Gov't Report on Youth, Pornography, And The Internet

Frisky070802 writes "I don't recall seeing this already, nor am I finding it when searching for it ... the National Academies commissioned a report on how youths are affected by child pornography, predators, and other threats on the net. They've issued a 400-page report on their findings, which are very extensive, and were used to support the argument for the new kids.us domain."

Comments

Wrong report

[GuyMannDude]

From the conclusion in section 14.1:

The Internet has enormous potential to contribute to public welfare and private well-being. One dimension of that potential involves the use of the Internet to enhance and transform education for the nation's youth, and many public policy decisions have been taken to provide Internet access for educational purposes. Easy access to the Internet (and related online services) has many advantages for children--access to educational materials; collaborative projects, publications, online friendships, and pen pals; access to subject matter experts; recreation, hobby, and sports information; and so on.

It might be useful for someone to produce a 400+ page report examining the above stated and widely-held belief that Internet access is going to magically "enhance and transform education for the nation's youth". I, for one, am not sure that filling cash-strapped schools with computer equipment is somehow going to result in brighter children than if we just stuck to the basics.

GMD

Re:Wrong report

[Kevin Stevens]

I do not believe that the goal of having computers in classrooms is to have brighter children. Rather, it is to make them comfortable using computers and to increase their skills in using them so that when they go out into the real world they are more competitive. The internet can also be used as a valuable resource. There were several times when my college professor's notes did not help me get an understanding of a topic, so I would go and search the web for alternate material. It almost always helped. If more money and energy was provided, the government could help transform education. As an example of what could be using today's technology, lets say all classrooms were wired. A teacher who is going to be absent for a day and needs a sub could potentially pick a lesson from a large internet repository and have the children watch the lesson that is piped over the internet as opposed to being given busy work by a clueless sub (as is all too often the case). Or I could envision homework assignments on a computer that report back to the teacher and give statistical analysis of where the students as a whole are having trouble understanding a concept, or even better, homework assignments that reinforce concepts to the children as they get things wrong, and then make them do problems until they get it down. Could you imagine the improvement that could be seen if software could pick out weaknesses and help someone understand something better, and then reinforce the concept? I do not think it is really possible to have a piece of software be the equivalent of a real live teacher next to you helping you, but, I do think it could help quite a bit.

On a side note, I made a bit of an attempt to create a piece of software to do just this over at Sourceforge, and while it appeared to be feasible to me and I did some proof of concept type stuff, my job has been killing me with hours and I have not had time to get anywhere with it. Its the eduonline project. If you have an interest in doing something like this, check it out on sourceforge and let me know.

Re:Wrong report

[Bastian]

I do not believe that the goal of having computers in classrooms is to have brighter children.
Not the goal, but a very oft-cited goal among schools I have been to and worked with. Heck, I even went to one of the schools that was involved with the Microsoft/Toshiba Anytime, Anywhere Learning project. The whole idea of it is that computer technology has some magical ability to help teach kids. We had laptops assigned to every kid, we had the entire school wired for networking, and were jacked into the 'net all through class.

Of course, the whole thing was a complete bomb. Teachers didn't know how to use the Internet. Kids spent more time in Yahoo chatrooms than following whatever website the teacher wanted them to be following along in. E-textbooks need to die. And, of course, kids learned very quickly about all the webistes out there that catalog thousands of papers for them to plagarise.

Not to say that kids don't learn from the 'net. The 'net got me involved in the demoscene and open source, which taught me to program. Various political sites gave me access to information about the world that I never would have touched any other time. I can't begin to say how liberating some BBSes were when I was 11, and when Prodigy gave its users Internet access, it gave me oppotrunites to think that I never would have otherwise had growing up in a town of 7,000.

That, and I found a lot of porn. And jerked off. I have a hard time saying that was unhealthy, though, especially from the studies I've read giving evidence that boys who are exposed to a lot of porn as adolescents have a tendency to be much more well-adjusted sexually, more likely to use condoms, &c.

Filtering and .kids.us

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm not trying to troll here, but I think that .kids.us sounds like a better idea than the alternatives. For example, it sounds like a hell of a lot better solution than (poor) internet filtering. IMO, young children (10-12), shouldn't be exposed to ridiculous stuff online and a parent shouldn't have to watch what they do every second they are online. At the same time, we (everyone older than the first group, shouldn't have to suffer, because of fears the first group will see the questionable content. I realize there are a lot of /. zealots who would yell at the prospect of any potential filtering, but as long as it isn't implemented in a way that censors (even implicitly), it'll get my attention.

Re:Filtering and .kids.us

[GuruJ]

The biggest problem with the idea of .kids.us is that you would have to take away one of the biggest advantages of the Internet in the first place -- its ability to interact with other people.

Things you couldn't do on .kids.us:

• Run chatrooms
• Allow postings to forums
• Run personal webpages

... at least without 24-hour moderation of all materials that would be posted. And who will pay for those expenses?

How excessive!

[L. VeGas]

Youth, Pornography, And The Internet

Well, these are all things that I like. I don't need 400 pages to talk about it though.

Whitelist

[Henry V .009]

The main problem raised with filters isn't that they filter too little. It's that they filter too much. Internet whitelisting does not improve that at all. It only amplifies the problem.

kids.us is a humungous, unwieldy, unworkable, whitelist. (But at least it's .us, gotta keep them foreigners from corrupting our youth.)

Sex vs. Violence

[suricatta]

I'm all for providing a safe haven (?) for kids on the internet, after all there is a lot of filty stuff out there. However, one thing I've always found interesting is that society goes to a lot of lengths to hide young people from sex and yet no where near as much effort is spent on hiding them from violence. It seems to give the message that sex isn't OK while violence is fine. Any other thoughts on this?