PBS’s Frontline recently ran a special on kids and the Internet titled “Growing Up Online”. You can watch the entire show online — and I definitely recommend it for anyone involved in education: parents, teachers, administrators, IT.

They address some interesting issues, including:

The disturbing pro-anorexia phenomenon, which I had never heard of until I got into the Internet Filtering industry. Sometimes these sites attempt to walk the line between self-help and truly being pro-anorexia. 8e6’s categorization policy is for pro-ana sites to go into Obscene/Tasteless and anorexia disorder help sites to go into Health. Often, this is a surprisingly close judgment call.

They raise the question of what it means to cheat in today’s environment. Is using a site like sparknotes.com cheating? When I was in school we used to use Cliff Notes (remember those?) and that was certainly considered cheating, if you didn’t also read the book. In this context, they also talk about anti-cheating sites like turnitin.com, which uses text analysis to ferret out plagiarism. I think this is a particularly interesting topic in light of academia’s struggle with Wikipedia, despite attempts to verify its accuracy.

They attempt to throw some cold water on the media-hyped threat of child predators. They address the oft-cited “one in seven kids has received a sexual solicitation while online”, which originated from a set of Department of Justice studies (overview), but is woefully out-of-context when simply repeated.

They present some inconclusive (in my opinion) information on cyber-bullying, which may be the most insidious threat out there. The sea change that the Internet represents for bullying is the ability to emotionally abuse someone without ever speaking to them or even meeting them.

Of course, Myspace is covered in depth. Although the show appears to have been wrapped before the agreement between Myspace and the 49 Attorney’s General was announced, because they don’t address it.

The show’s most enlightened observation is that today’s generation gap is as large as it has been since the advent of rock-and-roll. Never in my life did I think that my kids would have less in common with me than I did with my parents. But the issues of the 70s and 80s (when I was a wee lad) seem almost quaint compared to today.

Also of note is that Parry Aftab of wiredsafety.org gets some much deserved air time talking about the need to teach kids how to use the Internet safely at the same time that we teach them how to use computers.

And finally, as a technologist and parent of young children (5 and 2 1/2) , I’m wondering how I’m going to attack this impending problem in my own household. I’m about as prepared as anyone could possibly be to understand the underlying technology, but that doesn’t mean I’m going to be able to bridge the gap between how they use the technology and how I use it.

Tags: internet safety, kids, training

This entry was posted on Friday, February 8th, 2008 at 12:09 pm and is filed under Online Safety. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.