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In the last several months, we have received more calls and emails from school administrators about issue related to cell phones than probably anything else.  The concerns about cell phones are varied.  For example, students are texting on them all hours of the school day, cell phones can be used to take pictures or video of students or staff members (in the classroom or even places where privacy is expected such as in a locker room or bathroom), and they can be used to cheat on exams.  In addition, one principal told us that her school had a problem with parents actually calling their children during the school day and expecting a response even when they knew the student was in class.

This is a complicated issue.  First of all, many parents want their kids to have a cell phone so that they can be contacted for routine or emergency purposes.  Schools that attempt to ban cell phones from classrooms have a difficult time enforcing the policy, short of searching students as they pass through the doors.  At the very least, schools need to have a conversation about this and come up with a clear policy that outlines where and when students are allowed to use/possess cell phones – and specifies the consequences for violations of the policy.

On a related note, a friend recently made me aware of ChaCha (see www.chacha.com), a cell phone service that allows anyone to send a text message to ChaCha (242242) with a question and they will receive the answer in text message.  And the service is free.  Apparently, ChaCha receives about 300,000 questions a day and utilizes around 25,000 people to research and respond to the questions.  Employees of ChaCha earn between 10-20 cents for basically Googling the question, finding the answer, and texting it back to the sender. They boast a 93% accuracy rate and state that questions are answered within three minutes.  So imagine a student texting ChaCha to ask: What is the capital of Montana?  Clear implications for schools.

Just a quick cross-cultural thought – this article discusses how approximately 10% of 9th and 10th graders in Australia have been cyberbullied…and the article compares that figure to the 50% or so (????) of American students who have been cyberbullied.  The lead researcher and professor stated that their country is about five or so years behind on issues like this…and that this problem will grow in Australia with the increased adoption of high-speed Internet connections in homes.

I personally am not sure that higher broadband speeds available at home are going to markedly enhance the rate of online victimization.  I’ve researched intellectual property theft and found a strong correlation of piracy with faster lines allowing higher throughput, but I feel that there are fundamental behavioral, cultural, and societal issues that facilitate higher rates of cyberbullying in certain countries.  For example, certain countries in the Far East (e.g., Japan, South Korea) have ridiculously fast broadband (40mbps+) to the home, but cyberbullying is not a severe problem at all because demonstrations of interpersonal aggression and violence online are shunned, shameful, and disdained.  Justin and I plan to conduct comparative cross-cultural research on cyberbullying in the near future to further flesh out the relevant issues.  For now, I’d be really interested to hear the insight of others on this matter.

Mike Donlin, Senior Program Consultant (aka Program Manager), for Seattle Public Schools (and our good friend and esteemed colleague) recently asked us a few thought-provoking questions about cyberbullying prevention and response.  They are as follows:
1. How can we consistently involve all the major stakeholders – educators, legal, the tech industry, families and youth – in sustained conversations around these critical issues?
2. Assuming that the digital immigrants all begin to get it with all the current technologies, what’s going to be the next big thing we will have to be on the lookout for, cyber-danger-wise?
3. We (Seattle Public Schools) are implementing a full cyberbullying curriculum, starting with the middle school/junior high grades. What do you see as something we absolutely should not overlook in our materials?

We thought we’d take the opportunity here to discuss these issues.  School districts should contact relevant private sector companies who may want to demonstrate that they care about the community, and have them fund/sponsor events that the school district can organize which brings together the multiple stakeholders.  Local foundations also can help – this has been successful in my school district.  Parents’ nights can be sponsored, and speakers can be brought in to administer assemblies to youth (even in elementary school).  We have found these efforts bear much fruit, and are prompting youth to go to parents and other youth-serving adults more readily with their cyberbullying problems.  These events should happen annually at worst and biannually at best – there are many issues to cover and so material needn’t be repeated.  The next big thing cyber-danger-wise in my opinion isn’t harassment on Second Life and IMVU and other 3-D virtual realms, but cyberbullying among pre-teens and even children on the new social networking sites that cater to them (e.g., Club Penguin) – even if they are somewhat “locked-down” and supervised web-based environments.  Even if certain curse words or hateful words are filtered, youth can still ostracize (through silence and passive-aggressive methods) others in these venues…and can still reveal personal information that may get them into trouble….  I should also say that we may see more picture- and video-based forms of cyberbullying, which will likely include more sexually-explicit images of teens.  Finally, cyberbullying curriculums would be remiss if they fail to include the cultivation of empathy and self-esteem among youth.  Honestly, if our kids were more naturally inclined towards the golden rule, and had internal and external buffers that provided a protective bubble from hurtful words or actions of peers, this wouldn’t be the problem that it is.

I just read an interesting article covering a topic that is frequently brought to our attention when we speak at conferences – cell phones and sexually-explicit images of teenagers being circulated among peers.  The bottom line is that we have got to figure out the best way to get kids to think hard and seriously about the implications of content they create or post or send getting into the wrong hands.  It is largely inevitable, but youth naively assume that it will stay private and protected by a small, intended audience.  The image started out “as a summertime joke between the ninth-grader and her friends.”  How many of us have taken a picture of ourselves naked – even as a joke?  Wait, don’t answer that.  In keeping with my previous post – this picture could be tagged (with her name? with her contact information?) and shared on one of the numerous photo-sharing and photo-gallery web sites out there, and she would suffer the rest of her life from the humiliation.  Let’s hope law enforcement are able to confiscate every device on which this picture is found, and scrub those flash memory cards and hard drives minty clean.  And let’s try to remind everyone that possession and transmission of this sort of stuff is usually a Class I felony across the United States.

As my eyes tend to be super sensitive to statistics and data related to cyberbullying, I was taken aback by the findings from a study mentioned in this recent FoxNews article. It states:

According to Parry Aftab, an Internet security and privacy lawyer and founder of WiredSafety.org, 85 percent of 5,000 middle-school students surveyed said they had been cyberbullied. Only 5 percent of them said they’d tell someone about it.

Parry does good work, and she may be citing someone else’s project, and the writer of the article may be misinterpreting or misquoting someone, but 85% is ridiculously high. In addition, 5% is incredibly low – we consistently find that youth are willing to tell a friend…and a growing number are definitely turning to adults for help.

Finally, the article states that cyberbullying peaks in 4th and 7th grade. I agree that the phenomenon is extremely prevalent among middle schoolers, but I’ve talked to a number of 4th graders across the country and while some kids have experienced very mild forms of it (at that age), it definitely doesn’t peak at 4th grade. What does that even mean, and how does that even make sense?

Anyway, wild outliers tend to color our perceptions of any phenomenon. Statistics like these are only going to lead to knee-jerk reactive responses and moral panic. I don’t think we (or the media) need to convince society of the reality of cyberbullying. As Justin pointed out previously, it is extremely important to understand exactly how cyberbullying is specifically defined, and how data are collected. Otherwise, we will continually have wide variation in stated frequencies of cyberbullying, which will only confuse everyone as to the actual extent and scope of the problem.  We know what it is, and we know (generally) how often it occurs among youth.  We now need to zero in on exactly what can be done about it.