Safety on the Web

Ok, so the internet is a scary place. Watching the iSafe videos and having a child in one of the computer classes I teach this week gave me a new outlook on students using the internet. When I was in high school, I was often annoyed about sites that were blocked on the school computers -- we weren't allowed access to any pages that mentioned alternative religions or beliefs (it was a Catholic school). As a somewhat "experienced" internet user, I tend to forget that I know which sites to avoid...and that there is a lot out there that needs avoiding. The approximately 11-year-old I observed this week clicked on every single ad on every web page she visited, even when she knew they were ads. While this is a relatively innocuous behavior, it does illustrate that younger users have less knowledge of what can happen when you just click on anything that is colorful and a link.

One of my first thoughts while watching the iSafe videos of children actually making plans to meet people from online was that kids are smarter than that. But then, kids have been getting in cars with strangers for a long time, so I guess it's not so easy to say that everyone knows how to keep themselves safe. I can see how setting rules for posting information about oneself on sites that are used within the context of a classroom project would be generally accepted by students, but I'm not sure how well they would react to someone telling them that they shouldn't even put their interests on a profile for another site. Despite what we may teach about internet safety and the dangers of networking sites like MySpace, these sites are too prevalent and popular to expect young adults to just stop using them, even in favor of somewhat more protected sites, such as Facebook (though I'm not sure how protected this site really is...).

Therefore, I think the SLMS can do their best to inform students of the dangers, but perhaps not much more than that, aside from preventing them from engaging in personal information sharing within the school setting (though that may be more up to the school's filtering policy). Maybe if education started at a younger age, before students are ingrained in multiple sites and develop bad habits...