Warning: This post solicits audience participation! It’s a crowd-sourcing experiment to find out what kinds of resources content producers and developers are interested in. Help us out! Puh-leaaasssseeee???

If you follow us on Twitter (@noCrusts), you might have noticed a bit of a tweet-storm last week, particularly with the hashtag #FredForward. (I highly recommend checking out all tweets related to the tag.)

I’m actually not talking about the auto-tuned Fred Rogers that’s going around, though I recommend that if you haven’t seen it yet. Rather, Fred Forward is the bi-annual conference of the Fred Rogers Center for Early Learning and Children’s Media, which this year focused on “A Framework for Quality in Digital Media for Young Children.”

The Framework is different than the statement on children’s technology use that was issued by the Fred Rogers Center with the National Association for Education of Young Children earlier this year. (I talked about the statement briefly in this post)

Taking the recommendations in the joint statement one step further, the Fred Rogers Center is working toward providing resources or guidelines to developers on creating quality educational media for kids, otherwise known as the Framework for Quality. At the conference, a number of brilliant minds, including researchers, policy makers, and content producers, were there to weigh in on the discussion, much of which is captured on the #FredForward tweets. Dave Schlafman from CloudKid and I were on a panel moderated by Alice Wilder where we discussed four games (Tinkatolli, Cut the Rope, Toca Tea Party, and Dance Central) and what makes them quality.

Since the conference, my thoughts have turned from the idea of what is quality media for children to what kinds of information is most useful for those of us who are making kids media? And so I turn to you, because I’m really curious to know what is useful to developers, particularly those developing interactive materials. (The folks at the Fred Rogers Center want to know, too!)

Crowd-sourcing time!

Are statements of quality, like the current framework recommendation food for thought? Or do you prefer nitty-gritty specifics, like design principles and tips? What are useful tools, resources, guidelines that you use in your process? Where do you find yourself saying, “I wish there was information on…”?

Because I’m a data-collecting fiend, I created a Google form to capture the answers! Follow this link please!

If we get some good responses (caveat emptor!), we’ll post the answers in a later blog. And if you don’t have enough hashtags to follow, check out #GLS or #GLS8 for the tweets related to the Games + Learning + Society conference in Madison, WI. Otherwise, as always, find us @noCrusts on Twitter or kidsGotGame@noCrusts.com.

Photo (c) elginwx