Taste of Tech

I’ve received a couple questions lately about keeping kids safe online. We see news reports all the time about the danger of social networking sites, and the problems with posting personal information online, and the number of children who have been exposed to inappropriate material online. Today, I’m starting a series of blog posts about cybersafety to take a fairly comprehensive view of the issue and what we can do about it.

Today, we’re starting with a look at the problem itself. Maybe you’ve heard about the softball player who was stalked by someone she met online. She thought he was a 14-year-old boy halfway across the country instead of a 40-year-old man in her town (the story is fiction, by the way). We’ve seen plenty of news items about how dangerous the Internet is for kids. Most of them cite statistics that claim that one out of every seven teens with Internet access has been sexually solicited online. We hear stories about children and teens getting tricked into meeting online predators. Theoretically, all of those things can happen. But the problem may not be as serious as many would have you believe.

Take, for example, the one-in-seven statistic. That comes from Online Victimization of Youth: Five Years Later, a report from from the Crimes Against Children Research Center. Here’s what the report actually says:

…approximately 1 in 7 youth Internet users (13%) received unwanted sexual solicitations or approaches in the past year. Close to half of the solicitations were relatively mild events that did not appear to be dangerous or frightening. Four (4) percent of all youth Internet users, however, received aggressive sexual solicitations, which threatened to spill over into “real life” because the solicitor asked to meet the youth in person; called them on the telephone; or sent them offline mail, money, or gifts. Also 4% of youth Internet users had distressing sexual solicitations that left them feeling very or extremely upset or afraid. Two (2) percent of youth had solicitations that were both aggressive and distressing.

So while the implication is that 13% of our teens are being stalked by predators, the reality is that only 4% of teens are upset or afraid, and only half of them were in situations where the person tried to initiate offline contact. While one in fifty is still a serious problem, it’s not on the same scale as one in seven. A panel discussion of these findings took place recently among experts meeting in Washington, D.C. Video and transcripts of this discussion are online.

The Pew Internet and American Life Project studied teens and online stranger contact in 2007. They found that nearly a third of online teens have been contacted online by someone with no connection to them or their friends. That’s not too surprising. I meet new people online all the time. It’s not necessarily any more dangerous than striking up a conversation with someone in line at the store, or the people in adjacent seats at a concert or sporting event. Considering the facts that they count social networking friend requests and spam email messages in this count, I’m surprised that the number isn’t higher. A more important number is the percent of teens who have been contacted by a stranger online who made them feel frightened or uncomfortable. The Pew study reports a figure of 7%. Again, it’s not an insignificant number, but it’s not a third of online teens.

Interestingly, the biggest predictors of stranger contact are social network profiles and posting photos online. Teens who have publicly-viewable profiles on social networking sites, or who have posted photographs of themselves online are twice as likely to be contacted by people they don’t know.

Writing in the New York Times, David Pogue points to some of the findings reported in a recent PBS Frontline documentary, Growing Up Online. Pogue points to several quotes from producer Rachel Dretzin, including these:

The data shows that giving out personal information over the Internet makes absolutely no difference when it comes to a child’s vulnerability to predation.

The vast majority of kids who do end up having contact with a stranger they meet over the Internet are seeking out that contact.

All the kids we met, without exception, told us the same thing: They would never dream of meeting someone in person they’d met online.

These statements directly contradict most of the cyber-safety information that’s intended to help protect kids. The first item, certainly, contradicts the Pew report I just mentioned.

The Byron Review released its report on cybersafety in March, 2007 (an executive summary and a guide for students are also available). The report focuses on video games, media content, and Internet use among children and teens. I like the analogy to swimming. The odds that you are going to die by drowning are approximately 1 in 1100. Yet we still have swimming pools and water parks. We still go to the beach. Some people even have dangerous bathing tubs in their own homes. We put up fences around the pools. We post signs warning about the dangers of drowning. We post lifeguards in busy swimming areas. We have shallow ends. We do everything we can to protect people from the danger. But at the same time, we also teach people how to swim, so they can protect themselves.

Conclusions? Children need to be protected online. Certainly. Especially at younger ages. As they get older, they need to learn how to protect themselves. This is really important, and cyber-safety is something we should be addressing with every student. But it’s not more important than teaching kids how to cross the street or ride a bike. The Internet is not more dangerous than firearms or alcohol or cars, all of which kill a significant number of teens each year. The problem calls for a balanced, reasoned approach. And we’ll start there with part 2.

It’s been an RSS day. It started last night, actually, when I was trying to figure out how to get an RSS feed of an entire Google Reader account into a Protopage (still haven’t figured that one out). Then, there was the challenge of helping my wife get an RSS feed of her Twitter messages on her blog. This morning, two colleagues and I were playing with RSS feeds for delicious tags and feeds for Technorati searches. I returned to the office and took a call from the developer of our content management system. He wanted to change the XML chicklet icon we were using to the standard RSS icon. We also talked about adding some explanation of what RSS is to the web site.

I’ve explained RSS at least twice before (here and here). Basically, it allows you to automate the checking of web sites, blogs, and other web resources for updates. When something new gets posted, you see the content in your feed reader.

I always use CNN as an example. You can get an RSS feed for any of their news categories. If I just want world news, or education news, I can subscribe to those feeds. Then, when something new is posted, it shows up in my feed reader.

Here’s the interesting thing, though. Take a look at this image of CNN’s home page from August 29, 2007:

Now, look at this image from CNN’s home page, May 2, 2008:

See what isn’t there? The RSS Feed link. You used to be able to click on that link in the upper-right corner of any CNN page. It then took you to a page listing all of the available RSS feeds. It explained what RSS feeds are, and how you can use them. That link isn’t there any more.

You can still get to the feeds though. All you have to do is scroll to the bottom of the page. Click on “Tools & Widgets.” That will take you to a page that will try to get you to install the Google toolbar widget, and the desktop alerter, and other things you don’t need. Scroll to the bottom of that page, and you’ll see an “RSS Page” link under “Other Products.” Click on that link and you’ll find the old list of RSS feeds available on the CNN site. Easy, right?

So if RSS makes it so easy to share information and aggregate content from multiple sources, why did CNN make it so hard to find?

Of course, I can only speculate about CNN’s motives, but I would guess that it has to do with advertising revenue. See, if I grab an RSS feed from CNN’s site, and I put it on my Protopage, that means I’m reading CNN’s content on my own page. That’s what RSS is for. Maybe I have CNN on one part of the screen, and the New York Times somewhere else, and some other news sources and blogs in other places. But by not going to CNN’s web site, I’m not seeing their advertisements. So they’re getting less traffic on their web site, and generating less advertising revenue. That hurts them financially, so they’re no longer actively encouraging people to do that. At least, that’s my theory.

And I hope it works. The alternative would be to put advertising in the feed, so I would get today’s headlines along with a few advertisements on my page. That would set a very unpleasant precident for news feeds, and I don’t think any of us really want to move in that direction.

The Brecksville-Broadview Heights Schools now have an email subscription service for content posted on the district and school web sites. Parents, community members, and others interested in the schools may subscribe using the “Email Subscription” link on the district’s web site.

When signing up, subscribers decide which categories of information they want to receive, and how often they would like updates. For example, a parent might be interested in receiving school news from Hilton and Central schools on a weekly basis, and district Board Briefs on a monthly basis. Currently, there are 117 categories available, with new ones added as needed. These categories reflect sections on the web site to which content has been posted.

Once the subscription is confirmed via email, subscribers will begin receiving email messages on their chosen schedules when information has been added to the web site. The email messages will contain the text of each new article, along with links to any associated pictures or documents. The messages also contain details on changing or removing subscriptions, which can be done at any time.

Because the email updates are tied to information posted on the web site, both forms of communication are automatically handled when new content is posted. This allows parents and community members to stay informed without forcing staff members to separately post information to the web site and send out email updates.

The email addresses provided by the subscribers are not used by the district for any other purpose. They are not stored with or tied to student or employee records, and they are not provided to other organizations.

The software powering the email subscription system was developed internally by the district’s technology department for use by our district.

Community members interested in real-time updates may also subscribe to RSS feeds for any of the categories by using the RSS icon in the lower-right corner of each page on the web site.

The Rest of the Story

Okay, that’s the part that’s on the district web site. I’ve been talking about doing this for years, and most of the people I’ve discussed it with don’t get it. After all, we already provide RSS feeds for every category on the web site. If people would just subscribe to those, we wouldn’t need this clunky email system.

The problem is that most of the people in our target audience don’t understand RSS. So while it’s a great, convenient technology for those who use it, explaining it to everyone is beyond the scope of our communications efforts. We want simple ways to send information to people in ways that are comfortable for them. They know email. They like email. They understand email. So we’re using email.

That’s not to say that we’re abandoning RSS. We’re still using it, and we’re going to keep talking about it and trying to get people to use it more. We’re also thinking and talking about ways to use tools like Twitter to keep people informed. But when the focus is on communication, and not technology, we have to provide the information in a more accessible way.

That’s also, by the way, why you can sign up for email updates on our blogs. Sometimes it’s just about getting the word out. And I get as much feedback from my email subscribers as my RSS ones.

EarthCast 2008 is a  webcast taking place on April 22, 2008. It started at midnight GMT, and continues for 24 hours. This is a continuous, day-long conversation about the Earth and taking care of it.

Matt Montagne has spearheaded this effort, with a great deal of support from Doug Symington, Jose Rodriguez, and others in the EdTech community. Jason Robershaw created an outstanding promo explaining what EarthCast is all about, and how you can participate.

Students and teachers are participating from the United States, Mexico, the UK, and Germany. You can listen live, participate in the text chat, or use Skype to call in and share your views.

While the project ends at 9PM EDT, much of the archived audio will be available afterwards on the web site.

We can’t keep up. We can’t know about everything. Just because something’s famous, even in the relatively small world of education and technology, that doesn’t mean I have ever heard of it.

Sure, I know about Creative Commons. If you license your work with a CC license, you allow others to use it, with some limitations. You can require attribution. You can specify that derivatives can’t be made from it. You can restrict people to non-commercial use. You can allow people to change it, but only if they redistribute it with the same license.

There’s lots of flexibility with Creative Commons, and it fits well with the collaborative attitude of the education world. We work together. We share resources. If you want to print out one of my blog posts and pass it out to your staff, be my guest. If you want to use my something I’ve written for a class or workshop you’re teaching on blogging, go for it. If you can find some value in my work, I think that’s wonderful. It would be nice if you give me credit, though. And if you’re going to be profiting from it, you should contact me first. Oh, and if you make improvements to it, you should also let people share them in the same way. So I can use an “attribution, non-commercial, share-alike Creative Commons license” for my blog. And there it is, over in the sidebar. So copy away.

But that wasn’t what I wanted to talk about.

Last night, I heard about the famous Mayer and Bettle animation that explains Creative Commons.

This animation was created by Pete Foley, with music by Chris Perren. It was coordinated by Elliott Bledsoe, from Creative Commons Australia. And apparently, everyone on the Internet has seen it. Except me. And maybe you.

Oh, and the reason I heard about it last night is because there’s a new sequel to the first animation that goes into a little more depth and focuses on how to make money by giving away your work for free. IMHO, it’s not as good as the original, but it still may be worth a look.