Research

So the teams have been decided and the question has been set. It is now up to use to complete a full intensive research process and begin to build up our presentation.

In my team there is:
Carl Robertson (Me of course)
Mattew Bradley
Tony Marsh
Billy Hudson

The question we have been given to produce a research presentation on is "How can we create a safe environment for children online without discouraging participation?"

This was my second choice of which question I would have liked to have been given, so I farey pleased. I did a research presentation last year about how to get children of this target age range that we have been given (8-12 year olds) interacting with a website of this nature. I feel like I have some first hand knowledge and understand of the task at hand then.
We have come together as a group and decided on a strategical plan of how we are going to approach this task.

We first think it would be helpful if we set the questions out into sections, so first maybe do research on child safety online. Maybe find out the laws and regulations on what is appropriate and what is not. Then develop some questionnaires for the likes of teachers and parents to see what their views are of the content that is available to their children online, what they think of the websites they go on and if they feel they are at risk.

Once we have got a substantual amount of information through primary and secondary information we can then tackle the participation part of the question and then hopefully bring it all together.

Me and Tony both know teachers so we feel it may be appropriate not only to hand out the questionnaires to them and their staff, but also have an interview with them so we can get some more in depth answers and insight to their thoughts and feelings on the situation.

We have started building a questionnaire together, which currently is in the process of being finished. Once these are complete then we will start handing them out. Billy is currently working on some new and suitable questions that will help us gain a better understanding of what we want to know.

It may be useful in our questionnaires to ask what the parents/teachers what kind of things they go on when they are on the internet, and what sort of things they feel that their children should be going on. This way we can get a sense of how they feel about the whole participation side of the question.

Also with the childrens questionnaire we will have to make it engaging and fun for them so that they actually are interested in filling it out, and giving us appropriate answers. This will have to be done through useful thought of the question structure and visual design.

Matt has come up with an the idea to research into how children are being engaged online, especially on social networks. He wants to get an understanding of how children may be at risk from older people approaching them online by using false indentities. He found this useful link to help us out.http://www.kidpower.org/resources/articles/internet-safety.html

Hypothesis
We have come up with a hypothesis to base all of our research upon. We believe that as children reach the beginning stages of adolescence they want to or begin to explore ways in publishing themselves to a wide audience through the means of the internet. They want to be known as an individual and they want other people to see them for who they are. They want to have this online presence were by their thoughts, feelings, views, interests, hobbies, likes and dislikes, age, gender, location etc are accessible.