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A survey of more than 200 Kansas State University students — mostly freshmen — indicates 54 percent of them believe cyberbullying is a "minor problem" or a "common problem" among students at the university.

The survey used the cyberbullying definition provided in Kansas' anti-bullying law, which took effect in January 2008 and was revised in July to include cyberbullying. The law requires schools to develop anti-bullying policies, plans and preventative measures. Cyberbullying is the use of any electronic communication device, such as e-mail, instant messaging, text messages, blogs, mobile phones, pages, online games or Web sites, to create an intimidating, threatening or abusive environment.

Director of Special Programs for Paducah City Schools, Tom Ballowe, says the new law impacts reporting requirements and gives new directives to principals and schools on the reporting of the information.  He says the law also requires the state to send out reports each year on each district and each school in that district, so it’s a reporting issue as well as a policy and procedures issue. Ballowe says people should not be afraid to report bullying to school officials because you should report it and you’ll be protected from retaliation. The school district will then report the incident if it’s serious enough to law enforcement. 

I also asked them why they allowed certain girls to be on their friends list when they know that some of them will resort to this type of bullying, and most said because they felt they “had to.” This kind of pressure to allow “friends” on one’s site could also be considered a form of bullying, as they feel there may be consequences to shutting some out regardless of their lack of Internet etiquette.

As a public school principal, I can’t legally discipline a student for cyberbullying actions that take place outside of school that don’t result in bodily harm at school. However, when cyberbullying that has taken place outside of school becomes a school issue, as it did today, we must reserve the right to take action if the effects of outside cyberbullying threaten the safety or well-being of the student(s) in school, even if it hasn’t caused bodily harm…yet.

School officials have the authority to impose discipline if the speech has, or there are particularized reasons to believe it will cause a substantial disruption at school or interference with the rights of students to be secure. Three types of situations generally meet this standard - violent altercations, hostile environment for a student, significant interference with instruction.

Dave Crenshaw discussed his latest book, The Myth of Multitasking. Crenshaw makes a strong distinction behind “background tasking”—reading a magazine while waiting in line, for instance, or listening to music while coding—and “switch-tasking.” Most of the time, when we talk about “multi-tasking,” we’re actually talking about the very costly practice of “switch-tasking.” Every time you switch your attention from one place to another—even from one browser window to another—you take a significant hit to your focus

Switch-tasking, he definitively proves, causes you to execute each task more slowly than you would otherwise, with more errors

pecifically, what can parents, teachers, and employers do to help their kids, students, and employees focus their attention more effectively? As a kid, student, and employee myself, I have to say that I believe the solution is emphatically not to limit access—at least not for older teens. Rather, I think the key lies in laying out the facts and discussing strategies. Information overload and the allure of infinite access, after all, are challenges that affect everyone with an internet connection—not just young people. And, though writing a stellar book report might not be a cause compelling enough to warrant total focus, every young person will at some point find a pursuit worth paying attention to. Maybe it’s writing short stories; maybe writing music. Maybe it’s making art. But when that pursuit comes along, they’re going to want to know how to firewall their attention, focus their efforts, and—for once—stop switching.

he new law takes effect January 1st and provides that the Internet safety curriculums in schools will begin with the 2009-2010 school year. The bill allows the age-appropriate unit of instruction to be incorporated into the current courses of study regularly taught in the districts’ schools.

Illinois’ partnership with the Netsmartz national Internet safety program was a Governor’s initiative that was launched in 2006.

Earlier this week, Governor Blagojevich signed into law the state’s new Cyberbullying law. It clarifies the definition of harassing someone by using electronic communication such as the Internet and text messaging and enables the prosecution of someone who anonymously bullies in this capacity.

For years, Symantec has included a parental-control element in its Norton Internet Security and Norton 360 packages. It's so limited as to be nearly useless, so for years I've given it poor ratings. OnlineFamily.Norton is a huge improvement, on a par with the best existing parental-control programs. Now both suites offer it as an alternative to the old, lame Norton component. Users should definitely choose it instead. The new free offering is a strong contender, matching almost all the features of the top paid parental control systems.

In a move aimed at cracking down on cyerbullying, Texas lawmakers passed a new bill that makes it a crime to impersonate people online. The new "online harassment" statute makes it a felony to create phony profiles on social networking sites with the intent to "harm, defraud, intimidate, or threaten" others. The statute defines commercial social networking sites broadly, saying they include any sites that allow people to register to communicate with others or create Web pages or profiles. (Email programs and message boards are excluded from the definition.)

The implication is that 11% is a small number, but if we look deeper, it turns out that Twitter has a higher concentration of teens than Facebook. You can see in the chart below that Facebook is only 9% teen, so Twitter is actually more teen than Facebook, which rightly has never been perceived as having a “teen problem.” Facebook has so many users that teens just can’t be that large a percentage of the service, by definition.

Nielsen also suggested that “Teens Don’t Tweet” in a report that was destined to become a trending topic on Twitter itself. Almost as quickly as it came out, a number of bloggers, including Danah Boyd, debunked the study for charting the age group 2 – 24 and yet drawing conclusions about teens, noting there are not too many 2-year-olds on Twitter.

As it turns out, teens actually tweet more than the general population, prompting Silicon Valley Insider to say yesterday, “Kids Don’t Hate Twitter Anymore