To put my thoughts into context, I offer the following assertions:

• Our public education system is failing;
• Incremental change to a failing system is the same as making no change at all;
• Kids today spend—on average—seven hours each day interacting with and through digital media;
• The digital world has become the “new vast wasteland” unless, of course;

We seize the opportunity to build quality, engaging digital content that reaches, teaches, and optimizes the skills and talents of the rising generation.

The phrase “generation gap” hasn’t gotten much mileage since the 1960’s, but it applies to the phenomena we experience today. Kids born post-1985 are digital natives. Most are blissfully unaware that questions have not always been answered immediately via Google search. Parents, teachers, and other authority figures intertwined with this generation are, at best, digital ex-pats. Where kids go when they surf the net, play games, and network on Facebook appears to the older generation to be a travelogue to places unknown and unknowable.

Therein lies the gap. Adults have vague notions about where kids go on the net. They wonder: Is digital technology a threat? A waste of time? A direct path to attention deficit disorder? Reasonable questions, to which we have very few answers.

While many view the digital world as an evil interloper to more pastoral time, when we read and played and had more face-to-face contact, no one can quarrel with the fact that the digital world is here to stay. It has radically changed the way we gather and present information, communicate with one another, connect with issues and people and locations on the opposite side of the globe.

The digital world is evolving, and it is growing in only one direction: larger. My contention is that it needs to grow in another direction as well: better.

School, as Connie Yowell of the MacArthur Foundation reminds us, is now one node on kids’ learning network. Information is being sought and conveyed to them 24/7—on computers, hand-held devices, iPads, on-demand television, and phones.

This incredibly powerful tool offers unparalleled potential to teach, to encourage kids to imagine, produce, participate, practice, and create. But only if kids can find their way to engaging, enriching, wonderful content.

Many elect a position of neutrality when it comes to assessing Internet content, particularly when it comes to products claiming to be “educational.” But it is challenging to both kids and adults to negotiate the overabundance of information available, to arrive at sites that genuinely capture minds and imaginations. And these places exist.

Non-profits, commercial companies, university laboratories, game producers in the entertainment field, and even those who work to shape and promote popular culture have an unprecedented opportunity: to help cultivate, curate, and distribute digital tools that ask users to do more than shoot targets and collect tokens.

While education in the future will no doubt seek to blend the right amount of time, talent and technology, we need to work intelligently on all three tracks. Learning extends well beyond classroom. We have a chance to reach an ever-growing number of kids, to connect with them digitally and to help equip them with tools to make them contributing citizens, strong and innovative workforce members, aware and responsible human beings.

This can — and will — happen, if we have some familiar, highly respected, cool faces leading the charge of the digital revolution.

Susan Crown is the Chairman and Donor of SCE, a social investment organization that connects talent and innovation with market forces to drive social change. SCE’s Digital Learning program focuses on the potential of digital media technologies to help children learn and practice both traditional and 21st century skills. Ms. Crown serves on the boards of major corporations including Illinois Tool Works and Northern Trust Corporation, and as a Vice-Chair of Rush University Medical Center, Trustee of the Natural Resource Defense Council, and a director of CARE, USA. She served for 26 years as Chairman of the Arie and Ida Crown Memorial, a foundation that focused on urban education, human services, healthcare, cultural arts, and the Middle East, and for 12 years as a fellow of the Yale Corporation.

Last week I had the opportunity participate in a panel discussion at Sprockets, Toronto’s International Film Festival for Children and Youth (which, by the way, is a FANTASTIC event held in the new and equally fantastic TIFF building). The topic of the panel? Transmedia. Well of course. It seems that transmedia has blossomed into an all-out industry buzz-word — it’s a featured topic at conferences ranging from SXSW to Kidscreen. Rumor even has it that Henry Jenkins is out to “reclaim” the word, and I don’t blame him.

Regardless, I was thrilled to join fellow Canucks Jennifer Burkitt (CBC), Sara Grimes (University of Toronto), Matt Toner (Zeros 2 Heroes) and Richard Lachman (Ryerson University) in a spirited discussion about how transmedia is effecting traditional broadcasting models, how it is effecting education, and — most importantly — what really is transmedia, anyways? Here is a summary of our discussion:

• What is transmedia?
  Transmedia is a single property that crosses multiple platforms. It’s hard to find something that is not labeled as transmedia these days, meaning that the property lives on multiple platforms. However, true transmedia capitalizes on the unique affordances of each individual platform, expanding established storylines and allowing fans to connect and participate in the fictional world. It was interesting to see that everyone on the panel had a slightly different bar for what constitutes “true” transmedia, and made me think that the industry is all probably using different definitions for this word. Perhaps we all need to sit in on a class with Jenkins?

• Is transmedia a threat to traditional broadcasting models, or an enhancement?
  The panel seemed to agree that transmedia is certainly something all media producers need to be paying attention to, if for no other reason than that kids are expecting it. But the truth is that transmedia can provide exciting new entry points to your property, and can offer unique enhancements to traditional media. However, they key point that panelists tried to get across was that if your core competency is in one platform, that’s OK! It can be better to try to specialize in one medium than spread an idea over multiple platforms where you don’t have expertise. Not every developer has to be a jack of all trades (and in fact, usually the best ones aren’t), but every developer should be considering how their audience might want to interact with their story in ways outside of the core medium.

• How can content producers leverage new platforms to build around and expand on existing properties?
  You need to consider the unique affordances and more importantly limitations of each individual platform as you are extending your property across mediums. If you’re telling a story in a lot of different platforms, you should be putting something unique and plausible in each place. If it doesn’t make sense, and if it doesn’t add something distinctive, why is it there? So, for instance, mobile devices provide anytime, anywhere accessibility. On the other hand, they have small screens and smaller keys and if you’ve got young readers and writers in your audience this needs to be a serious consideration.

• How does multi-platform content affect education?
  In terms of formal education, a teacher may have a better chance of bringing a property into the classroom if it is available in multiple forms – especially if some of that content is freely and openly available. In general, multiplatform content can increase opportunities for learning by:

– Meeting different learning styles and needs

– Expanding children’s knowledge networks outside of their immediate community

– Motivating learners

– Enabling participation in media construction

– Encouraging deep investigation of narrative structure as well as story content

– Bridging the gap between school and the other sectors of a child’s life

As Cooney Center’s resident transmedia expert Becky reminded me, it’s important to remember that if a property is too all-encompassing, it can have the unintended negative effect of restricting kids’ play and talk about the stories, ideas, characters, etc. There need to be holes for kids to fill in their own ways.

Hopefully this helps (at least a little) in de-buzzifying the industry buzz word of the moment. Overall, the panel agreed that transmedia has been around since long before the hype, citing examples like Star Wars, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and Pokemon. Developers shouldn’t let a big word stand in the way of expanding their property and allowing kids to partake in its creation. It’s an exciting time, with all of these new platforms that can help enable this expansion and participation — just remember that you don’t need to be everywhere, and if it feels like a stretch it probably is.

As long as media have created content for children, there have been debates about what defines “quality.” From the “penny dreadfuls” to radio to comic books to music, and onward to TV and digital media, parents have been cautioned about wasted time, moral decay or learning delays. At the same time, creators and distributors of children’s media have proclaimed its great benefits; every recent media innovation from TV (and color TV!) to tablet computers has been marketed first to parents as a breakthrough for children’s learning. Too often, those promises disappear once the technology is entrenched.

Recently, the American Center for Children and Media has been collaborating on a project launched by the Fred Rogers Center for Early Learning and Children’s Media at Saint Vincent College. The goal is to develop a framework for defining and describing quality in (especially digital) media, meant for children aged 0-8. To make a Sisyphean task harder, we believe it’s possible to develop one set of guides that can support producers in creating media, and also parents in choosing what’s right for their particular children.

There are existing efforts to describe quality in children’s media. Some reviewers use rubrics that inform without necessarily endorsing; others give “seals of approval.” Awards give a set number of prizes, usually chosen via a transparent process. Other, research-based efforts analyze particular areas, such as educational content or gender portrayals.

We don’t want to duplicate any of these existing efforts; indeed, whatever we create needs to dovetail with them. Moreover, we don’t want to create a directive set of rules; children’s media is an art, not a science, and a fixed standard of excellence only leads to imitation and regression to the mean.

Still, many current measures grew from attempts to appraise children’s television, and need updating to include digital media. Further, with manifold children’s TV channels or blocks, the wide-open Internet, 24 hours of video uploaded to YouTube every minute, and tens of thousands of mobile apps labeled as child-friendly, it’s impossible to think we might rate and review everything for kids and families. Parents need guidelines they can apply to seek and find (or assess in retrospect) content that is best suited to their children.

Of course, you can’t find quality content if it’s never been created. That’s why we hope to describe properties that every producer could apply, regardless of target audience, platform, genre or purpose. What knowledge about how children grow, learn (in the broadest sense) and consume media could creators use as touch points throughout development and production?

We’re consulting with a wide range of experts in media, education, child development, research and more. Already, from them, we’re able to isolate lessons learned from past efforts:

“Quality” and “education” aren’t the same thing. Media with educational intent can be of low quality, and high quality media can be intended purely to entertain. Like adults, children turn to media to fulfill different gratifications at different times, and deserve excellence in all they consume.

All screens are not created equal. The different screens that are part of children’s lives offer unique opportunities, benefits and challenges. In the television era, a two-dimensional grid based on best practices at different ages or developmental stages might have been adequate; today, at least three dimensions would be needed to define quality.

Quality is far more about what is included than what isn’t. Some quality measures reward absence of violence, stereotyping or negative role models. While it’s important not to exploit these or use them gratuitously, their mere absence Focus on what goes in, not what might come out. Children’s media gets into trouble by suggesting that its use promotes specific outcomes (e.g., smarter children, earlier reading). A quality framework should help creators express what’s gone into their work — their goals, intended audience, technology choices – forestalling others from imposing post facto analysis.

Don’t stifle innovation. A clear and expansive vision of young people’s needs and abilities should open the door to new creative approaches, not simply advocate for what’s been successful before.

Context is crucial. Sometimes, quality must be evaluated across a producer’s or distributor’s body of work (a channel or block, a portal site, a suite of apps) or a child’s media diet. For example, while gender, race and ethnic balance are vital goals, children can easily see through artificially-constructed settings in a single work that achieve balance at the expense of authenticity.

Every framework for defining or describing quality has advantages and risks. Some scale easily to encompass lots of content; others are limited but therefore coveted. Some establish focus and consistency; others value flexibility to respond to evolving platforms and creative innovation. Some give end users specific recommendations; others provide them with tools to reach their own conclusions.

The Fred Rogers Center acknowledges that it has a long road ahead and many choices. The Center’s plan for moving forward relies in very important ways on collaboration with other organizations and developers in early learning and children’s media.

We’re eager for you to contribute to this process: how would you define quality in children’s media? Whether you are a parent, caregiver, teacher, researcher, media producer, writer, or business executive, your expertise is unique and valuable. Please post your thoughts in the comments below, or e-mail them to dkleeman@atgonline.org.

David Kleeman is President of the American Center for Children and Media, an industry-led creative professional development and resource center. The Center leads the US industry in developing sustainable and kid-friendly solutions to long-standing issues. The Center also promotes the exchange of ideas, expertise, and information as a means for building quality, and looks worldwide for best practices. David is Advisory Board Chair to the international children’s TV festival, PRIX JEUNESSE.

I hate to admit it, but I’m the one who brought Pocket Frogs into my daughters’ lives. We were at the airport, awaiting our flight. I was loathing the idea of breaking into all the carefully packed-up pens and activity books before boarding in 20 minutes. Why not find a new gaming app on my iPhone that would satisfy my girls, 6 and 8 at the time, while also giving me something fun to fool around with once in a while? Pocket Frogs, a game by NimbleBit, fit the bill, with a “free” pricetag and relatively innocent premise: Collect little frogs in your virtual nursery, breed them when once tamed and fully grown, and await that special moment when a rare and brightly colored one might show up on your screen.

The girls loved it immediately, especially my older daughter, who gravitates toward anything that looks and feels like a science game. It wasn’t until a few days later, however, that she pointed out what should have been obvious from the beginning. I asked her if she thought the game would be a good one to mention to her science teacher. “Not really,” she said. “There’s no such thing as a baby frog you know.” There’s not? “They should be tadpoles, Mom.”

Oh right.

Entertainment doesn’t have to be accurate. It doesn’t have to be intellectually challenging. And it certainly doesn’t have to “teach.” These are the statements made by defenders of the entertainment and gaming industry. And they’re right that games don’t have to be any of these things.

But what if at least some of them were? What if adults and children happened to learn something new that related — either conceptually or in terms of specific subject matter — to what they were grappling with at school or on the basketball court or in their science projects? Would it have been that much harder to design a game that adhered to some semblance of amphibian reality?

It took a few more weeks of playing for me to start feeling bothered about Pocket Frogs for another reason. My oldest was hooked. She had been breeding frogs, taming frogs (namely, showing them how to hop and catch flies), and getting shipments of new eggs arriving with each level she mastered. But then she got a message on the screen. If she wanted to receive her new frog eggs immediately, she would have to buy some special “stamps” that would ensure expedited delivery. The cost of the stamps? $2.99 — in real money, not virtual coins.

We talked about whether she really wanted the frogs that badly. I reminded her that these were frogs that were so “not real” that they didn’t even grow from tadpoles. No matter. She was ready to spend a few weeks of allowance money to get the new eggs — now.

It was a learning moment for me as much as for her. Evidently some apps seem free until you realize that to play at the level you’d like, as soon as you’d like, you’ll have to pony up a few more bucks, and then a few more, and a few more. It was like a virtual tollbooth had appeared on the gaming highway with no warning. The Federal Trade Commission is now looking into the propriety of offering games without some kind of alert about these “in-app” purchases, which were the subject of a great Washington Post story in February. Some have argued that children’s content, at least, should come with warning labels. (But Pocket Frogs, to be clear, was never marketed to me as a children’s game – it’s just that NimbleBit had already wowed us with Scoops — a game blessedly void of tollbooths, at least so far. Like most parents, I didn’t do any real vetting. I just pressed “Install.”)

I know what many of you are thinking. C’mon, it’s just a game. True. But it could be so much more than that too. Designers could be helping to generate sparks of insight for young and old about the way the real world works and what to explore within it. When those kinds of apps arrive – I hope they do — I’ll be a lot less resentful about putting another $2.99 on my credit card. Better yet, I won’t be faced with those surprise tollbooths in the first place.

Lisa Guernsey is the director of the Early Education Initiative at the New America Foundation.  In her research and writing, she works to elevate dialogue about early childhood education by analyzing new findings in developmental psychology and spotlighting best practices in homes and classrooms, from infant-and-toddler care through the early grades of elementary school. Ms. Guernsey has been writing about education, technology and social science for nearly 15 years as a former staff writer at the New York Times and at the Chronicle of Higher Education, and currently as an editor and contributor to the Early Ed Watch blog. Her most recent book is Into the Minds of Babes: How Screen Time Affects Children From Birth to Age 5.

At SCE, we aim to support and influence the emerging world of anywhere, anytime, any-device, access-for-all learning. Our vision, of course, relies heavily on high-quality digital media, and on aiding the people and organizations with the potential to create tomorrow’s innovative digital learning products.

But we (and the field) have a problem: No one knows where digital learning’s killer apps will come from.

Here is a quick take on potential sources of high-quality digital learning media—which I’ll define (for simplicity’s sake) as age-appropriate, highly engaging, and efficacious for learning.

Big Ed

Major textbook publishers like Pearson and The McGraw-Hill Companies boast an unmatched distribution channel–their products already reach tens of millions of kids in schools. They also have capital to deploy on new technology platforms, and promising (though far from market-ready) projects aimed at bridging the education-entertainment gap. But our existing education system is very profitable for textbook publishers; so they don’t have much incentive to disrupt that system with new learning models or products promoting unconventional, higher-order skills (e.g. systems thinking).

Entertainment, Technology, and Media Conglomerates

Products from entertainment businesses like The Walt Disney Company and News Corporation and tech giants like Microsoft and Google dominate the other half of children’s waking hours. Yet none of these companies have succeeded in breaking through in education. Again, this is as an incentives problem: It is highly profitable to create entertainment products with minimal learning value (Grand Theft Auto); and only slightly less profitable to create products that seem to be educational, but aren’t (Baby Einstein). Yet it is not very lucrative, at least in the short term, to do research and design work necessary to create high-quality digital learning media. The same dynamics will hamper toy companies as they become more techie and learning-focused.

Digital Learning Start-ups

The great cliché of innovation is that it arises from smaller, lighter, nimbler, younger, higher-risk organizations. There’s a reason this became cliché—in markets from television to enterprise software, it describes events quite well. Already, digital learning has its share of promising start-ups started by engineers, entrepreneurs, teachers, and parents. Here’s the rub: The sector suffers from a middle management talent shortage; not enough incubators or service providers; not enough distribution channels; shifting business environments; and many of the same profits-over-deep-learning incentive constraints (in this, case from venture capitalists) that experienced entertainment and education companies face.

Social Sector, Government, and Academia

I am lumping these together partly for brevity and partly because they often share commonalities: a pro-social vision, significant funds, and high-IQ talent; combined with unwieldy bureaucracies, top-down decision-making, and a lack of understanding of market forces. They can succeed—just look at Sesame Street or, more recently, Gamestar Mechanic. But it’s unclear that in a distributed, networked world, civic-minded organizations can create competitive products. The real wild card is the open educational resources movement. It’s hard to underestimate OER’s potential after visiting a site like Khan Academy. Nevertheless, how to create quality standards and achieve financial sustainability remain open questions.

Kids

Don’t laugh—look at what teens are creating in the Scratch community, ThinkQuest competitions, and the STEM Challenge. The concept of kid designer-entrepreneurs raises concerns (privacy, commercialism), but if the field is serious about helping kids learn to create and innovate, we need to take seriously what kids are already creating.

All of these groups will play crucial roles in the new learning ecosystem. Our challenge is to influence the market and help face down the problems I highlight above, so the field can work together in the service of kids’ learning. Disagree? Argue with me in the comments or find me at the Cooney Forum.

Ryan Blitstein is Executive Director of SCE, a social investment organization that connects talent and innovation with market forces to drive social change. He oversees SCE’s Digital Learning program, which focuses on the potential of digital media technologies to help children learn and practice both traditional and 21st century skills. Mr. Blitstein serves as board treasurer of Global Press Institute, a nonprofit that trains and employs women in the developing world as investigative reporters, and he is a member of the Chicago Committee of Human Rights Watch, one of the world’s leading independent organizations dedicated to defending and protecting human rights.

We are thrilled to have an outstanding lineup of speakers who will be participating in the Learning from Hollywood Forum. Here, Carla Sanger, President and CEO of LA’s BEST After School Enrichment Program, highlights uses of digital media for expanding kids’ experiences of the world, developing understanding and empathy for others, and energizing kids for learning. Drawing from her expertise in youth development, Sanger also emphasizes the importance of critically evaluating the media kids use and using digital media as one of many tools to address students’ individual learning styles and needs.

Cooney Center: What concerns you most about the impact that digital media are having on children’s healthy growth, learning, and development? What excites you about the potential of new technologies to support learning?

Carla Sanger: While there has been concern for decades over children zoning out in the front of the television, it seems to me that today’s technology, particularly with the advent of portable devices, poses an even greater threat to children’s socialization, critical thinking, and skill development. When digital media is either used as a form of sedation or babysitting to pacify children without or in lieu of direct engagement in conversation and interaction with adults and their peers, children have fewer opportunities to develop diverse interests, enhance fundamental skills and learn to decode or think critically about what they view.

Parents and after school staff are excited by technologies that encourage creativity and that are vehicles for rich skill-building experiences, such as video and audio recording and editing, animation and robotics. Additionally, technologies that provide children who have limited experience outside their own communities with appropriate portals to explore the world and connect with other people and cultures can be very beneficial, such as Skype, podcasting, webcasting and interactive websites. “Virtual” field trips can be great learning experiences for young students.

Is there a better way to optimize the time and effort that kids are spending with entertainment media?

The more products are designed with the capacity to motivate, energize, engage and physically activate students with more than eye/hand coordination, the greater the value of the time spent with entertainment media.

The reality is that children are consuming unprecedented levels of entertainment media, much of it unsupervised. In addition to maximizing consumption of high-quality, relevant, intelligent and informative media, children need guidance from adults to deconstruct individual media messages and develop comprehensive media literacy, rather than perceive all that they watch as authentic and accurate.

Are there new values, skills or perspectives which media can promote to help children prepare for work and play in a global world?

To the staff of LA’s BEST, the greatest value or perspective which media can promote is that there is more than one way to live. Experiences that promote decision-making, build empathy, reduce a tolerance for violence, help young people manage anger and control impulses, and also awaken intellect and creativity are the most valuable, in my opinion, for youth development.

The concept of “digital citizenship” is becoming increasingly more important as children grown into older users of technology. Media that instill values such as online courtesy and etiquette and promote online safety should be targeted at young users, just as good manners are taught, so that from an early age children are discerning and equipped to interact appropriately online.

Are the fields of entertainment or creative media at cross-purposes with education? What are important synergies or connection points to probe? Are there key responsibilities for digital media producers and educators in our new age?

Creative media can be at cross-purposes with education when activities are promoted as overly important to a child’s optimal growth while they may be out of sync with a child’s individual readiness or developmental capacity. For example, programs that purport to teach babies to read, or enhance neural development in infants, and so on.

An important aspect of a child’s education is the development of critical thinking skills, and entertainment/creative media can either support that development or discourage it. Given the power and influence of global entertainment, these industries have a responsibility to create programming and tools that challenge children to think independently and use their imaginations. Adults working alongside children in turn have a role in ensuring that there is access to high-quality media, and in providing guidance to interpret and decode images, messages, narratives and statements of fact. Creativity can be stifled in young children when they imagine all fairies to look like Tinkerbell, for example.

If you had a $10 billion budget to spend to promote the learning of children under the age of 10, what would be your highest priorities? What role would digital media and technologies play in advancing these priorities?

If I had 10 billion dollars to spend, I would use it to re-vamp teacher training institutions to educate teachers about the value of connecting to each child and his/her learning style, and equip teachers to effectively probe for what children already know, are curious about, and eager to learn. Teachers must be in a position to observe, listen to and understand the individual children they teach, and be able to connect to children’s knowledge and experience as well as to high-quality digital media.

President and Chief Executive Officer of LA’s BEST (Better Educated Students for Tomorrow) After School Enrichment Program for 21 years, Carla Sanger, M.Ed. has been a specialist in children’s education policy and advocacy for more than 39 years in the public and private sectors. Over the course of her career, she has been a public school teacher, curriculum writer, supervisor of day care services for the state of New Jersey, Executive Director of LA Child Care & Development Council, President of the California Children’s Council and co-chair of the California State Department of Education Task Force on School Readiness.

Tune into PBS this weekend to see Joan Ganz Cooney Center’s Executive Director Michael H. Levine, PhD on Richard Heffner’s The Open Mind. The program airs on Channel 13 in New York (check your local listings) this Saturday, April 23rd at 12:00 p.m. Together, Michael and Richard discuss some of the top concerns about kids, who are “Growing Up Digital.” The episode raises a question doubtlessly on many people’s minds: Is growing up digital good for kids, or bad?

Amid recent headlines like “Wired for Distraction” and “Hooked on Gadgets,” the Cooney Center continues to look at digital media as potential tools for children’s learning. In a fascinating discussion on various “elements of digital promise,” Michael describes the current relationship between digital media and children across the fields of educational policy, the media and technology industry and research. He suggests that we’re in need of a “new learning equation” where innovations in digital media result in research-based products built on educational standards. We hope you’ll tune in to hear how the Cooney Center is currently working towards that goal, and for a more in-depth look at how we can move towards this new learning equation and hopefully “turn distraction to unlimited potential.”

Watch the full episode. See more The Open Mind.

This May, a group of leaders from the creative media industries, education, research, policy, and philanthropy will come together at USC’s School of Cinematic Arts for the Joan Ganz Cooney Center’s Leadership Forum, where we will spend two days considering innovative ways to support young people’s learning with and through media. 

Entertainment is often considered the antithesis of education. Children go to school and learn; then they come home and “relax” or “unwind.” The dichotomy between entertaining content and educational content is presupposed — a wall of the church-and-state variety.

As we reinvent education for children of the 21st century, this wall must come down. The entertainment industry has understood the power of media for decades. When Sesame Street debuted over 40 years ago, it was hardly the only television program geared toward children. But it was a first-of-its-kind educational program for children. That – broadcast-only – is a solution that doesn’t do enough today. The media-as-entertainment industry is moving toward interactive, platform agnostic solutions – content which is available 24/7, blends the viewer’s feedback into the product, and increasingly expands to include the views and opinions of the viewer’s social circle as well.

This is natural progression which travels in tandem with advancements in technology. In today’s world, not only are children “always connected,” but they’re also expecting a very different media environment than in generations prior. No longer is media broadcast-only. There is a back-and-forth, and that back and forth is expected by the user.

Children engage with content via a cornucopia of media options at their fingertips. Video games, MP3 players, television, DVD players, movies on demand, computers, iPads, etc. are ubiquitous and are used as much as seven and a half hours a day by children. That’s as much time as they spend in school! And if we’re going to compete for the minds and attention of children, we have to be just as engaging as the other content out there.

And it will be necessary in the classroom.

At the end of February, Karen Cator, Director of the Office of Educational Technology at the U.S. Department of Education, announced that the Obama administration wanted to move away from paper-and-ink textbooks and toward 1s and 0s — in her words, “from a predominantly print environment to a digital one.” But she made specific effort to note that the goal is not a mere translation from paper into, say, PDF. Rather, Cator stated that the Administration wanted to take advantage of a core, inherent trait of digital tools: interactivity.

That’s the direction we’re moving in. From iPhone applications which allow child-initiated play (in an educational way!) and console-based games which are both fun and foster learning, Sesame Workshop is striving to meet the adapting needs of today’s child. We’re turning books into e-books which allow children to play with Grover, not just read his story. And we are constantly looking at new ways to get engaging, educational content on every platform in a child’s life.

But we can only do so much. We hope that those who are already in the business of producing interactive, entertaining content – Hollywood, so to speak – join us in making sure that children’s media, regardless of platform, is as educational as it is engaging.

Gary E. Knell is President and Chief Executive Officer of Sesame Workshop. Mr. Knell leads the nonprofit educational organization in its mission to create innovative, engaging content that maximizes the educational power of all media to help children reach their highest potential.

On April 5, 2009, 11-year-old Carl Walker-Hoover hanged himself after enduring constant bullying at school, despite his mother’s weekly pleas to the school to address the problem. It was the fourth suicide of a middle-school aged child linked to bullying that year. That same spring, Cartoon Network’s audience research with young people 6-14 found that of all the concerns kids had—concerns including parents who were out of work and worries about wars Americans were fighting overseas—bullying was one that stood out. It was highlighted by the majority of kids not because they were being bullied, but because they’d watched friends get bullied and had done nothing to stop it. It wasn’t that they didn’t care; rather, they told us they were afraid and that they didn’t know what to do.

CN’s Stop Bullying: Speak Up emerged from our audience’s need for useful information, specific actions to take, and the desire to protect their friends.

Cartoon Network is a youth entertainment brand. While news and information experts at CNN, Headline News and CNN Student News are corporate partners, our work is providing our audiences with humor, adventure and drama that broadens their horizons and takes them out of their everyday lives. This project offered an opportunity to use our entertainment skills to provide information our audience asked for and needed. Following a proven model (thank you Joan Ganz Cooney!), we asked experts for subject matter advice; researched creative approaches with key target audiences; and went to the best of our comedy writers to spin academic straw into entertainment gold.

Kids told us they didn’t want to see celebrities or superheroes teach them these skills, that just didn’t feel real; they wanted to see kids who looked like they might actually get bullied. And they were really clear about the fact that they wanted us to show them what to do, not just tell them. CJ, Jackson and Ali—the slacker-esque stars of CN’s then-new series Dude, What Would Happen—fit the bill perfectly. With scripts that had them not just messaging, but modeling behaviors kids could safely emulate; and a digital platform that let players spread the word that bullying wasn’t cool and that there were ways you could safely step in and not become the next victim, CN’s Stop Bullying: Speak Up launched in October 2010 using the best properties of entertainment media to inform, educate and empower a generation.

Alice Cahn is Cartoon Network’s VP  for Social Responsibility, directing content and the implementation of outreach and pro-social initiatives across all of the Cartoon Network divisions.  Prior to joining Cartoon Network, Cahn served as Managing Director of the Markle Foundation’s Interactive Media for Children Program.  Cahn came to Markle from Sesame Workshop where she served as President of the Television, Film and Video group.  From 1993-1998 Cahn was head of children’s programming for PBS.

A few weeks ago I blogged about Fisher Price’s new iPhone case, a plastic case that protects the devices from the poking, prodding, and sticky fingers of young children. I commented on how we’ve figured out how to protect the device from sticky fingers, but questioned who’s protecting those sticky fingers from the device. Well, it seems like Apple has taken one step in the right direction.

Recent accounts of children unknowingly racking up thousands of dollars through in-app purchases of virtual goods in games such as Smurfs Village prompted Apple to change its policy for the way purchases are made within iPhone and iPad applications. In the old operating system, there was a 15-minute window after an application was downloaded that allowed purchases to be made without having to re-enter a password. In the updated operating system, a password must be entered again when making an in-app purchase. There has been a great deal of debate about whether this initiative is enough. My opinion? Not even close. But I think we are barking up the wrong tree.

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