Online Safety: the sensible and the bizarre

Posted on | February 11, 2010 | Comments Off

The Sensible

Pupils in schools that use ‘managed’ online systems have a better knowledge and understanding of how to stay safe when using new technologies, according to The Safe Use of Technologies. ‘Managed’ systems are systems that have fewer inaccessible sites than ‘locked’ systems and so require pupils to take more responsibility for their own safety. ‘Locked’ systems make many websites inaccessible and although this ensures pupils’ safety in school it does not encourage the pupils to take responsibility for their actions or prepare them for dealing with systems that are not locked.

The above blurb on the Ofsted website introduces their recently published report, The Safe Use of New Technologies [downloadable PDF: 121kB].

It is encouraginng to see a government-sponsored report taking such a sensible line. Common sense tells us that we are safest, in any context, when we are able to take responsibility for our own actions and have been given the knowledge and the skills needed to stay safe. Whether that relates to road safety, online safety, or any other of life’s potential dangers, the principle just makes good sense.

The report, therefore, promotes the need to teach young people how to use the Web safely:

In one local authority, the schools adopted a ‘think before you click’ policy.
From an early age, pupils were taught that, before clicking onto a site,
they should ask questions such as:

who wrote the material on this site?

is the information on it likely to be accurate or could it be altered by anybody?

if others click onto the site, can I be sure that they are who they say they are?

what information about myself should I not give out on the site?

Logically, therefore, as school students get older, and as they are able increasingly to demonstrate their own levels of responsibility online, the ‘managed’ portion of the network should lessen – and I can see no reason why our older pupils, assuming they have demonstrated the necessary levels of responsibility, should not enjoy the freedom to use the Web completely ‘un-managed’.

Of course, it all begs the question that I and others have asked many times before: how many of our teachers really know how to use the Web safely, and so, how many of them are capable of teaching the skills needed to stay safe on the Web?

The Bizarre
And so, from the sensible to the bizarre

Glyn Moody asked yesterday: Is Microsoft Exploiting the Innocent?. And I would add, is the Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre (CEOP) one of the innocents being exploited?

On the front of its website at the moment, CEOP appears to be promoting Internet Explorer 8 as a ’safe’ browser. When you click the link, you get this:

Download the ‘Click CEOP’ button into your browser toolbar to provide instant access to internet safety information for children and parents.

As Glyn notes:

….it’s rather a pity that to access the information you have to use Internet Explorer 8, scion of a family of browsers that has probably done more than any other software to expose young people to harm on the Internet through woeful security that allows viruses and trojans to be downloaded so easily – one still riddled with flaws.

And irony is that, when you follow the links given on the site you end up being asked to download and run an .exe file,