News for the Week of May 21, 2006

The impact of teen social-networking on schools in grabbing more and more headlines in technology news, especially this week...

'Students accountable'

This week a school board in Illinois unanimously passed rule changes to the effect that high school students in its district will now be "accountable for what they post on blogs and social-networking Web sites," the Chicago Tribune reported. "All students participating in extracurricular activities, including athletic teams, fine arts groups and school clubs, will have to sign a pledge agreeing that evidence of 'illegal or inappropriate' behavior posted on the Internet could be grounds for disciplinary action." Those student participants represent about 80% of the district's 3,200 high school students. Interestingly, only one parent commented during the meeting's public-comment period. She said the district was overstepping its bounds, that monitoring what students are doing online is parents' job. Here's the Electronic Frontier Foundation's "FAQ on Student Blogging" and free speech.

Social-networkers' protests

In California, students were demonstrating for their free-speech rights. "Zach Fuller, 18, held up a sign recently in front of Etiwanda High School [in San Bernardino], proclaiming 'We don't need no thought control'," reports the San Bernardino Sun. Zach "was protesting the school's decision to suspend five of his friends for profane online postings made off campus." The Sun quotes the executive director of the Nashville, Tenn.-based First Amendment Center as saying that social-networking technology, or the user-driven Web, is opening up a whole new area for the free-speech issue. But the San Bernardino students' postings weren't just profane. Defamation might've been an issue too: "The five students suspended last month had posted profanity-laden comments about a teacher on MySpace from their home computers. Vulgar language and photos of the teacher accompanied other pictures of Nazi images."

Control or communicate?

Or both? Those seemed to be the questions in a Honolulu Star-Bulletin article about how schools in Oahu are dealing with teen social networks. The article leads with two examples of high school students videoing and posting fights on YouTube.com. But the story's about a deeper question schools are grappling with in the face of something school administrators admit they don't fully understand: how to deal with out-of-school online behavior that can affect school safety? One school board member in Honolulu is interested in a term used in a proposed school-safety policy in Utah: "substantial disruption." The policy would allow schools "to react to off-campus situations earlier, especially if they cause 'substantial disruption' to school operations or infringe on student or staff rights." A private school in the Honolulu area that "has had its share of cyber-situations" told the Star-Bulletin that school-parent-student communication is key - "acting quickly to show students and parents the harm caused has shown good results." Here's a Washington Post story last January about DC-area schools' handling of students blogging and social-networking. Examples of blog posts schools want parents to know about, according to the Post: "an Alexandria girl with an abusive mother confides that she wants to have a baby, even though it would 'most likely make everything 5,000 times harder'; a girl from a Fairfax County school posts photos of herself in a bikini, inviting boys to comment."

In Other News...

  • The spyware plague. Where spyware's concerned, using the Net is getting *more* dangerous at home or work, the New York Times reports. "Spyware" is a broad term that can mean anything from harmless cookies to Trojan horse software that can take over your PC. One of the riskier kinds is the growing problem: keylogging software, the kind that logs and sends your every keystroke to someone interested in credit card numbers, passwords, and other information only you should know. Make sure your kids know (they probably do) that this kind of code can get installed by worms/viruses in email and IMs and by malicious Web sites people click to from search engines.
  • Word to the wise. One feature of MySpace considered very cool to some of its young users is that they can customize their spaces not only esthetically but also functionally. They can add free software code (downloadable from sites out on the Web or from fellow MySpacers) to "enhance" it. One type of code people are adding "spies" on people who come to their profiles. Here's where a heads-up is needed, according to the Washington Post. "Take, for instance, the latest scam being passed around like a digital disease on MySpace: a message advertising software that promises users the ability to track who is viewing their profile pages. This thing, brought to my attention by the folks at Fortinet, arrives as a Myspace bulletin (bulletins allow Myspace users to send messages to all of their 'friends' simultaneously) and directs users to visit www.myfriendspy.com [don't go there!], which claims the visitor can download the software after clicking on an icon that automatically posts the same bulletin to their friends." What Friendspy does is install spyware on the MySpacer's own PC.
  • Game laws update. At the state level, legislation about videogame sales to minors appears to be gathering momentum - even though a Tennessee bill was withdrawn by its sponsor, Gamasutra.com reports. Louisiana is working on such a law (see ArsTechnica.com ), and one in Maryland just got signed by its governor. Interestingly, in Maryland's case, the Entertainment Software Association, which has successfully fought similar state laws in courts around the country, says it won't fight this one. "The law is narrowly written to cover the kind of content that would only be seen in a pornographic movie or magazine, and as such, can be seen as an extension of current laws barring minors from purchasing pornographic DVDs to video games," Ars Technica reports.
  • Games getting serious. While videogame violence grabs a lot of headlines, there's something else parents of gamers may want to know about: the "Serious Games Movement." The movement has even had its own summit. It's all about "creating games that play roles in areas such as education, health, public policy, science, government and corporate training," USATODAY reports. One source called it "stealth education." The most well-known example is America's Army, with about 5 million registered users. Originally designed as a recruiting tool, its really viewed as a game (which gives people a pretty good feel for what combat's like). But there are more "serious" examples. One is a project at University of Washington looking at whether game technology can "help adolescents and young adults manage chronic diseases like diabetes."