News for the Week of September 21, 2008
With school in full swing now, "cyberbullying" is in the news a lot, and not just technology news!
What is 'cyberbullying'?
We've heard the one-third-of-US-teens-have-been-cyberbullied figure a lot (I've shared it too), and it's not in the best interests of online youth for the now-subsiding predator panic to suddenly now turn into a cyberbully panic. It's not that the one-third figure, arrived at by two highly credible sources (Pew Internet & American Life and Profs. Patchin and Hinduja) is wrong, of course; it's that "cyberbullying" really needs to be more clearly defined. Are all those kids actually bullied?
"In many cases, the concept of 'bullying' or 'cyber-bullying' may be inappropriate for online interpersonal offenses," write researchers at the University of New Hampshire's Crimes Against Children Research Center (CACRC) in the Journal of Adolescent Health. "We suggest using 'online harassment,' with disclaimers that it does not constitute bullying unless it is part of or related to offline bullying. this would include incidents perpetrated by peers that occur entirely online, but arise from school related events or relationships and have school related consequences for targets."
Three key characteristics
The study's authors - Janis Wolak, Kimberly Mitchell, and David Finkelhor - found that "9% of youth were harassed online in the past year," 43% of them by known peers and 57% by people they met online and did not know in person.... Most online harassment incidents did not appear to meet the standard definition of bullying bullying used in school-based research and requiring aggression, repetition, and power imbalance."
So online bullying - not just harassment - looks like this:
- Related to "real life"
- Not just aggression, but repeated aggression
- A power imbalance.
"Only 25% of incidents by known peers and 21% by online-only contacts involved both repeated incidents and either distress to targets or adult intervention," the authors found. Just looking at that first number, that's 25% of the 43% of the 9% - a pretty small number of actual cyberbullying victims.
So when we see data showing large numbers of such victims, it's good to be aware that they can include random and even mild incidents of harassment that don't really cause stress - and could just be someone in a bad mood one afternoon who feels like acting out. "Cyberbullying" deserves to be taken with a grain of salt. In any case, teaching young people citizenship of both the real-life and digital sorts will help mitigate any behavior that falls into that large category.
Recent coverage
Forbes just published a very well reported article, "How to Stop Cyber-Bullying". Canadian teachers say "Online bullying should be a criminal offense," (I wonder if their US counterparts agree). In New Zealand, they're asking "Why kids don't tell on cyberbullies". In Wisconsin, there's a substance anti-bullying program for elementary school students, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reports. School CIO magazine recently ran an interview, "Standing up to cyberbullies," with Mike Donlin, who "manages federal technology programs and cyberbullying education and prevention efforts" for the Seattle public schools. See also "P2P healing in cyberbullying case" and the story behind Letters to a Bullied Girl: Messages of Healing and Hope, by teen authors Olivia Gardner, Emily Buder, and Sarah Buder. Web resources include Cyberbully.org and the book Cyberbullying & Cyberthreats from the Center for Safe & Responsible Internet Use; CyberbullyHelp.com from Patricia Agatston, Susan Limber, and Robin Kowalski, the authors of Cyber Bullying: Bullying in the Digital Age; and Bullying Beyond the Schoolyard, a new book from Profs. Sameer Hinduja and Justin Patchin.
In other news...
- Tweens are into phones. If you want some data to back you up when your middle-schooler tells you that "Everybody has a cellphone," Forbes.com has some. Citing Nielsen Mobile research, it reports that "46% of US tweens (ages 8 to 12) use cellphones, but only 26% own them" and about 20% are using parents' hand-me-down phones. The 20% who don't own them borrow them from Mom or Dad. "About 50% take their parents' phones more than three times a week." Nielsen says that 8.5 is the average age when kids start borrowing parents' phones, and 10 or 11 is when they start owning their own. Ages 13-17 is when "phone use soars," with about 77% ownership in that age range. And how is the bill footed? Family plans: 65% of tweens. Prepaid, pay-as-you-go plans: 30%. "By age 18 to 24, most pay for their own mobile usage."
- YouTube bans violence-inciting videos. YouTube has changed its content guidelines and now bans videos that involve "inciting others to violence," the Washington Post reports. Last May Sen. Joseph Lieberman (I-CT) "issued a bipartisan report by the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs staff that described how al-Qaeda created and managed its online media," then wrote a letter to YouTube's parent Google "demanding that the company 'immediately remove content produced by Islamic terrorist organizations from YouTube'." YouTube only removed some of them but "refused to take down most of the videos on the senator's list, saying they did not violate the Web site's guidelines against graphic violence or hate speech." A policy review reportedly ensued, with YouTube telling the Post that the senator had "made some good points."
- Facebook plugs security hole. The security issue was people being able to view some members' private photos using the mobile version of Facebook and the Firefox browser, CNET reports. "Basically, someone who knew the serial number of a Facebook user, which is easy to get, and knew a trick for rejiggering the URL, could see private photos of that user," according to CNET. Facebook says it fixed the flaw within hours of being notified. It also plans soon to launch a program to verify the security of third-party applications (those mini applications users download to add games, slideshows, playlists, and other features to their profiles) - an update, apparently, over the statement from a Canadian consumer privacy group in the Toronto Globe & Mail that Facebook wasn't "doing enough to screen third-party developers to ensure they're not phishing for information or trying to commit identity."
- Nine parts of digital citizenship. These make complete sense ("complete" as in comprehensive, too). The nine elements grew out of a three-year PhD dissertation project by educator Mike Ribble at Kansas State University. Mike defines "digital citizenship" as "the norms of appropriate, responsible behavior with regard to technology use." The nine elements are Digital Etiquette (I think I'd use the broader term "ethics," which includes standards of conduct); Digital Communication; Digital Literacy (sub-categories might be media literacy and behavioral critical thinking); Digital Access ("full electronic participation in society," Mike writes, but I'm not sure "electronic" is the best word); Digital Commerce; Digital Law ("electronic responsibility for actions and deeds" - I'd delete "electronic" and include taking responsibility for a basic understanding of digital law); Digital Rights & Responsibilities ("those freedoms extended to everyone in a digital world"); Digital Health & Wellness ("physical and psychological well-being in a digital technology world"); and Digital Security (self- and collaborative protection of one's data and equipment). [Ribble describes all of these in great depth on that page.] I think twice wherever anybody puts "electronic" or "digital" in front of "communication," "ethics," etc. because of the disappearing distinction between digital behavior and the real-life kind, certainly as young people experience it. Hey, ethics is ethics, right?
- A teacher on texting. High school teacher Allison Cohen asked 90 of her students about their texting practices where school and academics were concerned and then wrote about it. But in this insightful article at bNetSavvy, you'll not only find her students' views but also hers and those of fellow teachers as well. If parents have concerns about cellphone abuse at school, do check this out.
