News for the Week of October 7, 2007
Topping youth-tech news this week is a look at cyberbullying victims - and a new class of perpetrators: bystanders.
A film worth more than a 1,000 words.
What does cyberbullying look like? We hear the word, and sometimes a definition — the online version of the nasty, mostly pre-adolescent behavior that's been making kids miserable for eons. But, to many adults, cyberbullying is pretty murky. With this new video, "Let's Fight It Together," Childnet International brings the picture into sharp focus. (Watch Childnet CEO Stephen Carrick-Davies on video explaining why a clear picture is so important.)
The London-based nonprofit organization believes that "Digital citizenship isn't just about recognising and dealing with online hazards. It's about building safe spaces and communities, understanding how to manage personal information, and about being Internet savvy — using your online presence to grow and shape your world in a safe, creative way, and inspiring others to do the same," according to the Digizen project's About page.
Cyberbullying: The bystander factor.
When people hear about cyberbullying, they usually think of either the bully or the victim. But as we think together about how to deal with this problem (victimizing about a third of all US 12-to-17-year-old Net users, according to Pew Internet & American Life Project), it would be good to consider the third category of participant (yes, participant): the bystander.
On the Internet, there are a lot more "bystanders" when the bully can put mean text, photos and video in front entire peer groups or schools all at once, greatly compounding the victimization. Then there's the viral kind of bullying, when mean statements get passed along, IM'ed, cut-'n'-pasted by bystanders who suddenly become accessories to the bullying.
"Helping children to understand that they can make someone else suffer by swapping photos or commenting on video clips, and that a 'harmless bit of fun' to one person could be agonising humiliation for someone else, is really important," writes commentator Bill Thompson at the BBC, pointing to a new anti-cyberbullying program of the UK government's Department for Children, Schools and Families, written by Childnet International. Thompson writes that the program "shows how seriously the problem is being taken, and that may make it easier for children to tell someone about what is happening... As with physical bullying, the first step to resolving the problem is to admit that it is happening and find someone who can help you take the next step."
In other news...
- Miss America's browser for kids As Miss America, Lauren Nelson made online safety her cause because of a scary experience she and some friends had as young teens seven years ago when they were messing around in a Web chatroom during a sleepover. Someone in the chatroom asked for one of the girls' personal information and "within a week, an online predator was emailing one of them lurid photos," the Associated Press reports. Now Lauren's the star of "The Miss America Kid-Safe Web Browser." The browser, which can be downloaded for free at MissAmericaKids.com, "permits access to 10,318 Web sites, all of which were prescreened and determined to be kid-friendly by the Miss America Organization and the Children's Educational Network, which developed the software for it. It has a feature enabling parents to lock the computer and prohibit Internet access with any other browser, and it lets parents add sites to the approved list."
- Family computing for a cause. It's a new twist on buy one, get one free. You buy a laptop for a child in a developing country and your child gets one free. The project is called "Give 1 Get 1," and with it, "Americans and Canadians can buy two laptops for $399," the New York Times reports. The donated computer is a tax-deductible charitable contribution. Long in development, the One Laptop per Child campaign is "an ambitious project to bring computing to the developing world's children," according to the Times. And there have been some successes in getting laptops to their intended owners — e.g., Peru "will buy and distribute 250,000 of the laptops over the next year — many of them allocated for remote rural areas," and the Italian government "has agreed to purchase 50,000 laptops for distribution in Ethiopia."
- Parents exposed in social sites. Kids talking about parents online can be good and bad. Some parents deserve more privacy, but the behavior of others should be exposed. Cases in point, reported by SmartMoney.com: A mom in Oregon arrested "for buying a keg of beer for her son's 17th birthday party, after the boy posted photos of the festivities on his MySpace page; a dad who lost his job after his daughter blogged about his "drinking a lot because of his boss, whom he considered a 'jerk'"; and a couple in Maryland facing trial for child abuse after their 12-year-old daughter posted in MySpace about their giving her pot and cocaine. In any case, it's not just teens' reputations that are at stake on the social Web.
- Videogaming reduces a gender difference. University of Toronto researchers not only found that there's a "spatial attention" difference between men and women, but also that women can catch up to men in this ability rapidly to switch attention among different objects by playing videogames "for only a few hours." "One important application of this research could be in helping to attract more women to the mathematical sciences and engineering — since spatial skills play an important role in these professions," the university's news site quotes Prof. Ian Spence as saying.
