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A survey released in December by the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project found that 4% of teens ages 12-17 who own a cell phone say they have sent sexually suggestive nude or nearly nude images or videos of themselves to someone else via text messaging, a practice also known as “sexting”; 15% say they have received such images of someone they know via text message.

“Teens explained to us how sexually suggestive images have become a form of relationship currency,” said Amanda Lenhart, Senior Research Specialist and author of the report. “These images are shared as a part of or instead of sexual activity, or as a way of starting or maintaining a relationship with a significant other. And they are also passed along to friends for their entertainment value, as a joke or for fun.”

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A recent survey by Common Sense Media shows that 35 percent of students use their cell phones to cheat on tests. Here’s how they do it:

Happily, teachers and administrators are well aware of this problem and are attacking it head-on. Solutions range from creating a unique grade for cheating (FD), which stays on the student’s record for two years, to designing tests to be more process-oriented. You can read the full discussion at HigherEdMorning.com.

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 The New York Times reported yesterday that cyberspace may not be as threatening to children and teens as we’re led to believe:

A task force created by 49 state attorneys general to look into the problem of sexual solicitation of children online has concluded that there really is not a significant problem.

The findings ran counter to popular perceptions of online dangers as reinforced by depictions in the news media like NBC’s “To Catch a Predator” series. One attorney general was quick to criticize the group’s report.

The panel, the Internet Safety Technical Task Force, was charged with examining the extent of the threats children face on social networks like MySpace and Facebook, amid widespread fears that adults were using these popular Web sites to deceive and prey on children.

But the report concluded that the problem of bullying among children, both online and offline, poses a far more serious challenge than the sexual solicitation of minors by adults.

Several attorneys general disputed the results of the task force’s report.

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I totally agree with Hank Williams’ thought here that the fun factor in Apple products relates to what’s missing in education these days.

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And that includes just about everybody in the age-group, apparently. A recent survey released by the Pew Internet & American Life Project finds 99 percent of teenage boys say they are gamers. About 94 percent of girls say the same.

The happy news is that teens playing video games are not the solitary and dark people we may imagine or fear. In fact, this Yahoo news report on the study, says:

If any kids are reading this, here’s the part that should really win your parents over. The Pew study also found that games can “incorporate many aspects of civic and political life.” More specifically, 76 percent of young gamers “report helping others while gaming,” and 44 percent say they play games “where they learn about a problem in society.”

 All good news.

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I just read a transcription of a brilliant speech given at this year’s Web 2.0 conference by Clay Shirkyon, author of Here Comes Everybody. He speaks of our societal ”cognitive surplus,” the mental time freed up as we’ve moved from physically taxing work and long hours to a more balanced, cognitive work and lifestyle. When the industrial revolution took hold in the early 1900s, people dealt with the new urban life by drinking. (Skirkyon calls it a collective bender.) In the 1960s, people dealt with the new suburban life by drowning in TV sitcoms. Shirkyon’s hope is that we can wake up from this TV stupor and spend our time in a more interactive, participatory way. For his mind the arena for this is social media.

When a TV producer asks him, “How do people find the time?” after talking about Wikipedia collaboration, Skirkyon gets feisty. He calculates:

All of Wikipedia, the whole project–every page, every edit, every talk page, every line of code, in every language that Wikipedia exists in–that represents something like the cumulation of 100 million hours of human thought. And television watching? Two hundred billion hours, in the U.S. alone, every year. Put another way, now that we have a unit, that’s 2,000 Wikipedia projects a year spent watching television.

But Skirkyon really caught my attention when he described how children’s television is more highly evolved than adults’ because it’s participatory:

I was having dinner with a group of friends about a month ago, and one of them was talking about sitting with his four-year-old daughter watching a DVD. And in the middle of the movie, apropos nothing, she jumps up off the couch and runs around behind the screen. That seems like a cute moment. Maybe she’s going back there to see if Dora is really back there or whatever. But that wasn’t what she was doing. She started rooting around in the cables. And her dad said, “What you doing?” And she stuck her head out from behind the screen and said, “Looking for the mouse.”

Here’s something four-year-olds know: A screen that ships without a mouse ships broken. Here’s something four-year-olds know: Media that’s targeted at you but doesn’t include you may not be worth sitting still for. Those are things that make me believe that this is a one-way change. Because four year olds, the people who are soaking most deeply in the current environment, who won’t have to go through the trauma that I have to go through of trying to unlearn a childhood spent watching Gilligan’s Island, they just assume that media includes consuming, producing and sharing.

This morning I watched my five-year-old in front of the TV doing cat’s pose, as Jo-Jo did yoga with a lion. Even though I have my own yoga practice, I can’t say I felt at all drawn to getting down on the floor. But that’s just my Gilligan’s Island-trained brain, which learned long ago that TV is not for interacting, TV is for distracting. Food for thought.

In describing the book, Ms. Goodstein says:

By providing adults with a greater understanding of what their kids are really doing on the internet and how they are using technology, Totally Wired will give adults the ability to set realistic boundaries necessary to keep children safe.

Ms. Goldstein is a journalist who focuses on informing marketers about youth culture. Her writing has some great takes from academics about the value of technology. Definitely worth checking out.