I've pointed before to stories on the "Give 1, Get 1" program for Americans to help get laptops to kids in third-world countries, but this one in the Washington Post goes in-depth and shows the scope of the challenges. One challenge for the MIT people behind Give 1, Get 1 is competition at home. What […]

We – parents – are the winners in the "showdown of new parental controls in Apple's Leopard versus Microsoft's year-old Vista," CNET's Stefanie Olsen reports. The reason is, filtering, monitoring, and time-control features are increasingly built in right at the operating-system level on both PCs and Macs now. That means it's all easier for parents […]

The benefits of social networking "can far outweigh the potential dangers," wrote Dr. Brendesha Tynes in the latest issue of the Journal of Adolescent Research. The assistant professor of African American Studies and Educational Psychology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign further argued that "banning adolescents from social networking sites – if this were […]

Social media researcher danah boyd caught some flak for similar observations last July (see below), but now research at Northwestern University agrees that "college students’ choice of social networking sites is related to race, ethnicity and parents’ education," a PsychCentral.com blog reports. The survey of 1,060 freshmen at the University of Illinois, Chicago (among the […]

It's South Korea's first "Internet addiction" rehab camp and it may be the first in the world too. The Jump Up Internet Rescue School is "part boot camp, part rehab center [and] resembles programs around the world for troubled youths," the New York Times reports. "Drill instructors drive young men through military-style obstacle courses, counselors […]

If anyone wonders how law enforcement people around the US will be handling sex offender registries, see this article in Police Chief magazine. Any day now, the Justice Department will be issuing guidelines on how law enforcement agencies can implement the Adam Walsh Child Protection and Safety Act of 2006, which established "comprehensive standards for […]

ZDNET blogger Dan Farber says the social Web just "reached a new stage of legitimacy" with a recent post by Tim Berners-Lee, the Web's inventor (in 1989, BTW). Berners-Lee says the Web has evolved in people's minds from connecting computers to connecting documents (maybe this was "Web 1.0") to connecting the things those documents are […]

Humanity still has a battle ahead in its effort to stop online child pornography, says Ernie Allen, CEO of the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children in a commentary in the Christian Science Monitor. "While inroads have been made in the fight against child pornography, the problem remains severe," he writes. "The Internet has […]

The Wall Street Journal's "numbers guy," Carl Bialik, zoomed in on that number – 150 – which many reporters have cited as the limit to the number of personal contacts any human being could possibly sustain. This is when they're writing stories about the lengthy friends lists some teens have amassed in social sites. The […]

Yup, it's now possible. I would love to hear from you if high schoolers at your house or school are using Facebook not only to research schools but also to apply. The widget's called College Planner, and its source, Embark.com, says students can research some 5,000 schools and apply to more than 1,000. As a […]