Please vote for Sex Ed Online at SXSW.com

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Please support my efforts to get the SXSW Interactive Festival to accept my proposal for a panel I would like to host during the March 13-17, 2009 conference.

The SXSW Interactive Festival (http://sxsw.com/interactive) is an industry conference for web developers and digital creatives, held in Austin and now in its 15th year. These days the conference has become so popular that it gets hundreds of proposals, like mine, from people who would like to present at the conference. To help them sort out what people what to hear, the conference organizers now use a web-based panel picker. I’m writing to ask you to please visit and use the panel picker and to place a vote on it for my proposal and leave a comment.

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==> Please go to http://panelpicker.sxsw.com/ and, in the search box, enter “Sex Ed” in order to quickly find the listing for my proposal, place your vote and leave a comment. The panel picker will be active until August 29. Please act now!
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Watch my video plug:
http://www.facebook.com/video/video.php?v=21477839524&ref=nf

It will take you less than 3 minutes and costs nothing, but you must open an account on the panel picker to post a comment. You are not signing onto any e-mail lists by giving your information, and you do not need to attend the conference nor must you have attended it in the past in order to vote for my panel. While votes to rate the proposal (1-5 stars) are valuable, I’m told that what really counts with the organizers it is having comments written about why someone would be a good speaker and/or why the topic is of interest. So please vote for my idea and comment!

Here is the title and description for the panel I am proposing:

Sex Ed Online: How Teens Self Savvy

Creators of popular online teen sexuality content—including the Midwest Teen Sex Show and Scarleteen.com—community educators, scholars and advocates discuss teenagers, sex, and the Internet. Content developers, parents and teens: Bring your questions, fears and hopes. We’ll answer generational quandaries. Sexy prizes for the best questions.

And here are more details:

I’m very excited about the wonderful women who will be on this panel: Karen Rayne PhD, Heather Corinna, Nikol Hasler, Kris Gowan PhD.

* Karen Rayne earned her Ph.D. in Educational Psychology, which she puts to good use educating parents about how to talk with their teens about sex and romance. She also provides comprehensive sex education to teenagers.
* Heather Corinna is a sex educator and activist, founder and editor of Scarleteen.com, and author of “S.E.X.: The All-You-Need-to-Know Progressive Sexuality Guide to Get You Through High School and College.” Heather, via her website Scarleteen, serves tens of thousands of teens and young adults internationally every day, making sure they have a trusted place to ask questions they can’t ask anyone else.
* Nikol Hasler is one-third of a highly entertaining podcast, “The Midwest Teen Sex Show.” A Midwestern mother of three (who isn’t afraid to use her children in the service of sex education) Nikol has no formal training as a sex educator but along with her co-creators Guy Clark and Britney Barber, she has created a great sex education tool, playing with stereotypes not just about sex, but about age, race, class, and orientation in a way that is engaging and opinionated enough to be useful.
* Kris Gowan has a Master’s in Education in Human Development and Psychology and a PhD in Child and Adolescent Development. She is the author of “Sexual Decisions” (Scarecrow Press, 2003) and started www.teensforum.com (but left before it became overly commercialized) Her research has focused on healthy relationships/sexuality in adolescence and lately on positive youth development and the intersection between youth, the Internet and sexual development/sexual identity.

I, Karen Kreps, will be moderating the panel. I have more than two decades developing interactive content (www.netingenuity.com), and I’ve written and published the book, “Intimacies: Secrets of Love, Sex & Romance,” a collection of columns I writes for The Good Life magazine. See http://trueintimacies.com. For six years, I’ve hosted monthly public discussions about love, sex and romance. I’ve attended every SXSWi and twice served on panels.

Some of the questions that will be answered on this panel include: 1. What do teens want to know about sex? 2. How do they use the Internet to find answers? 3. Which social media tools provide the best sexual education? 4. What positive or negative impact can the Web have on teen sexuality? 5. At what ages should online use by children and teens be monitored? 6. Are parents abdicating their roles as sex educators to the Internet? 7. Does online info encourage or discourage sexual experimentation by teens? 8. What role does the Internet play in educating youth about sex? 9. Can the government regulate online sex education and should it? 10. Can online sex info be trusted for accuracy?

I will be most grateful for any support you can offer and hope that you will please use the Panel Picker and vote for my proposal. Thanks!

==> Please go to http://panelpicker.sxsw.com/ and, in the search box, enter “Sex Ed” in order to quickly find the listing for my proposal, place your vote and leave a comment. The panel picker will be active until August 29. Please act now!

KK