TikTok, a popular app with teens, has revised its community guidelines and provides more specifics outlining 10 unacceptable content categories, including violence, hate speech, bullying, dangerous acts and threats to minor safety. As of yet, however, the platform did not detail how it will determine which content providers are breaking the rules.
School assemblies, poster campaigns and lectures are largely ineffective at curbing bullying among students, writes clinical psychologist Jeff Nalin. In a blog post, Nalin suggests seven strategies to help educators and parents address bullying behavior, including modeling the desired behavior, teaching coping skills and rewarding prosocial behavior.
A recent blog post from Cal Newport is challenging readers to commit to spending less time online this month by listing a number of analog commitments that will “reduce the anxious attraction of your screens”. Finding good books to read, connecting with others, and going to a meeting or taking up a hobby are all suggestions given in the Study Hacks Blog. "We fall into the traps of the digital only when we distance ourselves from the attractions of the analog," he writes.
Did you go to class today? How about the library? Some colleges are finding this information about their students by adding a mobile app and short-range phone sensors to track students around campus. Using networks of Bluetooth transmitters and wireless access points, the app can track attendance and even calculate "risk scores" for academic success based on how frequently students visit the library. Critics say this kind of intrusion into students’ lives represents a new low in invading student privacy on a massive scale, but this style of surveillance has become just another fact of life for many Americans. Many apps and programs involve cameras, sensors or microphones that measure people’s activity and whereabouts with striking precision. This tracking of everyday living allows trends to be analyzed for any number of purposes.
Art students at a Pennsylvania high school recently created 25 paintings of emoji expressions as part of a project aimed at encouraging honest conversations about emotions and technology. “The Emoji Project” challenged people to look up from their cellphones and have conversations about the paintings of emoji expressions hanging in various locations around the school. Students painted emojis that they liked, used a lot, or identified with, in their own style.
Students worldwide are finding ways to use their phones in school despite bans, according to a global review by the Australian government. The findings come as a ban on the devices in some schools in New South Wales and around the globe has drawn criticism from some educators and parents. In the US, it was found that 65% of students in schools that banned devices still bring their phones to school.
Sixty-five percent of children who entered primary school in 2017 will one day hold jobs that do not currently exist, according to a World Economic Forum report. Heather McGowan, a future work strategist, says that the key to preparing children for those jobs lies in training them to learn for themselves rather than for transferal of knowledge. It is also important to teach children how to adapt to changes as the work force and job functions will be continuously changing as new technologies are developed.
Google for Education has introduced a feature called Originality Reports that allows teachers and students to scan their work for plagiarism. As the feature scans work for commonalities among billions of webpages and millions of books, it highlights text that may need additional sourcing.
Recently released PISA (Program for International Student Assessment) study results revealed that only 14 percent of U.S. students were able to reliably distinguish between fact and opinion. PISA is an international assessment that measures 15-year-old students' reading, mathematics, and science literacy every three years. These findings are particularly alarming in these times when many rely on social media to get their news – a place where everyone has an opinion. In a commentary reaction to these results, Chris Link of the Global STEM Alliance at the New York Academy of Sciences shares strategies to help teachers and parents improve students' ability to identify information that is false or biased. One of the exercises he suggests is providing students with links to legitimate looking sites containing false information to see if they are deceived. He says, “experiences like these, where students are challenged to consider the validity of information and sort what’s real from what’s fake, would better prepare them not only to be savvier consumers of news, but also to someday digest contradictory information to make complicated decisions about their own health care, finances or civic engagement”.
Recent research has shown that facial recognition technology is more likely to misidentify African Americans and Asian Americans, a finding that is continuing to raise questions about using the technology in K-12 schools. In a blog post, Sarah St. Vincent, director of Cornell Tech's Computer Security Clinic, shares 10 questions school leaders and parents should ask before adopting the technology, including how accurate the system is, particularly for women and people of color.
Less than a year before the 2020 election, and false political information is moving furiously online. Avaaz, a global human rights organization, has reported that the top 100 false political stories were shared by Facebook users over 2.3 million times in the United States in the first 10 months of 2019. Still, few politicians (or their staff) are prepared to quickly notice and combat incorrect stories about them, according to dozens of campaign staff members and researchers who study online misinformation. Several of the researchers said they were surprised by how little outreach they had received from politicians. Campaigns and political parties say their hands are tied, because social sites such as Facebook and YouTube have few restrictions on what users can say or share, as long as they do not lie about who they are.
As a voter and a parent, what can you do? Review the basics on how to detect misinformation and share with your children. Misinformation hurts everyone by normalizing prejudices, and even justifying and encouraging violence.
While parents are used to being the sole receiver of important information about their kids, the college application process marks one of the first times when the communication goes directly through the teenage applicant. According to some experts, this could be a flawed process, as colleges primarily use email for communicating with prospective students, yet teenagers statistically do not default to email to communicate. Critical information sent via email may be lost in a crush of other messages. Research shows high schoolers don't commonly use email, and it is possible for important information to fall through the cracks when they're inundated with messages, experts say.
According to a recent New York Times investigation, sexual predators have found an easy access point into the lives of young people: They are meeting them online through multiplayer video games and chat apps, making virtual connections right in their victims’ homes. Many of the interactions lead to crimes of “sextortion,” in which children are coerced into sending explicit imagery of themselves.
What can parents do to prevent those kinds of contacts and exchanges? Experts say that first and foremost, parents need to spend time with kids on new apps and games so that they learn the features and can set realistic rules for when and how children can interact with others online. Showing an interest in what games your kids play also builds trust that they will be able to have honest conversations about issues they may run into down the line. As kids’ online lives begin to expand, parents should also educate their children on how to block other users who make them uncomfortable. Lastly, experts warn that parents must remember that they are ultimately responsible for being their child’s online protector.
Research remains inconclusive on whether all screen time - and in all quantities - is harmful to children. Nick Allen, director of the Center for Digital Mental Health at the University of Oregon, points out that digital technology actually has "significant benefits, " such as connecting people of like interests and outlooks.
For parents struggling with how much screen time is OK for their children, try asking your kids: ‘What are you doing on there? What makes you feel good? What makes you feel bad?’ ” says Michaeline Jensen, of the University of North Carolina, Greensboro. She was an author of a study in August that showed on days when teenagers use more technology, they were no more likely to report problems like depressive symptoms or inattention than on days when they used less. The study concludes, “Findings from this EMA study do not support the narrative that young adolescents’ digital technology usage is associated with elevated mental-health symptoms.”
Forbes recently highlighted data put together by ResumeLab, a company known for their job application-building software, on how 1,000 self-identified “highly successful” professionals use technology. The results show some interesting factoids about the tech habits of those that consider themselves successful: preferring laptops over desktops, using health apps, and only spending a small amount of time on social media per day, with Facebook being the most-used social media platform.
Have you been getting a lot of spam calls on your mobile phone recently? One study shows that nearly half of all calls to mobile phones are fraudulent, and scams are getting more sophisticated. Call-protection company First Orion says that hacker breaches of major consumer-oriented businesses, such as retailers, give scammers data such as names, phone numbers and more that they can use to impersonate brands or charities in phone calls or emails to consumers.
The use of facial recognition technology continues to grow in K-12 schools despite research suggesting the software may be inaccurate as much as 35% of the time when scanning female faces with darker skin. School leaders say the technology improves security by alerting officials to potential threats more quickly, but these findings raise definite concerns about inequality and social stigmatization.
Facebook and Instagram already ban ads for guns and e-cigarettes, but now they have announced that they will also be banning "branded content" (influencer posting) that promotes weapons, tobacco and vaping. Enforcement for the new rules should take effect in the "coming weeks," Facebook says. They are also working on tools to help creators honor the new policy, such as setting minimum age requirements on their content. This is the first time Instagram is limiting what influencers can pitch in their feeds, and it's considered overdue by some. Facebook and Instagram have both come under fire for letting social media stars advertise harmful products, including those who stars who are sometimes underage themselves.
In an effort to make the platform a more positive place, Instagram has rolled out a new feature that prompts users when something they are about to post might be offensive. Users can ignore the prompts and proceed to post the content, but Instagram is hoping the alerts might make people think twice before posting something they might regret.
Whether or not this proves effective is still up in the air. Instagram said that its efforts to reduce bullying in comments have been "promising," but that doesn't guarantee similar performance for the posts themselves. Someone caught up in the heat of the moment might hit "share anyway," and not worry about the consequences. And there will be moments where a vicious tone may not represent bullying at all -- calling the policy of a politician or public figure stupid may not be constructive, but it's not bullying. Still, this could be helpful if it leads even a handful of people to mend their ways.
Facebook is trying a new approach to fact checking by using “community reviewers”, a diverse group of contractors hired through partners like YouGov, to check potentially false reports. Facebook will use its machine learning process to identify misinformation in posts, as it does already. When content is tagged as potentially false, Facebook's system will then send the post on to the new team of community reviewers. The community reviewers will be prompted to check the post by conducting their own additional research, and if they find the post to be incorrect, they'll be able to send their findings and resources to Facebook's fact-checkers for their official assessment.
By enabling more people to provide input into the fact-checking process, Facebook's aim is to improve both the relative accuracy of its findings, and to lessen accusations that it is favoring one side of politics over another. Critics, however, say this new ‘diverse’ review system is just cover for their policy on not fact-checking political ads and should be brought up when discussing misinformation with your children.