March 30, 2006

Children online: developing language skills, social interaction

Linguist, psychologist Justine Cassell and students explore virtual playmates, blogging and online forums

By Wendy Leopold

Virtual playmates can help children with language, literacy

Can “virtual” playmates — what the Northwestern researcher who created them calls “embodied conversational agents” — help “real-world” children develop language and literacy skills?

Justine Cassell, professor of communication studies and director of the Program of Technology and Social Behavior, thinks so. Cassell recently presented a paper describing her work with “Sam,” “Alex” and other chatty, fidgety computer-generated cartoon children who move about on a screen at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Built on a unique methodology that relies on data about children’s natural development, Cassell’s “virtual peers” are capable of interacting with children and engaging in collaborative storytelling.

“Children often first acquire language and literacy skills in social contexts such as language play and storytelling,” explained Cassell, a linguist and psychologist who calls her laboratory the Articulab.

“The listener — the people with whom children talk and interact — plays an essential role in building language and literacy skills in youngsters,” Cassell said. “That’s why kindergarten teachers engage in sharing time, round-robin storytelling and other student-to-student activities.” And that’s where virtual peers have an advantage, said Cassell.

“Real-world classmates can be disruptive, disengaged or lack the language skills that we adults want children to acquire. Virtual peers look and act like a playmate but have the capabilities of an adult and therefore can help to positively contribute to children’s learning skills,” Cassell added.

Benefits, risks of teen blogging

A study of 68 randomly selected Web logs (online diaries) produced by teenagers aged 13 to 17 finds that teen bloggers often willingly reveal their actual names, age and offline locations, putting them at risk for cyberstalking and cyberbullying.

David Huffaker, a Northwestern doctoral student working in the technology and social behavior program with Professor Justine Cassell, presented his study findings within the context of other studies of teenage Internet behavior at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

In “Teen Blogs Exposed: The Private Lives of Teens Made Public,” Huffaker finds that half of all teenage bloggers link to other bloggers and often include a “friends list.” Sixty-seven percent of teen bloggers provide a comment section to get feedback from readers of their blogs and send comments on other teen blogs.

From a developmental perspective, Huffaker says, blogs play a positive role by offering teens a place to construct narratives and share stories. “These activities are important to identity exploration which is one of the principal tasks of adolescence,” he says. “What’s more, the mechanics of these online diaries, with their opportunities to link to and get feedback from peers, also aid teenagers in creating and maintaining social ties.”

The randomly selected teen blogs — equally divided between male and female teens and with a mean age of 15.47 years — were examined for content and amount of personal or private information revealed.

Seventy percent of the teens disclosed at least their first name, 67 percent revealed their age, and 61 percent provided their contact information either in the form of e-mail (44 percent), instant messenger name (44 percent) or a link to a personal home page (30 percent). Fifty-nine percent of those who provided contact information disclosed the city or state in which they reside.

“Studying teen blogs highlights the fact that blogging is not an individual pursuit in the way teen diaries once were. Instead, blogs are used by teens to form a small or large community,” says Huffaker.

On the positive side, blogs give teens an opportunity to share their stories and feelings. “They provide a venue in which they can reflect upon their experiences,” says Huffaker. “The ability to create a community online also bodes well for future social development.”

Almost half of all the blogs included discussions about boyfriends, girlfriends or attractions to someone in the form of a “crush.” Seventeen percent of those who wrote about their own sexuality discussed homosexuality and their experience of “coming out.”

Not surprisingly, 71 percent included commentary about school-related topics, such as grades, homework, high school, college or college pressure. Almost half of the online diaries discussed aspects of music, including use of MP3 players, songs, lyrics, favorite bands and concerts.

Huffaker found that blogging has positive effects on verbal and digital literacy as well as increased social interaction. “The danger of sexual predation by adult strangers and of bullying by peers, however, are sometimes unfortunate products of the teen blogging phenomenon,” he says.

Unlike the tattered, leather diary of the past, online teen diaries can be read not only by members of the family “sneaking a look” but also by strangers with questionable intentions.

Huffaker cites a study in which 2,500 children aged 10 to 17 reported being harassed or threatened online. In another study, one in five teenage Internet users said they’d been approached or received a sexual solicitation within their last year of Internet use. One in 33 reported being aggressively solicited by predators who asked to meet them, called them on the phone or sent them letters, money or gifts.

Despite their apparent frequency, the incidents are seldom reported to parents, school administrators or other authorities, according to the surveyed teens. Huffaker suggests using blog software packages that offer an opportunity to keep one’s online diary “friends-only.”

Online time fosters youngsters’ social interactions, civic involvement

Parents often fear that their children are spending too much time on the Internet and, as a result, are losing a sense of the importance of social interaction, civic involvement and participation in social communities. A Northwestern researcher, who for seven years has been studying a remarkable online community of 3,000 youngsters aged 10 to 16, tells parents otherwise.

“The involvement of youngsters in online communities today is qualitatively, not quantitatively, different than it was a generation ago,” says Justine Cassell, professor of communication studies and director of the Program on Technology and Social Behavior. Cassell presented her findings recently at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

“For the young technology enthusiast, involvement might not mean attending meetings in the school gymnasium or sitting in a circle of people around an outdoor campfire,” Cassell says. “Young people may well be socially engaged while seated in the glow of their computer screens and reaching out to others online.”

Cassell, Northwestern doctoral student David Huffaker and Stanford’s Dona Tversky studied the online group of young people representing 139 countries and with different social backgrounds and levels of computer proficiency. “We found that these young online community members demonstrated high levels of civic involvement. They care passionately about their communities and the world,” Cassell says.

Cassell is studying the characteristics of youth leadership and leadership styles by analyzing data resulting from a 1998 online junior summit that she directed. Without ever seeing one another face-to-face in a community almost entirely free of adult intervention, these children traded messages in an online forum about ways in which technology can be used to improve life for the world’s young citizens. They then elected leaders to represent their community in a real-world meeting with political and industry leaders from around the world that took place in Boston.

“While other studies have reported that leadership in the online world is similar to leadership in the offline world, those studies have been based on the behaviors of adult technology users,” says Cassell. “We find that young leaders using technology do not necessarily reproduce adult styles of leadership.”

Cassell and her colleagues also found that they could predict who was going to be elected a leader after analyzing the kinds of online language the youngsters used. Whereas in the real world “leader language” has been found to contain many references to the leader’s ideas and abilities, this was not the case in the online youth community.

The researchers discovered that the leaders in Cassell’s online community were more likely to synthesize the ideas of others and to be highly socially adept — characteristics more typical of women than men in studies of adult leaders. Not surprisingly, more girls than boys were elected to leadership positions.

Cassell also found that online community members appear to place high value on collaboration, social ability and persuasiveness. In adult studies those attributes are found to exist more frequently in women than in men.

Cassell’s work on youth leadership online is supported by the National Science Foundation.