School Boards Rule, Internet No Longer Dangerous

destinyland writes "Good news. The National School Boards Association, which represents 95,000 school board members, just released a report declaring fears of the internet are overblown. In fact, after surveying 1,277 students, "the researchers found exactly one student who reported they'd actually met a stranger from the internet without their parents' permission. (They described this as "0.08 percent of all students.") The report reminds educators that schools initially banned internet use before they'd realized how educational it was. Now instead they're urging schools to include social networks in their curriculum!"

Sure

Because kids will tell their teachers and the school boards the truth.

Re:Sure

In related news; The researchers originally intended to intervied over 2,000 children, but for unknown reasons 723 children were mysteriously vanished even though logs showed they were accessing their myspace profiles just hours before.

Re:Sure

I heard about a show once that explored this pretty well - kids telling adults what they want to hear.

I didn't see it, but someone was telling me about it. They interviewed these kids about what they would do if they were to find a gun. They said stuff like they would never touch it and they would immediately tell an adult. They then put the kids in a room without adults and with a see thru mirror and left a gun laying around. Their parents were on the other side of the mirror watching them. Of course, the kids picked up the gun and starting playing it.

Re:

The McMartin preschool criminal trial is a better example than the 20/20 episode you mention. In the McMartin case, hundreds of children told investigators they were abused because the children thought that was what the investigators wanted to hear. Appa

Now we can visit grammar sites

remember kids, the internet might not be dangerous, but overuse of commas can be!

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are you serious? Over use of commas can lead to comas!

Re:Now we can visit grammar sites

remember kids, the internet might not be dangerous, but overuse of commas can be!

This guy isn't kidding, kids! I once knew a guy who turned in a paper in freshman English class with a comma splice in the opening paragraph. BAM! Hit by a school bus at the end of the day. Perhaps, in hind sight, this had something to do with being chased down by his English teacher wielding a rolled up copy of the paper as a LART.

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And god forbid; you should run into; a foulest fiend, enemy of everyone; semicolon.

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That's no ordinary semicolon; that's the most foul; cruel and bad tempered punctuation mark you've ever set eyes on!

Re:Now we can visit grammar sites

However, comma overuse, you see, is something that, though sometimes problematic, can also, in my opinion at least, be a bit subjective, owing to the fact that, in certain instances, things could be expressed in multiple ways, and the expression with fewer commas may not be, to the average person, immediately obvious, or even desirable, depending on the circumstances.

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Kidding aside... Sometimes I look at AP-style written stuff and how most editors spend too much time discouraging the use of too many commas, and it just makes some sentences incomprehensible at first glance.

In a long ass sentence, using commas is like s

Re:Now we can visit grammar sites

You young people and your '3 shakes' rule... just wait till you get older! If I had to get it done in 3 shakes or less, I'd be walking around with wet pants all the time.

Re:Now we can visit grammar sites

The problem, with that, is, you hear William Shatner's voice, in your head...

That's some powerful stuff

By the end of reading your post, my pulse was perfectly in sync with the commas. If you had ended your post with ellipses instead of a period, there's a good chance I'd be dead right now...

Sigh...

Heaven forbid our youth finds out that the world isn't nearly as bad a place as our fear-mongering overlords paint it to be. I for one welcome... Ah crap, I'm too afraid to finish...

0.08 percent?

Apparently the chances of being taught good fundamental math is lower than the chance of meeting IRL a freak that you chatted with on the internet.

Public education -- a series of tubes down the drain.

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Apparently the chances of being taught good fundamental math is lower than the chance of meeting IRL a freak

I wouldn't be so sure. There are plenty of sites that can help [purplemath.com] with basic math, if you just look for them. I guess you belong

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Well, putting aside statistical issues with sample size and whatnot, 1 / 1277 is indeed 0.00078, or as a percentage: 0.078%. Rounding that to 0.08% hardly seems like bad math.

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It was written, "Apparently the chances of being taught good fundamental math is lower than the chance of meeting IRL a freak that you chatted with on the internet."

1 / 1277 = 0.0007830853563038371182458888018794

Move the decimal over two places for percent

Re:0.08 percent?

Absolutely, whoever raised that .7 needs to be spoken to in the harshest possible terms.

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It's funny how people bashing the public school system don't understand how percents work themselves.

Social Networks Educational ?

Are social networks (presumably they mean things like myspace, bebo etc) really the most educational resources on the internet that they could think of ? If so future generations are in serious trouble.

The 3 R's

Now instead they're urging schools to include social networks in their curriculum

OMG mathz rulz. I have mad science skillz, lolz!2!@! check out my blogz. c u guyz at da mall. ;)

While I agree with the sentiment

That's the surprising new recommendation from the National School Boards Association -- a not-for-profit organization representing 95,000 school board members -- in a new study funded by Microsoft, News Corporation, and Verizon.

I'm hardly surprised that a study funded by that group would decide the Internet is safe. And less surprised that social networking sites should be used. Perhaps using Myspace from your Vista PC on your Verizon broadband connection isn't so bad!!11

Just like the real world

Next thing you know, these kids will be poitnlessly commenting on newsgroups and opinion sites instead of worki... Oh Crap, here comes my boss!

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Question is, how did you access Slashdot while driving the ice cream truck, and what was your boss doing there?

Re:Just like the real world

The real quesion is... Does the freezer run Linux?

The internets be edjucationel

"...76% of parents expect social networking will improve their children's reading and writing skills..."

The internet improving the writing skills of children? That's unpossible!

.08%?

It may be early, and I haven't had coffee yet, but wouldn't 1/1277 be more like .0008%? Methinks the public school system has bigger problems to deal with than internet access...

Re:.08%?

No, it isn't, and you've obviously fallen in the trap of dividing one by 1277 and forgetting that 1% == 0.01. Which means you're probably right the public school system has bigger problems than internet access.

Re:.08%?

At which Verizon location do you work?

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1/1277 = 0.0008

0.0008 would be 0.08%

Remember that the '%' stands for '/100' That's why it's a percent. "Per Centum". So,

0.08% = 0.08/100 = 0.0008

Good news??

"yet only 3% of students say they've ever given out their email addresses, instant messaging screen names or other personal information to strangers." - TFA

I would think this is a fundamentally flawed survey. What student hasn't heard the message that giving out personal information is considered risky?? I remember getting surveys in school that involved some rule or restriction that was unpopular and organizing group responses in the hope of getting those restrictions lessened.

Why on earth would you need to teach about social networks in school? Isn't it easy enough to pick up outside of school? Their success would indicate that to be true.

"84% of school districts have rules against online chatting in school" - TFA - OH NOES, my freedom of speech!!!!!!! Seriously maybe you should be learning where Iraq is on a world map instead of talking about your latest crush in IM.

This is why I pay for private school. Freaking tax dollars going to rubbish like this

Why teach about social networks

Why on earth would you need to teach about sex in school? Isn't it easy enough to pick up outside of school? It's success would indicate that to be true.

Of course I don't expect the teachers to know anything about social networking, just like in High School I suspected that the teachers were pretty clueless about sex as well.

A new low in misinformation

Internet No Longer Dangerous != Fears overblown

And

Internet != Social Networking

Geez, you'd think that a user on /. would get that.. I'm sure there is some value in social networking sites for educational use, even though nothing comes to mind at the moment. But, the summation is wrong, the internet IS dangerous. I'm sure that, pulling stats out of my butt notwithstanding, fear of social networking sites IS overblown, but that does not mean the danger isn't there.

When do I get to mod an Article "Stupid Summation"?

NSBA==BSA?

The "NSBA" study in this case seems to be conducted by the National Software Business Aliance. http://www.bsa.org/ [bsa.org]

Children "who reported" x,y, or z

Those magic words, "who reported," show why this is non-important data although most will not consider it so. Like surveys, Nielsen ratings, man on the street interviews, and polls, this is a classic case of bad science. Take a sample and rely on the honesty of the people involved to report difficult truths. I'd say it's about as reliable as government promises.

I'm all for a free internet, but that requires no one declare it "safe," because then fat politicians will feel compelled to attempt to make it so, even though that's mathematically impossible.

You assume they want the 'truth.'

Who says they wanted the truth?

Doing a non-anonymous survey is a good way to skew the results the way you want. If you're looking to make the internet seem "safe," do all the interviews with the kids' parents sitting next to them. Nope, no porn on that Int

Wherever there is a kid getting in trouble online

There usually is a parent who is, for whatever reason, not involved. I bet if you did a study on the parents whose kids meet strangers in public after contacting them online, you'd find a few of the following things:

1) Parents are working extra hours to buy fancy things.
2) Parents are afraid of their kids being bitter toward them for *gasp* being AUTHORITY FIGURES!
3) Parents are more concerned about being their kid's friend than a mother or father.
4) Parents are too lazy to learn how to control their own home.
5) The kids have internet access in their rooms, where their parents have far less control.

#5 is something that my wife and I have already agreed to with our kids. They can be on the Internet all they want/need, but they will not be doing it in their room where no one can watch them. It's possible that they could sneak downstairs while we're asleep, but if they can just get out of bed and go to their desk, that makes it virtually impossible for us to police them.

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I'm going to set up a proxy server for my kids. It will be like a cat and mouse game. They'll try to gain access to things they shouldn't, and I'll try to stop them. I can't think of a better way to teach my kids about computers and the Internet.

To put it

Banning social networking not about student safety

It's about student productivity. It's a lot easier to ban IM/e-mail/social networking outright than try to enforce "now you can, now you can't" policies. Given access to sites like Myspace, a lot of kids would never get anything done without a teacher hovering over them constantly.

It's also about network security. Giving a thousand high school students unfettered internet access is just asking for trouble, no matter how hard you try to protect your network.

Hell, they are more likely to be abused

by a teacher than by a total stranger on the internet.

While we do get some sensational stories on occasion, usually involving hottie female teacher or some male gym coach, there are hundreds of cases that never get national press attention. There are some estimates that children are more in danger from teachers and other school employees than any other source (they were comparing to the scare on churches)

The internet is not dangerous

Certain people who use the internet are dangerous, for sure. Certain website might expose children to things (Sex, violence, etc.) that parents might not want them to see, for sure. But in and of itself the internet has not killed, raped, or assaulted anyone. (Apart from goatse and tubgirl)

Speaking as a teacher and future school administrator, schools are legally and morally obligated to protect the children in their care. No principal wants to be known as the "Porn Principal" who allows high school students to surf for pornography. No principal wants to have to answer calls from the media regarding why little Amber was allowed to chat with a previously-convicted pedophile from the school library and ended up kidnapped and molested as she walked home (What do you mean you don't know why? What kind of unsafe place is this?) The odds of these things happening is small, but it's a simple risk analysis. What do school administrators have to gain from granting students total access to the internet? Sadly, not much, really. So, sometimes they go a little overboard.

Children, however, have to be taught responsibility in a controlled environment. Generally, most school buildings can be rather well-controlled (doors locked, visitors checked, metal detectors, etc.). The internet, however, opens up access to the school and reduces the control of the administration, which is something most administrators are very afraid of. Combined with the slight possibility of things going terribly wrong, we pay to have the filters block out most "objectionable" content.

Oh no!!! Schools are approving the Internet ...

If this works like most school actions, it'll be a disaster. The kids will soon be deciding that the Internet isn't cool; it's boring and "hard". They'll drop it and go back to other ways of upsetting the adults.

If we really want young people to become familiar with the Internet, and learn to use it for their benefit, we should take the approach that works: Ban its use by children (where "child" even includes someone 17 years old). Put all sorts of leaky barriers in the way of their access. That way, the kids will be fascinated by it, and will spend lots of time learning how to use it.

Lots of people have observed that the main effect of most schools is to take various topics and make them boring and uninteresting. Consider a topic like history. How could the story of all the people who came before us (and messed up this world so thoroughly ;-) be boring? But the schools (and some historians) manage to make it so.

Or consider music. That's a hard-wired human activity, that can be intensely exciting, right? How can we teach kids to not waste their time learning to make music, and make them content to spend the rest of their lives at a desk job? Right: Give them music lessons.

We should totally ban the use of the Internet in schools. They'll just do to it what they've done to so many other exciting human developments; they'll teach the kids that it's boring and uninteresting, and too hard for anyone but a "nerd" to understand.

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Oh, it can be fun. Just take a teacher that knows what buttons to press. A history teacher I once had started a lesson about WW1 with the words "I give you an hour 'til the first one pukes. Now, the battle of Ypres in 1915...".

It didn't take an hour.

We had

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Heh. I had a history teacher like that in high school. He taught us about all sorts of things that weren't covered in the standard textbooks, and told us where to learn more. For example, he taught us about the War of 1812, which is carefully skipped ove

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Agreed. Their methods must be incorrect if they can describe anything containing /. as not dangerous, or anything other than "A threat to humanity, the planet, and possibly the solar system, galaxy and universe as well."

Re:Yeah great

Pretty much all assignments I gave (home, or just in class) ended up to be copy/pastes of wikipedia or another website.

Proving just how generic and banal your assignments and standards must have been. You could have asked them to do a survey/experiment/essay. Instead you probably asked them to "Write a report on Sweden". Let me ask you a question. If someone asked you for a report of Sweden, what would you actually end up doing?

Re:Yeah great

Your answer is a good illustration of what the parent poster was saying. "What's the difference between lossy and lossless compression?" Sheesh, that's exactly the computer equivalent of "Write a report about Sweden". No wonder the dropout rate is at an all time high. How about "Does the Star Trek transporter use lossy or lossless compression? Why?"

Back in the day, we could have typed stuff out of the encyclopedia. Wikipedia and computers has made cheating a little easier, but hasn't enabled anything new.

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ow about "Does the Star Trek transporter use lossy or lossless compression? Why?"

So *that*'s why the show kept gradually getting shittier over time. ;)