The debates about screen time and kids are really confused: the studies have contradictory findings, and the ones that find negative outcomes in kids who spend a lot of time on their screens struggle to figure out the cause-and-effect relationship (are depressed kids using screens more because that's how they get help, or do kids become depressed if they use their screen a lot?).

Sonia Livingstone, an LSE social psychology prof, gives us a peek into the results from The Class, a year-long, deep research project into the digital lives and habits of a class of 13 year olds at an ordinary school.

It takes more than videos on the Internet to get kids engaged in learning to code, writes Mimi Ito.

Game on? Or game over? [PDF], a brief research report from the U Washington Information School, summarizes some of the findings from the TASCHA report on computer skills acquisition. This particular explainer deals with the relationship between playing games and goofing off on computers and learning to do "productive" things with them, finding (as Mimi Ito did, before) that horsing around is a critical component of mastering computers, and that labs that ban games and other forms of playful engagement with computers are hampering their ability to teach the people they're supposed to be serving.

Mimi sez,

A new research report released by the Connected Learning Research Network is a call for educators, parents, youth, media-makers, geeks, creatives and intellectuals everywhere to work together to make the learning riches of the online world accessible to everyone.

Fourteen-year-old Luna Ito-Fisher started making her own clothes and accessories when she was nine, after attending a friend's birthday party at a sewing studio in LA.

"I remember at the beginning, threading was so hard and I could never get it through the needle," Luna tells me as she sets up her machine on her family's dining room table. — Read the rest

My family didn't have a home computer until I graduated high school, so my memories of Where In The World Is Carmen Sandiego? involve more Rockapella and less pixelated police officers. But, like The Atlantic's Alexis Madrigal, I know the series of geography puzzle games left factoids floating around in my brain that will likely never be fully dislodged. — Read the rest

Mimi Ito sez,

The State of the Art of DIY Video is a feature-length program of the best from the world of do-it-yourself video. The screening will feature the latest in online, geek, remix, and fan culture, curated to highlight the most recent trends and techniques emerging from anime music videos, political remixes, fan vids, videoblogs, and the YouTube scene.

Mimi Ito sez, "We've just announced a new research hub and web site for the field of digital media and learning, funded by a $2.97 million grant from the MacArthur Foundation. This is a key component of a broader $85 million effort on the part of the foundation to mobilize digital media and online networks to transform learning. — Read the rest

Dr danah boyd's newly-minted PhD from UC Berkeley was awarded based on her fantastic thesis project, "Taken Out of Context: American Teen Sociality in Networked Publics." danah's ground-breaking research on how kids (especially marginal kids) use the Internet has been featured here a lot — she was one of the contributors to Mimi Ito's gigantic Digital Youth Project, and the attorneys general's report on the relative absence of pedophiles online. — Read the rest

The Digital Youth Project, a MacArthur-funded three year, 22 case study, $3.3 million ethnographic study of what kids are doing online, has wound up and published its results. The project was undertaken by the eminent sociologist Mimi Ito and her talented colleagues (including the incomparable danah boyd) and is the largest and most comprehensive study of young peoples' internet use ever undertaken in the US. — Read the rest

Howard Rheingold points us to an event taking place this weekend in Los Angeles, "24/7: A DIY Video Summit." He explains:

The event is an effort to
bring together the various academic, technology, and creative
communities that have a stake in the evolution of the amateur and
DIY video space.

For TheFeature.com, I interviewed John Poisson, former head of Sony's mobile media research and design groups. Poisson is now focused on how cameraphones could revolutionize photography and communication — if people would only start using them more. He and human-computer interaction researchers Chris Beckmann and Scott Lederer are developing cameraphone software and services they hope will get the world snapping and sharing. — Read the rest

Sociologist Mimi Ito has just published a great paper on the way that mobile phones change teen social interaction on Vodafone's Receiver magazine:

After young people have converged in physical space, mobile communication does not necessarily end. In contrast to work meetings in which mobile communications are largely excluded, among gatherings of young people, the mobile phone is a social accessory.

On today's edition of the NPR program "Day to Day," I speak with host Alex Chadwick about how phonecams are changing the way we communicate with each other, and the way we see the world around us. The segment includes a live in-studio demo (which produced the phonecam snapshot at left), and a chat with anthropologist Mimi Ito (yes, Joi Ito's sister!) — Read the rest