Danish youngsters teach The Minister for Education about internet and ICT in school September 1, 2009
Posted by Malene Charlotte Larsen in Internet, Internet Safety, School, Youngsters.add a comment
The Danish Media Council for Children and Young People has set up a youth panel called “Medierødderne” consisting of a group of children and young people between the age of 10 and 15. During the summer they have been working on compiling a list of ideas and guidelines for better ICT and internet usage in school. In June they presented their ideas for the Danish Minister of Education.
I have picked out a couple of their recommendations (translated from Danish):
1. Let students teach each other about the internet, and have children share their good and bad experiences with each other, their parents and teachers.
2. All teachers must attend a course in internet and computer skills, and they should include the internet in their teaching more often.
5. If a school creates filters on their computers, the students should be informed why.
9. Schools should set up a rule that prevents teachers from ‘friending’ students on Facebook – and vice versa.
See the complete list of recommendations here.
The panel is one out of many European youth panels within the Insafe network.
New citation manager August 31, 2009
Posted by Malene Charlotte Larsen in Academic, Dissertation, Research.add a comment
When I first started writing my PhD dissertation I used Endnote to manage citations and references. Half way through the period I switched to RefWorks, which I liked because of the possibility to store all of my references online. Then a few weeks ago some colleagues of mine pointed me towards Zotero, which is now my favourite tool for creating in-text-citations. Zotero is actually an open source Firefox extension so I have all my research sources stored in the web browser itself. The Word plug-in is really easy to use and I haven’t encountered any problems importing all my references.
Learn more about Zotero here.
Btw, if you wonder what I am up to at the moment and why I am an awfully unstable blogger, I can tell you that all I am doing is writing my dissertation. It is going okay and I enjoy having the time to be absorbed into the project.
My PhD Blog featured in woman’s magazine July 15, 2009
Posted by Malene Charlotte Larsen in Blogging, Media coverage.5 comments
More than 1.5 year ago I gave an interview to a Danish woman’s magazine called Femina about keeping a research blog. Last week the interview was finally published as part of a special theme on blogging. It’s a really small piece (and the article was even shortened in the end), but it can be read from the journalist’s own website here (in Danish – page 6).
I think keeping a research blog is an interesting methodological approach. In my dissertation I have written a small section about research blogging and how it affects my research and empirical data. When I have more time I will write a post about that. I the meantime, I can recommend this paper from 2002 by Jill Walker and Torill Mortensen: “Blogging thoughts: personal publication as an online research tool“.
Twittering from Social Media PhD Course June 24, 2009
Posted by Malene Charlotte Larsen in Academic, PhD, Twitter.4 comments
I’m attending a PhD course on “Social Media: Analysing Identity, Sociality and Creativity in Online Networked Environments“. Some of us are twittering using the hashtag #PhDsmc. Feel free to follow
Nancy Baym at Aalborg University June 17, 2009
Posted by Malene Charlotte Larsen in Aalborg University, Academic, Lectures.Tags: Qualitative Studies
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Next week Nancy Baym, University of Kansas, will be visiting Aalborg University to give a summer lecture on ”Qualitative Internet Research: New Media and Methodology”. Nancy is coming to Denmark in connection with the PhD course on Social Media I have been involved in planning, and luckily she agreed to come by Aalborg first to talk about her research and how she deals with methodological issues in social media studies.
The abstract of Nancy’s talk is:
Nancy Baym will be discussing the methodological issues she’s encountered in her recent qualitative and quantitative research online. Her research on friendship in the music-based social networking site, Last.fm, for example, combines quantitative and qualitative survey questions and raised several challenges in recruiting appropriate participants as well as integrating the two kinds of responses. Her work on independent Scandinavian music and its online fans involved multiple forms of online interviewing including email, chat and skype (audio and video), and she will discuss the variation in interviews that resulted.
The guest lecture takes place Monday 22nd at 10. Read more about it here and feel free to attend or pass on the invitation.
After the lecture Nancy will join the local researchers for a lunch seminar and an informal discussion on “The new shape of online communities“.
New facts about online predators May 8, 2009
Posted by Malene Charlotte Larsen in Internet Safety, Survey.Tags: Predators
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I recently read an article from Switched reporting on a new study from University of New Hampshire’s Crimes Against Children Research Center. The study deals with data collected from an sample of American law enforcement agencies about crimes by online sex predators during two 12-month periods, in respectively 2000 and 2006.
Here are some of their conclusions based on the study:
- Arrests of online predators in 2006 constituted about 1 percent of all arrests for sex crimes committed against children and youth.
- Arrests of online predators increased between 2000 and 2006. Most arrests and the majority of the increase involved offenders who solicited undercover investigators, not actual youth.
- The internet is not more dangerous than other environments that children and adolescents frequent.
- Social networking sites are not necessarily dangerous environments (predators are more likely to use online chat rather than SNSs to initiate contact to possible victims).
Read more about the study and the measurements here.
Be aware that the numbers represented may not reflect the full number of crimes committed by online predators, as “many sex crimes against minors never come to the attention of law enforcement”. However, it is safe to say that children are still “most likely to be exploited by acquaintances and family members, rather than strangers on the Internet”, as pointed out in the article from Switched.
Three kinds of online safety May 6, 2009
Posted by Malene Charlotte Larsen in Internet Safety, Talks, Youth.2 comments
During the past few weeks I have been giving a couple of public talks at different conferences in Denmark, all focusing on youth and digital media. Even though my talks usually don’t include many perspectives on online safety and focus more on communicating my research results and giving a general introduction to how Danish youth use social network sites, I know that many of the participants (often teachers, social educators, parents, librarians etc.) are interested in knowing how to teach kids about safety issues.
In this regard I recently read an interesting post from the NetFamilyNews blog. Here, Anne Collier offers three perspectives on online safety and internet literacy:
- Physical safety – the one we have focused on the most, freedom from physical harm by predators and bullies
- Psychological safety – freedom from cruelty, flaming, and other forms of harassment and cyberbullying involving ex-friends, mean kids, bullies, colleagues, etc. [...]
- Reputational and legal safety – these can overlap with the psychological kind, where, for example, online defamation can harm someone’s reputation; they provide for freedom from restriction or repercussion as a result of online communication or production by one’s self or others [...].
She argues that US kids “have practically tuned out the term online safety” because of a strong focus in US society on the first perspective. The term “can’t really help them deal with the complexities of their online/offline social lives, it’s in danger of becoming irrelevant to them”, she writes. I agree very much with Collier and her point is quite similar to what I was trying to argue in this article on Nettendenser in December. I think it is important to focus not only on the threats and risks (and thereby treating children and young people as victims) in order to get them to listen to advice on online safety.
Read the post from NetFamilyNews here (which also includes many relevant links) .


