Cyber Ethics Summit

Here at the Yahoo campus on October 19,2007. Listening to David Warlick discuss how our world is outpacing us. The following are my notes from the seminar.

Links from presenters:
Keynote speakers handouts, bib., etc.
http://davidwarlick.com/wordpress/?p=202

Other speaker sites:
http://www.ctap4.org/cybersafety/

http://landmark-project.com/
http://www.werenotafraid.com/
http://connectsafely.org/
http://safely.yahoo.com/
http://www.isafe.org/
http://www.cyberbully.org/
http://www.netsmartz.org/
http://www.safekids.org/
http://digg.com/spy
http://digg.com/
http://www.ikeepsafe.org/


Video Games: students are doing more than playing, they are looking for stories and are inserting themselves into the plots. They are becoming a part of the story. This makes them fundamentally different from many of their teachers, who see gaming differently.

We tend to want our students to be the children that we want to teach, instead of letting them be who they are.

Realistically, we have around 5 years until the students we have in our classrooms are completely 21st century natives. They will not have been around for the typewriter, or the electric typewriter. They never knew a divided Berlin, or a U.S.S.R., they didn't experience vinyl records, and don't know a world without computers.

Even now by middle school many of them have cell phones, portable music players, and portable video games. Increasingly students will expect the classroom to include the technology that they have grown up learning with and using, and we are not necessarily prepared to help them manage this technology in a way that promotes effective, focused, and positive learning.

Students are growing up as a part of a connected network- they look for their information from this network, it is a collaborative community.

For us information is seen as consumable: CD's, DVD's. etc. We buy it and we use it the way it was intended for us to. We don't attempt to change or reshape what we have.

For our students information is seen as raw material- It's value is in what can be done with it, not necessarily what it is. Our students see information as changeable, for example: taking video games and using them as movie sets for videos, making video and setting it to audio from movies and musicals.

Web 1.0- Is static, authoritarian. Like our textbooks, it is information that has been selected for us and not meant to be questioned. A great example of this is the New York Times Website. There is a place for this type of information. It is needed.

Web 2.0.- Is dynamic, changeable, collaborative. The information in these types of websites is meant to be manipulated by users. The collaborative nature of these websites allows for collaboration and interface. A great example of this is digg.com

Our students are frequently collaborating, using social networking sites (like Facebook and Myspace), and making multiple meanings from the digital media that they use. So, the question is...
What do we want our students, who live in this world to know?
We can't shove them into our world because it is really not fair to them, as we would be asking them to live in what is ostensibly their past instead of moving forward into the future.

What kind of literacy do our children need to have in order to be successful in their world?

They have already created an entire new grammar system for the new language of text messaging and instant messaging, so what is literacy?

In reality we are talking about global learning vs sardine can learning. Students need to be empowered and learn to take ownership of the things that they create on the net. The new classroom needs to be a learning engine, with the teacher maintaining it. It is collaborative, with the students having an audience- their peers on the net.
Increasingly we are in a participatory information landscape. Everything is connected- the teacher- the net- the student- information.

The web that the student crawls is defined by an abundance of free information. Literacy changes in this environment. To them it is a playground.
In 2007 it is expected that we will have a 35 billion dollar loss due to spam. We could bring HIV/AIDS under control world wide with this amount of money.
Starting in kindergarten we need to be teaching our students about ethics on the Internet. We focus throughout the grade levels on what we can call "regular" ethics- but we don not broach to topic of cyber ethics. Like all things, students rely on the adults around them to understand what is right, wrong, safe, and unsafe.

Many students will comment on how their parents are very involved in maintaining their safety. They check in at school, know who their friends are, check up on their activities. But they don't check in on their activities on the web. This causes students to often think that the web is safe, otherwise their parents would be monitoring.

We have decided that every child needs to learn to read in this country. It is in their best interest. It is also in their best interest to have convenient access to digital content. it is the world that they will spend their adult life in, and it is not ethical of us to deny them this. That is why schools, communities, and teachers need to do everything in their power to help them get connected.

As we look at acceptable use:
We need to include students in the process.

Students don't understand what intellectual property is. To them the Internet is free because they can download or copy and paste what they need. This is different from a bookstore or a library, where they must check out or pay for materials. They are further confused because, unlike us, they view the materials that they get from the Internet as raw material, while we view it as consumable.

We can help them gain understanding by having them create their own type of "copyright" symbols for work that they publish to the web.
A side note... many teachers have the same problem dealing with copies!

Parents need to get more involved in their child's Internet life. As schools we need to help parents learn to parent their kids on the web. They don't tend to come to info meetings, so ...
get them where they are. Partner with local businesses, orthodontists, doctors, etc. to have infomercial type videos playing in their foyers and waiting rooms. Record meetings you do hold and upload them to the district website as podcasts. Have administrators such as principals, deans, VP's and DO personnel blog on easy to access websites.

These steps will get to many parents with information as well as tips. It won't get to our hardest to reach - the parents of at risk students. These families are traditionally non-responsive. For these students we need to get to and connect the professionals that are working with the population.
Parents need to become a part of their child's online world. One option is to make companion sites on their child's social networking site (facebook, myspace, club penguin) and then make their kid a friend. Check the photos and web posts that their children make, and talk to them about why some posts may not be appropriate.

In reality, most students don't have a clear understanding of what the line of appropriateness is (especially in our mall driven world!) so they really need to be monitored by an adult who is comfortable having conversations instead of barking orders. In most cases, when a student realizes the type of impression they are giving out to the web, they make really good choices about changing their online behavior. And that is what we really want- for them to learn to edit themselves, and create boundaries within their world.

This will help them also with their ethical understandings as well. In the end the rules we need to communicate to parents are:
Keep current
Communicate
Keep checking

When parents are not involved with computers and the digital world their kids assume that there is no risk, the Internet becomes another playground.

Cyber bullying:
The school needs to be able to respond in a meaningful way when online bullying affects their life at school.
1. Students need to be able to recognize what cyber bullying is- most don't really understand. We tell them not to do it, but never really explain what it is that they aren't supposed to do.
2. Students don't understand that there is no anonymity on the web. Things that they say or do will be out there forever, with no real way to take them back. They don't understand that comments and pictures spread on the net.

For the school, there is a balance between the ease of use and the safety of the kids. Teachers and parents need to be more aware of what cyber bullying looks like in its various forms, and what to do about it.

School officials can respond to cyber bullying if it has caused or has the potential to cause on campus harm. It is a very complicated area for schools and they often opt to do nothing, which is also to the detriment of the students. In general cyber bullying falls under the jurisdiction of the state.

We spent the last part of the day in group discussions. Thanks Yahoo!

Mrs. Anderson