Spotlight on Digital Media And Learning

12.7.10 | The New York Times on Sunday examined the new challenges facing today’s parents as they try to protect and support their children through the bullying incidents taking place online.

The article describes teenagers forging online identities to bully using other kids’ names, repeated cruel harassment and the “cavalier meanness” that many of us may have blocked out from our adolescent years.

Parents, Jan Hoffman reports, are too often “bewildered” by new technology, but are “beginning to turn out for community lectures, offered by psychologists, technology experts and the police,” for help.

But many are also resorting to blocking and monitoring software, including using “keystroke loggers,” which record everything children write and see on their home computers. One parent’s solution was a post-it note near the computer that reads: “Don’t Forget That Mom Sees Everything You Do Online.”

Their responses belie the state of digital literacy today, among both parents and teens. As with any new technology, the terms of use and a code of ethics take time to develop. During this Wild West interlude, confusion and fear often reign. Bullying is a real, and frightening, problem that calls for a response. However, as the Berkman Center for Internet and Society finds, “parents who checked their children’s online communications were seen as ‘controlling, invasive and ‘clueless.’ ”

As online safety expert Anne Collier of NetFamilyNews.org, says, although monitoring may be warranted in rare cases, what kids really need is to feel listened to.

“If you’re monitoring your child secretly,” Collier told the Times, “what do you say to the kid when you find something untoward? Then the conversation turns into ‘you invaded my privacy,’ which is not what you intended to talk about.”

Collier expands on this idea in a blog post where she notes more schools are beginning to understand the need to get involved in these incidents, despite their off-campus occurrence. 

“The No. 1 action for parents to take in every case is to talk with our children,” Collier says.

Professor Nichole Pinkard, founder of Chicago’s Digital Youth Network, argues that context in which kids are using computers matters very much in creating a digitally literate and digitally ethical generation of young people. Blogging on Spotlight this past summer, she said adults need to be actively involved in teen computer use to make sure that their time online is constructive.

While undirected Internet use will often result in students spending the majority of their time in social communities like Facebook and YouTube, research shows that with some guidance from peers and mentors, teens will use their time online in self-directed, creative and educational ways.

“When students’ use of computers as learning aids has been scaffolded,” Pinkard says, “students have been shown to use technology to extend their knowledge, create media products that demonstrate understanding of academic content, and engage in real-time chats and collaborative projects with peers in the same room or halfway around the world.”

In a piece on cyberbullying we covered earlier this year, Harvard law professor John Palfrey reminds that there’s nothing fundamentally different about bullying and harassment that occurs in digital spaces.  What is different, Palfrey writes, is that where kids interact has expanded to include online spaces such as Facebook as well as physical sites such as schools and malls.

New research on how youth make ethical decisions online from Harvard University finds that youth most often think only of the immediate, individual effects of their actions and much less often about the larger community when interacting online.

The researchers, Howard Gardner and Carrie James, find that though guidance from adult mentors and supports are more important than ever to help young people think through the complex consequences of their online behavior, such adults supports are often “utterly absent” in the digital world.  (For more on this study, including tips for parents see Josh Karp’s “The New Wild West: Teens Navigating Ethical Decisions Online without a Sheriff”.)

Palfrey notes that criminal harassment laws can be helpful and law enforcement officials need support to be able to do their jobs in this arena. But a combination of outreach, education, mentoring and “being tough where we have to be” is needed to protect children in these new social spaces.

Educators and parents nationwide are turning to new digital citizenship curricula to help students understand their rights and responsibilities online.

Above all, those on the front lines of digital media argue, we must not retreat from these online spaces, for they are not going away. Instead, we must work to develop digital literacy, including awareness of one’s actions in a much more public sphere, and the consequences of one’s acts, whether virtual or real.