News for the Week of March 26, 2006
This week kid-tech news takes us behind the scenes of student online-safety management in middle and high school. A great article in the Fort Wayne Journal Gazette offers some insights into how it's doing, with technology and humanity...
6,000 students, 6,000 hackers?
Contrary to what you might think, having a handle on 6,000 students' Internet use doesn't seem to be rocket science to Southwest Allen County Schools' network administrator Mark East, even though he jokingly told the Journal Gazette that's about how many hackers there are on his network.
The article offers insights into how some public schools are handling students' online safety. Most of the districts in this part of Indiana block blogging and social-networking sites, but workarounds are often found. For example, "senior Larry Buchanan, 17, said when he wants to access his Facebook account, he goes to the Web site ProxyKingz.com, which will bypass any blocks put on a site by the school system." But countermeasures work both ways. "Computer lab supervisors keep track of which students are using which computers at a certain time and the Web sites they visit leave somewhat of a fingerprint.... East said if he notices a particular student doing inappropriate things on the computer three times, he'll turn the evidence over to the principal, who must decide how to handle the situation." One assistant principal told the Journal Gazette that's happened 32 times at his school so far this year, and "punishments have ranged from suspension from computer class for one day to all-day in-school suspension." Searching for pornography would spell "an out-of-school suspension, but that hasn't happened this year."
More important is monitoring the information students upload more than what they're trying to download. One smart principal sent a letter to parents advising them to monitor their kids' blogging and told the Journal Gazette he tries to do the same, sometimes going to a student's profile with him or her in his office and talking about how much info s/he's providing and who could be reading it. Now that would be a memorable encounter with one's principal!
Student's school-filtering fix
The best part of this 16-year-old's commentary in the Salem [Ore.] Statesman Journal is not about the flaws in his school's Web filtering system, though he presents a convincing case – e.g., "some sites are blocked for strange or false reasons, leaving students scratching their heads as to why something on the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Web site is blocked for 'jokes'." The best part is his fix. It respects students' intelligence and involves accountability. For example, "Start by giving each student a personal logon and password. Then use new software that would start out with a basic list of allowed sites.... If a student were to try to access a site unknown to the software, a screen would be produced that would inform the student that the visit would be recorded and the site would be reviewed by the school district's network administrator." I doubt there's any discussion about protecting online kids that wouldn't benefit from the subjects' input. Most adults have developed a certain amount of life literacy and most kids have considerable tech literacy; both are needed in the discussion, don't you think?
In Other News...
- Webcams flying off shelves. Webcams are being used for some creative films that are being uploaded by teens to video-hosting sites like YouTube.com. On the upside, for example, a creatively edited 75-second video called "Breakup," by 17-year-old "Bowiechick" (her YouTube screenname), received more than 210,000 pageviews as of Monday, CNET reported. It's not clear, CNET says, how much "Breakup" affected sales, but "after Bowiechick posted a second video, it was revealed that she shoots her clips with Logitech's Quickcam Orbit MP, which retails for about $100," and Logitech's Webcams "were among Amazon's 100 best-selling electronics items on Friday." By Monday, "two more of the company's cameras broke into the top 100, including the Quickcam Pro 5000." The kind of creativity and initiative "Bowiechick" showed is great, as long as that's what all these Webcams are used for. But they can also be used for child exploitation (see "Kids & Webcams: Disturbing story").
- Bebo craze in UK. Social-networking site Bebo.com has "racked up more than 22 million members" in its 13 months of existence, the BBC says, and - though targeted at people 13-30 - enjoys major traffic from high school students. And this will sound familiar to Americans: "But this popularity has come with a price. Some schools and colleges have stopped pupils from using the site and block access to it during the school day."
- Cyberbullying study. A new study in the UK has just given Britons a cyberbullying reality check. The BBC reports that a MSN/YouGov survey found that more than 10% of UK teens have been bullied online; 13% say cyberbullying is worse than physical bullying; 24% know a victim; 44% know someone who has been threatened via email or instant-messaging; "about one-third know of instances where bullies hacked into mail or IM accounts and sent embarrassing material from them"; and 62% know of rumors or malicious gossip being spread online; 74% did not go to their parents or anyone for advice last time they were cyberbullied (reportedly out of fear their Net access would be shut down). Meanwhile, half of parents are unaware of cyberbullying.
- Behind France's iPod law. It hasn't passed both houses of France's legislature yet, but it has stirred up some interesting and important discussion about digital music and consumer rights. The Los Angeles Times has an editorial today that suggests the motivation behind a law meant to open up iTunes to all music players: "The rationale for the measure, two [National] Assembly deputies told Reuters, was to 'prevent the emergence of a monopoly in the supply of online culture'." That makes sense (even though France often argues for *French* cultural protectionism), because both the Times and a Washington Post commentary say there's an obvious workaround plenty of consumers use anyway.
- Heavy's for guys. You know a Web site's a phenomenon when the New York Times publishes a profile of the site and nothing but the site. In this case that would be Heavy.com. The site is heavy on the ads, targets males in their late teens/early 20s, and "mixes animation, music, video games, grainy home movies of oddball characters, supermodels in bikinis and pop culture parodies" in a fast-paced, sensory-overload sort of way. Like many Web 2.0 sites, it's lowering its targeted age. "This year Heavy will increase its production of original programming tenfold, to 600 segments. It will spin off one of its popular channels, 'Teriyaki Strips,' which features animation with an Asian theme, into a separate site aimed at teenage boys." Some ads test on the site, then move to television. The site "commissions amateur videomakers to create short videos featuring the masked king character who now appears in Burger King's TV commercials." But they have to be made less risque for TV. Virgin, Unilever, Verizon, and NBC Universal are among other advertisers.
