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One in 10 of these preteenagers has responded to and chatted online with strangers, according to the Tween Internet Safety Survey, sponsored by Cox Communications and the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.

90 percent of American kids have used the Internet by age 9 and more than a third of 11- and 12-year-olds have a profile on social-network sites such as MySpace and Facebook.

Of the tweens with social-network profiles, 61 percent post personal photos online, 48 percent admit to posting a fake age online and 51 percent have received messages from people they didn't know.

Dave Crenshaw discussed his latest book, The Myth of Multitasking. Crenshaw makes a strong distinction behind “background tasking”—reading a magazine while waiting in line, for instance, or listening to music while coding—and “switch-tasking.” Most of the time, when we talk about “multi-tasking,” we’re actually talking about the very costly practice of “switch-tasking.” Every time you switch your attention from one place to another—even from one browser window to another—you take a significant hit to your focus

Switch-tasking, he definitively proves, causes you to execute each task more slowly than you would otherwise, with more errors

pecifically, what can parents, teachers, and employers do to help their kids, students, and employees focus their attention more effectively? As a kid, student, and employee myself, I have to say that I believe the solution is emphatically not to limit access—at least not for older teens. Rather, I think the key lies in laying out the facts and discussing strategies. Information overload and the allure of infinite access, after all, are challenges that affect everyone with an internet connection—not just young people. And, though writing a stellar book report might not be a cause compelling enough to warrant total focus, every young person will at some point find a pursuit worth paying attention to. Maybe it’s writing short stories; maybe writing music. Maybe it’s making art. But when that pursuit comes along, they’re going to want to know how to firewall their attention, focus their efforts, and—for once—stop switching.

Our first Teachers' Strategy Guide: Reading in a Participatory Culture, offers strategies for integrating the tools, approaches, and methods of Comparative Media Studies into the English and Language Arts classroom. The guide provides a set of lesson plans using Herman Melville's Moby-Dick as the sample text and a theater adaptation by Ricardo Pitts-Wiley entitled Moby-Dick: Then and Now as an example of a contemporary adaptation. The guide is intended to demonstrate techniques which could be applied to the study of authorship in relation to a range of other literary works, pushing us to reflect more deeply on how authors build upon the materials of their culture and in turn inspire others who follow to see the world in new ways.

Over the last four years, more than 10,000 children on five continents have participated in the project. We have demonstrated learning gains in science, language arts, and social studies, and students have completed literally thousands of Quests, some of which were assigned by teachers and many of which were chosen by students to complete in their free time.