Happy Friday!

November 1, 2009
A Better Safety Net: It’s time to get smart about online safety
It’s time to get smart about online safety
By Anne Collier, School Library Journal

Online safety as we know it is obsolete. A concept little changed since the 1990s, it’s one size fits all, emphasizing fear instead of facts, with young people stereotyped as potential victims in a hostile media environment. While kids and the better informed may simply roll their eyes at the notion, the fear generated by what we’ve heard about online safety has affected technology funding and access in our schools, and from a student’s perspective, keeps them from the media that they find so compelling (not that they don’t have workarounds). It’s past time for Online Safety 3.0.

Why 3.0? Previous versions—let’s call them 1.0 and 2.0—focused on inappropriate content, adult-to-child crime, and flat-out misinformation about youth risk and social media. While more recently the concept began to factor in peer-to-peer safety issues such as cyberbullying, we still failed to recognize youth agency: young people as stakeholders in their own welfare as well as the community’s.

Online safety must be relevant to youth, or we’re talking to ourselves. It must accommodate the growing body of research on youth risk and what kids themselves say about how they use digital media, and it must be respectful—of both young people and the new media conditions they’re ably exploiting.

Version 3.0’s main components, new media literacy and digital citizenship, are empowering as well as protective. This is intuitive to librarians, but not so much to online-safety advocates and law enforcement officials, whose expertise in crime and the law (rather than education, adolescent development, and new media) has dominated the Net-safety discussion thus far.

What we know about youth risk online
In January 2009, the Internet Safety Technical Task Force (ISTTF), created by 49 state attorneys general and MySpace, wrapped up a year’s work with a report that summarized all the online safety research to date—a major contribution to the public discussion. It concluded that cyberbullying and harassment are the biggest hazards youth face; all children are not equally at risk; and children’s psychosocial makeup and environment are better predictors of risk than the technology they use.

Predation
Let’s take on the issue that gets the most attention: predators. Online predation cases, according to ISTTF, never involve prepubescent children and almost never involve abduction and assault, the scenario long associated with “stranger danger.” “These are not violent sex crimes,” explains David Finkelhor, director of the Crimes Against Children Research Center (CCRC) at the University of New Hampshire. “They are criminal seductions that take advantage of common teenage vulnerabilities. The offenders play on teens’ desires for romance, adventure, sexual information, and understanding” (see “Profile of a teen online victim”). In fact, most sexual solicitations of teens online are by peers.

The overwhelming majority of crimes against youth continue to take place in the “real world,” mostly by adults known to the children. The best protection against this type of manipulation and exploitation is critical thinking, engaged parenting, and mentoring.

Online, young people are far more likely to suffer from their peers or the consequences of their own online behavior. Consider an important finding published in 2007: “Youth who engage in online aggressive behavior by making rude or nasty comments or frequently embarrassing others are more than twice as likely to report online interpersonal victimization” (Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine). Aggressive behavior increases risk, while kindness, empathy, and good citizenship reduce it. See how important critical thinking skills have become?

Social networking
As for the risk inherent in social network sites, CCRC released a significant report in March 2008. It concluded “there was no evidence that online predators were stalking or abducting unsuspecting victims based on information they posted at social networking sites.”

One size does not fit all
ISTTF’s summary additionally found that “not all youth are equally at risk” and that “those experiencing difficulties offline, such as physical and sexual abuse, and those with other psychosocial problems are most at risk online.” To be effective, the Internet safety community must find ways to tailor its message based on specific risk factors.

When online-safety advocates gather at conferences, the room is typically filled with public policy professionals, technology experts, lawyers, and law enforcement people. Online Safety 3.0 needs to adopt other perspectives, including those of librarians, tech educators, counselors, school administrators, and young people themselves. To help youth who are at risk—of sexual exploitation, domestic violence, eating disorders, substance abuse, and suicide—mental health professionals and social workers must also be brought into the circle.

The Net effect
The Internet is not “the problem,” but there are certainly ways it can affect the equation for all of us, regardless of age. I call this “the Net effect.” It’s based on a set of characteristics unique to online networking as identified by social media researcher danah boyd in her doctoral dissertation, “Taken Out of Context: American Teen Sociality in Networked Publics.” These traits include persistence and searchability (the Net as a permanent, searchable archive), replicability (the ability to copy and paste from and to anywhere on the Net), scalability (potential visibility beyond the audience you have in mind), invisible audiences (never really knowing who’s seeing/reading/watching what you post), and blurring of public and private (private from whom?).

Important, too, is disinhibition: what happens when you’re unable to see or hear the other party online. Inhibitions break down, which can be good, but may reduce empathy and civility as well. That’s why lessons in citizenship, ethics, and critical thinking about content that’s incoming and outgoing are essential, throughout the grade levels, curriculum, and school day, ideally using the very social media and technologies so much in use outside of school.

More than one type of online safety
Online Safety 1.0, with the predator panic it cultivated, was largely one-dimensional. Protecting youth from predators deals only with physical safety; essential, certainly, but that’s not all. Here are the four types of safety, or rather freedoms, required for healthy online participation:

• Physical—freedom from physical harm
• Psychological—freedom from cruelty, harassment, and exposure to potentially disturbing material
• Reputational and legal—freedom from unwanted social, academic, professional, and legal consequences that could affect you for a lifetime
• Identity, property, and community—freedom from theft of identity and property and attacks against networks and online communities at local, national, and international levels.

What we know about how youth use social media
“[Teen] participation online is rarely divorced from offline peer culture,” writes boyd. “Teens craft digital self-expressions for known audiences and they socialize almost exclusively with people they know.” For them, the Web and cell phones represent just another place to hang out and socialize; the device used matters little.

And they’re not just socializing. Based on a three-year study by the more than two dozen researchers of the Digital Youth Project, we know that a lot of important informal learning is going on while youth are “online, texting, or playing video games.” “The digital world is creating new opportunities for youth to grapple with social norms, explore interests, develop technical skills, and experiment with new forms of self-expression,” reads the report. In fact, kids are engaged in two kinds of social networking: friendship-driven—the most common—and interest-driven social networking, which might better be characterized as collaboration or creative networking.

Even in multiplayer online games, there’s a lot more going on than just play. But even that’s not a bad thing. “Play is hugely important to the learning and the crafting of the brain,” psychiatrist Stuart Brown said in a recent TED talk. In the multiplayer online game World of Warcraft, for example, educators who are also WOW fans tell me that players analyze statistics and probabilities, strategize, learn how to budget and market, and explore supply and demand—key concepts of economics, math, and sociology.

In his recent book, The Element: How Finding Your Passion Changes Everything (Viking, 2009), Ken Robinson describes how many people—artists, writers, scientists, etc.—achieve success when they find their “tribe” or community of shared interest, where “interest-driven social networking” happens. There, they encounter validation, feedback, and a safe place to experiment. This is the work many young people are engaged in as they use social media—informal but authentic and compelling learning experiences.

As a consequence, school becomes less important for many youth. As one student told a researcher: “If you’re doing it for a grade, it doesn’t really count.” What a missed opportunity for education and the teaching of safe media use. When in school, students could be learning the skills that ensure safe, productive writing, producing, and collaborating using social media.

Why digital citizenship and literacy are key
Consider “sexting,” the practice of sharing explicit personal photos, usually via cell phone. In most jurisdictions, a minor caught sexting could be prosecuted for committing a federal felony under child pornography laws. In a recent Florida case, for instance, a just-turned 18-year-old was convicted of child-porn distribution and, as required by state law, will be listed on the state sex-offender registry until he’s 43 because, in a fit of anger one night, he forwarded some naked photos of his longtime girlfriend (which she had taken and shared with him).

Sexting has a whole spectrum of causes—from a misguided idea of romance and intimacy, impulsive risk-taking and peer pressure to revenge, malicious bullying, or even blackmail—and the instructive, disciplinary, and legal responses to it must be equally nuanced.

You can see then why I strongly advocate for integrating new media literacy and digital citizenship into the learning experience, from the informal kind that happens outside school to within K–12 libraries and classrooms, and to teachable moments with peers, parents, administrators, and whole communities.

I’m not suggesting that these efforts will cure sexting. But literacy and citizenship training represent the baseline, primary prevention work that may help curb impulsive behavior, ease manipulation, and fuel rational discussion among young people and between generations. And it’s what librarians do best.

Either way, if parents take proper precautions when they start letting their kids roam on the older-skewing social networks (the ones for kids are also discussed in the article), then danger can be averted. See: PC Pandora

Social networks and kids: How young is too young?
By Doug Gross, CNN

Status updates, photo tagging and FarmVille aren’t just for adults or even teenagers anymore.

Researchers say a growing number of children are flouting age requirements on sites such as Facebook and MySpace, or using social-networking sites designed just for them.

Facebook and MySpace require users to be at least 13. But they have no practical way to verify ages, and many young users pretend to be older when signing up.

Some scientists worry that pre-adolescent use of the sites, which some therapists have linked to Internet addiction among adults, could be damaging to children’s relationships and brains.

But many other experts say there’s not any solid research to back that up and that most children seem to use social-media sites in moderation, and in positive ways.

“For the most part, although there’s so much press about all the bad things they’re doing, much of what they do on these sites is stuff they would be doing anyway,” said Kaveri Subrahmanyam, a professor of psychology at California State University-Los Angeles.

In two surveys reported this year by Pew Internet Research — of 700 and 935 teens, respectively — 38 percent of respondents ages 12 to 14 said they had an online profile of some sort.

Sixty-one percent of those in the study, ages 12 to 17, said they use social-networking sites to send messages to friends, and 42 percent said they do so every day.

The data in the study was from 2006, so it’s not a stretch to assume those numbers are higher this year. Research on younger children is limited, but anecdotal evidence shows that many of them are also logging on.

“Of course they are,” said Amanda Lenhart, a senior researcher at Pew and one of the report’s authors. “They’re using them because that’s where their social world is. Because there’s no effective way to age-verify … children very quickly realize, ‘I just say I’m 14 years old, and they’ll let me use this.’ “

Marc Bigbie, a software salesman who lives near Savannah, Georgia, said he has three children — 14, 12 and 11 — who all have accounts on at least one social-networking site.

His oldest daughter, then 11, was the first in the family to create an account, on MySpace. And it was without her parents’ permission.

“It was kind of a negative thing at first,” he said. “We kind of took it away from her. But, finally, we said, ‘You can have it, but we need the password so we can be on there at any time.’ “

Since then, all three of the kids have gotten Facebook accounts, with their parents even agreeing to fudge their ages.

Bigbie said he makes sure his children’s accounts are set to provide as little personal information as possible, and they allow their activity to be seen only by confirmed friends. He and his wife monitor the pages to make sure they know the friends that their children have added.

He said the oldest daughter is the only one who uses the account almost every day, while the younger children log on briefly every now and then.

In the past couple of years, some scientists have voiced concerns that children are spending too much on these sites and that such online socializing could have lasting negative effects as they mature.

“My fear is that these technologies are infantilizing the brain into the state of small children who are attracted by buzzing noises and bright lights, who have a small attention span and who live for the moment,” Susan Greenfield, an Oxford University neurocientist and director of Britain’s Royal Institution, told London’s Daily Mail in February.

“I often wonder whether real conversation in real time may eventually give way to these sanitized and easier [online] screen dialogues,” she said.

Other scientists criticized Greenfield’s comments, calling them speculation, not science.

Subrahmaynam said a study of high school students showed that in most cases, the people they interact with most often online are people they also socialize with in person.

Children today have spent their whole lives on computers, and their brains are better adapted than those of adults to integrate online activities with their offline lives, she said.

“You’ll always have the small minority of kids who are not using it appropriately,” she said. “I do think you’re going to have a few people that are doing things that kids probably couldn’t do with telephones a generation ago.

“But we don’t want to get swept away by the general fear. It’s here, and it’s pretty harmless.”

Many parents also worry that younger users of social sites could be targets for online predators. While there are some concerns that kids aren’t mature enough to make good decisions about their privacy, Subrahmaynam and Lenhart said most are savvy enough by their early teens to know what, and who, to avoid. Younger children, they say, need more parental supervision.

Alternately, a growing number of networking sites are geared specifically toward younger users. Sites such as Disney’s Club Penguin — mainly a game site, but with limited social functions — WebKinz and Whyville feature more restricted and supervised networking.

Such kids-oriented sites are “sort of a training ground” for future use of mainstream social networks, Lenhart said.

Children as young as 5 have accounts at KidSwirl, a kids’ social-networking site patterned loosely on Facebook, said creator Toby Clark.

Clark said the average user spends about five minutes on the site per visit — far less than Facebook’s average of more than 20 minutes.

He said he limits the amount of time his two children, 9 and 6, spend on the site, but that any parent who bans their children from such sites isn’t facing the facts.

“The reality is that we’re a technology-driven generation,” said Clark, who launched the site in February and said it has about 10,000 users. “That’s not going to change.”

So what long-term effect will social networking have on children? Scientists say it may be hard to know for sure.

“We’ve lost the control group,” Subrahmanyam said. “How do you find a group of kids that are not using the computer?”

Think your kids are perfect angels? Are you sure? Better think twice.

If the parents had computer monitoring software, they could have prevented this situation from happening.

Hindsight is 20/20… then again, monitoring what your children do on the Internet is just basic parenting in 2009…

November 4, 2009
Oldham County Missing Girl Found In Ohio
Rosemary Weiler Reported Missing Tuesday Morning

OLDHAM COUNTY, Ky. — The father of a missing Oldham County 14-year-old girl said his daughter was been found in Ohio.

Rosemary Weiler, 14, was reported missing by her parents after 7 a.m. Tuesday. Her father said she was found safe and sound in Portsmouth, Ohio.

“When I got on the bus, everybody was freaking out saying, ‘Rosemary’s missing, and did you hear about Rosemary?” neighbor Drew Mitchell said.

Her family said she met an 18-year-old college student at Shawnee, Ohio. She told him she was 16 years old and he drove down to Oldham County to pick her up.

“For someone to be gone in the middle of the night, that’s kind of scary,” resident Mary Felt said. “It must have been really tragic for them to go through that all day and be so upset and panicked and you know, what happened to her, is she safe, is anything wrong?”

Detectives said they quickly started putting the online pieces together.

“(We) went through her chat and e-mail rooms that she was in. As far as with her computer, they had located a phone number for a gentleman, they contacted that number,” Oldham County Police Department spokesman Chris Morris said. “At this time, it’s unknown what his intent was, he obviously came down to Kentucky from Ohio to pick this female up and it’s unknown what, if there was a relationship prior to that, or they’d just met.”

The man took Weiler to the Shawnee Police Department after Oldham County police contacted him to tell him she was only 14 years old, officers said. Police said no charges will be filed.

“She is still sticking to the story that she told him she was older than she was, and with her saying that, we really can’t file charges against that 18-year-old adult, he was under the pretenses that she was older,” Morris said.

Authorities are using the episode to warn parents once more about the dangers of online predators.

“I know your kids don’t want you monitoring what they’re doing, but sometimes you need to, because there are predators out there,” Morris said.

Weiler’s father said he drove to Ohio to reunite with his daughter. He said he’s just glad his daughter is safe. He had no comment on the fact that no charges will be filed.

WLKY also asked police why that student couldn’t be charged with transporting a minor across state lines for sex.

Police said they just don’t have enough evidence to say that sex was the reason the student brought Weiler back to Ohio.