President Barack Obama stuck to the script almost word-for-word in his address to schoolchildren across the nation earlier today. Critics of the speech complained last week that Obama would try to indoctrinate schoolchildren with his “socialist ideology.” Some said they would keep their children home today.
The White House posted the speech text online Monday so that concerned parents could read the text themselves and decide whether the content was suitable for their children. Some parents still insisted that Obama could stray from the text and deliver extemporaneous subversive ideas.
Roger Cooper, an insurance agent who was out shopping with his wife and three school-aged children, told the Wall Street Journal said he hadn’t read Mr. Obama’s speech but had read about it on the Internet. “It’s propaganda,” Mr. Cooper said as he emerged from an Apple Store in Dallas’s Knox-Henderson neighborhood. “I don’t trust the man. He’s been nothing…
Teenagers have previously lagged behind adults in their ownership of cell phones, but several years of survey data collected by the Pew Internet & American Life Project show that those ages 12-17 are closing the gap in cell phone ownership. The Project first began surveying teenagers about their mobile phones in its 2004 Teens and Parents project when a survey showed that 45% of teens had a cell phone. Since that time, mobile phone use has climbed steadily among teens ages 12 to 17 - to 63% in fall of 2006 and then to 71% in early 2008.
As can be seen on the chart, older teens are much more likely to have a cell phone than younger teens. But that doesn’t mean young teens aren’t connected to their friends. Phones aren’t the only mobile device teens use to connect them…
Click on the video screen above to see a CBS report about a British video targeted at young drivers that uses a graphic car-crash re-enactment to draw attention to the potentially deadly consequences of texting while driving.
The video was made by the police department in Gwent, Wales, last summer for $20,000 has gone viral online, with more than 1.5 million people viewing the video on YouTube.
“Yes it is violent, but the reality of a fatal road accident is much more gruesome, is much more violent,” writer-director Peter Watkins Hughes told CBS News. “My position on this is that if you are old enough to drive, if you are old enough to want to drive, you are old enough to be aware of the real and serious risks one places yourself in every time you get…
Jenn Savedge has a blog on the Mother Nature Network and today she posted her interview with Alaskan teenager Bart Grabman, who has converted an old Volkswagen Super Beetle to run on electricity. Grabman is a high-school student and avid skier, and worries about global warming. He says the declining snow levels he is witnessing first-hand in the northern state motivated him to build the eco-sensitive car. The vehicle is not yet finished, but he has taken it out for test drives in front of his house. It’s a good example of the Net Generation’s desire to innovate.
Bart Grabman’s electric Volkswagen Super Beetle
Some excerpts from the interview:
Mother Nature Network: What inspired you to build an electric car?
Grabman: I was taking a class at school called Passages, and the purpose of…
I posted yesterday about the national poll released by Common Sense Media that looked at some of the potentially negative aspects of teenage online behavior. But on the whole, of course, the possible drawbacks pale in comparison to the Internet’s enormous benefits, such as helping teens support charities, volunteer, be creative, and improve their academic performance. To wit:
- 54% have joined an online community or a “group” on Facebook or MySpace in support of a cause
- 53% post online creative writing or artwork that they’ve created.
- 50% post or share videos or music that they’ve created
- 45% organize or invite people to an event using a social networking site like Facebook or MySpace
- 34% volunteer for a campaign, nonprofit organization, or charity
- 26% participate in online study groups
Parents and children agree that the Internet is helping their academic performance.
Common Sense Media has released a national poll of teens and parents on social networking behaviors that confirms teenagers continue to find social media sites compelling and that parents may not be fully aware of what their offspring are doing online.
If you haven’t seen the wedding entrance dance on YouTube by the couple from St Paul, Minnesota, then click on the link here and prepare yourself for a big treat. The five-minute video clip shows the pair dancing energetically towards the altar, preceded by their ushers, bridesmaids and groomsmen. It’s all done to the tune of Chris Brown’s song Forever. The video has gone viral. Posted less than two weeks ago, it has already been viewed more than 8.5 million times.
The bride, Jill Peterson, and groom, Kevin Heinz, are both 28, which puts them on the leading edge of the Net Generation.
The creative entrance captures five of the Net Generation’s eight norms. The couple felt the Freedom to be creative and not constrained by tradition. The entrance was Customized just the way they wanted it. They Collaborated with others in the wedding party. It provided huge Entertainment for them…
It’s official - South African youth love to Scrutinize! An animated public health campaign called “Scrutinize HIV” has been chosen by children and young adults as one of the best media campaigns in the country.
All seven television commercials in the campaign can be viewed here.
The Scrutinize campaign aims to raise awareness of HIV among young people and encourage them to scrutinize and take responsibility for their own potentially risky behavior - and already, its catchphrases such as “Flip HIV to HI-Victory” are being incorporated into popular culture.
“In my 20 years of global advertising work, I’ve never heard of a social marketing campaign featuring in a people’s choice marketing/brand awards and certainly never in one polled amongst teens,” said Cal Bruns, director of the commercials. “That Scrutinize was featured in the same breath as Coke, Pepsi…
The well-known Toronto band Men in Suits will be profiled this evening on the Global TV 6:00 pm news. Band members Don Tapscott, Gerry Throop, Jim Hardy, Vince Mazza and Stewart Borden have given charitable concerts for many years in Toronto, and have had a long relationship with the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health with their annual popular “Rock for the Brain” concerts. The Centre is Canada’s leading addiction and mental health teaching hospital, and proceeds from this year’s Rock for the Brain event went to fund research in the area of Eating Disorders.
Click here for an excellent story in PC World about San Francisco’s nonprofit group City Youth Now, which gives donated laptops to at-risk teenagers and young adults caught up in gang and drug-related activity. The laptops help these kids get their lives back on track and graduate from high school and college.
“In today’s age, a computer is kind of like a pencil if you’re going to college. You have to register online and submit essays online. Everything’s about the computer,” says Brittany Heinrich, executive director of CYN.
Laptops are handed out to foster-care residents between the ages of 17 and 22 and to juveniles between 16 and 19 who are on probation for committing crimes. The nonprofit has given out 72 computers since 2008 and plans to give 60 more starting in July. A beneficiary is chosen based on high-school grades and recommendation letters.
Good piece in today’s New York Times about a major milestone Facebook will reach this week: 200 million users. As the Times notes: The sites’s staggering growth rate - doubling in size in just eight…
A very shiny diamond in the rough on the op-ed pages of the New York Daily News. A call for a “Digital Teachers Corps.” to promote the use of digital games in schools to help our students catch up to the new-media prowess of students from other countries.
The op-ed is by Michael Levine and Ann My Thai from Joan Ganz Cooney Center at Sesame Workshop, which promotes digital technologies for educational purposes.
Here are the main points:
The financial crisis’ hammerlock on our country has forced Americans to swallow a bitter reality: Our future as the world’s innovation leader depends on the nation’s ability to take bold steps to change how we prepare the workforce of tomorrow.
Unfortunately, our education system is stuck in wet cement. In recent years, while countries like China, the U.K. and India have raced ahead in embracing the digital age, the U.S. has fallen behind in…
Don was in Austin March 11th to speak at the Consortium for School Networking’s annual conference. While there Don was interviewed by the local NPR affiliate KUT, and you can can listen to the eight-minute interview here.
This is further to earlier posts re Us Now, the UK documentary that had its North American premiere recently in Toronto. One of many attending the premiere was Ruby Ku, a self-described 20-something SciBus student at the University of Waterloo. Ruby was good enough to track down the URLs for many groups featured in the film.
I’ve finally got around to dig up some of the sites that were featured in the film to share them here - very cool stuff, all worth checking out:
School of Everything - a website that helps people who want to learn meet up with people who want to teach.
Zopa - a market place where people lend and borrow money to and from each other, sidestepping the banks.
Couchsurfing - a worldwide network making connections between travelers and the local communities they visit; participate in a better world, one couch at…
Baronness Susan Greenfield, a professor of Synaptic Pharmacology at Lincoln College, Oxford, and Director of the Royal Institution of Great Britain, has warned that the experience of growing up immersed in hyper-stimulating digital technologies will result in human minds characterized by “short attention spans, sensationalism, inability to empathise and a shaky sense of identity.”
The remarks were made to the House of Lords and written up by the Guardian as Greenfield criticized regulators for not taking into account the broad cultural and psychological effects of social networking.
Like others in the field, Greenfield asserts that exposure to digital technologies impacts brain development. “It is hard to see how living this way on a daily basis will not result in brains, or rather minds, different from those of previous generations. We know that the human brain is exquisitely sensitive to…
