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August 15, 2002

Net-Wise Teens: Safety, Ethics, and Innovation (cont'd)

Clicking with Kids

Before considering how schools can address the relevant Internet issues, it's important to look at the facts. What are students doing online, and how have their behaviors evolved over time? What role are parents and schools playing? The kids I spoke with gave me answers that corroborated much of what the research is saying about where they're going on the Net and why. Among the themes that emerged are the following.

The majority of kids are wired. It's not really news that millions of kids have access to the Internet today. Thanks to federal funding initiatives like the E-rate, almost all public schools are wired. (The Department of Education reports 98 percent; education research firm Market Data Retrieval says 92 percent.) The 2000 Census found that two-thirds of homes with a child aged 6 to 17 have a computer, with 53 percent of these homes connecting to the Internet. While home access has increased overall, low-income kids still lag behind. The National Assessment of Educational Progress found that 41 percent of eighth-graders in free and reduced-price lunch programs have home Internet access, compared to 72 percent of their financially better-off peers.

Wired kids are information hunters and gatherers. Talk to a group of Internet-connected kids, and you'll find them using the Web in sophisticated ways to improve their "offline" lives. Tyler, a high school junior, has collected thousands of music files using peer-to-peer file sharing sites such as BearShare and Morpheus. Henry, an eighth-grader, logs on to vendor sites to compare prices for guitar equipment. His classmate Alyse checks out book descriptions on Amazon before heading to the local library, so she knows what she wants when she gets there.

Kids are also using the Internet in growing numbers to find answers to questions they might feel uncomfortable asking in person. A survey conducted by the Kaiser Family Foundation found that over two-thirds of teens and young adults have searched the Internet for health information, with sexual health being the most sought-after topic. Chat rooms and message boards are other outlets for kids grappling with sensitive issues. For example, Scarleteen, owned by adult e-zine Scarlet Letters and edited by former educators, provides an anonymous forum for teens to ask everything they want to know about sex and sexuality.

What other kinds of research are kids doing on the Internet? According to the Pew Internet & American Life Project, 71 percent of Internet-connected students choose the Web over a visit to the library to complete school projects. A separate study commissioned by AOL backs this up, finding that over 50 percent of teens consult the Web for help completing schoolwork.

Wired kids are communicators. As any educator or parent could probably predict, the number one way kids use the Internet is for communication. According to the Pew Project, three-quarters of wired teens are zapping instant messages to one another. The study also found that 56 percent of teens online have more than one e-mail address or instant messaging screen name. In particular, girls are much more likely than boys to assume different roles online. But even when they're being themselves, many students I talked with believe they communicate in a different way online than they do face to face. Joe, a middle school student in suburban New Jersey, told me he found it freeing. "You can be less reserved online, and less worried about someone's response. It's easier to say what you're thinking."

Research based on 193 respondents, ages 12-17, from survey of over 2,000 households.

To be sure, there's a flip side to the liberating facelessness of the Internet. There are the extreme cases of kids using its anonymity to blend into the adult world: the 14-year-old financial whiz from New Jersey who made hundreds of thousands in online trading before being caught, and the 15-year-old prodigy who, using the innocuous screen name "LawGuy1975," managed to become the top-requested legal expert at Askme.com. More often than not, though, parents and teachers worry about the Internet facilitating risky contact for kids, whether it's an adult looking to establish a relationship with a minor or classmates "flaming" each other with online insults. Almost 60 percent of teens surveyed by the Pew project said they have been contacted by a stranger online.

"When you're IM-ing, grammar goes out the window," says Emily, a middle school student in California.

Wired kids lack information literacy skills. Youth are tapping into vast resources on the Web, but how much consideration do they give to the legitimacy of sites they use? Is the information accurate? Can the source be trusted? The news on this front is not entirely bad: UCLA researchers found that 41 percent of Internet users ages 12-17 think "about half" of what they find on the Internet is reliable and accurate. On the other hand, 51 percent still believe that "most or all" the information on the Web can be trusted to be right.

Parents aren't watching their wired kids as much as you'd think. "My father understands I'm smarter than him when it comes to computers, and there's not much he can do to stop me. He'd be more concerned if I did drugs," a high school junior from New Hampshire tells me, adding that adults don't realize the extent to which kids are downloading illegal software. Most parents claim they keep an eye on where their children are going online, but more than half of kids ages 12-15 admit-not surprisingly, of course-they don't tell their parents everything they do on the Internet, according to the UCLA Internet Project. More telling, perhaps, is the number of wired kids-almost 30 percent, according to the Pew project-who have Internet-connected computers in a private space in their home, usually their bedrooms. Like phones, televisions, and CD players, computers are becoming just another unsupervised entertainment option.

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