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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
remember kids, the internet might not be dangerous, but overuse of commas can be!
OMG mathz rulz. I have mad science skillz, lolz!2!@! check out my blogz. c u guyz at da mall. ;)
FAQs are evil.
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
Next thing you know, these kids will be poitnlessly commenting on newsgroups and opinion sites instead of worki... Oh Crap, here comes my boss!
"...76% of parents expect social networking will improve their children's reading and writing skills..."
The internet improving the writing skills of children? That's unpossible!
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.
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.
No, it isn't, and you've obviously fallen in the trap of dividing one by 1277 and forgetting that 1% == 0.01. Which means you're probably right the public school system has bigger problems than internet access.
Your answer is a good illustration of what the parent poster was saying. "What's the difference between lossy and lossless compression?" Sheesh, that's exactly the computer equivalent of "Write a report about Sweden". No wonder the dropout rate is at an all time high. How about "Does the Star Trek transporter use lossy or lossless compression? Why?"
Back in the day, we could have typed stuff out of the encyclopedia. Wikipedia and computers has made cheating a little easier, but hasn't enabled anything new.
Intron: the portion of DNA which expresses nothing useful.
If this works like most school actions, it'll be a disaster. The kids will soon be deciding that the Internet isn't cool; it's boring and "hard". They'll drop it and go back to other ways of upsetting the adults.
;-) be boring? But the schools (and some historians) manage to make it so.
If we really want young people to become familiar with the Internet, and learn to use it for their benefit, we should take the approach that works: Ban its use by children (where "child" even includes someone 17 years old). Put all sorts of leaky barriers in the way of their access. That way, the kids will be fascinated by it, and will spend lots of time learning how to use it.
Lots of people have observed that the main effect of most schools is to take various topics and make them boring and uninteresting. Consider a topic like history. How could the story of all the people who came before us (and messed up this world so thoroughly
Or consider music. That's a hard-wired human activity, that can be intensely exciting, right? How can we teach kids to not waste their time learning to make music, and make them content to spend the rest of their lives at a desk job? Right: Give them music lessons.
We should totally ban the use of the Internet in schools. They'll just do to it what they've done to so many other exciting human developments; they'll teach the kids that it's boring and uninteresting, and too hard for anyone but a "nerd" to understand.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
At which Verizon location do you work?
The most important thing to do in your life is to not interfere with somebody else's life. -FZ