Blog

This has been a very busy year for us at the Cyberbullying Research Center.  We continued our research activities and expanded our outreach and educational efforts.  We enjoyed meeting many of you through our travels throughout the United States.  We did about 50 presentations, workshops, or assemblies for thousands of youth, parents, educators, and others in 14 different states this past year.  We collected data from about 2000 students in 2009 and have plans to collect even more data in 2010.  We have a number of academic articles that were completed this year that will be in print in 2010 and are working on our next book projects.  We pledge to keep advancing the state of understanding and awareness about cyberbullying in the New Year.  There is still much work that needs to be done.

Both Sameer and I would like to take this opportunity thank everyone for taking the time to visit this site to learn more about (and contribute to the understanding of) the causes and consequences of online harassment. We can’t be everywhere, so we are relying on you to get the word out about this pernicious problem.  With knowledge comes power and we are thankful that this web site has become a leading platform upon which knowledge about cyberbullying can be built.  Hopefully the information gained will give us the power to do what is needed to effectively prevent and sensibly respond to all forms of cyberbullying.

All the best to you and yours this Holiday Season.

Recently, I spoke about cyberbullying on Wiki-type sites at the annual Answers.com conference in Atlanta, Georgia.  Let me first say that the Answers.com community (employees of the company and volunteer supervisors and contributors) is top-notch.  I absolutely loved being with them, witnessing their contagious passion for improving user experience on the site, and hearing their vision for the future.  They were wonderful, highly-motivated, kind-hearted, and very, very smart.

Many people who don’t actively contribute in Web 2.0 user communities such as Answers.com don’t realize that cyberbullying is a nontrivial problem in these settings.  Apart from spamming and general harassment, Wiki-based communities also have to wrestle with: Flaming (angry and insulting interaction between users); Trolling (posting controversial, inflammatory, irrelevant messages to provoke other users into an emotional response); Blanking (deleting a good answer in its entirety); Vandalizing (spoiling the quality of user contributions or pages); and Misadvising (providing incorrect or harmful answers to another’s question(s)).

After going through a number of examples of cyberbullying on Answers.com, I provided them with an evaluative rubric I created through which they could filter problematic content or pages or posts they saw.  This would allow them to make distinctions as to what is cyberbullying, and what is not – and then respond accordingly.  They have (and are continuing to implement) technological solutions to problem behaviors on the site, but I shared with them a variety of site-specific social solutions that I believe can help promote community self-regulation and the maintenance of a warm, inviting culture for new and existing users.  The presentation was very well-received, and I look forward to working with them further as they continue to grow and expand.

I was in Naperville, Illinois about two weeks ago for a cyberbullying summit sponsored by the Illinois Attorney General’s Office.  The audience was comprised of select stakeholders in education, law enforcement, and technology industry.  The most relevant companies and constituencies were there.  Attorney General Lisa Madigan was on hand to kick the event off with some opening remarks.  Michelle Collins from the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) followed with some general comments about cyberbullying and sexting and highlighted some of the efforts of the NCMEC in online safety education and prevention.  Next, I participated in a panel of experts along with Hemanshu Nigam from MySpace, Andrew Chaulk from the Vermont Internet Crimes Against Children (ICAC) task force, and Nancy Willard from the Center for Safe and Responsible Internet Use.  We each provided a short introduction to our background and initiatives, then opened it up to the audience for questions and discussion.  As expected, it was a great discussion.

During lunch, Sarah Migas from the Illinois AG’s office described their efforts to educate youth, parents, educators and others about online safety issues.  In the afternoon we all were broken up into smaller groups to discuss in depth a particular scenario.  My group (Go Red Team!) discussed a sexting case from a few months ago.  We brainstormed possible prevention and response solutions and then presented our analysis to the larger group as a whole.  All in all it was a great event.

It is essential to bring all of these players together on a regular basis to develop a coordinated community response to cyberbullying.  Having pretty much everyone at the table really made for some interesting discussions.  The Illinois AG’s office is very much ahead of the curve with respect to these issues.  Stay tuned for more great resources from this group in the future.

I just got back from presenting at the Jostens Renaissance National Conference in Orlando.  As I wrote about after attending this conference last year, these folks really know how to have a good time!  The energy was just amazing.  There were once again over 1100 educators and high achieving students from around North America in attendance which created an electric atmosphere.  (The fact that it filled up in this economy tells you how great it is!)  Not only that, but everyone who attended one of my presentations seemed genuinely interested in learning about preventing and responding to cyberbullying.  I look forward to continuing to work with many of these folks in the future.

One of our good friends and fellow Internet Safety advocates Anne Collier (co-author of MySpace Unraveled) recently did a presentation on Second Life.  By that, I don’t mean the topic was Second Life (an online virtual reality world in which people interact with each other via avatars), but she, through her avatar, gave a presentation about “Internet Safety 2.0″ in that virtual world.  It is fascinating stuff and she did a really good job.  I encourage you to check it out if you want a no-nonsense primer on the real dangers that adolescents face while online.  You can check out more of Anne’s great work on her blog.