Doug Levin, of Cable in the Classroom, shared a report that seems to present an interesting picture of what the Internet means, from the perspective of parents. Presented yesterday, via a webcast, the report shares the findings of a survey conducted by Harris Interactive®, on behalf of Cable in the Classroom. The survey was conducted between July 27 and 31, of 374 U.S. adults who were either parents or guardians of children between the ages of 8 and 18.
Among the findings was that
94% of the participants said that they have “..taken some action to ensure their children’s safe/responsible Internet use.” I found the breakdown of those actions to be very interesting.
- 88% say that they have talked to their children
- 82% monitor online activity
- 75% limit use to open spaces
- 74% set time limits
- 55% installed filtering software
- 54% sought advice from other parents
- 42% sought advice from school
This breakdown is encouraging to me. The highest number of parents in the survey acted toward their childrens safety on line by interacting directly with their children, by talking and watching. The more procedural actions were less often stated. I’m not sure if this really means anything, but it goes along with what I hear so much from teachers who use student blogging in their classrooms — that they are having new conversations in their classrooms, conversations about conversations. It’s not just the curriculum and content, but how you communicate about what you know.
Contrary to their reliance on talking to their children, only one-third of parents said that they were “..’very knowledgeable’ when it comes to educating their child or children about how to use the Internet safely and responsibly.” This doesn’t discourage me, because I suspect that it means that they were having true conversations with their children, not just telling them what to do. I think that we have to get use to the idea that this new information landscape is something where expertise is not dependent on age. However, we must continue to accept our responsibilities — because judgement is.
Of course “do you consider yourself an expert or a novice” is a really hard question to try to get a good picture of in a survey. It’s all relative. It was interesting to me that only 10% said that they were “..not at all knowledgeable..”
Apparently, a previous survey, conducted by Grunwald Associates in March, also on behalf of Cable in the Classroom, found that 60% of teachers thing that we are not teaching students enough about information/media literacy. 78% said that what they know about media literacy skills, they learned on their own.
The final result that I want to share was actually the first to appear in the report’s presentation slides. 90% of the survey participants said that parents “..have a lot of responsibility for ensuring Internet safety.” 71% said that schools have a lot of responsibility. 49% said that the government has a lot of responsibility.
Clearly, Internet safety is something that concerns us. But I think that it is just as clear that this new information landscape is something that we value for our children.
You can find more information on the survey and the report on the Cable in the Classroom web site, Parenting the MySpace Generation.
"Parenting the MySpace Generation." Cable in the Classroom. 10 Aug 2006. Cable in the Classroom. 11 Aug 2006 <http://www.ciconline.org/Enrichment/internetsafety/>.
Technorati Tags: cableintheclassroom, medialiteracy, parenting, warlick
Very timely, David. Students (and adults) need to be literate not only in how they evaluate and use info from the web, but also to what degree they expose (pardon the pun) themselves on the web. One only has to consider the quick demise of PBS’ Melanie Martinez as evidence.
Our school system is acting locally to promote an Internet Safety Week in September to heighten awareness of schools and communities. But the one thing I don’t want as a result is the common knee-jerk over-reaction. On one hand, we have to be safe. On the other, don’t pull the plug on the conduit to the richest repository of info in history.
Here is our BOE resolution for Internet Safety Week:
http://www.carteretcountyschools.org/techmedia/meetings/0607/RESOLUTION.pdf
One of my favorite go-to’s on Internet Safety is Nancy Willard. Here is a link to her concise article entitled The MySpace Phenomenon:
http://www.galeschools.com/article_archive/2006/03/myspace.htm
The statistics are really encouraging if I could buy into them. The pessimist in me thinks if I was a parent that didn’t care about internet safety, I would not want to participate in a internet safety survey. I would love more info on how they conducted their survey. (Including the script.)
When they called the 374 people did they say, “We want poll you about internet safety?
On a side note, I really like the resources Cable in the Classroom are providing.
&
On Harris Interactive’ website, they do have a poll that says that 83% of the population would trust a teacher to tell the truth. Teachers are only 2nd to doctors in this poll.
AMartin, here are some of those details:
Harris Interactive (www.harrisinteractive.com) regularly (if not daily) conducts polls of the U.S. population via telephone and the Internet. We at Cable in the Classroom worked with them to (a) define our population of interest: a nationwide cross section of U.S. adults ages 18 and over who are parents or legal guardians of a child ages 8 – 18 (roughly parents of 3rd to 12th graders); (b) write survey questions to solicit parents’ views of who should be responsible for children’s internet safety; what actions parents are taking to ensure their children’s safe and responsible use of the Internet; and how knowledgeable parents thought they were in terms of educating their children about the safe and responsible use of the Internet; and (c) include those questions into one of their regular polls.
We asked Harris Interactive to conduct the survey via telephone (so as not to bias our results) between July 27 and July 31, 2006 and received responses from 374 U.S. adults meeting our criteria. Of note, we did NOT restrict our sample to parents who had Internet access at home, since most kids use the Internet and they use it in a variety of settings (like school and friends’ homes) and – increasingly – a variety of devices (like cell phones).
Using standard polling procedures, figures for age, sex, race, and region were weighted where necessary to align them with their actual proportions in the population. This resulted in a +/- 5% margin of error at the 95% confidence level in terms of extrapolating the results nationally.
Other details about the items and other research we’ve cited can be found at the links David already pointed to in his posting above.
David,
This is good news, I guess… this is exactly what the folks pushing the passage of DOPA would have everyone believe – that the answer lies in parents educating their children at home
This is absolutely wrong in my opinion, and studies like the one Doug presents feed into and validate this extremely unrealistic notion. My experience of 25 years as a classroom teaches says so. The answer to preparing ALL our kids to safely enter the workforce as responsible and competent Internetizens does not lie with the family. It falls to the schools. And we DO have some work to do. – Mark
Media literacy: I conduct workshops for parents and educators. Contact me if you are interested.
This Internet Safety belongs to the whole village. I have students in school maybe 6 hours. I don\’t pretend to try and educate parents about TV/ VIDEO/MUSIC ratings. However, I do educate parents about Internet Safety. Many parents need to know the vocabulary, the options, how to set parameters and why. I\’ll be responsible for the 6 hours during the day, for educating netizens, parents and community. I will enter into a partnership with parents and communities, I\’ll collaborate, but I won\’t advocate for schools to own this whole Internet Safety. Just as I do not advocate for the US Senate try and legislate Internet Safety.