Group items tagged

Campaigns to educate students about the pitfalls of Facebook — how professors, parents and prospective employers can use the social networking site to uncover information once considered private — have become a staple of freshman orientation sessions and career center clinics. Students are apparently listening.

If I’m holding something I shouldn’t be holding, I’ll untag,” says Robyn Backer, a junior at Virginia Wesleyan College. She recalls how her high school principal saw online photos of partying students and suspended the athletes who were holding beer bottles but not those with red plastic cups. “And if I’m making a particularly ugly face, I’ll untag myself. Anything really embarrassing, I’ll untag.”

The researchers also discussed opinions, some of them perhaps surprising, on other notable subjects in the online social-networking space. Lawley, who has a 14-year-old son, said she is strongly against some of the restrictive methods used online to segregate adults from children in an attempt to protect kids from predators. On Second Life, for example, she can't interact with her son because he has to be in the teen grid and she has to be in the adult grid.

"So I don't learn from him about how to use technologies, and he doesn't learn from me about how to interact in a social context," she said. Shutting down sites or trying to shut out people won't solve the problem of sexual predators, she said. "We don't talk about shutting down the Catholic Church," she said, referring to the clergy sex-abuse scandal. "Sexual deviancy isn't unique to the online world."

Nancy Willard, author of "An Educators Guide to Cyberbullying and Cyberthreats" breaks down cyberbullying into the following categories: Flaming. Online fights using electronic messages with angry or vulgar language. Harassment. Repeatedly sending nasty, mean, an insulting messages. Denigration. "Dissing" someone online. Sending or posting gossip or rumors about a person to damage his or her reputation or friendships. Impersonation. Pretending to be someone else and sending or posting material to get that person in trouble or damage their reputation. Outing. Sharing someone's secrets or embarrassing information or images online. Trickery. Tricking someone into revealing secrets or embarrassing information and then sharing it online. Exclusion. Intentionally and cruelly excluding someone. Cyberstalking. Repeated, intense harassment and denigration that includes threats or creates significant fear (Willard, 2006).

ead teachers are being advised to draw up new rules on mobile phone use amid a growing number of cases of what is now known as “cyber-bullying”. In many secondary schools, over 90% of bullying cases are through text messages or internet chatrooms. It is hoped that the rules about mobile phone use will protect children from abusive texts, stop phones going off in class and prevent mobiles being taken into exam halls.

Although the majority of kids who are harassed online aren’t physically bothered in person, the cyber-bully still takes a heavy emotional toll on his or her victims. Kids who are targeted online are more likely to get a detention or be suspended, skip school and experience emotional distress, the medical journal reports. Teenagers who receive rude or nasty comments via text messages are six times more likely to say they feel unsafe at school.

The problem is that bullying is still perceived by many educators and parents as a problem that involves physical contact. Most enforcement efforts focus on bullying in school classrooms, corridors and toilets. But given that 80% of adolescents use mobile phones or computers, “social interactions have increasingly moved from personal contact at school to virtual contact in the chatroom,'’ write Kirk R. Williams and Nancy G. Guerra, co-authors of one of the journal reports. “Internet bullying has emerged as a new and growing form of social cruelty.'’

Several local teachers and professors see Second Life as a tremendous opportunity. There are educational islands in Second Life where teachers can go to digitally swap ideas, conduct research or attend real life conferences.

However, a teacher can take students on a virtual field trip in Second Life - using his or her own login - to places like the Alamo or the Louvre Museum, both of which have been impressively recreated in Second Life.

The University of Alabama is using Second Life too. In fact, Professor Rick Houser, Chairman of Educational Studies at the Capstone, is working on building an entire virtual University of Alabama campus in Second Life.

hildren like Nadia lie at the heart of a passionate debate about just what it means to read in the digital age. The discussion is playing out among educational policy makers and reading experts around the world, and within groups like the National Council of Teachers of English and the International Reading Association.

As teenagers’ scores on standardized reading tests have declined or stagnated, some argue that the hours spent prowling the Internet are the enemy of reading — diminishing literacy, wrecking attention spans and destroying a precious common culture that exists only through the reading of books. But others say the Internet has created a new kind of reading, one that schools and society should not discount. The Web inspires a teenager like Nadia, who might otherwise spend most of her leisure time watching television, to read and write.

n fact, some literacy experts say that online reading skills will help children fare better when they begin looking for digital-age jobs.

A person is on the other end of all web communication. The web connects people in a community where everyone becomes each other's neighbor. It is just as important to observe safety on the Internet as it is to follow traffic signs. The Think.com community is a place where the teacher sees everything. Everyone is responsible for his/her own actions while in Think.com. Passwords are to be kept secret.

An attorney for a suspended Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools teacher said Thursday she never intended for the public to view negative comments she made about students on Facebook. But the case is now part of a national debate that pits teachers' right to free expression against how communities expect them to behave.

She now faces possible firing for listing “teaching chitlins in the ghetto of Charlotte” among her activities.

e district allows teachers to post personal information online, but had to take action because it affected the teacher's ability to interact with students and parents. She called the comments racially insensitive or offensive to students at Thomasboro Elementary School, where she teaches.

Yet with so many different types of cyberbullying, ranging from online impersonation to e-mail hacking and distributing embarrassing materials about a person, it can be difficult for kids, let alone those trying to help them, to know how to respond and stop the 21st century bully in his or her tracks. "Awareness about the issue is high, but awareness about what to do when it happens is mixed," says Michele Ybarra, president and research director for Internet Solutions for Kids (ISK) and an adjunct faculty member at Johns Hopkins School of Public Health.

Research suggests that those on the receiving end of traditional bullying may be more likely to cyberbully as a form of retaliation. Kids involved in the more severe instances of cyberbullying also tend to have more psychosocial problems, exhibiting aggression, getting in trouble at school and having poor relationships with their parents, says Nancy Willard, an expert on cyberbullying and author of Cyberbullying and Cyberthreats. And while traditional bullying appears to peak in middle school and drop off as kids reach high school, cyberbullying tends to slightly increase among kids in high school, a trend researchers can't yet explain.

One of the tricky things about helping cyberbullying targets is that they aren't always willing to talk about the problem. Teens often cite a fear of having their Internet privileges revoked as a reason for keeping quiet, Agatston says. Kids who receive threatening messages in school may not divulge what's happened for fear of getting in trouble, since many schools ban use of cellphones during the day. To get around that problem, Willard recommends having a frank discussion with your children about cyberbullying before it happens.

Yesterday, Rep. Sanchez defended her bill on this subject in an item here on the Huffington Post. Unfortunately, the response doesn't quote or link to the bill, which in relevant part reads: Whoever transmits in interstate or foreign commerce any communication, with the intent to coerce, intimidate, harass, or cause substantial emotional distress to a person, using electronic means to support severe, repeated, and hostile behavior, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than two years, or both....

I’m not aware of any federal Internet safety commissions that met during the Bush administration. From what I can tell, that administration paid very little attention to Internet safety other than to add to the exaggerations and fear-mongering about so-called Internet predators. So is there any point in taking yet another look at Internet safety? Yes, if only because things have changed dramatically over the past few months. To begin with, we have a new administration led by a president who actually understands the Internet as well as the constitutional issues that arise whenever government tries to control online speech, access or even safety.

When the new working group convened Thursday, our first speaker was Susan Crawford, who works at the White House as special assistant to the president for science, technology and innovation policy. A law professor and founder of OneWebDay, Crawford brings a refreshing understanding of the government’s need to balance safety and security with civil liberties, privacy and even the First Amendment rights of minors. Her opening remarks helped set the tone for the group by admonishing us to “avoid overheated rhetoric about risks to kids online,” pointing out that “risks kids face online may not be significantly different than the risks they face offline.”

Attorney General Bill McCollum today announced that a Miami man is in custody on charges of sexual battery on a child. Acting on a tip received from a Clay County student at one of the Attorney General’s CyberSafety presentations, deputies from Clay County Sheriff Rick Beseler’s Office arrested Anthony Alexander Caldara, a mechanic serving active duty in the U.S. Navy, for sexually abusing a young girl. The tip was reported by the victim’s older sister to an investigator with the Attorney General’s CyberCrime Unit.

The older sister, a student at a local Clay County junior high school, approached the CyberCrime investigator after attending the Attorney General’s CyberSafety presentation. She reported to the investigator that she and her younger sister had been communicating with Caldara, 21, via cell phone and text messaging and Caldara had sent the children pornography. The two children eventually met Caldara in real life and a subsequent investigation revealed Caldara sexually abused the younger sister.