News for the Week of February 5, 2006

The biggest kid-tech news this week was overseas - the EU's Safer Internet Day, with its global "blogathon," and an OECD report linking computer literacy and kids' academic performance - but this news raises interesting questions here in the US...

Global Safer Internet Day

What's new about this year's day of awareness-raising (which was Tuesday, 2/7) was the "blogathon," a blog to which Internet safety organizations worldwide posted about Net-safety issues in their countries. They posted across the time zones, west to east, from New Zealand to Argentina, reports the European Commission's Internet Safety Zone Web site.

Some great networking is undoubtedly happening as a result. For example, at Lithuania's "first public lesson on Internet safety," according to the blog, kids were the featured teachers (some sample "witty comments"). In Israel, Dr. Avshalom Aderet, wrote, "As a result of a tragic event in my family, in which my son, being in depression, received encouragement and instructions how to commit suicide over the net, 8 years ago, which resulted shortly in his death, I decided to set up a non-profit organization in Israel, called ESHNAV, translated in Hebrew to "People for Safe Internet."

Net-safety numbers

Net-safety instruction should be compulsory in all schools, says Dr. Rachel O'Connell, director of the University of Central Lancashire's Cyberspace Research Unit. Speaking at the Safer Internet Day conference at the Museum of London, she said Net safety should be "embedded throughout the curriculum," the BBC reports. She had some numbers with her, among them: 90% of 9-to-19-year-olds (in the UK) "now access the Internet at school, but a third had received no instructions on doing so."

Also timed to Safer Internet Day, BT announced that its "Cleanfeed" filter, which blocks access to illegal child pornography, blocks 35,000 attempts to view child porn every day, the BBC reports. It adds that only .3%, or 20 out of every 6,000 such pages are hosted in the UK - the rest are on servers in many other countries. The Guardian adds that the number of attempts has tripled in the last 18 months. Here's how the UK system works: "People who discover a site that harbours suspicious content are invited to report the site to the Internet Watch Foundation," which has a report-illegal-content button on its home page. The IWF passes the reports on to the UK's National Crime Squad for analysis. "Any UK-based site hosting child pornography can be traced quickly and easily, despite elaborate attempts to hide the unique Internet addresses, known as IP addresses, which identify each site. Once traced, the ISP hosting the site is notified and the site taken down," according to the BBC. If the content's not hosted in the UK, the IWF passes the info along to Interpol for cooperation with police in other countries. Foreign-based child-porn pages also go into the IWF's database of black-listed pages. ISP filters like BT's "Cleanfeed" check page requests against that black list.

PC literacy & academic performance

"Regular computer users perform better in key school subjects," according to a new report by the Paris-based Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). The No. 1 "key subject," cited in the OECD's press release , was math. "The study [which compared 15-year-old students' performance in multiple countries] provides the first internationally comparative data in this area," the presser states. In other findings, almost 75% of students in OECD countries "use computers at home several times each week" (90% in Canada, Iceland, and Sweden). At school, the figure is 44%. The discrepancy between home and school use is especially marked in Germany. "Germany has the lowest percentage of frequent computer users at school among OECD countries (23%) but a high proportion of frequent users at home. The number of students needing to share a computer in a school in Germany ... is three times higher than in Australia, Korea, and the US." The study also found that "Greece, Mexico, Poland, the Slovak Republic and Turkey are among the OECD countries where 15-year-olds have the lowest access to computers at home."