So why did Disney decide to offer a full refund to families who bought its Baby Einstein DVDs because they were supposed to make baby smarter? It’s because Baby Einstein DVDs and Disney were accused of making false claims in their marketing materials. The Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood (CCFC) faulted Baby Einstein for stating that the software would improve infants’ thinking skills, thus paving the way for future Einsteins. According to news reports, the feud between Baby Einstein and CCFC has gone on for years.

I’m no lover of false or overinflated product claims, especially when it comes to kids, but the question of infants and screen time has never been more important. In fact, we should be steeling ourselves for an explosion of apps made to engage infants and toddlers.

YouTube is filled with videos like this one showing a one-year-old competently touching his way through an iPod. Sweet little applications like Old McDonald from Duck Duck Moose and Giggle Computer Fun Time for Babies are being used and enjoyed by kids barely old enough to touch and point.

To date, the authority of screen time and kids has been the American Academy of Pediatrics. Its position is that kids younger than two-years-old should have NO screen time. But that rule was a world ago, before interactivity and the ability to explore virtual worlds was an everyday reality. The main argument against screen time was that it didn’t engage all of a child’s modalities. Now that the world of touch has been added, the game may change.

Personally, I’ve admired Baby Einstein’s founder, Julie Clark, as an early pioneer in the stay-at-home-mom-turns-entrepreneur movement. I never thought leaving a baby in a crib to stare at a screen for hours on end was a very good idea, but most parents I knew used Baby Einstein as a way to participate: singing, pointing, and sharing with their children. It’s all in how you use the tools.

Baby Einstein and the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood have both expressed their points of view. What’s yours?

Disclosure: My company, Living in Digital Times, is in talks with Baby Einstein about participation in an upcoming event.

I’ve always felt a little sheepish about comparing a human teacher to a computer, but when it comes to Rosetta Stone’s language immersion software, TOTALe, it’s hard for to give the advantage to Dr. Salas. (Tom Adams, the company’s CEO, would argue that Rosetta Stone was designed as a teaching supplement, and not a replacement, but maybe he didn’t have Dr. Salas.) 

When I met Tom Adams from Rosetta Stone, I was prepared to roll my eyes a bit. I’ve listened to podcasts, visited websites, and made a few other attempts to get my Spanish game back.

Tom explained that the magic sauce behind Rosetta Stone is that it treats you like an infant. Infants learn by matching words to things. Rosetta Stone starts you off with simple pictures and language. But within 10 minutes, just by looking at pictures and hearing words, you’re differentiating between a girl and a boy, girls and boys, men and women, and whether they’re drinking, eating, running, etc. You’ve learned masculine and feminine as well as singular and plural without realizing it.

The second magic ingredient–the one that’s really changed–is the social networking component. In addition to the course, the newest version of the product, Rosetta TOTALe, lets you practice with a live coach, play online language games, meet native speakers, and join groups of people so you can practice at your level. There’s even an Audio Companion that you take with you in the car.

You need a headset and microphone to use to Rosetta Stone. The program checks your pronunciation and inflection. There are scheduled tutorials with native speakers.

The TOTALe approach just adds a level of gravy to an already world-acclaimed way to learn a language. It’s not inexpensive, either. Rosetta Stone costs $999 for a 12-month subscription (regularly priced at $1,100).

Gulp! As much as I’m motivated to improve my Spanish, I have to confess that in the last month I’ve only been able to put in an hour of practice time. That’s an expensive hour! Dr. Salas, on the other hand, was with me every day at 5th period whether I was motivated or not.

A Publishing System for Young Kids: Tikatok

The cofounder of this site was sitting in a bookstore with her kids when she realized that every book on the shelves was written by an adult. The epiphany? Create a site where kids can publish. Tikatok brings out the storyteller in every kid, allowing them to see the fruits of their labor shared with others on the web. Posting a story is free. Creating a book and selling it has varying costs depending on the size of the book. Story Sparks, an idea generator, helps those with writer’s block and it’s relatively easy to add artwork, too. (Average price for printed copies is around $20.)

A Stay-cationer’s Dream: Wii Sports Resort

Players participate in a virtual vacation on an island with 12 different activities. Basketball, table tennis, canoeing, archery—the games are eclectic and tons of family fun. Sports Resort is one of the first Wii games to use Motion Plus—Nintendo’s new accessory. It allows the game to track the motion of your forearm and wrist which makes table tennis and archery more realistic. But the new accessory adds to the price and doesn’t add anything new to older Wii games. ($49.99)

Summer of Apollo:

This one won’t cost you a dime. The moonwalk (no, not the Michael Jackson kind) has captured and re-captured the imagination of kids and adults everywhere. Earth.google.com/moon is a joint project of NASA and Google. You can zoom in and actually see the 1969 footprints from the first spacewalk and take an guided tour narrated by Apollo astronauts.

A Quirky Game for Teens: Little King’s Story

For the teens in the house, this quirky masterpiece mixes adventure, strategy, and a heavy dose of whimsy. The plot begins with a young king that inherits a mess of a kingdom. Done in something similar but not as irritating as anime style graphics, the game includes cultural references and clever innuendo as the king (you) assembles his motley crew of subjects. Be warned: there are scenes with drunken and crude behavior. Normally I’m no fan of the anime style nor lengthy multicharacter games, but this one seems to be the pacesetter. And if you don’t believe me, see what the gamers have to say. ($49.99)

And what should you be avoiding this summer?

I used to write about the “cut and paste your way to an A” phenomena. Kids got so used to cutting and pasting text from the web into their documents that they failed to see the fine line between research and plagiarism.

Now, we’re seeing the same disappearing line with cheating. Kids who use the web, their cellphones, and other electronics as extensions of their brain don’t always see the importance of working without these tools (like on a final exam, for instance).

Research by Common Sense Media indicates that a significant number of kids have used their cellphones during a test or have texted friends about answers. And nearly 40% have indeed copied text directly from the web to turn in as a homework assignment.

Is storing notes on your iPhone a resourceful use of electronic tools or is it cheating? To many of the students surveyed, using cellphone notes was not defined as cheating. And helping your friends by texting them answers? Well that’s just collaboration—another 21st century buzzword.

As we delve into a discussion about 21st century skills, it will be interesting to see which wins out: memorizing the Pythagorean theorem or knowing how to find it when you need it.

For more on this see: http://www.eschoolnews.com/news/top-news/news-by-subject/research/index.cfm?i=59295

That’s the question that Amy Tucker, CEO of Matter Group and founder of a new kid’s multimedia property called Xeko, posed at a recent meeting of Women in Children’s Media where the subject was “green” media.

Xeko challenges kids to “Be a Force of Nature.” By combining a trading card game, eco-friendly plush dolls, a cast of animals facing extinction, exotic endangered locales, and difficult web-based missions, Xeko itself promises to be a force to be reckoned with.

While the game play is a bit convoluted for my tired brain, kids seem to love it. Watch a Xeko card game demo at Ambitious Green.

And, from what I can tell, the love extends passed the earnest “Birkenstock-wearing” families to good old kids that find Xeko as captivating as the Yu-gi-ohs or Pokemons of the world. The game play appeals to the same card-collecting, rule-memorizing kids that love trading cards, but, as Tucker says, “it’s organic—good for people, high quality, and good for the planet.”

You’ll want to give Xeko a try and keep that notion of organic media close as you guide your kids through their media choices.

I’ve lived it. A few years back I made a dumb business decision and it’s still there, haunting me each time I Google my name. Most of what was written was not true, but that hardly matters. It hurt me personally and professionally and still does to this day.

As we put more of ourselves out there on the Internet, we’re going to be hearing a lot about the growing science (or is it art?) of reputation management. Reputation management consists of two parts. First, you’ll want to track what people are saying about you (your company, your employees, your product, your children). Next, you’ll want to take the appropriate action if your online reputation is being sullied. That’s the tougher part.

Tracking Your Reputation

The first steps are the easiest. There are a number of programs that let you see what’s being said on the Internet by tracking a specific word—like your own name. A Google search will bring up your name, but to automate the process you can use Google News Alerts. Just enter your name, company name, or any other term you want to track in the news and if it comes up on the web you’ll receive an email. Lots of false positives and misses, but it’s really easy.

From there, tracking tools get more granular. If you blog you’ll want to monitor where your work or words show up on blogs. It’s advisable to register at a site like Technorati. They keep a sort of uber-list of blogs and can search for mentions of whatever it is that you’re tracking across thousands of blogs. If you want to track comments about your blogs you’ll use a different tool.

For the top 10 free tools to track stuff on the web, read this Mashable post.

If less choice is more, then stick to the five free tools discussed on the Personal Branding Blog.

And, if you want too much information about how you should be thinking about your reputation in cyberspace, you can read 100 tips from criminal justice.

Next, we’ll look at the hairier, thornier issue of what to do when bad things are said about good people (like you).

There’s something really creepy about paying your kids to learn…or is there?

The New York Times recently ran an interesting piece on whether or not kids learn better when they’re given material incentives. Historically, educators have frowned on rewards. They want very much to believe that education, the pursuit of knowledge, is reward enough.

The concept of education as its own reward is starting to feel a bit dated in a world where everything is measured on the immediate return on investment. In an era when life is about accumulating stuff–coupons, trinkets, friends, and more–for many kids, it’s starting to look as if rewards for learning might do the trick. As parents, we give our kids everything from allowance money to toys/games/clothing as a way to reward their good behaviors. The hope is that these extrinsic rewards will become intrinsic as the kids grow older. Purists argue that kids are born explorers and their love of exploration translates to the love of learning, but let’s face it: Multiplication tables and fractions are not exploratory territory. They require route memorization tasks and most kids find this sort of learning far less compelling than just about anything else they could be doing.

As I ponder, I’m at a conference called DEMO 09 that showcases new products and start ups in the technology space. I just watched an exciting demo of a SmartyCard, an online learning world for kids ages 7-12 where they get rewards for learning. The creators of the system aren’t being subversive, either. The company’s slogan is YOU LEARN, YOU EARN.

The content is mostly in the form of online quizzes with colorful graphics, simulations, and videos included. The content is grade-specific and compartmentalizes skills according to activities like “space” or “America” rather than the old “reading/math/science” classification.

As the child plays they earn points. The rewards are all virtual and they’re precisely the type of reward every 7-12 old covets: Club Penguin membership, iTunes music, WebKinz stuff, and more.

I’m loving the idea of virtual rewards for many reasons. First, kids learn to purchase their own virtual stuff–their currency is learning. Second, a virtual reward lets them personalize how they decide to spend. This makes them better consumers of all media. Finally, learning basic facts has never been scintillating stuff . Do you remember playing eraser tag in your classroom or any one of a number of other games to make memorization a bit more memorable? SmartyCards does the same thing, as did so much of what we’ve despairingly called edutainment.

I’m not advocating a Skinnerian education where material goods become the reason for learning. But kids’ work is schoolwork, and their job is to do it well. Everyone expects compensation for a job well done and that means both the knowledge that they’ve done good work and a little salary, too.

You go, SmartyCard. You learn. You earn.

“Our greatest natural resource is the minds of our children.”

For a child, today’s play is tomorrow’s work. Whether it’s playing with a toy doctor kit, a tea set, a digital camera and editing software, or inside of a virtual world, the skills they’ll need tomorrow are being honed.

But their skills will only be as good as the tools we give them. According to a recent report from NPD, a higher percentage of kids ages 4-14 are using computers than they are televisions. Fourteen percent of kids in this age group own their own computer. Twenty-eight percent use digital music players. Twenty percent own cellphones.

What they do with these tools is still a great social experiment. The web and consumer electronic devices have provided them with a vast sandbox in which to play and explore. A recent study from the MacArthur Foundation found that social networking is, contrary to many parents’ beliefs, a motivator—a place to practice both social and creative skills. Simulations teach them to play “what if” in the safety of a virtual environment. Educational software is able to pinpoint their strengths and weaknesses with a granularity that a teacher in a classroom never could. The tools of youth—IM, chat, Facebook—are finding their way into the workplace. There’s an economic imperative to learn to play digitally.

At the  Kids at Play Summit http://kidsatplaysummit.com we’ve enlisted some of the greatest minds from education, journalism, product and content development, and academic research to paint a picture of why being digital changes everything.

In his book, Playing the Future, Douglas Rushkoff said, “Our kids may be younger than us, but they are also newer. They are the latest model of human being, and are equipped with a whole lot of new features. Looking at the world of children is not looking backwards at our own pasts—it’s looking ahead.”

Welcome to the future. I founded http://kidsatplaysummit.com as a forum to help the high tech industry continue to create and innovate in your respective fields so that kids everywhere can reap the benefits.

We’ll be looking at some of the announcements made during the Kids@Play Summit at CES. (Disclosure: Robin Raskin, the author, also produces Kids@Play at CES.)

Elmo on Your Cellphone?

Sesame Street Workshop CEO Gary Knell kicked off the morning session with a new study from the Joan Ganz Cooney Center, a think tank for advancing kids’ learning in the digital age, called “Pockets of Potential.” The study looks at how cellphones and handheld devices can be successfully used in education.

More than half of the world’s population now owns a cellphone and children under 12 constitute one of the fastest growing segments of mobile device users. The study looks at research, expert opinion, and industry trends to show how mobile devices can help re-energize learning. To see the full study.

Intel Debuts One Very Special Laptop

While the first low cost laptops like the OLPC and Intel Classmate were created with the kid-population of developing countries in mind, the Intel Classmate PC’s second generation design is different. It’s meant to be a powerful tool for kids everywhere. At Kids@Play, Jeffery R. Galinovsky, the regional head for the Classmate PC ecosystem in mature markets, and his preteen daughter, MacKenzie, gave a compelling demonstration of the newest Intel Classmate.

The biggest difference is that the new Classmate can be transformed from a clamshell design to a tablet PC so that kids can use them as writing and drawing tablets. Intel implemented a technology called “palm rejection” that allows the PC to be used as a writing tablet, while ignoring those hands and palms that rest on the screen and mess up the child’s work. The Classmate also has an accelerometer built in. It knows when you’ve switched screen orientations and adjusts accordingly. Watch Jeff preview the new unit on YouTube. The most dramatic moment of the demo was when MacKenzie and Jeff gave the laptop a rough toss that landed on a nearby table in order to prove the tablet’s ruggedness.

Mattel’s Mind Flex

One of the hottest announcements at the show was Mattel’s Mind Flex, a real world miniature obstacle course you control with your mind. The idea is to get a small ball kept afloat by a fan to literally jump through hoops. To play, you put on a special getup with sensors placed on your head and your earlobes. The sensors register theta waves. The more you concentrate, the stronger the theta waves. The stronger the theta waves, the more the fan spins. Get your fan spinning just right and your ball is pushed through its paces. Here’s a YouTube video from TechCrunch.

My name is Hybrid Snoodle. I’m pretty hip-looking with my army chick/punk-er getup: camouflage t-shirt, black fishnet tights, short skirt, day-glo helmet, and one of those shapely 3D bodies. It’s 2 AM and in a few hours I’ll be back to life as Robin Raskin. But for the moment I am off on Orientation Island, the newbie training ground for Second Life. Second Life is one of the largest of the online virtual worlds; it’s also one of the graphically richest and most compelling worlds in the growing number of online communities.

I jumped into Second Life to witness firsthand the allure. I depended on the kindness of strangers (and there were more than a few strange-ers out there) to help me master how to move, gesture, find clothing, chat, shout, and more. Clueless was an understatement.

Upon completion of training you’re ready for the real thing, well, the real virtual thing. Second Lifers spend inordinate numbers of hours conversing, building, drinking, gardening, shopping, dancing, going to conferences and doing just about anything else that you do in the real world. They’re just doing it in a cyberworld.

And they spend real money in this virtual world. Real money buys Second Life’s currency, the Linden Dollar. An annual fee to Second Life gives you a small Linden Dollar allowance each week. Then, you need to figure out how to augment your allowance with good old ingenuity.

Why, I keep asking myself, am I spending time in Second Life land when my first life as a mom, wife, and entrepreneur is already keeping me teetering on the brink? For the moment my best answer is Sir Edmund Hillary’s “because it is there.” But, for many women, Second Life is just as real and perhaps more interesting and compelling than their first.

I gave Ef Deal (note to editor: that’s her real name, sorry), a high school teacher and writer, a call because she has a very involved Second Life. As a teacher, Deal is convinced that Second Life has an important part to play in schools. Deal meets with other teachers in Second Life where they hold conferences, share ideas, and network. To relax she’s built a little garden oasis where you can join her to sip tea and listen to the burble of the brook. When she had a bout with a migraine-like condition she used her private cyber getaway as a place to relax and feel better.

But all is not perfect in Deal’s garden of cyber-Eden. She’s been stalked in her home, with her photo snapped as she was changing her clothes. Once she had to evict a naked troublemaker from her property. And sometimes she learns the local customs the hard way, like the time a cyber-friend informed her she’d be treated a lot better with a new “skin.” (Second Life’s own brand of racism is what she called it.) And while you can do all of these socially acceptable things in Second Life, there’s no shortage of lap dance joints and strip clubs as wanderers seek to fulfill their sexual fantasies. You can buy S&M equipment, meet a virtual madam, or visit a brothel, but you’ll want to buy some genitalia first. (Second Life avatars have none to start.)

Second Life is far from the only virtual world out there. Women over 30 like worlds like Moove with its focus on matchmaking and meetups. There.com and Worlds.com are also based on social meetings. Younger women in their twenties flock to Gaia for its tools to create intricate private spaces. Kaneva offers play places. And no list would be complete without crediting The Sims, one of the early worlds for stepping out of your reality.

Curse or Blessing?
Is heading out for a spin the virtual community tantamount to trying a shot of heroin? Like all things Internet, the virtual world has its pros and cons; much depends on who you ask and what’s your definition of time well spent. A therapist friend of mine reports that more and more of her patients are coming to see her with an online dimension to their problems. For some that’s gambling or virtual infidelity. For others it’s an addiction to some sort of role-playing game. For others it’s their second life.

Many therapists would say that these worlds perpetuate the illusion of reality but it’s just an illusion. The social cues of the real world are missing. But others say it’s no less or more than the real world, it’s just different. They say that cultures are evolving and traditions are being formed.

Can you be addicted to your virtual life? An addiction is something you are compelled to do – free choice starts to edge out of the equation. The American Medical Association is noodling on this as I write, trying to decide whether Internet addiction deserves a place in the litany of medical maladies. More research is needed, they say.

Most women I’ve talked to enjoy Second Life, and like going there precisely because it’s not their first life. They feel a sense of control over where they go and what they do. If they don’t like the life they’ve made, well, they can get out. If they haven’t spent hours primping who cares? They can invent a world as they imagine it, unconstrained by those real world borders. What’s there not to like?

Real World Self Control
Moderation is the key to keeping your sanity in the virtual world. Like anything else in real life, these worlds are fine until they become obsessions and interfere with your daily life. Virtual worlds can be just as addicting as working out, shopping, TV, work, or any number of things; they become “addicting” when people lose the ability to set and maintain priorities.

Another thing to remember is that virtual worlds are out to make money. Not that making money is wrong, but you should be aware of who’s representing themselves and who’s representing some great initiative. Some 50 million people participate in a virtual world online today. To give you an idea of the size of these worlds, The Walt Disney Co. acquired Club Penguin in a deal worth as much as $700 million and Linden Labs, the creators of Second Life, is rumored to be worth $750 million. And, believe it or not, some Second Lifers have become real world millionaires from businesses launched in cyberspace.

Thinking of Getting A Life?
It costs nothing to join until you want to buy something. You can sign up at http://secondlife.com/ and then download and install a small piece of software on your PC. You really need to have a cutting edge PC with fast graphics since Second Life has lots of heavy duty graphics and renderings. (The program will analyze your machine as it loads and if they say you’re going to need more ummph in your PC, you better believe it.)

And don’t forget to look me up while you’re there.