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School Boards Rule, Internet No Longer Dangerous
destinyland writes "Good news. The National School Boards Association, which represents 95,000 school board members, just released a report declaring fears of the internet are overblown. In fact, after surveying 1,277 students, "the researchers found exactly one student who reported they'd actually met a stranger from the internet without their parents' permission. (They described this as "0.08 percent of all students.") The report reminds educators that schools initially banned internet use before they'd realized how educational it was. Now instead they're urging schools to include social networks in their curriculum!"
Because kids will tell their teachers and the school boards the truth.
The opposite of progress is congress
Are social networks (presumably they mean things like myspace, bebo etc) really the most educational resources on the internet that they could think of ? If so future generations are in serious trouble.
That's the surprising new recommendation from the National School Boards Association -- a not-for-profit organization representing 95,000 school board members -- in a new study funded by Microsoft, News Corporation, and Verizon.
I'm hardly surprised that a study funded by that group would decide the Internet is safe. And less surprised that social networking sites should be used. Perhaps using Myspace from your Vista PC on your Verizon broadband connection isn't so bad!!11
"It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education." -Albert Einstein
It may be early, and I haven't had coffee yet, but wouldn't 1/1277 be more like .0008%? Methinks the public school system has bigger problems to deal with than internet access...
"yet only 3% of students say they've ever given out their email addresses, instant messaging screen names or other personal information to strangers." - TFA
I would think this is a fundamentally flawed survey. What student hasn't heard the message that giving out personal information is considered risky?? I remember getting surveys in school that involved some rule or restriction that was unpopular and organizing group responses in the hope of getting those restrictions lessened.
Why on earth would you need to teach about social networks in school? Isn't it easy enough to pick up outside of school? Their success would indicate that to be true.
"84% of school districts have rules against online chatting in school" - TFA - OH NOES, my freedom of speech!!!!!!! Seriously maybe you should be learning where Iraq is on a world map instead of talking about your latest crush in IM.
This is why I pay for private school. Freaking tax dollars going to rubbish like this
Internet No Longer Dangerous != Fears overblown
/. would get that.. I'm sure there is some value in social networking sites for educational use, even though nothing comes to mind at the moment. But, the summation is wrong, the internet IS dangerous. I'm sure that, pulling stats out of my butt notwithstanding, fear of social networking sites IS overblown, but that does not mean the danger isn't there.
And
Internet != Social Networking
Geez, you'd think that a user on
When do I get to mod an Article "Stupid Summation"?
A positive attitude may not solve all your problems, but it will annoy enough people to make it worth the effort.
May the Maths Be with you!
Those magic words, "who reported," show why this is non-important data although most will not consider it so. Like surveys, Nielsen ratings, man on the street interviews, and polls, this is a classic case of bad science. Take a sample and rely on the honesty of the people involved to report difficult truths. I'd say it's about as reliable as government promises.
I'm all for a free internet, but that requires no one declare it "safe," because then fat politicians will feel compelled to attempt to make it so, even though that's mathematically impossible.
technical writing / development
There usually is a parent who is, for whatever reason, not involved. I bet if you did a study on the parents whose kids meet strangers in public after contacting them online, you'd find a few of the following things:
1) Parents are working extra hours to buy fancy things.
2) Parents are afraid of their kids being bitter toward them for *gasp* being AUTHORITY FIGURES!
3) Parents are more concerned about being their kid's friend than a mother or father.
4) Parents are too lazy to learn how to control their own home.
5) The kids have internet access in their rooms, where their parents have far less control.
#5 is something that my wife and I have already agreed to with our kids. They can be on the Internet all they want/need, but they will not be doing it in their room where no one can watch them. It's possible that they could sneak downstairs while we're asleep, but if they can just get out of bed and go to their desk, that makes it virtually impossible for us to police them.
Any idiot knows the internet can be dangerous to children (and adults too...), yet, now they try to debunk that with some statistics? How good of a survey was this...
If you're reading articles, sure, it can be safe (but exposure to non-appropriate material is still an issue), but when you engauge in social activities (chat, IM, etc) - it goes to a whole new level.
Just simply...WOW.
It's about student productivity. It's a lot easier to ban IM/e-mail/social networking outright than try to enforce "now you can, now you can't" policies. Given access to sites like Myspace, a lot of kids would never get anything done without a teacher hovering over them constantly.
It's also about network security. Giving a thousand high school students unfettered internet access is just asking for trouble, no matter how hard you try to protect your network.
120 characters for a sig? That's bloody useless.
by a teacher than by a total stranger on the internet.
While we do get some sensational stories on occasion, usually involving hottie female teacher or some male gym coach, there are hundreds of cases that never get national press attention. There are some estimates that children are more in danger from teachers and other school employees than any other source (they were comparing to the scare on churches)
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
Certain people who use the internet are dangerous, for sure. Certain website might expose children to things (Sex, violence, etc.) that parents might not want them to see, for sure. But in and of itself the internet has not killed, raped, or assaulted anyone. (Apart from goatse and tubgirl)
Speaking as a teacher and future school administrator, schools are legally and morally obligated to protect the children in their care. No principal wants to be known as the "Porn Principal" who allows high school students to surf for pornography. No principal wants to have to answer calls from the media regarding why little Amber was allowed to chat with a previously-convicted pedophile from the school library and ended up kidnapped and molested as she walked home (What do you mean you don't know why? What kind of unsafe place is this?) The odds of these things happening is small, but it's a simple risk analysis. What do school administrators have to gain from granting students total access to the internet? Sadly, not much, really. So, sometimes they go a little overboard.
Children, however, have to be taught responsibility in a controlled environment. Generally, most school buildings can be rather well-controlled (doors locked, visitors checked, metal detectors, etc.). The internet, however, opens up access to the school and reduces the control of the administration, which is something most administrators are very afraid of. Combined with the slight possibility of things going terribly wrong, we pay to have the filters block out most "objectionable" content.
"... but it isn't teaching"
Go to hell. You and all your "get off my lawn / kids nowadays" buddies can seriously just go stuff yourselves. With comments like this you devalue everything learned and accomplished by schoolchildren / highschoolers in America. Stop tearing things down just because you don't understand. I have no idea why slashdot moderators allow comments like this. How about you a) do something about the education system since you dislike it so much or b) stop reducing the work of millions of childrens and teachers to "daycare."
Why on earth would you need to teach about sex in school? Isn't it easy enough to pick up outside of school? It's success would indicate that to be true.
Of course I don't expect the teachers to know anything about social networking, just like in High School I suspected that the teachers were pretty clueless about sex as well.
All ideas^H^H^H^H^Hprocesses in this post are Patent Pending. (as well as the process of patenting all postings)
You young people and your '3 shakes' rule... just wait till you get older! If I had to get it done in 3 shakes or less, I'd be walking around with wet pants all the time.
Well at lease their knot misusing apostrophe's or homonymns.
More seriously, and actually on-topic, with a liberal dose of commas, I'd like to say it's about fucking time! There is no way to physically harm anyone over the internet, short of selling them drugs or cigarettes or booze or something (and yes, I know cigarettes and booze ARE drugs). Your kid is far more likely to be molested by their coach or Priest*, or harmed by a babysitter than some random stranger, let alone a random stranger from the internet.
The "internet is dangerous!!!!" is like "We must give up our liberty because of teh terrorism!!!!" Do the math: less than 3,000 dead in America this century from Muslim terrorists, while there are half a million from heart attacks and another half million from cancer, and forty thousand from auto accidents every single year! I'd say that Homeland Security money would be better spent on a few guard rails, and maybe if we can outlaw smoking something that slows lung cancer we can outlaw something that causes it? Or at least legalize the one that slows it so the cigarette smokers can legally... oh hell, never mind. This is mainstream media, law and government we're talking about. Logic, reason, and sanity should have nothing to do with the debate.
-mcgrew
*Old joke- A Rabbi, a Priest, and a lawyer are on the Titanic when it hits an iceberg. "Save the children!" screams the Rabbi. "Fuck the children!" snarls the lawyer. The Priest exclaims "No time for that!"
Who says they wanted the truth?
Doing a non-anonymous survey is a good way to skew the results the way you want. If you're looking to make the internet seem "safe," do all the interviews with the kids' parents sitting next to them. Nope, no porn on that Internet, no-siree.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
I'm going to have to agree with the grandparent. You are the one that doesn't understand the situation. Since I'm presently attending a public high school in the United States, everyone can rest assured that "day care" would be putting it lightly.
In my last math class (supposed to be a preparatory course for calculus), the capable ones including myself passed the time playing calculator games. The others asked questions about simple concepts from basic algebra. Everyone passed with a near perfect score.
In other classes, people would leave on impulse and come back with fast food. Or just not come back.
The hallways are frequently filled with students loitering in the middle of a class period, while the administrators seem not to notice them.
The computers are a mess. Every domain user is in the Administrator group. This is either laziness or incompetence -- I suppose they feel safe by having DeepFreeze installed (some filter driver that makes any change to the filesystem persist only until the next reboot). Of course, the privileges granted to everyone are sufficient to circumvent it. Despite the decent hardware, all the machines are unbearably slow, mostly the work of some braindead virus scanner. Once again, easy to turn off if I need to actually get some work done.
The web filters they've used over the years have been more of a luser filter than anything. They will usually block the big offenders like MySpace (and Google Images...?) but anyone with a few braincells or a friend with some (an alarming minority) see it as mere annoyance. I'm glad to say that Firefox gained a lot of users when it was noticed that the web filter was enforced by IE proxy settings.
Some dumbfuck MCSE somewhere is making good money for not doing anything.
Halo is quite popular. It runs well enough on the integrated graphics hardware. On an average day last year, I had time to play for several hours if desired. The most disheartening part was the 'Join LAN Game' screen. When you see over a dozen others already in a game at some random point in the day, you know something is wrong.
It's not a total loss for me though. Taxpayer dollars are hard at work paying for a giant pipe and rarely used (for work) computers, so I have a machine set aside with a torrent client, downloading movies all day. A truly nice setup -- I can check status when I have a moment and copy everything over the network to my portable hard drive when one finishes. I'd often get several in a day, in fact. Taxpayer dollars will be even harder at work if the school gets sued, but I honestly don't care at this point. They're wasting it anyway.
Content filtering is an exceedingly difficult and often labor-intensive task, but public school IT departments are among the worst funded and supported IT departments in the entire IT industry, perhaps equaled only by those in public healthcare. There are many examples of legitimate Internet use which might be blocked by a content filtering system. For example, an anatomy/physiology teacher may attempt to 'incorporate the Internet into the curriculum,' performing (during class) a Google Images search upon the word 'chest' but have the appropriate and desired results snared by a content filter. In addition, the content filtering system may block the desired content and allow a piece of undesired content through. The number of possible content iterations is mind-boggling.
I'm not saying that the effort of content filtering should not be undertaken by public schools. Instead, the public school boards and the court system must uphold the principle of 'reasonable effort' undertaken to protect a child. Just as we should not allow school building doors to be locked (fire safety) yet still control school campus ingress and egress, we can also implement 'reasonable' Internet controls. Society needs to wake up to the fact that the entire world can be a dangerous place just as much as a beautiful place, and teaching children how to respond accordingly seems far more valuable and sensible that insisting upon a futile 'arms race' to impose blinders and barriers to protect the tender minds of lil' Johnny and lil' Suzy.
I have a teen child who has a computer in his room with full Internet access. However, my child does *not* have Administrator access to any computer in the house, all of which are loaded with real-time virus and spyware protection as well as a bidirectional firewall. The home network is also firewalled, and I have configured all of the systems at home to use OpenDNS so that I can utilize the (free) rudimentary content filtering offered by OpenDNS. I can review the firewall logs to see every place upon the Internet which is visited, and have done so in order to demonstrate to my child that monitoring is done and that access to certain types of content is not appropriate for his age. Is the system perfect? No. Can his friends still expose him to 'inappropriate content' at their homes? Yes. Has he tried to bypass the controls? Yes (and such is normal). Have my wife and I shown 'reasonable due dilligence?' We believe so. The configuration that I have described above is not expensive - excluding only the network firewall, all the tools to do so can be obtained for free. The sad truth is that the majority of technology companies, Internet Service Providers, school boards, and police organizations have done virtually nothing to educate parents (all users, for that matter) about not only the risks, but the countermeasures and how to use those countermeasures.
"Doveryai, no proveryai." ('Trust, but verify.' - Russian Proverb)