{"id":30,"date":"2015-01-30T22:50:43","date_gmt":"2015-01-30T22:50:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.scu.edu\/eolsoncomm123a\/?p=30"},"modified":"2015-01-30T22:50:43","modified_gmt":"2015-01-30T22:50:43","slug":"franktown-rocks-or-does-it","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.scu.edu\/eolsoncomm123a\/2015\/01\/30\/franktown-rocks-or-does-it\/","title":{"rendered":"Franktown Rocks! (Or does it?)"},"content":{"rendered":"

Franktown Rocks<\/a> is a social networking experience targeted to kids 8-12 that combines games and music in a massively multi-player online game. Users create their account as a skunk, pig, bear, or hamster. There are two chat level options: free type or pre-typed. An email is needed but will only be contacted if the user forgets his\/her password. A birthdate is never asked.<\/p>\n

At Franktown, you can earn money by voting in polls or playing games. This is a positive aspect of the website. The entire concept of the town promotes and socializes kids for community involvement and political participation. The multi-player games are easy ways to meet other users. Another strength to Franktown is its ability to bridge distances. Quite a couple users said they were from the UK. Others said they were from the US, including Kentucky and California. One user said he attended NEMIS (which, I looked up, is the New Middle East International School in Saudi Arabia).<\/p>\n

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When you\u2019re moving around the town, you can listen to a music stream that includes artists like Taylor Swift, the Jackson 5, the Jonas Brothers, Toby Mac, and Hannah Montana. If you become a paying member, you can create your own playlist with a bigger selection of songs (including hip-hop, country, and international). I played some games at the \u201cRecording Studio,\u201d which also offered 1-2 minute non-animated, music lesson videos for guitars, drums, and the keyboard. This was my absolute favourite aspect of the website; it\u2019s educational and uniquely about music instead of subjects like literacy or math. At Franktown\u2019s movie theatre, users can watch short clips of videos, even from works like Up, School of Rock, Pee Wee Herman, and Veggie Tales. These music and movies elements are two major strengths of the site by showing age-appropriate and age-relevant media.<\/p>\n

Most conversations seemed pretty trivial and random, like \u201cWhat\u2019s up?\u201d or \u201cHow\u2019s your day?\u201d but some were inappropriate. zxy_josh asked, \u201cAre you Arab?\u201d and \u201cDo you ride camels?\u201d and \u201cWhy is there so much unrest in the Middle East?\u201d Another girl responded, \u201cArab and Proud\u201d and \u201cYou are very na\u00efve.\u201d Others were sexual; \u201cpssy\u201d and \u201cprn\u201d frequently came up in conversations. I asked, \u201cWhy are you saying these things?\u201d and one user replied, \u201cCuz you can\u2019t stop me.\u201d Franktown Rocks does have an intricate system of electronic and human monitoring, according to their online policy manual. In fact, I tried to type out \u201cporn\u201d and was given an immediate message that the content was not permitted. I understand that it is very difficult to realistically maintain these kinds of boundaries, especially when offering the free text option to users.\u00a0I read the site\u2019s privacy policy and parent manual. They state that user activity is carefully monitored by human and electronic means. The site also has a No-Cyber Bullying policy which educates its online staff about its dangers and disciplinary steps.<\/p>\n

\"fr4\"<\/a> \"\"<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Franktown Rocks is a social networking experience targeted to kids 8-12 that combines games and music in a massively multi-player online game. Users create their account as a skunk, pig, bear, or hamster. There are two chat level options: free … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1062,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"qubely_global_settings":"","qubely_interactions":"","kk_blocks_editor_width":"","_kiokenblocks_attr":"","_kiokenblocks_dimensions":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-30","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"gutentor_comment":0,"qubely_featured_image_url":null,"qubely_author":{"display_name":"eolson","author_link":"https:\/\/blogs.scu.edu\/eolsoncomm123a\/author\/eolson\/"},"qubely_comment":0,"qubely_category":"Uncategorized<\/a>","qubely_excerpt":"Franktown Rocks is a social networking experience targeted to kids 8-12 that combines games and music in a massively multi-player online game. Users create their account as a skunk, pig, bear, or hamster. There are two chat level options: free … Continue reading →","post_mailing_queue_ids":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.scu.edu\/eolsoncomm123a\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.scu.edu\/eolsoncomm123a\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.scu.edu\/eolsoncomm123a\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.scu.edu\/eolsoncomm123a\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1062"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.scu.edu\/eolsoncomm123a\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=30"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.scu.edu\/eolsoncomm123a\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":37,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.scu.edu\/eolsoncomm123a\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30\/revisions\/37"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.scu.edu\/eolsoncomm123a\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=30"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.scu.edu\/eolsoncomm123a\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=30"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.scu.edu\/eolsoncomm123a\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=30"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}