Education Week - April 24, 2013 - 8

EDUCATION WEEK

APRIL 24, 2013

www.edweek.org

DIGITAL DIRECTIONS > Tracking news and ideas in educational technology
www.digitaldirections.org

Online Socialization Is Hot Topic Among Researchers
New studies look at
impact on children
By Sarah D. Sparks
As technology becomes ever
more ubiquitous in children’s social lives, new research suggests
fundamental skills still apply,
particularly in environments
that mirror real life.
Children’s online social lives
were a big topic at the annual
Society for Research in Child Development conference in Seattle
last week. Several new studies

presented there suggest that
while socializing virtually can
make it harder for students to
make deep connections with one
another, situations that more
closely mimic the real world—
such as video-chat or avatar environments—can lead to more
natural engagement.
Both in and out of school, students are socializing more online.
According to an annual report released last month by the Pew Internet and American Life project,
95 percent of teenagers are active
online, and nearly three out of
four children ages 12 to 17 access
the Internet via mobile devices,

making virtual connections much
more integral to most students’
daily lives.
At the same time, more than
6.7 million students took at least
one online class in 2012, according to an annual national survey;
most of those classes require students to interact or collaborate
with classmates and instructors
virtually.

Emotional Connections
Pew found that educators and
technology experts report concerns that socializing virtually
will lead students to be “dis-

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tracted away from deep engagement with people.”
In one study scheduled to be presented at the conference, Lauren
Sherman, a psychology researcher
at the Children’s Digital Media
Center@Los Angeles, recorded 50
pairs of 18- and 19-year-old friends
while they planned together via
videoconference, audio-only chat,
and instant messaging, and while
sitting together in the same room.
She and her colleagues measured
both students’ reported feelings of
connectedness and physical signs,
such as smiles, nods, and gestures.
The closer the virtual method
was to live interaction, Ms. Sherman found, the better students
were able to engage socially,
though in-person interaction remained the most engaging.
Students using video chat—
which allows the most identification of facial and body gestures,
voice inflection, and other cues—
showed the greatest depth of
social bonding, and students reported the greatest feeling of social engagement afterward. Students using text messaging felt
and acted the least connected.
“Emotional connectedness can,
of course, make an essential difference in classroom learning and
student success, and our study
suggests that emotional connectedness is limited in digital environments,” Ms. Sherman said in
an interview. “Even for digital
natives—that is, young people
who have grown up surrounded
by digital media—in-person communication is still most effective
for establishing connectedness.”
“This means that if digital
learning environments are replacing in-person environments,
students could lose out on opportunities to forge strong bonds
with teachers and classmates,”
she said.
The context matters, though.
Students reported that digital
collaboration was more efficient for ongoing planning and
small talk, while it was better to
be face to face for in-depth
discussions.
Virtual collaboration can be
beneficial, Ms. Sherman found,
when it supplements in-person
learning by providing opportunities to work with peers or teachers at a distance, or to use less
emotional digital methods “to discuss tough topics that would feel
overwhelming in person.”

Evaluating Avatars
She pointed to the rising popularity of technology that more
closely mirrors real life, such as
video-texting apps and avatarbased virtual classrooms.
“This suggests that efforts to
use technologies that afford audiovisual communication [such
>>

as] video chat could allow for a
far greater bonding experience in
digital collaborative-learning environments,” she said.
A team of researchers led by
Stephanie M. Reich, an associate professor of education at the
University of California, Irvine,
have spent the past three years
and 2,000 hours online observing
students in virtual play worlds.
Separately, over a six-month period, the researchers also tracked

“

Even for
digital natives—
that is, young
people who have
grown up
surrounded by
digital media—
in-person
communication
is still most
effective for
establishing
connectedness.”
LAUREN SHERMAN
Psychology Researcher
Children’s Digital Media Center@Los Angeles

10 families with children ages 3
to 12, interviewing and observing the children’s on- and offline
interactions.
Ms. Reich and her colleagues
found that the students who were
the most socially successful online—the ones who were able to
start and maintain conversations
with new people—used social
skills that would be equally appropriate in real life.
They used in-world slang,
moved their avatars to create
nonverbal gestures, and included
emoticons like “;^)” to make up
for the lack of voice tone to clarify
the meaning of a typed comment.
By contrast, students who interrupted other players or tried to
continue conversations when the
other person was “clearly uninterested” were less successful
overall.
Moreover, while Ms. Reich found
aggression common in virtual forums, other players comforted the
victim and reported the bully after
most hostile incidents.
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Education Week - April 24, 2013

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