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Minecraft & the shared, creative safety of gaming, social media

By on June 27, 2013 in Featured, NetFamilyNews

Reporters and reviewers write about Minecraft as if it’s just like any other videogame. Even this highly readable piece about its creator (Markus Persson, aka “Notch”) and its parent company (Mojang) by Harry McCracken in Time magazine doesn’t cover what makes it different from other games specifically for its kid (and parent) players. But he [...]

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Snapchat’s SnapKidz: All snap, no chat

By on June 24, 2013 in Featured, NetFamilyNews

It’s an interesting experiment: The creators of Snapchat, the social app for sharing photos that disappear in seconds, have just introduced SnapKidz, a non-social photo app for kids under 13 with Apple mobile devices (it’s not yet available for Android). So, true to its name, it’s basically the snap without the chat. It’s also the [...]

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Instagram adds video

By on June 21, 2013 in Featured, NetFamilyNews

Facebook’s little photo-sharing app just became a video-sharing app too. Whether they’re using Apple or Android phones, Instagram’s 130 million users can now simply pick whether that image they want to capture is better static or in motion, then click on either the little camera or videocam icon. If they go with video, they can [...]

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Video viewing increasingly ‘mobilized’

By on June 20, 2013 in Featured, NetFamilyNews

If it ever really did, screen size no longer has anything to do with the length of a video people will watch. “Smaller screens aren’t deterring people from watching more videos on their tablets and mobile phones,” TheNextWeb.com reports. People of all ages are now doing more than half their “long-form video” viewing on these [...]

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The power of kid-powered tablets

By on June 19, 2013 in NetFamilyNews

This article about tablets in school has something to teach us about tablets at home too. Tablets – iPads, Kindle Fires, Meeps, Nabis, iTouches (see this) – and even the apps on them aren’t the main event. They can be seen as the means to an end: creativity, communication, learning, fun (author and game designer [...]

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Pinterest for consuming, curating, producing

By on June 18, 2013 in NetFamilyNews

I love seeing the clear distinction being made by this teacher between consuming vs. producing social media – and the learning value being placed on the producing. Seems obvious, I know, but I still see peers – including media researchers – referring to today’s media as merely consumed. “As I looked into using Pinterest as [...]

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Hurting others hurts us: Study

By on June 17, 2013 in NetFamilyNews

Although the victim is usually the focus in discussions about the impacts of social cruelty, everybody involved in it feels some pain or distress, research shows. Two recent studies offer fresh insights into the impacts on bystanders, both those who witness cruel behavior and those who feel compelled to participate. First the latter, from the [...]

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Parenting the littlest media users: Important study

By on June 13, 2013 in Featured, NetFamilyNews

Increasingly, digital media are just part of the rhythm of everyday US family life, a significant new study of parents of young children indicates. The study, “Parenting in the Age of Digital Technology,” conducted by Northwestern University’s Center on Media & Human Development, surveyed a nationally representative sample of more than 2,300 parents of children [...]

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Point & counterpoint on young video gamers: 2 studies

By on June 11, 2013 in NetFamilyNews

What an interesting point and counterpoint about videogames have been turned up by two just-released studies, one from Northwestern University in the US and one by University of Victoria in Canada: On the one hand: “Parents assess video games more negatively than television, computers, and mobile devices. More parents rate video games as having a [...]

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Undercover mom on Instagram

By on June 10, 2013 in NetFamilyNews, Safety Advice Articles

One of her aliases is CupcakePuppy44. That’s parent, author, and former teacher Sharon Duke Estroff’s Instagram handle. She created a join account with her 10-year-old after some stonewalling and some external investigation (with kids, fellow parents, and psychologists), not to mention a certain amount of hounding by her daughter, who – not unlike other 4th- [...]

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