Course Reflection. Keeping Kids Safe Online: Whose Job?
Essential Question: Whose responsibility is it to teach students to be safe online?
It’s Everyone’s Responsibility (everyone with any connection to “21st Century Kids”, that is).
- Everyone
- Everyone teaching
- Everyone teaching kids
- Everyone teaching kids online
- Everyone teaching kids online safety
- Everyone teaching kids online
- Everyone teaching kids
- Everyone teaching
- Everyone…
(image: a “Duck and Cover” poster reproduced in Wikipedia)
Why everyone?
- Because issues of identity, security and safety touches every individual in the interconnected world that web2.0 has introduced – and we don’t come with a built-in protective shell…
- Because it’s never too early to begin teaching kids about the world they are stepping into. My 22-month old son regularly astonishes me with the depth of his understanding. Although he’s just developing the verbal language to engage in logical discourse, he intuitively recognizes good and bad behaviors and safe vs. unsafe practices. Since he’s not at school yet, it’s my job, and the job of all his caregivers, to help him develop this mindset of behaving safely in the tactile world he still inhabits, and so to prepare him to behave safely online.
- Because personal Safety, in any environment, must become a “habit of mind”, and so we should turn to any and all resources available to promote this habit.
- Because we can’t rely on “the powers that be” to do the right thing when faced with a question of the magnitude that this represents.
In a neat cycle of positive reinforcement, the web itself is a wonderful resource for tools, strategies and resources to help kids develop this overarching culture of personal safety. Some interesting and useful personal safety resources include;
- Power of Parents. A Child Safety and Awareness Program – an age-graded and personnel-specific handbook to strategies for keeping kids safe up to the point where they might be developing an online presence. Sponsored by Duracell and the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.
- Mecklenburg County Public School Internet Safety Curriculum for K-12. There are likely many of these available. I’ve chosen this one simply because it’s neatly laid out in the traditional “Scope and Sequence” style that I still find easy to follow.
- iSafe K-12 Curriculum Scope 06-07 - a commercial product by i-SAFE Inc. a self-proclaimed “worldwide leader in Internet safety education. Founded in 1998 and endorsed by the U.S. Congress, i-SAFE is a non-profit foundation dedicated to protecting the online experiences of youth everywhere.”
I’m reminded, though, that I grew up in the 1950’s, when “Duck & Cover” was the official advice from the US government to address the nuclear threat we were reminded of with every 6 pm Wednesday Emergency Alert siren test. The “Duck and Cover” strategy was not just woefully inadequate. It was ludicrous. Even at 10, I recognized the futility of hiding my head in the sand if the big one went off where I could see it.
I wonder if exhortations to kids to protect themselves online don’t have some of the same theatre-of-the-absurd elements to them. Is there a value in promoting specific strategies to help protect one from dangers past? What about the frightening potentialities of the future? How can we let kids online at all and still protect them against the constantly evolving web of virtual entanglement?
The web, however, is a fact of life for kids in the here and now. Ignoring the already identified risks in online activity is a sure recipe for personal and societal disaster, and there are already enough coming-apocalypse scenarios to go around. And so, it seems, it’s up to Everyone, to follow the Middle Way regarding online safety for the next generation of virtual explorers.
(the 8-fold Path or Middle Way: Show Understanding in Thought, Speech and Action through Right Livelihood, Effort, Mindfulness, and Concentration)…
Reuben James Runquist, the octagenarian protagonist of my own Post-Apocalyptic “Road-book” proposes a mnemonic to keep himself on the Buddhist “Eight-fold Path” in the post-apocalyptic world he inhabits.
“Live Every Moment Carefully”
…advice as relevant in the virtual world as at the dawn of Buddhist thought…
