Monday, March 7, 2011

Practicum Post #3 - Jamie N.



I finally learned how to chat with other penguins freely. As long as you are in chat rooms that are not labeled Ultimate Safe Chat, you can type what ever you want minus swear words and inappropriate things. As so you can in the picture below one of the Penguins was trying to turn other Penguins Green.

I'm not sure what the idea was behind trying to turn the others different colors, but it just goes to show that anyone can type almost anything they want. The website as a whole became more fun once I was able to figure out how to chat by typing what I wanted to say instead of using set phrases and questions.

I also learned that parents can set their child's settings on Club Penguin in order to limit the amount of time spent on the game. Once the parent is logged in they can see if their Penguin son or daughter got banned at all from playing the game (meaning they were using inappropriate language or doing bad things). As you can see in the next picture, I have not been banned at all.

Parents can also check their childs connection history in order monitor the time they spend on the website.
To me these features make the social network site much more appealing to parents, and children may not even know their parents have this kind of access.




My presentation is on Users and Audiences, specifically I have Tweens. I chose to look at Club Penguin as site that a lot tweens these days use. It is an interactive social network, it includes games, online chat, designing your avatar and you Igloo home. You can play games to earn money and stamps. If you read my Practicum Post #3 you can see all the features that the site has for parents (it may help to better answer my questions).


My questions: Do you think parents will still be skeptical to let their children use this site because of the fact that they can have unlimited chat capabilities? Do parents still need to worry as much about online predators with sites like Club Penguin? and do they need to worry about their children giving away too much information?

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