Thanks to everyone who joined our live video feed last night of the Teen Internet Workshop for Parents! It was great to have your interaction and contribution to the discussion. And those of you who started making my cell phone take off with text messages during the Facebook demonstration, thanks. lol

If you missed the live video feed, but still want to watch the seminar, I have the video archived on Blip.tv, so feel free to check it out there. I also have it embedding at the end of this post.

Unfortunately, I had a LOT more content to review than I thought I did. Ten pages of notes is a lot, I know, but the demonstrations took longer than I anticipated. The seminar ended up lasting two and a half hours and that’s even with skipping the entire World of Warcraft section and several other sites I planned to show. I should have just stuck to one or two basic sites, like Facebook and MySpace, rather than making parents feel overloaded with information. Oh well. You live and learn, I guess. A couple other churches in the area have asked me to come give the presentation at their church, so I’ll have more chances to make it better. Too bad my youth group’s parents had to be the guinea pigs, though.

About getting my notes
A lot of people have asked that I make my notes available, but I haven’t yet decided if I’m going to or not. It’s clearly not because I want to just keep them to myself because you all know I give away pretty much anything of quality that passes through my hands. My concern is that people will take these notes and teach from them while not really knowing what in the world they’re talking about. If anyone teaches on this subject, it’s critical that they don’t circumvent the learning and research process involved. I’m not trying to be snotty or anything, I just want to set anyone up to do a disservice to the parents in their group. I dunno. What do you think?

My main resources for this seminar
Here’s a list of the main resources I used for preparing for this seminar. I HIGHLY recommend Anastasia Goodstein’s book, “Totally Wired,” linked below to all parents and anyone who works with youth, regardless of whether you plan to teach on the subject or not.

• Totally Wired: What Teens and Tweens Are Really Doing Online by Anastasia Goodstein
• Teens and the Internet CNN interview with Anastasia Goodstein
• Internet Caucus Advisory to Congress
• World of Warcraft FAQs for Christians
• My own experience from being a user of each of these sites.

Click To Play

Posted on November 7, 2007