Using technology of the day (a telephone), before Caller ID, before *69, I was a prolific prank Caller
For me, the summer does not begin until I walk out of school on that last day. Thankfully that day has come. Please excuse the tardiness of this post as my need to get away for a few days was greater than my need to post. I’m sure you all understand. This afternoon, I was reading an article in the June/July issue of American Libraries. I grabbed it off the table as I ran out of my house hoping there would be something interesting for me to discuss. As soon as I saw the headline ILA and MySpace Promote Cybersafety, I knew I had found the right piece. Illinois has an advantage in that the vote to block access to school and library computers has not taken place. The ILA teamed up with my space to talk about cybersafety. Bookmarks (actual bookmarks highlighting strategies) were created and are the most recent strategy in ILA’s campaign to oppose legislation that would bag social-networking sites from computers in Illinois libraries and schools. This link brings you to the ILA Website:http://www.ila.org/netsafe/index.htm I'm not one for banning anyhting and am a proponent for education to teach students to be independent users of information.
3 comments:
As I linked to the site you mentioned, I found many interesting articles on cyberbullying. Most contained tips to protect the internet user. As you suggest, education is the weapon provided rather than blocking access to certain sites was worked on by MySpace and ILA. This led me to other sites, which listed suggestions such as: Student should not answer offensive messages. Don’t send a message when you are angry. You don’t have to be “always on”. Nothing that I saw would protect a student from anyone intent on harassing another student. Since it is difficult to protect someone from cyberbullying, and schools have enough to deal with, access to these sites should be blocked. MySpace has received much negative publicity of late which may have been their motivation to team up with ILA to avoid more severe regulation.
One thing that's interesting about cyberbullying is how it is automatically and necessarily archived--saved to be proof later! (I recognize that IMing gets around that.) I know, as Tech Tank point out, that bullying has been going on in different forms forever, and the curious question is whether blocking sites like this just pushes the bullying back into the schoolyard and paper notes, or whether it actually reduces it.
I have certainly been guilty of firing off the angry email that I regret fiercely the next day, and I think that "holding your fire" is an important message/lesson for everyone to learn. I'm still really ambivalent about blocking.
I think that a lot of IM stuff can be really easily logged, and YALITC's comment about the archiving of cyberbullying evidence is very relevant. I think that this should be highlighted to students, especially as we hear about misuse of "private" digital photos etc.
The role of schools in cyberbullying is an interesting and complicated thing. I believe that I've heard of cases concerning very upset parents blaming schools when all the bullying has occurred via home PCs. I'm not sure about the responsibility of the school in the situation in which the school becomes aware of problem activities that take place in an arena in which the school has no control.
Blocking at school seems to be kind of moot if schools are asked to intervene in home based cyberbullying. As YALITC pointed out, in some way it would perhaps be advantageous for the school to have concrete evidence of violation of school computer use policies in order to intervene.
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