Digital Parent

Digital Thanksgiving and Holidays with Family

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sat, 26 Nov 2011 18:09:00 +0000

We are wrapping up a Thanksgiving weekend with three generations of family. Our teens are not portable game device folks, though my son's borrowed Nintendo DS gets snuck under the table. I am fascinated, however, by the little ways where the digital divide affects the holidays. We have suffered for a few years now about the role of communal television in family gatherings. The older relatives don't have a digital video recorder, nor have it in their lives. They also don't have Netflix hooked to their TVs, which perplexes our teens. The kids and I check the weather on our smartphones and iPads, which perplexes our relatives in their 60s and 70s. They spend the morning with the newspaper, and wonder why the kids only look ot the funnies. The older relatives are less concerned about the kids getting texts from their friends during all waking hours. The kids, on the other hand, have gotten more subtle about it and have been gracious. Information sources seem to be the most interesting change. Our older relatives look to the TV and newspaper for information to make social decisions, like Black Friday sales, information on movies and TV, and restaurant ideas. My husband's aunt was intrigued to look at her own community on Yelp, seeing how other people review the restaurants in her area. She has had a computer in her den for years, went to broadband last year, and mostly leaves it off. The "always on" window into the outside world for her is "always off," or almost always so. The shift to having the Internet as an available window for information for decisions has never permeated her life. What has called our attention to the digital divide is the consideration of "normal" and information to make decisions. My family, much more digitally connected, consults digital sources for alternatives for many decisions. My older in-laws grab a small piece of data from the newspaper and make life decisions and daily activity decisions based on that smaller alternative set. How has technology affected "normal" holiday gatherings in your family?

Kids Brains? Good, Bad, & Grey

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Fri, 01 May 2009 14:28:00 +0000

I sat through a great presentation yesterday by Dr. Aimee Drolet of UCLA Anderson School about how older consumers react to emotional messages and how their worldviews on the time they have left impacts the responses to messages.

One conclusion she reached from her own and related research is that older study participants were more comfortable with a balance of inputs -- good and bad, for example. In contrast, younger respondent in the US (not in Asia) needed to perceive something as either good or bad and had a difficult time with "grey." She said that wasn't the same in more communal cultures.

Hmm. I wonder if that is the same with our younger children and how that impacts their decision-making? My own tween/teen children seem to have positive responses to more things than I would expect, but I've never looked at their attitudes this way...

Modern...mail?

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Fri, 13 Mar 2009 21:03:00 +0000

My oldest is 15 and took the PSAT for the second year - her school urges them to start taking it in the 9th grade for practice.

What is impressing her? All the lovely and expensive mailers from colleges she has never heard of. In a year when units of mail are down dramatically, my lovely teenager is impressed by old fashioned mailed brochures.

I view it that mail isn't otherwise part of my children's overdeluged lives of digital images. It now has become "special."

Ah, Daylight Savings Time!

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Mon, 09 Mar 2009 14:15:00 +0000

This is the first school morning after Daylight Savings Time kicked in, "springing forward" for an hour Sunday morning.

Yesterday began the ritual of recalling how many clocks we have in our home. As the kids (and we) get older, whose job it is to change all these clocks come into question. This year, I noted we have more and more "automatic" clocks that reset themselves from a central server: cell phones, cable, etc. But we still have clocks on the microwave, clocks in our cars, wall clocks in the kitchen, living room, dining room...

We, as most folks, in theory have fewer watches. My three kids all have watches...somewhere. But two of them usually look at their cellphones instead.

I have something like 6 watches. Why do I have six watches? Well, I have one for the gym and working out. I have one dress watch. I have an inexpensive watch in green and another in red. Two others were gifts that usually sit in the drawer.

I finally have pulled out the pin in the three I rarely wear and they have become my backup watches. So that leaves three to remember to change yesterday...or I'll put them on later and not realize I hadn't changed the time.

Why are we doing this again? There is a nice piece on the origins of Daylight Savings Time on the US Naval Observatory's pages: http://aa.usno.navy.mil/faq/docs/daylight_time.php

Mabinogi now has elves...and why that matters at my house

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sun, 01 Mar 2009 14:54:00 +0000

Nexon, a South Korean gaming company known for the game Maplestory, has moved elves into Mabinogi. You would think that you had minted gold coins in our house.

Mabnogi, a "free to play" massively multi-player online role-playing game (MMORPG), runs the core game free and then allows you to buy more functions as features with a Nexon card, found at your local Target, 7-11, or other retailer. My son buys cards every so often to get more pets, weapons, and gear.

My two daughters, who both play the game as well, are more frugal. One found that there was a NPG (non-player character) giving away Elf cards for free and told the other. They spent quite a bit of time yesterday trying clothes on their new elves and chattering about a new expansion area in the game that was launching.

My kids have been fickle to games and virtual worlds for some time, drifting from one to another. Mabinogi has something for all three and is run very well. All three kids can play together on our home network system because we don't have to pay a monthly fee per user, but can decide to invest their hard-earned real world money to upgrade their experiences.

In addition, Mabinogi keeps freshening the game, adding features and places to keep them excited.

Would I rather they be reading a book? They do...long into the night so I need to return to quietly turn off their lights over sleeping heads.

The real magic is it has my 11 year old writing. She is cueing off of Mabinogi characters, creating her own stories for up to three hours a day on weekends. She has compiled a fabulous mini-library of engaging stories, taking these digital adventures in the world of words.

I've only played once. I guess I'm stuck in the glory days of my Star Wars Galaxies Wookie that I invested so much time on!

Smithsonian/USA Weekend/YouTube: National Anthem Singing Competition

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 17:41:00 +0000

Do you have a young, sparking vocalist in your midst? Or can your family help you record and make a video as a family project of your own singing talent? The Smithsonian is going very Web 2.0 to bring the public into the spirit of the National Anthem, and this might be an excellent family project.

The Smithsonian is partnering with USA Weekend and YouTube to create a National Anthem competition. Very charming and a nice Web 2.0 integration with the museum's mission. The Smithsonian "gets it" fairly well, plus has a new director from more of a digital heritage. They even Tweet (http://www.twitter.com/amhistorymuseum).

And, of course, I put in a submission...helped out an critiqued by my lovely family. I had two of my children over my shoulder making changes with the video edit (too slow here, mom!) and one just wincing in the corner.

Take a listen at http://tinyurl.com/gigianthem, vote, and listen to some of the rest, then pass this on!

Note: You need to help your own younger children and submit for them.

New and Old Fashioned Valentine's Day

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Mon, 16 Feb 2009 16:49:00 +0000

I do miss the painful era when my kids were younger of the Valentine's cards for $1.99 from Thrifty Drugs (now Rite Aid). They had to have the perfect card and then slaved over it, writing the exact right names, matching up the goofy characters with which kid would get it, and angsting over who gave them what card back.

My kids are older (11-15) and so am I. Cards have given over to candy passed between friends. Strangely this year, no digital valentines. Many other "Hallmark holidays" have swung into major digital mode. I got more digital Christmas letters than I had patience for. Some of them became a meld of business updates and reminder pitches seeming "Facebook-y" friendly. Some of them were fabulous but strange versions of Photoshop art, melding places and faces to a new form of social comment. Some were animated gif things that I can't even describe.

But Valentine's Day this year didn't really go there. From my kids and husband, I got traditional printed greeting cards, even more traditional than in prior years. I got some Facebook apps to send me hearts and flowers, but nothing more than a blip. Some iPhone apps launched for V-Day and even e-card SPAMs were highlighted, but it was a digital trickle

Michaels Craft Stores ended up with an NPR mention that they are busier than ever, with a free make-a-card event at their stores that was crazy-busy. Sales of do-it-yourself crafts are reported to be on the increase, not surprising in this economy, but surprising that we haven't flipped to digital love in this era.

Are we getting closer to emotional, physical home? Or is digital finding its own places and spaces depending on what we are needing for that holiday? Family is near and dear but 2nd-degree friends (friends of friends) are an email blast away and not a "Valentine"?

Amusing on another front -- I was wandering around Second Life on the 13th and found another trail of Valentine's Day. There were some of the most gorgeous artificial balls and dances, with beautiful surreal outfits, and couples dancing in Second Life. Couples were slow-dancing (that is, their SL characters were) in beautifully decorated elegant ballrooms, ice palaces, and nightclubs. I felt I was intruding in that these seemed both public and intimate, so went back to my own RL home and waited for my kids to get back from an old-fashioned, rock music school dance.

Valetine's Day itself? Despite the Recession, we enjoyed a very crowded evening at our delicious neighborhood pizza joint, packed with other families enjoying a live Valentine's Day together with soda, pizza, and beer...while a big-screen TV was on in the background, droning the news.

Gifts, you may ask? I got a lovely necklace made by my 15-year-old daughter (who makes jewelry professionally already at this age) and new windshield wipers from my husband, who installed them in the dark.

Hope your own Valentine's Day was personal, fun, and with those who care for your heart and needs. That's not yet a fully digital world and it will be interesting how these worlds blend over time.

What is a newspaper for?

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 15:12:00 +0000

So what is a newspaper for?

Son, 13: "Funnies."

Daughter, 11: "Funnies."

Daughter, 15: "Communicate things." But why do you read it? "I don't know."

(This was after our usual fight for the funnies in the morning.)

Dallas Article on Teacher Tube, Army of 1

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 04:40:00 +0000

Good article in the Dallas Morning News on TeacherTube today. It evidently has 1 full-time employee and over 800,000 videos/month viewed...and from the outside has nearly no business model with perhaps one ad shown on the front page.

So how can this asset thrive and survive?

Ah, The Holidays with Wii and Sci Fi Curses

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 04:14:00 +0000

We are blessed to have Christmas, Hanukkah, and my son's 13th birthday in the same few weeks. So we are Wii-abundant. We already had succumbed to the Wii and Wii Fit, as well as Wii Kart months ago, after spending a lot of time haunting Circuit City. The kids, in fact, earned the money for all but the Wii Fit. The Wii Fit was my indulgence. I'm not sure it is when I step back on the scale each time and it nags at me...but that's another post.

So with the recent birthday, we just enjoyed both Wii Skii and Wii Star Wars Lightsaber...whatever it is called. Wii Skiing is a bit of patting head and rubbing stomach, but all three kids have spent the weekend re-learning to ski the Wii Ski way. And the trash talking around the lightsaber duels has given me new instruction in Sci Fi swearing. Frack and Frell have come back from BSG and Farscape. (Note: BBC has swear word dictionaries online: http://www.bbc.co.uk/cult/farscape/swearing/clip0.shtml)

New wonders have opened up now that we have hooked with Wii to our wi-fi in the house. Now the kids have begun creating Isaac Newton, Ben Franklin, and little bald piggies to share on the Mii function. I've had dreams already of little Mii people coming out at night and taking over the house. I wonder....can that be done as a humorous web video?

Of the lovely quips so far, besides the sci fi curse words, has been the following quote at dinner, "Hey, now I can really be 13 on the Internet!" Ah, what we are teaching our children...

Ah, and school starts back up tomorrow morning. I'll miss them. Really. I mean it.

Amazing Resources from UGC for Connected Ed

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Fri, 02 Jan 2009 21:16:00 +0000

I'm working on putting together resources for parents and interested schools on what is out there in connected media for the classroom and home. The challenge is THERE IS A LOT OUT THERE. Lots of user-highlighted stuff. To me, this is an interesting world of User Generated Materials (blogs, videos, podcasts) because there is a need for these voices and not a good "professional" source to bring this all together that doesn't cost an arm and a leg as a service...or that isn't trying to create a walled garden and own the space all by themselves.

This space, which is a blend of Edublogging and self-publishing, needs something like BlogHer to monetize it so teachers and parents aren't creating these content spaces out of the goodness of their hearts.

More to follow. Ping back with thoughts.

Connected Learning -- Your Toolbox

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Thu, 11 Dec 2008 23:10:00 +0000

We're looking for partners to create Connected Learning (http://connectedlearning.wetpaint.com), a space to share resources and perspectives for teachers and parents. We'll focus on resources for Site Council, parents' advisory groups, teachers' planning for professional development, and free resources from the Internet for classrooms and homes. We're setting it up as wiki so you will be able to join and add to the mix. We should have it more fully populated by the new year, but come join and add if and when you have time.

All the best!

More Internet, Worse Scores?

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 10 Dec 2008 22:15:00 +0000

As noted in Education Week, Duke University researchers found with 4th-8th graders did worse on math and English tests with Internet access and computers at home. There was mitigation with parental support and instruction and with less instances of time online. http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/DigitalEducation/2008/12/reanalyzing_the_digital_divide.html

Is this surprising?

Even our fun side venture, http://www.ikidtools.com, showcases these thoughts with our interviews of 10-12 year olds about their Internet use. Homework? Nah...

Kids' Creative Play versus Adults' -- Ted.org video from '08 Creative Play

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Tue, 11 Nov 2008 23:50:00 +0000

Crowded Abundance of Family Web Tools

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sun, 02 Nov 2008 02:24:00 +0000

Check out Mashable at http://mashable.com/2008/11/01/family-sites/ for a long and glorious list of family web tools. Have NO idea how all of them will make any money in this strange economic climate, but glad to see that some good thinking is going in this direction. We've tried lots in the past, and mostly still write on the calendar on the fridge in different color pens and call relatives when it is their birthdays...

Connected Tools -- Inside and Outside the Classroom

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Thu, 16 Oct 2008 04:33:00 +0000

Interesting times! Spent much of this week at the Innovative Learning Conference in San Jose, CA. I'll be adding content here over the next couple of days with all sorts of interesting tools that kids can be using that some classes are using. But it has been quite an interesting set of discussions. How do you add technology to learning while integrating it into classroom planning? How do you use the "cool stuff" and engage kids while not spending lots of time and energy figuring this out yourself as a teacher.

So in the next few days, we'll tinker with Audible, WetPaint, Wikispaces, Moodle, and other cool tools...but looking how the classroom stuff can blend with the home stuff.

We're also working with www.ikidtools.com on an episode of the iKidTools show about how to use wikis, bookmark tags, and related sites for kids' learning and interests.

Do take a look at their/our first episode, which is presently posted at http://ikidtools.nings.com as a full half hour show, interviewing two sets of tweens on their current web attitudes. It's a bit tongue-in-cheek and airs in full at KGEM-TV. Check it out here.

Find more videos like this on iKidTools

Spore! A bit of biology and computer gaming...

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Tue, 09 Sep 2008 13:47:00 +0000

So we are on day 3 of Spore ownership. EA's new Maxis game, supposedly $50 million in the making, starts you as single-cell organisms working your way up the food chain, eating things to gain DNA points to add arms, legs, eyes...and mate, fight, eat, sing, dance, pose (pose??)...

What it is doing nicely with my 11 and 12 year olds is (a) getting them to talk with me and each other about biology and ecosystems and (b) play a computer game together. The graphics are cute and engaging, and one is always sitting over the other's shoulder enjoying their decisions and cheering them along.

Is singing, dancing, and posing accurate in nature? For a lot of species, perhaps, though the dancing here is a bit...odd? So far, my oldest has moved to level 3 and is thinking about societal/tribal issues. He also has learned that pie isn't the big mover of a culture (game inside joke).

So far, I do recommend Spore as something to add to the family gaming quiver. It isn't an accurate depiction of biology, but brings a lot of the concepts to the discussion forefront. Its design does imply that evolution is reality versus myth, but that's what I'd like my children to learn as well. :) And hopefully there isn't an 11 year old at the helm adding a third eye to a pink critter... :)

We'll see as we get further into tribal and planetwide conquest...

E-Learning Tools as School Starts Back Up

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Tue, 02 Sep 2008 20:25:00 +0000

Last year, ReadWriteWeb had a nice list of available resources: http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/e-learning_20_all_you_need_to_know.php.

They have expanded it further at http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/web_20_backpack_web_apps_for_students.php. Some from last year have been bought, some closed, etc. I won't reinvent the wheel with their listings, but some highlights of note are the list of Mindmapping tools and sticky noting options. The more I work with high school and college students, the more I realize that they don't just need these tools, but they also need to be instructed how to use them.

The challenge I've found this year is group project work. Delicious can be good for sharing links. Another option is to use a free Wiki. Some of my students have used Wetpaint; others have used Wikispaces. Google Docs was tried this year as a group work space, but isn't as good for bookmark and research sharing.

Experimenting...Chore Wars!

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Tue, 02 Sep 2008 17:57:00 +0000

I just got back from a fun sci fi/kitch culture convention and was hanging out with some tech-savvy moms. One enthusiastically recommended ChoreWars.com, which we are starting today at the house. Very cool concept!

You sign up as a Player Character in a Dungeons & Dragons environment, then set up a "party" that works together. Evidently, this can be for offices or families. (Hmmm?) Then you can set up a pre-arranged group of "average" chores or start with manual settings. For each chore, family members get XP, or experience points, but also can get random treasure and monsters.

My friend has a snack drawer that you can only exchange for XP or game gold, and other treats around the house (non-food) that can only come from game results. She has 5 kids and finds that this both incentivizes and monitors in a really fun way. So we'll set this up today and see how my tweens react. All three have become decent gamers so this might be a nice tool set. More to follow!

The site is www.chorewars.com and the basic setup is ad-supported. If you want a Gold account, you can pay $10 (one time) and get rid of the ads, plus acquire additional features. It was launched by UK-based developers in 2007 and according to a recent article in The Times of London, has about 70,000 people signed up.

Olympics, Digital family style

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Mon, 11 Aug 2008 19:17:00 +0000

Ah, Olympics time. Not just added DVR this time -- lots of options, right?

My family is not very geared up for the Olympics. Perhaps it is because we've been without TV for the past week on a family camping vacation. We've had mobile internet on my Blackberry, which has kept us enough in the loop. In fact, we have enjoyed the mobile download to my Blackberry -- one click for NBC Olympics updates with a cool logo for my mobile desktops. Starcut was brought in to launch this service and seems to have done a nice job. It was great on the road.

Now that we are home, for my savvy tweens, tuning into NBC's main show has been fairly flat. It is hard to DVR, as the scheduling is in 4 or so hour blocks, so we get chunks of programming instead of what we want.

So we went to the Time Warner VOD service, which was below underwhelming. There were two recaps and not in HD. Perhaps this is because we are early in the games. I'm assuming the technological challenge to vend segments to the headend servers is just too expensive and not too important to those involved.

So we went to NBC.com for solutions. Now, I consider myself fairly digitally savvy, but I expected a little more handholding coming into this -- and in fact expected some marketing to enjoy the games this way. There was a banner and three buttons -- what was the difference?

My favorite thing on the site was the TV listings at http://www.nbcolympics.com/tv_and_online_listings/index.html. I didn't realize that so many NBC-related channels were in the Games. As a result, we've been parked on Universal HD watching women's basketball for much of the day.

To go further into their onlines services for streaming video, found also at www.nbcolympics.com, I needed to both download Microsoft's Silverlight (which I had before during a presentation) and had to register with the program to ensure which cable broadband system I was on. I hadn't realized that NBC and MSN Video had agreements with the broadband providers directly for this expanded streaming service. (Why didn't my broadband provider let me know they were giving me this great service? And why no promotion and ads? Is Microsoft paying for most of this to get Silverlight into our homes?) Glad that Time Warner had arranged this -- evidently the baggage is a bit deeper with Cablevision, which held out and didn't get the expanded package, according to MediaWeek. It quotes that about 10% of multiplatform subscribers won't get the packages -- unless they lie and say they are in one of the systems that has cracked a deal. Not something that I'm in favor of online, but it is an option...

So after the hoops and too much personal information for my taste, I had the wonderful experience of the Live viewing option with 4 subscreens and Picture-In-Picture (PIP). Loved the view of the opening ceremony.

But then, not through this site, I found out about NBC Direct's online VOD with subscription by sport. NBC Direct itself has been in Beta since November 2007 with not very great reviews. Here, I needed to sign up for myNBC service and download a whole interface program, download a Windows patch, restart my computer, etc. Augh!

Upon relaunching, I found a different screen sponsored by Lenovo and muddy language telling me that I'm part of the NBC Direct Peer to Peer Network to get high quality video. Hmm?

I then was taken back to http://www.nbc.com/Video/direct/subscriptions.shtml to update my subscriptions, which I set up. Not sure how much of my hard drive space this will eat up here....

I'm downloading now...and will have 48 hours to watch each after I start viewing before they mysteriously disappear...

So now I'm heading back to watch the opening ceremony on nbcolympics.com with Universal HD in the backgrounds, watching my kids drift in and out of the room, and will wait to see what downloads.

Earthquake Followup -- Digital and NonDigital Resources

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 20:00:00 +0000

Parenting during a mild/moderate earthquake -- any teachable moments? 5.4 (not gigantic) earthquake caused all sorts of consternation in my 100-year old 2-story house. First, I wasn't home, so my kids called me on the cell immediately. By the time I got home, my husband had fielded calls from my sister overseas and his mom in the central valley.

Lesson #1 -- The Phone. It is good to know where everyone is. The phone system evidently was stressed even by this level of activity, so good to be able to call OUTSIDE the area. My sister is our outside-of-California contact. Cell phone systems are reputed to be robust in such a circumstance, but Verizon Wireless anecdotally was supposedly stressed to points of non performance even with this low level (read "none") of damage. Officially, their representative, Bill Kula, told Associated Press that the landline systems were stressed in that area, but cell was fine.

Lesson #2 -- In this day and age, how to find out what is going on. Good old Radio. KPCC, NPR radio, fairly quickly came to a 5.8 (later revised to 5.4) and Chino Hills epicenter. The family at home had shifted to TV, which just had talking heads. Twitter had some good echos from friends and turned out to be a good way to get a quick word out that everything was fine.

Lesson #3 -- Good online sources. IF you keep your power and broadband service, do remember the great resources at Cal Tech and US Geological Survey. The latter has great tools at http://earthquake.usgs.gov/eqcenter/dyfi/ -- "Do You Feel It?" Survey. You can log what you experienced and they use it for planning and information. Pretty cool! You can show your kids what it looked like on an experience map, then go look at other (bigger) quakes. You can also check out all the aftershocks.

They also have a great toolset of information for kids, good especially if it is their first quake: http://earthquake.usgs.gov/learning/kids

My son thought it was fun. All my kids found the doorways, so I guess I'm glad for small favors in that this provided good practice. Lovely Southern California...

Digital Mornings vs. Digital Evenings -- Disconnected Media

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sat, 26 Jul 2008 15:56:00 +0000

When does it make sense to immerse yourself in digital media? For me, it flushes away the 5-8 am hours when the laptop takes over while the family sleeps on weekends. It used to be walking and reading time for me -- instead it is sucked into emails, blogging, Twitters, and dealing with business/politics by email.

For my kids? Digital connectivity increases as the evening goes on. Everyone, left to their own desires, would each be connected to something in our digital flow in a different room all evenings. My husband? Message boards on scale modeling. My oldest? Tokyopop.com. My middle? Games, games, games. My youngest? Actually reading a book while blasting classical music on the radio. (Have I mentioned that she is a little 60-year-old person in a 10-year-old body?)

As for me -- I stare at their heads, holler for them to come into the living room, and try to figure a connected evening together...

A missing voice -- what a change! -- and some digital alternatives for his company

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 21:39:00 +0000

My son is off at Boy Scout camp -- with no devices. No phone, no gaming system, no music. He's not all that plugged in versus his friends so the loss won't be that big for him...and he'll have plenty to do.

My remaining family -- transformed. With one less voice, it is strangely much quieter. Now, that's in part to my daughters not being harangued by a teasing brother for hours on end. We've had quieter hours all around, as my daughters have found ways -- digital and not -- to occupy their time with simpler pursuits.

My oldest is studying for her Mandarin final the old fashioned way: reviewing paper notes and speaking with one of her Chinese-speaking friends live (not by phone) for 1-1/2 hours last night at her house. She did tiptoe into TokyoPop's graphic novel reader this morning before we knew she was stirring, but did finally stumble down to breakfast.

My youngest is reading two newer The Warriors books (by Erin Hunter) without worrying about her brother taking them before she is done.

At the same time, she is the one wanting to plug in more to make up for her brother's absence, as they tend to spend every waking moment together. I acquiesced and let her use my Netflix subscription for its instant viewing option. And she is sorely disappointed, as the movie she was watching last night stopped and asked her to wait over an hour for the download. This doesn't make sense to her 10-year-old mind. We explained bandwidth and pipes for about 15 minutes, and she still shook her head as to why this happens with our cable modem. Not only do we have 3 shared computers but in the evening we are sharing the pipe with all our neighbors who are online. So in the morning? Not so much a problem.

So we have a little piece and a bit more quiet than normal and we're finding a little more space in our week for solo work. Nice every so often!

Google's Lively -- more than hanging with 20 year olds from Ireland?

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 16:06:00 +0000

I've peeked into Google's Lively virtual world a few times in the past two weeks. It's like Second Life with premade stuff (rooms, furniture) and based on rooms, so a bit Habbo Hotel-ish. You can add music, which does add some interesting atmosphere.

You are supposed to be older than 13 to use it, etc., which means you have a place for 14 year olds and up all in one bucket.

So the other evening I spent some wasted time building a few rooms (Video coffee bar and Goth Room) from starters with furniture and enjoyed the creative elements of taking videos from YouTube and photos from Picasa and adding them as room elements -- screens, floors, room dividers.

Then I went into some of the more popular rooms. Findings?
-- Blaring music and basic public spaces
-- Interesting internationally themed rooms -- for users from France, Brazil, Portugal, etc.
-- Young men who had changed nothing about the standard starter character's looks (so all looked nearly the same) all telling everyone their ages and countries (e.g. 23, Ireland). Many of them were using the kicking and punching aspects to throw punches at each other.
-- A smaller proportion of young women standing around in vapid conversations with same guys above.
-- Folks just wandering around.

Most folks were just citing how boring it is. What all can it be instead? Art sharing rooms? Video screening rooms?

The second most asked question, according to Lively's FAQ, is How can I create items? The answer is that for now they are just createable by professionals.

How Lively is that?

Summer -- Digital Family Style -- Earning Fun

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 15:51:00 +0000

So how has summer changed?

When I was growing up, we would bum around, my sister and I. Both my parents worked and we were expected to do chores, go to the movies, read, go to friends houses. I'd need to earn my allowance, which gave me my budget for summer fun.

With my three children's friends families, they all seem to overbook summer. Summer school, family trips, summer programs with museums and organizations. Mom and dad might both work, if there are both, but the kids are expected to be booked up, just like during the school year.

My own kids are enjoying a mixed summer. They are going to the community pool together, reading, using the slip & slide, heading to the local movies, and getting together with friends. But their friends are hyperbooked -- traveling, in summer programs, not around.

Where does the digital media side fit in? If it was up to my tween son, he'd be on computer games all summer and never see the outside of the house. We have limited him to about 2 hours max/day, which he has to "earn" with points for chores and doing good things without being asked. Our Point system we set up when the kids were very small, giving them colored stones in a jar for doing things without being asked. That has turned into a long-term ecosystem, with scores on the refrigerator by child. Points are spent on TV (unless watching it with a parent), computer time, and buying things. A point is a dollar in the real world. TV time is 3 points per half hour and computer time is similar (depending on if the child had bought the game).

The nice impact this summer is that the kids are budgeting their resources, taking on small projects around the house in order to earn more TV and computer time (with so much spare time in hand). My kitchen is cleaner, weeds are pulled, and most of the laundry is done.

What are they choosing to do with digital media?
-- Youngest is on Webkinz, but mostly spending her hard-earned points on the critters themselves. It is hard to earn that many points regularly without doing a lot of household chores. She is doing a nice job on the lawns and small yard tasks. She also makes everyone lunch, which earns her points. Excellent at Top Ramen and sandwiches. Mac & cheese is a favorite. She even cleans up after cooking for extra points.
-- Tween son has been doing more kitchen duty like breakfast and dishes. Points earned go right to computer time.
-- Teen daughter? She is reading and writing her summer, as well as taking Mandarin at the local community college. Her use of earned points? She's catching up on past series with Hulu.com. I've just bequeathed to her our Netflix subscription so that she also can (a) shephard our orders to plan family viewing and (b) see the first two seasons of Doctor Who on demand streamed right to her computer.

Our Points system has infiltrated a few other homes over the past few years, as other parents have asked us for tools on how to help them offer media as a choice and reward instead of an entitlement. My kids have developed wonderful skills, judgment, and budgeting talents. They know they have tradeoffs to make.