More online freedom for students=lower risk: UK watchdog

Students who are "given a greater degree of freedom to surf the Internet at school are less vulnerable to online dangers in the long-term," the BBC reports, citing a just-released study by Ofsted, the British government's education watchdog found. Ofsted looked at the state of online safety in 37 schools for students aged 5-18, finding that five of the schools had outstanding Net-safety conditions and instruction. The five shared some interesting characteristics: They had a whole-school-community approach to student Net safety, and they had "managed" rather than "locked down" systems for filtering and other safety measures. "'Managed' systems," Ofsted explains, "have fewer inaccessible sites than "locked down" systems and so require pupils to take responsibility themselves for using new technologies safely. Although the 13 schools which used 'locked down' systems kept their pupils safe while in school, such systems were less effective in helping them to learn how to use new technologies safely." The weakest area was Net-safety training for school staff, the report said. "Most training provided was 'one size fits all' and therefore did not always meet needs. There was very little evidence of schools drawing systematically on the views and concerns of pupils, their families or governors in identifying priorities for such training."

What Ofsted seems to be saying is that teaching students the critical thinking skills of media literacy ultimately lowers risk. The schools rated "outstanding" in online safety all had managed systems whereby "pupils were helped, from a very early age, to assess the risk of accessing sites. For example, at the elementary level in one of the top 5 schools, students are taught to ask themselves these questions:

"Who wrote the material on this site?"

"Is the information on it likely to be accurate or could it be altered by anybody?"

"If others click onto the site, can I be sure that they are who they say
they are?", and

"What information about myself should I not give out on the site?"

We would add a key 5th question for full social-Web safety (or "Online Safety 3.0"): "What impact will the information (photo, video, etc.) I give out on this site (or cellphone) have on my friends and my community?" We at ConnectSafely feel this question is essential because the preceding four excellent questions deal only with the impact of the info uploaded on the student himself/herself and, to move forward, we need all to understand that online well-being and safety in today's social new-media environment is, by definition, a collaboration – ideally starting in elementary school and broadening outward as a child matures. Interestingly, too, based on the research, posting negative or harassing info about others also increases risk to oneself (see this). [A pdf version of the full report can be downloaded from Ofsted's site here.]

Safer Internet Day: Wrong to focus on 5-to-7-year-olds?

I was surprised by the surprise in the voice of a newspaper reporter interviewing me last week, when he asked me to repeat a point about how a youth police officer I know started talking with 4th-graders about online safety. Well, today – the European Union's Safer Internet Day – the UK's awareness campaign is aimed at 5-to-7-year-olds (see The Guardian's coverage). Wouldn't the reporter be surprised about that?! I actually think new-media literacy and mindfulness about how they (we all) treat one another online and offline should be taught to children from the moment they start playing with digital devices. And I'm certainly not alone – I heard many statements to that effect at the Safer Internet Forum in Luxembourg last October (see this).

Yet, Ian Douglas at The Telegraph is saying "Safer Internet day is pitching too young" and says parents need to be the primary audience. Absolutely, they're paramount. But I think there is no primary audience. Safety on the fixed and mobile, user-driven social Web is a multi-stakeholder proposition. Just as the only logical solution to bullying/cyberbullying (there is great overlap between the two) is a whole-school-community one, the same goes for youth safety at the societal level. Everybody's teaching and learning in this multi-directional new media environment, everybody has a say in their own, their friends', and their community's well-being, online and offline piece of the solution: user, family, school, caregivers, teachers, industry, government. And yes, Douglas is right that it's not for young children if Net-safety messaging defaults to the old predator-focused, fear-based, research-ignoring fare we've hopefully moved past. He's wrong if online/offline citizenship and mindfulness are the content of safety education. Meanwhile, two-thirds of 14,000 European children surveyed said their parents "do nothing to encourage them to be safe online," according to a new Microsoft survey cited in the Irish Times. [Here's much more Safer Internet Day coverage. See also "Online Safety 3.0: Empowering & Protecting Youth." I'll be blogging more about the school part of the equation soon.]

Net-safety leadership: UK Council unveils strategy

Where dealing with children's online safety is concerned, the UK continues to impress. Clearly it was no easy task, but on the recommendation of psychologist, professor, TV personality, parent, and author of the Prime Minister Brown-appointed Byron Review Tanya Byron, the September 2008-launched UK Council for Child Internet Safety – made up of a staggering 140+ companies, organizations, and individuals – this week released its first safety strategy: "Click Clever Click Safe." A lot of the executive summary is music to my ears. Here's what I read:

Safety in context - safety's role not only in protecting but also enabling children's full, healthy participation in participatory society (I would only add: as active good citizens, not just digital ones, and stakeholders in their own well-being and that of their communities online and offline)

Safety takes a village (maybe even more than raising a child does), requiring the expertise of all stakeholders: chief among them youth, but also parents, educators, the Internet industry, mental-health and risk-prevention practitioners, law enforcement, policymakers, and clergy – many of these skill sets are represented on the Council. And hear, hear!: "By working together, learning from one another’s experience and reinforcing one another’s messages we can achieve more than the toughest legislation, the biggest company or the most caring charity ever could alone."

The child-protection village is global. Again, hear, hear!: The Strategy says, "We need to make links between international, national and local efforts to help children.... Work done here must be done with and alongside international efforts to improve child online safety."

Practical intelligence: How little have I seen this level of realism in our news media: "As in the offline world, we can never keep children completely safe, and this is not about imposing unnecessary restrictions that undermine the Internet’s benefits," the Strategy states. I would only add this bit of practical intelligence: that all forms of safety need to be addressed and, hopefully seen eventually to be children's rights and responsibilities online. The forms of safety are physical, psychological, legal, reputational, and personal (identity and property).

Clearly, we have kindred spirits across the Atlantic (see some similar thinking in ConnectSafely's"Online Safety 3.0: Empowering & Protecting Youth"). But what we all need to consider adding, now, to our work on both sides of the Pond, I feel, is a *layered* approach to online safety education, mapped to the need and the audience and based on the research showing that not all youth are equally at risk, and the young people most at risk online are those most at risk offline....

One thing I'd add: Levels of Net-safety ed needed

A logical way to organize Net-safety education is to map it to the levels of prevention which the risk-prevention community has adapted from disease prevention, I realized in talking with risk-prevention practitioner Patti Agatston of the Atlanta area's Cobb County School District. In a conversation started by Nancy Willard of the Center for Safe & Responsible Internet Use, it dawned on me that this tiered approach is exactly what online-safety ed needs as well – and I hope colleagues agree. The levels are simply:

Primary: Not "primary" as in school but as in universal – tangible prevention in the form of new-media literacy and citizenship (as mentioned above), taught pre-K-12, throughout the curriculum (based on research published in Archives of Pediatrics that youth who engage in aggressive behavior are more than twice as likely to be victimized, indicating that critical thinking and civility are preventive if not protective).

Secondary: More focused prevention education aimed at mitigating cyberbullying, sexting, cutting, anorexia, substance abuse, etc. represented or reinforced online as well as offline. This level of prevention can also be applied to specific events or incidents that need to be turned into "teachable moments" at school, either with a whole-school approach or in working with focused groups of students – e.g., a unit in health class about the psychological and legal implications of sexting.

Tertiary: Prevention AND intervention for the minority of youth who already have established patterns of risky behaviors disrupting their lives. At this level, the risk-prevention practitioners themselves need the training – in social media use – so they can fold this knowledge into their work with young people.

Key take-aways: School, industry, child services

As for the headlines in the UK, the most common was that, starting in September 2011, it'll be compulsory in British schools for kids aged 5+ to be taught Internet safety (see The Telegraph's). I hope the universal education piece will evolve quickly to new media literacy and citizenship (online and offline), which by definition include the critical thinking about potentially harmful incoming messages from mean peers, adult strangers, and all sorts of manipulators as well as harmful outgoing messages from young stakeholders in constructive community at school and home and online.

The strategy calls on the Internet industry to move beyond the self-regulation it had apparently hoped for. According to the Times Online, "child safety campaigners have been locked in months of tortuous negotiations with internet industry leaders over what companies could do to make children safer. The industry has agreed [to] a range of new requirements, such as offering parents more rigorous privacy settings which, for example, include a secret password," including "reluctant agreement ... to have progress on safety assessed independently by one of the big consultancy firms."

And for everybody who works with children, the 140-member Council pledges that: "In England and Wales by March 2010 we will include online safety in the ‘Common Core’ of skills and knowledge for people who work with children and work to make sure this is reflected in qualifications for people who work with children." The next step is to teach the same experts (mentioned in the Tertiary level above) how to function easily in the media environments youth love (texting, virtual worlds, online games, social network sites, etc.). A clinical psychologist I met in Mexico City couldn't get an extremely shy teenage boy to talk with him until he went to see the boy in World of Warcraft, where the latter felt comfortable to talk with him; then the boy was able to talk with the psychologist in his office. I heard a similar story from a Texas mother, who was able to keep in touch with her college-student son once they played World or Warcraft together on Sunday afternoons (he at his distant college and she at home).

Some key data in the report

The Strategy reported that...

99% of British 8-to-17-year-olds have access to the Net.

76% of young people say the Internet means their friends are there whenever they need them.

18% of children have come across harmful or inappropriate content online

50% of children encountering harmful or inappropriate content say they did something about it.

82% of children say their school has taught them how to use the internet safely.

67% of parents have rules for their children’s internet usage.

33% say their parents don’t really know what they do on the internet.

79% of UK parents say they talk to their children about online safety, but only 52% of children agree.

Related links

The indispensable multi-year, pan-European online-youth research at "EU Kids Online," based at the London School of Economics and funded by the EC's Safer Internet Programme

"From users to citizens: How to make digital citizenship relevant"

"Social norming & digital citizenship"

Proposed definition of digital literacy and citizenship"

"Europe's amazing Internet-safety work"

"Net safety: How social networks can be protective"

"Social media literacy: The new Internet safety"

UN Child Rights Convention: How about online rights?!

This past week, "the world celebrated the 20th anniversary of the
UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) – the most universally ratified human rights treaty," the European Commission reports. It adds that "the Convention is the first international legally binding instrument establishing minimum standards for the protection and safeguarding of a full range of civil, political, social, economic and cultural rights of all children around the world." As for children's online rights, it says "significant progress has been made in the areas of cyber security and combating child pornography especially through the [EC's] Safer Internet programme" (see this).

At this month's Family Online Safety Institute conference in Washington, British Member of Parliament Derek Wyatt spoke about a petition he has drafted with a number of children's organizations which "calls on the United Nations to 'examine and assess whether the Convention on the Rights of the Child fully addresses the needs and expectations of children in the digital age'." The four types of online safety laid out in ConnectSafely.org's "Online Safety 3.0" suggest a framework for online children's rights. They are the right to...

1. Physical Safety (freedom from physical harm)
2. Psychological Safety (freedom from online cruelty, harassment, and exposure to potentially disturbing material)
3. Reputational and Legal Safety (freedom from unwanted social, academic, professional, and legal consequences that could affect one for a lifetime) 

4. Identity, Property, and Community Safety (freedom from theft of identity and property and attacks against one's networks and online communities at local, national, and international levels).

What this Internet-safety taxonomy is really saying is that all the rights and freedoms the Convention calls for for children need to be transferred online. They must enjoy these rights in cyberspace as well as in the rest of their lives. According to Wyatt, "the Convention provides a framework of rights that children around the world should be entitled to, such as the right to life, identity and protection from exploitation." Only five words need to be tacked onto the end of that sentence, really: "online as well as offline." Or something to that effect.

Now maybe Barack, Michelle, Malia, and Sasha Obama will together help speed up the US's ratification of this global treaty representing "a new vision of the child," as UNICEF puts it in its FAQ on the Convention. As we hope Internet-safety education will come to do (respect youth agency, recognize young people as stakeholders in their own wellbeing online, and teach children their rights and responsibilities as citizens online and offline), the Convention "focuses on the whole child. Previously seen as negotiable, the child's needs have become legally binding rights. No longer the passive recipient of benefits, the child has become the subject or holder of rights." [As Amnesty International points out, "the Convention on the Rights of the Child is the most widely accepted human rights treaty – of all the United Nations member states, only the United States and the collapsed state of Somalia have not ratified it."]

Please feel free to weigh in (post in the ConnectSafely forum) and help spread the word!

[Thanks to Dave Miles at the London- and Washington-based Family Online Safety Institute for keeping me posted on work in the UK on children's rights online.]

Related links

"From users to citizens: How to make digital citizenship relevant"

"Afterthought: Social norming & digital citizenship"

"Europe's amazing Internet-safety work" and now that I'm just back from a Net-safety conference in Mexico City, top of mind is Mexico's fine work in this area through its Alianza por la Seguridad en Internet (Internet Safety Alliance), which just launched Mexico's Internet safety helpline. [Europe has 20 such helplines. The US doesn't have one yet, but I hope to see that change soon too, with the help of SAMHSA, the Substance Abuse & Mental Health Services Administration of the US government; the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline and the crisis centers it coordinates around the country; the RAINN Hotline; The Trevor Helpline; the CyberTipline; and other outstanding projects.]

Europe's amazing Internet-safety work

Last week I had the great good fortune of participating in Safer Internet Forum 2009 in Luxembourg. What a fantastic experience, connecting with online-safety experts representing the 27 EU member countries plus Malaysia, Brazil, and New Zealand. I spoke on "Online Safety 3.0" and felt right at home (imagine how confirming it is to have colleagues from Bulgaria and Slovenia come up afterwards and say how much they could relate!). The Forum included teen panelists (aged 14-18) from 26 of the 27 countries.

This year's focus was "Promoting Online Safety in Schools." Here are highlights – things I heard from presenters over the four days of Forum and INSAFE meetings (INSAFE coordinates the European Commission's network of Safer Internet Centres, one in each member country):

POV is key: "What adults see as risks, young people see as opportunities - there's no easy line between risk and opportunity"; "what we want young people to grow up to be is resilient; the only way for that to happen is for them to encounter risk," suggesting that the need is for adults to support their development process; Internet safety is part of media literacy, part of the wider media picture – we need to enable them to make constructive, critical judgments in context." – from Prof. Sonia Livingstone of the London School of Economics & Political Science and lead author of the huge, ongoing pan-European EUKidsOnline comparative research project

"We must not be afraid to learn along with our kids." – from Prof. Gianna Cappello at U. of Palermo, Italy

Sound familiar?: "Both parents and students look to school for Internet safety advice, while schools struggle to take on this agenda," Livingstone of the UK said. Teen participants echoed this throughout the day they were with us (schools' struggle with the Net-safety-ed needs).

A way to think about school: Elisabetta Pupuzza of Safer Internet Centre Italy said, "We need to think of schools not just as places but as educational agencies and contexts of relationships."

Holistic approach needed. A representative from Germany said, "We need a Media Blueprint for schools – one that takes an integrative approach, not merely teach cybersafety, but rather cybersafety as part of a complete range: technology skills, media skills, and life skills." I spoke, too, about the need to teach and model life literacy, as teachers have always done (this is why Net-safety ed, if we can even call it that much longer, is naturally integrated into all subjects, pre-K-12). And Janice Richardson, head of Europe's INSAFE network, told me they work on promoting "social literacy," which almost says it all (you can see we're all seeking the best terminology).

Embedded & contextualized. UK representative Karl Hopwood also called for embedded Net-safety ed, and a colleague from the same country said students need context, need to be shown how social technologies affect them, and on the same panel a Slovenian representative agreed, saying that this means every teacher teaching appropriate use whenever appropriate throughout the day (perhaps like working with books and other traditional media?). Slovenia is teaching safe Net use, ethics, privacy, etc. through all elementary-school subjects and grades.

Even more on this: "We can't possibly include one more subject in school – the only way to teach this [new] media literacy is to integrate it throughout the curriculum," said a representative from Luxembourg's Ministry of Education. He said his country is now rolling out Net-safety ed in all primary schools, having just begun distribution of a manual to all primary school teachers: "It's modular, adapted to the needs on the ground, in classrooms." To make sure it's adopted well, teachers will take a basic training class, and if something comes up in school, teachers can contact the trainer to help them deal with situations in a flexible way. "We've found we don't need to teach the technologies, we need to teach how to work with them well," he added.

Simply digital citizenship. New Zealand defines "Internet safety" as digital citizenship. Period. Full stop. Netsafe for all New Zealanders and Hector's World for 2-to-9-year-olds focus "developing caring and capable digital citizens – and transforming the culture of a school to implement these technologies in meaningful ways," including in "the early childhood sector," which in NZ includes homes and noncompulsory preschool.

Kids want communication. "Youth are looking for ways to communicate more and better with their parents and teachers about their Internet use," said mental health expert Pauline Ostner from Sweden.

Adult fears push kids away. In Portugal, the Safer Internet Centre works directly with the Ministry of Education and tells schools that they must not invite law enforcement to speak to parents on Internet safety without the Safer Internet Centre there too; the representative said that it's vital not to scare parents. Portugal now teaches Internet security and citizenship from the 5th-grade level.

Not about technology: An educator from Italy said that, when regular teachers are resistant to technology, Net safety is left to school IT people and then becomes a technical issue, which is not good. This was echoed by panelists from the UK and Cypress (one solution that occurs to me is programs like the US's GenYes, where students teach technology to teachers!).

Clever videos. Saw clips of some great safety-awareness videos at Norway's Dubestemmer.no about how "information sticks to you through both space [school and beyond] and time [later in life]." Don't miss this one presenting a fairly uncomfortable student-parent-teacher conference (with English subtitles). ["Dubestermmer" means "You Decide" in Norwegian.] The presenter told us digital literacy is a basic skill required in all Norwegian schools.

Peer mentoring: Finland has a 40-year-old "peer-support" program that operates in 90% of Finnish schools which has folded Net use into its student2student mentoring; its 750 adult instructors train the country's 14,000 "peer students" each year; middle school students give Net-safety lessons in primary schools.

Social-networking educators. "We're introducing Ning for teachers' social networking nationwide," said a speaker from the Austrian Education Ministry. She said all of Austria's schools already use the open-source virtual-learning environment Moodle.

Social Web's mobile too: Mobile carriers Vodafone (UK-based) and Orange Spain have recently launched Web-based parents' guides to the technologies youth use. I didn't hear many other references during the four days to safety on the mobile social Web.

Not one-size-fits-all. Over the four days, I didn't hear much about different levels of online risk prevention and education, which we're beginning to think about here in the US because of the research showing that not all youth are equally at risk. There was absolutely no evidence at the Forum of scary online-safety messaging, all of it seems firmly research-based. I did hear experts calling for more academic evaluation of Net-safety messaging and programs, a need that has been identified here in the US too.

There is no question in my mind that more dialogue and collaboration between the US and Europe would be good for all, especially youth.

Projects I'd love to see happen in the US:

1. For parents: As in the Netherlands, a "Cyberparent" program, training a parent or group of Cyberparents or Techparents in every school, possibly associated with PTOs and PTAs, working with the school and peer-mentoring fellow parents
2. For schools: A pilot project supported by the US Department of Education, with a half-dozen school districts around the country implementing a holistic Tech Skills, Media Skills, and Life Skills program pre-K-12 (an idea I got while on a panel with a representative from UK education-technology agency Becta)
3. For students: A nationwide school-based peer-mentoring program like Finland's (mentioned above).

Related links

The EC's page on the Safer Internet Programme, including a map of participating countries and a list of countries showing whether they have helplines and hotlines (for reporting Net crimes to law enforcement) as well as Net-safety education centers. The hotlines work along the lines of the US's CyberTipline.com and Canada's Cybertip.ca. Mexico just this year launched its own helpline (Europe has 20 helplines).

INSAFE coordinates Europe's network of Safer Internet Centres.

Almost all of the Safer Internet Centres have Youth Panels of 14-to-18-year-olds. The panels' sizes "vary between 6 to 28 participants," according to the EC site. The Czech Republic's has 6 members, Germany's 9, Bulgaria's 25, and Finland's 28. Meeting frequency varies too, of course. Cyprus's "meets once a month, and adults are not allowed to take part in their discussions." In Germany and Finland, the youth panels meeting 2-3 weeks. "In the Netherlands, the Czech Republic, Bulgaria, Latvia, Slovenia, and Denmark the panels meet 3-5 times a year."

Social-networking-style problem solving (& policymaking)

I think, or at least hope, online safety (the whole world, actually) is going in the direction of what New York Times columnist Tom Friedman prescribes for solving most global problems: toward using the social-networking model. "Huh?" you might ask. Right, Friedman didn't call it that. But I see a lot of similarity between his prescription for solution development to the collective way young people increasingly do everything from socializing to producing to problem solving. And their collaborative, inclusive approach as well as participation are definitely needed in the Net-safety mix (see "Online Safety 3.0" for more on this). Think "social producing," "creative networking," or interest-driven, social civic engagement (see also the report of the Digital Youth Project). Friedman wrote: "We’re trying to deal with a whole array of integrated problems – climate change, energy, biodiversity loss, poverty alleviation and the need to grow enough food to feed the planet – separately. The poverty fighters resent the climate-change folks; climate folks hold summits without reference to biodiversity; the food advocates resist the biodiversity protectors. They all need to go on safari together," he said, writing from Botswana's Okavango Delta. "We need to make sure that our policy solutions are as integrated as nature itself." Exactly. In other words, not just integration of skill sets within a field by "experts," but collaboration among fields and disciplines, incorporating all skill sets, including the participants or beneficiaries of policymaking and education.