While many young people are developing a broad range of sophisticated skills online, they also are experiencing new challenges, including how to manage their online identity, how to behave ethically, how to assess the credibility of information, and how best to participate in civic and social settings. MacArthur-supported research on ethics, credibility, and civic participation suggests a set of skills young people will need to navigate online spaces.

Young people's ethics are often driven by self-interest, said Howard Gardner, a leading thinker about education and human development and professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education.

With support from the MacArthur Foundation, Gardner's GoodPlay Project is exploring the impact of digital media on young people's ethical development, with a focus on identity, privacy, ownership and authorship, credibility, and participation. Based on the results of a survey of young people on these themes, Gardner is developing curricula for parents and teachers on how to teach ethics in the digital age.

"Until new digital media, young people simply dealt with the people who lived near them. If they behaved in an immoral way, someone from the neighborhood would chastise or correct them," said Gardner. "Today, any young person can communicate with a number of people around the world and it could last forever. Nobody is prepared for that kind of world. You can send an e-mail by mistake and it lives forever. Ethically, it is a whole new ball game."

At the same time, Gardner said, youth are making important ethical decisions at a younger age than their parents did. "As a citizen, you are supposed to know the rules and not just promote self-interest. What is happening now is that this is falling on younger people."

Gardner said adult mentors are as important online as they are in young people's offline lives to help them make an "ethical landscape" online.

Unlike prior generations' experience, the primary sources of information for young people today are digital. The abundance of information online, however, can be overwhelming for children and adults. And determining what information is credible on the Web, where amateurs and experts can be indistinguishable, poses a challenge for all age groups.

"The need to evaluate credibility is more pressing now because we have access to so much more information," said Miriam Metzger, of the University of California, Santa Barbara. Metzger and Andrew Flanagin, also of UC Santa Barbara, conducted the first systematic survey of youth designed to assess their strategies for gathering and sifting through information. Parents also participated in the survey.

Compared to traditional media, the online world has few filters that clue users about the authenticity of information. "A typical newscast has an anchor or a professional journalist who acts as a thought leader," she said, adding that the anchor's role is to help filter information for the audience. Digital media have resulted in "disintermediation," Metzger said, or the loss of such filters.

Most of the children surveyed said their parents taught them to be skeptical about information online and to take a more analytical approach to the information. Yet 89 percent of those surveyed by Metzger and Flanagin said that "some" to "a lot" of information online is credible. In addition, children report that the Internet is a more credible source of information for school papers or projects than books.

And though they are not very trusting of blogs, young people said Wikipedia was "somewhat believable." However, young people surveyed implied that people in general should be more skeptical about the online encyclopedia that invites entries from both amateurs and experts.

Digital media have also transformed the definition of community, raising new issues about civic engagement. Joe Kahne, a professor at Mills College in Oakland, Calif., is the lead researcher for a new MacArthur interdisciplinary research network that will study the impact of digital media on young people's political and civic participation.

"We've always associated local with geography, but that is no longer clear, in large part because of the power of the Internet," said Kahne, echoing Gardner's sentiments.

Historically, Kahne said, many theorists have understood democratic society to be developed and nurtured in local society. Because of digital media and human mobility, communities may not be geographically bound. Instead, they are bound by common interests, Kahne said. For example, more than a decade ago an international grassroots campaign to change trade policies emerged via the Internet.

The concept dovetails with Ito's research on interest-driven participation and young people's formation of online networks based on mutual hobbies.

Researchers and scholars are divided over the impact of digital media on civic participation. Some argue that the new media detract from engagement; others say they are generating a new type of participation. These are issues the research network will explore.

"We are on the cusp of one of the significant transformations in media and potentially in the nature of public participation. Young people are the best ones through which to look at this transformation," Kahne said.

Adults and educators have an important role to play in helping youth navigate this profound change, Ito said. "The ability to participate in a responsible way online is part of what kids have to learn about becoming responsible members of the public."