CBBC

In this lecture, we had a talk led by Jim Fleming of BBC Children's. He posed the question:

How can we create a safe environment for children online without discouraging participation?

Jim talked about the development of the CBBC and CBeebies websites, where children can sign up and take part in a virtual community and how they could combat the issues of children's online safety whilst still being able to give them a sense of individual identity.

The CBBC website is a community which is aimed at children between the ages of 6 and 12. It aims to provide a form of safe social networking for younger children, to prevent them from signing up to other social networking websites such as Facebook and Twitter, which typically have a minimal consent age of 13 years old and are not considered to be safe for people younger than that, due to the more open identity features, such as profile pictures and education/ location information.


Ideas that Jim Fleming had for encouraging children to sign up to the CBBC website were:

•  Holding hosted personality web-chats
• Personalised profiles/ identity
• Providing compelling content (Games, points systems, etc) 

He felt that children would enjoy being able to have their own unique profile that could be customised to suit their personality with colours and sounds. Children could also list their interests in order to find other members with similar interests to make friends with.
However, a problem that always comes with personal profiles is security and making sure that not too much of the children's identity is given away.
This could perhaps be solved by:

•  Not allowing children to use a photograph of theirselves as a profile picture to identify them, but letting them make a cartoon avatar to represent them.
• Instead of letting them type in their own username (because a lot of children still use their names or part of their names in their username), have the website generate a few different usernames when signing up for them to choose from. The new Pottermore website uses this method to ensure safety for their younger users. 
• Making sure that on sign up, parental consent is given through sending an email to the parent's email address to ensure that they are aware that their child is joining the community.

Jim described that members on the CBBC website had invented a concept called "E-Pets", where children would simply type out a description of a pet that they have invented:

About Pink Panthers: They are exactly like black panthers but are a dark, fiery, ginger-red colour. They live to between 30 and 45 years. They are able to be weened at 12 days,and all of these youngsters are 13-17 days old. When a Female has a litter, it takes up to a week for all the cubs to be born. Females are rare, as when you breed them there is only a 20% (1-in-5) chance of getting one. However, My female (Amber) has had a litter of 7 and 3, yes 3, are female! I'm keeping one of the females, but the rest are all for sale!

 They would then "sell" them to each other using an imaginary currency.
I think that this could be used as a basis for the 'compelling content' that the CBBC want to introduce to their website, as the children have come up with the idea themselves. Perhaps the children could actually create a virtual pet on the website, similar to Moshi Monsters and Neopets, where they can then play games to earn money to "feed" their pets, and trade them with other users.