Here is the full, uncut text of the research report by Robert Hart, Director of Research at Intuitive Media, which was featured in issue 20 of Connected Magazine. Drawing on the results of a research project into how online connectivity is changing children’s lives, Robert shares the story of Emily Sanderson.

The human species is evolving rapidly. Our children are growing up in a very different environment to their parents. They have access to huge amounts of information at the click of a mouse. They can connect with people all over the world from their desktops, their laptops, and now increasingly from their mobile phones and mobile internet devices. Things have changed.

Let’s wind the clock back 25 years to 1972, when Carl Sagan was asked to design a plaque to go into deep space with the NASA Pioneer 10 and 11 spacecraft. It was naively designed to invite ET round for tea, or to eat us for tea! It showed how to find us and what we looked like. Looking at the plaque (pictured left), the humans are standing side by side, but disconnected. If Sagan had known about Emily Sanderson and her online friends, the picture might have been different.

With humans now intimately connected to each other online around the world, we are seeing the emergence of Homo sapiens continuus – the Connected Ape.

Working with the Department for Children, Schools and Families (DCSF) and Becta, Intuitive Media conducted extensive research into how children behave and learn in protected online social learning networks. The research included observation and analysis of the online behaviour of more than 120,000 children, direct online consultation with some 12,000 children who took part in a series of research surveys and the detailed profiling of eight representative children. Here, we distil what we learned through the profile of a single 10-year-old girl.

Who is Emily Connected?

Emily Sanderson is a real child (although her name has been changed to protect her identity). She is 10 years old, lives in the Midlands and is a representative of more than 120,000 children in the SuperClubsPLUS & GoldStarCafe social learning networks. This profile describes Emily alongside other children in her online community.

• Statements about Emily are given in relation to the statistical analysis of whole community. For example: “Emily owns a Nintendo DS (24%)” indicates that statement is true for 24% of the community.
• How and when is Emily connected?
  Like 61% of the SuperClubsPLUS and GoldStarCafe communities, Emily has a home PC. She also owns a Nintendo DS (24%) and a Sony PSP (16%). She has a mobile phone (like 76%) which she uses her mobile to access SuperClubsPLUS (as do 46% of her peers).
• Like more than half of the children surveyed, Emily gets just 30 minutes a week on the school computers. Emily would like more frequent access for longer periods of time. Most of her online communications activity is at home. She checks her SuperClubsPLUS emails before she leaves for school and logs in again as soon as she gets home. She’s active in the evenings from 4-8 pm and very active at the weekends. She spends over 300 hours a year in the SuperClubsPLUS community.

What does Emily get up to online?

In her online community Emily is exceptionally productive and communicative. She joined SuperClubsPLUS in June 2006 and makes three visits a day. Emily is a dedicated personal website developer. To populate her four home pages in SuperClubsPLUS, she has sourced, prepared and published 32 images and 15 icons. She’s edited her home pages 4,180 times, with 279 updates per month or nine per day. She also contributes her content to her school’s site in SuperClubsPLUS.

Emily has created her own online club – a Web Ring called ‘Birmingham City are the best!’ Emily’s home pages and webrings are dedicated to her favourite football teams.

At home, Emily likes to create her own images, photos and animations (e.g. icons) and send interesting site links to friends. In SuperClubsPLUS she says she likes to make and share content. Emily likes sharing her ideas and content with others, but wants to retain her creative individuality.

How communicative is Emily?

Emily is very sociable and communicative one-to-one. In 15 months she sent 8,419 emails to 580 different members. She sends 140 emails a week and receives 146. She’s also a prolific communicator in groups. She made 5,721 contributions to 13 different SuperClubsPLUS forums (mostly from her Nintendo DS) She is a prolific contributor to community ‘hot-seat’ forums, making 72 posts in 12 weeks.

Emily’s pages are very popular with other children. She’s had an exceptional 6,268 visits to her main home page and her digital guest-book has been signed by 544 visitors. Her circle of young friends has expanded enormously, spanning the UK. She receives emails from 503 different community members. One hundred children list her as a close buddy (they can only choose 10 buddies each, so this is an indication of high regard).

Emily also has a productive online relationship with her teacher (133 emails sent, 84 received). She talks more with the community mediators (259 emails sent 212 received).

How does Emily’s learning vary between home and school?

At school Emily wishes she had more choice in what she learns. She wants to “choose my own work” and “do my own projects.” Unlike 95% of her online community, Emily says she prefers to do easier work and at a slower pace than other kids in class.

Like 83% of SuperClubsPLUS members, Emily would like to work with her teacher from home, making use of email and forums to show her teacher her work and ask for help and ideas. Emily thinks she learns better at school (like 77%), but says she also learns well in the evenings and weekends (17%), with her parents (53%) and siblings (22%).

In contrast to her limited access to ICT at school, she spends over 300 hours a year communicating, collaborating, creating and learning in SuperClubsPLUS.

What can we learn from Emily?

Emily works at a slow pace at school, but she turns into Hurricane Emily online! Her mobile connected lifestyle has changed her educational and social experience. The combination of a mobile phone or games console plus a safe online learning community leads to a new social learning dimension.

Things have changed. Emily takes her learning home. She communicates and collaborates with a vast peer group across the UK. She has become a productive, effective and engaging publisher and communicator, sociable and popular with a very wide circle of online friends – adults and children.

Emily Sanderson has become Emily Connected, a member of the species H. sapiens continuus – the connected ape!

Categories: Active Learning, Connected 20, Digital Literacy, Gaming, Literacy