Teenagers without Internet access at home are educationally disadvantaged, UK study suggests

Dec. 30, 2012 — A major in-depth study examining how teenagers in the UK are using the internet and other mobile devices says the benefits of using such technologies far outweigh any perceived risks.

The findings are based on a large-scale study of more than 1,000 randomly selected households in the UK, coupled with regular face-to-face interviews with more than 200 teenagers and their families between 2008 and 2011.

While the study reflects a high level of parental anxiety about the potential of social networking sites to distract their offspring, and shows that some parents despair at their children's tendency to multitask on mobile devices, the research by Oxford University's Department of Education concludes that there are substantial educational advantages in teenagers being able to access the internet at home.

Teenagers who do not have access to the internet in their home have a strong sense of being 'educationally disadvantaged', warns the study. At the time of the study, the researchers estimated that around 10 per cent of the teenagers were without online connectivity at home, with most of this group living in poorer households. While recent figures from the Office of National Statistics suggest this dropped to five per cent in 2012, the researchers say that still leaves around 300,000 children without internet access in their homes.

The researchers' interviews with teenagers reveal that they felt shut out of their peer group socially and also disadvantaged in their studies as so much of the college or school work set for them to do at home required online research or preparation. One teenager, whose parents had separated, explained that he would ring his father who had internet access and any requested materials were then mailed to him through the post.

Researcher Dr Rebecca Eynon commented: 'While it's difficult to state a precise figure for teenagers without access to the internet at home, the fact remains that in the UK, there is something like 300,000 young people who do not -- and that's a significant number. Behind the statistics, our qualitative research shows that these disconnected young people are clearly missing out both educationally and socially.'

In an interview with a researcher, one 14-year old boy said: 'We get coursework now in Year 9 to see what groups we're going to go in Year 10. And people with internet, they can get higher marks because they can like research on the internet…my friends are probably on it [MSN] all the day every day. And like they talk about it in school, what happened on MSN.'

Another teenager, aged 15, commented: 'It was bell gone and I have a lot of things that I could write and I was angry that I haven't got a computer because I might finish it at home when I've got lots of time to do it. But because when I'm at school I need to do it very fast.'

Strikingly, this study contradicts claims that others have made about the potential risks of such technologies adversely affecting the ability of teenagers to concentrate on serious study. The researchers, Dr Chris Davies and Dr Rebecca Eynon, found no evidence to support this claim. Furthermore, their study concludes that the internet has opened up far more opportunities for young people to do their learning at home.

Dr Davies said: 'Parental anxiety about how teenagers might use the very technologies that they have bought their own children at considerable expense is leading some to discourage their children from becoming confident users. The evidence, based on the survey and hundreds of interviews, shows that parents have tended to focus on the negative side -- especially the distracting effects of social networking sites -- without always seeing the positive use that their children often make of being online.'

Teenagers' experiences of the social networking site Facebook appear to be mixed, says the study. Although some regarded Facebook as an integral part of their social life, others were concerned about the number of arguments that had escalated due to others wading in as a result of comments and photographs being posted.

The age of teenagers using Facebook for the first time was found to go down over the three year period from around 16 years old in 2008 to 12 or 13 years old by 2011. Interviews reveal that even the very youngest teenagers who were not particularly interested felt under some peer pressure to join. But the study also suggests that the popularity of Facebook is waning, with teenagers now exploring other forms of social networking.

Dr Davies commented: 'There is no steady state of teenage technology use -- fashions and trends are constantly shifting, and things change very rapidly when they do change.'

The research was part funded by Becta, the British Educational Communications and Technology Agency, a non-departmental public body formed under the last Labour government. The study findings are contained in a new book entitled, Teenagers and Technology, due to be published by Routledge in January 2013.

Teenagers and Technology: http://www.routledge.com/books/details/9780415684583/

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Two-thirds of U.S. adults say kids should be 13 to use internet alone: Most support stronger protections

Nov. 19, 2012 — The Internet is full of information, but also full of real risks for children, like online predators or the pitfalls of losing privacy when kids share too much information. In a new University of Michigan poll, the majority of the public supports updating federal laws that require Internet safety standards to protect kids.

The University of Michigan C.S. Mott Children's Hospital National Poll on Children's Health recently asked adults nationwide about Internet use and proposed changes to the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act, known as COPPA.

COPPA was enacted to protect young children from some of these Internet dangers by prohibiting collection of personal information through websites if the user is under age 13. But COPPA was written in 1998, before the dawn of smartphones, applications and social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter.

The Federal Trade Commission is considering updating COPPA to reflect technology advances in the past decade.

The poll found that two-thirds of adults think children should be at least 13 years old to use the Internet on their own. But 29 percent of the parents with children age 9 to 12 said their children have their own handheld Wi-Fi enabled devices, which may mean children are online and unsupervised.

Although social networking sites like Facebook restrict access to users under age 13, 18% of parents polled said their children age 9-12 have their own social networking profile.

So it's not surprising that adults think COPPA needs updating, says Matthew M. Davis M.D., M.A.P.P., director of the C.S. Mott Children's Hospital National Poll on Children's Health.

"For parents, COPPA may be the most important piece of federal legislation you've never heard of," said Davis, who is also associate professor of pediatrics and internal medicine at the U-M Medical School and associate professor of public policy at the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy.

"So much has changed in the 14 years since COPPA was enacted: Facebook, Twitter and other social networks, along with applications. This report underscores the concerns among the general public to make sure proper safeguards are enacted to protect kids."

The Federal Trade Commission has suggested updating COPPA to reflect technology advances in the past decade, and this fall sought comments on proposed revisions.

In the poll, most adults expressed strong support for the proposed updates. The poll found that 60 percent of adults expressed strong support for prohibiting websites and applications designed for kids from collecting personal information of children under age 13.

The respondents showed similarly strong support to require websites and apps to ask users to confirm they are at least 13 years old and to require cell phone service providers and app developers to comply with COPPA regulations for users under age 13.

"Updating COPPA is a start, but parents must realize the digital landscape is continually evolving," says Davis. "It is important that parents play a key role in protecting their children online. With so many young children using the Internet every day, parents must talk to their kids about Internet safety and help teach them to identify and avoid dangerous situations."

Report: http://mottnpch.org/reports-surveys/public-supports-expanded-internet-safety-requirements-protect-kids

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TV and the internet: a marriage made in entertainment heaven

Dec. 18, 2012 — If you have bought a new television lately, the chances are it is a lot smarter than your old one. Smart TVs, also known as connected or hybrid televisions, featuring integrated internet connectivity, currently account for around a third of TV sales in Europe. They are the end point in a huge and rapidly expanding value chain driven by the intensifying convergence of television and the internet.

Just as accessing the internet solely from a desktop PC is rapidly becoming a thing of the past, so too is broadcast TV in the traditional sense -- along with the complaint that 'there's nothing on television!' With connected TVs, channels become interactive, content can be shared, rated and commented among friends, videos can be streamed and watched at will, and a favourite programme will never be missed.

'Connected TV', in the words of Neelie Kroes, Vice-President of the European Commission responsible for the Digital Agenda, gives consumers, 'the potential to combine the best of what they get from existing media, with the best of what they can get from the new. To combine their favourite TV shows with their favourite games and social networks; material on demand, not on schedule, from the comfort of your sofa.'

And it is not just about the TV set in your living room. Increasingly both traditional broadcast TV and new multimedia content is accessible across a range of devices -- you can start watching a programme at home over coffee in the morning and seamlessly continue watching it on your smartphone on the commute to work.

For consumers it sounds like entertainment heaven, but making it happen is both a major opportunity and challenge for network operators, system developers and integrators, content providers and creators. Several EU-funded projects are addressing the challenges, from finding the best methods to deliver content to ensuring a seamless integration of all media for end users.

Bandwidth hunger: from HD to 3D

The Optiband (1) project, for example, is focusing on the delivery of high-definition (HD) and Video-on-Demand (VoD) via 'internet-protocol television' (IPTV) networks, which today typically use high-speed 'Digital subscriber line' (DSL) to deliver media content from the internet to end-users alongside more traditional voice and data services. By applying innovative algorithms to efficiently distribute content while preserving video quality, the Optiband researchers have been able to demonstrate the delivery of three HD video streams over a single 15Mbps DSL connection, allowing, in effect, three users to share one connection to watch different HD content with no loss in quality -- a big improvement on the current state of the art.

Optimising delivery methods is perhaps the most crucial factor for the widespread rollout of connected TV services today. Video content is bandwidth hungry: it already accounts for more than half of all data traversing the internet. And as HD content becomes more widespread, network saturation becomes a very real -- and alarming -- possibility. By 2016, it would take one person six million years to watch all the video content that will cross networks worldwide in a single month, according to some estimates. That requires a lot of bandwidth, but perhaps not as much as feared.

'The golden rule to remember is that all bandwidth available will be consumed,' says Jari Ahola, a project coordinator at the VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland. 'Just as bandwidth increases, the ways to consume it are increasing too: high-definition video is one example.'

So adding more bandwidth -- essentially laying more cables and other network infrastructure -- is not the only way to address the problem. Changing the way video is distributed would also help.

Instead of using the traditional unicast model, based on servers sending data to each client, Mr Ahola and a team of researchers working in the P2P-Next (2) project have shown that content can be distributed much more efficiently over a peer-to-peer (P2P) network in which data hops from one user to the next. By deploying a modified version of the P2P technology used for illegal file sharing, the P2P-Next team demonstrated a system for delivering video that uses at least 65 % less bandwidth compared to the unicast streaming approach.

'For network operators, P2P offers a big advantage in terms of bandwidth demands and cost,' the P2P-Next coordinator says.

More efficient delivery methods are important not just to keep pace with current trends, such as the more widespread distribution of HD content, but also future ones that are likely to be even more bandwidth intensive. After HD, 3D is set to become the new viewing revolution, and researchers working in the Romeo (3) project are attempting to ensure it gets to users with sufficient quality. Their approach is to combine a quality-aware P2P system with Digital Video Broadcasting (DVB) technology and innovative real-time compression methods to deliver 3D video content and spatial audio -- including live streams -- to multiple users on both fixed-line and mobile networks.

Still, network operators worry that, even with content optimisation and more efficient P2P delivery methods, user demands will lead to uncontrollable increases in traffic over time. The issue is being dealt with in the Napa-Wine (4) initiative, in which researchers in France, Italy, Hungary, Poland and the UK are carrying out an in-depth analysis of the impact a large deployment of P2P-TV services would have on the internet. Based on their work, they plan to provide recommendations for P2P-TV developers for best-in-class design of systems that minimise network load; also demonstrating low-cost changes that network operators can make to better exploit the available bandwidth for P2P traffic.

Two-way TV

For service providers and network operators, understanding what is going on over the network is crucial to ensure quality of service. Equally, content providers and creators want to know how their content is being received by their audience.

Because linked TV can be interactive and data is able to travel both ways there is a huge opportunity to mine viewer information, enabling more accurate market research for providers -- compared to relying on viewer feedback surveys -- and the possibility of much more personalised viewing experiences for end-users.

The recently launched Vista-TV (5) project is developing a system to extract, mine and analyse anonymised viewing data from connected TV users. The end result, the project team hopes, will be the creation of an entirely new SME-driven market in TV viewing-behaviour information.

'This is a revolutionary approach. Until now, the only measurements are taken by national organisations, and only a few thousand users at a time,' says Professor Abraham Bernstein, the project coordinator at the University of Zurich, Switzerland.

For end-users, however, the most revolutionary aspect of connected TV is the fact that it effectively puts them in control. You want more information on the subject of a documentary? A couple of clicks and it is on your screen, along with a list of other programmes you might be interested in watching via a video-on-demand service. You want to watch the football with your friends but don't feel like going out? Watch together, comment and interact via a social network. Just returned from holiday and want to share your photos and videos with family and friends? Upload them and create your own private channel from the comfort of your sofa.

A range of projects are working on the underlying technologies to make this integration of different media, delivery methods and viewing devices as seamless and transparent to the end user as possible.

Getting social

In the HBB-Next (6) initiative, researchers are developing user-centric technologies for enriching the TV-viewing experience with social networking, multiple device access and group-tailored content recommendations, as well as the seamless mixing of broadcast content, complementary internet content and user-generated content. In NoTube (7), a team from nine countries has focused on using semantic technologies to annotate content so computers can understand the meaning of what someone is watching, which, combined with data on viewing habits and social networking activities, enables highly personalised, intelligent services. And in Comet (8), researchers are focusing primarily on user-generated content, developing an architecture for content-aware networks to make it much easier to locate, access and distribute videos.

Meanwhile, in LinkedTV (9), a team from eight European countries are going one step further, putting cloud computing firmly at the centre of the TV-internet convergence mix. By weaving content together to deliver a single, integrated and interactive experience, the researchers are building an online cloud of networked audio-visual content that will be accessible regardless of place, device or source. Their goal is to provide an interactive, user-controlled TV-like experience -- whether the content is being watched on a TV set, smartphone, tablet or personal computing device.

'Browsing TV and web content should be so smooth and interrelated that in the end even "surfing the web" or "watching TV" will become a meaningless distinction,' the LinkedTV team says.

The projects featured in this article have been supported by the Seventh Framework Programme (FP7) for research.

(1) Optiband: Optimization of Bandwidth for IPTV video streaming (2) P2P-Next: Next generation peer-to-peer content delivery platform (3) Romeo: Remote Collaborative Real-Time Multimedia Experience over the Future Internet (4) Napa-Wine: Network-Aware P2P-TV Application over Wise Networks (5) Vista-TV: Linked Open Data, Statistics and Recommendations for Live TV (6) HBB-Next: Next Generation Hybrid Media (7) NoTube: Networks and Ontologies for the Transformation and Unification of Broadcasting and the Internet (8) Comet: COntent Mediator architecture for content-aware nETworks (9) LinkedTV: Television linked to the Web

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