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Feb 10, 2009

In time for Safer Internet Day, new resources to fight cyber bullying
Posted by: Matthew Johnson

Today is Safer Internet Day, an annual international event sponsored by Insafe to promote a safer Internet for children. Recent research on Internet life has shown that the greatest threat to kids online comes from kids themselves, both in the form of risky behaviour and online harassment, or cyber bullying. Cyber bullying can take forms such as harassing e-mails or text messages, social exclusion and spreading private photos and videos, among others, and presents a particular challenge for parents and teachers because it often happens outside the home or classroom. Because the Internet has become an essential part of kids' social lives, cyber bullying can also have more devastating effects as youth feel they have no escape.

To help educators address this issue in their classrooms, Media Awareness Network, with the support of the Canada Gazette, has developed the bilingual lesson series Cyber Bullying: Encouraging ethical online behaviour. The resource give students a better understanding of the ethical and legal implications of cyber bullying, while promoting positive and ethical Internet use.

Intended to support and enhance school-based anti-bullying and empathy-building programs, Cyber Bullying: Encouraging ethical online behaviour comprises the following lessons:

Introduction to Cyber Bullying: Avatars and Identity
Grades 5-6

With the layering of identity through the use of nicknames and avatars, as well as a sense of anonymity, it is easy for young people to sometimes forget that real people—with real feelings—are at the heart of online conversations. In this lesson, students are provided with opportunities to explore this concept and discuss the importance of using empathy and common sense when talking to others online.

Understanding Cyber Bullying - Virtual vs. Physical Worlds
Grades 7-8

In this lesson, students explore the concept of cyber bullying and learn how the attributes associated with online communication may fuel inappropriate or bullying behaviour. Connections between other contributing factors to bullying—online and offline—are also reinforced as students develop an understanding of the role played by bystanders and the ways in which our own responses may fuel or stop this kind of behaviour. As a class, students establish a class “code of (N)ethics” for online conduct.

Cyber Bullying and the Law
Grades 7-8 and Grades 9-12 (two lessons)

In these lessons, secondary and middle school students learn about and discuss the legal aspects of cyber bullying. They review a variety of hypothetical scenarios and a case study, and consider the seriousness of the situations, who is legally responsible, what action (if any) should be taken and by whom. To determine this, students will seek answers to the following questions: How does cyber bullying differ from offline bullying? What aspects of a cyber bullying case make it a cause for legal action? What determines whether it is a civil or a criminal matter? How should rights to freedom of expression, guaranteed under the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, be balanced against rights to security of person? When and how are schools responsible for cyber bullying cases?

Cyber Bullying and Civic Participation
Grades 7-8

This lesson allows students to explore the concept of civic participation in the creation of Canadian laws through a study of the consultation process found in the Canada Gazette. Students will create their own School Gazette by proposing and discussing rules against cyber bullying at school.

Promoting Ethical Online Behaviour: Our Values and Ethics
Grades 7-9

In this 3-part lesson, students learn about online privacy and ethical behaviour by exploring their digital footprints to better understand how our online interactions may not be as anonymous as we think they are. In Part One, students create a digital map of their Web-based activities and the various characters and personas they assume online. In Part Two, students further assess the privacy and ethics of their online activities by applying their cyber-portraits to a questionnaire and, in Part Three, students look at areas in their virtual lives where they can make improvements.

Comments | Categories: Internet, Events, Professional Development, Resources, Cyber Bullying | Print

Dec 03, 2008

Learn to Play, Play to Learn: Building a better educational game
Posted by: Matthew Johnson

Educational games have had a troubled history. At their worst, they have been neither educational nor games; even at their best they have faced scepticism from educators, game designers and especially children. The standard response to being given an educational game – This is supposed to be fun? – might be compared to finding a Brussels sprout at the centre of a Tootsie Pop. Teachers, meanwhile, are rightly concerned that the educational content of these games might be outweighed by the entertainment value. Already loaded down with curriculum that has to be delivered, many educators feel they don’t have the time to spare on anything but direct instruction.

Media Awareness Network’s study. Young Canadians in a Wired World (YCWW)—the most comprehensive and wide-ranging study of its kind in Canada—convinced us that there was a need for a comprehensive Internet literacy resource that could be used in Elementary and Intermediate classrooms. The research showed that young people are actively interested in learning more about their online environments. In focus groups, young people articulated that what they need from adults is more information about the kinds of content they find online so they can make informed choices about what they choose to see, as well as training in how to protect their online privacy and how to avoid undesirable content. The interest is highest among the children in Grades 4 to 6; this is a particularly important time to learn these skills because kids in these grades are playing on commercial game sites that actively seek to collect their personal information, and, by Grade 6, students are exploring edgier Web sites.

These were our concerns as we began the development of Passport to the Internet, an Internet literacy tutorial for Grades 4-8. As we listed the areas we hoped to cover—understanding safety, marketing and privacy issues, authenticating information found on the Web, managing online relationships and dealing with cyber bullying—it quickly became clear that Passport to the Internet would be a very ambitious project. With the amount of content it would need to deliver, Passport to the Internet had to be sufficiently interactive that students would play through each of the modules with little encouragement from their teacher. Could we achieve this without sacrificing its educational value? Was it even possible for a game to teach complex skills like these?

Given the relatively brief history of educational games, it might come as a surprise that the question is an old one. One of our oldest games, chess, was traditionally seen as a preparation for war, and in 1989 David Perkins and Gavriel Salamon designed a thought experiment to test whether or not it actually did so. They imagined that a small country, home to the world’s greatest chess master, was invaded by its larger neighbour. The citizens of the invaded country immediately put the chess master in charge of their military, reasoning that his skill on the board would transfer to the battlefield. In designing this scenario, Perkins and Salomon raised the question of just how we learn: is it more important to develop skills with broad application, that might move back and forth between related fields (such as chess and war), or were the skills specific to each context more important? In his book Schools For Thought, John Bruer revisits this problem, applying recent advances in cognitive theory to show that neither answer is entirely true: the chess master will not automatically be a great strategist in the real world—the two situations are too different—but some of his specific skills may transfer to the new context.

The word “transfer” is key to understanding why some educational games work and some don’t. In cognitive theory, it’s used to refer to the ability to apply skills acquired in one context to another. In general, the more similar two contexts are, the easier it is to transfer from one to the other. Learning Spanish grammar, for example, will help you learn Italian grammar, but not Russian grammar, because Spanish is similar in structure to Italian but not to Russian. The catch is that strategies which are applicable to the most contexts are also generally the least useful: cognitive scientists call these weak methods. Conversely, those skills most dependent on specific understanding of a particular context, called strong methods, are the most effective—but are also, for obvious reasons, the hardest to transfer.

Transfer is, of course, important in all educational situations. One of the greatest challenges facing any teacher is to get students to transfer what they learn in the classroom to other situations. This is especially important in educational games, because by definition their worlds—like a chess board—are artificial; any similarity to real-world contexts has to be designed in. It’s entirely possible to acquire mastery of a game without learning any skills that can transfer to other contexts.

Why use games for education at all, then? Because players do acquire mastery, often with amazing commitment and speed. Many writers, from game designers such as Will Wright (Sim City, Spore) and Scott Osterweil (Labyrinth) to academics such as Henry Jenkins and Constance Steinkuehler, have noted that computer game players learn how to succeed at games through an application of the scientific method. As Wright puts it, “Just watch a kid with a new video game. The last thing they do is read the manual. Instead, they pick up the controller and start mashing buttons to see what happens. This isn't a random process; it's the essence of the scientific method. Through trial and error, they begin to master the game world. It's a rapid cycle of hypothesis, experiment, and analysis.” As well, games are well-suited to independent learning because they can allow students to learn at their own pace: each student moves through the game separately, progressing at whatever speed best suits her.

In designing Passport to the Internet, then, we knew there were several major issues we would have to address for it to be successful. The most important was the question of transfer: could we really teach Internet literacy skills, or would users only learn how to succeed at the game? We decided for this reason that the core of the game would be simulation – the modules would reproduce genuine online environments as closely as possible. Our module teaching privacy management skills, for instance, is a simulated social networking site that combines elements of Facebook and MySpace. Because of this choice we were able to teach specific skills that would transfer directly to the actual Internet: a student could, for instance, use the exact same techniques used to analyze the game’s fictional Web sites to judge real ones.

Because the teachers who will be administering Passport to the Internet in the classroom are not necessarily experts in the skills we hope to teach (though we offer a detailed Teacher’s Guide to provide background), we provide as much of the educational content as possible on demand, to be accessed by the students when they want it rather than delivered beforehand. We created a Help tool that lets students get information on any active items on the screen; but only when they decide they need extra information.

There were, of course, many other factors influencing our design decisions. As always, two of the most important were money and time: both limited our options in terms of how much we could do and how we could do it. An early plan, for instance, to have an unlockable “bonus” module had to be dropped due to time constraints, and the fully functional search engine simulator had to be narrowed significantly in scope. We were also concerned with making the tutorial appropriate to students’ cognitive development: because the age range – from as young as eight to as old as thirteen – covered so much cognitive growth, we knew we had to have two different age levels in the game. This was most important in the authentication module, where the older students analyze Web sites on a much more complex and subtle level. Older students also face more sophisticated tasks in other modules, such as being a witness to cyber-bullying instead of a victim.

The landscape is littered with educational games that have failed for a variety of reasons: those that were insufficiently entertaining, those that had too little educational value, those where the match between the game and the content was too distant and arbitrary, and those where there simply wasn’t enough time and money to make it work. Every designer has compromised on one or more of these, and we are no exception. We believe, though, that by being mindful of these concerns we have made Passport to the Internet a rich and powerful tool for teaching Internet literacy skills.

Passport to the Internet is available through a licensing arrangement as a stand-alone resource or as part of the MNet’s professional development program Web Awareness Workshop Series. For more information you can check out an overview , or to preview Passport to the Internet, contact licensing@media-awareness.ca.

Passport to the Internet partners are: Inukshuk Wireless Learning Plan Fund, TELUS, Elementary Teachers’ Federation of Ontario, Toronto Catholic District School Board, London Public Library, and Nortel LearnIT.

Comments | Categories: Privacy, Internet, Professional Development, Resources, Cyber Bullying | Print

Sep 07, 2007

Bullyingcourse.com
Posted by: Warren Nightingale

Canadian bullying awareness and prevention pioneer, Bill Belsey, is launching Bullyingcourse.com, a Web site offering online courses for parents and educators.

Bullyingcourse.com is designed to help people understand bullying: how to identify it; how to prevent it; and how to respond to bullying incidents. The Web site currently offers resources for parents, including tips to help their kids and information on how they can get involved with their children’s schools. A similar course for educators will be launched at the beginning of October.

“Bullying is a universal issue that touches almost every person, family, school, business or community at one time or another regardless of age, gender, race, religion or socio-economic status” notes Mr. Belsey. “Bullying is not only a ‘school’ issue, bullying is a broader community health and wellness issue.”

In addition to the online courses, the site also offers online presentations, or “Webinars” that can be used during professional development days in schools, parent association meetings and community gatherings.

The Webinar Cyberbullying: An Emerging Threat to the 'Always On' Generation addresses bullying in online and digital environments. Topics covered by the resource include:

Setting the context for the issue of cyber bullying: An introduction to the "Always-on" generation
How cyber bullying is similar and different to traditional forms of bullying
Why young people cyber bully
Research about cyber bullying
What can be done to address cyber bullying

Courses are available at a cost of $125 per parent or $150 per teacher. For more information, or to register for a course, visit www.bullyingcourse.com.

Comments | Category: Cyber Bullying | Print

Jun 21, 2007

Preventing Cyber Bullying
Posted by: Warren Nightingale

From my experience as a teacher, I know first hand many of the challenges schools and communities face when it comes to bullying. Many efforts are made to provide a safe place for students to learn and grow; schools implement bully prevention programs and parents make themselves aware of how to detect signs and symptoms of bullying.

I recently attended the Promoting Relationships and Ending Violence Network’s (PREVNet’s) second annual conference. PREVNet is a national network of Canadian researchers, non-government organizations and governments committed to stop bullying and promote safe relationships for all Canadian children and youth. PREVNet’s approach is to build bridges between researchers working in this area and those who directly work with young people. One of the key themes raised at the conference was “Are we doing all we can to provide a bully-free environment for young people?”

As bullying behaviours cross over into an online environment, additional challenges surface, such as:

Access – the Internet allows for 24/7 access to young people who are targets of bullying behaviour. Unlike traditional bullying, even when kids are in their homes, they cannot escape the harassment.
Anonymity – Often young people don’t know who is behind the harassment and they are reluctant to tell anyone since they believe nothing can be done.
Audience - the Internet allows for easy distribution of harassing and hateful messages to millions of people. And the more people who are involved, the greater the impact.

The following are resources that address the topic of cyber bullying and promote the ethical use of the Internet:

Background Information/Tip sheets

Professional Development

Cyber Bullying: Encouraging Ethical Online Behaviour
Cyber Bullying is part of MNet’s Web Awareness workshop series.

Web sites

www.prevnet.ca
They just launched their new Web site, which includes a section of downloadable resources that includes tip sheets, research and study guides.
www.bullybeware.com
www.cyberbullying.ca
http://www.youcan.ca/
http://www.internetsuperheroes.org/cyberbullying
http://www.leaveoutviolence.com

Studies

Cyberbullying and Online Teens

Comments | Category: Cyber Bullying | Print

Feb 13, 2007

Cyber Bullying
Posted by: Warren Nightingale

While most social interactions taking place online are positive, young people are increasingly using the Internet to intimidate and harass others. Of the 34 per cent of Canadian students in Grades 7 to 11 who report being bullied in MNet’s survey Young Canadians in a Wired World Phase II, 27 per cent say they were harassed over the Internet. Some students reported disguising their identity online specifically so they could be "mean and not get caught".

And students are not the only ones who are targets for cyber bullying.

Earlier this week 11 students at a Catholic high school, northwest of Toronto, were suspended for cyber bullying a principal. The students allegedly made sexually explicit, derogatory and demeaning remarks about the principal on the popular social networking site Facebook.com. According to an article on the CTV Web site, the students were reacting to the principal banning personal electronic devices, such as cell phones and iPods.

This past November, a teacher from a school in Gatineau went on stress leave after a video of him yelling at a student was posted on the YouTube Web site. One student provoked the teacher into yelling at her while her classmate secretly recorded the incident on her cell phone. The school suspended the two 13-year-old girls.

To assist educators with the topic of cyber bullying, MNet has developed a professional development workshop Cyber Bullying: Encouraging ethical online behaviour. The workshop explores the pervasiveness of online bullying, why the Internet is such an effective tool for harassment, and the role of the victim, perpetrator and bystander in cyberspace.

For more information, visit our press release Challenging Cyber Bullying or read our article Cyber-bullying: Understanding and preventing online harassment and bullying.

Comments | Categories: Internet, Professional Development, Cyber Bullying | Print

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