Wednesday, April 15, 2015

Stephanie Valentine's Digital Friendship Workshop in Eagle Lake

Stephanie Valentine, the creator of the social networking site, KidGab, co-founded the nonprofit Wired Youth, Inc. to aid in tackling the problems that arise for children in the digital age. Valentine, with help from fellow founders Dr. Tracy Hammond, the Director of the Sketch Recognition Lab, and Catherine Miller, aims to spread internet safety through programs operated by the nonprofit organization.  

In a digital age, social media sites (SNS) have become incredibly important to communication with and connection to one another. SNS increases a person's ability to stay in contact with friends and family on a worldwide scale. Yet while most sites require a user to be at least 13-years-old due to legal and safety reasons, there are people who have skirted around rules and regulations.

“Through my dissertation work, I created KidGab. It’s a social network and is sketch based. You can sketch pictures, which become videos, send text and pictures, and earn digital badges,” Valentine explained as she connected her social network site to Wired Youth. “But the Digital Friendship program is through Wired Youth, which is almost a year old, now.”


(Girl Scouts at the March 8 Digital Friendship workshop editing their KidGab avatars)

KidGab fills the void before children join social media. Just as people practice a sport before playing a game, KidGab is practice for social media. It is a safe, online environment for children to interact with others. It acts as the pre-social media site that also can be interacted with via sketch tools.

Pre-social media plays an import role in internet safety. With such easy access to a wide variety of SNS, the age at which people are exposed to online connections and social outlets has become younger and younger. Consumer Reports in 2012 found that 7.5 million Facebook profiles are owned by people who are under the age of 13. 5 million users were reported to be 10-years-old or younger.

“It’s scary,” Valentine stated. “Children under that age don’t understand the fact that there is no context on the internet. They don’t understand how to keep themselves safe in real life environments, let alone online.”

Through KidGab, children are provided a place to learn and make mistakes online. They are able to explore and understand what it means to be a digital person in a constantly expanding virtual world. A short video-description created by Valentine to introduce KidGab can be found here.


(Video outlining the features of KidGab)


Currently, KidGab is only available to a few groups of people, for the technology is still being finalized and tested. Among these groups are troops from the Girl Scouts of Central Texas.

During workshops with Girl Scout troops, Valentine and Wired Youth unite to present a program called “Digital Friendship.” Through Digital Friendship, children are educated on how to safely create and maintain a digital self. Valentine helps girls set up KidGab accounts and teaches how to have a safe online presence through creative and fun activities, such as making friendship bracelets, during these days.

Digital Friendship focuses on exploring the safe transition of real world friendships to a digital setting. For example, when and to whom can friends appropriately give out contact and personal information online?

Here, she took time to reiterate an example that is used during gatherings – an online predator asked someone’s best friend for a girl’s address so that he could send her roses. When he obtained the address, he abducted the girl.


“There are aspects of digital friendships that are different from 'real life' that kids need to be aware of,” she concluded. “It is not just your own information that you need to protect. That’s a big part of the program.”

Wired Youth educates people – parents and children alike – on how to prevent and respond to cyber threats. While many internet-savvy people today are used to handling themselves and content online, there is room for misunderstanding between the generations. Many parents do not know how to respond to cyber threat situations, by no fault of their own. They did not have the access to the technology and social platforms that are so readily available today.

“Because of this, children may not tell parents about things that happen,” Valentine commented somberly. “It’s so important that kids keep their parents involved with what’s going on and I think that all starts with a whole-family approach to online safety.” The latest workshop for Digital Friendship was held on March 8 in Eagle Lake, Texas. Valentine and fellow SRL member, Jung In Koh, ran the workshop.



(Stephanie Valentine and members of the Central Texas Girl Scouts at Digital Friendship)

“The girls were great,” Valentine smiled. “I had girls between 9 and 18-years-old. I didn’t know that 18-year-old girls would be interested in this, but they were interested and according to the girls' program evaluations, they loved it!”

14 girls attended the workshop and all of them were automatically 'friends' with one another once they created a profile on KidGab. While the workshop does have a demonstration of KidGab and the girls have a chance to customize their avatars, it is not the main focus of the day.

The workshop kicked off with an introductory game called ‘Great Wind Blows.’ Afterward, the girls took a personality test to learn more about themselves. Based on the results of the True Colors personality test, the girls broke into four groups and create a poster about what they like and dislike in a hypothetical friend.

“The test isn't a silly magazine-type quiz about what they like or what annoys them, the test classifies according to years of psychology research,” Valentine commented, “The results tend to be spot on. It’s amazing how well it works.”

An additional exercise in the workshop was presented at this point – making "Digital Friendship" bracelets.

In this exercise, the girls imagined that the room was split into four corners with a different color representing each corner. Valentine asked the girls a series of personality questions -- for example, how they respond to being in a large crowd. Each answer corresponds to each corner of the room, where an adult is standing with a cup of beads of a specific color. When a girl chooses an answer to a question, she takes a bead from the cup and adds it to her bracelet.
 

 (Girls making digital friendship bracelets)

“At the end, everyone has made a bracelet. But they are all different in terms of color frequency and ordering,” she explained. “It shows the girls that everyone is inherently different and that the approach to befriending them should reflect those differences.”

After making bracelets, the attendees played cyberthreat Bingo to better understand what is meant by cyberbullying and online predators. With more knowledge about the subject, the girls transitioned into performing skits about how to be safe and handle cyber threat situations – cyber bullying, cyber predators, sharing too much information, etc.

Another activity was introduced to the Digital Friendship program during the workshop at Eagle Lake. The girls explored ‘choose your own adventure’ stories about cyber threats like cyberbullying, online predators, and talking to strangers online.

“I had to communicate that this activity was about exploring choices, it wasn't about right or wrong. The girls get to see what happens when they make choice X verses Y,” Valentine explained. “The idea is that they can learn from the characters' mistakes, and hopefully not make the mistakes themselves.”

While the majority of the workshop is upbeat and positive, the ‘choose your own adventure’ stories brought reality into the teachings. The tone of seriousness was solidified when Valentine revealed to the girls that the stories were fictional adaptations of real life situations.

“In the last 10 minutes of the workshop, I sat down with the girls and told them about my own experiences with cyberbullying and how it’s affected my life,” Valentine concluded. “I think it ended up being a really powerful experience for them and a perfect capstone for the program.”


“I couldn’t have done this without the support of Emily Magnotta from the Girl Scouts of Central Texas,” Valentine commented. She also wanted to thank the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at Texas A&M University for donating drawstring bags for the workshops.