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Sean McHugh

Teens, Technology and Friendships | Pew Research Center - 1 views

  • Social media and online gameplay are the most common digital venues for meeting friends
  • Along with texting, teens are incorporating a number of other devices, communication platforms and online venues into their interactions with friends
    • Sean McHugh
       
      The overlap between socialising within a gaming context and within the context of platforms like Facebook is an interesting one... Teen use of social media has many parallels with MMORPGs, I wonder how the time spent on these platforms compares... I'd bet the girls spend as much, if not more time on social media than the boys do, even combined with their gaming time.
  • Video games play a critical role in the development and maintenance of boys’ friendships
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  • Playing video games is not necessarily a solitary activity; teens frequently play video games with others.
  • video gameplay, particularly over online networks, is an important activity through which boys form and maintain friendships with others:
  • 38% of all teen boys share their gaming handle as one of the first three pieces of information exchanged when they meet someone they would like to be friends with
  • Teens face challenges trying to construct an appropriate and authentic online persona for multiple audiences, including adults and peers. Consequently, many teens feel obligated to project an attractive and popular image through their social media postings.
    • Sean McHugh
       
      Again, classic gamification of social media, where the online persona becomes more like a 'role' than the true character of the person, the equivalent of social media becoming a 'massive, multiplayer online, role playing game', but with the critical difference that this is IRL, which is a little scary, Black Mirror crazy...!
  • Some 76% of teens ages 13 to 17 use social media
  • Social media helps teens feel more connected to their friends’ feelings and daily lives, and also offers teens a place to receive support from others during challenging times.
  • But even as social media connects teens to friends’ feelings and experiences, the sharing that occurs on these platforms can have negative consequences. Sharing can veer into oversharing. Teens can learn about events and activities to which they weren’t invited, and the highly curated lives of teens’ social media connections can lead them to make negative comparisons with their own lives
  • 88% of teen social media users believe people share too much information about themselves on social media
  • 78% of teen online gamers say when they play games online it makes them feel more connected to friends they already know
  • Girls are more likely to use text messaging – while boys are more likely to use video games – as conduits for conversations with friends
Sean McHugh

We are not addicted to smartphones, we are addicted to social interaction - 0 views

  • A new study of dysfunctional use of smart technology finds that the most addictive smartphone functions all share a common theme: they tap into the human desire to connect with other people
  • it is our desire for human interaction that is addictive—and there are fairly simple solutions to deal with this
  • Could smartphone addiction be hyper-social, not anti-social
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  • the desire to watch and monitor others—but also to be seen and monitored by others—runs deep in our evolutionary past
  • the most addictive smartphone functions all shared a common theme: they tap into the human desire to connect with other people.
Sean McHugh

Is There a Healthy Way for Students to Use Social Media? | Greater Good Magazine - 0 views

  • we might be overlooking the “educational and psychological benefits of using social media sites,” such as developing critical thinking and perspective-taking skills
  • parents and educators have been led to demonize what could simply be an evolving means of social connection
  • a constant stream of interruptions
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  • we are probably all struggling to balance what our devices make possible with what they seem to impose on our attention spans and the rest of our health. Yet, for children, this difficulty is more acute because their bodies and brains are still developing.
  • heighten awareness of our multi-generational love of screens and encourage kids and parents to face it together.
  • None of us know the full extent of how our digital dependence is affecting us, or how it will affect the youngest generations growing up today. The least we can do is look up every now and then to ask each other how we’re doing, and how we can do better
  • they’re not alone in this struggle to practice what they preach
Sean McHugh

BitTorrent and the Legitimate Use of P2P - 0 views

  • How can P2P networks go legit?'' My answer is, ``they already are
  • No one here would dispute that filesharing networks are used by those who would violate copyright. But this is not solely the domain of P2P; copyrighted software has been traded on electronic bulletin board systems (BBSs) since their inception and has permeated every public communication protocol on the Internet. Filesharing is a social phenomenon, not a technological one - demonizing P2P based on one use of the technology is a mistake
  • BitTorrent is a P2P system that allows large, popular files to be downloaded quickly
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  • a distinction can be made between a technology (P2P) and implementations of that technology
  • the system was not designed with illegal use in mind, but instead to faciliate transfer of large files in an economical way.
  • trading of copyrighted files is not central to the technology
  • While you could potentially upload a virus to a public tracker and provide a .torrent file for it, you'd still have to convince people to download and run the file just as if you posted it to a website.
  • Legitimate uses of BitTorrent
  • Open Source
  • Live-Taping
  • Dave Matthews Band, Pearl Jam, Tenacious D
  • bands are realizing that having a loyal following is very valuable and that they can both support their fans and still sell records
  • Slashdot
  • DIY Publishing
  • legitimate P2P use is here and has a definite role to play in the future of the Internet
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    "How can P2P networks go legit?'' My answer is, ``they already are.'' The world-wide-web is used to download illegally copied software, copyrighted music and movies as well as child pornography, yet we're not asking how the web can go legit. No one here would dispute that filesharing networks are used by those who would violate copyright. But this is not solely the domain of P2P; copyrighted software has been traded on electronic bulletin board systems (BBSs) since their inception and has permeated every public communication protocol on the Internet. Filesharing is a social phenomenon, not a technological one - demonizing P2P based on one use of the technology is a mistake in my opinion. P2P already has positive mainstream benefits in certain communities and new uses are being found all the time."
Sean McHugh

Video Games and Social Emotional Learning | User Generated Education - 0 views

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    "Video and online games can promote SEL skills and as such, should be integrated into classroom instruction."
Sean McHugh

It's Time For a Serious Talk About the Science of Tech "Addiction" - 0 views

  • Anxieties over technology's impact on society are as old as society itself; video games, television, radio, the telegraph, even the written word—they were all, at one time, scapegoats or harbingers of humanity's cognitive, creative, emotional, and cultural dissolution. But the apprehension over smartphones, apps, and seductive algorithms is different. So different, in fact, that our treatment of past technologies fails to be instructive
  • To combat addiction, you have to discard the addicting substance," Turkle wrote in her 2011 book Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other. "But we are not going to 'get rid' of the Internet. We will not go ‘cold turkey’ or forbid cell phones to our children. We are not going to stop the music or go back to the television as the family hearth.
  • it's really hard to do purely observational research into the effects of something like screen time, or social media use," says MIT social scientist Dean Eckles, who studies how interactive technologies impact society's thoughts and behaviors. You can't just divide participants into, say, those with phones and those without.
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  • that 0.36 percent means that 99.64 percent of the group’s depressive symptoms had nothing to do with social media use.
  • In datasets as large as these, it's easy for weak correlational signals to emerge from the noise. And a correlation tells us nothing about whether new-media screen time actually causes sadness or depression
  • research on the link between technology and wellbeing, attention, and addiction finds itself in need of similar initiatives. They need randomized controlled trials, to establish stronger correlations between the architecture of our interfaces and their impacts; and funding for long-term, rigorously performed research
Sean McHugh

GENER(aliz)ATIONS - Alfie Kohn - 0 views

  • It’s an idea that rational people should view with a generous measure of skepticism if only because each of these labels refers to something on the order of 80 million people.
  • variations (in beliefs and behaviors) within each generational cluster are typically far greater than those between them.
  • If you look at what their underlying needs and aspirations are, there’s no difference at all between this new generation of workers and my generation and my father’s generation
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  • All those kids glued to social media, for example? That’s not because of who the kids are; it’s because they’ve come of age when the technology is available. In fact, a recent survey found that older adults actually use social media more than younger adults do.
  • Sometimes these bogus claims are due to a tendency to describe as generational shifts what are actually developmental differences:
  • the authors whose research showed this to be true have also debunked conservative psychologist Jean Twenge’s sweeping claims about Millennials (which, in her telling, almost always reflect poorly on them). For example, assertions about their supposedly higher levels of narcissism, which are catnip to the media, rest on embarrassing methodological errors.
  • we should be very cautious about offering any generalizations about an entire generation.
Sean McHugh

Grand Theft Auto Is Today's Great Expectations | TIME.com - 0 views

  • are video games art? The short – and long – answer is yes. While it’s impossible to categorize all games easily (just as it is impossible to categorize all fiction, let along writing), there’s no question that gaming is a thriving form of participatory creative expression.
  • Ironically – and tellingly – people such as Schultz are repeating the same sorts of criticisms that dog all forms of popular culture in their early stages of developments. As novels became increasingly available to non-aristocratic readers in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, they were frequently criticized for impairing the morals of their then-mostly female readers by allowing them to imagine themselves in new and exciting worlds. Movies, comic books, and rock and roll – which like novels are often drenched in sex and violence – came in for exactly the same opprobrium. What good can come of allowing large numbers of people to imagine themselves transgressing conventional morality and playing different social roles for themelves, critics have asked for centuries.
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    Ironically - and tellingly - people such as Schultz are repeating the same sorts of criticisms that dog all forms of popular culture in their early stages of developments. As novels became increasingly available to non-aristocratic readers in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, they were frequently criticized for impairing the morals of their then-mostly female readers by allowing them to imagine themselves in new and exciting worlds. Movies, comic books, and rock and roll - which like novels are often drenched in sex and violence - came in for exactly the same opprobrium. What good can come of allowing large numbers of people to imagine themselves transgressing conventional morality and playing different social roles for themelves, critics have asked for centuries.
Sean McHugh

Social And Emotional Benefits Of Video Games: Metacognition and Relationships | MindShift - 1 views

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    For years, most people thought that video games were like candy: mostly bad, tempting to children, but okay in moderation. Now we understand that they can have more "nutritional" value than our parents ever imagined.
Sean McHugh

Technology in Education | American Federation of Teachers - 0 views

  • pedagogy (i.e., teaching practice) and not the medium (i.e., technological tools and resources, such as whiteboards, hand-held devices, blogs, chat boards) that made a difference in learning, stating that instructional media are “mere vehicles that deliver instruction but do not influence student achievement any more than the truck that delivers our groceries causes changes in our nutrition
  • there was no proof to show that a medium was capable of ensuring that pupils and students could learn more or more effectively. He saw the medium as a means, a vehicle for instruction, but that the essence of learning remained—thankfully—in the hands of the teacher
  • it is not the medium that decides how effectively learners learn
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  • the effectiveness of learning is determined primarily by the way the medium is used and by the quality of the instruction accompanying that use
  • The crucial factor for learning improvement is to make sure that you do not replace the teacher as the instrument of instruction, allowing computers to do what teachers would normally do, but instead use computers to supplement and amplify what the teacher does
  • the use of both e-learning and contact education—which is known as blended learning—produces better results than lessons given without technolog
  • the medium does not influence the learning
  • the medium seldom influences teaching, learning, and education, nor is it likely that one single medium will ever be the best one for all situations
    • Sean McHugh
       
      But 'ordinary real life is mediated by computers! I'm still only in classrooms where the myth that this is not true still persists! 
  • students do not naturally make extensive use of many of the newest technologies, such as blogs, wikis, and virtual worlds
  • the main reasons young people use technology. These reasons are mainly social
  • Digital natives! Whenever the question of digital innovation in education is discussed, this is a term that immediately comes to the surface. But it should be avoided. Even the person who coined the term digital natives, Marc Prensky, admitted in his most recent book, Brain Gain, that the term is now obsolete.2
  • Prensky’s coining of this term—and its counterpart for people who are not digitally native—was not based on research into this generation, but rather created by rationalizing phenomena that he had observed
  • The students use a large quantity and variety of technologies for communicating, learning, staying connected with their friends, and engaging with the world around them. But they are using them primarily for “personal empowerment and entertainment
  • university students do not really have a deep knowledge of technology, and what knowledge they do have is often limited to basic Microsoft Office skills (Word, Excel, PowerPoint), emailing, text messaging, Facebook, and surfing the Internet
  • There is simply no experimental evidence to show that living with new technologies fundamentally changes brain organization in a way that affects one’s ability to focus. Of course, the brain changes any time we form a memory or learn a new skill, but new skills build on our existing capacities without fundamentally changing them. We will no more lose our ability to pay attention than we will lose our ability to listen, see or speak.
  • Note that many of these studies examined the influence of television rather than the influence of interactive technology, such as smartphones and social media
  • when people think that young people today read less, it’s not about reading online content or text messages, it’s about reading book
  • young people are still doing a lot of reading, and these statistics make clear that many of them are reading for pleasure. However, we need to be careful about making too many sweeping assertions, since the reading figures in many countries are falling. Even so, we know that reading continues to be important: both reading by young people themselves and parents reading to their childre
Sean McHugh

The trouble knowing how much screen time is 'too much' - BBC News - 0 views

  • For now, anyone thinking about how much time using screens and social media is "OK" will ultimately have to make a personal judgement.
  • Rather than stating that social media was harmful, it suggested a more complex effect.
  • increasing the time spent using technology was linked to improved wellbeing
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  • the positive effect of regularly eating breakfast, or getting a proper night's sleep, was three times stronger.
  • the effects were small, with the positive effects of exercise being more significant.
  • A broader look at evidence provided by some other high quality studies again suggests the story is not clear-cut.
  • Playing electronic games, however, was not seen as leading to a greater risk of hyperactivity, or friendship or emotional problems
  • So how much time should we, or our children, spend looking at screens? It is difficult to be precise as different people spend time online in such different ways.
  • sugar
Sean McHugh

Ten Kid-Friendly Rules for Texting With Respect and Dignity | Psychology Today - 0 views

  • “What is the “right” age for youngsters to begin texting and using social media?”
  • If you wouldn’t say something to a person’s face, don’t send it via text or the internet.
  • Don’t gossip about other people
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  • Once you share something online, you lose control of where it goes, who can forward it, who will see it, and how it can potentially be used.
  • Never post a photo or message that you wouldn’t want “everyone” to be able to view.
  • Once you put something out there online, it’s almost impossible to take it back.
  • In this immediate world of instant messaging and constant contact, you may be tempted to say whatever comes to your mind in a given moment. Don’t give in to the temptation.
  • You have the ability to instantly end a digital conversation and should plan to do so the minute you recognize that cruelty has begun.
  • there is a very, very, VERY big difference between real friends and online followers
  • make sure that the only person who is speaking for you is YOU
  • Your accounts are your accounts. It is in your best interests not to let any friend—even a best friend—post or text from your account. Ever.
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