The report was released on Wednesday, January 20, 2010, at a forum in Washington, D.C., that featured the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, media executives, and child development experts.News Release
Report: Generation M2: Media in the Lives of 8- to 18-Year-Olds
Webcast of the event
Agenda (.pdf)
The Computer Gaming Inventory (CGI) was created in the Spring of 2006 at the University of North Texas as a result of discussions with Educational Computing doctoral students. There was a need to measure gaming use and attitudes, but there was little success finding an existing instrument in the literature. One recent attempt to measure computer game use and attitudes in a small sample of college students was the qualitative survey performed by Pew Internet and American Life Project (Jones, 2003). However, we desired a quantifiable questionnaire that would be easy to deliver online to college students and in the future to K-12 students. Therefore, we adapted elements from the Pew study, and then added questions based on our content expertise as well as demographic questions, to create our Computer Gaming Inventory (CGI).
The verison 1 instrument is a ninety-six question survey consisting of two sections: (1) computer gaming types and frequency (66 questions), and (2) attitudes towards computer and video games (30 questions). Although the CGI seems lengthy, we found that college students can take the survey in less than 15 minutes.
The initial pilot stuides showed that the instrument does indeed measure computer game attituides and the frequency of use. The AERA paper in the publications section has the initial details on the factor analysis.
Two full stuides at both UNT and TCU started in the fall of 2007 using the instrument with over 800 college students involved in both stuides. The initial TCU data is being presented at the 2008 AACE SITE conference. The UNT study will not be complete until the end of spring 2008, when its analysis will begin. The instrument is scheduled to be used in two Texas High Schools during 2008, which will be our first look at its use in a K-12 setting.
We are planning to complete the full analysis of version 1 by the end of 2008. When completed, this web page will be updated again to reflect the research discovered. If you want more information about the instrument, e-mail Dr. Jones (gjones@unt.edu).
Jones, J. G., Copeland, B., & Kalinowski, K. (2007). Pre-service teacher's attitudes towards computer games. In Proceedings of the American Educational Research Association. Chicago: American Educational Research Association.
Gratch, J., Maninger, R., Jones, J. G., & Kely, J. (2008, March). Video games in education: Do they have a future? Society for Information Technology and Teacher Education International Conference, Las Vegas, NV.
Earlier today we covered a mobile social network called Buzzd, which will be featured at the music festival Bonnaroo. In this post we outline 10 mobile social networks to keep your eye on. It's a developing field - and there are issues such as hardware compatibility to overcome - but we expect some of these services to make a big impact in the next year or two. Because, as Sarah Perez recently noted, with 975 million Mobile Web users expected by 2012, this is a potentially very lucrative market.
Of course our list is subjective, so please leave a comment if we missed one of your favorites. Also let us know your thoughts on social networks going mobile. We've written before that MySpace, Facebook, and MSN are the leading mobile services - and March stats indicated that MySpace is the leader. But surely there will be one or two unknowns who rise to capture this nascent market. So with that in mind, here we go...
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Dada is a mobile SNS that enables users to update personal blogs with pictures and video, download mobile entertainment, connect with and meet other local singles in real time and stay in contact with all their friends. Dada can be used on both PC and mobile and dada.net is its portal destination page. The 3 main products within the portal are Dada Dating, Dada Life (personal space and social networking), and Mobile Entertainment.
See: Dada Leads Mobile Social Networking Charge
Recommendations company Strands started out as a music discovery mobile social networking service. Its mobile features include a mobile Web portal, a personalized radio station, and a personal version of partyStrands (its service for party organizers, bars, clubs and DJs). Strands' mobile social networking service basically enables its users to find music and network with their friends via their mobile phones.
See: MyStrands Revamp - More Integration Between Mobile, Online and Physical Worlds
The itsmy.com mobile community wants to be MySpace for your phone. By connecting people and content in both the U.S. and E.U., itsmy has already gathered up more than 1 million registered mobile users with 4 million mobile home and content pages and continues to grow. Recently, itsmy announced they've now launched 100,000 personal mobile TV channels - one for each of its top 10% of content uploading customers.
See: itsmy Launches Personal Mobile Broadcasting
In April mobile social networking company Frengo released a toolkit for development of Open Social and Facebook applications on mobile phones. The Open Social Mobile Toolkit supports MySpace, Hi5, Bebo, and Facebook and allows developers of applications on those networks to extend them to the mobile phone. In addition to extending support for the Open Social and Facebook platforms to the mobile phone, the Frengo toolkit allows developers to monetize applications via the company's social advertising platform or via premium SMS.
See: Frengo Launches Mobile Open Social Toolkit
In July 2007 Nokia acquired the media sharing service Twango. Twango combines online storage with social networking, allowing users to organize and share photos, videos and other personal media. ReadWriteWeb wrote an in-depth profile of Twango in January '07, in a post entitled Twango Tackles Lucrative Media Sharing Market. Nokia planned to use Twango to enable users to share multimedia content through their desktop and mobile devices.
See: Nokia Acquires Media Sharing Startup Twango
Shozu is not strictly speaking a social network, but it enables you to share your videos and photos via your mobile phone - e.g. from your Flickr account, YouTube, Facebook. RWW reader Honor said in a past post that "it allows me to send the pictures I take with my n80 to Facebook and share with my friends, or email people pictures while I am at an event, shopping for stuff for them etc..."
The final 4 services are from Corvida's post on ReadWriteWeb entitled: The Future of Mobile Social Networks: 4 Promising Services
We recently profiled Brightkite as a winning mobile social network in the arena. Brightkite allows for your network of friends to keep track of where others may be at any moment. Since no GPS is required, users can send updates to the service via text messaging or email, to update their profile with location updates, pictures, and notes. With a host of privacy settings to prevent any form of stalking, Twitter users are increasingly using the network to update friends with status locations sent to their Twitter streams. Brightkite may be one of the best mobile networks to use, especially when going to a conference or big event in town.
Taking a different approach from Brightkite, Zyb aims to be a mobile contact organizer for your social network. While we already have our address books for this, Zyb looks to provide a way for you to backup and synchronize your contacts online. You can store your phone numbers, calendar and texts, manage this information online, and transfer your information to a new phone if there ever comes a time. You can also use Zyb to find out who has you in their phones as a contact and even discover friends of friends. Think of Zyb as an expansion on your Facebook pictures and contacts only more mobile.
Groovr is your mobile network's night out on the town. Post a picture, message, or video to your Groovr profile and have it sent to all your friends too. Instant chat? Groovr's got you covered. However, some of these features are redundant. Can't we already send messages, pictures, and videos to our friends without a third party? The only feature we found remotely unique is a city's Explore page on Groovr. All of your posted items are sent to the corresponding cities Explore page. Here's a peek at San Francisco on Groovr:
Developed by MoBlast Technologies, Fon11 could become the hottest mobile social network for the iPhone. With a nice UI (of course) and great features like the ability to see just how far away your contacts are from you, availability status messages, visibility settings and more, it seems Fon11 has a lot more to offer than the rest of the pack. Fon11 has already been ported to Android and Nokia Web Runtime with development plans in the works for J2ME and Windows Mobile platforms. While GPS remains an issue through no fault of Moblast, we've been assured that there are many strategies in development to find a resolution.
We hope you enjoyed this look at 10 interesting and exciting mobile social networks. The information in this post came from a variety of past ReadWriteWeb articles and we will continue to explore this promising market. In the meantime, please list your favorite mobile social networks in the comments below.
