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12th April 2006

Online Dangers

posted in ethics, isafety |

Don’t Believe the Hype is a website sponsored by the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. It includes sections for kids titled:

  • Know the Dangers (on the web, in chatrooms, with IM, in email, P2P programs, and other spots online)
  • Situations to Avoid (physical danger, harassment and bullying, hurting others)
  • Surf Safer (identity privacy, not meeting F2F, responding wisely, and communicating with parents/guardians)

I think one of the best ways to help people (young and old) learn more about ethics is through case studies. These resources are excellent, but the big challenge is how to get students to ENGAGE with the content and ideas in ways that challenge their current ways of thinking, while encouraging them to consider other options or decisions. Unfortunately the resources on the site are predominantly textual. (Not any videos I could find.)

I suggest teachers use case studies/stories to help highlight the importance of PRACTICAL knowledge in each of these areas. It would be great if students could create digital stories to “set the stage” of a case study. Then that digital story could be used to jumpstart small group and classwide discussions on these issues. For different case studies, students could use graphic organizers to brainstorm consequences for the situation, and different options for each one.

Collecting and sharing these digital story case studies for online safety lessons would be a great project for an educational organization or institution to sponsor.

The online game linked from the site, ID The Creep, is conceptually OK but I’m not sure how long it would actually engage students. Again, the key to ethics development (in my view, that is what we are talking about with Internet safety: helping people make good ethical choices) is helping them connect with case studies and stories. These resources aren’t perfect, but they are free and certainly in line with some of the lessons we need to be offering to students as part of a larger educational program in digital citizenship.

The NetSmartz Workshop is another good website worth checking out on these subjects. The Blog Beware page includes some updated statistics on social networking and what parents should do together with their children. Again, unfortunately most of this is just text-based, but here is an opportunity for students and teachers to collaboratively author content related to these subjects. Thankfully, the report appears to be balanced, not sensationalizing the dangers and risks and leaving out all mention of benefits:

Blogs and social networking sites where people can meet, communicate, and interact have recently exploded in popularity. The number of visitors to MySpace went from 4.9 million in 2005 to currently over 67 million. Like most new technological developments, this brings both positive and negative implications, especially for parents and their children.

The majority of the activity on these sites is legal and can be positive. Young people who are curious connect with friends and seek like-minded individuals. However, many children and teens are not aware they are putting themselves in danger by giving out too much personal information and communicating with people they’ve only met online.

I’d like to see a read/write web digital storytelling website that specifically challenges educators and students around the globe to create digital stories addressing Internet safety, and permits them to share their creations via the website.

On this day..

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 12th, 2006 at 9:15 pm and is filed under ethics, isafety. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

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