Smartphones in schools: Yes, no or maybe?

Smartphones are society’s latest addiction. But students at San Lorenzo High School in California have no way of feeding this addiction. Since last year, they have reportedly had their mobile phones locked in pouches by Yondr from 8am until school lets out at 3.10pm, every day.

Used to prevent fans at comedy clubs from taping shows or posting Facebook updates during standup performances, the form-fitting lockable pouches found their way into the education sphere across thousands of schools in the United States, Canada and Europe. Just like the comedy clubs and concert venues, schools aim to target students more absorbed in their phones than what’s being written on the board.

“There are so many studies that have come out in the last few years on the social anxiety, stress, low self-esteem, teen suicides are up – Studies have shown how disruptive these devices can be, [and] not only the devices itself, but the social media aspect of it,” Allison Silvesti, Principal at San Lorenzo told CNBC.

Smartphone use among children and adults is booming all over the globe. A Pew Research Centre study last year found that 95 percent of teens can get their hands on one these days, with 45 percent claiming to use it constantly. While Facebook use is down from 71 to 51 percent, a sizable majority said they have shifted their attention to other social media platforms such as YouTube, Instagram and Snapchat.

“Smartphone ownership is nearly universal among teens of different genders, races and ethnicities and socioeconomic backgrounds,” the report said.

For all the hype surrounding EdTech’s potential benefits in classrooms, the general consensus on mobile phones tends to fall towards the negative. San Diego State University Professor Jean Twenge found that smartphone and social media use coincided with the spike in the rise of teens’ feelings of uselessness, as well as with the fall of their satisfaction and happiness.

In Australia, the New South Wales government has ordered the country’s first review of the “risk versus reward” of mobile phone use once inside the school gate. France has a ban of mobile phone use in school premises, while UK culture secretary Mark Hancock called for a similar ban last June.

What’s seen as a weapon of mass disruption and bad parenting in some places, however, is actually an effective teaching tool in others.

In Montreal, for example, educators are experimenting on ways to integrate smartphones in and outside of the classroom in novel and creative ways. Working with researchers, high school art teachers and about 300 students used Instagram as “a private, closed network accessible to only teachers and students”.

Teachers post visual prompts (images) called “Missions” – exploring themes of “self,” “my school” and “my surroundings” – and students are invited to respond through a smartphone photograph.

“What we experienced was consistent with earlier research: sharing from their different perspectives and locations heightened the students’ desire to be connected at school and their sense of personal involvement in their learning,” Ehsan Akbari, a PhD candidate at the Department of Art Education, Concordia University wrote in The Conversation.

“And, through sharing their own images, the students created a peer-learning network, in which they could teach and learn from each other by taking and sharing images online.”

What the experiment in Montreal suggests is that the solution to mobile phone use may lie in achieving balance. Limited usage is key, which explains why Twenge isn’t entirely anti-smartphone.

“This is not about taking the phone away. They are wonderful devices, but it’s limited use,” she says, especially for teens. “Make sure the phone doesn’t become an appendage.”

 #edtech #studentsupport

>studyinternational.com

COVID-19: Don’t make university students choose between education and legal rights

When U.S. President Donald Trump held a rally earlier this summer in Tulsa, Okla., expecting thousands of supporters to gather in close quarters, he had them all sign COVID-19 liability waivers. This meant they couldn’t hold him or his campaign responsible if they contracted COVID-19 at the event.

At the time, we were amused by the irony, but COVID-19 waivers are becoming commonplace. The city of Halifax has one for its summer camps, as do Saskatchewan 4-H clubs and some dental clinics and yoga studios.

Several American universities make students sign waivers before participating in sports.

There’s every reason to think that if or when students return to campuses in the fall, Canadian universities will seek to limit their legal risk. We urge them not to.

COVID-19 liability waiver

St. Francis Xavier University, in Antigonish, N.S. — known colloquially as StFXU — recently announced its students would have to sign COVID-19 liability waivers. StFXU is offering most of its courses in person this fall.

Under StFXU’s proposed waiver, students won’t be allowed to return to campus or participate in any activities — including online activities — unless they first sign it.

By doing so, students would have no legal recourse against StFXU if they contracted COVID-19 due to the university’s negligence or wrongdoing.
A man''s hand grasps a pink pencil and prepares to sign a liability waiver.

In response to concerns raised by the university community, StFXU reconsidered the specific wording of its waiver, but ultimately decided to proceed.

Even without a waiver, StFXU wouldn’t be financially responsible for all COVID-19 infections — it’s only liable for those infections caused by its unreasonable acts or omissions. But the waiver meant that even if StFXU acted unreasonably, students couldn’t recover compensation.

COVID-19 waivers are wrongheaded

StFXU and other universities would be wrong to impose this risk on their students. Moreover, such waivers might not even be enforceable.

Liability waivers are contracts — agreements between parties committing to some kind of exchange. They allocate risks and rewards. If you want a company to provide you with scuba lessons for $500, for example, it will insist you sign a waiver so that you bear the risk of injury.

In theory, you could pay the company (or a competitor) $600 for those lessons and the scuba company could insure against losses. The ability to allocate risk and voluntarily agree on terms is fundamental to contract law, and Canadian courts have generally enforced liability waivers.

University COVID-19 waivers, however, are different. Students don’t have the ability to negotiate the terms of a waiver or to pursue their post-secondary education elsewhere. These waivers are take-it-or-leave-it: if you want to be a university student this fall, you’ll have to sign away your legal rights. If you don’t, you can’t have access to your education.

Public policy concerns

There are several reasons why universities would be wrong if they sought to impose the financial risk of COVID-19 on their students as insurance companies stop covering losses due to the pandemic.

First, post-secondary education is a public good. Like all education, it benefits not only individual students but society as a whole. If liability rests with universities, compensation will come partly from governments, which still provide a significant portion of university budgets.

Second, universities that unilaterally choose to offer in-person education this fall shouldn’t be allowed to shift the financial risks of their choice onto their students.

Third, liability waivers remove an important incentive to ensure campus is safe. Though universities will undoubtedly continue to take all appropriate measures to protect their students, the risk of legal liability helps encourage institutions to prioritize safety measures.

Legal concerns

There’s no "freedom of contract" here. Instead, there’s a significant inequality of bargaining power. University students will be forced to either accept the waiver or forego their education — at least for now. This isn’t a bargain students enter into willingly, as concerns over the StFXU waiver show.

Indeed, waivers like the one initially imposed by StFXU may not be legally enforceable. The Supreme Court of Canada’s recent decision in the Uber Technologies Inc. vs. Heller case emphasized that contracts won’t be enforced when they’re unfair.

For example, if your doctor said she would only take you on as a patient if you waived your right to sue her for negligence, such a waiver wouldn’t be enforced, any more than a promise made with a gun to your head would be.

The law in Canada on unfair or "unconscionable" contracts depends on the specific facts of each case. The initial StFXU waiver was an entirely one-sided, take-it-or-leave-it deal in the context of access to higher education and the risk of serious illness. There are reasonable grounds to believe it wouldn’t be upheld in court.

While it’s not inconceivable that a university could craft an enforceable COVID-19 waiver, the law is unlikely to tolerate a contract effectively compelling students to choose between their education and their health.

Universities must ensure student safety

We sympathize with institutions whose insurance companies will soon stop covering losses due to COVID-19. That puts them in a difficult position, and for many organizations, like summer camps and yoga studios, waivers may be appropriate.
Students carrying bags and suitcases walk in a group on a grey sidewalk.

But universities are different. They have a higher calling than merely protecting the bottom line. Universities have a duty to provide a safe learning environment for their students.

If they fail in this duty and students contract COVID-19 as a result, universities should be legally responsible.

> theconversation.com

Muslims treated differently by newspapers, says press watchdog

The portrayal of Islam and Muslims in the British press has been “the most difficult issue” facing the press watchdog in the past five years, according to its outgoing chief.

“I speak for myself, but I have a suspicion that [Muslims] are from time to time written about in a way that [newspapers] would simply not write about Jews or Roman Catholics,” said Alan Moses, who is standing down after five years as chairman of the Independent Press Standards Organisation.

His comments come two months ahead of Ipso’s plans to publish voluntary guidance for journalists when writing about Muslims, who make up roughly 5 per cent of Great Britain’s population, according to 2017 data from the Office for National Statistics. The regulator has previously issued similar advice for journalists reporting on transsexual people and victims of sexual crime.

The decision followed a home affairs select committee hearing last year on Islamophobia and Britain’s print media, during which Ipso was accused of not doing enough to tackle inflammatory and inaccurate writing.

“A shock-jock Muslim story on the front page sells papers,” the former Conservative party chair Sayeeda Warsi told the committee at the time. “This is nothing new, we have been here before — some of the headlines we see now could have been written about the Jewish community in the 1930s and indeed were.”

Ipso was founded in 2014, after calls for a tougher system of press self-regulation following the phone hacking scandal. It regulates more than 1,000 British newspapers and can force members in breach of its editors’ code to publish a correction, or pay a fine if there has been a serious and systemic breach.

Sir Alan, who became its first chairman in 2014, said Ipso faced “constant” requests to make its editors’ code stricter on discrimination, which states that the press “must avoid prejudicial or pejorative reference” to an individual based on a range of categories, including religion.

“I think producing guidance is the best, sensible and decent way forward,” the former court of appeal judge said, adding that Ipso’s powers to “tell an editor what to write” were unprecedented and had to be administered “proportionally”.

Critics have, however, said that Ipso could do more. Steve Barnett, media professor at the University of Westminster and member of campaign group Hacked Off, argued that The Times’ stories last year about a “white Christian child” who was “forced into Muslim foster care”, which Ipso later found to have been in breach of its rules on accuracy, should have prompted a wider investigation.

“Had that disregard for the industry code happened in any other industry, the press would have been up in arms condemning the shocking negligence of these professionals,” Mr Barnett said.

Miqdaad Versi, assistant secretary-general of the Muslim Council of Britain, said enforced corrections were rarely given as much prominence as the original misleading article. “It’s an incentive to lie and only correct when you get found out,” he said, pointing out that the now debunked story about the girl in foster care could still be read online.

Sir Alan, however, asked how stricter rules could be implemented. “Do you have a law that says you have to be like the BBC in taste, balance and decency? I mean, what sort of a rule would it be to say to a newspaper ‘don’t be nasty’?”

He argued that more stringent rules on what newspapers were allowed to write would lead British media down a dangerous path of authoritarianism. “That is not a price worth paying, but it is wretched if you are part of the group that is under attack.”

One of the first jobs for Sir Alan’s successor as chairman, Edward Faulks, a former justice minister who sits as an independent peer, will be to defend its guidance on writing about Muslims. It has already been branded a threat to free speech by newspapers such as The Telegraph. The regulator has said the claims are “groundless”.

Addressing concerns raised in The Spectator that Ipso had been “correcting” opinion pieces, the regulator responded that “comment pieces, while free to be partisan, challenge, shock and offend, nonetheless must be accurate”.

Some critics have argued that Ipso, which can force members in breach of its editors’ code to publish a correction, or pay a fine if there has been a serious and systemic breach, is too close to the newspapers it seeks to regulate. The organisation is paid for by its members, which also foot the £150,000-a-year salary for the part-time role of the chair.

“We never have [issued a fine] because we have not had a newspaper that had a systemic failure,” Sir Alan said, adding that one outlet had been “close to it” because of “a stream of misleading statistics about immigration”. The newspaper, whose name he would not disclose, improved after Ipso “spoke to them about it”.

Mr Barnett questioned the regulator’s definition of a systemic problem.

“The serial untruths that were published by British press during the [2016] referendum was a perfect case study of what should have led to an investigation,” he said, referring to front-page stories such as The Sun’s “Queen Backs Brexit” that prompted the monarch to file her first complaint with Ipso.

Sir Alan acknowledged that a creeping disregard of facts in public debate risked spreading to newspapers, because their “absolutely legitimate” political bias was making it “difficult” for journalists and editors to call out lies.

“The nature of the press is such that they will be biased towards the party they favour and won’t be critical,” he said. “That is the price you pay for a free press.”

> https://www.ft.com/content/60d5bea6-1ff9-11ea-b8a1-584213ee7b2b

How junk food shapes the developing teenage brain

Obesity is increasing worldwide, especially among children and teenagers. More than 150 million children in the world are obese in 2019. These children have increased risk of heart disease, cancers and Type 2 diabetes.

Teenagers with obesity are likely to remain obese as adults. If these trends continue, 70 per cent of adults aged 40 years could be either overweight or obese by 2040.

I am a neuroscientist and my research investigates how diet changes the brain. I want to understand how unhealthy diets impact the developing brain, and also why young people today are so prone to developing obesity.

Adolescents are the greatest consumers of calorie-rich “junk” foods. During puberty, many children have an insatiable appetite as rapid growth requires lots of energy. Heightened metabolism and growth spurts can protect against obesity, to an extent. But excessively eating high-calorie junk foods and increasingly sedentary lifestyles can outweigh any metabolic protection.

The teenage brain is vulnerable

The teenage years are a key window of brain development. Adolescence coincides with a new-found social autonomy and the independence to make personal food choices.

During adolescence, connections between different brain regions and individual neurons are also being refined and strengthened. The adolescent brain is malleable because of increased levels of “neuroplasticity.”

This means the brain is highly receptive to being shaped and rewired by the environment — including diet. In turn, these changes can become hardwired when development is complete. So the adolescent brain is vulnerable to diet-induced changes, but these changes may endure through life.

Resisting junk food is tough

Neuroscientists use functional brain imaging to examine how the brain responds to specific events. Brain scans show that the prefrontal cortex — a key brain area for behavioural control and decision-making — doesn’t fully mature until the early 20s.

The prefrontal cortex controls and overrides urges triggered by events in the environment. Resisting eating a whole bag of candy or buying cheap junk foods can be particularly difficult for teenagers.

Voracious drive for rewards

In contrast to the immature prefrontal cortex, the brain’s reward system — the mesocorticolimbic dopamine system — is fully developed at a much earlier age.

Teenagers are particularly drawn to rewards, including sweet and calorie-dense foods. This is due to increased numbers of dopamine receptors in the adolescent brain, so the feeling of reward can be exaggerated. Frequent stimulation of the reward system results in enduring brain adaptations.

During adolescence, these changes may cause long-lasting shifts to the balance of brain chemicals.

Taken together, the teenage brain has a voracious drive for reward, diminished behavioural control and a susceptibility to be shaped by experience.

This manifests as a reduced ability to resist rewarding behaviours. So it’s not surprising that teenagers prefer to eat foods that are easy to obtain and immediately gratifying, even in the face of health advice to the contrary. But what are the enduring brain consequences?

Transcranial magnetic stimulation

Functional imaging studies show brain activity during tasks or viewing images of foods. Brain circuits that process food rewards are more active in adolescents with obesity compared to those considered normal weight.

Interestingly, lower activity is seen in regions of the prefrontal cortex. This shows that obesity can both heighten activation of the reward system and reduce brain activity in centres that can override the desire to eat.

Importantly, successful weight loss in adolescents restores levels of activity in the prefrontal cortex. This provides critical knowledge that the prefrontal cortex is a key area of the brain for controlling food intake, and that diet interventions increase activity in brain regions that exert self control.

Transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS), a way scientists can modify brain activity in the prefrontal cortex, can change inhibitory control of eating behaviour. Repeated TMS treatment could be a new therapy to restore cognitive control over eating, helping with long-term weight loss.

Exercise boosts brain plasticity

Excessively eating junk foods during adolescence could alter brain development, leading to lasting poor diet habits. But, like a muscle, the brain can be exercised to improve willpower.

Increased brain plasticity during adolescence means the young mind may be more receptive to lifestyle changes. Physical exercise boosts brain plasticity, helping to set in place new healthy habits. Identifying how the brain is changed by obesity provides opportunities to identify and intervene.

Functional brain imaging adds a new layer of information where clinicians can identify at-risk individuals and track brain changes during nutritional and lifestyle interventions.

Even more, TMS could be a new treatment approach to improve the re-calibration of the young brain to prevent enduring changes into adulthood.

The dark side of Alexa, Siri and other personal digital assistants

A few short years ago, personal digital assistants like Amazon’s Alexa, Apple’s Siri and Google Assistant sounded futuristic. Now, the future is here and this future is embedded, augmented and ubiquitous.

Digital assistants can be found in your office, home, car, hotel, phone and many other places. They have recently undergone massive transformation and run on operating systems that are fuelled by artificial intelligence (AI). They observe and collect data in real-time and have the capability to pull information from different sources such as smart devices and cloud services and put the information into context using AI to make sense of the situation. Although we have come a long way in the design and execution of these AI technologies, there is still more work to be done in this arena.

Much of the data that these digital assistants collect and use include personal, potentially identifiable and possibly sensitive information. Can Alexa or other personal digital assistants violate the privacy and security of our data? Possibly. There is a dark side to these virtual assistants.

My expertise is in data privacy, data governance and artificial intelligence. I was previously the Information and Privacy Officer with the Ontario Information and Privacy Commissioner’s Office.

Welcoming service

Imagine the following situation.

You are expecting some guests over. Your first guest arrives, and the outdoor security camera on your porch captures her walking up to your home. A polite voice welcomes her and unlocks the door. Once she is inside, your digital assistant explains to your guest that you are on your way and will be home soon. Through your home audio system, your digital assistant plays a selection of your guest’s favourite songs (from your Spotify friends network). Your digital assistant asks your guest if pumpkin spice is still her preferred coffee flavor or if she prefers other ones: french vanilla or Colombian. Soon after, your guest picks the coffee up from the digital coffee machine. Welcoming duties now complete, your digital assistant goes silent, and while waiting for you, your guest makes a few phone calls.

It is fascinating how a digital assistant can accurately and autonomously validate the identity of your guest, select her favourite songs, remember her preferred coffee flavor and manage the smart appliances in your house.

Hosting assistants

But does your digital assistant’s behaviour concern you?

Digital assistants can record our conversations, images and many other pieces of sensitive personal information, including location via our smartphones. They use our data for machine learning to improve themselves over time. Their software is developed and maintained by companies that are constantly thinking of new ways to collect and use our data.

Similar to other computer programs, the fundamental issue with these digital assistants is that they are vulnerable to technical and process failures. Digital assistants can also be hacked remotely, resulting in breaches of users’ privacy.

For example, an Oregon couple had to unplug their Alexa device, Amazon’s virtual assistant, as their private conversation was recorded and sent to one of their friends on their contact list.

In another incident, a German man accidentally received access to 1,700 Alexa audio files belonging to a complete stranger. The files revealed the person’s name, habits, jobs and other sensitive information.

Awareness privilege

Increasing popularity and availability of personal digital assistants has resulted in a widening of the so-called digital divide. The interesting paradox is that individuals who are aware of and sensitive to issues of privacy typically limit their usage of digital tools, while users who are less prone to protect their privacy extensively incorporate personal assistants into their digital lives.

Digital assistants either record data continuously or wait for a word to “wake up” or become activated. They do not limit data collection to the owners’ or authorised users’ information. Personal digital assistants may collect and process unapproved users’ personal data, like their voices.

In the digitally divided society, someone who is privacy savvy would not invite such equipment into their lives, while others may accept or rationalize such behaviours.

Respecting others’ privacy

In this age of ubiquitous devices and internet access, how should we deal with this paradox and respect each others’ space and choices?

Let’s revisit our imaginary personal digital assistant. It had to process different sources of information about the guest to operate as a smart host. Did the digital assistant use all that data to feed the algorithms or to invade the guest’s privacy? Depending on who you ask, the answer will be different.

Our etiquette-conscious upbringing tells us that we have a social and ethical responsibility to respect each others’ values when it comes to digital technologies. But the implications and growth of these technologies have been so significant and rapid that we have not yet been able to redefine our social norms and expectations.

For instance, as a host, do we have an ethical obligation towards our guests to inform them about our personal digital assistant? Is it polite for a home visitor to ask the host to turn their digital tools off? Should we inquire about the presence of smart tools and digital assistants before arriving at a friend’s house, a hotel or an AirBnB?

The answer to these questions is yes, according to etiquette expert Daniel Post Senning. Senning explains that etiquette is most powerful when you use it as a tool for self-assessment. Would we like to be informed that we are being recorded in a business meeting or a private gathering? Or how do we prefer to be asked to turn digital tools off if we are hosting? The etiquette rules are universal: to be considerate, honest and kind.

Inform your colleagues and guests that your digital devices may record their voices, images or other information. Ask your host to turn off digital assistants if you are not comfortable having them around. But be considerate. You may not want to ask your host to turn off digital assistants in the presence of somebody who is elderly or has a disability and depends on those tools.

Maintaining our collective privacy

Privacy is a social norm that we have to work together to maintain. First of all, we need to educate ourselves on cybersafety and potential risks of digital technologies. We should also be proactive in keeping current with the latest news on technologies and take actions when required.

The government’s role in this complex paradigm is critical. We need stronger privacy laws to address privacy issues associated with personal digital assistants. Right now, companies such as Amazon, Google and Apple are making the rules.

Other jurisdictions have developed and implemented regulations such as Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) which provides oversight on data collection for a wide variety of household devices. Canada should follow suit.

#environment

Mum's habits determine their children’s weight

Overweight and obesity often continue for generations in families. The links can be genetic but are also related to family relationships and lifestyle habits.

“Parents have a major impact on their children’s health and lifestyle. Behaviours that lead to obesity are easily transferred from parent to child,” says Marit Næss, who is the laboratory manager at the HUNT Research Centre and a doctoral candidate at NTNU.

But how do parents’ lifestyle changes affect their children’s body mass index (BMI)? Very differently it turns out, depending on whether it’s mother or father we are talking about.

Smaller children when mom loses weight

If the mother loses weight, it also affects the children.

“If mom drops two to six kilos, this can be linked to lower BMI in the kids,” says Kirsti Kvaløy, a researcher for HUNT, a longitudinal population health study in the former Nord-Trøndelag County of Norway.

The researchers found no significant link if the father loses weight, although it may be possible to read a tendency in the same direction.

The results largely correspond to similar studies in India and Finland, but the Finns found that the heaviest fathers also affected their daughters’ weight.

And the differences between the impacts of the father’s and mother’s lifestyle changes don’t end there.

You may also like: What’s the best way to help adolescents with obesity?

Less active, bigger children

“Mothers whose activity levels drop as their children are growing up are linked to children with higher BMI in adolescence,” says Næss.

If the mother does not stay physically active, the children become bigger across the board. The father’s choices had no significant impact here either. Less active fathers were not linked to higher BMI in their children.

According to Næss and Kvaløy, a lot suggests that moms are still the ones who are primarily responsible for planning activities in the home and perhaps for food choices too, although this study did not examine these speculations.

The mother-child link may often revolve around the mother wanting to lose weight. She makes small changes in diet and living habits that involve the whole family.

This notion is reinforced by the fact that the researchers found no corresponding relationship when parents lose a great deal of weight. This kind of weight change is often associated with illness or more extensive diets that do not involve others in the family.

Education plays a role too

The results are quite clear also when taking education level into account.

“On average, BMI is lower in families with higher education compared to ones with less education,” says Kvaløy.

But maternal weight reduction seems to wield greater influence on children’s BMI in families with higher education.

The study included 4424 children and parents who reported to the HUNT Study. Researchers followed changes in weight and physical activity over eleven years. One recent positive change is that people have generally become more physically active during their leisure time.

The results of the study were recently published in BMJ Open.

>https://partner.sciencenorway.no/child-health-forskningno-norway/mums-habits-determine-their-childrens-weight/1460972

‘I’m in another world’: writing without rules lets kids find their voice, just like professional authors

Ask a child why they write and you might receive a common response: the teacher told me to. Kids often lack confidence as writers and find it emotionally draining. The problem might be the classroom and its detachment from what writers do in the real world.

In some classrooms, students learn writing techniques and then apply them to a writing assignment. In others, students are given freedom over their writing with little teacher intervention.

Both approaches work to develop the writing craft, for similar reasons they work for authors. Authors learn discrete techniques from mentors to improve their skills and also write freely to experiment with style.

Teachers have a lot of influence over their classroom writing environment. But, while most identify as proficient readers, not many know what it’s like to be a writer.

Studies show teachers who identify as writers have a positive impact on their students’ writing. This is because they empathise with the experiences of writers at different stages of the writing process.

I conducted a study to help teachers understand what the creative writing experience is like for the students they teach. I interviewed eight children in Year 6 (10-11 years old) throughout a creative writing unit in class to find out.

Another world

When children write freely, they often feel as though they’re stepping into a different world. All kids I spoke to talked about this experience, with one student summarising it this way:

I feel like I’m in that place, another world, another zone. So I go into that place where I’m writing. I take my characters there, this large meadow or something. When I come back I’m like, where’s the meadow gone?

Most feel as though writing is a momentary “escape from your everyday thinking”. One student felt they don’t need to think very hard, because “my head is creating that and not me”.

This other-world experience is like watching a movie in vivid detail. Ideas “come out of the blue” and “pop in and out like a slideshow”. One student said ideas “flow into words like water, through your brain and onto your page”.

Published authors have a similar experience. In Writing Down the Bones, a book on the writing process, author Natalie Goldberg writes:

Of course, you can sit down and have something you want to say. But then you must let its expression be born in you and on the paper. Don’t hold too tight; allow it to come out how it needs to rather than trying to control it.

My thoughts have been caged up

All students I spoke to talked about the frustration of being pulled out of this other world. One student recounted moments when he thought his writing ideas did not meet the task set by his teacher:

My mind is stuck inside, like, a perfect writing thing. It’s like all those sections where all my thoughts have been […] have to be caged up.

For these children, it is impossible to be a student and a writer at the same time. Being a student means maintaining awareness of task requirements, grade-level standards and rules of spelling, punctuation and grammar.

Addressing school requirements made one student feel as though they “need to put away good ideas, and think of what would give me an A”. Another said doing this means they “can’t let my brain fly” and “can’t add my own words”.

This leads to “so many mental blanks because I’m afraid I’m gonna fail”.

Balancing the student and the writer

Most students I spoke to expressed being frustrated when free writing time gets interrupted.

A progressive view of teaching suggests teachers allow children to explore their writing world, encouraging them to make decisions at each stage of the writing process. This is called the process approach to writing and it helps kids develop their writer identities.

A traditional view favours providing students with fundamental writing skills aimed at developing a finished product, known as the product approach. This develops kids’ knowledge of texts.

But are writing identities and knowledge mutually exclusive?

The students I spoke with understood the need to learn explicit knowledge such as text structures, vocabulary and literary techniques to grow as writers. But they did not think of these things when writing freely.

Authors think more about these things, but not necessarily in the first instance. Ernest Hemingway is famously known to have said: “the first draft of anything is shit”. And Anne Lamott advised:

Perfectionism is a mean, frozen form of idealism, while messes are the artist’s true friend. What people somehow (inadvertently, I’m sure) forgot to mention when we were children was that we need to make messes in order to find out who we are and why we are here — and, by extension, what we’re supposed to be writing.

We can teach kids to think more like authors.

The solution may be in striking a balance between kids as students and kids as writers. Kids, like published authors, need space to write freely first without distraction from teachers and expectations. This helps them generate ideas, motivating them to find a purpose for their writing.

Then they become students. They write another draft, but this time they seek advice from teachers to use literary techniques, like authors and their mentors.

Five ways parents can help their kids take risks – and why it’s good for them

Many parents and educators agree children need to take risks. In one US study, 82% of the 1,400 parents surveyed agreed the benefits of tree-climbing outweighed the potential risk of injury.

Parents cited benefits including perseverance, sharing, empowerment and self-awareness. One parent thought it allowed her son to learn what his whole body was capable of.

Taking risks and succeeding can motivate children to seek further achievements. Failing can lead to testing new ideas, and finding personal capabilities and limits. In this way, children can overcome fears and build new skills.

We mentored a group of educators in a research project trialling how to best introduce kids to risk.

Parents can use some of the lessons these educators learnt to help their own children take more risks and challenge themselves.

What was the research?

Adamstown Community Early Learning and Preschool (NSW) wanted to conduct research around risky play. “Risky play” is a term which has evolved from a trend to get more children out into nature to experience challenging environments.

Adamstown wanted to find out whether adult intervention to promote safe risk-taking would play a significant role in developing children’s risk competence.

Educators engaged children in conversations about risk, asked prompting questions and helped them assess potential consequences.

The Adamstown research built on 2007 Norwegian research that identified six categories of risky play:

- play at great heights, where children climb trees or high structures such as climbing frames in a playground
- play at high speed, such as riding a bike or skateboarding down a steep hill or swinging fast
- play with harmful tools, like knives or highly supervised power tools to create woodwork
- play with dangerous elements, such as fire or bodies of water
- rough and tumble play, where children wrestle or play with impact, such as slamming bodies into large crash mats
- play where you can “disappear”, where children can feel they’re not being watched by doing things like enclosing themselves in cubbies built of sheets or hiding in bushes (while actually being surreptitiously supervised by an adult).

The educators examined their practices in these areas to see how and whether they were engaging children in risky play, and how children were responding.

Here are five lessons educators learnt that parents can apply at home.

1. Have real conversations with children (don’t just give them instructions)

Adamstown educators found children were more likely to attempt risky play when adults talked to them about planning for, and taking, risks.

Parents can use similar strategies with their children, helping them question what they are doing and why.

Phrases like “be careful” don’t tell children what to do. Instead, say things like

“That knife is very sharp. It could cut you and you might bleed. Only hold it by the handle and cut down towards the chopping board.”

Equally, praise with meaning, using phrases like

“You cut the cake, thinking about how you held the knife and didn’t slip or cut yourself. Well done!”

It is important for children to provide insight into their own problem solving. You could ask their thoughts on what might happen if they used the knife incorrectly or what safety measures they could put in place. This will help develop their risk competence.

2. Introduce risk gradually

Allow your children to try new things by slowly increasing the levels of difficulty.

At Adamstown, a process of introducing children to fire spanned nine months. First – on the advice of an early childhood education consultant – they introduced tea-light candles at meal times. This then moved to a small fire bowl in the sandpit, before children were introduced to a large open fire pit.

The fire pit is now used for many reasons. In winter, children sit around it in a circle and tell stories. Educators show them cooking skills, referencing the ways Australia’s First Nations People cook. The fire pit is also used to create charcoal for art.

Children have been made aware of the safe distance they need to keep and about the potential hazard of smoke inhalation.

During the research process, as children were introduced to more risk, there were no more injuries than before and all were minor. There were also no serious incidents such as broken bones, or events requiring immediate medical attention.

3. Assume all your children are competent – regardless of gender

Adamstown educators were surprised to discover that, although they weren’t excluding girls from risky play, the data indicated they challenged and invited participation more often with boys.

Parents may hold intrinsic biases they are not necessarily aware of. So, check yourself to see if you are:

- allowing boys to be more independent
- assuming boys are more competent or girls don’t really want to take as many risks
- dressing girls in clothes that limit their freedom to climb
- saying different things to boys and girls.

4. Be close-by but allow children to have a sense of autonomy

Children don’t always want to be supervised. Search for opportunities to allow them to feel as if they are alone, or out of sight. Be close-by, but allow them to think they are playing independently.

5. Discuss risk at times that don’t directly involve it

When walking together to the shops, talk about the risks involved in crossing roads, such as fast cars. You can note safe and unsafe situations as well as encouraging your child to notice these as you go about your daily life. This can also be done in relaxed situations like in the bath.

This way, when the time comes for your child to learn a new skill like crossing the road alone, they have already had some opportunity to consider measures to keep themselves safe in a non-stressful situation.

If your child has a fall or other mishap, when everything is settled again, ask your child about why it happened and how they might suggest it could be prevented next time.

An 8-year-old made US$22 million on YouTube, but most social media influencers are like unpaid interns

Like any eight-year-old, Ryan Kaji loves to play with toys. But when Ryan plays, millions watch.

Since the age of four he’s been the star of his own YouTube channel. All up his videos have gained more than 35 billion views. This helped make him YouTube’s highest-earning star in 2018, earning US$22 million, according to Forbes.

That’s more than actor Jake Paul (US$21 million), the trick-shot sports crew Dude Perfect (US$20 million), Minecraft player DanTDM (US$18.5 million) and make-up artist Jeffree Star (US$18 million).

Ryan is apparently living the dream of many kids – and adults.

According to a Harris Poll/LEGO survey covering the United States, Britain and China, 29% of children aged eight to 12 want to be a “YouTuber”. That’s three times as many as those who want to be astronauts.

Other polls suggest an even higher percentage of teenagers aspire to fame and fortune via YouTube or another social media platform. An eye-grabbing news report out this month suggested a whopping 54% of Americans aged 13 to 38 would become an “influencer” given the chance, with 12% already considering themselves influencers.

These numbers might be questioned, but given the apparent fortunes to be made by goofing around, playing games, applying makeup or unboxing toys, it’s no surprise so many are besotted with the influencer dream.

But there’s a stark divide between the glossy façade and reality of this new industry. The fact is most wannabe influencers have as much a chance of walking on the Moon as they do of emulating Ryan Kaji. They’ll be lucky, in fact, to earn as much as someone working at fast-food joint.

Let’s take a look at the numbers.

Marketing’s new foot soldiers

Marketing literature defines an influencer as someone with a large following on a social media platform, primarily YouTube and Instagram.

As people consume less traditional media and spend more time on social platforms, advertisers are increasingly using these influencers to spruik their products. A mega-influencer like Kylie Jenner, with 139 million followers on Instagram, can reportedly charge more than US$1 milllion for a single promotional post.

In 2017 an estimated US$570 million was spent globally on influencer marketing. In 2020, according to the World Advertising Research Center, it will be between US$5 billion and US$10 billion.

A key driver of this booming market is that about half of consumers use ad-blocking technology, which limits the reach of traditional advertising.

Keeping up appearances

One company to really embrace the social influencer trend is cosmetics giant Estee Lauder. In August the company’s chief executive, Fabrizio Freda, said 75% of its advertising budget was now going to social media influencers, “and they’re revealing to be highly productive”.

But while part of the company’s budget is going to “micro-influencers” – those with fewer than 10,000 followers – it’s likely the bulk is still wrapped up in deals with big-name “spokesmodels” and “brand ambassadors” like Karlie Kloss, Grace Elizabeth, Fei Fei Sun, Anok Yai and Kendall Jenner.

In a sense these celebrity deals aren’t much different to what the cosmetics company has done for decades with the likes of Gwyneth Paltrow, Elisabeth Hurley and Karen Graham.

Unpaid internships

So far most of the indications are that the new economics of influencer marketing are not too different to the old economics of marketing.

As in the acting, modelling or music industry, there’s a tiny A-list of superstar influencers making millions. Then there’s a somewhat larger B-list making a handsome living. But the vast bulk of influencers would be better off getting an ordinary job.

In 2018 a professor at the Offenburg University of Applied Sciences in Germany, Mathias Bärtl, published a statistical analysis of YouTube channels, uploads and views over a decade. His results showed that 85% of traffic went to just 3% of channels, and that 96.5% of YouTubers wouldn’t make enough money to reach the US federal poverty line (US$12,140, or about A$17,900).

Cornell University associate professor Brooke Erin Duffy suggests the lure of being a social influencer is part of a larger myth about the digital economy providing the opportunity for fulfilment, fame and fortune in doing what you love through developing your “personal brand”.

This is a particularly problematic illusion for young women, Duffy writes in her 2017 book (Not) Getting Paid to Do What You Love.

The tales of achievement, she says, should not obscure the reality. Rather than a satisfying career, what most have is an “unpaid internship”.