The past may come back to bite you...

There's a sign on the window by my office door that points out that I'm not young enough to know everything (kids read it sometimes, and go, well, of course...)...and yet sometimes you see the bulletproof young heading towards disaster - or at least, problems - assuming they're teflon-coated, when you know they aren't.  Internet privacy's one of those problems.

In The Web Means the End of Forgetting, (NY Times) Jeffrey Rosen discusses how publication of information about individuals can influence present circumstances, future prospects, eliminate opportunities.

We’ve known for years that the Web allows for unprecedented voyeurism, exhibitionism and inadvertent indiscretion, but we are only beginning to understand the costs of an age in which so much of what we say, and of what others say about us, goes into our permanent — and public — digital files. The fact that the Internet never seems to forget is threatening, at an almost existential level, our ability to control our identities; to preserve the option of reinventing ourselves and starting anew; to overcome our checkered pasts.

Worth reading.  One to share with colleagues, students and children.

Cheers

Ruth

PS. if the lemon tree in your garden is utterly ignored except when you can pick fruit from it, does that benign neglect qualify it for 'organic' status?  If so, today's lemon cupcakes with chocolate icing had organic lemon zest in them... Hurrah for a cupcake Monday!

Internet safety: Teaching about the web includes the troublesome parts

There's some discussion of this going on around the traps internet safety, cyberbullying, the dangers of the social networking online.

Teaching about the web includes the troublesome parts by Stephanie Clifford in the New York Times

Common Sense’s classes, based on research by Howard Gardner, a Harvard psychology and education professor, are grouped into topics he calls “ethical fault lines”: identity (how do you present yourself online?); privacy (the world can see everything you write); ownership (plagiarism, reproducing creative work); credibility (legitimate sources of information); and community (interacting with others).

Here's a link to the (coming soon) curriuculum documents - there is a preview of the privacy unit. 

Edited by Howard Gardiner: Young people, ethics and the new digital media (link to a free pdf).

 Cyberbullying report from the ABC's 7.30 Report:

In a recent study one in four teenage students said they'd been bullied in the previous few weeks. A conference in Melbourne starting later this week will examine why schools aren't able to properly tackle the problem, and whether bullying itself should be made a crime.

This report spends time on teacher unfamiliarity with social media, and teachers' lack of training, as being part of the reason for the problem.

I am not abrogating the role schools and teachers can play in educating to reduce/eliminate cyberbullying, but surely it's not down to schools alone to solve this (if indeed it can be entirely eliminated/solved)?

I've done a short presentation on cybersafety at the Year 11 Crossroads program these last few years, so it will be good to incorporate material from these resources.

Cheers

Ruth

Safer Internet Day 2010: 9 February

Logo source, which has more information

This is an international cybersafety event, with the theme of 'think before you post'.  It's organised by InSafe, and international organisation for internet safety, and supported in Australia by ACMA.

The link above has more info, including a poster to print, tips for kids and teens, and this YouTube video:

Why not compile a quick email to send out to students/parents/staff?

Cheers

Ruth

The 3 settings every Facebook user should check now

From the New York Times, The 3 Settings Every Facebook User Should Check Now - based on recent changes to Facebook and their impact on privacy/personal information.

Read all about them here.

It's one of the challenges of the internet, the balance in social networking between sharing and privacy, and many students, I find, are less careful than they ought to be about personal information.  I'll be sharing this link with our staff and our students.

Cheers

Ruth

Privacy, Facebook and student naivety

Presenting a session on Internet Security Issues at our school's Crossroads program recently, I remarked to the Year 11 students that if my dad had done something extremely foolish when he was a teenager, it might, maybe have made it to radio and newspapers.  If I had done ditto, you can add television to the mix.  Still large corp. media outlets, though, not necessarily aware of or able to capture an individual life easily or quickly. 

Now, if they do something extremely foolish, it can land on YouTube via a mobile/cell phone, or on Twitter, within seconds.  Such is the changed world they need to take account of.  Their foolishness can be far more readily found by potential employers doing a bit of googling than would have been possible ten, twenty, more years ago.

A recent NY Times article discusses the change Facebook has made, so that ALL status messages are now by default, PUBLIC - ie available for anyone to see - unless the Facebook user actively chooses otherwise.  Default is public.  Private requires action.  Previously, the default setting has been 'private'.

How many students will make the change?  Or care?  How many should?  More than will.  I find students interestingly (expectedly?) naive about such things, far more trusting than they should be.  It's part of being young and bulletproof, maybe.  I regularly discuss internet privacy issues with students informally, as well as on the more formal occasions such as offered by the Crossroads program.  The school system in which I work has, at present, blocked social networking sites such as Facebook so they aren't available when logging in at school, but students are certainly using these outside school hours - and I know that there are schools/systems where social networking sites are used in educational contexts.

How aware will students be that something they don't mean to be public may have legal implications?  Unintended and possibly serious consequences?  A whole scale of possibilities, from the agonies of social embarrassment to active/passive cyber-bullying to legal action for libel?

Given that the new social media are new to parents and teachers, the responsibility for understanding the implications of this - and conveying wise advice - is shared by home and school.  But do parents and teachers understand and convey?  And, if they don't, how bitter might be the lessons some of our kids learn from unexpected experience?

Cheers

Ruth

Digital footprint

From the Pew Internet report: Digital Footprints: online identity management and search in the age of transparency.  Read more here.

.

Social networking and privacy online

In a useful article from Nick Galvin of the Sydney Morning Herald, entitled, The kiss and tell of social networks, possibly the most apt and thought-provoking observation is the one at the end of this quote:

Among many younger net users there is now an assumption that everything should be shared and a casualness about what was once thought of as personal information that makes many older people shudder.


"I don't know what it is like to live your entire life publicly online," says social media expert Jeffrey Veen. "But there are kids today who are figuring it out."

Veen has been at the heart of the internet revolution all his working life. Among other things, he has been a key designer behind hugely successful social media applications such as Flickr and the blogging service TypePad.

He says attitudes to privacy and information sharing are easily defined by the generation you belong to.

"There is a generational divide that is as strong today as the divide that existed between kids and their parents over music in the 1950s," says Veen, visiting Sydney last week for an industry conference, Web Directions South.

"People older than 25 years think of everything they do on their computer as being private unless they share it, where people younger than that think of everything they do on a computer as public unless they choose to make it private. This is a fundamental difference."

(my highlighting)

The article points out some of the traps of this thinking - eg. the use of social networking/googling by employers to assess prospective employees, which can be a plus or minus, depending on what they discover.