Tuesday 24 January 2012

Presentation

19/01/12
Today was the day of the presentation, and oh my word I have never been so nervous about presenting a pierce of work in my life! The reason is unknown to me but I'm glad it's over and done with now. All the work we had done seemed to be worth it and over all it went well. It could have gone better but at the same time it could have gone a lot worse so I'm pleased with what we presented.

Our team was meant to present at 3:45pm but due to technical difficulties and the fact other people were running over we didn't end up presenting until 4:40pm. In a way this was great because it gave us more time to run over our presentation but at the same time it was a burden because I just wanted to get it over and done with. The waiting is most possibley the worst part.

We ran over our presentation again and with it still lasting not within the 15 time frame it was obvious that either some stuff would have to be cut out during the presentation or we were going to have to rush some of our content. When we were told that people were being stopped at 15 minutes or were just given an extra couple of minutes to wrap up their presenation this worried us, especially me. It got me panicing about the out come because I really just wanted it to go well, but now i felt more under pressure.

Once we finally got called in to do our presentation my nervous subsided for a brief moment as we chatted with the panel. Then we started and I could feel my tongue drying up and my words clogging in my throat. There were a few stumbles upon my behalf but i feel the rest of the team did quite well. Once the last words were mentioned I felt a weight lift off of my shoulders. The panel seemed to think we brought up some good points and had a good conclusion so this could be a sign that it went well. We'll just have to wait until the feed back is sent out.

I think I need to try and become more confident in my formal presenting, and this can only come with experience and practice.  

Presentation Preperation

13/01/12
Today was the day myself and my group came together to start putting the pieces of our project together and start producing our presentation. With the deadline only being just under a week away it was time for us to meet up as much as possible to produce a professional and satisfying presentation, and to get as much practice in as possible. We have a plan of action that we are going to follow through with, meeting up everyday until the day of the presentation to produce as much work as possible. Even with other priorities such as work being a factor we have all planned to make time available to get this presentation sorted as it's such an important assignment to get completed.

Today we sieved through all the information each of us has found out individually and all the research we have carried out as team to find ihe important information that will be featured in our presentation. This took some time doing but once it was done it was easy for us to piece the structure and layout of our presentation. We decided what parts each of us would be undertaking and what our roles would be so there would be no confusion later on or closer to the time of the deadline. Individually we wrote out our scripts for our assigned parts, and then looked over each others parts to see if there were any changes that could be made before we actually start practicing. We also came up with the bullet points and diagrams that would be shown as we were talking through our parts. Gathering all this content together would make it a lot more easier for us to build our presentation.

We have 5 days to go until the presentation so it has been decided we'll meet each day to ensure all our work is completed, leaving us some valuable time to get some practice in.

14/01/12
We came to the agreement to produce our presentation on www.prezi.com because Billy had some previous experience with the internet program, although it had been a while since he had last used it so he needed some time to get to grips with it again. We took it in turns to try prezi out so we'd all get an understanding of it but it soon became apparent that the program wasn't as straight forward as it seemed. Billy became the leader of creating the actual presentation on screen whilst the rest of us gave in-put to how it should look and work. We tried to make it relate to the actual CBBC website by incorporating a similar colour scheme. After working all day on fixing up our scripts and  then Billy continuing to get to grips with the technology of prezi, whilst the rest of us were having more of an in-put on how it should look. We decided to call it a day and Billy took it upon himself to collect all our work which we had already put into presentation form to make it easy to be added in and he was going to work on putting the presenation together at home.

16/01/12 
Today we met in the library to see the progression of the presentation as it stands so far and hopefully get it completed. Billy had done such a great job in starting putting the presentation together, and now it was up to us to go through what was done so far, make any amendments and complete the rest of the presentation. It didn't take long for us to get done but there are still some things that need tweaking about and changing. Once this is done we can finally start practicing. We all have access to the presentation so we can call easily view it at home and start thinking of things that could be changed, added or even start practicing our parts. Tomorrow we'll meet up to get it fully completed, leaving us all day Wednesday and a few hours Thursday to go over it.

18/01/12
We met up to practice our presentation today. It all went well but I get all nervous when it comes to formal presentations, I just know I'm going to mess up and forget what I'm talking about. Even though I have a script, the presentation itself and the knowledge of everything we've done I just know when it comes to presenting it tomorrow I'll stutter and draw a blank. I don't know what it is about formal presentations but they just get me in a state. We've practiced so we all know our parts and how it will go but I'm seriously dreading tomorrow. It can't come soon enough!

We did come across one problem. We timed ourselves and found out that our presentation was 26 minutes long! We only have a 15 minute time limit. We've tried to cut it down but there seems to be so much that we want to get across so it's been difficult. We want to obviously meet the time constraint but also put across everything we've found out and our answer to the question without compromising or missing out crucial information. This has also got me a bit worried because knowing we have too much content will probably make me rush my parts, which will probably result in me forgetting something. Oh well! we'll just have to wait and see. We'll get some practice in before the actual presentation and hopefully find some way of cutting it down.  

What Do Teenagers Need?

http://www.parents-and-kids.com/parenting/en/what-do-teenagers-need/

This is a little site I found which tries to help parents understand their children by offering tips, encouragement, knowledge, facts and statistics. It's a way for parents who maybe feel distant to their children or just want to relate to them more.

I thought it was quite an interesting site because it talks a lot about children growing up and moving into adolescence and the difficulties they face during this change. It has quite some good facts and opinions that not only support our hypothesis, but reflect our questionnaire results and other information we have come across. I'm feeling soon that we will be able draw up a conclusion to what we have found out and start coming up with some improvements for the CBBC site that promotes safety and encourages participation.

I think I will just give a brief over view of some of the things that are featured on the link above. It starts off by talking about how there are more difficulties and dilemmas that children face when becoming a teenager and growing up, especially these days with such things as the increased "virtual world" and globalization.

It moves on to talk in some depth about in this transition from child to young adult how they start to want an identity. They want to know who they are and develop an identity. It becomes about deciding what their values are and these are the things that eventually shape them into the person they want to be. In this shift from child to young adult they are looking for acceptance, a place where they feel valued as a person and the internet these days seems like a good place to find this acceptance.

In this day and age teenagers are ever growingly becoming more involved with the internet and it's popularity. They start to live in the virtual world, seeking knowledge, comfort and populating it with their presence. The internet is seen as a distraction for them. A way to unplug from reality for a little while. It becomes their source of knowledge, communication, entertainment etc.

It states that due to the rise of globalization that "some people even feel that the true tutors of our children are not school teachers or university professors or parents but online and offline filmmakers, advertising executives world wide".

If this is true then maybe there should be more websites out their like CBBC that not only try to appeal to a young persons interests but also tries to educate them.

I feel that some of the information I have come across on this site is highly reflective of some of the thoughts and opinions I have already mentioned throughout this blog. The internet is a place for young people to understand who they are and feel like they have some kind of meaning, even if it's through this so called virtual presence. They want to be accounted for, but also want to explore, develop and publicise themselves.

Children's Online Privacy Protection Rule

Searching online for more about safety online for children and protocalls websites abide by to keep them safe, I began to look more into the law side of things and how it affects available content on the internet. The link below leads to a site that goes on about the ethics of social media and has a direct link to the "Children's Online Privacy Protection Rule". There is a lot of content that is to be read and I could probably talk about it for way too long. So instead of doing this I am going to leave it just as a direct link that I can refer to and use whenever I nead to. It may come in use later on as our research progresses and could also back up some relevant information we have gathered.

http://business-ethics.com/2010/11/19/the-ethics-of-social-media-part-ii-playing-by-new-rules/

Internet Safety Statistics

I was doing some research online about online safety for young children and I came across a site displaying a couple of statistics all from a number of sources. One of these being a book published in 2010 called "Social Media and Young Adults" by Amanda Lenhart, Kristen Purcell, Aaron Smith, Kathryn Zickuhr. For all refrences click the link below and scroll to the bottom of the page.

http://www.netsmartz.org/safety/statistics

The statistics all reflect young children between the ages of 12 and 17, and their participation within the media culture. The site displays just how online issues are affecting children within society today.

I thought this site may be of some use as our taget audience includes 12 year olds so it may give us some insight to their doings on the internet. Also it may give us a greater understanding of the dangers that are a potential threat to children using the website and just how much they affect them.

All the stats below are refrenced from the netsmartz website:

Access
  • 93% of teens (12-17) go online.
  • Of the children (0-5) who use the internet, 80% use it at least once a week.
Cyberbullying
  • 1 in 3 teens (12-17) have experienced online harassment.
  • Girls are more likey to be victims of cyberbullying (38% girls vs 26% boys)
Online Gaming
  • 97% of teens (12-17) play computer, web, portable, or console games.
  • 27% of teens (12-17) play games with people they don't know online.
Predators
  • Predators seek youths, vulnerable to seduction, including those with histories of sexual or physical abuse, those who post sexually provocative photos/videos, and those who talk about sex  with unknown people online.
  • Boys who are gay or questioning their sexuality are particularly at risk. 25% of victims are boys and almost all of their offenders are male.
  • 1 in 25 youths received an online sexual solicitation where the solicitor tried to make offline contact.
  • In more than one-quarter (27%) of incidents, solicitors asked youths for sexual photographs of themselves.
Social Networking
  • 73% of teens (12-17) have profiles on social networking sites.
  • 47% of teens (12-17) have uploaded photos; 14% have posted videos.
Looking at these stats I have a greater understanding of why the CBBC site has such a high restrictions in maintaining the protection of their users. These stats surprised me slightly because I didn't think that the percentages would be so high. I knew that children had access to the internet but I never imagined that there would be such a high number, especially 93% accessing to it. It just shows how much the internet has become apart of our lives and how it influences us each and every day.

With so many users online, and with so many users being of a young age there is no doubt that the actions the BBC are taking on the CBBC website are fundamental. Although as I have stated before that some of the restrictions may be the beneficial factor to drawing people away from the site. So we need to find a good balance of keeping the site as safe as possible, but reducing the restrictions so that a wider range of things can be done on the site to keep users interested.

Also whilst looking at these stats it came to me that we have mainly been focusing our attention on the target age with have been given, but shouldn't gender also be something to look at? does the CBBC website cater to one sex more than the other? Which gender uses the site more? Which gender is more at risk being on the CBBC site?
I thought maybe these are some facts that we could potentially draw our attention to.

Questionnaires/Focus Groups

A couple of weeks before the Christmas holidays myself and my group were prepared to hand out questionnaires and conduct a focus group to gather some primary information to back up our material so far. We had first decided at the beginning of this process that we were going to carry out this part of the research through a school because Tony's sister is a teacher. As time went on it became more and more apparent that we wouldn't be able use her to help us out due to multiple reasons such as time constraints, busy schedules etc.
Lucky for us we had a back up plan if this was to fall through. I used to be a member and also a volunteer at a youth club called "The Loft Zone" which is held at The Foundry Church in Widnes. "The Loft Zone" is open to the public every Wednesday and Friday, 6pm - 11pm where about 30 - 50 people attend, varying in ages from the likes of 6 years old to 17 years old.

There are a numerous amount of volunteers and leaders who try to engage with the people attending through all different kinds of activities and fun things to do. I knew this would be a perfect place for us to conduct our research and hand out questionnaires.
After contacting the senior leader Lucas Dewhurst who I know personally, he gave us permission for us to go down on the days of our choosing to carry out our research and was able to supervise us as we carried it out. Myself and Matt were the only two who went to conduct our research method as we were the only ones with CRB checks which meant it was only right that we went. We attended "The Loft Zone" on both the 7th and 9th of December because we felt if we did it over the space of 2 days we could get the views of a variety of kids/young teenagers which would provide a wider range of results.
As a team we came up with a variety of questions to ask our target audience (8-12 year olds) and also decided amongst ourselves that we wouldn't just hand out textual based questionnairs for the kids/teens to fill in. We wanted our questionnaire to be a little more engaging. We wanted them to actually want to answer the questions and get involved, and also give us more of an open answer. We came up with the idea of having cut outs and diagrams which you had to colour in to show your answer. These cut outs and diagrams reflected answers to the questions we would be probing the target audience with. Below are the questions and a couple of diagrams just showing the style of the answers to our questionnaire.
Questions
  • How old are you?
  • What do you use the internet for? (a big sheet of paper provided for answers to be written down by all members of the groups)
  • Put these 11 websites in order of favouritism, putting your least favourite at the bottom and then ordered them one above the other with your favourite at the top)
sites to choose from are: CBBC, Facebook, Myspace, CITV, Blogger, Bebo, Habbo, Youtube, Miniclip, Cartoon Network, Nickelodeon.
  • How much time do you spend on the internet? (colour in activity)
  • Do you use the CBBC website?
  • If so, what do you like the most about the CBBC website? (answers on big sheet of paper) 
We tried to make the questionnaire as engaging as possible, making the participants feel comfortable and at ease with us. We wanted them to give us serious answers whilst making them we feel that it wasn't a serious process.

We found out that the older age range spend more time on the internet that the younger ones. They mainly go on the internet to get away from everything. The internet is seen as sort of a place were they can go and relax, escape for a few hours and just socialise/play games. It seems what we had already expected or had known from pervious research is coming true and being reflected in our questionnaire.

The kids where great in getting involved and helping us with our research, they just saw it as just another club activity and a way to chilling out with one another. It was a fun experience and helpful to our project.

Having the different groups of kids collate their answers for some of the questions on a huge sheet of paper really just acted as a huge poster for us to look over, making it easier for us to collect our results. And as kids were writing down their answers it was good to be able to talk to them more in depth about their answers and why they were writing them down. I found it easy to connect with the kids there mainly because I have helped out there before and know a few of the attendances.




Here we displayed 10 websites that we found to be popular with our target audience. The task was to arrange the 10 sites in order of their least favourite to their favourite. Each individual's answers were recorded in a tally as the representation of the order in which they put the sites in would give each individual site a score between 1 and 11. For example if they put Mininclip in seventh position then it would score 7 points. A point system would make it easier for us to tally up the results to produce a graph reflecting our findings.


The diagram above is just a representation of the answers to one of the questions we were asking. We designed the answers to be shown in circular diagram which was split into different segments were a different answer would be. The idea of this was for us to ask the question to our target audience and for them then to colour in their answer, giving us a clear indication and also making it a little more fun for them to be taking part. Whilst the participants were colouring in their answers we would be engaging with them a little more about the questions to try and get a more in depth answer to why they had chosen that option. 

Over the 2 nights we had 30 different children participate in our questionnaire/focus group, 5 representing each age from our given target audience. We made sure this was possible so that it was a completely fair test that we were carrying out, and so that the results could not be swayed to one side more than the other.

We also conducted the questionnaires/focus groups in groups of 5 which made it easier for us because we didn't have to print out 300 cut outs for the website question, and  it also made it easier for us to engage with the participants because they didn't feel under pressure or nervous seeing as they were with friends.

Once we had successfully carried out our test we then rendezvoused with the rest of the team to gather our results and looked to see what our findings were. We needed to find out if they matched our hyphothesis and if there was any patterns emerging.

Graphs Representing Our Results
Age 8

Blogger  2%
Facebook  4%
MySpace  5%

YouTube  7%

Habbo  11%

Bebo  12%

CITV  14%
Miniclip  14%

Cartoon N 15 %

Cbbc  15%







Age 9

Blogger 2%
Facebook 6%
MySpace 6%
Habbo 8%
You tube 9%
Cartoon N 12%
CBBC 12%
CITV 13%
Bebo 15%
Miniclip 16%


Age 10

Blogger 2%

Habbo  8%

CITV 9%
Cartoon N 10%
You tube 10%
CBBC 11%
MySpace 11%
Facebook  12%
Bebo 13%
Miniclip 15%




Age 11
Blogger 3%
Habbo 6%
CITV 6%
Cartoon N 9% 
You tube 10%
CBBC 11%
Facebook 13%
MySpace 14%
Miniclip 14%
Bebo 14%


Age 12

Blogger 3%
Habbo 4%
CITV 5%
Cartoon N 8%
CBBC 11%
You tube 12%
Bebo 13%
Miniclip 14%

MySpace 14%
Facebook 15%

Overall

Blogger 2%
Habbo 7%
CITV 9%
You tube 9%

Facebook 10%
Cartoon N 11%
MySpace 12%
CBBC 12%

Bebo 13%
Miniclip 14%

From the graphs we can see that the younger side of the spectrum were more swayed to going on websites that reflected the adverage day interests of a young person, which is watching telly and playing games. The top 5 sites for the 8 and 9 year olds were CBBC, Cartoon Network, MiniClip, CITV and Bebo. Bebo was a surprising one but when looking into what Bebo site actually is we could see how it was appealing. It seems like a more fun and younger version of Facebook/Myspace. Maybe Bebo is the stepping point from were people move onto other social networking sites? 

You can see as the age groups get older you can see a change in interests, or maybe not even interests but a way of growing up. The social networking sites become more dominant although the CBBC stays relatively around the same position throughout. This shows that it has some appeal still to young people as they grow older. However if people are straying to social networking sites were they have some sense of freedom to interact with their friends and other people without so many restrictions, then soon enough they will become tired of the CBBC site I would think.

Bebo is a popular choice with all ages as you can clearly see in the results. It may still be used by young people as they grow older because they still have an account and there it may have some aspects that they still enjoy. There is that thought though that there is a graduate change in maturity, the switch between Bebo to Facebook or even Myspace. This change in identity.

Miniclip stays a favourite because it appeals to an interest that most people enjoy, which is gaming. From other research and what we were shown in the Rebel Play presentation gaming is a huge hobby for all ages and genders. It's not about knowing who you are or telling people about your interests. It's basically a way of having fun and relaxing.

Blogger was an interesting choice for us to include because I think it's personally more of a older teenager/adult website. It's a way of reflection, personal diary broadcast on a wide scale yet it's really not that personal. Even though it had a low percentage it was interesting that to know that there were some people who knew about it and were using it.

Parents Questionnaire

Whilst we were at "The Loft Zone" we asked parents who were there to drop off/pick up their children if they could spare a few minutes to fill out our questionnaire. We also asked team leaders of the youth club who have children themselves if they would be willing to fill in a questionnaire for us. 30 parents kindly partcipated and our questions/results are as follows below.
(The answers to the open questions have been abbreviated and only show the most common answers) 

Questions and Answers

Question 1: Are you concerned with the content your children could be viewing online? If yes, why?

Yes = 22     No = 8

Why: Concerned about harmful and adult content. Parents' are also worried about their children talking to strangers on the Internet and potentially revealing personal details.

Question 2: How much restriction do you put in place on your home computer for your child? If you do, what precautions do you take?

None = 11     Very Little = 14     A lot = 5

Precautions taken: Blocking certain website, setting google search to "strict". Installing anti-spyware and other software.

Question 3: Do you check the websites your child visits for any inappropriate content that may be unsuitable?

No = 3    Sometimes = 16     All the time = 11

Question 4: Are you concerned with social networking sites? If yes, what concerns you the most?

Yes = 17     No = 13

Most concerning aspects: Talking to strangers, personal information being distributed and cyber bullying.

Question 5: What kind of things do you think attract your children to a website?

Answer: Socialising with friends and games.

Question 6: How often do your children use the CBBC website on a weekly basis?

Not at all = 0     Less than an hour = 3     1-2 hours = 9     2-5 hours = 18     5+ hours = 0

Question 7: Are you aware of the precautions the CBBC takes to protect your children online?

Yes = 4     No = 26

Question 8: If you do, do you feel the precautions they take are adequate for your child's safety?

Yes = 4     No = 0

Question 9: What features included on a website would make your feel that your child is safe online?

Answer: Moderation on websites. This was the most popular answer.


When talking to the parents about what the BBC offers in the terms of safety online the majority of them felt that the CBBC website's safety precautions were to an adequate standard. We felt it necessary to inform those who didn't know about what the BBC offers just so we could quickly get their opinion on whether or not they felt they were doing all they could do to keep their children safe.


Unfortunately with the research that we carried out about online participation, we came to the conclusion that the current state of the safety implace could be a beneficial factor to discouraging participation. Therefore there needs to be some common middle ground that allows the users to have more of an online presence/freedome but also follow the rules and regulations of the childrens online privacy act.

Wednesday 11 January 2012

Further Research: What Teenagers Want From The BBC

It's been some time since I last posted anything on this blog. This has been due to other commitments such as work and other various essays that have had to be completed, not to mention the Christmas period being a factor. My research that I have been collecting has just been building up and just sitting there waiting to be blogged about, and now that I finally have some time I can eventually get everything posted on here. So here comes a flood of posts!!!!

My last post was talking a lot about the CBBC website, about it's aestheical structure, what it offers young teenagers and why teenagers would be interested in participating in such a website. Not only that but I went into some depth about the safety of the site and how easy it was for someone like me who is not of the correct age restriction to create an account and being using the website.

After my analysis on the website I began to do a bit of research on what teenagers actually want in a website. It was here in my search on the internet that I stumbled upon this link

http://cardiff.academia.edu/CindyCarter/Talks/47018/What_do_Teenagers_Want_from_the_BBC

This is a PPF written by Cynthia Carter that refers to a research survey that was conducted by the Children, Adolescents and the Media Division in 2011 about what teenagers want from the BBC. It is about what they want from it as a whole, not specifically one area or domain such as the internet, radio or television. The survey was conducted throughout the UK with various different focus groups of 12-15 year olds completing questionnaires, brainstorming and pitch sheets.

The quantitive information that was gathered reflected the following results:

  • 12-15 year olds are a distinct audience group who preferred not to be grouped with "young adults" (16+) nor "children" (under 12's).
  • This age of audience group see themselves as citizens but feel that their peers and adults don't.
  • They are knowledgeable about current affairs locally/globally. They are interested in the news but feel it should be a mixture of seriousness and funniness.
  • Their primary source of information or news is the television. The internet isn't used as often for such things and is merely used for gaming and social activities. They think that there should be more younger presenters seen on the television (teens or people in their 20's) maybe so that they can relate to them more.
  • They have good ideas for improving web news provision, but need encouragement to upload their own content.
Yes this soruce is more focused on getting teenagers more envolved with the news but I think it has been a reliable source that has proven to have some relative information. It shows that we shouldn't stereotype teenagers and just automatically think we know what they want. Everyone has different interests and the BBC should try to incorporate as much versitility as possible to ensure that their intended audience have something to come back for.

Social networking and gaming is the primary function of the net for teenagers and I know that through my research into the CBBC website that there is gaming but maybe there should be more? Maybe the games that are featured on there are not pleasing to the audience of the website? Maybe the games are seen as childish, uninteresting, too educational? Maybe there should be more choice?

Maybe the site should be more socialable, a place of interactivity, a place were they can get involved with each other rather than just whats going on, on the BBC. It's all about instantanious connection with people. Getting yourself out there and participating with others in a virtual communtiy. They want to be acknowledged, not as some sort of alter-ego or computer generated name but as an individual, as themselves. It's about having an identity.