JGC - Meaningful Engagement: What's going on in today's social networks

What's going on in today's social networks and online communities for young children:

- what social structures and dynamics prevail in today's online communities and social networks?

- In what ways do these structures and dynamics affect peer and/or parent interactions?

- What are the affordances of online communities and social networks for discovery, learning, and development?

- young kids - can they make a disctinction between a real and virtual environment? Sandra Okita from Columbia Uni -  doing a study with robots vs humans -- around 3 years old where they consider the worlds the same. this changes around 5 years.

- Andres Monroy Hernandez - build Scratch at MIT, now at Microsoft research.  One thing consistent on Scratch community is idea of kids building other kids works, kids collaboration. The basic building block is the idea of building from scratch, and also building (remixes) of existing work.  Around 30% are remixes. While kid's don't care about intellectual property, they're very proud of their work and get very upset if they feel content is simply taken or stolen.    How to solve this is a question they have.  For example, give automatic contribution to original people's work.  But original users actually wanted personal attribution - eg personal 'thank you to ____ for creating _____ originally" - so remixing is not just about building about existing work, but collaborating, acknowledging, etc.  

Some kids have built 'companies' on Scratch - decide to create a project collaboratively through remixing. eg. a girl from russia who is good at drawing posted drawings to the site, uploaded to for people, ended up creating a 'company' with a girl from UK - then everyone wanted to be in the 'company' so they decided to open for applications.  That's how companies started on scratch!


Kate Crawford from UNSW - new study where they replicated the EU kids study - the AU kids online study.   Had a smaller sample of 400.  Aged 9-16 conducted 6 months after the most recent 25 nation study in Europe.  Interesting points:
- Aussie kids are amongst the youngest users amongst 25 countries compared.
- very high for mobile access, handheld devices.
- average use about an hour a day, and they're feeling guilty about it!  55% said they were spending more time online, and had tried unsuccessfully to spend less time online.
- top activities - still school work then videos, then games, then emailing, then social networking (around 63%) but 29% of 9 and 10 year olds are using social network sites. When it is 11-12 year olds, 59% have a profile.  What does this mean in terms of regulation in terms of under 13 and privacy - also it's the start of secondary school that seems to act as a 'trigger'.
- more kids are using private settings.
- relationship between parents and kids - strong connective tissue - 2/3 of parents said they were talking regularly with kids about their internet use, with particular focus on younger girls and older boys.
- majority of kid enjoyed these discussions, but 48% said this was kind of limiting to their ability to create online.
Read more at

Kati London - Zynga
- used to work at area code - a cross media company that was platform agnostic - involved real world systems coming to life through game play (eg data on sharks that can be utilized on a site or game)
- worked on a 9-15 year old MMO game called 'Code of Everand' - kids 9-11 about road safety - were the highest percentage of kids getting injured or killed when crossing the street.  Notion of 'road safety' considered a bit babyish for this age group.
- children in this world were called 'path finders' - they had to work together to navigate landscape to keep other people safe. Mechanics of play required route planning, etc, but the core game behaviour itself was using behaviour of crossing the street - using looking left and right mechanisms, using traps and spells to mitigate dangers, and get rewarded by 'crossing' over the path to the next level. s
Read more at http://www.technologyreview.com/tr35/profile.aspx?TRID=964