Each day we are confronted with messages in the media about the dangers of the Internet, viruses that crash computers, students who copy material from a CD or the Internet and hand it in as their own, schools that load software meant for one computer onto all their computers and hackers who take joy in breaking into the computer systems of schools, businesses and government agencies. Along with the advantages of using technology, come problems that we must face and work together to solve.
In this article, we'll detail real-life incidents involving legal and ethical abuses of technologies.1 One might be tempted to avoid using technology, particularly with children, after hearing some frightening stories. However, technology offers such wonderful opportunities for children that we encourage you to play a significant role in raising awareness of the issues in your community and helping raise a generation of responsible users of technology. To help, we have included lots of ideas for protecting students and leading them in positive directions. Many of the suggestions were provided to us by teachers, parents, students and others in past Computer Learning Month contests. We know that the best ideas come from those who are dealing with positives and negatives of computer use each day.
Real Life Stories -- It could happen to you. (1)
Educators and students, including the author of this article, have experienced going online only to have the following note, or something similar sent to them by instant message or email, "Our administration has determined problems with your account. Please verify your user name and password immediately or your account will be discontinued." The notice looks official, and it is tempting to reply with the information requested. Beware&emdash;replying gives someone else your password, which along with your user name, allows them to use your account. Online services and Internet Service Providers (ISP) never request your password like this.
Some of the most serious online problems have evolved because of the ease and efficiency of email. Get-rich-quick schemes and sex-related offers fill mailboxes. Spammers (those who send junk mail online) get to millions of email addresses by pressing their mouse buttons. One educator received a note saying that she could email to 57 million addresses for $89. To avoid getting unwanted email, an art teacher reports selecting a new screen name for her third graders. The class never used the name to go into a chat room and activated full safety controls. Despite these precautions, within 12 hours, the new name had two dozen pieces of email, some of which were pornographic.
An educator tells the story of a student who mistyped the name of a popular Internet site. The student's computer went to a site that forwarded the student to a pornographic site. When the student tried to backtrack to get out of the site, a loop was created sending the student back to the porno site. After complaints about the site were made, the link no longer exists. However, typing errors and lack of knowledge about sites can often lead to problems. A student who types www.whitehouse.com instead of www.whitehouse.gov, for example, will travel to a pornographic site with explicit photos on the opening page.
Although the Internet is probably the most enticing and useful to students in their preteen and teen years, the stories about dangers of online use for this age fill the news. This is the time when young people are sure they know it all, and teachers and parents know nothing. What they most likely see, however, is a myopic view of the world with limited peripheral vision. They believe they could never be the victims. Here's an example. A fifteen-year-old boy told a school administrator that he met a wonderful girl online. She was attending a prestigious university in the western United States, and she excelled in drama, sports and just about everything. "I couldn't tell her I was a sophomore in high school," the boy explained. "So I said I was a junior at an Ivy League college and played varsity lacrosse." When the administrator asked, "Do you think she is who she says she is?" "Yes," was the boy's prompt reply, "she wouldn't lie to me."
Impersonation and illegal use of others' accounts have caused problems at some schools. A student finds a way to get into another's account and sends nasty or threatening messages. Middle school teachers liken it to passing notes about "uncool kids" and signing others' names, something that went on well before the invention of computers. This unkindness is viciously multiplied when students send messages to multiple email addresses. In a case mentioned in the School Library Journal (Frances Jacobson and Greg Smith, "Teaching Virtue in a Virtual World," March 1998, 101), "a (still unknown) student impersonated an alumna online and sent a highly offensive email message about a female student to the entire student body." Threatening messages often result in school and police investigations to find and punish the offender.
The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children site includes the story of a 15-year-old girl who met an 18-year-old boy in a chat room. The girl invited her 13-year-old friend to join in the chatting and eventually talked the 13-year-old into running away from home with her and the boy. At the FBI site, cases such as those of a child molester who sent pornographic pictures of children over the Internet from jail and a man who posed on the Internet as a 15-year-old and enticed a 13-year-old girl into sending him videos of herself can be found. On the NPR site, a 12-year-old boasts that he downloaded pornography and sold it.
Breaking into systems has become a challenge for a number of students who are adept at using computers. Charlie Atterbury of the Atterbury Foundation explains, "Part of the problem is teenage curiosity and part of it is rebellion against what we say they can't do." Even young students are paying others to show them how to get around filtering programs.(2) The NPR site includes an audio segment of a young boy describing how he learned, by visiting "hacker sites," to disable filters. One of the most noteworthy of "hacking" cases involves student participation in the recent break-in to the Pentagon's computers. Five teenagers in two countries allegedly caused the problems. In another disturbing case, a teenager who hacked into telecommunications equipment and erased vital information, shut down community services, including airport systems for about six hours. Because of such threats to safety, the Department of Justice and the FBI are actively investigating and prosecuting juvenile offenders for cybercrime.
Parents report problems with Internet overuse, privacy, and viruses. One contacted an online service because of a huge bill she received. The service verified that her son's account totaled what amounted to about 8+ hours per day. When asked if this was highly unusual, the service representative said that there had been worse cases.
A father took his work home to complete over the weekend. Part of this work contained performance evaluations. He loaded his files onto his home computer's hard drive. One of his children, when using the computer, read the files and at school talked about an evaluation.
A child brought home virus-infected disks. His father used one of the disks and took it to work. About four hours after the disk was loaded into the company computer, four floors of networked offices were down with the virus. It took two and a half days to get everything back to normal.
Parents found pornographic pictures on their computer, but their eleven year old insisted he didn't put them there. His babysitter, a high school student who used the computer to do "homework," left them on the hard drive. It was the child who solved the problem after noticing what the teenager was doing.
Sometimes when school reports look too good to be true, they are. Students have become adept at cutting and pasting parts of web sites and articles into their essays and term papers. Teachers tell stories of entire reports taken from CD encyclopedias. "It's just so easy to print the information," one teacher commented. There are, in addition, web sites with term papers students can download. "The good news," according to a high school teacher from Canada, is that "most of the papers available online at this time aren't of a very high quality."
Teachers have stories about students handing in research papers that cite sources of questionable quality. When students see the words in print in a book or online, they often think the content has to be true. There are hate sites such as those from the Ku Klux Klan and Nazi sympathizers and other sites that offer purely personal opinions. There are sites that seem legitimate but aren't. Alan November, a frequent speaker at education technology conventions, tells the story of a student who used a web site to "verify" that the Holocaust never happened. November insists that we must teach children from a very young age to evaluate the worth of content.
One school project resulted in a United States Secret Service investigation. It involved scanning real money, printing the scans and asking classmates to identify the counterfeit bills. The student didn't realize that copying money for her report was illegal. The case came to the attention of the authorities when several students passed the scanned money in the community.
Problems with illegalities aren't all with students. Teachers and parents sometimes ask to copy school software, perhaps because they do not understand the legalities of copying. A school administrator comments, "There is confusion about shareware, freeware and commercial software. Besides that, we have lab packs for varying numbers of computers; people see us loading onto different computers, and it looks like we purchase one package and load everywhere. One software company provides free home use of school software, which makes people think other companies do the same. I've gotten used to telling people about the legalities involved, but it was hard at first. The people are embarrassed that they asked."
School yearbooks, newspapers, magazines and web sites often contain photographs of students, personal data and information about student awards. College-bound students are placing information online for college admissions officers to see. Some schools allow students to post information about themselves on web sites. But school leaders are worried about privacy and student safety. Is this more dangerous than publishing it in a local newspaper?
Steps Forward&emdash;Ethics, Technology and Education
Although the problems are many, the advantages of using technology far outweigh the obstacles. Educator groups, technology companies and local, state and national organizations are working on strategies to keep technology use ethical and legal. In this section we've detailed some of the steps forward in providing safe, ethical and responsible use of technologies, along with teacher-suggested strategies for teaching children.
Online Safety -- Most browsers and online services now include filtering software, as do many ISPs. The National Council for Missing and Exploited Children has a toll-free cybertip hotline (800-843-5678). Project Open features an abundance of information and links about online safety, and RSACi (Recreation Software Advisory Council on the Internet) provides a method of filtering sites by reading labels called PICS. Safety Tips for Kids on the Internet and a lesson plan targeting computer crime may be downloaded from the Department of Justice site.
Filtering programs, designed both for individual computers and networked systems, allow users to go only to sites considered "acceptable." The programs work by using the RASCi or another filtering system, include lists of sites that can be visited and/or allow users to put in their own lists of sites, including words and phrases that they consider unacceptable. Some of these programs track sites, information and images individuals access on the Internet. They can email you, if you so specify, a list of the sites visited, along with the graphics viewed. These tracking programs, often referred to as snooping programs, have brought about heated discussions about privacy issues.
For valuable information about online safety, a good site to visit is the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. You'll not only find guidelines to follow and pamphlets to order, but also a detailed section on problems teenage girls may face online and offline. Another great resource is PBS TechKnow that offers an excellent teaching-type quiz. One quiz question, for example, asks for your most frequently used password. Those who type a password in are scored as wrong, as passwords should never be given out.
As for chats, the best solution at this time is to locate monitored chats, plan carefully for chat sessions and know your chat partners. Set up chat sessions for your classes by going to sites such as TalkCity EduCenter, the Educator's Resource Network and Windstar Village.(3)
Virus Protection -- Recently, an educator in Singapore asked if there was any way to know whether an attached file contained a virus. "Is there a program that can handle this? I get the warnings on my screen that the attached file may contain a virus, but how do I know if it does?" All of us throughout the world have the same worries when we get the "virus message." Currently, however, the best virus protection is to make sure students are careful about what they download and programs they load into school and home computers. They should get your permission before downloading attached files or loading anything onto computers. All computers, in addition, must be protected with anti-virus software. The virus checker should scan any downloaded file before it is opened and give a warning if the file is infected.
Email Difficulties -- ISPs and online services are trying to control unsolicited email by offering filters that can be set up and by requesting information about problem email. Sites such as CNet offer detailed instructions on programming for filtering, hiding address, checking on senders, anti-spam, etc. General rules for dealing with unacceptable email include reporting violations to the service or ISP, not replying to senders, not threatening senders, not opening attachments unless you know that the sender is reliable and filtering your own mail by looking carefully at the sender's address and the subject.
Educator-Recommended Student Activities (4)
Teaching Suggestions
Realize that after you've done all you can to instill good values, taught about legalities and dangers, opened on-going dialog and supervised; you've got to give students your trust -- the trust that they will follow expectations.
One last bit of advice: Encourage your students to produce their own ideas on how to teach students to be responsible users of technology and enter the Computer Learning Month Competitions. It's a great way of getting your students to think creatively as they learn about the serious problems related to computer use. They may even win a new computer for themselves and their schools.
"The only way to be absolutely sure your child is safe from online problems is to lock the computer in the closet, but you don't really want to do that, do you?" explained a ninth grade student. "The kid would find another computer to use anyway."