How to teach Net safety, ethics, security? Blend them in!

US K-12 students aren't getting adequate instruction in "cyberethics, cybersafety, and cybersecurity," according to a just-released study sponsored by the National Cybersecurity Alliance and Microsoft released today. The survey, of more than 1,000 teachers, 400 administrators, and 200 tech coordinators, found that – although over 90% of administrators, teachers, and tech coordinators support teaching these topics in school – only 35% of teachers and just over half of school administrators say the topics are required in their curriculum. A bit of pass-the-buck thinking turned up in the results too – 72% of teachers said parents bear most of the responsibility for teaching these topics (51% of administrators say teachers do). They're both partly right; it's everybody's responsibility, the experts say (see this). But the thing is, most teachers are already teaching online safety (which includes ethics) and may not even know it. More on that in a moment....

The filtering hurdle

The biggest hurdle to Net-safety instruction may actually be school filters! Note this statement in the study's press release: "The survey also found a high reliance on shielding students instead of teaching behaviors for safe and secure Internet use. More than 90% of schools have built up digital defenses, such as filtering and blocking social network sites...." Then note UK education watchdog Ofsted's finding just last month – that schools using extensive or "locked down" filtering "were less effective in helping [students] to learn how to use new technologies safely." If schools could just teach a lot of what they've always taught, folding digital media in with traditional media (aka books, pencils, etc.), the academic ethics and citizenship they've always "taught" (hopefully modeled and encouraged) will naturally include "cyberethics," for example.

Citizenship is a verb!

A classroom is a community, as is a blog, a team, or the group of people working together on a Google Doc. How do participants/"citizens" treat one another in those various communities as well as in the classroom one? You can't *be* a citizen without a chance to practice citizenship in the community where you're supposed to be a citizen. The same goes for the digital sort; today's social media give us a whole array of opportunities to practice citizenship in online communities.

"Student leadership becomes an engine of citizenship," Sylvia Martinez of GenYes told me in a phone interview recently. I asked her what she meant by student leadership: "It's putting students in charge of something that matters [such as enlisting students to help integrate technology and digital media into the classroom, as GenYes programs do for schools] – giving them responsibility, then watching them, expecting them to do things that show they've accepted the responsibility, and then challenging them to do more," Martinez adds. "It's a cycle. Students are engaged [citizenship as civic engagement – or, in this case, classroom, task, or project engagement] because they're doing something important." So let students help with or run the incorporating of blogs, wikis, Google docs, and nings into class work!

Citizenship is protective

As for "cybersafety," that too is practiced naturally when people are thinking about citizenship (and ethics!) online and offline. How can I say that? Because the research shows that peer harassment and cyberbullying represent the most common risk to students, and aggressive behavior more than doubles the aggressor's risk of being victimized; so civility, respect for others, and citizenship represent the lion's share of safety online for students. [As for the predation risk, which is extremely low for students who are not already deemed "at risk youth," the research shows (see this), the don't-talk-to-strangers-online message and associated fears have gotten through to kids during several years of technopanic; a teacher in New Jersey recently told me that her middle school students are just as afraid of predators as their parents are.]

Media literacy – critical thinking about behavior as well as information in a blog, wiki, Ning, or virtual world – supports citizenship and safety, as students learn to think critically about the motives behind and accuracy of info, comments, photos, text messages, etc. they download and upload, whether the source is a friend, advertiser, or stranger. This is not rocket science!

Students involved in tech integration can also model and help teach good computer and network security practices – that third C in the study mentioned above, Cybersecurity. This, too, is an aspect of good citizenship: protecting our passwords, not being tricked by phishers and other manipulators, and knowing what's needed to protect our computers and networks. Critical thinking is key here, too, because social engineering, or manipulation, is a basic component of phishing and malicious hacking.

Basic ingredients, with or without a recipe

This kind of "online safety" education – learning to behave civilly and ethically online and offline and to respect one's own and others' passwords, identities, and intellectual and physical property at home and school – is not only protective, it's *relevant* to students because they enable all of us to function effectively in a 21st-century media environment.

Martinez told me that half the schools GenYes works with say they don't want a cybercurriculum, and about half very definitely do. So, hey, if any schools do want formal curricula or lesson plans for "cybersafety, cybersecurity, and cybercitizenship," there is no better material than Cybersmart's. Just don't let those big words make you think that this is all about new technology, some sort of add-on to students' life or education, or anything that we haven't all been thinking about and working on together for a very long time!

Related link

You only need one: educator Anne Bubnic's 2.5 pages of "digital citizenship" links, starting here.

'Culture of responsibility' for the social Web

This deserves notice: "What we need in response to this and other equally alarming cases is a new culture of responsibility where government, industry, schools, parents and the kids themselves share differing and overlapping responsibilities for what happens online so that Megan's untimely death is not repeated, nor the emergence of a cyber lynch mob ever needed again," wrote Stephen Balkam, CEO of the Family Online Safety Institute, in the Huffington Post. He was referring to what the most intelligent response to the Megan Meier tragedy (see "Indictment in Megan Meier case" here) would be. I agree wholeheartedly. It's the next phase of online-safety advocacy: calling for and contributing to a concerted collective effort toward an online culture of responsibility - a sense of citizenship online as well as off - starting with the first references to it at home and school. [See also "Imposter profiles: No easy solution."]

More polite in virtual worlds?

CNET asks that question, and I think it's an interesting one - especially given a growing public discussion about cyberbullying and why some people are so nasty on the Web (see my earlier post on this). The question is: Are people more polite in online worlds and games with avatars than in, say, social-networking sites? And is it because there are avatars - visual representations of ourselves - instead of just text and the anonymity associated with it? Maybe virtual worlds (like Teen Second Life, Whyville.net, and There.com) are logical "places" to teach cybercitizenship and cyberethics, then. Parents, educators, and online-safety advocates concerned about social behavior online and cyberbullying might consider putting heads together with operators of tween and teen spaces online to consider making this a component of virtual worlds for youth. See also ZDNET's "When cyberbullying hits teens."

Ethics & media literacy: Facebook in their yearbooks

Students at a Washington, D.C.-area high school found some of their Facebook photos published in their school’s yearbook, the Washington Post reports. There were pictures of everything from tailgate-party drinking to cellphone portraits to silly antics among friends. “Desperate and crunched for time, yearbook staffers resorted to filling pages with photographs downloaded from student Facebook pages. They did it largely without the permission of students and without crediting photographers.” The Post writer suggests the incident illustrates “how complacent the denizens of Internet vanity sites have become” about sharing their private lives. Maybe so. I think this just points to another piece of the cyberethics training that’s needed – the media-literacy piece. This piece of the training deals with issues like cut ‘n’ paste plagiarism and copyright theft. Here’s coverage from the Student Press Law Center.

Cyberethics training needed

“She was a little big for her age, her face still chubby and prepubescent,” writes ZooeysRoom.com’s Kaley Noonen in Edutopia.org. “She pulled me aside after the cyberbullying workshop I'd just given to a room full of 20 middle school girls. She looked as though she were hiding something. ‘Would you help me get my MySpace page shut down?’ she asked.” The girl explained to Kaley that an ex-friend had used her password to hijack her MySpace profile and proceed to bully her by posting “all kinds of malicious [sex-related] lies” about the girl on it.

As hard as that is to read, anecdotes like Kaley’s and so many others from teens, reporters, and other experts are not unusual. Then there’s…

The brand-new finding from the Pew Internet & American Life Project that some 8 million US 12-to-17-year-olds have been bullied (see this issue).

The recent finding from the Crimes Against Children Research Center about the fine line between bullying an victimization: “Youth who engage in online aggressive behavior making rude or nasty comments or frequently embarrassing others are more than twice as likely to report online interpersonal victimization” (see this summary), and…

All this points to a serious and growing need for ethics training. Kaley quotes a 2005 Pew/Internet study that found girls are “now considered the ‘power users’ of online communication tools. This kind of power needs to be tempered by ethics training. You wouldn't give a 16-year-old girl a chainsaw without warning her of its dangers, yet with a keystroke, many girls are capable of carving up names, reputations, even entire lives with cheerful indifference.”

At the end of his 10-part Internet-safety series, author, public-policy expert, and dad Adam Thierer writes that “one of the most important parenting responsibilities involves teaching our children basic manners and rules of social etiquette.” Helping them apply those basics in their online experiences is equally important, he suggests, offering eight “sensible rules” for online behavior. Rule No. 1 is “Treat others you meet online with the same respect that you would accord them in person.”

Kaley takes it a step further when she teaches middle-schoolers what empathy means – with a real-time demo of their own completely non-empathetic reactions to a photo of Britney Spears with her head shaved and dark circles under her eyes (see the article for those heartless reactions).

One thing is clear: If we don’t want our children to be victimized themselves, we need to talk with them about treating people online the way they would to their faces, and if someone else is cruel online, not to make the situation worse by participating. Note one high school student’s intelligent attitude:

"’I've heard of [cyberbullying] and experienced it. People think they are a million times stronger because they can hide behind their computer monitor.’ This student called them ‘e-thugs,’ while displaying his own maturity about the practice: ‘Basically I just ignored the person and went along with my own civilized business’.” [This is on p. 5 of the Pew/Internet report, also quoted in InternetNews.com’s coverage.]

More on this

The latest numbers: My summary two weeks ago of the Pew Internet & American Life Project's just-released study on cyberbullying in the US, based on both a survey of and focus groups with teenagers.

Cyberbullying's seriousness. In a commentary at MSNBC, Helen Popkin suggests we need to come out of denial about cyberbullying’s seriousness, especially when dealing with not-yet-fully-developed teenage brains. But we also need to acknowledge, she suggests, that this new/old social ill is certainly not “owned” by teens – and she’s right. There is a lot of ugly online harassment being committed by adult bullies too, male and female.

An adult’s-eye-view of social-networking etiquette at The Times of London: Note No. 8 in writer Jack Malvern’s “A Guide to Internet Manners” at the bottom: “The golden rule for Facebook Etiquette is the same as for manners generally. Manners mean how we behave in society. Treat others as you would like to be treated yourself. And this does not mean having to admit every unknown Tom, Dick and Harriet to your friendship.”

Mobile bullying across the pond – one in five 11-to-19-year-olds in the UK have been bullied either via phone or the Internet, the BBC reports.