Well-being on the digital networks
17 September 2010 -
A Workshop on
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in
Vilnius,Lithuania
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Note: The following is the output of the real-time captioning taken during Fifth Meeting of the IGF, in Vilnius. Although it is largely accurate, in some cases it may be incomplete or inaccurate due to inaudible passages or transcription errors. It is posted as an aid to understanding the proceedings at the session, but should not be treated as an authoritative record.
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>> DIVINA: Thank you for being here on the last day and not going shopping. We are grateful that you put education before tourism. And I hope you have some time tomorrow to do that. This is to introduce this workshop on basically literacy. That is a follow-up and a series of workshops that we have been conducting with the Council of Europe at every single IGF to raise awareness and increase an interest in literacy, in education, from all perspectives. Each time, we have been able to highlight a region, a set of actors.
At this time we were lucky to be asked to comingle with another workshop, where research from Asia is going to be presented. So you have the benefit of seeing this perspective from Asia, from a group of actors who are the parents, who are relatively concerned, and of course always with young people at the centre of practice.
The reason we're doing this series of workshops at IGF is out of volunteerism, because IGF doesn't think that media literacy counts. The people who are doing governance here are engineers, business people, and even the NGOs, and the grass-roots people aren't concerned about access.
So why does media literacy belong to Internet governance? That's one of the things I want you to keep in mind. I'll make a few suggestions, please add to them if you feel like that. Politicians are not interested. You can pay lip service and at the moment everybody on all sectors is saying yes, media education is great. And we don't go into implementation. We don't go beyond good practices. We don't go beyond international scaling up. And yet, the results and the research show us a trend that is bothering us. It shows that there is more and more users from different parts of the world on the Internet, and less and less creation of content. There is more and more consumers, profusers, whatever you want to call them. And yet we all talk, we talk about participatory cultures, expression, creativity, creative industries. So, how do we bridge the gap with more and more people? And we have Web zero and IPv6 and more people, so how do we bridge the gap between more access and actual creativity? This is what we, from the grass-roots people and from the research community, we call sustainable access. Not just having the hook up to the computer, but being able to use everything that is on it to produce your own creations, your own productions, and including of course your own consumption of services. But there is definitely this enormous challenge. The gap to being actual users of the net.
This is not going to happen if everybody stays in his or her own corner. Scaling up at the speed that is required by the changes of the Internet requires everybody in the community and everybody worldwide to help. And so this is where the governance issue, the international, the transborder issue, the transferring of experiences, et cetera, seems to us very important.
The other reason why we think it's important, of course, is because -- and I'm afraid sometimes we forget it here at IGF -- our concern is with the end-user. And who is the end-user in the end?
Young people, parents, they are the majority, the silent majority, for which we have to speak here and that we have to defend, even though themselves very often feel totally challenged as we will see by the research by what is going on today.
So there are a lot of elements that are in favor of media literacy within the Internet governance, and part of it is building trust, building proper use, including building ethical use, and this is why very often we are pushing and we see examples here, I hope, for media education that is attached to human rights.
These are some of the main points that I want you to keep in mind about the importance of this and why we should continue pushing this in the next IGF and whenever you have a chance to push them.
How to go about it is more difficult. This is why we need everybody and why we are here. We will see that there is a need for research, because we can't push any idea, any policy, any grassroot organisations to move if we are not informed by research. Always we are pushing for this. There is a media education coalition, Dynamic Coalition that is research based and is pushing in this direction. We also need good practices, and we will see examples from business, multi-stakeholder examples, examples from international governmental organisations. And then we are going to see that some tools are starting to exist, toolkits, et cetera, but maybe we need more. And one of the questions that is going to be the one we want to come out with, at the end, the one for which I'll be Rapporteur and bringing it back to the Council of Europe and at IGF will be how to move forward together.
What kind of instruments at the international level can be pushed forward, can we create, and with whom, in order to create information, literacy and including what is called now transliteracies using online and off line literacies.
Think about it. We are hoping that you will contribute so that we can empower everybody and especially young people. There are young people who are going to be moderating. Here is Sheba and Edmon. They will introduce themselves and they will introduce the rest of the panels.
>> EDMON CHUNG: I've been reminded that I'm not young people anymore by any of the younger people in the last little while. But anyway, thanks for the introduction. I think that sort of sets the environment for what we want to talk about. In terms of the organisation, I think we will first hear from Dr. Wong Yu Cheung. He is a professor in the University of Hong Kong. And one of the researches that we will talk about is about parenting, and how the Internet brings new challenges to parenting, I guess, especially with young people growing up now, we are called digital natives.
Also on the panel, Jeremy Godfrey, the chief information officer of Hong Kong with the government, and he will talk about some of the things that the Hong Kong government is doing.
And also, Ross LaJeunesse. He is the head of Google Public Policy in Asia Pacific; to talk a bit about the private sector response to the issue.
We also have Aurel Graur, a school inspector in Romania, and he is -- we talked about him being the teacher of teachers. So he will bring that, both of those perspectives.
And of course, Nadine Karbach, who is actually a student at the University and is working on protection laws and media and protection of adolescents.
And to highlight us being adults and then the children's side, we also representatives from NetMission Ambassadors, and Elaine Cheng, who is no longer a child, but has been involved with the child movement from Hong Kong and internationally as well. And I understand that there are people from UNESCO, from the Council of Europe, and we will go into that, in the audience.
First, to kick off the discussion and give some background, Professor Wong will talk to us about the research that was done in Hong Kong.
>> WONG YU CHEUNG: Good afternoon. I'm happy to have a chance to speak in the IGF workshop. I'm going to present a little bit about the research that we have done in Hong Kong about the experience of parents in supervising their children and using the Internet to the extent whether they feel that they can help the children benefit from the Internet and also from whether they have the ability to protect them from the possible stress of using the Internet. This study is commissioned by the Hong Kong government, by the Office of the Chief Government Information Officer of which Mr. Jeremy Godfrey is the director.
To give you a bit of the context, the parents are concerned about the studies of the children. So the Internet for many of them is seen as part of the time they spend in study. So this is considered dissatisfaction among the parents. In Hong Kong, the adults, it looks very developed, but in our study and also in the studies, you find that a lot of parents are not -- do not have any knowledge in using the Internet. About one-third of parents actually don't have any Internet knowledge, so this is the bit of the background of the study.
One of the major purposes of the study is to find out the factors which account for the satisfaction of the parents in supervising the children in using the Internet. Because there are different levels of satisfaction. In our study, about a third of the parents are not satisfied with their experience in supervising the children and using the Internet. But of course there are people who are very satisfied.
So we tried to find out the factors which account for this variation in the dissatisfaction. So I prepared only two slides. So, this is the major slide. And the factors that we tried to identify, some say it was the level of satisfaction, we can categorize into three broad categories. The first one is about parents and children's background. The second one is about the -- we call it parenting. And then the family relationship. All these categories of variables have a strong association with the parent satisfaction and supervising the children.
Regarding the parents profile, our finding is that parents having more high level of Internet knowledge, they have younger children, and they see that the children spend less time in using the Internet and also the parents hold a more positive attitude towards the Internet. These factors we associate with the satisfaction of the parents.
And another set of broad categories is about Internet parenting. We will see that the parents who adopt a parenting style which is called authoritative, it's different than authoritarian. Authoritative means that emotionally they are caring and warm to children but they care about the studies.
So these types of parenting styles are very positive. And if the parents adopt this parenting style, then they have a high level of satisfaction. And secondly, it's about the method of supervising the children. There is a category of methods which involve more -- we see that parents have more involvement in the children's activity, Internet activities, like discussing with them what they are doing on the Internet, discuss about the threats or possible threats and use the Internet together, like watching a movie, going Web surfing and things like that. If the parent is involved, they have a high level of satisfaction.
Finally, family relationship, so if the parents spent more time with the children, and have a better communication flow in the family, then they will have satisfaction, a high level of satisfaction in supervising the children in using the Internet. So we can see that of course regarding the level of satisfaction, knowledge of the Internet is one thing that is very important. Because the young people are digital natives. The parents are digital migrants. So there is always a kind of stress or tension between the relationship. This is an important set of factors. But the other set of factors not related at all to the Internet or knowledge about ICT, it's about parenting style, which is applicable not only to the use of the Internet but also applicable to any other aspect of the parent child relationship. So if the parents have a more positive parenting style and they have a method of more and more engagement with the children, then that will be contributing to more satisfaction in the relationship.
Finally, family relationship, spending more time with children and having better communication will help also.
There is one interesting thing that I want to mention is that a factor here is the support model. The factors within it are mutually controlled. That means each individual variable or factor, they have a unique contribution to the satisfaction of the parents. So that means other things being equal, if you have younger children or if you have a better Internet launch, then you'll have a high level of satisfaction.
One interesting thing is that if you consider using filtering software with the satisfaction of the parents, if you only look at these two factors, there is an association. When we put using filtering software into this model, the relationship disappeared. Because that association can be explained by some other factors.
For example, higher level of education of parents, and parents with better Internet knowledge, then you tend to use the filtering software more often. So if parents -- if -- with two groups of parents, the same level of Internet knowledge, same parenting style, use filtering software or not, it does not make any difference. So this is an interesting finding that we want to point out.
Finally, regarding the policy implication, because all of these aspects can be, even government, the teachers, NGOs, other stakeholders can have a role to play. For example, improving Internet knowledge of the parents, discussing with the parents, a more positive parenting style, that will also help.
>> EDMON CHUNG: Jeremy wanted to add.
>> JEREMY GODFREY: The association that we found between the use of filtering software and parent satisfaction was actually negative. The parents who used filtering software were less likely to be satisfied with their ability to guide and supervise their children's use of the Internet. That disappears as you go look at other factors. It tended to be the parents who knew less about the Internet who used filtering software. So the parents who knew about the Internet felt that they didn't need it or had better ways of helping their children. But, in fact, the people who use filtering software on the whole were less satisfied than the people who didn't use it. Sorry.
>> WONG YU CHEUNG: The presentation is almost over. The second slide is the last slide. But we have an upload of the report on these studies on the Web site. It's in Chinese. But if you go to this link and you just click on anything, then you can go to the report that is in an English version.
That is the end of my presentation. Thank you.
>> Thank you. Now we will go to Nadine who will present her findings on what she has been doing.
>> NADINE KARBACH: Perfect. Thank you very much. I'm happy to provide you with a status quo of the European academic research on parental mediation online. And before going into the details, I want to briefly --
>> ROSS LaJEUNESSE: You can be more comfortable so you don't have to lean.
>> NADINE KARBACH: Before I go into detail, I will briefly say what is going to happen. I'll first give you a definition of what is parental mediation, then going into the current parenting styles from the European research. Afterwards, I'll extend the existing styles with the findings from my own research. Afterwards I'll briefly go into the effectiveness of risk reducing using the parental mediation styles.
First of all, parental mediation, what is the understanding about it is like parent tea mediation is like to capture the parental management of the relation between children. I must admit that I love the internal of Internet media, which was just used in this session. So maybe we will introduce that in the academic research on this topic in the future.
Now we are going to the first, one and only European academic study on parental mediation online, which was conducted by Professor Livingston in 2008 in the UK. And they found four co-existing parenting styles, which means that parents are not only using one style, but they are using different ones, depending on several factors. Like there's not the one and only, but different.
The first one is active course, which means that parents and the kids are experiencing the Internet and the Internet is experienced together.
The second one is so-called interactions and restrictions, which means that parents put certain rules on the kid about the Internet use, like, for example, only between 3:00 and 6:00 in the afternoon.
Number three are technical restrictions. As we know, the filter programmes are in this category.
Number four means monitoring, which is checking e-mails and the downloads after the child has finished the online session.
From my personal research In which these four parenting styles to other ones, there is a fifth one which I call like pressure. Which means, like, it's a sort of -- you can call it blackmailing, like no homework means no Internet or first duty to the Internet.
And the sixth one is sort of prevention, like showing your child what can actually happen when you, for example, used the browser bar for searching on the Internet instead of a search engine or something.
So, these two additional parenting styles I found in my research are indicating only that there is more outside and that research on this is not finished yet.
About the effectiveness in reducing being opposed to risk online is like there is neither an effect of any parenting style nor of any software based strategies, like monitoring or filtering software. This is also found in the study of homelife, Nancy Ellsber. If we can make a copy after this, or I can give you the source.
In the end, it is worth in terms of policy making to think about a certain equilibrium or the cost analysis of reducing teenagers' and kids' freedom to interact with their peers online, because of what's happening.
And as a closing thought, maybe it is worst to think about more peer-to-peer dialog, like peer-to-peer education, which is because it's more likely that peers rather listening to other peers in their age than to any educators, teachers, parents, whoever. And of course they still remain plenty of open research questions in the future.
The outlook is that next year there will be research on the mediation online so there is a plan to broaden this and to put more academic efforts to strengthen this in order to build up upon these findings.
So thank you very much.
>> Thank you for providing a foundation of what is being shown by research and some of the emerging issues. This workshop continues a discussion that is happening internationally and started last year.
We had a workshop in Sharm. How many of you were in Sharm last year?
(Showing of hands)
So a lot more people are here this year.
>> AUDIENCE: Thank you. I'm Danine. I'm from Egypt. And I was lucky to participate in the workshop at Sharm El Sheikh on media literacy. I'm happy that this workshop is taking place and continuing this time here in Lithuania.
And I would like to share with you the experience of Egypt with parents, parents, parenting online. Because we have a working group of parents in online safety. As Nadine said, the best thing is to have peer-to-peer. Have parents speaking to parents and parents tutoring parents. This was helpful in increasing their knowledge about online safety and how to deal with their children, maybe opening up their horizons and showing them different styles of work and discipline as well. So this is moving ahead quite well. We have some challenges, because we also need to empower parents. So recently we thought about producing literature that is particularly geared to parents, that is written in a style and in a language that would make it easy technologically speaking of course for the parents to understand more about certain key technology tools or applications such as Facebook. So these were some thoughts from Egypt. Thank you very much.
>> Thank you. This is a nice segue. We had perspectives from Hong Kong and Europe and now Egypt. It's a very diverse group in the room and we want to keep this as interactive as possible.
You had any perspective they say wanted to give from their region, just on the whole issue, just put your hand up and I'll come to you.
>> AUDIENCE: Thank you. I'm so sorry we were late. I appreciate your perspective. I had a question about the cost analysis -- I'm Ann Collier with connectsafely.org in the United States. Were you saying that parents who are doing this cost analysis, this is becoming normalized behavior in the home, or is that just beginning to show up on the horizon?
>> NADINE KARBACH: Actually, this is -- it's just a theoretical thought brought up in the research that further research on any indication, any policy, should take this into consideration because opportunity costs, like cutting down your freedom for more safety so you have to balance it in a way. No. It's just a theoretical thought.
>> ANNE: That's interesting. I think parents do that cost analysis in many aspects of child raising. But I think it would be interesting to look at cost analysis also from a child's perspective. The child would see maybe a greater cost than the parents in, say, banning the Internet. And it would be very interesting to look at -- you know, to have the research look at that and the gap between the two possibly. Please do that research.
>> Hi. Larry Maggot from connect safely. I'm fascinated by the Hong Kong study. You're finding. If I understand you right, I apologize, I came in in the middle of your talk, but when you factor in parental involvement, filtering had no impact or may have a negative impact, probably not the filtering per se, but -- well, that's what I would want to learn more about. Is it what was behind the filtering, the fact that the parents -- that if you take -- you know, this universe of involved parents, and the gentleman with the -- you had made the comment, I apologize not knowing your name, about the negative part. But you take the universe of involved parents, and if I heard you right, the ones who filter have less satisfaction than the ones who don't filter. Then the question is, is there a causal relationship in the sense that filtering is in any way causing that dissatisfaction or is it a correlation perhaps based on the overall?
>> JEREMY GODFREY: Hi. It's Jeremy Godfrey. I work for the Hong Kong government. So I commissioned Dr. Wong's research. The answer is it's probably not causal. When we took all of the factors into account, the use of filtering software drops out being a driver. So what we tended to find was that it's parents who are less -- who know less about the Internet tend to use filtering software more. And it's the lack of knowledge about the Internet that seems to be the causal driver of the dissatisfaction. So it's kind of interesting that the use of filtering software is more of a sign that the parents don't know what else to do. And it doesn't actually seem to help them be more satisfied.
>> LARRY: The work we do, and fortunately we are working on intuitive senses in the work that Anne and I have been doing over the last 15 years, we argued the best filter is the one that runs between the ears. And we always questioned whether filtering is something that most parents ought to implement. But we had no empirical data, just the fact that having dinner with your children every night, being involved with your children, struck us as being a more powerful force. But we had no empirical data to prove that.
>> ANNE: But it's the more technically savvy parents who are using filtering, which is an opposite finding from what we have seen in the United States. It could be a cultural thing. I could be wrong.
>> SHEBA MOHAMMID: It's interesting to have a different geographical perspective. It's a one to one mapping and the public outcry, starting this September, school time, and the public outcry has been enormous, because everyone is freaking out, because they don't know, they are banning kids from sites. And the prime minister -- we have a female prime minister now, but she made a comment and she said well, there will be firewalls. And it's just not knowing how are we going to deal with this and mediate this and how do we give well-being to youth online? What is well-being? You know I had to speak about this today, maybe we can start from the crowd and then go to the panel.
But any perspectives on what you think well-being really means to youth? We are here to talk about this. I'm from Trinidad and Tobago. And we have UNESCO here.
>> Hello. I'm from UNESCO. I'm not sure I can reply to your question of what is well-being for children. But I think well-being relates to critical thinking. And this is what I would like to share with you, what in UNESCO we worked on for the last years. We think it's important what parents, when they try to control their children or they try to communicate more with their children, that's very good. But at the same time, we have another side, where we have teachers at school. And the thing that is really important with teachers is they would try to really raise awareness for children. We have to be self aware about certain changes in opportunities and Internet. During the last few years we worked on more media literacy for teachers. They would be able to use certain techniques and methods, that they would be aware.
With children we have to be independent who use the Internet, to understand what is the content, how to create the new content, where to find, how to use it. Well, you say I find it on the Internet. So what, is it correct? Is it an old source? You have to really understand what is written. Or what -- what did you share with your friends? So there are many issues involved. So we want to finalize the curricula for teachers by the end of the year.
So we really invite you to follow our news when it comes out. We guess it will be ready and tested with several institutions as well before it really will be finalized.
And we are working as well on development of meeting information and literacy indicators. And that goes well for the education sector to see, really, at the policy level for ministries of education to see what is the level of education in the media literacy, from teachers to school children. And it's important, what children would be self aware, critically able to think what they do online, as well as we parents. Thank you.
>> SHEBA MOHAMMID: So it's just interesting to see that we are looking at something beyond safety now.
>> ANNE: Absolutely. There is an Oufsted report in the UK released last February. It was a study of 37 schools that would map to our pre-K through 12, preschool through high school, that showed that the schools that practiced the most effective online safety messaging and instruction were those with managed, not locked down filtering, but actually helped develop that critical thinking for lifelong online protection. So that might be useful to you.
>> SHEBA MOHAMMID: As you know, we have remote moderation going on, so we have people tuning in kind of all over. So I think we have a question now from somewhere in the world.
>> This is from Peter Quark. The Hong Kong studies about the satisfaction, how about the implication to the children's satisfaction?
>> SHEBA MOHAMMID: Anyone from the panel, do you have a response, Dr. wong?
>> WONG YU CHEUNG: I haven't presented that part of the findings. Actually, in our study, we interviewed 2500 families with children ages between 6 to 17. We interviewed the parents. So far I presented findings on the parents' side. I haven't done it on the children's side. But I'll organise it and then find out the results, and share with Peter. I know Peter.
>> SHEBA MOHAMMID: Peter is from Hong Kong. He is tuning in from Hong Kong.
>> JEREMY GODFREY: There were interesting differences, but by and large, they were quite congruent, that the techniques that parents felt worked were techniques that the children felt comfortable with and positive.
>> EDMON CHUNG: It's an interesting segue into a couple things in terms of the satisfaction level and the use of filtering. I'm kind of interested to hear from perhaps our other panelist, like Aurel here, and the teachers' perspectives as well. I know that there are people from the library association, and you know -- because filtering is often put in the libraries, and how that -- how that affects. And perhaps -- we talk a lot about the parenting styles. We definitely should hear from the youth and people from children's rights. And I'm alarmed at one of the parenting styles, which pretty much -- you know, really using the Internet to look into what their kids are going doing. And is that some sort of a breech of children's rights? So, I don't know... maybe Aurel and then Elaine and then --
>> Stewart Hamilton. I'm from the International Federation of Library Associations. So it is true that the use of filtering software we find in libraries worldwide is increasing. And the reason why we know this is that we do about a biannual survey which has been going on since 2003. This current survey, available on the Web site, covers 122 countries. And we ask for the motivation for filtering. And the overwhelming reason is protection of children. Having worked in a public library myself, and just as an aside I can tell you that children find it extremely easy to get around filtering software in libraries and causes more problems than installing it is often worth. But I think I'll come back to make some further comments on sort of children's security and safety in libraries.
But just to say that libraries do take this very, very seriously. To give you an example, the Australian Library Association launched a larger campaign in association with Google and other parents groups to look at this issue in a holistic way and try to find the correct environment for children to actually best make use of the resources.
Often, filtering software in libraries can actually be mandated by sort of the government legislation. So the Children's Internet Protection Act, if libraries wish to receive state funding for Internet access, they have to impose filters, which impacts on adults' use of the Internet as well. So libraries are often restricted. The best filter is between the ears, is something which I do take note of very much as a librarian. It's the responsibility to try and help young users in libraries best interpret information. So we will talk about that when we get on to information literacy.
>> SHEBA MOHAMMID: We have a question from somewhere in the world. So if you go ahead --
>> AUREL GRAUR: During the conference in each room, there were always items concerning security, privacy, protecting and so on. I'm also a parent. I'm not only a teacher. And I suppose that all teachers are also parents. So if you ask what is their point of view concerning educating or let's say assuring that children have a normal path in development, we may find out that in real life, it's not like we describe it here. We talk about filters, but that can be applied only if children are in a very controlled environment. When an adult is always next to them, and can supervise and can guide what the children did, they have a lot of time spending out of sight or sight of adults. So, I don't know if filtering is very effective if we talk from this point of view.
My opinion is that education is the solution. And when I say education, it's not about children education, but all people education, if we may use a general term like lifelong learning education.
So, everybody must learn how to behave in an Internet environment. Teachers, parents, other adults, children, and everybody. I forgot to introduce myself. I'm Aurel Graur, school inspector, teacher, too, but I represent the Council of Europe. In fact, the programme from the Council of Europe, in case you're not Europeans, this is a training programme devoted to training professionals in education.
As you may notice on the materials on your desk, the Council of Europe has three pillars of interest. That means democracy, human rights and rule of law and intercultural ID. They are very strong pillars. And the Council of Europe's -- they did do all the best for strengthening democracy and assuring the respect of human rights. In the countries that are members.
Why I made this introduction for telling you that all this discussion we have here are linked with some important interest of the programme. Here, we have spoken about media literacy. Since 2010, the Council of Europe started the programme called media literacy based on human rights that concerns training of teachers from all over Europe in that field. Because, when we speak about privacy, when we speak about security, when we speak about copyrights, when we speak about anything you want, and all was here in that conference, it's about human rights. You have the right to your own image, your property, and so on.
So that programme is targeted exactly in that kind of topic, let's say.
We have started this programme in 2008 with 25 people, 25 trainers from all over Europe that have had to make their own need analyzers for producing materials for training teachers. These materials they have produced since today show us that we have serious problems in our society. We speak here about parents satisfied or not satisfied with their children's education. We speak here about teachers that are intended to have their children to better perform using the Internet. But we found while doing our unofficial research that teachers are not very interested in applying techniques, tools and anything. I speak from a European point of view, I'm sorry. They know their education. If they must do it, they have an official, a formal curricula and they will do it. But they're not very, let's say, convinced that they must do that. So we found that we have problems with teachers.
So one of our main aims was to train teachers, to educate -- not to train, but to educate teachers, if you permit me to say it like that, to use the Internet, to understand what is the Internet and to understand what is their duty, to act for educating children and not to lure them in one direction or another.
So, for the moment, that is my point of view.
>> A question from Hong Kong. Sylvia asks, our students have changed radically. Today students are no longer the people that the education system taught in the past. How can a digital immigrant instructor who speaks in an outdated language struggle to teach a population that speaks an entirely new language. Shall I repeat it? That's okay.
>> SHEBA MOHAMMID: We are grappling with a new audience and they want to know how teachers can respond to this.
Do you want to respond? Jeremy?
>> JEREMY GODFREY: I'll have a go at responding. There was a comment made earlier about media literacy and the need for people to be educated about, if you come across a piece of content, how should you evaluate it? And I speak from two other perspectives apart from being a government official. One is as a parent. The other is as a school Governor. And I've been very struck by the schools that I'm involved with use the international baccalaureate style of teaching. It's much more constructionist rather than instructionist. You try to teach children to be lifelong learners. Teach them to be inquirers. Teach them to have the skills, not just what they come across on the Internet. It's possible to get come across misleading information in other places as well.
So the question is, to the instructor, the key thing is that the teachers cease to be instructors. They are no longer the source of knowledge. They are no longer the people who tell children what to do. It's their job to equip children and inspire children to be able to find out things for themselves. And to be guides to the world of learning and information. And that's a relationship between adults and children. That has been a positive relationship for thousands of years, when parents and children had that kind of relationship. It becomes all the more important. The answer is that the old fashioned styles of teaching, you know, are becoming even less useful in today's world. But, more constructionist styles of teaching and engagement with children, which are not new, but they are the ones that will be effective in enabling children and teachers to learn together.
>> SHEBA MOHAMMID: Thank you.
>> AUREL GRAUR: This synonomy between teacher and instructors is dangerous. Because the teacher must be an educator. And that is the source of the strength for now and for the future. Because he will -- if the teachers remain only transmitters of information, they will lose their authority, let's say, on children and on parents, also, because they will be only instructors. They will only be transmitters of information. And the Internet is full of information. Why do you need a teacher if you have the Internet?
So I think it's about a very important reshaping of the educational system and considering the teacher not as an instructor but as an educator. That's the key for the future.
>> SHEBA MOHAMMID: I know Divine has a lot of experience, so I will ask you to give input.
>> DIVINE: Yes, I just wanted to stop the crap. I think I'm fed up with this divide between digital natives and migrants. I want to say that children are digital naives. They are going to the Internet. They get what is already preprocessed for them. They have no authority on the formats. No authority on information. They don't know how to control it. They don't know what information means. We don't know what data, what news, what rumor, what, et cetera.
So, they don't know about human rights. They don't know about giving away and signing away their privacy. Let's talk about naivete a bit. Not to diminish children and their qualities and their Dynamism and their curiosity, but let's really stop getting trapped into words that are nice and that rhyme nicely and all of that. But the reality is -- what is underneath it is more problematic.
What we realise is that there is not that much well-being as you would like. Or we assume. A lot of us here have a positive attitude towards technology. And we think this type of technology, because it's constructionist, like some parenting styles and some educating styles, is going to move forward. But a lot of cultures are not constructionist. A lot of cultures are authoritarian. It's not just Asia. It's the Arab world, it's Europe, et cetera. A lot of families, you know, the families that are participatory in style in most countries, it's one-third. So two-thirds of families are authoritarian. So there is a lot of give and take. And we have to realise that there are several speeds, that there is -- that people who are already empowered are continuing being empowered.
But there are all the ones left behind and these are the needy, these are the ones less educated, less technologically savvy with kids in the same position. And if you want -- and if you want creativity to be available to everybody in a much more Democratic way, let's start being concerned about the naive, because they are the majority. Young people can relax.
>> EDMON CHUNG: Perhaps that is a good segue to what Elaine has to say, because she has been working on children's rights for the last ten years.
>> Hi. I'm from Darasia. I've been working on children's rights for ten years. When I received the training about what is children's rights? Actually, your NCRC, Hong Kong children Ambassadors in 2000, I think.
Okay, I think it's very interesting that empowered parents is a way to protect children. Yes, it's very true. So I think especially in the digital world, so let us do more on parents' education, what is the best way to be okay with their children. Was it a good relationship between the children and the parents?
In children's rights, we always think that right is rights, okay? Only rights. But I hope to introduce three rights concept. The first is rights.
The second is responsibilities.
The third is respect. I think respect is the most important -- core value in the human rights. Because if we have a charter, we will ensure that you have the right and I have the right. So between it's between parents, adults and children.
So I think your UNCRC Article is a very good hint to deal with the parents -- sorry, it's UNCRC.
It's a way for answering how to respect children. It's not only listen, but it's a good environment, a child friendly environment for discussion. It's not equally to who takes the dominant side. Because I think sometimes children are not mature enough. It requires more discussion on that way. So I think you can, if you feel interested, you can search on that. Thank you.
>> SHEBA MOHAMMID: Thank you, Elaine. I have a comment here from our friends from the U.S.
>> A in NNE: Sorry. We're talkable. Responding to the digital native comment. It's interesting, even the guy who coined that, Mark Prenski moved beyond it. Now he refers to digital wisdom and wrote a very interested piece on it that I'm getting ready to blog about. But I feel that the digital native concept is a kind of myth that adults have somehow adopted, maybe because it was a clever phrase or something. And certainly public relations and news media people really like it, because it says a lot very fast. But there are people in the United States, like Professor Henry Jenkins and Sonia Livingston who have been trying to help us move past that whole divide -- thank goodness!
But, in the US, it's interesting, with this concept of facilitating or educating versus instructing, in the glass room. It seems that the Internet requires that. An educator in the LA unified school district, which is bigger than some countries -- you know, it's just a huge school district in Los Angeles was saying recently that we really need to -- you know, we can't fill their brains with information. There are natural hunter gatherings on the Internet. We have to help them filter that information and that's a literacy media question. And one of the things that we have to promote is new media literacies. There is a project at MIT that migrated with Henry to USC. It's called newmedialiteracies.org. It lists the literacies. But fund tament tale it's a two-way literacy, because media are social or behavioral now. The literacy requires critical thinking about what is outgoing, posted, as much as what is incoming, read, and consumed.
And that's why teachers need to be and facilitating that kind of learning that is highly protective. It becomes an online safety issue, because the research is showing that people who engage in aggressive behavior online are more than twice as likely to be victimized. So media literacy becomes a protective element that plays into child protection and children's rights as well.
I think that's all. In the United States we have the same problems. And we are all over the map. We have teachers who want to retire before they are forced to deal with the Internet and 21st Century technologies, well into the 21st century. And then you have these visionary tech educators who really -- are pushing past great obstacles to bring social media into the classroom and adopting things like out of the University of Indiana, there is a virtual world called QuestAtlanta continue.org. It teaches social welfare principles, while helping children do questions that map to the school curriculum. So it's an amazing, very holistic project that embraces late elementary school through middle school. And so that -- we're all over the map and really there is a recognized need to move past this traditional form of education. But also great resistance.
>> SHEBA MOHAMMID: Thank you. It's interesting to see how we're kind of evolving, not just semantics, but frameworks. Perhaps we will have a question or comment, and then we can turn to see how this is translating to public policy and Jeremy said he is a parent as well. And then we will go to Google.
>> Just a quick comment therefore that we're also hearing that teachers in some cases do not want to take on some of the roles that we're talking about here. And we're finding that librarians can step up. And parts -- in parts of the United States, the new library, which is a continuation, is the part of the school where the children are first introduced to the Internet and first explained what is going on. And they come into contact with literacy and media literacy. What IFLA would like to do is bring this further up in policymakers minds, that you do have in school environments a professional who is capable of getting across the ideas about how to encounter information and how to be careful with it. And very often, in part of the WSIS process and perhaps part of the Internet governance debate, existing professions like librarians and the jobs that we have been doing have been perhaps neglected in the rush to encounter new technologies and to say that they are fantastic and I would like to see that turned around. I think we have forgotten that.
>> SHEBA MOHAMMID: We had a statement from UNESCO and now we will talk to parents and Google.
>> I want to support what you said about nay teach. We over estimate. Really, we think kids know everything but at the same time we really don't know many things. It's important to talk about techniques and -- techniques and controls. But with filtering techniques, we just try to see what we find online. But we can't see how we behave online. One example what is happening in the country where we are at now, I'm Lithuanian. We ever been surprised when one day we saw in our newspapers what one young child, I don't remember the age. He killed himself because two of his classmates made a film about him and put it online. It was nothing criminal. The only content that was inside was a bit strange. It was not really the most appropriate behavior. In this case, we can't control, we can filter, which is -- you can put the film on the networks, all of us here.
It's just behavior. As a parent you can't control. It's what we think about here, critical thinking. How we behave. Filtering is not a solution. It can be sometimes. But how we think, that's very important.
>> AUREL GRAUR: We must educate children that they understand that they have rights, but other people have also rights. The right, it's their own image. It's a right for everybody. So they must respect that. And that's education.
>> SHEBA MOHAMMID: It's interesting. We are can see that maybe we will turn to government now and hear your perspective and how you're broaching this whole issue. >> JEREMY GODFREY: I'll give some context to why we commissioned Professor Wong's research. It's difficult to form policy in this area, because every parent in society has got an opinion about this, and they hold their opinions very, very strongly.
And the genesis of the research was a review in Hong Kong of our law on obscenity, which wasn't particularly focused online, but that was a big issue in the review.
Of course, there was a huge lobby from some people in society to increase the use of filtering software from, -- from the most extreme points of view, which is that it should be compulsory for everybody, to less, such as ISPs should be mandated to at least offer it to all of the customers.
And we decided that it was important to have a sound evidence base to make policy the partly because you make better policy if you understand, if you understand the facts and partly because it at least gives you some chance of creating consensus in society. If you can explain why you got that policy. So we commission the research and which we have heard the results of, which really I think supported the education of children, of parents, and of educators, was likely to be the most effective form of government intervention in this field.
One thing I would encourage all governments to do is to get the data. Divine said she heard a statistics that two-thirds of all parents are authoritarian. Most people's prejudices would be that Asia parents are more likely to be more authoritarian than European. But we found that 72 percent of Hong Kong parents had the predominantly warm caring style. And it was only one-third that was the authoritarian style. It's interesting to get the data. Maybe some of it surprises us.
In parallel with doing the research, we kicked off a big education campaign with the Hong Kong federation of youth groups. So during the course of that -- it was a one-year campaign. During the course of that, we did 78,000 home visits. So we trained up about 500 Ambassadors to go and both deliver kind of seminar, and talks in school, but also to go and do visits to people in their home, to help them either with some technical support issues that they might need, or to -- but also to talk to them about Internet safety, and about how to get -- how to use the Internet in a positive fashion. So we were -- I remember when we started the campaign, it was very tempting to focus it on Internet safety. But we wanted to make sure that it had at least as much emphasis on the -- on how to make the Internet the most positive experience you could have.
We saw 150,000 people in various seminars, and we published a handbook which is available in English. Most of the materials are in Chinese. The best way to find it, because the Web site is in Chinese, search for benetwise. If you look for the be net wise handBook, you'll get a link to Ross' handbook and you'll get a link on that.
From our point of view, we can kind of see the need to do more about media literacy when -- literacy when you think about safety online. But really, it's just one aspect to reform of education. So I'd go along with the observation from the US that many teachers are finding the transition from being instructors to being educators is a very, very difficult transmission to make. And that is probably our biggest challenge in -- in -- because that goes through the whole education system. We did research on that -- as well as the research that was presented today, we did research on Internet addiction and also there has been a bit of research done on cyberbullying. And I remember when it was presented to us, the cyberbullying research, was one of the conclusions that was reached is that the worst kind of cyberbullying is an extension of playground bullying. So it's not anonymous people who you met online who are people bullying you. It's your classmates and it has a bigger impact when it's class rites mates. And I asked, what are teachers doing about this? And the answer is that most teachers don't regard it as any of their business. And I found this to be surprising. I said well, suppose children went to McDonald's after school and one of the children in the class was bullying another child, would the teacher think that was their responsibility? And the answer was well, if they are wearing a school uniform, then the teachers would regard it as their responsibility as opposed to them not wearing a school uniform.
So you're reaching out to teachers and parents and it's a good idea when you think about other influences, too. Such as librarians. How do we really, you know, respect the relationship between adults and children to be one that isn't instructional and is much more educational.
>> SHEBA: Thank you Jeremy. So in terms -- we had policy issues coming up but also resources that can empower. And grasp Google can give us a perspective on that as well. Ross, we will go over to you.
>> ROSS LaJEUNESSE: Hi. I'm from Google. It's been interesting to listen to the conversation, because it -- because it parallels conversations that we have internally at Google about how to keep kids safe online, and seeing that as part and parcel of how to give users control over their own experience online. Because that is really part of the same issue.
And there are a couple speakers who broke down their principles into three, and maybe three is the magic number, but we do the same thing.
So we look at it as -- we have three core principles when it comes to giving users tools and information they need to control their own experience online. It's educate, empower, and protect. And educate comes first, as many of us in the room already discussed, because we really feel it's the most important principle to have.
And so we do certain things to help users educate themselves and help parents educate their children and help peers educate their peers about how to have the best online experience and how to be safe.
We launched the Google family safety centre, which was launched just a few weeks ago. We are in the process of localizing it across the world to make it relevant to different countries and user experiences, recognizing that those factors do influence online use and approaches to the Internet.
We work with educational NGO, educational and community groups around the globe, in Australia, for example, with the libraries. We work with about six different community organisations whose primary role is to each kids and parents online and educate them on how to more safely navigate this world. We support them. We give them Ad space. We give them platforms on YouTube and that sort of thing as a way of getting the message out. On YouTube, one of the platforms which often finds itself in the cross hairs or at least the topic of much of this discussion, we take an especially aggressive approach on that working with NGOs around the world, to provide them their own YouTube channels. We have our own YouTube channels.
We think of our role as very important and we take it seriously, but we recognize that we're just one small piece of this. You know, it's got to be government, parents, schools, anybody, peers, and use theirs themselves taking responsibility for kids.
And I found the comment about the digital natives millenniums interesting. They say look, I don't get this world, they get it, I can't possibly learn it, so I have no responsibility for it. You have a responsibility for it. And it gives people license to just turn their back and not be a part of it, and that's really dangerous. Because the Internet, whether we like it or not, in all of its good or bad parts, is pretty much just a reflection of overall society. And the same sorts of dynamic personalities, things that happened on the Internet happened in the real world.
So we take it seriously, but we recognize and we want others to recognize that we will do what we can, but we're just one small piece of it.
So education is the first thing we do. Provide specific tools. And this is the empowerment part, some specific tools to help parents. Like safe search. Parents can set up filters so that their kids are searching with the save filter on and locked. And there are various levels that you can set, that sort of thing.
Turning back to YouTube when it comes to tools, we set up YouTube -- we deliberately set up YouTube to not just be a regular part of the Internet. It's a community. It's spent to be a community. We don't permit pornography, abusive images, even derrogatory comments, those are all banned under the community guidelines. And we enforce those guidelines or we use users to do that. We can't do it ourselves. The reason is that there are 24 hours of video uploaded to YouTube every minute of every day.
I used to do California policy and politics, and I had legislators come in and they would say Ross I'm going to pass a law and it's going to make YouTube preview every piece of video before it's uploaded. And you explain how that is not going to work. So what is smarter and what does work is using the YouTube to do it themselves.
We give people, when they see something that they don't like, they flag it, and we review it and usually within an hour we react on it. 50 percent of all YouTube users, people who visit YouTube, are actively engaged in that sort of flagging. So we feel like we have a system that works with the community involved in application itself.
And the final piece I want to talk about is really when, you know, it's sort of -- when all else goes wrong, it's sort of the protection piece. And that is we work hand in hand with law enforcement around the globe. When we see abusive images or child porn online, we have a zero tolerance policy when we see it. We take it of down ourselves. We report it to NICMIC, which has partnerships all around the globe. And we have done cool things with NICMIC. We built the software that allows them to do digital hashing. When an image is uploaded, we hash it against any other images that are online so it can't be reuploaded again.
So we see ourselves as having an important but only one piece of the the puzzle. We feel that we have a responsibility.
>> SHEBA MOHAMMID: It's one piece of the puzzle and we have had government, educators, private sector, and some civil society. So we will turn it over to the youth and hear what they say. The remote moderation is streaming now, so just let them know out there if anybody has any questions, feel free to throw them out, or any perspectives from any regions. So we will hear what the young are people have to say. Are there comments or responses to what you heard so far? Yes?
>> AUDIENCE: I'm Desiree. I represent the youth here. I can't really speak on behalf of parenting, because I'm not a parent yet, but I can only speak from a personal perspective. I don't know very much in this respect. But, I started using the Internet when I was about 8 or 9, I think when IM became popular. Then we had our first computer at home, my mom put in a filtering software, I think it was a very ancient version that made our Internet access quite poor, because it filtered a lot of things that when we wanted to look at it. We couldn't see things that were not necessarily bad. It's just that they had sensitive words that might be interpreted otherwise.
And I think there is a need, if filtering software is to be used as a mechanism, then it should not compromise the quality of our Internet access. That's one thing.
And some of the ways my parents have tried to take control of my Internet access is to put the -- well, we used to have a desktop. So they put the desktop in the living room so that I was never just stuck in my room on my own. And I think that's basically my own personal experience. So...
>> SHEBA MOHAMMID: Thank you.
>> AUDIENCE: Well, I want to echo people here. They are really focusing on developing the critical mindset. Sorry. My name is Bianco. So again, we are a whole group so I really thank (Off microphone.) For bringing us here and also all the efforts bringing it back to my point.
I think the critical mind is more important to develop rather than, you know, having these softwares. Because -- so I was listening to Vint Serf talk today and he said Internet is the (Off microphone.) Of the world. So you can't physically tie your children to a certain geographical extent. So you can't tie them and tell them okay, do not go to this area and they just won't go. Or they will just be pulled back at a certain point.
So really, the Internet is a mirror of the world. So why should information be restricted? Even you right now, you adults, I'm sure there are Web sites that you don't want to access or shouldn't be accessing. So like since you're exposed to these things in the real world, I guess it's just a learning process to put it into perspective for children. And it's the guidance along the way that would really work instead of having these filtering softwares. But I know that parents are frantic about children using the Internet and not knowing what they are doing. And there are negative effects on the Internet. But really, to try to guide them along the way and trust them along the way helps more than having a software that probably impedes their access or restrict the knowledge that they can gain. And it's just, you know, a mistake, and then they are learning by mistake. I just want to echo that point.
>> SHEBA MOHAMMID: Thank you. I think we have a question here or a comment.
>> LARRY: From connect safely. I've been involved in the Internet safety world since 1993, which probably makes me the senior person in this room and beyond, actually, in this area. And in 1993 I wrote my rules for online safety and child safety on the information highway for NICMIC, whose board I serve on. And I watched this field evolve from the day that I wrote that document until now and I have lived to repent having written that document. Because what we lived in 1993 was based on what we imagined to be problem, not based on reality. In 2010, we have studies like the one being done in Hong Kong and the one done by PEW and others, but the studies that are vindicating for the positive aspects of the Internet and very reassuring, and we have scholars that could say it better than I, but what we found is that number one youth risk online correlates with youth risk off line.
Generally speaking, and there are exceptions to every rule, but generally speaking the young people who get in troub