How did the kids use the blogs?
Steve: For this study, we chose blogs as we wanted to have each kid privately detail his or her usage without being influenced by their peers. The only people who could see a participant’s blog were the researchers and the participants themselves. The kids kept essentially an online journal of their experiences during the week. The blogs offered the richness and immediacy that paper simply cannot do. I have an example of this. My favorite picture from the study was a picture of a classroom with the teacher up at the blackboard, back turned to the students. We had asked that the kids take a picture of the location of a given phone usage if possible. The picture was obviously taken from a camera phone and the person who posted it said that she had been playing a game to fend off boredom during her math class. The picture really made us feel like we were there in the classroom with her, and it would have been really difficult and intrusive to have a researcher attempt be there to capture
