Internet Safety and Responsible Use Information for Teachers and Parents
Ollie Bray
National Advisor, Emerging Technologies for Learning
Hello, and my name’s Ollie Bray and I’m National Advisor for Emerging Technologies for Learning at Learning & Teaching Scotland. And I’m going to speak to you about Internet safety and responsible use, and offer some advice here for both teachers and for parents. And really the reason that this has come about is because the Scottish government has now got an action plan for Internet safety and responsible use, and we’ve been out and around all over Scotland and the one bit of feedback that we have been getting is that more and more teachers and more and more parents would like some guidance on the things that they should be talking about with the children that are in their care.
So I’m going to speak to you for I guess about an hour. I’m going to share some of the emerging issues that we think that teachers and parents need to know about at the moment, and then towards the end of the presentation I’ll also point you in the direction of some resources which might actually help you in the classroom. Let’s make a bit of a start.
Lesson objectives
There’s a big thing at the moment in education isn’t there about setting lesson objectives, so I thought it would be interesting at the start of the talk to set some lesson objectives, what we’re going to be covering in the next hour. And you’ll notice that I’ve written them here in text speak, and I’ve done that for a couple of reasons really. One of them is to sort of try and make the talk a little bit more interesting, but the second one is, I don't know about you, I have the privilege of working with young people pretty much every day when I’m at work, and the thing that I’ve started to notice is that these people speak a completely different language from what I’ve spoken to you before, you know. They exist very much in this digital age, and whether they’re speaking to their friends or whether they’re speaking to their colleagues, they’re speaking in a completely different language.
So these are the things that we’re going to cover. If you don't speak text speak I’ll put it into plain English for you. So we’re going to have a bit of a context in terms of where I think we are now and some of the things that we need to think about. We’re going to talk about some of the perceived dangers of using the Internet, then we’ll talk a little bit about keeping safe online and we’ll make specific reference to chat rooms, to instant messaging and social networking sites. And then at the end of the presentation I’ll give you a few locations where you can ask questions or maybe find the answers to some of the questions yourself, because there’s a huge amount of resources that are available online and some of the things that we’ve developed to help support you.
LINGO2WORD
Now interestingly enough, I don't speak text speak - probably come as no surprise to you at all - and actually translated those words using a website which is called ‘lingo2word.’ And why am I telling you that? Well I’m telling you that because I think that the way that we use computers and the way that we use information and communication technology has completely changed.
ICT can be used in a variety of ways ...
When I was at school using technology was very much about, you know, how to develop word processing documents or how to draw a graph on Microsoft Excel and things like that, and I think that the way that we use technology, and ICT in particular, in schools has changed. Very much now children are using the computers and they’re using ICT in order to create content, and some of that is to go online into the Internet and can be incredibly powerful in terms of creating great learning environments.
Predictions from the past ...
I thought I’d also share with you at this point some different predictions that we’ve had from the past, because there are still some people, and indeed some teachers, that perhaps think that technology won’t catch on, you know, perhaps it’s just a phase that we’re going through in school. And I thought that these quotes in particular were particularly interesting.
This is the first one here, it’s a Western Union memo back from 1876, and it basically says the “the ‘telephone’ has far too many shortcoming to be seriously considered as a means of communication. The device is inherently of no value to us” at all. And I think that’s really, really interesting because, you know, probably now every single one of the young people that you’ve got in secondary school and a lot of the young people that you’ve got in primary school as well will have their own telephone, and they’ve got that in their pocket which they can keep with them at all times.
Second prediction from the past then, Warner Brothers back in 1927, “Who wants to hear actors talk?” And again if we stick with our telephone analogy, isn’t it interesting now that not only can we all hear actors talk, but isn’t it interesting that we can all make our own films now, perhaps using our mobile telephones or perhaps using our flip cameras or digital video cameras in order to do it.
And the third kind of prediction which I’ll share with you, which again was hideously wrong, was the Chairman of IBM back in 1943 who said, “I think perhaps there’s a market for maybe five computers.” Obviously he was talking about very, very large super computers, but isn’t it interesting again to think about our mobile now that we’ve got in our pockets, I’ve got more power and more computing power in my phone than they had with them on the entire Apollo space mission.
So computers and the way that we use technology are completely changing and we’ve got to think about these things.
And of course when we talk about computers, when we talk about mobile phones, we have to remember that many, many young people have got these devices now in their pockets, and we need to think about how we might be using these and capitalising on these in a teaching and learning environment.
ICT
So when we talk about ICT we talk about information and communication technology, and it’s great that we’re able to speak to different people all around the world using computers and using mobile phones and using technologies like this. But I guess the thing that worries us as educators is this word ‘communication,’ because when we’re dealing with young people it’s this word communication which can occasionally lead to contact, and the thing that we’re most worried about as responsible parents, as teachers, as guardians for our children, is that young people may meet somebody online that might lead to contact, and then there could be consequences of that contact as well.
And of course all of these things have been made possible because of the Internet, and the Internet is growing at an incredibly fast speed. And we’re adding to the growth of the Internet all the time because there are more young people or more ... lots of people just generally, that are adding more and more content, whether that’s video content, whether that’s pictures, whether that’s text via their sort of social networking sites. And every time we click “publish” or every time we click “send,” this adds to this body of information, but also adds to the body of the Internet online as well.
So what do we know about young people and what do we know about what they think about the Internet? Well this was a report that came out on the BBC, it’s fairly recent, it came out in March 2009, and it highlighted a number of points. It surveyed a number of parents, but it also surveyed a number of children as well, the children of the parents, and it said different things.
So one of the interesting statistics was that 81% of the parents surveyed said that they were very, very confident that they knew what their children were doing online. Interesting, by complete contrast, 31% of the children that were surveyed of the same ... from the same family said that their parents didn’t have a clue what they were doing online at any one time as well. so there’s a bit of a difference between what we think children are doing online and maybe what they’re actually ... what actually they’re doing online as well. And not that that’s a problem, but these are just things that maybe we need to be aware of.
Why iseducationso important in this area?
So why is education so important in this area? Well I’ll share with you some statistics which came from Ofcom last year, and these are things that we maybe need to be thinking about. Now these are UK wide statistics, they’re not specific for Scotland, but I still think that they’re particularly valid.
So basically by far the majority, 84% of children between the ages of 5 and 15 live in a house with Internet access. Now if we’d have asked that question five years ago it would have been a lot less, if we’d have asked the question ten years ago it would have been a lot less. Children basically are now completely immersed in technology, and by far the majority of families that we have that come into our schools have got access to the Internet at home. So they need to be taught how to use it responsibly, it’s part of one of the digital skills that we need to be thinking about.
Interestingly, 35% of 11 to 16 year olds surveyed have got Internet access in their bedrooms, and 75% of the same group have a games console in their bedroom. Now the thing that I find interesting about this statistic is that by far the majority of games consoles, and we’ll about this again later, for example the Nintendo Wii, the Xbox 360 or the PlayStation 3, are all Internet enabled. So wouldn’t it be interesting to actually find out how many of these games consoles are actually Internet enabled in the young people’s bedrooms as well.
66% of all 12 to 15 year olds have a social networking space, and 19% of 8 to 11 year olds. By social networking space we mean something like Facebook or we mean something like Bebo or MySpace or Habbo Hotel, these are all examples of popular social networking spaces. Of course the interesting thing about social networking spaces is that, particularly for things like Facebook and Bebo and MySpace, is that you’re meant to be over 13 years old to have one, that’s what it says in the kind of small print of these sites, yet we know throughout the whole of Scotland there’s lots and lots of children a lot younger than the age of 13 that are on these type of website and they’re being very, very social with their friends. And again we’re not saying that’s a bad thing, but it’s just things that we need I think to be perhaps aware of when we’re talking to children about Internet safety and responsible use.
And the kind of final statistic which I’ll share with you from Ofcom at the moment is this one here about young people using gaming sites. So 40% of 12 to 15 year olds use gaming sites at least once a week, 47% of 8 to 11 year olds, which is not a big difference in that statistic, and 30% of 5 to 7 year olds. So online gaming, which again we’ll touch on later on, is a big issue, this is a big emerging thing in terms of youth culture.
So as well as gaming, as well as sort of social networking, as well as talking and communicating with their friends, you will be pleased to know that from the survey it also said that by far the majority use the Internet for their homework, and we’ll talk about digital literacy later on, and again that’s a very, very popular thing and I think will continue to be more popular with time, as we progress through time.
1 in 4
A couple of other just statistics that I want to share with you during this talk. This hasn’t come from Ofcom, this has come from some research that was done by the Child Exploitation Online Protection Agency, or by CEOP. And this for me is actually a bit of a worrying statistic, because in 2007 there was a survey that was done and it was to look at how many young people had actually met somebody offline which they’d originally had contact with online in the first place. And there was a massive survey that was done, it was over 1.2 million young people between the ages of 11 and 16 throughout the UK, and the figure came back as being 1 in 4. So one-quarter of all young people in that age range have actually struck up a relationship - and I don't mean a personal relationship, I mean a friendship in a lot of cases, and a lot of the cases it was with people from their own age - have met somebody online who they’ve never before and then have actually gone and physically met them in the real world, and that was 1 in 4. And that was in 2007.
And it was one of the reasons that there’s been a big education campaign in the UK since 2007 to see whether we can get this figure down. Interestingly enough, data was again collected in 2009 and the figure is exactly the same, it’s still 1 in 4. So despite a massive amount of time and money and education that’s gone into schools and to community groups talking to young people about some of the potential dangers of communicating with people online and then meeting them in the real world, we’re not actually getting any better at this.
So it’s been I guess a little bit of doom and gloom hasn’t it so far, I’ve given you a lot of statistics there which might appear to be quite worrying for some of you. And this is the next point that I really want to make, is that I think that by far the biggest Internet danger that we come across in the UK is that actually we concentrate on all of the dangers and that we completely forget the benefits of the Internet.
Benefits of the Internet
Because without a doubt, the Internet and the use of technologies, in particular online technologies, there are a huge amount of benefits. It’s completely revolutionised, for example, the way that we teach in schools, the way that we research, the way that we can collaborate with young people, even the way that we shop. And I know that I don't need to tell you people about the benefits of the Internet, but the point that I’m trying to get across here is that I think the Internet is a good thing, it’s just like any type of technology or anything that we do, we need to make sure that we teach young people to use it responsibly, because just like anything in life, there are risks and perceived risks that also go with that as well.
What are the dangers?
So what are the dangers then, what are the dangers that we might come across for young people when we talk about the Internet? Well, we quite often describe these as the Four Cs, and the first C would be content. So a young person going online and coming into contact I guess with content which is inappropriate, maybe it’s racist, maybe it’s sexual, maybe it’s just too mature really for the age group of the young people that are looking at it.
Now I think there’s a couple of important points to make here, and one of the important points is that young people do go online and they do purposely go looking for mature content. Again there was some research that was done by the BBC and young people we know are going online and they are, for example, searching for pornography, they are searching for words like ‘sex’ and they are searching for different sort of social networking sites as well. And I think part of the reason for that is because young people, this particular age group are naturally inquisitive about these things. Now I have to say that due to filtering in all of our local education authorities in Scotland, access to explicit obviously would not be allowed, it would be filtered, and it would be taken out all of the time.
Validating Information
And it’s because of that that I’m not actually that worried about young people coming into contact with some of this more extreme material, I’m more worried in fact I think with perhaps young people coming into contact with what I would deem unreliable content online, and I think that’s the biggest challenge that we face in education at the moment, the unreliable content online. And quite frankly, they see something that’s on the Internet and because it’s printed on the Internet they think that it’s true. So one of the biggest challenges that we’ve got as educators and as teachers, and as parents and as responsible parents, is to make sure that we teach young people to validate the information that they find online.
And Wikipedia is a perfect example of that. Wikipedia, the largest encyclopaedia in the world is a fantastic resource, it’s got some incredibly accurate information on it, and it’s also got some information which isn’t as accurate as well, but it’s giving the young people the tools to make sure that they actually understand how Wikipedia can be used, and other online sources can be used as well.
What are the dangers?
So the first danger that we were talking about was content. The second danger when we talk about kind of risks for young people, or people in general I guess, would be commerce. And with a doubt, Internet commerce it’s one of the fastest growing markets that we’ve got, it’s worth a huge amount of money, but this really needs to be talked about within our sort of financial education agenda as well. And of course the great thing about the Internet is it’s always kind of flagging new words that come out as well, and I guess the kind of words or things that young people would need to be aware about would be words like ‘phishing’ or would be words like ‘pharming.’
And what do we mean by these words? Well, let’s take, for example, phishing, spelt with a P. This would be when somebody was actually going out and they were actually looking to find out some personal information about you. And you may have even experienced it yourself that sometimes you get an email and the email comes from the HSBC Bank, and it says “Please can you update your account details” and in order to do that you need to put your old password in. And it looks completely legitimate, it’s come from what looks like an HSBC email account, it’s got a header with the HSBC on, etc, etc, etc, and of course the only thing which is slightly suspect to you is that you don't have an account with the HSBC. It’s a scam, it’s a massive phishing email that’s gone out to thousands and thousands of people, and even though that we might not fall for it, thousands of people do, that’s why these things that still exist.
This is one that I had, was sent through to me the other day. The interesting thing about it is that I had to read it twice before I realised that it was a complete scam, because just by complete luck is that I do know this person particularly well, she is travelling around the world at the moment and she was due to come to Scotland, and it was the bits about missing passport and actually asking for money which didn’t make any sense. But it was a good example of the fact where I had to read it twice to think actually, you know, somebody’s hacked into this email account here and they’re being scammed about it.
The biggest phishing websites are websites like Facebook and the social networking websites. Why are they big phishing websites? Because every time that you type information into your Facebook profile, that’s a way then that Facebook targets advertising at you all of the time. It’s finding out that personal information about you and it’s targeted advertising for you on the right hand side. And that again is an important issue in financial education and digital literacy for young people.
I think the other thing that perhaps we need to be aware of as well is that now it’s possible for young people to use their mobile phone if they’ve got credit on their mobile phone as a form of currency. In fact it’s possible for a young person under the age of 18, as long as they’ve got a mobile phone with credit on it, to use websites like one here is Onebip that I’m showing, and basically it turns your mobile phone into a credit card and it pretty much means that you can purchase anything online using your mobile phone credit. So again, it’s being aware of these things and having these kind of conversations with our children and young people, but also being aware of course I guess that if you’ve got a mobile phone which is pay as you go, it’s very, very difficult to trace where that credit goes. If you’ve got a mobile phone which is on a bill, which on a contract, then you’ve probably got itemised billing that goes with that as well.
The other word that I mentioned earlier on was a word that was called ‘pharming,’ and what pharming is, pharming is a way that websites will push you towards products. Again possibly the biggest pharming website on the Internet would be Amazon. I don't know if you’ve ever bought anything from Amazon before, but say, for example, that you go on to buy a book, it will say “People that have bought this book have also bought this book.” It will normally give you a bit of a discount because it’ll be encouraging you to buy one or two together, and by the time you’ve finished your shopping, bearing in mind that you were only going on to buy one book in the first place, you may have ended up buying three or four things. Now you’ll be getting a good deal out of it and that’s absolutely fine, but the point is that the website is pushing you towards products, it’s encouraging you to buy things, which is not a problem if you can afford to buy the things, but if you’re an 18-year-old and you’ve gone to university and you’ve just been given your first credit card, again then this may become a financial education issue as well. So it’s being aware of things like pharming and phishing and other kind of things to do with e-commerce.
So we’ve got our content, we’ve got commerce. I guess the fourth [sic] danger, which we’re going to talk about in a bit more detail in a minute, would be contact. We’ve already sort of slightly mentioned it. So it’s the way that we can use interactive technology, social networking spaces, instant messaging for example, multiplayer games, and that may actually lead to meeting somebody online, and then actually perhaps meeting somebody in real life, which is absolutely fine if the person is who they say they are. In fact, a lot of relationships have been formed this way, a lot of very, very positive, a lot of very, very good relationships, but unfortunately we’ve also got examples of incidents that have happened all over Scotland, all over the UK, all over the world, where young people have met somebody offline and actually that person wasn’t who they said they were in the first place. And these have been online predators and they’ve been grooming these groups of young people over a prolonged period of time.
123 friends
I mentioned before the statistic in terms of 1 in 4. I think another interesting statistic to look at here is that the average number of friends for a 12 to 24 year old to have on a social networking space is 123 friends. And actually when you drill down into the data and you look into the data in a little bit more detail, it’s the 12 year olds that have got 123 friends and it’s the 24 year olds that have got a few less than that. And I think this is really, really interesting, because obviously if you’re 12 years old you’d maybe be lucky to actually know 123 people, and to actually call them your friends might not be the case. And I think this is an interesting point because I think that there’s a lot of young people now that have actually changed the definition of what a friend is and actually what it means to be friends with somebody online compared to what it means to be friends with somebody offline as well, and that’s a point that we’ll maybe come back to in a minute.
So contact was our third danger. Our fourth danger then is culture, so different culture and how the Internet has affected youth culture. So one of the reasons why we started to run parental training courses in a number of authorities in Scotland is because we were getting into a situation, particularly in secondary schools I have to say, where there had been some perceived bullying which had been taking place online, normally via a social networking space, yet the interesting thing is of course that the social networking spaces are actually blocked in schools, so actually this bullying was taking place at home where the social networking spaces aren’t blocked, are often unsupervised, are often unfiltered, yet it was the schools that were being expected to pick up the pieces first thing on the Monday morning.
And I think the whole culture of what we perceive to be bullying has changed, if indeed you believe that it exists in the first place. I think that ten years ago if somebody was being bullied that would probably happen out in the playground, it would probably be quite physical. About five to six years ago, bullying kind of shifted a little bit, it went to kind of text messages, normally these text messages were limited to 140 characters, and then, as I’ve already mentioned, there’s kind of ... there’s been a paradigm shift again as young people now are perhaps being bullied a little bit more by social networking spaces as well, being actually highly unpleasant to each other sometimes. And it’s moved away from this kind of physical form of bullying perhaps more to this kind of mental torture, in some cases young people are being unpleasant to each other.
And I think this whole sort of changing culture, this whole kind of changing digital culture, has had a bit of an impact. This is some research that Channel 4 did. I’ve mentioned one of the figures already, which is 123 friends on a social networking space, but it was research as to how young people actually interact with technology. And I’m not going to go through the whole of the paper, but I think it’s interesting in terms of how digital culture has changed and how this culture may have an impact on young people.
So one of the things that this survey found is that it was actually very, very common that within a household that people would have access to about eight different devices that could access the Internet, and whether this was a desktop computer, a laptop computer, a Netbook, an iPhone, an iPad, a different type of mobile phone, a variety of games consoles, but there’s an awful lot of houses that have got a huge amount of devices that can access to the Internet.
The one that I found one of the most interesting was that 25% of the young people within this age category, they would rather stay at home than go on holiday without their mobile phone. And the reason that I find that figure fascinating is because if we’d have asked that question five years ago the figure would have been a lot less; if we’d have asked it ten years ago the figure would have almost been non-existent, because young people didn’t have mobile phones ten years ago, or there would have been very, very few of them out there. And it’s a good example I think of how technology has had an effect on youth culture, even youth behaviour to a certain extent as well.
And a final fact that again I found fascinating was that the first thing that the majority of this group do when they get home is to turn on the computer, and for the children between the ages of 12 to 18 that’s normally to speak to the people that they’ve just left at school. So again, a fascinating statistic which begs all sorts of questions about do we let young people speak to each other enough at school, and what other effects might this be having on society for example.
Do we use the Internet in different ways?
So it presents some interesting questions I think, and I think one of the things that we need to acknowledge as educators is that different people use the Internet in different ways, and I don't want to get into a debate here about young and old, or digital natives and digital immigrants, all of these things, but I think we just need to accept that different people use the Internet in different ways. And I would kind of say that maybe as a general rule of thumb that if you’re a little bit older you maybe use the Internet possibly a bit more for kind of a bit of research, maybe a little bit of shopping, certainly for email if it was linked in with your work. I would say, for example, if you were a little bit younger, perhaps under the age of 18, then you probably wouldn’t use email as much. You might do research in terms of your schoolwork or homework, but very much you would be using the Internet as a communication tool, a way that you could collaborate and a way that you could communicate with other people, either via your social networking space, either via uploading your content, or either via some kind of like instant messaging service.
So we just need to acknowledge I think that different people use the Internet in different ways. And again I think that one of the key questions for parents and teachers is to actually find out how the young people in their classes use the Internet or how the young people at home, how do they use the Internet. You know, what are their favourite websites, what do they use them for? How many friends have they got on their social networking spaces? Have they actually met them? Can you describe them in real life? So key questions that we should be asking of young people to actually find out how they’re using technology and the sort of things that they’re doing.
One of the things that we have seen a massive kind of growth of in the last number of years has really been the kind of growth of virtual worlds, and one of the biggest virtual worlds is a world called Second Life. I’m not going to go into it and talk about it in a lot of detail, but basically it’s what we call avatar based, so everybody that you can see in this picture here is controlled by a person who is sat at home behind their computer and these avatars can walk around, there can be gestures, you can dress them. You can even speak to them if you speak to each other as well, either via instant message chat or using your voice, just by normal speech.
But the reason that I show this picture, and I think that this is the really, really important point, is that we need to be trying to get the message across to children that being online, whether it’s in a virtual world or whether it’s in a social networking space, or anywhere really, but being online is just like being in another real place. So behaviour that we would expect from young people in school, in the playground, in society, needs to be mirrored really I think in that online environment as well. So, for example, if it’s inappropriate to swear in real life in a classroom or on the street and be loud and be obnoxious, then it should be inappropriate to do that in the online environment as well. And I think that’s probably even more true of an online environment because anything that we type, even to a certain extent anything that we say, anything that we do, there’ll be a digital footprint of all this information which is kept somewhere, and potentially this may come back to haunt young people in years to come, and we’ll pick up on that point a little bit later on.
Now I don't pretend to understand virtual worlds or why people would want to go in them, and how we would even sort of engage in this environment, but I think that we do need to understand that they’re highly attractive environments and that young people do like spending time in there all of the time.
The difference between knowledge and wisdom
So when we talk about online behaviour then, I guess it’s really the difference between what we would call knowledge and wisdom. So as a responsible adult, or somebody who like to think that they’re a responsible adult, I would say that I’ve probably got the wisdom to behave responsibly online, but I might not be confident with the knowledge or the technology. Whereas, you know, I’ve got a young person who’s very, very competent using the technology, they can surf the Internet well, they can use social networking sites very well, they find them very, very intuitive, but they might have the wisdom to be able to relate the online world to the real world.
Let me give you an example which will maybe kind of explain it a little bit better. If you went to any Primary 6 pupil in the whole of Scotland and you said to them, “Right, you walk outside the school gates and somebody stops in a car outside, and you don't know who they are and they ask you where you live, what would you do?” The majority, perhaps even all of these young people, would say they would walk away, they would run away, they would be polite, they would leave, because this very, very concept of stranger danger has been drilled into them for ... all of the time by adults and by parents and by other responsible figures in their lives.
If you said to a group of young people, “Let’s write your name and address down and your mobile telephone number on a piece of paper and photocopy it two hundred times, and give that out to the first two hundred people that walk out of Tesco’s, would you do it?” Again, they would all say no. But then if you say to young people, “Well, what information are you sharing on your social networking space?” and many of them will say their name, their address, maybe their school, maybe their mobile phone number, maybe their likes and dislikes. “And is your social networking space private?” Many of them will say yes, they’re sharing this information, and no, it’s not private. And the reason it’s not private is because it’s not very cool, you know, for it to be private.
But my point is this, is that the analogy between giving your information out to a complete stranger at the school gate or giving your information out to two hundred strangers in Tesco’s, is really exactly the same. There’s sharing all this personal information in a public place on the Internet, apart from instead of it being available to that one person or two hundred people in Tesco’s, it’s available potentially to over a billion Internet users worldwide. So it’s trying to get this balance between knowledge and wisdom. So it’s okay to share information, but let’s make that we share it responsibly to the people that we want to be able to see it.
And that’s the interesting point isn’t it when we talk about friends, because on a social networking space is that you will share all of your personal information with your friends. Now the average number of friends for a 12-year-old is 123, are they all really their friends? What sort of information are young people sharing to their perceived friends or their friends on social networking spaces, where actually they wouldn’t share them with their friends in real life, their real friends, their trusts friends a lot of the way. So these are big questions and interesting questions that I think we need to be having with young people.
“Children are not the same as they used to be ...”
And this kind of brings me to this next point I guess, is that I kind of think that young people that we come into contact with today, in our schools, in our community centres, are not the same as they used to be, alright. When I first started teaching I worked with a fantastic teacher that taught me a huge amount of stuff about geography and things like that, and she would always maintain that kids were kids, alright. And I just don't think that kids are kids anymore, right, I think that young people have changed.
Convergence ...
And the reason that I think that young people have changed is because now they’ve got access to this kind of, you know, completely unlimited amount of information, all knowledge. And we can have a debate about whether it’s knowledge or information, but they’ve got access to a completely unlimited amount of information via the Internet. And I think that sometimes young people come into contact with information they’re not maybe, you know, emotionally ready for, alright. And in the past I think it was teachers and adults and, you know, responsible parents who were the gatekeepers of knowledge. We would decide when a young person was old enough to know about sex and drugs and rock and roll and all these things. And that’s where we had a curriculum that was completely based on age and stage, whereas now a young person can go online, they can find out a lot of information. Some of this information might be unreliable because they don't know how to validate it, some of this information, or a lot of this information will be highly glamorised, right, and some of this information arguably may be highly inappropriate for the maturity of these young people.
Let me give you an example, BBC iPlayer. A fantastic example, and the BBC has been streaming content on iPlayer for a while now and it’s been producing content for television and radio for a long period of time. But there’s always been something called the watershed hasn’t there, and that would be that after nine o’clock at night you would show programmes which were perhaps a little bit more mature in nature, maybe they had a bit more sexual content in them, maybe they included swearing and maybe the swearing wasn’t filtered out. Now on BBC iPlayer you can watch any content which is available after the watershed, you just have to tick a box to say that you’re over 18, or that you’re over 16 as part of it as well, but that content is available to everybody. Now again I’m not saying that this is a bad thing, I like BBC iPlayer, I think it’s a wonderful resource, but I think it’s a good example of now how children have got access to content which they might not have had access to in the past, and how is this contributing to their body of knowledge, and what additional education needs to go with that as well.
And of course the really, really interesting thing is this whole idea of convergence. I mean, the Internet has turned mobile. I can pretty much guarantee that Christmas 2010 every new mobile phone that young people will get will have a fully enabled web browser on it, and that will probably be part of the data contract, where young people will be able to access the Internet, often unfiltered, on their mobile phone, and have access to this wonderful resource. And that’s no longer going to be confined to computers at school, computers at home or computers in the family room at home, everything is going to converge.
And this is why we need to work together to make sure that children are safe whenever they use the Internet. Not where they use the Internet, not whether it’s at home or whether it’s at school, because increasingly our young people in Scotland will be using the Internet all of the time, they will be constantly connected. Indeed, some of the latest research from CEOP suggests that young people between the ages of 11 and 16 they don't see any difference between being online and offline, because they’re constantly connected and because they’ve only ever grown up in the world with the Internet, and indeed it’s been a fascinating time for the Internet to grow in terms of rich multimedia and some of the resources that are available on it as well. So these are important things that we need to think about.
Now we talked about convergence in terms of mobile phones, and this is something that I’ve touched on already. Here are some pictures up on the screen here of different gaming machines, the PlayStation 3, the Nintendo DS or the Nintendo DSi, the Nintendo Wii, the Xbox 360, and a variety of mobile phones. And the interesting thing about all of these devices is that they can all access the Internet as well. and of course the other interesting is that young people are clever, and even in our most responsible households where the time on the computer is limited, where parents are monitoring young person’s Internet use, it’s interesting to think that there are a lot of adults that don't realise that some of these devices can access the Internet.
And of course that we know that young people are clever, and we know that a lot of households now have got wireless Internet, wireless broadband, and young people know that if they pick up your wireless broadband box and if they copy the 16-digit code down from the bottom of the wireless broadband box, and if they go up to their bedroom and if they put that 16-digit code into their PSP, they’ve got complete access to the Internet without even their parents knowing about it. Now again I’m not saying that’s a bad thing, I think it’s a great example of children being very, very clever, I think it’s a great way of sharing devices and having access to this wonderful body of knowledge, but I think the interesting point for parents is that all of these devices that we’ve got on the screen here have actually also got very, very sophisticated parental controls as well. You can turn off whether these devices are Internet enabled or not, some of them you can actually set the time that the Internet is available for, and of course the interesting thing about a lot of the games consoles is that the game console knows the age range on the game. So you can tell the games console, for example, that you don't want it playing games that are designed for people that are 18 if you’ve got children, for example, that are only 12 in your household as well.
So the one thing that I would encourage you to do if you’ve got games consoles, if you’re got wireless broadband in your house, etc, etc, is to have a look at some of these controls and some of these filters, and think about these things and think about how they can be used to help keep your children safe online. I’m not talking about locking everything down here, because I think that’s inappropriate as well, but thinking about what is appropriate to use for the maturity of your child and what you feel comfortable with as well.
Social Networking
So want to talk now a little bit about social networking, because this is a bit of a buzzword at the moment isn’t it, and I’ve got some pictures here of some social networking sites. I think the first thing to point out is that social networking isn’t new, one of the first social networking sites ever to come around was a site that was called Friends Reunited, which some of you may have heard of before. The thing about Friends Reunited is that there was a massive, massive drive at the time to get lots of different people onto it, to get people to sign up, and it’s not that popular now, it’s not grown with the times, but it was the first social networking site and it’s been around for over ten years.
And there are lots of other ones as well. I mean, Habbo Hotel is a virtual hotel, it’s kind of marketed at 13 years olds. It’s a hotel that you can walk around with, you can buy things for your hotel room, you can buy clothing, you can ... it’s avatar based, you can speak to other people that are in your hotel. Again, it’s very, very popular, particularly popular a number of years ago. Bebo up until recently has been very, very popular with young people in Scotland. It’s not as popular as it used to be. Facebook now tends to be a lot more popular, even for young people under the age of 13. The majority of Primary 7 children in our schools will have a Facebook account. In some recent research that we did in one education authority we found out that pretty much all of S1 pupils had Facebook accounts as well, which again is interesting because if you’re an S1 pupil you’re 11 years old, you’re not 13 years old, so at some point you’ve ticked the box to say that you’re 13 to actually sign up for your accounts.
YouTube is also an example of a social networking site, because you can upload your own content there and you can set up networks, you can befriend people. You can rate other people’s content as well, so a good example of a social networking site. MySpace, very, very popular in the United States, not as popular in the UK. Specifically I guess designed for sharing music and bands and these sort of things is what it was famous for. Flickr is a photo sharing website where again you can upload and you can share your own photos, you can comment on other people’s photos. You can also put Flickr ... you can also put, sorry, video and stuff onto Flickr now. It’s owned by Yahoo, a massive amount of resources on there for educational purposes.
Piczo is one where we can design our own kind of websites, popular with the kind of age group I guess sort of 9 or 10 years old, before they maybe move into some of the more popular social networking spaces which are very, very current with adults, for example Facebook. We’ve already mentioned things like Second Life, these kind of 3D avatar based social networking sites.
The simple truth of it is though that there are actually hundreds and hundreds of social networking sites that are available on the web, and there are new ones that are started pretty much every day. Some of them make it big, like Bebo and Facebook, some of them don't make it more than a couple of weeks. And it would be absolutely impossible for us as educators or as parents to stay on top of every single social networking website that there is online. The important thing for us is making sure that we reinforce that message of we need to assume that being online is just like being in another real place, and trying to get that balance between knowledge and wisdom right so that we can teach our young people to use the Internet responsibly. Because we’re never going to stop them using the Internet, and indeed we don't want them to stop using the Internet because it’s a wonderful thing, but it’s staying on top of some of these things.
The other sort of social networking site that I’ll just flag up, again this is with no disrespect to this space, but it’s a website which is called Club Penguin, it’s owned by Disney. And it’s basically a 3D avatar based social networking space where you’re a penguin, you can go around and you can throw snowballs at other penguins and you can talk to them, or you can build an igloo, or you can do any of these things. But the reason that I’m mentioning it is because it’s kind of marketed at between 5 to 8 year olds, it’s a social networking space for actually quite young children, and quite often when we’re having these conversations with primary school or early years teachers is that sometimes there’s this perception that the problem with social networking is really for older children. And actually I don't think that’s the case, I think there are issues and responsible use messages to do with social networking that we actually need to get out to our very, very young children.
And I don't have a problem with Club Penguin, it’s owned by Walt Disney, it’s very, very well moderated. You’re meant to get parental consent before you sign up, although we have had examples of children signing up without parental consent because they pretended to be parents themselves. But my worry of course is where do these children go when they grow out of Club Penguin? If they’ve not picked up the good habits, if they’ve not had that kind of education at school in terms of how do you behave in a virtual 3D world, how do you behave in a social networking space, then what are they going to do if they go into an environment which isn’t as well moderated, where we’ve got people in there who definitely aren’t who they say they are? In fact, we’ve got people in there that are purposely going out to try and manipulate or to groom children then meet them offline.
So I think that the whole Internet safety and responsible use message, this is a 3 to 18 problem, right, and this is something that we need to be speaking about with young children, very, very young children, and then all the way through their school career, reinforcing these core messages about safety, reinforcing these core messages about responsible use, because that’s what it comes down to.
Digital Footprints
And the other thing that I think we really need to get across to young people is this whole kind of notion of digital footprints. And what I mean by digital footprint is that pretty much I think that anything that you put online you can’t really delete from the Internet. Now I don't pretend to be a computer scientist or anything like that, but what I do know is that is I’ve saved a document to my laptop computer and then if I delete it by accident, I can normally get the IT people where I work to retrieve that document for me, or I can download a piece of freeware that can normally retrieve that document from the hard-drive. Because even though that I’ve deleted it, it still exists on that hard-drive. And if we can appreciate that the Internet is really just a series of billions of hard-drives all around the world, anything that I upload to the Internet and then delete is still going to exist on that hard-drive somewhere. And unless I can actually track down and find that hard-drive and destroy it, I’m never actually going to be able to destroy that data.
And in fact the interesting thing is of course with a number of social networking sites, anything that you upload to that social networking space, in the small print, which nobody ever reads, you’re actually saying that you’ve given that data away to the company that owns that. So they maybe have still got your data and they are maybe still keeping it somewhere else.
So my point is this, the point we’ve got to be getting across to young people is anything that they put up online, anything that they type in, any picture that they upload, even anything that they say up to a certain extent, there’s an opportunity for that to always be with them, particularly if it’s associated with their name, if it’s associated with their email address, it forms their digital footprint.
And there have been a number of examples over the years where young people have said inappropriate things online and then this has been found out by an employer, or by a school, or even by the person that they’ve said these inappropriate things about, and that’s caused great emotional turmoil for the young people.
And this is an interesting example. I don't know whether you recognise these two people here. This is Naomi Broady and David Rice, both very, very good tennis players, both sponsored by Slazenger, hoping to represent the UK in the 2012 Olympics. Yet on their Bebo profiles one of them is drunk at a party and one of them is stuffing his face with pizza. Now obviously these are young people, they’re kind of 18 years old, this is the sort of behaviour that young people do when you’re 18, it’s not seen as being particularly extreme. However, because these two young people were sponsored athletes, and because their Bebo profile was public, Slazenger withdrew their sponsorship, right, because they were saying that they were not being positive role models for the sport of tennis, in particular youth tennis, and they were also suspended by the Lawn Tennis Association for a period of time as well.
And even though it’s a bit of an extreme example, I think it’s a good example of the fact that these young people were behaving irresponsibly within their own individual context. They’d put this information up on line, they’d not set the privacy setting on their social networking space so they were basically saying, “Hey, come and look at me.” People got access to the photographs, the media got access to the photographs, and this is what happened. And it’s an unfortunate thing for two people who’ve got a huge amount of potential to give back to youth, and obviously a huge amount of potential to give back to tennis as well.
And again there are other examples of it. There are examples of, for example, people being off work sick but still going on Facebook. There are examples of people being disrespectful to their boss or other employees on Facebook but forgetting they were actually friends with them on Facebook in the first place. And there’s an example here of a teenager, again 17 years old, and she called her job “boring,” and when she came into work the next day she was basically, she was asked to leave because it was against kind of company policy and all of these other things.
And this presents a big problem for school teachers I think, because even though we need to be getting this message across that we’ve got to be very, very careful about what we put online, I think we still need to put online. Because if there were a young people in your ... wanting to have a career in certain professions, journalism is the obvious one, then if you’ve not got a digital portfolio, if you’ve not got a blog, if you want to be a photographer and you’ve not uploaded some of your own photographs to Flickr or things like this, then when you go to get a job the first thing that people will do is they will Google you and they’ll be looking for what you’ve written, or they’ll be looking for different photographs that you’ve taken as well. So again it comes back to this word ‘responsible use.’ I think it’s absolutely fine to publish stuff online as long as we’re doing it responsibly. In fact, I think if we do it responsibly we can create this really, really good, this really, really positive digital footprint around ourselves, and that might actually increase our chances of employability.
The other thing I guess is that if we are putting stuff that’s negative online, if we are talking about things that are inappropriate, as sometimes young people do, then I think that in years to come more and more employers will Google the name of the people that are going to got a job to see what they’re like. Because let’s face it, you can find out a lot more about a young people from their social networking space than you ever would do from a job application form. And this has happened recently a number of times, and also it’s not illegal to Google people to find out information about them, to actually find out what they said. So anything that you put online potentially could basically be form of a future job application form.
Now just as a good example for people that don't necessarily believe what I was saying about it’s almost impossible to delete anything from the Internet, one website which is quite good at demonstrating this, and one that we use a lot in training sessions, is a website which is called the Wayback Machine. And the Wayback machine is basically the Internet archive, it’s where I guess from time to time the Internet is periodically backed up. It’s a wonderful, wonderful resource. And let me just take you through an example of how it works.
This is the Seabird Centre, which is in North Berwick in East Lothian, and the website address for the Seabird Centre is seabird.org. Now if I go to the Wayback Machine, which is archive.org, it’s the internet archive, you can see there’s a little box there where I can type in any URL. So if I type in seabird.org, right, into that box, and then if I click on the button which says ‘Take me back,’ what I start to see is I start to see a whole series of dates of when that website has been backed up, when it’s been archived. And if I click on the one that says the 24th April 2000, because 2000 was when the Seabird Centre came around, it was one of the Millennium projects, if I click on that you can see that I get a very, very old version of the Seabird Centre website. Some of the pictures are missing but a lot of the pictures are there, but the URL is no longer seabird.org, we can see that’s on a completely different server. And that’s because the website has been copied by the internet archive and it’s been backed up and it’s being hosted somewhere else.
And people are copying websites all the time. The reason that Google search and Bing search and Yahoo search are so quick is because most of the websites have been copied and they’ve been cached and they’re hosted somewhere on Google servers. Websites are being copied all the time, which makes them easy to be searched, but it also goes towards this point that it’s almost impossible delete anything from the Internet. Of course the fascinating is that if you happen to know the URL for your social networking space or a child’s social networking space, if it’s not private you can type that into the Wayback Machine and again you can see a number of dates of when that’s been backed up. And it will have been backed up, this has been happening all the time. So a good example, just to kind of show how this works.
What I’d like to do now is I’d like to show you a quick example about social networking, but also a good example I guess about privacy as well. And I’m going to use Bebo as an example, and I know that I’ve already said that Bebo isn’t as popular as it used to be, and even though I’m using Bebo here, this would be applicable to the majority of social networking sites, I think that’s the important thing. A place where we could share information and we could choose either to have our information public or we could choose to have our information private.
So let me just show you a kind of screen shot. This is what a slightly older version of the Bebo home page looked like. One of the interesting things about it of course is it’s covered in advertising, because these websites are free to use, they make their money from selling advertising. They make a lot of money from selling targeting advertising, and it comes back to phishing that we were talking about earlier, or pharming young people towards different types of products.
And if I kind of scroll down the screen, I get to this kind of interesting space which talks about who’s on Bebo. And there’s a couple of interesting things about this. First of all, anybody that appears in this box are people that have got their profile open, right. These aren’t people that have got a private profile, these are people that have got their profile open, which is basically telling Bebo that anybody can look at this, and that you want people to kind of look at this information as well.
The other interesting thing about this is that it’s geo-sensitive, right. Bebo and Facebook and other social networking sites, they’re all about trying to get people to meet up. That’s their idea, it’s meant to be social. Which means, for example, if I logged onto Bebo or Facebook in Edinburgh, the people who else would be online in my network would be people that probably lived in that geographical area, right, it’s meant to be geo ... it’s geo-sensitive as part of it as well.
Now when I sign up for a social networking site I’m asked to put in lots of different information. This is just a typical kind of sort of sign-in screen here. One of the things that I’m obviously asked to put in is I’m asked to put in my date of birth. Remember that you’re meant to be over 13 to use things like Bebo and Facebook. If you’re not over 13 it will tell you you’re not over 13, so it makes it very, very easy for young people just to kind of change, you know, their age as part of it. You can also decide whether you want to be male or female, you can say whether you’re in a relationship, you can put your postcode in if you want to and all these things, and you can talk about your life and what you get up to.
Now obviously there is some information that you have to put in, but you don't have to put in a lot of it, but what we know is that young people are used to answering questions which means they just kind of keep typing all the time. They like filling in the boxes, they want to share this personal information with their friends online or people that they might meet.
Quite often when you sign up for a social networking space it will ask you questions like ‘What films do you like?’, ‘What music do you like?’, “What sports do you like?’ We’ll talk about this under the auspices of this will be a good way for you to meet people that have got similar interests. Of course this comes back to what we were talking about earlier in terms of financial education, is that this information will also be used for targeted advertising. So if you like Britney Spears, chances are the adverts that will appear on your Bebo or your Facebook profile will be about Britney Spears. If you like rugby and football, if you like ... if you support Hearts, for example, you’ll have merchandise that will be flagging up from these different companies. It’s targeted advertising, it’s phishing advertising. And again there’s nothing wrong with that, but it’s just important that we make young people realise that the software is very, very clever and it is trying to get them to buy products all the time and click on some of these advertisements.
At some point during the sign up profile we can decide whether we want to make our profile public or whether we want to make our profile private. I have to say that both Bebo and Facebook are very, very good at saying in all of their print that if you’re under the age of 21 they recommend that you have your profile private. It recommends that you don't share information with direct friends, etc, etc, etc. I think that the social networking spaces have done everything right here. Of course a lot of young people don't do that because in terms of a youth culture thing it’s not seen as being very cool to have a private profile, and it’s not seen as being very, very cool to have an avatar, they’d much rather have a picture of themselves there as well. And that’s why to address some of these perceived issues it’s an education issue but not a social networking issue I think as such.
And the final screen that you can quite often fill in is actually some really, really quite detailed information about exactly where you live, maybe your phone number, maybe your mobile phone number. And you’ll see here there’s a warning on this which says that it’s only visible to direct friends, but that then brings us back to that whole question of what is a friend for a young person, right, because there’ll be many, many young people that have got lots and lots of friends on their social networking spaces, which means that this very, very personal information will be shared with them, but actually they may never have met them, and indeed they might not actually be their friends in terms of the true or our perceived definition of the word. So again, all of these things need to be thought about, all of these things maybe need to be pointed out to our young people.
Let me take you through an example. Now this is a fictitious example here. So this is a list of people that says who’s on Bebo. What I’ve done in this particular instance is I’ve linked my own Bebo account to this, so if I click on Ollie Bray it takes me through to what’s called my Bebo page. As you can see there’s a picture of myself, I’ve got a little bit of information about myself. It says that I’m male, it says that my home town is Weymouth, which is where I grew up in Dorset before moving up to Scotland, and it doesn’t say a lot of other information.
Now this big picture that you’ve got behind me, this is called my ‘skin,’ right, and I’ve got a map on the world that’s on there because I’m a geography teacher, and still maintain that I’m a geography. But the interesting thing about skins is that this is part of my digital identity. Now, for example, if I was giving this talk in an assembly and I picked a skin which said, for example, “I love beer,” then that may be sending an inappropriate message about my digital identity to the people that are going to look at my profile. And the reason that I’m making this point is that it’s now highly desirable for young people to customise their skin, to customise the back of their screen, and unfortunately there’s a lot of young people that have got explicit references to drugs and alcohol on their screens, and there’s a lot of the girls that have got references to things like Playboy, for example. And maybe there’s a whole discussion to be had there about digital identity and actually the perceptions of how you come across when you’re putting this information on the background of your social networking space. Because this is you online, there’s no difference really between the online and the offline world. This is like your business card in the real world.
So let’s change that skin. Let’s pick one which is perhaps a little bit more friendly, a farming one. Again, giving very little information away here, just my home town, there’s a picture of me and my first name Ollie Bray. Now if I scroll down this page I’ve uploaded some content onto Bebo. And just like all these type of social networking pages I can upload video, I can upload photographs, I can pretty much do anything that I want really. Now I’ve not uploaded very many photographs here at all, I’ve just got the one that you’ve already seen, but I’ve also got a section here which is called ‘school photographs.’ Now if I click on the school photographs, you can see that this is a picture of my primary school. This is actually a picture of me at primary school from a number of years ago, and again it’s not giving very much information away, but what I have given away here is the name of the primary school, Radipole County Primary School.
Building up a picture
Now why is this important? Well, it’s important because straight away my profile is not private and I’ve started to give some information away to somebody that might be interested in me. For example, I’ve given away my first name, which is either Ollie, or we can make the assumption that it might be Oliver, my surname’s Bray, my home town is Weymouth in Dorset, and the primary school that I went to is Radipole County Primary School. So I’ve not given a lot away, right. But somebody that had an interest in me, somebody that potentially wanted to find out more about me, somebody that perhaps even wanted to meet me, could potentially use this information to find out more about me.
And here’s how they might do it. So first of all, they know the primary school that I go to. Now we need to make a bit of assumption here that unless you’re in the independent sector, most primary school children live quite close to their primary school. It’s a little bit different with secondary schools, but most primary school children live quite close to their primary school. Which means that probably if we can find out where the primary school is, right, and we can do that with a Google search, Radipole County Primary School, through to the website, find the address of the school, we can make the assumption that possibly the postcode of the primary school might be quite similar to the postcode of where this person lives.
Then what do we do? Well, we need to remember that there’s a massive amount of public data that’s already available online. The phone book is a good example of that, so if you’re a teacher and you’re not ex-directory, your name, address and telephone number will already be online in the phone book, and all we need really is the person’s surname and the home town. And if I do a search for that then it’s going to give a list of telephone numbers and a list of addresses of the people that fit into this category within the search. Now if I know the postcode of the school I can make the assumption that if I can match the postcode, then that might be where this person lives. Obviously I don't know if that’s the case or not, but I can make the assumption. And if the push comes to the shove, I’ve got a telephone number and I could always ring up and I could always actually ask if the person lives there.
Now I have to point out at this point that online predators, people that are particularly looking out to go and groom children, will often groom over a hundred young people at the same time. So if this particular search doesn’t work out, one of the others from the hundred plus may work out. This is potentially a real issue. So I find the address, or what I think the address is, and again I can type that address into Google, into Google Maps, and I can then zoom in to actually see where that house is. I can even, if you like, look at a satellite image of the house, I could find out whether that’s a high-rise flat, I could find out what type of area that’s in, I could find out whether that’s a detached house with a swimming pool, or I could find out whether that’s a terraced house in the middle of an inner city, but I could find out a lot of information from looking at this. I could even zoom in and I could look at street view imagery and I could find out when that street view imagery had been updated, and I could start to get a feel for what that area might actually look like. I could go to other free websites and I could actually find out how to actually get there. I could directions either by walking, by cycling, from the nearest airport, to actually get to that particular location. So I can find all of this information out.
If I was willing to part with a bit of cash, about £8, then I would have access to a massive directory which is called 192.com, which is where I’ve got a lot of public information. So, for example, there’s a lot of census information which is here as well. And I could do a search and I could find out how much houses are worth, I could find out how many people live in the house, I could find out business addresses, there are all sorts of things. And all of this information has been found out because I gave those few small bits away on that social networking space. So we found out the name, found out the address, found a picture of the person, a picture of the house, potentially get the census information as well. And we actually gave hardly any information away at all on a social networking space.
And of course we know that young people are giving away a huge amount of information. They’re talking about their likes, their dislikes. They may be using inappropriate language, which might mean that they’re slightly more vulnerable than children which are more polite. They may be posting to the Internet at different times of the day, so for example a young person that posts to the Internet at one or two o’clock in the morning is likely to be more vulnerable than a young person that posts to the Internet at seven o’clock at night. And these are all things that we know that the research tells us that online predators would look for if they were looking to groom young people.
There’s another bigger issue that I think we maybe need to touch on here as well, is that we do know that there are people that have got a sexual interest in children, and we do know that young people have been found this way. But there’s also a huge amount of people that have got a real interest in theft, and if you’re a young person and if you’re going online, and if you’re saying “I’m going on holiday next week to Ibiza for two weeks with my dad,” who happens to be a dentist, if you live in a small, isolated rural community, the chances are when you get back your house may have been burgled. Now that’s happened in a number of rural areas of Scotland, we know that, and there has actually been a case now in the UK, not in Scotland but in England, where an insurance company has refused to pay out insurance because a house has been burgled but they said that basically they wouldn’t pay it out because the people had said that they were going away on holiday on Facebook, and that was being made public. So there are some big issues here for us to think about in terms of the wider sense of things.
So what else? Well I think the other just to mention is that increasingly now police are using social networking spaces, because if it’s not private it’s public, which means anybody can look at it, and they’re using this for data and they’re using this for intelligence. There have been, for example, a number of gang fights that have been stopped, there have been a number of drugs rings that have actually been stopped from looking at social networking spaces as well. So there’s lots and lots of people that are looking at this information, a) to try and protect young people, but there are also a lot of people that look at this information as well to try and exploit young people. Now whether that’s financially or sexually it doesn’t matter, it’s still exploitation. And cybercrime, e-crime, was the fastest growing area in terms of theft that we’ve got at the moment in the UK, and in fact globally.
There are other websites that perhaps we need to be aware of as well. This is a horrible website I think, it’s called Spokeo, I don't know how you pronounce it, and it brands itself on the fact that you will type in somebody’s email address and then it looks for other social networking sites, and it searches 43 of them at the moment, to find out little bits of information about you, and then it builds up a digital profile of you. Now it markets itself as this is how you find out secrets about your friends, but of course it could also be used about undesirable people. So if you’re got your ... if you use the same email address, which a lot of people do, if you’ve got your first name on one social networking space, your surname on another one, your mobile phone number on another one, it’s websites like this which will build up this kind of complete digital profile of you.
And there are other websites as well, this is one that’s called Pipl, and again you can search this, it’s a people search. So again you can search by email address, you can search by phone number, you can search by username for different social networking spaces. And this one is free, it links the websites that you have to pay for to get more information, but all these websites are available to anybody to find out personal information about young people, and also about adults as well, because we can’t forget that we’re not immune to this.
So I’ve just about finished, you’ll probably be pleased to know, but before I finish there’s a couple of things that I want to flag up. And the first thing really where can I get some support and advice to either go into a bit more detail about some of the things that I’ve been talking about, or to look at some resources that I might be able to use, either with my class or with my children at home. Now without a doubt one of the best resources that we’ve got available on the web at the moment is a website called thinkuknow.co.uk, which is funded by CEOP, the organisation that I’ve mentioned a few times already. And this has got really good resources, not just for teaching in schools, but also for parents and carers as well.
And one of the things that I really, really like about this website is it’s also got some great resources for younger children. So in the 5 to 7 year old category, for example, we’ve got a great resource which is called Hector’s World, which is basically about stranger danger but it’s set in the context of an underwater scene where the policeman is the seahorse, and it’s got a high-tech technology theme to it but it’s set as a cartoon. We’ve had this in some schools, it’s been highly successful there, the young people relate to it, and again it’s a good opportunity so that we can start to have conversations with our children about this.
For the 7 to 11 year olds there’s a great resource which is called Cyber Cafe. Again it’s talking about the dangers and the problems of social networking spaces, but the great thing about is that nothing’s branded. So, for example, you could start to tackle some of the issues perhaps surrounding Facebook and Bebo with young people using Cyber Cafe, using a website which looks a bit like Facebook and looks a bit like Bebo but it’s not called Facebook and Bebo. It’s unbranded, which means you’re not going to run to the problem of actually talking about the specific social networking space, and therefore then the children that weren’t on the social networking space being on it by the time they’ve got home. So again a worthwhile resource to have a look at.
And something that’s recently just been released in August 2010, which I think is a very, very good and a very, very well worthwhile and needed resource to the suite here, is the special educational needs resources. And these resources are aimed at children who have particularly low academic ability, but there’s also really, really good resource for deaf children on there as well, which is well worth looking out, and you can access that if you’re a teacher and you just need to register with the website.
The other thing that young people need to be aware of is this button here, it’s called the Click CEOP button. This appears on a number of websites, including Bebo, including MSN Messenger, it appears on a number of the GLOW website pages that we’ve now got on the Learning and Teaching Scotland online area, and it also appears on the Think U Know website. And if you click on this button it basically takes you through to the CEOP Help and Advice Centre, which is manned 24 hours a day by a qualified team of people from the police, youth workers, social workers, and educationalists as well.
And within the Advice Centre you can find information, help and support and bullying, on texting, on cyber bullying, on the use of mobile phones, but also, I think more importantly, you can also actually report information there as well. So if you’ve come across a website which is highly sexualised, maybe it’s even got inappropriate images of children on it, this is the place that you would go and that you would click on the button and you would actually report this website basically to the police, and you can do that digitally. If you’re a young person or if you’re an adult and you suspect that your child is maybe being groomed by an online predator, this again, as well as having to your local police obviously by dialling 999, this is a place again where you could seek advice and where you could actually report cases as well. So it’s the CEOP one-stop shop, and again if you go to the Think U Know website and if you click on the Click CEOP button you’ll find this.
And the last couple of resources that I want to remember is that CEOP are increasingly trying to inhabit places where young people are, so there’s a CEOP Facebook group, for example, which gives out advice on Internet safety and responsible use. So if you’re on Facebook and your children are on Facebook, why don't you encourage them to join the group because then they’ll get this constant trickle of Internet safety advice that will come through as well. And it’s not aimed at getting people to not be on the Internet, it’s sensible advice aimed at young people or aimed at adults, it’s talking about the latest scams, the latest viruses, as well as risks actually from coming into contact with people as well, so definitely worth recommending to young people or maybe signing up for yourself if you’ve got your own Facebook account.
And the final resource just to mention is obviously the resources that we’ve produced at Learning and Teaching Scotland. You’ll find any of our resources and advice at ltscotland.org.uk, and all of the Internet safety and responsible use advice is in the ‘Using Glow and ICT’ tab, which is on the far right-hand side of the screen. And within this tab you can link to a couple of resources that have been put together. One of the resources is basically on the latest news, it’s like a news blog of information that’s been coming in, and that’s been run in conjunction with Highland Council. And the other resource as well is basically an aggregation of all of the best resources that we found around the Internet, because there’s lots and lots of great resources that are out there, produced by mobile phone companies, produced by social networking companies, produced by CEOP, some of the ones that we’ve mentioned already, and what we’ve been doing is as a new resource becomes available and as we’ve used it, and then as we’ve actually made sure it’s been used in the classroom, we’ve been uploading and flagging these resources here and then tagging them to the ages and stages of the Curriculum for Excellence. Because the one thing that we do know is that within the Curriculum for Excellence, Internet safety and responsible use should be seen really as the responsibility of all.
Well, I hope you found that presentation interesting. By all means, if you’ve got any further questions please go onto the LTS website and access the Internet Safety and Responsible Use Glow group. There are discussion forums on there and there are also details of how to get in contact with some of our development officers. But I think it’s just worth finishing with this one point here, which I made right at the start, is that a lot of this presentation has maybe been about getting you to think about things. There’s quite a lot of it when people hear me talk about these things to parents and to teachers that get people worried. Remember I think again that the biggest Internet danger is that we concentrate on the dangers and that we forget the benefits. The Internet is here to stay, it’s a fantastic, it’s a wonderful resource, but just like any fantastic, wonderful resource we need to make sure that we encourage our children, whether that’s in school or whether that’s in home, to use it responsibly.
Thank you very much.
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