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Century 21, cyber world, young people…

I am not going to say that there is nothing more important than the education of our young people. Nup, not gonna say it. But there is this.

ABC Radio National’s ‘Law Report’ of 4th May 2010 offers some interesting stuff. Here (with thanks) are a few quotes from a conversation with Robyn Treyvaud:

Damien Carrick: And I’m just thinking back to my adolescence, I can think of humiliating moments, I don’t necessarily think of things which were there constantly, 24 hours a day for the rest of my life, you know, if that stuff is online.

Robyn Treyvaud: Well that’s the problem with this, is that once you’ve got images and text in a digital format, which you’ve got invisible viewership, plus it’s permanently there and available, or other people may very well have copied and pasted or just sort of archived that data, if you like, then you’re absolutely right, it potentially is there forever and the humiliation of when it happens initially is very great, but we don’t necessarily know what it’s like when people can view it five years, ten years or fifty years from now.

AND…

Robyn Treyvaud: Well again, Damien, this is one of the great challenges we’ve got, because a school has to demonstrate a duty of care, and that can be duty of care in terms of the environment, monitoring behaviours, etc. Now part of the duty of care demonstrated by a school in relation to digital technologies and the internet specifically, is to have a firewall, to have filters, to block inappropriate sites, or to ensure that between the hours of 8.30 and 3.30 students in their school aren’t accessing sites where covert bullying or cyber-bullying can occur, or where sexting-type images can be spread. We get into some issues here, because a lot of this is done via mobile phones, and the school really, they might have a policy that say you’re not to use your mobile phone at school time, but those of us who work in schools know that you can’t enforce it. Then we have the other problem where young people in schools bypass our gatekeeping mechanisms, if you like, without our knowledge, using what are called proxy sites. So the school will see that the student has gone to a proxy site. One example is, say, Sneaky Sue, and you go to a proxy site and you then type in facebook.com, and it will then allow the user to go to Facebook and leave the school’s network. Now that I think leaves schools incredibly vulnerable to duty of care issues, because we don’t know where they are, we don’t know what they’re doing, and we don’t know who they’re with when they hang out in those places when they’re at school.

So to say that we in a school have an ability to monitor where they’re going and what they’re doing, I think is inappropriate because it’s not true.

Thanks to lotsa people for this vid. It pops up various places including Wes Fryer’s site:




 

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