by HN and Reddit.
When I wasn't playing Halo, I spent a lot of time reading and editing Wikipedia, which might be something for kids to try out now. But Wikipedia's barrier to entry has risen significantly...one of the reasons I've quit the community there.
Eventually, it'll turn into a war between time spent on "productive" sites and activities, and time masturbating to porn, in my experience.
4chan isn't just /b/ and /b/ isn't all of 4chan as the saying goes...
Most of my time there was on /g/ /w/ and a few other boards like /mu/, but I first got hooked because of the raids on Wikipedia. 4chan is a fascinating place, not just full of CP as some would think.
And Webkinz, but typed chat is unavailable to my kids. I have one around 12 years old now, and nearly all her friends have Facebook profiles (verified, usually wide open), so it's hard to explain why she can't have one yet. I don't really think there's anything terribly wrong with it; just another way to communicate, like cell phones and, much earlier, telephones. We let them use email, so I'm starting to question the barrier we put up ourselves to Facebook.
With the amount of vitriol thrown around in American politics these days, I wouldn't want my kids directly exposed to a public forum like that if I was in the Presidential family.
I doubt Mr. Obama tells them national security related things, they're a little young for that. I have no doubt they would be subject to well organized and foul trolling if anyone could locate them online.
I don't think that's what he meant. Even simple things like "We're going to Disney World tomorrow" could be dangerous in the wrong hands, especially if the trip wasn't publicized beforehand.
My kids (9 and 11) aren't going to be allowed to use Facebook at 13 either.
It bothers me a bit --- it's something I've considered Asking HN --- that what meager writing ability I have, I gleaned from dialup BBS's in the early '90s; my kids lack a similar forum.
This is a big deal. Holding everything else at a low constant threshold, the ability to write and to take tests practically guarantees a B average. On a single day, no, hell, between build cycles! we write comments on HN that'd pass muster as a middle school essay. I've tried to communicate to my hemming and hawing son that I write stuff of similar length for enjoyment, and he doesn't get it.
Isn't a place like this (or reddit or any of the many special-interest forums out there) an equivalent replacement for the BBS era? Are the available platforms just not productive for "long form" writing?
I like places like this, but Reddit isn't the answer; it needs to be populated by and welcoming to "tween-age" kids while not being entirely restricted to them. It's a tough mix to get right.
Trajectory - I feel that's the only hope for what you desire for your kids -- that you put them on a trajectory to become the kinds of adults who will write essay quality posts on forums one day.
Try to visualize an online forum with fifteen year olds writing well thought out posts to each other. Try to visualize those kids. I can't. Not enough of them exist. It seems the closest you could get would be a Doogie-Howser-esque kid conversing with adults, or the opposite, one who's mastered short, slang, text-message type communications with his peers.
Yeah I think you missed the sentence in my original comment about how I found the environment we're talking to on dial-up BBS's --- if you could get that back when you had to tie up the phone line for your family to type a comment, it has to be possible today. ;)
These dial-up BBS's were populated by tween-aged kids? If so, I'll change my tune and become encouraged. I wasn't engaged in anything similar at that age.
I was involved in a few of AOL's teen (which is what we called 13-year-olds back then) message boards in the mid-'90s, and the level of discourse on some of those was excellent. The Teen Religion & Faith board remains to this day my mental model of an ideal online community. The conversation was great and the community was adept at either reforming or spitting out bad users (and that was despite the fact that we tried as hard as we could to keep the forum under the radar of the AOL moderators).
Ostensibly, the topics we were there to talk about were things like "how to get free phone calls from pay phones with Radio Shack DTMF pads" or "is the sequel to Monkey Island better than the original" or "what ANSI group had the best pack this quarter" or "should we tell everyone that In Utero is the worst album ever so it doesn't become popular and get ruined by jocks" but, just like on HN, conversations ranged wildly and hit politics, religion, and pop culture.
You can imagine the age range of people participating in conversations like this.
I was heavily involved in the Chicagoland BBS scene in the 90's (disallusioned society, damage inc, whammy bar), and my recollection was that the age group was much more teenager (and even early twenties) than pre-teens.
I was 15-17 when I was most involved, and I remember a lot of us being really weirded out when we found out the admin of disallusioned society was only 13.
I was an op on Whammy Bar and NBFC (Mike works with me, Ken is an old friend of mine). You're right, it's teenaged. I'd like something that would scale down to 10+, but 13+ is just peachy.
We're still trying to figure out how to balance between this interest to engage in interesting discussions while still trying to maintain a focus on the core of community which is learning programming. We've spun off some other discussion forums in the past such as those involving role-playing games (http://scratch.mit.edu/tbgforums/viewforum.php?id=49)
For my mother, writing basically made up the majority of her work. Accordingly, she spent practically a decade of my childhood making sure that I could write. She nitpicked my essays down to the last word and criticized me both on small-scale issues (e.g. sentence structure and word choice) as well as large-scale issues (structure of an argument, etc).
At the time I didn't quite realize how useful this was. As a kid, I was rather annoyed that I had to spend so much time to write short essays. Everything I did was a back-and-forth process between me and her -- in retrospect, rather like a code review.
Today, for me, writing is basically second-nature. Even when typing on IRC, if I want to, I can write reasonably well without putting much effort into it. The most surprising discovery for me as an adult was that this isn't normal -- that, particularly outside of our community here, most people really can't write without significant effort. From my perspective today, those years of nitpicking school writing assignments were the single most useful thing my parents did for me, and if I raise kids, I will ensure that I do the same to them.
One consistent observation I've made over the years is that the highest concentration of "good writers my age" during childhood was to be found in school scifi/fantasy writing clubs, text-based RPs such as MUSHs, and so forth. I don't know which direction the relationship goes in however: do such activities attract good writers, or do people become good writers through them? Or is it both?
Your kids will have an account, if they don't already. No special software is needed, just a browser and the ability to remember a password. School, library, friend's house...in this war it isn't you vs. them, it's the smartest, most motivated kid they know vs. the dumbest, most apathetic adult they know.
Yes, Facebook. If they ever go to a friend's house and they have a computer, or go to school...kids in my church get on Facebook at school all the time, either with no effort or I hear them talking about how to get around blocks with proxies, and these aren't the geeks, these are the "normal", average tech knowledge kids.
My kids are in an especially unfortunate (for them) situation vis a vis their ability to circumvent parental controls. Sure, they can try to use a Facebook account entirely from their friends house, but why bother? There's so little value in doing it that way that the cost of slipping up just once demolishes it.
> There's so little value in doing it that way that the cost of slipping up just once demolishes it.
The average child doesn't do an in-depth cost-benefit analysis before deciding whether to disobey his/her parents. With the right mix of peer pressure and childlike impulsiveness, your children will have Facebook accounts in no time.
Yes, and by that logic, will also surely be smoking, drinking, smoking up, and whatever else they've made after school specials about. Human trafficking? Overly-leveraged options speculation?
My point here is just, unlike a lot of parents, I'm pretty well situated to control my kids use of the Internet.
Remembering myself as a kid, being interested in something, and forbidden from doing so, was an instant "totally going to do that" impulse. I'd perceive such ban as a challenge, and would do my best to work around it. And I wouldn't say I was some exceptionally stubborn kid — I believe I was fairly average.
I don't see the connection between Facebook and writing. There are still forums they can participate in that serve whatever interests they have.
Also, don't you think reading newspapers/magazines/books (either online or on paper) are a better way to improve your langauge (written/verbal/comprehension) than internet forums?
"My dad said he wasn't going to sign that FTA with [country X]"
"No, I heard him say he really can't stand senator [from state X].
"My mom and I will be going shopping at [some store] at around 2."
"Yeah, I actually saw the King of [country] in the oval office --It's supposed to be a secret."
Not saying their daughters would have loose lips as exemplified above, and the example are highly unlikely as they would be trained to avoid such statements, but you could imagine people mining what they say to try to infer from what they post and extrapolate as well.
It would be a profitable mine for the opposition as well as for any wrong-doers.
doesn't this mean though that you'd have to keep them off the internet in general? It's not like (no pun intended) Facebook is the only forum for expressing one's opinions.
I'm surprised bullying hasn't been mentioned in this discussion. That's one of the main reason I plan to keep my unborn children off the internet as long as possible.
It's interesting though, when I was 13 my parents took TV away from me during the weekdays, but I still got to use my computer and AOL account. I think I'll be limiting my kids use of the internet for non-school purposes. This reminded me of the chinese-mother article from the other day--sometimes we know what's best for our kids before they do. Getting on facebook at age 13 is not good for kids in a society filled with obesity and online bullying. If anything severely restrict and monitor. I intend on requiring the password to all my kids social networking profiles--there is no way a 13 year old can have a reasonable expectation of privacy from their parents!
Our home has no broadcast TV. We do Netflix and Hulu for some (mostly advert-free) entertainment. My 12-year-old son can only go online via the living room PC (mostly because he doesn't have a PC in his room) and my 15-year-old daughter has mostly free-reign to do what she wants online via her netbook. I'd much rather have my kids reading and writing stuff online (even if some of the correspondence was questionable), as opposed to drooling in a trance while watching the boob-tube.
Call me a parent with weird priorities, but I'd rather my kids hold their own on places like Reddit and (yes, even) 4chan over watching much of the crap on TV (extreme left/right hate politics on CNN/FOX/CNBC, Hanna Montanna, reality TV, etc.). Not that either of them know of Reddit or 4chan yet (that I'm aware of), but I assume you catch my meaning.
Of course, the 'net does have a lot of TV-like mindless crap that can be just as (in my opinion) soul-killing as TV; things like Farmville and other pointless drivel. However, the kids don't seem to get hung up on stuff like that. Yet. We'll see, I guess.
This brave new world of parenting is always a mixed bag, isn't it?
58 comments
[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 138 ms ] threadAnd if they did get accounts, they'd be reported very quickly: http://www.facebook.com/help/contact.php?show_form=underage
I'd prefer something owned and operated by the schools themselves. I've had a feature in Appleseed for a while now which lets you block or allow social networking domains based on regular expressions.
In the US, since all schools get a domain, a junior high in Wisconsin could block all domains except *.k12.wi.us, so that only other students could connect.
You could pitch the solution as a sort of portal-with-social-network-features to the school (something they're all keen to have) and you'd wind up with a huge userbase and a steady stream of profiles that want to port-out or echo-out from their school-based service each and every year. And, as even large schools are tiny on an internet-scale, scaling problems are vastly simplified.
Then each outside service that wanted to be able to take these profiles in, or allow a link between an in-school profile and one of their profiles (so Sue's uploads to the photography club make it to the flickr stream their parents can subscribe to), would essentially be signing on to a common data format and interchange protocol.
I strongly disagree. Part of the point of these things would be to not be the school, to emphatically not be the school. My BBS days would have been much less interesting if everything had to be sanitized for school authority consumption.
At some point children are no longer in school. It would be nice if they have some miniscule amount of experience in being in a not-school environment, what with that making up the majority of their lives. If schools are anything they are already too large, in terms of the footprint they leave on our children's lives.
But up to around 13, building your social network around your classmates makes sense. And the ability to exclude older children, and non-students, as well as be able to monitor their activity also makes sense. There isn't the strong need for privacy when you're nine than there is when you're 14.
As to the litigiousness of school administrators around free speech issues, that's something that will have to be worked out with social networking whether schools run their own networks or not.
But when you're dealing with the pre-teenager crowd, I don't think it's as much of a legal issue.
When I wasn't playing Halo, I spent a lot of time reading and editing Wikipedia, which might be something for kids to try out now. But Wikipedia's barrier to entry has risen significantly...one of the reasons I've quit the community there.
Eventually, it'll turn into a war between time spent on "productive" sites and activities, and time masturbating to porn, in my experience.
That's a pretty disgusting thought.
Most of my time there was on /g/ /w/ and a few other boards like /mu/, but I first got hooked because of the raids on Wikipedia. 4chan is a fascinating place, not just full of CP as some would think.
It bothers me a bit --- it's something I've considered Asking HN --- that what meager writing ability I have, I gleaned from dialup BBS's in the early '90s; my kids lack a similar forum.
This is a big deal. Holding everything else at a low constant threshold, the ability to write and to take tests practically guarantees a B average. On a single day, no, hell, between build cycles! we write comments on HN that'd pass muster as a middle school essay. I've tried to communicate to my hemming and hawing son that I write stuff of similar length for enjoyment, and he doesn't get it.
Try to visualize an online forum with fifteen year olds writing well thought out posts to each other. Try to visualize those kids. I can't. Not enough of them exist. It seems the closest you could get would be a Doogie-Howser-esque kid conversing with adults, or the opposite, one who's mastered short, slang, text-message type communications with his peers.
Ostensibly, the topics we were there to talk about were things like "how to get free phone calls from pay phones with Radio Shack DTMF pads" or "is the sequel to Monkey Island better than the original" or "what ANSI group had the best pack this quarter" or "should we tell everyone that In Utero is the worst album ever so it doesn't become popular and get ruined by jocks" but, just like on HN, conversations ranged wildly and hit politics, religion, and pop culture.
You can imagine the age range of people participating in conversations like this.
I was 15-17 when I was most involved, and I remember a lot of us being really weirded out when we found out the admin of disallusioned society was only 13.
We're still trying to figure out how to balance between this interest to engage in interesting discussions while still trying to maintain a focus on the core of community which is learning programming. We've spun off some other discussion forums in the past such as those involving role-playing games (http://scratch.mit.edu/tbgforums/viewforum.php?id=49)
ImpishIdea was founded by a young HNer who was dissatisfied with previous literature discussion sites for young writers.
At the time I didn't quite realize how useful this was. As a kid, I was rather annoyed that I had to spend so much time to write short essays. Everything I did was a back-and-forth process between me and her -- in retrospect, rather like a code review.
Today, for me, writing is basically second-nature. Even when typing on IRC, if I want to, I can write reasonably well without putting much effort into it. The most surprising discovery for me as an adult was that this isn't normal -- that, particularly outside of our community here, most people really can't write without significant effort. From my perspective today, those years of nitpicking school writing assignments were the single most useful thing my parents did for me, and if I raise kids, I will ensure that I do the same to them.
One consistent observation I've made over the years is that the highest concentration of "good writers my age" during childhood was to be found in school scifi/fantasy writing clubs, text-based RPs such as MUSHs, and so forth. I don't know which direction the relationship goes in however: do such activities attract good writers, or do people become good writers through them? Or is it both?
The average child doesn't do an in-depth cost-benefit analysis before deciding whether to disobey his/her parents. With the right mix of peer pressure and childlike impulsiveness, your children will have Facebook accounts in no time.
My point here is just, unlike a lot of parents, I'm pretty well situated to control my kids use of the Internet.
Also, don't you think reading newspapers/magazines/books (either online or on paper) are a better way to improve your langauge (written/verbal/comprehension) than internet forums?
"My dad said he wasn't going to sign that FTA with [country X]"
"No, I heard him say he really can't stand senator [from state X].
"My mom and I will be going shopping at [some store] at around 2."
"Yeah, I actually saw the King of [country] in the oval office --It's supposed to be a secret."
Not saying their daughters would have loose lips as exemplified above, and the example are highly unlikely as they would be trained to avoid such statements, but you could imagine people mining what they say to try to infer from what they post and extrapolate as well.
It would be a profitable mine for the opposition as well as for any wrong-doers.
It's interesting though, when I was 13 my parents took TV away from me during the weekdays, but I still got to use my computer and AOL account. I think I'll be limiting my kids use of the internet for non-school purposes. This reminded me of the chinese-mother article from the other day--sometimes we know what's best for our kids before they do. Getting on facebook at age 13 is not good for kids in a society filled with obesity and online bullying. If anything severely restrict and monitor. I intend on requiring the password to all my kids social networking profiles--there is no way a 13 year old can have a reasonable expectation of privacy from their parents!
Call me a parent with weird priorities, but I'd rather my kids hold their own on places like Reddit and (yes, even) 4chan over watching much of the crap on TV (extreme left/right hate politics on CNN/FOX/CNBC, Hanna Montanna, reality TV, etc.). Not that either of them know of Reddit or 4chan yet (that I'm aware of), but I assume you catch my meaning.
Of course, the 'net does have a lot of TV-like mindless crap that can be just as (in my opinion) soul-killing as TV; things like Farmville and other pointless drivel. However, the kids don't seem to get hung up on stuff like that. Yet. We'll see, I guess.
This brave new world of parenting is always a mixed bag, isn't it?