91Èȱ¬ Trust's good news for C91Èȱ¬
On Friday last week the 91Èȱ¬ Trust signed off the 91Èȱ¬ Executive plans to a £1m increase in the amount of money we spend on Children's websites at bbc.co.uk. This comes as a fantastic endorsement of the important role the 91Èȱ¬ has to play in empowering children as they become more experienced online and supporting them to develop the skills required to operate safely in the digital world.
Take a quick glance at (published a couple of weeks ago) and you realise how timely this is. Children are spending more and more of their allotted screen-time online, both supervised and unsupervised. Fortunately C91Èȱ¬ is amongst their most popular children's websites already, but in recent years we've seen massive growth in the 'other' sites they're visiting. And the reality is not all of these are appropriate for younger children.
As usual, it generated a number of newspaper headlines about how young children are being let loose in the wild west of the world wide web but as ever, the knee-jerk reaction seems to be 'ban the internet' altogether.
Apart from being completely impractical, it overlooks the huge positive benefits that children can gain using online resources. And in a society where we adults increasingly rely on being connected in our working and social lives, it's not only hypocritical but also wreckless to deny children access to the support and tools they need to become the "netizens" of tomorrow.
To use a real world analogy, you wouldn't refuse to take your child to the swimming pool until they're 16 and then expect them to sink or swim on their first poolside holiday alone.
At C91Èȱ¬ we believe the solution has to be more practical. Our ambition is to create a safe online environment where children can have fun, laugh out loud, satisfy their curiosity for the world, be creative and at the same time develop all those essential internet skills.
I would argue this is more important now than ever before. In a world where TV viewing is becoming ever-more fragmented, particularly in the Multichannel Kids' TV space, it's inevitable that children are gravitating to the connectivity the web offers to have new types of shared experience with their friends.
As Ofcom research shows, growing numbers of 10s, 11s and 12s are being drawn to social networking sites - which, by their own terms and conditions are often not designed for this younger audience.
Under 13s are increasingly discovering these through their siblings, the almost-daily coverage in the media and probably parents like us who have embraced the new social opportunities these sites have to offer.
Rather than pretend this phenomenon doesn't touch children, we believe they should be offered alternative ways to connect and interact with their friends online that are designed around their needs and don't jeopardise their safety.
Everything we do is built around the 3Cs: Safer content, contact and conduct all built by design rather than leaving it to chance.
Content should be age appropriate, but also reflect the needs of children growing up in Britain today. is dominated by non-children's sites and US "kids'" brands. The C91Èȱ¬ website stands out as a place for British children to hear and see other young people like them and share in our unique British entertainment brands.
Preventing inappropriate contact is also a fundamental principle of our online service. All free text is pre-moderated - personally checked by human beings before it get's posted - so children don't inadvertently reveal personal details that allow them to be identified. We insist they use nick-names in profiles rather than email addresses (as these invariably read first name dot surname). We also pre-check all UGC (user generated content) that goes on our site.
However, these human checks and balances can interrupt real-time activities so we're also looking closely at more immediate methods of non-verbal communication that allow children to interact instantaneously without divulging sensitive personal information.
The last C is for responsible conduct. Whilst adults usually cite predation or strong content as their biggest issue for young internet surfers, children tend to be more concerned by cyber-bullying online or via mobile phones. So at C91Èȱ¬ we also try to encourage respect and a sense of decent civil behaviour on our message boards and other services like Bugbears.
I think it's obvious we strive to be the gold-standard in safety for children. But this can be a double edged sword. The last thing we want is for parents to think their children are safe at C91Èȱ¬ and absolve themselves from paying an active interest in what their little darlings are up to online. They need to engage in how the web is being used at home and provide support, explanation and house rules about what is acceptable.
C91Èȱ¬ is currently one of the most loved online brands amongst 6-12s in the UK. In the months ahead we want to build on that reputation, by maintaining our safe credentials but also working hard to ensure we remain relevant to world in which they inhabit.
The work we've just kicked off at C91Èȱ¬ is all about giving children the opportunity to find and connect with the brands and activities they love and also have fun online. We want to carry through all those great values that children already associate with our C91Èȱ¬ TV programming to provide great online entertainment with a British twist.
And we want to combine that with the best functionality. Great technology works at its best when it makes our lives easier and simpler and C91Èȱ¬ aims to take the pain out of the web for this younger audience who have some very particular needs. Young children who are still coming to terms with the letters in the alphabet can be completely flummoxed by the QWERTY keyboard. Some struggle with scrolling, others are only attracted to bright visual imagery. We need to understand all these needs and build that into our navigation and designs.
We're also working on new ways for them to discover content and navigate around it, and share both our "stuff" and their own in safe ways. We want to help them extend their playground friendships into the virtual spaces so they can have the equivalent of the adult water cooler moment and at the same time inspire them to be more active in the real world.
It's a fallacy that busy online children are automatically more sedentary. What we've discovered is that actively engaged and creatively inspired web users tend to replicate those behaviours offline too. So they deserve environments and services that stimulate and challenge them, provide moments of laughter and opportunities to escape or chill-out, and crucially, destinations that cater to what it means to be a child growing up in Britain today.
In short our ambition in the year ahead is to put the younger audience first and create an online service that most adults would be envious of.
Marc Goodchild is Head of Interactive and On Demand, 91Èȱ¬ Childrens.
Comment number 1.
At 26th Oct 2009, pasangikchin wrote:My emtymology is fine, thanks! Perhaps your ability to recognise hypocrisy is lacking though. After all, a party with known and stated prejudices demanding impartial treatment.
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Comment number 2.
At 26th Oct 2009, TV Licence fee payer against 91Èȱ¬ censorship wrote:"To use a real world analogy, you wouldn't refuse to take your child to the swimming pool until they're 16 and then expect them to sink or swim on their first poolside holiday alone."
But nor would one strap them in the drivers seat of a motor car, often totally unsupervised, and allow them to drive themselves were ever they wish! There is nothing to stop children from learning valuable internet skills (including cyber-security) on school Intranets, or even IP-secure 'inter-school Intranets', if you see what I mean?
If and when parents allow their children to use the internet then it is the responsibility of the parents to supervise, the 91Èȱ¬ should not be using the TVL to fund ways so that the child's parent can offload that responcibility onto the 91Èȱ¬, to act in loco-parentus.
"The work we've just kicked off at C91Èȱ¬ is all about giving children the opportunity to find and connect with the brands and activities they love and also have fun online. We want to carry through all those great values that children already associate with our C91Èȱ¬ TV programming to provide great online entertainment with a British twist."
Oh right, so this is actually about 'selling' the C91Èȱ¬ brand, more than some act of child welfare by the 91Èȱ¬, stepping in to protect kids when parents won't...
"Young children who are still coming to terms with the letters in the alphabet can be completely flummoxed by the QWERTY keyboard. Some struggle with scrolling, others are only attracted to bright visual imagery. We need to understand all these needs and build that into our navigation and designs."
Shouldn't the 91Èȱ¬ be doing that anyway, accessibility issues afflict all age groups.
"We're also working on new ways for them to discover content and navigate around it,
Why reinvent the wheel, the web has had perfectly good (and child frendly) navigation since HTML 2.0.1 (in it's current HTML4.0.1 and CSS2 form even more so), ever since pictures were able to be used within URLs instead of the usual text, or is the above just "meerkating speek" for 'We are developing ways to make kids want to visit our website'?...
" and share both our "stuff" and their own in safe ways. We want to help them extend their playground friendships into the virtual spaces so they can have the equivalent of the adult water cooler moment and at the same time inspire them to be more active in the real world."
But should kids be encouraged to make 'virtual friends', should they not be developing those real playground friendships, and safe real world friends outside of the playground, social interaction online (even in, and especially so in, a highly moderated environment) is quite different to 'real life', and with schools being forced to become ever more politically correct kids are not learning all those vital life skills that allow them to get on in the ruff and tumble real world.
I'm not sure what the answers are but I do know that the 91Èȱ¬ should not be encouraging more of the same.
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Comment number 3.
At 31st Oct 2009, MarcG wrote:Thanks to 'Boilerplated' for the in depth post. Although I'm surprised by the air of cynicism in the response, I think we fundamentally agree on few things. It's not the 91Èȱ¬'s place to regulate what our children can or cannot do in today's society. It should be a shared responsibility betweeen parents, schools and those who provide those services for young people to make sure youngsters are properly catered for and prepared for the adult world they're growing into.
But the Ofcom research suggests there is a real knowledge gap emerging between parents who know what their children are doing online and those who don't. We believe C91Èȱ¬ therefore has a important role to play both engaging children who have that parental support and providing essential tools for those who aren't supervised at home.
Many educational establishments have strict filtering software that means a lot of the sites children find attractive are 'off limits' in class, which makes the time they surf at home all the more precious. Obviously we'd like C91Èȱ¬ to be one of the brands they turn to first, not because we're obssessed with our brand reputation (as 'boilerplated' suggests) but because most of the competition only offer US imported content or are not sensitive to our audiences age-specific needs. If we're successful and can set some best practice at the same time, surely that's in the interests of our audience?
As for the criticism that we are pushing children into virtual relationships in preferance to real-world ones, nothing couild be further from the truth. We actively encourage our audience with a whole range of real-world activities from movie-making to science experiments and try to empower them by extending their established friendships beyond the playground. In our experience, children will nearly always elect to play with these friends outdoors if their allowed, but again societal pressures often mean their parents believe the risks are too great, and they're restricted to communicating via the web. At C91Èȱ¬ we just want to make sure we address that fundamental desire to be socially included by providing safe, responsible shared experiences.
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Comment number 4.
At 1st Nov 2009, TV Licence fee payer against 91Èȱ¬ censorship wrote:#3. At 01:00am on 31 Oct 2009, MarcG wrote:
"But the Ofcom research suggests there is a real knowledge gap emerging between parents who know what their children are doing online and those who don't. We believe C91Èȱ¬ therefore has a important role to play both engaging children who have that parental support and providing essential tools for those who aren't supervised at home.
Many educational establishments have strict filtering software that means a lot of the sites children find attractive are 'off limits' in class, which makes the time they surf at home all the more precious."
Wouldn't it be better to spend the budget on educating the ADULTS rather than entertain the children who might not be using your website anyway - all the 91Èȱ¬'s and Ofcom's good work has flown straight out of the window!
"We actively encourage our audience with a whole range of real-world activities from movie-making to science experiments and try to empower them by extending their established friendships beyond the playground. In our experience, children will nearly always elect to play with these friends outdoors if their allowed, but again societal pressures often mean their parents believe the risks are too great, and they're restricted to communicating via the web. At C91Èȱ¬ we just want to make sure we address that fundamental desire to be socially included by providing safe, responsible shared experiences."
So, rather than address the real problem, the perceived danger of real life (back to educating the parents about the real risks), you are planing to attract kids to the "Wild West World of the Internet" in the hope that they will not stray from your own or approved domains - and if parents don't understand the risks of the WWW can there be any certainty that their kids (I won't say family) computer is running any filtering software and if it is, that the kids don't know more than the parents and thus have just turned it off or changed the filter settings?!...
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At 30th Mar 2010, U14402580 wrote:This comment was removed because the moderators found it broke the house rules. Explain.
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At 12th May 2010, U14460911 wrote:This comment was removed because the moderators found it broke the house rules. Explain.
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