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."

Important new book on youth online

So much great work in youth social-media use and online safety has been going on in the UK, from the Byron Review and ensuing Action Plan to the just-released "Digital Manifesto" from a coalition of children's nonprofits to Digizen.org to the EU Kids Online project based at the London School of Economics & Political Science. LSE professor Sonia Livingstone has been busy - having directed EU Kids Online, a three-year, 21-country study that just ended with a conference last week; won a 2.5 million-euro ($3.47m) grant for two more years' research ("one of the largest ever won by the LSE," Webuser.co.uk reports); and published her new book, Children and the Internet: Great Expectations, Challenging Realities. Media professor Henry Jenkins has just blogged a short interview with Livingstone about her book here, commenting on the balance she has always struck: The book, he writes, "will be of immediate relevance for all of us doing work on new media literacies and digital learning and beyond, for all of you who are trying to make sense of the challenges and contradictions of parenting in the digital age. As always, what I admire most about Livingstone is her deft balance," Jenkins writes. I hope he won't mind if I share an especially interesting comment from Livingstone in the interview: "I've sought to show how young people's enthusiasm, energies and interests are a great starting point for them to maximize the potential the internet could afford them, but they can't do it on their own, for the internet is a resource largely of our - adult - making. And it's full of false promises.... It invites civic participation, but political groups still communicate one-way more than two-way, treating the internet more as a broadcast than an interactive medium; and adults celebrate young people's engagement with online information and communication at the same time as seeking to restrict them, worrying about addiction, distraction, and loss of concentration, not to mention the many fears about pornography, race hate and inappropriate sexual contact." I first wrote about Livingstone's work in 2003 and most recently in "Fictionalizing their profiles."

Fictionalizing their profiles

Adults need to take what they see in teen social-networking profiles with a grain of salt. Case in point:

Six UK newspapers ran a story about a teenager's "wild party" that her mother said never happened. It was a bit of fiction lifted from the girl's Bebo profile. First there was an invite sent out promising "the party of the year" for her 16th birthday, CNET reports. "Subsequent posts on Jodie Hudson's Bebo account spoke of underage drinking, sex acts, and violence that occurred at the celebration." The papers said 400 teens showed up and, encountering the ensuing "chaos," Jodie's mother "punched her in the face out of anger." Amanda Hudson wrote the newspapers that there was no underage drinking, no sex, no violence, and no stealing, despite what her daughter posted in Bebo. She's "suing for defamation and breach of privacy." In its coverage, The Independent cited legal experts as saying "the case may be a legal landmark because there is no precedent in disputes involving third parties who use or publish information from social-networking sites."

The case is also a perfectly timed illustration of a point London School of Economics Prof. Sonia Livingstone makes in her latest study, "Taking risky opportunities in youthful content creation: teenagers’ use of social-networking sites for intimacy, privacy and self-expression" in New Media & Society (June 208).

"It should not be assumed that profiles are simply read as information about an individual," the social psychology professor suggests. Referring to one of her research subjects, Livingstone writes: "Jenny, like others, is well aware that people’s profiles can be 'just a front.' For several of the participants, it seemed that position in the peer network was more significant than the personal information provided, rendering the profile a place-marker more than a self portrait."

Some teens have several profiles on various social sites, some with the peer group more on display than the profile owner. All in all, though, the profiles of the social networkers in her study apparently were more about the individual in relation to his or her group of friends than about the group itself. That blend of individual and group is key and what seems to drive the information that appears in the profile (photos, invites, comments, favorite whatevers). So great care goes into what is made private (to friends only) and what is made public, and - Livingstone indicates later in her analysis - the sites' severely limited choices where privacy's concerned (public or private) is a problem for young people wanting to display more gradations. "Teenagers must and do disclose personal information in order to sustain intimacy [as in sharing innermost thoughts or passwords]," Livingstone writes, but they wish to be in control of how they manage this disclosure."

One final observation I found fascinating, in response to what many adults are thinking these days (and which I'm adding here because the article costs $15 to download): Livingstone writes that "although it indeed appears that, for many young people, social networking is 'all about me, me, me,' this need not imply narcissistic self-absorption. Rather, following Mead’s (1934) fundamental distinction between the 'I' and the 'me' as twin aspects of the self, social networking is about 'me' in the sense that it reveals the self embedded in the peer group, as known to and represented by others, rather than the private 'I' known best by oneself."

My takeaway: There's no reason to overreact to a superficial surf through a bunch of social-networking profiles - even those of our own kids' peers. In many ways their profile fabrications are good. They're...

Protective - only real-life friends, not creeps, know what is and isn't true, which means strangers who try to contact them have zero credibility and usually get ignored.

A safe way to explore identity and social relating, which is part of adolescent development

A creative outlet with instant audience (mostly their friends and creative collaborators), something aspiring writers of the past could only dream about - see the last sentence of this item on the California-based Digital Youth research project.

Readers: Dr. Livingstone told me she'll send a pdf copy of her article to anyone interested. If you are, drop me an email at anne@netfamilynews.org, and I'll pass your request along to her.

Related links

Skewing a little younger: Note how 10-year-old Clementine creates and plays with fictional identities in various sites and worlds online, as told by her mother, New York Times columnist Michelle Slatalla in "Today, I think I'll be Hippohead" ("as of last month, more than 100 new virtual worlds had started up or were in development," Michelle reports).

The social sites teens use: In the UK, "Facebook dominates UK social networking with 45.29% of the market, almost double the share of second-placed Bebo and three times more than MySpace, as micro blogging site Twitter shows major growth," UK-based BrandRepublic.com reports.

"Just because they crave attention?"

Some US police don't take SN profiles at face value - see this on how some "gang members" in MySpace are just wannabes acting out.