We hear that smartphones can be addictive, that screen time can hurt learning, but can’t these minicomputers also teach kids about responsibility and put educational apps at their tiny fingertips?
safety
Common Sense Media, a nonprofit focused on kids and technology, says rather than considering the age of a child, focus on maturity. Some questions to consider are:
Are they responsible with their belongings?
Will they follow rules around phone use?
Would having easy access to friends benefit them for social reasons?
And do kids need to be in touch for safety reasons? If so, will an old-fashioned flip phone (like the one Sydney never charged) do the trick?
While Pew Research from 2015 puts adult smartphone ownership in the U.S. at 72 percent, there’s some debate about smartphone ownership among children. The average age for a child to get their first smartphone is currently 10.3 years according to the recent Influence Central report, Kids & Tech: The Evolution of Today’s Digital Natives.
An average of 65 percent of children aged between 8 and 11 have their own smartphone in the U.K. according to a survey by Internet Matters. That survey also found that the majority of parents would like a minimum age for smartphone ownership in the U.K. to be set at age 10.
However, some kids are using smartphones from a very young age. One study by the American Academy of Pediatrics that focused on children in an urban, low-income, minority community suggested that almost all children (96.6 percent) use mobile devices and that 75 percent have their own mobile device by the age of four.
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peer reviewed
Lauricella, A., Wartella, E., & Rideout, V. (2015). Young children’s screen time: The complex role of parent and child factors. Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology, 36, 11–17. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.appdev.2014.12.001
Rikuya Hosokawa, & Toshiki Katsura. (2018). Association between mobile technology use and child adjustment in early elementary school age. PLoS ONE, 13(7), e0199959. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0199959
Percentage of moms whose children used device by age 2.(THE DATA PAGE)(Statistical data). (2011). Editor & Publisher, 144(10).
PERCENTAGE OF MOMS WHOSE CHILDREN USED DEVICE BY AGE 2
Gen Y moms Gen X moms
Laptop 34% 29%
Cell Phone 34% 26%
Smart Phone 33% 20%
Digital Camera 30% 18%
iPod 34% 13%
Videogame System 13% 8%
Hand-held gaming device 13% 10%
Source: Frank N. Magid & Associates, Inc./Metacafe
Because of technological advances and the sheer amount of data now available about billions of other people, discretion no longer suffices to protect your privacy. Computer algorithms and network analyses can now infer, with a sufficiently high degree of accuracy, a wide range of things about you that you may have never disclosed, including your moods, your political beliefs, your sexual orientation and your health.
There is no longer such a thing as individually “opting out” of our privacy-compromised world.
In 2017, the newspaper The Australian published an article, based on a leaked document from Facebook, revealing that the company had told advertisers that it could predict when younger users, including teenagers, were feeling “insecure,” “worthless” or otherwise in need of a “confidence boost.” Facebook was apparently able to draw these inferences by monitoring photos, posts and other social media data.
In 2017, academic researchers, armed with data from more than 40,000 Instagram photos, used machine-learning tools to accurately identify signs of depression in a group of 166 Instagram users. Their computer models turned out to be better predictors of depression than humans who were asked to rate whether photos were happy or sad and so forth.
Computational inference can also be a tool of social control. The Chinese government, having gathered biometric data on its citizens, is trying to use big data and artificial intelligence to single out “threats” to Communist rule, including the country’s Uighurs, a mostly Muslim ethnic group.
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Zeynep Tufekci and Seth Stephens-Davidowitz: Privacy is over
The oldest members of Generation Z are around 22 years old — now entering the workforce and adjusting their social media accordingly. They are holding back from posting political opinions and personal information in favor of posting about professional accomplishments.
only about 1 in 10 teenagers say they share personal, religious or political beliefs on social media, according to a recent survey from Pew Research Center.
70 percent of employers and recruiters say they check social media during the hiring process, according to a survey conducted by CareerBuilder
Generation Z, nicknamed “iGen,” is the post-millennial generation responsible for ‘killing’ Facebook and for the rise of TikTok.
Curricula like Common Sense Education’s digital citizenship program are working to educate the younger generation on how to use social media, something the older generations were never taught.
Some users are regularly cleaning up — “re-curating” — their online profiles. Cleanup apps, like TweetDelete,
Gen Zers also use social media in more ephemeral ways than older generations — Snapchat stories that disappear after 24 hours, or Instagram posts that they archive a couple of months later.
Gen Zers already use a multitude of strategies to make sure their online presence is visible only to who they want: They set their account to private, change their profile name or handle, even make completely separate “fake” accounts.
Local Government Digital Equity Plans Municipal governments are in the forefront of local, collaborative digital access and equity planning. Local leaders will talk about the value of planning, the nuts and bolts of making a plan, and the outcomes of their planning efforts.
This research shows that it is more inclusive communities that experience better economic outcomes; that digital inclusion leads to economic benefits at the community level. Disparities in broadband adoption over time also track the widening inequalities that have become apparent across regions and communities in the U.S., and digital inclusion is a necessary part of policy solutions for narrowing place-based gaps in economic opportunity.
€416 a month allowance for 250 people over a three year period.
The pilot programme emulates the two-year experiment by Finland’s Social Insurance concerning Universal Basic Income which ended in January.
The broad conclusion in Finland is that the programme bettered the general quality of life of its participants without achieving a major boost to their employability or social standing.
The German experiment, however, has significant differences. Unlike what was rolled out in Finland, Germany’s planned programme – referred to as Harz Plus – is a private initiative by the Berlin-based non-profit organisation Sanktionsfrei.
Unlike normal “job-seeking” allowances, the so-called Harz Plus payment will not require that an individual provide proof that the beneficiaries are seeking employment. The German experiment will provide a safety net and the participants will be regularly interviewed to document the effect of the allowance.
The survey found that 70 percent of teenagers saw mental health as a big issue. Fewer teenagers cited bullying, drug addiction or gangs as major problems; those from low-income households were more likely to do so.
A study released in 2017 found that the number of children and adolescents admitted to children’s hospitals for thoughts of self-harm or suicide had more than doubled from 2008 to 2015, echoing trends in federal data.
In my state of Virginia (like many other states), we focus on these four:
Content knowledge
Workplace skills
Community engagement and civic responsibility
Career exploration
STEP 2: Tag team with colleagues to plan instruction
In step one we created our graduate profile by brainstorming and identifying both the personal and professional knowledge and skills that our future graduates need. Now it’s time to formulate plans to bring the profile to fruition. To ensure student success, implementation should take place in the classroom and tap the expertise of our colleagues.
Student success is never due to one teacher, but a collaborative effort.
STEP 3: Identify and leverage the right industry partners
Technological literacy requires students to create authentic products using appropriate edtech, therefore developing technologically literate graduates should not be left entirely to teachers and schools.
Soliciting the help of our industry and business partners is so crucial to this process
Step 4: Create career pathways in schools
schools create systemic K-12 career pathways — or pipelines — for their students and give teachers ample time and space to plan and work together to maximize the learning aligned to well-developed graduate profiles.
Social media is the best friend disinformation ever had, and the cure is far from obvious.
Anya Schiffrin is an adjunct faculty member at the School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University. She worked in Hanoi from 1997 to 1999 as the bureau chief of Dow Jones Newswires.
Network Propaganda: Manipulation, Disinformation, and Radicalization in American Politics By Yochai Benkler, Robert Faris, & Hal Roberts
Oxford University Press
A Harvard law professor who is a well-known theorist of the digital age, Benkler and colleagues have produced an authoritative tome that includes multiple taxonomies and literature reviews as well as visualizations of the flow of disinformation.
clickbait fabricators
white supremacist and alt-right trolls
a history of the scholarship on propaganda, reminding the reader that much of the discussion began in the 1930s.
Benkler’s optimistic 2007 book, The Wealth of Networks, predicted that the Internet would bring people together and transform the way information is created and spread. Today, Benkler is far less sanguine and has become one of the foremost researchers of disinformation networks.
Fox News, Breitbart, The Daily Caller, InfoWars, and Zero Hedge
As a result, mainstream journalists repeat and amplify the falsehoods even as they debunk them.
There is no clear line, they argue, between Russian propaganda, Breitbart lies, and the Trump victory. They add that Fox News is probably more influential than Facebook.
after George Soros gave a speech in January 2018 calling for regulation of the social media platforms, Facebook hired a Republican opposition research firm to shovel dirt at George Soros.
The European Union has not yet tried to regulate disinformation (although they do have codes of practice for the platforms), instead focusing on taxation, competition regulation, and protection of privacy. But Germany has strengthened its regulations regarding online hate speech, including the liability of the social media platforms.
disclosure of the sources of online political advertising.It’s a bit toothless because, just as with offshore bank accounts, it may be possible to register which U.S. entity is paying for online political advertising, but it’s impossible to know whether that entity is getting its funds from overseas. Even the Honest Ads bill was too much for Facebook to take.