Connect Safely | Online Safety 3.0: Empowering and Protecting Youth
Online Safety 3.0 – promoting critical thinking, mindful producing, and the ethics, responsibilities, and rights of citizenship – is just that: empowering because it’s protective.
I read this post about Online Safety 3.0 this morning. It’s going to be my #1 resource from now on. It’s tuned in to today’s reality and it’s visionary. Below is what I bookmarked in Diigo. My comments follow the bullet points.
- Version 2.0 fails to recognize youth agency: young people as participants, stakeholders, and leaders in an increasingly participatory environment online and offline.
They had little if any ownership.
- To be relevant to young people, its intended beneficiaries, Net safety needs to respect youth agency, embrace the technologies they love, use social media in the instruction process, and address the positive reasons for safe use of social technology. It’s not safety from bad outcomes but safety for positive ones.
Does this axiom, “It’s not safety from bad outcomes but safety for postive ones.” drive decisions?
- We invite you to help us get Online Safety 3.0 – enabling youth to participate fully and constructively in a society that functions both online and offline – off the ground.
- Young people are far more likely to be harmed by peers or the consequences of their own online behavior than by adult criminals.
When not face-to-face even nice people can turn into bullies online. People tend to lose their inhibitions when online. I see it with my students every year. I see it on Facebook. I see it in the comments of news online, especially sports news. Sometimes it seems online activity brings out the worst in people.
- “It’s not about access. It’s about what kids do when interacting online.”
That’s why parents and teachers need to be proactive.
- To be effective, the Internet safety community has to find ways to tailor its messages, based on particular risk factors.
Remember the “Just say no.” campaign. Effective for some. Ineffective for many.
- And young people themselves need to be part of the discussion, not just to listen and parrot what adults tell them to say, but to help think through the issues, help adults understand the difference between real and imagined dangers, how youth themselves are dealing with the real ones (research shows a good deal of intelligence on their part), and help adults come up with messages that will resonate with their peers.
Not only does this make our plans and actions more relevant and meaningful but interesting as well.
- Another very important factor we’d add is online disinhibition, the effect on people’s behavior of not having visual cues and voice inflection from the people to whom that behavior’s directed. Inhibitions break down, which can be good but also bad. It can have the effect of reducing empathy and civility.
Right on. Happens all the time. Very insightful.
- Online security must be an integral part of online-safety education. Not only is it a great set of training wheels for digital literacy, it 1) trains users to protect their identities and property with prevention and repair software tools for computers, mobile phones and wired & wireless networks, and 2) teaches the nuts and bolts of social engineering and influencing, lessons that will protect a lot more than computers in people’s lives.
I feel this is something that I must always strive to stay on top of. I’m not even sure I completely can/do protect myself. Sometimes I get lazy…
- That’s why we teach kids to swim, so they can enjoy and benefit from swimming and not fear the water. In the same way, as Internet users mature, we need to pull back on the technological controls in favor of self control.
And what do we tend to do when they jump into the deep end? Drain the pool, right? We take away their IT priviledges. Does that empower students?
- The best filter for protecting kids runs in their heads not on devices.
But it’s so easy just to ban the devices…
- …we need to consider all four types of Internet safety:
* Physical safety – freedom from physical harm
* Psychological safety – freedom from cruelty, harassment, and exposure to potentially disturbing material
* Reputational and legal safety – freedom from unwanted social, academic, professional, and legal consequences that could affect you for a lifetime
* Identity, property, and community safety – freedom from theft of identity and property and attacks against networks and online communities at local, national, and international levels.
A framework to guide teaching and learning. It makes “online safety” easier to understand and approach.
- This is important to understand because “safety” and addressing risk aren’t just online propositions; they’re about online and offline experiences and more about adolescent development and behavior than about technology.
Yes! It’s not about the technology. It’s about adolescent development and behavior or, in other words, LITERACY.
- In the multiplayer online game World of Warcraft, educators who play the game tell us, players are analyzing statistics and probabilities, strategizing, learning how to save currency, budget, and market, and exploring supply & demand – learning economics, math, and sociology.
I’d say this is one of the most popular games at IST. Students caught playing this game during school hours get their IT priviledges suspended.
- Because young people are increasingly engaged in authentic learning outside of school with social media, there is a growing gap between formal learning and informal learning, which increasingly compromises school’s meaningfulness for many youth. One student told a researcher that “if you’re doing it for a grade, it doesn’t really count.”
Contingent motivators (grades) dull thinking and reduce creativity. Reserver them for mechanical jobs not creative. Students see grades as carrots and sticks.
- “Rather than assuming that education is primarily about preparing for jobs and careers,” the Digital Youth researchers ask, “what would it mean to think of education as a process of guiding kids’ participation in public life more generally, a public life that includes social, recreational, and civic engagement?”
Education is primarily about preparing for life in a democracy.
- Online Safety 3.0 is not just safety from (risk and danger) but safety for maximizing the benefits of active netizenship.
Worth repeating.
- When people see themselves as community stakeholders – citizens – they behave as citizens because they tend to care about the well-being of the community itself and the individual and collective behaviors that affect it.
Do parents and teachers view themselves as citizens of the same community their youth belong to?
