What are your three top cyberwellness issues for your students?
My top three cyberwellness issues are:
Cyber bullying, Internet addiction and Copyright.
How would you define each of the three issues? Please provide an example of situations when your students might face the issues.
Cyber bullying talks about the issues when a child is been harassed, bullied, humiliated, threatened etc. It might caused psychology issues such as depression or in the event lead to cases of committing suicide when it gets into a life threatening situations.
Example:
An example would be in facebook when students see it as an outlet to openly comment or make fun of their friends. What might appeared to be a harmless remarks towards a certain individual's behavior or attitude might end up sparking off heated arguments and exchange of words. To make matter worst, they might retaliate with a series of harassment or humiliating one another through exchange of words as an act of revenge.
Internet addiction talks about the issues when one is immersed in the world of internet and as a result develop a compulsive behavior or disorder that affects his or her daily life.
Example:
An example would be an addiction to surfing pornography on the world wide web. The 'addicts' might formed inaccurate perception towards the opposite gender through prolonged exposure of pornography images and videos. The lack of knowledge in the subject area of sex might result in many other social issues such as abortion and premarital sex etc.
Copyrights talks about the issues of plagiarism, infringement laws etc. It is a dishonest act of using the works of another without permission.
Example:
An example would be in the area of studies when the students extract informations directly from a web source without acknowledging the source. This act of dishonesty results in the act of plagiarism.
Why are these three cyberwellness issues important for your students to be able to handle? Will they somehow affect their personal lives? Will they affect your lessons or classroom management? Will they have other impacts on your students?
These three cyberwellness issues are important as they can greatly affect how the child behavior and perform in their daily lives. Been young and immature, the way they perceived and learned are easily shaped in the wrong directions if no proper guidance is been provided. They might appear restless, preoccupied or uninterested during lessons. They might also express their frustrations in the form of violence causing the other classmates to live in fears thus depriving the them a safe environment to study.
Add your sources of information to share with your colleagues (URLs, books or articles).
http://ict.edumall.sg/cyberwellness/
http://www.wiredsafety.org/
Besides Cyber-bullying, Internet addiction and Copyright issues, I am also concerned with the issue of our students/children sharing their personal information online and socializing with the wrong people.
ReplyDeleteThrough many sites and especially networking social sites and chat rooms, our students are able to meet/make new friends, also known as cyber pals, through the Internet. As anonymity can be sustained by the Internet, it is very difficult to know the true identity of their cyber pals. Therefor a cyber pal is still regarded as strangers.
Having cyber friends may have its positive side where our students are able to share their thoughts and feelings freely and they can gain more confidence in opening up their mind. However, how can we ensure that these cyber 'friends' are not giving a false identity? Sharing our personal information with these strangers may result in a potential threatening situation.
It is important that we as teachers/parents remind our students/children that the people online may not always be who they claim to be. They should not be giving out their address or contact number to strangers and not to reply / block anyone who they may feel uncomfortable with.
To elaborate on Weiqiang's point on Internet addiction, obsessive behaviours may include
- Cybersexual Addiction
- Cyber-relational Addiction
- Gaming Addiction
A student that could be addicted to the Internet will often have repeated, unsuccessful efforts to control, cut down or stop their internet use. They may experience withdrawal symptoms such as feelings of restlessness, anxiety, depression or irritability when attempting to cut down internet time. By spending too much of their time on the internet, our student may lack concentration in class and may not complete their assignments/ revisions, in which this may result in their failing in class.
We as teachers will have to communicate with the parents regarding this issue. Ways that we can prevent this issue in school is to:
- Encourage pupils to engage in other social activities or pastimes
- Participate in internet safety programmes designed by community groups
- Explore ways to surf the Internet more efficiently
- Install filters in school computers.
Sources:
http://www.protectkids.com/youthsafety/
http://www.nygr.org.sg/pages/Promoting_prevention.html
I agree with what Wei Qiang and Diana’s opinion on the cyberwellness issues. To elaborate on what they mention on the internet addiction, I would like to address the issue on online game addiction.
ReplyDeletePlaying computer games especially to the young ones is the main things they do during school holidays when they want to fill up their time and their peer influence. For adults online games are not new, they are engage with this online game may be because they are used to it since their teenagers or just by peer influence as well.
This matter may seem not that influential but it does because it can cover the whole age spectrum. Though we see this as a habit but they really can spend few hours just by staring on any computer and play the online game. For young children especially, their parents may see this as a positive view as they thought that their children are engaging themselves with IT world. However, our concern arose when the children have lack attention and not attentive in class as well as homework is not done on time. This may be because they felt lethargic after spending hours of online games at home and “unintentionally” forgot to do their homework.
For example, I have a 5 years old cousin who knows to use Facebook, know how to chat with her friends and get so addicted to the online games on Facebook. She will get upset if anyone is going to stop her.
Another example, my aunt’s friend who is about 36 years old still playing online games mostly due to her colleague influence. The negative thing about this is that, she spent her credit card just to “buy money” so that she could win over her friends.
As a teacher for students who are addicted to online games, maybe we can think of ideas to incorporate homework based on how the online games work and make it interesting enough for them to take up their time just to do it. As for parents as well, engaging them to more family time and activities would make their children become close together and try to limit their online game activity.
According to Dr. Douglas Gentile, Director of the Media Research Lab at Iowa State University and the director of research for the National Institute on Media and the Family, states, "It is important that people realize that playing a lot is not the same thing as pathological play. For something to be an addiction, it has to mean more than you do it a lot. It has to mean that you do it in such a way that it damages your life.” In other words, many, if not most, kids who play online games are just playing games. It’s a healthy part of their life. If you see that game playing is becoming damaging to some aspect of their life, it’s time to act.” (1)
Source:
http://www.symantec.com/norton/library/familyresource/article.jsp?aid=fr_onlinegaming_addiction, retrieved on 22nd September, 2010 (1)
http://www.wired.com/gaming/gamingreviews/news/2001/12/48479, retrieved on 22nd September, 2010
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ReplyDeleteSorry. i accidentally posted two times, so i deleted the second post. :)
ReplyDeleteI do agree on internet addiction being one of the top 3 issues in Cyber Wellness. One website have highlighted internet addiction as a growing problem facing today's society. This includes students. In my opinion, students need to use the internet in the extent of providing a helping hand from resources for our assignments and to do group meetings for project. However, when students become addicted to the virtual world created by the internet, they tend to neglect the responsibility placed on them such as completing assignments. Furthermore, internet could disconnect students from the world they live in. As a result, they are busy with the virtual world to have motivation in coming school for learning or participate in the classroom activities. There have been several assistance provided by some parties to promote cyberwellness. An example is the internet addiction test. Check it out by clicking on this link: http://www.netaddiction.com/index.php?option=com_bfquiz&view=onepage&catid=46&Itemid=106
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