Digital Smarts Blog

According to a new Pew Research Center survey, defining online harassment is just as complicated for the average American user as it is for huge social media companies — and the line on what is and isn’t harassment gets even more fuzzy when gender or race come into the picture. The survey polled 4,151 respondents on various scenarios and asked them whether each one crossed the threshold for online harassment. For example in one scenario, people had widely varying opinions on when the harassment begins between two friends whose online disagreement becomes public, with one friend eventually being threatened by uninvolved third parties.

Men and women also widely disagreed on when an issue online became sexual harassment for a woman whose post is shared by a popular blogger resulting in her receiving vulgar messages, threats and having her photo edited to include sexual imagery. Men, by a wide margin, didn’t find that to be harassment versus the vast majority of women who did. And even when 82% of respondents found messages in one scenario to include racial slurs and harassing insults, only 57 percent thought the social media platform should step in.

These results show that there are roadblocks in addressing the issue of online harassment when people often have trouble agreeing on what qualifies as harassment in the first place, especially when women or minorities are involved. It also paints a troubling picture where even when people do define behavior as harassment, many still hesitate to hold the offenders accountable for it. This lack of agreement on when the social media platform or others should step in seemingly has troubling implications for those who are cyberbullied and how the matter should be handled.

Jana Partners LLC and the California State Teachers' Retirement System, which together own a $2 billion stake in Apple, asked the company in an open letter, recently, to address the issue of phone addiction among children. Among other things the letter asks Apple to create an option for phones to be set to an interface according to their age group which would include options for limiting screen time, restricting use to certain hours, reducing the available number of social media sites, and setting up parental monitoring.

In response, Apple has stated that it has plans to create new software features that will make the parental controls – many of which already exist on the iPhone – more easy to use with more choices. The current Settings app on every iPhone has a parental control section that allows adults to restrict website access, control in-app purchases, and install or delete apps, among other things. Of course, in the end, common sense about what is and isn’t too much use of digital devices for your own children is the best course of action, still it will be interesting to see how Apple handles this question about it’s role as a company in the issue of phone addiction.

An Accenture study reveals more smart-speaker owners use their smartphones less for entertainment (64%), purchasing (58%) and information searches (56%), and instead rely on devices such as Amazon Echo and Google Home for those purposes. The firm projects that by year's end, 40% of Americans will own a smart speaker. The question is will smart speaker manufacturers add an etiquette feature that some parents have asked for since children seem to be picking up on the idea that there is no need to add “please” to a request when talking to an electronic device? Parents have reported that this lack of awareness spills over into children’s relationships with humans!

The 1st US Circuit Court of Appeals in Boston is expected to take up a case regarding a Maine student's right to carry an audio-recording device in school. The student in question has autism and a neurological syndrome that affects his speech and he cannot talk to his parents about his school day so the family is fighting for the right for him to carry an “always on” recording device to ensure he is being properly treated during the school day. In other states, parents of special education students have secretly placed audio recorders on their children to expose abuse, which have led to firings or settlements. Opponents say though that this raises serious privacy concerns for other students and that it would actually be “disruptive and detrimental” to his education.

Especially now that every cell phone has a recording option, you may be wondering is it legal for a student to record a teacher? That may depend on whether you live in a one party or two party consent state. While federal law allows for recordings as long as one party to the conversation consents (known as "one-party consent"), several states have stricter recording laws. California, Connecticut, Florida, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, Montana, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania and Washington all require every party to a conversation to consent to recording (known as "two-party consent"). Most states make illegal recordings a felony. For instance Florida's wiretap law makes illegal recordings a third-degree felony, punishable by up to five years in prison. If you live in a one-party consent state, you (or your children) are probably OK recording a teacher or professor as long as you are present in the class, since you're a party to the conversation and by your action have given your consent to be recording. If you're in a two-party consent state, or are placing a secret recorder on your child, things may get a little trickier. Of course the easiest way to get around the issue may be to let everyone know you are recording, but as these parents in Maine are finding out even that may not satisfy everyone. If you or your children are thinking of doing any kind of recording at school or at college, be sure to check with the institution first.

Students who were born in 1995 and later -- known as iGen teens -- are spending less time partying than previous generations of students, data shows. And it is not just partying – college students, for example, are spending an hour less a day with their friends than previous generations.  Of course that means one less hour a day building social skills, negotiating relationships, and navigating emotions up close and personal. One possible reason is that teens are more connected than ever via social media. But what are they doing with all that extra time that they aren’t spending with friends? It isn’t social. Think screen time, including binge watching. Interested in more on this phenomenon? A new book entitled iGen: Why Today's Super-Connected Kids Are Growing Up Less Rebellious, More Tolerant, Less Happy—and Completely Unprepared for Adulthood—and What That Means for the Rest of Us by Jean M. Twenge takes up the topic.

The weather outside has been frightful which may well mean your kids have parked themselves in front of a digital screen more than usual. So what is the latest thinking on that? National Public Radio has pulled together 5 Things To Know About Screen Time Right Now and there are some things there that you need to know to guide your rules and guidelines about screen time. Some of the items on the list you probably already have discerned for yourself such as technology brings young people both opportunities and risks and young children are spending more time with small screens. But interestingly a new UNICEF report on the subject takes a “Goldilocks approach" — not too much, not too little — and encourages parents to focus more on what children are doing online and less on how long they are online. Another recent study along those same lines even found that limits on screen time over the course of a month were not necessarily associated with positive outcomes in children. On the contrary, the researchers found small links between moderately higher screen use and the children's good moods. The researchers concluded that caregivers, and their doctors, should do a cost-benefit analysis before "setting firm limits."

Home-School Connection, Digital Learning

Education is full of acronyms and as a parents it is always good to know when a new one comes along, especially one that involves technology. You may be familiar with the term “project-based learning (PBL),” an approach to teaching that tries to get students actively involved in their education by asking them, for example, to decide where the Spanish should put their 22^nd mission in California in 1820, and thereby helping them learn about the Spanish and Native Americans through their research, rather than having them read a text book on the subject. Challenge based learning (CBL) raises the stake one more step when students are asked to find a problem that needs solving and then use tech tools to help them work the challenge. It is another way to get kids started exploring the world where students do the work, often without teachers supervising their every step, by looking up the information online, finding experts and vetting their expertise or maybe watching YouTube videos describing how others have solved similar issues or on how to build working models.

Students in several states including Washington, Connecticut, Rhode Island and New Mexico will be learning more about media literacy in 2018 as lawmakers have passed legislation to take steps to help address false content online. Lawmakers in several states -- including Arizona, Hawaii and New York -- are considering legislation on the matter. A study in 2016 by Stanford University researchers brought the issue into focus. It warned that students from middle school to college were “easily duped” and ill equipped to use reason with online information.

The power of technology has recently been used to make it possible for everyone to glimpse what it is like for many with dyslexia to try to read and write. Created by a friend of a dyslexia sufferer, the website recreates the effort of reading a paragraph with the condition. While dyslexia affects every person differently, the site is an interesting way to simulate the learning difference that touches the lives of up to 15% of the world’s population.

Can Facebook actually keep up with the hate speech and misinformation that pores through the portal? Facebook seems to be working on the misinformation side. But even that is coming in fits and starts. Facebook had to retreat from using red flags that signal articles are fake news after discovering the flags instead spurred people to click on them or share them and has gone instead to listing links below the article to related articles with a more balanced view.

Now a new investigation from ProPublica shows that Facebook’s policy regarding hate speech is also having issues. In an analysis of almost 1,000 crowd-sourced posts, reporters at ProPublica found that Facebook fails to evenly enforce its own community standards. A sample of 49 of the 900 posts were sent directly to Facebook, which admitted that in 22 cases its human reviewers had erred, mistakenly flagging frank conversations about sexism or racism as hate speech. The problem is that the company also does not offer a formal appeal process for decisions its users disagree with so seemingly innocent outbursts may also get caught up in the reviewer’s net.

It is definitely a tough issue and this year Germany will enforce a law requiring social-media sites—including Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter, but also more broadly applying to Web sites like Tumblr, Reddit, and Vimeo—to act within 24 hours to remove illegal material, hate speech, and misinformation. Failure to do so could lead to fines of up to 50 million euros, or about $60 million. Is this this what should be done here in the US or is that too strict? Perhaps the topic of policing content is a good dinner table discussion to have with your teens?

The Library of Congress has announced it will stop archiving every tweet on Twitter beginning Jan. 1. The current archives go back to when Twitter was started in 2006. Officials said the volume of tweets has increased dramatically since the Library of Congress began archiving – currently at half a billion a day  - but going forward, it will archive only selected tweets.

Kids today have to learn to write differently for different situations – basically learn how to “code switch.” That’s the premise of a blog entry written by a seventh grade English teacher on the MiddleWeb site who feels that both parents and teachers need to understand the different contexts (school, eventually work and personal) where kids do or will communicate and help them explore those differences so they can make the right choices for each contextual situation. Without actually examining “code switching,” and practicing what is and isn’t acceptable in each situation, kids are robbed of the opportunity to understand completely why and when they need to make the switch from informal to more formal language or vice versa, a skill that they will need as they progress in their educational career. A common sense suggestion, perhaps, but as kids’ digital lives become so tightly intermingled with reality, it is very important to not only point out the differences between formal and informal writing, but make a case for each kind of writing and practice and even translate it – a bit like learning a foreign language.

Did you or your children get a new digital device of the Apple, Android or Kindle variety? Whether you are looking for apps to enhance learning, games, or ways to help keep you organized, a great place to start your search is the Essential Apps Guide on the Common Sense Media site. You can even sign up to get app updates by email.

Did your kids get any “connected digital toys” as holiday gifts? If so you might want to take a look at the Federal Bureau of Investigation notice on the privacy and unapproved contact concerns that such toys can pose. You might also want to take a look at the article A Cute Toy Just Brought a Hacker Into Your Home for some of the safety concerns about the latest toy releases. This includes the Q50 smart watch for kids, the Furby Connect doll, and even the BB-8 droid, which was released with “The Last Jedi” this past month, which some testing services found had an insecure Bluetooth connection.

Did you make some tech related New Year’s resolutions this year? Brian Chen, of The New York Times Tech Fix blog has some suggestions of things to add or to start your list. Cybersecurity is his major theme this year and his list includes things like updating your software, reading privacy policies, deleting unnecessary apps that may be monitoring your data or location and ideas for protecting you hardware.

Facebook is getting rid of the red flags that signal articles are fake news after discovering the flags instead spurred people to click on them or share them. The company is instead including related links under such articles that will provide more trustworthy sources reporting on the topic. The “related articles” effort is something Facebook started testing earlier this year. By the way, if you do try to share posts with contentious content, a message will pop up telling you that you may out to check out other sources before you do so. Or in other words, you won’t be able to use the excuse that you had ‘no idea” that article you passed on might have false or unproven content.

In the spirit of getting organized for the New Year, take a gander at this article on Netflix tricks to get more out of your subscription this year. Did you know that you get better quality video at off peak hours? How about trying your hand at Netflix Roulette to pick out something at random for you to watch? Want to delete the shows that embarrass you from your activity list? Take a look at the list of hacks.

Twitter recently has said that it will begin to enforce new rules related to how it handles hateful conduct and abusive behavior taking place on the platform. New guidelines will address hateful images or symbols, including those attached to user’s profiles. The announcement is Twitter's latest attempt, in a difficult year for the company, to clamp down on what many people consider its most pressing issue: disgusting behavior from a significant number of users. Many of the problems on Twitter came into focus after President Trump retweeted videos from a far right group in Britain.

The presence of artificial intelligence in schools is expected to grow, with some reports predicting 47.5% growth by 2021. Schools already are using the technology in various ways, such as identifying what math students know and then providing tailored assignments. Experts say this should offer teachers deeper insight in how to help struggling students, but this development does not signal that teachers are going to be replaced by machines.

While written for educators, the article Making Digital Communications Accessible on the Edutopia site is also useful to parents who may need schools (or parent/teacher associations) to use some accommodations to make sure the information they provide is accessible. By adding captions to Facebook pictures or turning on image descriptions in Twitter, communication improves. Adding captions to videos and posting transcripts of podcasts and videos by using transcription software can also make it easier for those with hearing or vision issues. And why bother? Accessibility is a matter of civil rights and can also be a legal issue. There are several districts across the country`` that are currently under investigation for issues related to website accessibility.