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Entries in Internet safety (17)

Thursday
Feb052009

If you don't tell your children you love them...

If you don't tell your children that you love them, they'll find someone online who will. - Moorhead police officer, Mike Detloff

Online predators are in the news again with 90,000 profiles of sex offenders being removed from MySpace. And because of the stories, the calls for blocking social networking sites in schools are being voiced again.

Thankfully Anne Collier at NetFamilyNews.org puts the issue into some sort of rational perspective in Sex offenders in social sites: Consider the facts:

  • Not all children are equally at risk of Net-related sexual exploitation (see "Enhancing Child Safety and Online Technologies" from the US's Internet Safety Technical Task Force, with a summary of all child-online-safety research to date).
  • A child's psychosocial makeup and family environment are better predictors of risk than the technology he or she uses (also from the ISTTF report).
  • The kids most at risk offline are those at risk online (see "Profile of a teen online victim" and the ISTTF report).
  • Sexual exploitation as a result of Internet activity (much less social networking) is statistically rare - "too low to calculate in the two national samples we conducted," the Crimes Against Children Research Center has told me.
  • The vast majority of teens - 91% - use social sites to keep in touch with friends they see frequently (mostly at school), not strangers ('07 Pew/Internet study).
  • The offenders in the vast majority of child sexual abuse cases are not strangers to their victims (multiple sources).
  • Despite the establishment of one or more public profiles of "teens" (fake profiles) on MySpace by the Pennsylvania attorney general's Child Predator Unit, "there has apparently not been one successful sting operation initiated on MySpace in the more than two years during which these sting profiles have been in existence" (see "Pennsylvania case study: Social networking risk in context").

Banning rather than teaching online safety strategies is the wrong approach. Period. Blocking access from schools pushes kids to using these sites in places that may have no adult monitoring at all. And while we do need to make sure all students are safe Internet users, are we going the extra mile with those kids who are most at risk? Those whose parents don't tell them that they love them?

Read and share Anne's full post. Get people asking smarter questions about the real Internet safety issues.

Wednesday
Jan142009

Just one more report - online safety

NetFamilyNews, Enhancing Child Safety & Online Technologies: Final Report of the Internet Safety Technical Task Force just came out at the end of December.

The executive summary does a nice job of summarizing the threats to minors online, acknowledges that most of the studies done were undertaken prior to the rise of social networking sites like Facebook, and recommends not just a technological solution to safety issues, but a broad based approach to help keep kids safe and savvy. (I am thinking the group may have learned a lot from Anne Collier and dayna boyd who served on it.)

Read this report, but also read Anne Collier's NetFamilyNews post "Key crossroads for Net safety: ISTTF report released." She writes about how this report might change the too common, fear-based approach to Internet safety to one that is "fact-base." Yeah!

She also writes:

One of the researchers' most important findings - information really helpful to parents, finally - is that a child's psychosocial makeup and the conditions surrounding him are more important predictors of online risk than the technology he uses. Not every child is equally at risk of anything online, including predation. The research shows 1) only a tiny minority of online youth are at risk of sexual exploitation resulting from Net activity, and these are at-risk kids in "real life," and 2) online risk of all forms - inappropriate behavior, content or contact, by peers or adults - has been present through all phases of the Web and all interactive technologies kids use; it doesn't show up only in social-network sites. It's rooted in user behavior, not in crime.

As one local police officer lecturing on Internet safety once said rather bluntly, "I tell parents that if they don't tell their kids that they love them, their kids will find somebody online who will."

I am sharing both Anne's blog post and the executive summary of this report at a parents' Internet safety night our library media department is hosting tomorrow evening. I am hoping, but not expecting, the parents of those children who might be most at risk will attend.

Monday
Oct062008

Facebook - an educational resource?

"Everyone charged with a criminal offence shall be presumed innocent until proved guilty according to law". Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms of the Council of Europe
Every website shall remain unblocked until proven to be "harmful to minors."
The Blue Skunk

I'm going to visit with our elementary principals' group in a couple weeks. I've (ominously) been asked to discuss Facebook  with them. One never knows the genesis of such a request, but it may center around why our district doesn't block such sites.

Or maybe it is purely academic curiosity. I hope so, but I think I will be prepared just in case.

I don't much care one way or the other if kids have access to Facebook itself at school. I am a very occasional and reluctant user of the service. I just don't get the appeal. (Although now that I am up to 60 friends, I may consider running for public office.) Its value on the surface seems recreational in nature and it's probably a nuisance trying to keep kids from using it.

But I do care that we give all Internet resources due process, just as we would give due process to any library or text book before before removing it from our schools.

For educators who don't use Facebook, it needs to placed in some kind of context beyond the scare stories on Dateline. Here are some things I think my principals ought to know about these kinds of social networking sites:

1. How and why people use sites like Facebook. I think I will show the short Common Craft video Social Networking in Plain English and share the Educause two-page document 7 Things You Should Know About Facebook II.

2. That there may be Informational value to having access to Facebook, and that really, we should be blocking based on content, not format. Along with both Obama and McCain, one of our favorite sons, a first year US Representative, uses Facebook to connect with his constituents:

Shouldn't students have access to this information?

3. Facebook is but a single manifestation of social networking, a means of communication and recreation that today's children are growing up with. Club Penguin and Webkinz are popular social networking sites for the pre-school set. Facebook is replacing e-mail as a preferred method of communication. Even educational gaming is becoming more social, as evidenced by new and emerging products like vMathLive.

4. Schools DO need to teach safety and privacy with all social networking tools. If we don't, who will? Educators need to know that privacy levels can be set on most sites and children need to know how to do this as well.

5. Safety issues need to be put in perspective by sharing reputable information resources such as Predators & cyberbullies: Reality check by Larry Magid & Anne Collier at ConnectSafely.org. report:

"we do not have a single case related to MySpace where someone has been abducted." - social media researcher danah boyd

Recommend the books MySpace Unraveled and Cyber-Safe Kids, Cyber-Savvy Teens: Helping Young People Learn to USe the Internet Safely and Responsibily. Emphasize that "reputation destruction" and cyberbullying are more likely hazards than predation.

Show:

and 

6. It's OK for individual buildings, libraries and classrooms to set their own rules on what is considered "productive" use of school time and technology. But a district-wide block needs to considered by a range of stakeholders after study, not as a knee-jerk response to any single request.

OK, readers. What would you do at a command performance of administrators asking for a discussion about Facebook? Help me out here...

  I just remembered that I addressed this issue a couple years ago, See also Seven Things All Adults Should Know About MySpace at Education World. Duh.