Just a quick note to let you all know that our book is currently on sale on Amazon for $29.92 (19% off) if you haven’t already picked it up.  More substantive posts will be forthcoming as we get caught up.  We just completed collecting data from about 1800 middle and high school students and will be spending the next couple of months analyzing everything.  Stay tuned…

Both Sameer and I will be at the Ophelia Project National Conference in Evanston, IL, Thursday and Friday this week (Oct. 16-17) talking about cyberbullying.  We will be presenting a couple of breakout sessions covering issues related to preventing and responding to cyberbullying incidents and legal issues facing educators.  If you are there, stop by and say hi!

When we first started exploring the issue of cyberbullying over 6 years ago, there weren’t very many of us out there. A very small handful of researchers were studying the problem and virtually nothing had been published in the academic literature. Now, thankfully, cyberbullying is being comprehensively studied by a number of competent research teams. Nevertheless, information from this important work is still slow to make it to the public who so desperately need it. It takes a long time (years in many cases) for a study to yield meaningful results, and even longer for those results to get into the hands of those who can make a difference. That is one of the reasons we started this Web site: to try to bridge the gap between research and practice.

We conducted our first preliminary study on cyberbullying in 2003 and those results didn’t make it into a journal until the spring of 2006. Even so, how many teachers and parents actually read journal articles? Not many, I’m afraid. So we launched cyberbullying.us as a platform from which we could disseminate our important work to those who can benefit most from it.

We continue to empirically study cyberbullying and other technological challenges facing adolescents and the adults who supervise them, but we have made a conscious decision to do a better job of getting that information out to the masses. That is why we spent over a year writing “Bullying beyond the Schoolyard” - because it is more likely that a teacher or parent will stumble across our book in the library than a journal article. We also have been presenting findings from our research in local presentations and workshops around the country for the last couple of years. As academics, it could be easy to simply sit in our offices and study and write about a social problem. While we think it is crucial to contribute to the academic knowledge base concerning cyberbullying, we also want to make sure those who need that knowledge can access it.

The next couple of years should provide valuable insights into the problem of cyberbullying. As I mentioned above, we are aware of several major research projects that are ongoing, in addition to the work that we continue to do. If you are interested in studying this problem and have questions about how to get started, feel free to drop us a line. We’re all in this together…

For those of you interested in purchasing our book, it is now on sale at Amazon.com for $21.41 which is 33% off the list price of $31.95.  This is such a good price you should maybe think about buying two copies!  We’re not sure how long the sale will last, but the book is still on track to be out by next Tuesday.

We are happy to report that our cyberbullying book is now expected to be in print on August 5th, 2008. We are very excited to have the book in our hands (and perhaps even more excited to have it in YOUR hands!). It represents the culmination of over five years of research and we worked very hard to make sure the book was comprehensive and easy to read. I will be doing a couple of presentations at the White Earth Communities Collaborative Brain Development Conference in Mahnomen, MN on August 13th and 14th and will have copies of the book available for purchase and signing. More info about this conference can be found here. We’ll post more details about the book as the release date approaches.

As regular readers know, we have been working on our cyberbullying book for well over a year. It is currently in the copy-editing phase and is still on track for publication in August. It goes without saying that we are extremely excited about this. It is a culmination of over five years of research. We truly believe that it will be the cyberbullying book for educators, parents, and others concerned about adolescent Internet use. Over the next several months we will be rolling out additional materials to supplement the book, including lesson plans, chapter quizzes, and ideas for how to work the information into your curriculum – both for adults and older teens. Stay tuned!