Week 7: C3

Cyberethics, Cybersafety, and Cybersecurity...how scary. C3 is a dreaded topic. As I detailed in my first discussion post for this week on the class wiki, my family purchased our first computer when I was about 13. My brother and I needed a computer desperately to complete school work. I believe we started using it in the beginning of my 8th grade school year. By that Summer not only was the computer slowed down (partly because of the dreaded Microsoft Millennium Edition operating system and the rest by spyware) but we had a virus that I inadvertently downloaded from a friend's instant message. I could have cried. I had heard all the bad stuff that happens when you have an infected computer. Files can automatically delete themselves, your credit card information can be stolen if someone is monitoring your transactions, and basically your once chaste little PC is now defiled and dirty...but this could have all been prevented, right?

That was over 11 years ago. Since then I have had my fair share of run ins with C3 issues. I have always been a proponent of downloading some sort of anti virus for all of my family member's computers. Even if it is some freeware kind of software, it has always had a home on our PCs. Also, every computer that I have set up (and there have been close to 10) have all had Lavasoft Ad Aware and Spybot: Search and Destroy downloaded too. I almost think of it as a 1-2-punch. You're basically golden! Well, that's until your 17 year old sister thinks that it is a great idea to download games off of unreliable websites. And this is where the problems begin.

Kids, as I affectionately refer to them, are reckless when it comes to almost everything. Its all about getting the newest thing, be it a car, cell phone, video game, and in this case, a computer. No matter how much of a safety net you provide for a person in regards to a computer it can always be broken, and mostly not purposefully. My little sister, Emily, got into a slue of trouble on the internet. She downloaded software that was tainted with spyware and viruses that slowed down our systems. She had Facebook fights with girls she went to school with and AOL Instant Messenger conversations where someone called her a swear word and told her that they were going to inflict bodily harm to her. Quite often this prompted her to print out the conversations and bring them into school where the administration replied with a, "I don't really know how to react to this, as there is no precedent." Getting off of this tangent, I just wanted to demonstrate that C3 education has not been present for most teens and adolescents who have been raised in this technologically crazed and dependent age. Oh, and let's not forget about their parents and educators too.

I believe that teachers take for granted that their students are learning computer safety at home and that parents are under the impression that their children know all there is about how to safely operate computer processes because of what they learn at school. Each party thinks that the other is responsible for providing the necessary education. In a study conducted by Pruitt-Mentle and Pusey, they discovered the following:

"Teachers (72%) and technology coordinators (58%) are most likely to think parents are primarily responsible for teaching children to use computers safely and securely, while school administrators (51%) are most likely to think teachers/schools are primarily responsible for teaching children the content." (pg 3)

I honestly believe that this conundrum stems from parent-teacher ignorance. Teachers and librarians are already pressed enough to meet quotas for their schools. School staff has been cut all over and those who remain need not do anything that may question their job security. Education standards are steep, thus creating little room for altering class plans to incorporate C3 standard education. That being said, maybe they should spend some time and planning creating an education plan on this topic.

In perusing this topic online, I found the following website, http://www.cerias.purdue.edu/education/k-12/teaching_resources/lessons_presentations/. I did not have to search very hard to find it either. What you have is Kindergarten through 12th grade teaching resources and presentations on common C3 issues such as computer viruses, website evaluation and site credibility, email security, safe searching, and many others. They are also organized by grade level, a novel thing for those who may be in a crunch for time. Not only do these presentations aide in providing C3 education, but they also deal with many different Information Literacy topics that are also beneficial for our students. It is practically a twofer.

I copied this chart from the aforementioned Pruitt-Mentle and Pusey article (pg 11):

In 2 out of 3 sections, Cybersafety and Cybersecurity, the selection of None dominates. This is a terrifying thing that I think through overexposure will subside. The information and the literature is out there to be discovered.

The following links seem to be very useful, especially in making a claim that C3 should be taken a bit more seriously.

http://www.cybercrime.gov/cyberethics.htm

http://www.microsoft.com/security/online-privacy/cyberethics-practice.aspx

http://www.socratesinstitute.org/curriculum/cyberethics.html