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Had a blast talking with all the folks in Ottawa.  Thanks for all the Twitter love!  As promised, here is my deck from the talk.

As many of you know, I co-chaired the Digital Kids (formerly Engage) this year with the lovely Izzy Neis, Regine Weiner and Amy Pritchard.  Had a great time and I thought I would update my notes on my panel and my musings here.

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My panel was on Parent Controls  We were tasked with presenting the parent controls we have on each of our sites – mine for Animal Jam, Hillary for Everloop, Holly for AOL and Sebastien from Oregon Scientific .  What follows is the rant I built up during/after the panel.

SO, Kids site owner…

You have a Fort-Knox caliber security system that makes registration super secure – nice!
You have reports on your child players’ usage and maybe even what they learned – cool!
You allow the parent to see who your child’s buddies are – neat!

While this exercise is fine, what I thought more valuable from the panel was the conversation we were able to have after with audience.  Parent controls are not required by law, so those of us who have them are already above the bar.  We can dust the dirt off our shoulders and congratulate ourselves, or we can talk for real about them.

Truth is, not many parents use parent controls.  And when they do, it’s usually because the are in a negative mood – their child was caught trying to swear, their child gave out their password and then is confused why they were “hacked,” their child “borrowed” their parent’s credit card and bought a membership or some virtual currency.  All of a sudden Mom/Dad/Grandma is SUPER interested in how to control their child’s activity on their favorite sites.

If the only time you engage with your parents are in these reactive and often negatively tinged situations, you are doing a disservice to your parent audience and your brand.  Parent controls are simply one pillar in what should be a larger parent communication strategy.

This strategy should encompass the parent controls, yes, but also:
- Your registration process
- Your tone in your parent focused area of the site
- The messaging and frequency in your parent emails and newsletters
- How contests are managed
- How your customer service reps interact with parents
- Your refund and retribution policies
- Your crisis management plan
- Your Social Media strategy

If parent controls are the only thing you have worked on, or if they are worked on in a vacuum without realizing how they intersect with these other parent communication channels, you are at best missing valuable audience engagement opportunities and at worst, losing customers.

Don’t assume that your Parent Controls are a “If you build it they will come” situation.  Most parents, like you, are busy.  They don’t even look at your site when their kids start playing.  Best case, they do a quick scan of your site to determine that it doesn’t offend them in some way.  Of course, there are parents who will sit with their children and explore all the sites they play on diligently to make sure they comply with their parenting pedagogy.  But these parents are a minority (albeit a vocal one.)

The average parent DOES discover your controls and other parent communication when their child is crying about something regarding your site.  Like I said before – they’ve been “hacked,” they’ve been bullied, they’ve been banned.  The parents are suddenly transformed into Momma and Pappa  Grizzly Bears, ready to defend their angels from the brutes of the Internet, usually holding you, the site, as the main offender.

You think this Hulk-esque mood will be placated with reports or the ability to deactivate newsletters?  Nope, they need their indigence/fear/rage to be acknowledged, validated and calmed.  That’s your job as a Community Management (or Customer Services, depending on your corporate structure).  In the process of calming their nerves, you can use the existence of your Parent Controls as evidence of your brands commitment to partnering with the parent.  Sometimes its the mere mention of their existence, sometimes its a patient walkthru of the tools – but usually it’s then that the parent becomes impressed and/or calmed by your commitment to their child’s well being and their own state of mind.

An important caveat here is that an equal amount of parent’s first engagement with parent controls is often to extend abilities, rather than remove them.  This is usually done to stop the incessant pleas to turn on some feature for them, usually chat or other interaction tools.

Now this could all change as our parent audiences get more comfortable with the technology and/or those who grew up online become parents.  But we aren’t there yet.  Until then, we need to stay eyes wide open regarding these communication avenues and not discount, ignore, or over-emphasize any particular one.

Tax season is less about numbers for me and more about another passion, organizing things.  Mainly receipts, forms, etc.  My mom was meticulous at organizing her tax recepts and I have picked up that gauntlet to carry on.

This time of year always brings up the 1099 versus w2 conundrum, too.  As an employer, I am super familiar with the difference between the 2.   But as a long time helper of other companies (aka contractor or consultant), I thought I would share my checklist that I make sure that I maintain, so that I am sure I am on the up and up as a 1099 receiver.

- Contract it up – I always make sure I have a contract when I am doing work for someone.  This is my assurance that the talked about terms are in writing, but also a good piece of evidence to legitimacy.

- Business licence or sole proprietor – This is a big one for some companies.  It’s much easier to show someone is a contractor if they have a business license.  You can get one through your state and it comes with your very own Federal ID Number to boot!  I personally go the route of sole proprietor, tax wise, and therefore do not have a FIN.  This just means I have to have cross my t’s and dot i’s in a couple more places to justify my existence.

- Advertising – This could be as explicit as an ad in a trade mag advertising your services or as implicit as listing all the ways people find out about you.  For example, if you want to know about my skill set, you can read this blog, my LinkedIn, see my thoughts in clubs or listservs or see me at a speaking engagement.  Since most of my stuff in the past has been on the side and via word of mouth, it’s important that I maintain these if I ever get contract work.  Having business cards helps too.

- Master of my own schedule – Another big point is scheduling.  If you are scheduled to the hours you work, that leans more in the direction of employee – not a deal breaker, but just more on that side of the list.  If you decide when you work, you are more of a contractor.  Of course, meetings need to be scheduled as we are not in an anarchy (at least I am not).  But with the advent of asynchronous communication (IMs, emails, etc) it’s easier and easier to have less face to face time.

- Expertise included – People want to hire me for my expertise in whatever area.  Many times, we hire people for their instincts and their ability to react how we would in certain scenarios.  Now that doesn’t mean that if they have to know how to use all of the software we use when they start – of course we can train them on that.  But there has to be a baseline of ability expected as a contractor.

And we can also give them feedback if their work isn’t what were thinking about.  Think of a decorator or painter redoing a room in your house.  It’s your house, therefore if they design or paint something that is not to your liking, you don’t have to just accept it.  And if there are special instructions to different areas of the room or previous methods used, you will need to explain that too.  But they are still a contractor for you.

- My precious (tech) – I have all the technology I need, hardware wise.  If I have to buy tablets, apps, software, printer ink, paper, etc – that’s on me.  Incurring expenses is just part of the contract work lifestyle – but you also get to write it all off at the end of the year, so it works out.

There are other areas on the differences sheet, but as each person’s situation is different, it’s all case by case.  And you will probably never have to justify your existence to anyone.  I am just a prepared sort of person, so I like to know I am on the up and up & I am a community person, so I thought I would share.

Currently, the law is written in such a way that it clearly intends to protect childrens’ personally identifiable information (PII) from being used for nefarious purposes by the websites collecting it or their third party partners.  Some of the changes being proposed (public comments are due by the end of Nov) help to update and articulate this point and make the criteria points a bit more salient with todays tech climate (i.e adding geo-location, behavioral advertising, etc).

One point that is hotly debated is Email Plus.  Currently, sites can use this method (sending notification emails to a parent informing them of a child’s intent to share PII), but the FTC is trying to remove this.  The reason for this being that the sites should, by in large, not be soliciting PII from children in the first place and if they are, they should be complying with the more rigid parental verification models detailed in the law.  As Amy Pritchard from Metaverse Modsquad articulated to me, “Email plus is being eliminated as a way to collect PII and use it internally, as most sites had used it as a best practice parental notification method.  In order to allow sites to continue to do this, the proposed changes allow for sites to collect the parent email address for purposes of notifying the parent that the child has become a member of [or registered for] the site.”

The informal debates that I heard and participated in at the FOSI conference dealt mostly in the intent of the law.  Most of us agreed that the law should protect a child’s PII from being used for anything other than to make the game play better.  For the most part, the consensus is that, except for specific situations, like contests, DOB and gender are really the only 2 pieces of child PII a site needs to collect, and these are allowed currently under COPPA.

The finer point that I recognized in our sometimes spirited debates was between solicited PII and passively collected PII.   A site should not solicit PII from kids, such as in the registration process, as most of this information is not needed for normal game-play (unless, again, they get verifiable parental consent).   But what if kids give PII freely, such as in chat or on forums/boards?  What, if any, sanctions should be levied unto the site in these scenarios?  The informal consensus was that the site should at least employ means of screening and moderating such content so as to make sure that this PII is not easily given and read on the site – but that this should not be legislated as part of COPPA.

Anne Collier wrote about this recently (http://www.netfamilynews.org/?p=30775) – “The proposed [COPPA] changes respond to the advent of social media (social network sites, virtual worlds, online games, apps, etc.) in that sites can “allow children to participate in interactive communities without parental consent so long as the operators take reasonable measures to delete all or virtually all children’s personal information before it is made public,” and companies will also have to hold third parties such as app providers to the same privacy standards their services are held to.”

I do not think that the intention of the law should be about teaching and protecting kids to be safe with their PII.  While this is an ethical and moral imperative that companies that target this demographic should abide by, I fall pretty firmly on the side that this should not be federally mandated.  Many of us, myself included, believe that the free market, and hopefully vocal parent groups and watchdog organizations, should be more of the gauge as to whether this is being done on individual sites.  In theory, educating and protecting kids from sharing PII in chat is a great idea, but those of use who have to DO that work, realize how difficult and sometimes impossible it is to be 100% effective.  I do not see how the government could keep up with or track down how effectively sites are at keeping up with that.

This was the 5th Annual FOSI conference, and it was very good to see more representation from practitioners, rather than just lobbyists, marketers, safety advocates, researchers and bloggers.  Hopefully, those of us with real-world/front-line experience in implementing these sort of laws can gain influence in the conversations so laws can be amended or written practically the first time, rather than after the fact (or not at all).

(see the whole thing at http://www.thetoryparty.com/comics/2011/06/16/your-guts-and-you/)

And as I was uploading this one, I saw this fantastically designed on on Slideshare as well.  Guess which one of us has access to graphic designers

Gever Tulley’s Brightworks school

His talk was basically a derivative of this TED talk he did last year, only thing different is that he is actually starting a school with these ideas in SF this fall.

My favorite quote from @gever‘s keynote – education is suffering from “atrophy of delight” – there is a vacuum of passion in most teaching that is robbing out kids from those intoxicating “aha!” moments.

Fortune Cookies: Long and Short Term Future of Kids Tech   

Left this talk totally inspired.  The kind of talk that you just nod your head to constantly while feverishly taking notes and jotting down ideas.  Best kind of talk.

- Education needs to focus less on the hardware and more on the content and curriculum

- Dr McEwen working on ipod/ipad work with non-verbal autistic children

- Gesture mapping and gesture guidelines for fine motor skill problems, swipe and drag are not easy – Dexteria is an example of an app like this

- Vygotsky – social interaction and instruction go together – which are 2 areas that are difficult for autistic children

- Need to continue development in sensory feedback – not just visual, but auditory, haptic, smell

- edubuzz.org, a collaborative tool where students, teachers and parents share info on school, spikes in traffic at 3pm and 11pm – parents getting invovled

- We need to encourage personal branding from an early age – being aware of personal profile building and owning that – what happens when you are googled…

- Use the tech as a tool, not as end goal – it’s the teaching/inspiration/passion that engages the kids

- Scrollmotion, with Haughton Mifflin, made Fuse – making the textbook more interactive

- I wonder, tho, how many teachers are empowered to fight for alternative teaching methods and how many schools allow that

- Jim Bower asked if the push of processing info in new digital ways might be increasing autism

- McEwen answers that continuity and reducing the amount of “noise” in the app is helpful, from matte finsh to reduce shine, to consstency in the voice used, etc

- Wifi is contenciois as there is research that exposing children to electromagnetcic frequencies may be causing problems

- Segregation of play in education – only in recess and phys ed – “not allowed” elsewhere int eh school day.

- Think in developmental stages, not ages

http://venturebeat.com/2011/05/16/national-geographic-virtual-world-animal-jam-hits-a-million-kids/

Even more fun, our team celebrated at the Hogle Zoo in Salt Lake City, our studio’s home town zoo and where we are sponsoring their EdZOOcation program and the coolio Allosaurus:

It’s been live for only a couple hours and the room has been full the whole time.  Dr Brady Barr specialized in cool gadgets that help him get crazy footage of all sorts of animals.  And we are showing some good ones, including Brady getting into a Crocodile getup and tagging Crocodiles, hanging out next to a deer carcass to see wolfpacks at night and pythons and Mystery Swamp Creatures!  ACK!

I love it!  And this is just the first day. Look out for more cool stuff from this awesome-tastic Scientist/Celebrity that we are partnering with.

I find myself  shouting at the videos – get away from there Brady!!!

Woot!

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5/12 – UPDATE!  Brady’s answering the player’s animal questions!

Dr Brady Barr now has regular video answers to questions from kids in the game.  So our kids can ask a real scientist their animal puzzlers and potentially have him answer their question.  Love this kind of feedback and recognition.  How exciting!