"The most deadly misconception about American youth has been the sexual predator panic,” [boyd] said. “The model we have of the online sexual predator is this lurking man who reaches out on the Internet and grabs a kid. And there is no data that support that. The vast majority of sex crimes against kids involve someone that kid trusts, and it’s overwhelmingly family members."
- Although Facebook’s minimum age is 13, parents of 13- and 14-year-olds report that, on average, their child joined Facebook at age 12.
- Half (55%) of parents of 12-year-olds report their child has a Facebook account, and most (82%) of these parents knew when their child signed up. Most (76%) also assisted their 12-year old in creating the account.
- A third (36%) of all parents surveyed reported that their child joined Facebook before the age of 13, and two-thirds of them (68%) helped their child create the account.
- Half (53%) of parents surveyed think Facebook has a minimum age and a third (35%) of these parents think that this is a recommendation and not a requirement.
- Most (78%) parents think it is acceptable for their child to violate minimum age restrictions on online services.
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While there is merit to thinking about how to strengthen parent permission structures, focusing on this obscures the issues that COPPA is intended to address: data privacy and online safety. COPPA predates the rise of social media. Its architects never imagined a world where people would share massive quantities of data as a central part of participation. It no longer makes sense to focus on how data are collected; we must instead question how those data are used. Furthermore, while children may be an especially vulnerable population, they are not the only vulnerable population. Most adults have little sense of how their data are being stored, shared, and sold.
Why are we legislating against the medium and not the behavior(s)? Before computer-mediated communication was really possible, didn’t teachers use paper and pens/pencils to get private messages to students? Did we ever ban paper and pens/pencils? Lots of inappropriate behaviors occurred in band rooms and cars and… We don’t ban those. Aren’t there ways to draft sexual harassment policies to cover the behaviors that policymakers are concerned about without singling out social media” or the Internet or…? Shouldn’t we encourage educators to model good/positive digital citizenship instead?
While 81% of tech coordinators and administrators felt that their schools and districts adequately taught [cybersafety], only 51% of teachers agreed with the statement, “My school/school district does an adequate job of preparing students regarding cyberethics, online safety, and computer security issues.”
Moreover, while approximately 60-70% of administrators and tech coordinators said that teaching cyberethics, cybersecurity, and cybersafety were required, only about 30% of teachers agreed that was the case.
teachers who get training in Internet safety restrict Internet access even more out of fear and confusion
Pre-teens around the world are revealing a remarkable amount personal information on Facebook. This has led the U.K. department of education, Ofsted, to recommend that schools teach students how to use the Internet safely, rather than ban it outright
We Filter Websites At School!· Students will not know what to do when they are at home and they come across malicious or inappropriate websites.· Searches may confuse and overwhelm students at home as they will be in unfamiliar territory.· While at school students will not be able to use many interesting and exciting websites that they can use at home.· At school we will not be able to help students who have issues with social software sites like Facebook.· Because we filter websites at school we cannot prepare your child to be net savvy. That responsibility now rests firmly on your shoulders. Good Luck!
Newsflash: Social media is here to stay. So is texting. So is facebook. Embrace and educate. Taking the easy road sets the wrong example.
One place you can comment on this proposal is here.
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You’re educators. Educate. Yourselves and your students.
Rather than encourage “security theater” and draconian, ignorant* responses that aim to make people “feel” safer, focus on actually being safer.
Karen Cator, the chief of the U.S. Education Department’s office of educational technology, says that “people have very different ways of interpreting” CIPA, and Federal Communications Commission officials say the number of schools actually found in violation of the act is minute. Most violations that occur, they say, relate to the proper procedures for establishing filters, not the exposure of students to improper content.
"This is not considered a sexual assault, sir."
Based on surveys Barnes collected, the top five worries of parents are, in order:
- Kidnapping
- School snipers
- Terrorists
- Dangerous strangers
- Drugs
But how do children really get hurt or killed?
- Car accidents
- Homicide (usually committed by a person who knows the child, not a stranger)
- Abuse
- Suicide
- Drowning
We need to be preparing students for ethical and constructive lives outside the school firewall and the hopefully watchful eyes of parents at home. This is a difficult proposition which school leaders, parents, and even national leaders continue to have difficulty embracing.
Security is both a feeling and a reality. The propensity for security theater comes from the interplay between the public and its leaders.
When people are scared, they need something done that will make them feel safe, even if it doesn't truly make them safer. Politicians naturally want to do something in response to crisis, even if that something doesn't make any sense.
Often, this "something" is directly related to the details of a recent event. We confiscate liquids, screen shoes, and ban box cutters on airplanes. We tell people they can't use an airplane restroom in the last 90 minutes of an international flight. But it's not the target and tactics of the last attack that are important, but the next attack. These measures are only effective if we happen to guess what the next terrorists are planning.
If we spend billions defending our rail systems, and the terrorists bomb a shopping mall instead, we've wasted our money. If we concentrate airport security on screening shoes and confiscating liquids, and the terrorists hide explosives in their brassieres and use solids, we've wasted our money. Terrorists don't care what they blow up and it shouldn't be our goal merely to force the terrorists to make a minor change in their tactics or targets.
Our current response to terrorism is a form of "magical thinking." It relies on the idea that we can somehow make ourselves safer by protecting against what the terrorists happened to do last time.
Faced with concerns about Internet predators, cyberbullying, students’ sharing of inappropriate content on social networks, and the abundance of sexually explicit or violent content online, many school leaders and technology directors are placing tighter restrictions on Web access to shield students from potential harm.
Yet in Trussville and other like-minded school systems, educators and school boards are instead expanding access to online resources, including social-networking sites, for students and teachers. Instead of blocking the many exit ramps and side routes on the information superhighway, they have decided that educating students and teachers on how to navigate the Internet’s vast resources responsibly, safely, and productively - and setting clear rules and expectations for doing so - is the best way to head off online collisions.
“We are known in our district for technology, so I don’t see how you can teach kids 21st-century values if you’re not teaching them digital citizenship and appropriate ways of sharing and using everything that’s available on the Web,” said Shawn Nutting, the technology director for the Trussville district. “How can you, in 2009, not use the Internet for everything? It blows me away that all these schools block things out” that are valuable.
Justin Reich, a former high school teacher and a doctoral student at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, writes that filters are especially skilled at blocking out one group of Internet users at schools: teachers. Students, he says, know how to get around the filters, while teachers have no idea how to go about accessing blocked material online.
I’m getting SO tired of this. Rather than asking ourselves why students feel the need to go around the restrictions – and treating those answers with the genuine respect and interest that they deserve – we treat our students like we might little street urchin pickpockets.
Alfie Kohn said in The Homework Myth: “The way we think about discipline seems to assume, as educational psychologist Marilyn Watson remarked, that Thomas Hobbes’ famous characterization of life also applies to children: They are nasty, brutish, and short.”
We are missing tremendous opportunities to foster efficacious, self-regulating, independent, thoughtful children. We reap what we sow…
My comment on Sylvia Martinez's post.
“Research shows that there is virtually no risk of pedophiles coming to get kids because they found them online,” said Stephen Balkam, chief executive of the Family Online Safety Institute. While the debate makes this crime seem common, he said, all the talk is really just “techno-panic.”
Prof. David Finkelhor, director of the Crimes Against Children Research Center at the University of New Hampshire, says TV shows like the “Dateline NBC” program, “To Catch a Predator,” have falsely inflated the danger of the Internet.
“There is this characterization of pedophiles using the Internet as an L. L. Bean catalog, but this is not the way it happens,” he said. Predators are much more likely to look in chat rooms or other sites, he said, where teenagers are suggesting that they may be open to a sexual relationship.
