Mr. Benesh’s Online Community

This article (http://uregina.ca/~benesh2d/net.doc) was in today’s paper. The title caught my eye, for sure, and I thought that this would be a great article with which to start my professional blogging part of my career.

In summary, the article stated that, “many children are still oblivious to the public nature of the Internet and the dangers that may lurk there”. It gave various statistics, and went on to say that various amounts of kids do not know every person they have on their MSN lists (I pride myself on personally knowing everyone of my contacts), have been asked for various personal information, and would be comfortable meeting someone that they only knew from the Internet. However, to counteract these seemingly dangerous trends is the fact that, “Nearly all parents [supposedly] (96 per cent) say they talk to their children about online dangers”. But really, how educated are those parents? I would say most likely their kids know more about the dangers on the Internet than they do!

What does this mean for me, pedagogically speaking? It means that very likely, most students will come in to my high school classes with some Internet skills, some will likely know both what positive and what negative things you can do on the Internet, mostly because of the anonymity. A hurtful comment here, a spiteful email there, a slanderous MSN bully there… I was once “bullied” myself over ICQ. It is strange how scary faceless text can be when it knows a lot about you (where you live, what you drive, where you go to school), tells you that he hates you (among other things), and threatens to beat you up. I was wise enough, somehow, being on in high school, to let it just roll off my back, and not escalate the matter. But obviously any time I am in a computer class, I have the obligation to ensure to the best of my ability that these things do not occur. On top of that, I can even do preventative things, such as warn of the dangers of I.P. address tracking, and show that the Internet may not be quite so anonymous as they may think.

It is promising, however, that parents are speaking to their children about Internet dangers. This goes to show, possibly, that some of the education that has been going on over the years (and some of the scary emails about identity theft, etc…) have showed parents that they have to parent, and teach, because kids are always going to be kids, as this article pointed out.

One quote to finish this blog off: “One of the most surprising and revealing report findings to him was that 85 per cent of children have access to the Internet outside their homes, enabling 15 per cent of them to visit Web sites their parents have declared off-limits”. I don’t see how this is “surprising” or “revealing”. Internet is available at schools, libraries, and at most friends’ houses, before their parents come home. It is always available. How is this any different from off-limit books or off-limit to go in mommy’s closet? You tell a kid they can’t do it, and it will be the first thing they want to do. I am not saying to advocate pornography to your children, but you can’t keep them from it forever if they want to view it. Unless you get some sort of filter/parental controls. Which you really should. I’ll likely have a keystroke logger on my children… Invasion of privacy? Definitely. Gotta love being a parent!

Dan