Sylvia

More from Bonnie:
Last week some of us were treated to a sharing of the National Broadband Map - this was from the office of Karen Cator at the Dept of Education and they shared data on the schools at CoSN.

The map is also a tool for your use. Here is what you can do with it. You can go to your school board and demonstrate broadband use in your community. You can share your speed and help to fill out the National Broadband Map. In case you missed it, it is a kind of citizen transparency project.

It is an amazing tool and the website includes some great resources (like this workshop plan and presentation) to help use and analyze the data. The Dept of Education and NTIA collaborated on that presentation.

Consumer Broadband Test vs Advertised (pink is less than advertised, green is as advertised, dark green is more than advertised)

Analyzing the Data
Use the tools on the map to rank an area by a specific broadband attribute, You can generate summaries of broadband availability for a given area and download reports containing popular statistics. This should be helpful to your learning community, your school board, and local consumers.

Some other ideas:

• Use the rank tool to compare broadband availability in different areas.
• Generate a national list of states, counties, Metropolitan Statistical Areas (MSA), Congressional Districts, census designated places or Universal Service Fund (USF) study areas by broadband speed, technology, number of broadband providers or demographic information.
• Generate ranked lists within a state, including by county, census designated place, Congressional District, state legislative district, MSA and USF study area.
• Use this tool to generate an overview of broadband availability for any state, county, state legislative district, Metropolitan Statistical Area (MSA), Universal Service Fund (USF) study area, or Native Nations.
• View and download popular reports in PDF form such as: Broadband Availability in Urban vs. Rural Areas, Number of Providers by Speed Tier, Access to Broadband Technology by Speed

Why don’t we know this already?
Measuring Internet access has been tricky for years. Sascha Meinrath of the New America Foundation explains that detailed network data about speeds, latency, jitter, and more used to be in the public domain until the government-run NSFnet was privatized in the earlier 1990s. Today, though, it’s hard to know what speeds ISPs are actually offering (knowing what speeds they advertise, by contrast, is simple).

M-Lab, a partnership between the New America Foundation and Google meant to measure Internet connections, has given Google two years worth of actual broadband connection data, as measured by users. That’s more than 300TB of data, which Google has imported into its Public Data Explorer for easy viewing and analysis. The results are remarkable.

M-Lab has distributed testing tools for two years now and its servers have recorded data on the results. One of the most basic measurements is pure speed, measured in megabits per second. When these real-world speeds are charted on a map, they make Internet speed differences obvious in a way often obscured by simple lists and numbers.

M-Lab is one of many projects exploring ways to help users more clearly understand the performance of their broadband connections. If you’re interested in exploring further, here are more tools and resources from the FCC, Electronic Frontier Foundation, and more.

Is the internet really an amplifier for youth deviance, bad behavior, and risk? Or is it just the opposite? Are we simply applying age-old paranoia about youth (juvenoia) to the newest technology and coming to all the wrong conclusions? Could the Internet be in fact promoting better, healthier culture, identity exploration with less risk, and increased accountability for personal actions? Dr. David Finkelhor takes on these questions with research, facts, historical perspectives — and connections with the fields of child development, human behavior, and psychology.

This talk is well worth watching – especially if you are dealing with parents or colleagues who take it on face value that the Internet is making children stupid, cheapening culture, and is the onramp to deviant behavior and predators.

The Internet, Youth Deviance and the Problem of Juvenoia on Vimeo on Vimeo

This video provides a lot of food for thought:

• Why do we label and blame kids for normal behavior?
• Is a fear OF children masquerading as a fear FOR children?
• Is the Internet similar to other technologies that caused social changes (like cars, TV, phones, etc.)? Or is it vastly different?
• Is “stranger danger”, sexting crackdowns, and technophobia really about protecting kids or is it political grandstanding and a way to sell fear-based products?
• Why do we ignore the many indications of better, healthier, connected, smarter youth and believe all too easily that children today are narcissistic, alienated, and addicted to techno-drivel?

Love your thoughts!

Sylvia

Although unwanted online solicitations can have an alarming impact, recent studies have shown that “the statistical probability of a young person being physically assaulted by an adult who they first met online is extremely low,” the working group noted.

And young people’s use of social networking sites does not increase their risk of victimization, according to a 2008 report that appeared in American Psychologists.

via Online safety report discourages scare tactics | Featured SAFE | eSchoolNews.com

And kudos to eSchoolNews for an excellent report on a complex and highly charged subject.

Sylvia
Tweet

Let them know that you will at some point every week be checking their text messages online! You have the ability to do this through your cell phone provider.

Let them know that you will be installing Parental Control Software so you can tell every place they have visited online, and everything they have instant messaged or written to a friend. Don’t install it behind their back, but install it!

Over 90% of all homework does not require the internet, or even a computer. Do not allow them to have a computer in their room, there is no need”

From an e-mail sent home from a New Jersey middle school principal attempting to curb cyberbullying at his school (source)

Changes in technology mirror changes in society and culture, and can impact schools in a number of ways. Some schools hide their heads in the sand. Some take extreme stands like the principal quoted above. Some attempt to address the issues more evenhandedly, even though the law is not clear, nor is the “right” thing to do always obvious.

Schools try to create policies to address issues of cybersafety, security, fair use, and other new issues brought up as technology changes. But these are not actually policy issues, any more than cyberbullying is a technology issue.

People have difficulty making a choice when presented with too many options. And schools are collections of people, and to make it more complicated, people who do not have ultimate authority since they have to answer to parents, the community, school boards, district, city, state, and national oversight.

I just read a study that said that when people do make a choice from among equal options, afterwards they realign their thinking to elevate whatever choice they made to be the best one. We’ve all seen this, once a school policy gets created, it’s hard to change people’s minds. It’s not just that it’s a lot of work to re-do policy, it’s also that once you do the work, your mind creates the illusion that the work and choices you’ve made are the best and most valuable.

As schools face cyberbullying, sexting, fair use, online security, etc. they see a confusing array of policy, tradition, legal, moral and ethical concerns. When confused, people retreat from the threat. Then once that choice to retreat is made, even if they know it’s not optimal, they remain stubbornly wed to that choice.

Julie Evans of Student Speak-Up shared this insight last year after her focus groups with students said that teachers who got training about the Internet started using it less. Confusion creates support for limitations, and those limitations get set in stone. It’s human nature.

To me, this makes the task to involve schools in making informed choices regarding technology policy even more urgent.

The problem with this principal’s stand is not that he’s wrong. In fact, he’s probably right. If he had a magic wand and could actually make parents stop their children from texting and accessing the Internet, and the children actually stopped, and we rolled the clock back to 1970, we could just go back to the good old days of kids harassing each other in person.

The problem with this principal’s plan is that it won’t work. We simply can’t put this genie back in the bottle. We HAVE to address the issue of digital citizenship in the real climate that children actually live in.

This is a floodgate well and truly open, whether or not you declare it closed.

Sylvia

She wraps up with this powerful thought -

“But for heaven’s sake – or even better, for youth’s sake – let’s please take the “panic” out of this whole important test. It simply doesn’t lend itself to the calm, mutually respectful conversations that help youth develop the critical thinking that protects on the social Web. We had our predator panic on this side of the pond starting in 2006.

At the Family Online Safety Institute’s annual conference in Washington last fall, the Net-safety field declared it over with a strong consensus that scary messaging is not productive. Why? Because it makes young people less inclined to want to come to us for help. They tend to get as far away as possible from scared, overreacting adults; find workarounds that are readily available to them; and then leave us out of the equation right when loving, steady parent-child communication is most needed.”

Please read the whole article: Connect Safely |Facebook: Why a Safety Center and not a ‘panic button’

Sylvia

This survey was conducted by a filtering company and taken by school administrators and teachers at the annual Christa McAuliffe Technology Conference held in Nashua, New Hampshire in Nov. 2009.

• 66% of the school administrators and teachers surveyed indicated that students know how to bypass their school system’s content-filtering solution
• 56% sense that their current security solution hampers the teaching process.
• 89% consider the Internet is generally safe for students.

While I disagree with the filtering company conclusion that these results mean that better filtering is THE  answer, the numbers are interesting. What does it mean when we know something doesn’t work and we keep doing it anyway?

Sylvia

Last week Chairman Julius Genachowski unveiled the children-and-family part of the FCC’s universal broadband plan, designed to enable, among other things, 21st-century education. There’s just one problem: Schools have long turned to law enforcement for guidance in informing their communities about youth safety on the Net, broadband or otherwise, and the guidance they’re getting scares parents, school officials, and children about using the Internet.

Read the rest of this article from Net Family News Major obstacle to universal broadband & what can help for the real facts about Internet safety.

Ann Collier has collected a compact list of resources that YOU NEED today about a new approach called the “social norms” approach, used by health professionals to “identify, model, and promote the healthy, protective behavior.”

The scare tactics and stranger-danger approach prevalent over the last decade is “doubly problematic”, says Ann. It not only fails to change behavior, it hampers the efforts of educators to integrate technology into meaningful, relevant learning experiences for youth that WOULD change behavior.

The good news is this appears to be changing, and kudos to the FCC for seeing this so clearly – the bad news is, there’s still a long way to go to reach most K-12 schools.

Sylvia

Pupils in schools that use “managed” online systems have a better knowledge and understanding of how to stay safe when using new technologies, according to a report published today by Ofsted, the Office for Standards in Education, Children’s Services and Skills.

“Managed” systems are systems that have fewer inaccessible sites than “locked” systems and so require pupils to take more responsibility for their own safety. “Locked” systems make many websites inaccessible and although this ensures pupils’ safety in school it does not encourage the pupils to take responsibility for their actions or prepare them for dealing with systems that are not locked.

Is there a US equivalent to the terms “managed” vs. “locked” – are those terms used in the US?

Sylvia

DARPA was the agency that funded the research that created what we now know as the Internet. It’s great that they are again looking to fund this kind of educational goals.

What kinds of projects do you think they should fund? Please comment!

via DARPA Promotes High-Tech Education.

This free guide from OnGuardOnline.gov tells parents and teachers what they need to know to talk to kids about issues like  cyberbullying, sexting, mobile phone safety, and protecting the family computer.

I’ve taken a look at this guide and like it. It’s sensible, straight-forward, and best of all, not fear-based. It contains positive messages about Internet use and real facts (what a concept!) It addresses parents of teens, who need different information than younger children.

Best of all, it’s FREE. You can order the print version of Net Cetera in English or Spanish. If you need lots of them, for your whole school, for example, bulk orders are available from the government printing office. Yes, your tax dollars being used for something useful!

Other links:

• Download a PDF of the guide
• Download a Net Cetera PowerPoint for presenting to groups
• Get a button for your website or blog

There is a nice article about it in the The Christian Science Monitor if you need more information.

Sylvia