Nontechnical Strategies to Reduce Children's Exposure to Inappropriate Material on the Internet: Summary of a Workshop (2001)

Page 42

Page 43

cial marketing strategies, media and information literacy, educational outreach to parents, monitoring and mentoring, acceptable use policies, responsible “netizenship,” and professional development for educators. This chapter provides a conceptual description of each approach, defining it in a broad sense and then providing more specific examples of instances in which these concepts were put into practice. Many of the strategies discussed can be adapted to the specific contexts, needs, and constraints within which a community may be working, although some approaches may be more feasible for larger institutions than, for example, parents concerned about their children's home use or a revenue-strapped school. For each approach, a brief discussion is devoted to identifying the contexts (e.g., home, school, libraries) or type of institution that might effectively put a strategy into place. It is important to note that many of the conceptual approaches can be adapted to particular circumstances with a little ingenuity. The particular material targeted (e.g., Internet safety, reducing exposure to sexually explicit material, recognizing and resisting direct marketing) is also explored. Again, many strategies may be used to address a number of issues online, and readers are encouraged to evaluate these strategies with their own needs and contexts in mind. Table 4-1 displays the range of strategies, the contexts in which these approaches have been effective, the feasibility of the strategy and who would need to support it, and material the strategies target.

Page 44

Page 45

Page 46

Page 47

Page 48

Social marketing strategies such as these would help to keep young people away from pornography and other inappropriate material by providing a venue that meets their needs and interests. By increasing the number of sites or creating a domain name dedicated to children, easily searchable, and convenient (e.g., homework help to guide students to relevant information), young people might choose to go to these sites voluntarily, which in turn would keep them away from objectionable material. Parents might also have an easier time directing their children's Internet use by directing their children to surf only the “.kids” domain.

Sarah Keller identified three benefits in adopting a social marketing approach. First, by providing better educational and more healthful content, the burden of regulating and screening content is reduced. Schools could use portals to these educational sites, which might reduce the costs of filtering and screening if they could provide an online platform that went directly to these useful cyberspaces.

Second, although educating parents and encouraging them to be responsible and involved in their children's online activities is an important and viable strategy, it is difficult to accomplish. Social marketing alleviates the difficulty to some extent by reaching young people directly. These web sites could easily include information on online safety as well as other educational content.

Third, evaluating educational web sites and portals is more feasible than trying to evaluate online content as a whole. As an example, Keller described the evaluation process of the teen web site, < iwannaknow.org>, a project she and Jane Brown are currently involved in. This process began with a content analysis that compares the information available on the site to the recommendations established by the Sexuality Information and Education Council of the U.S. (SIECUS), a recognized authority on sex education (Keller et al., 2000). The analysis was used to create an online survey to measure the site's impact on teen knowledge, attitudes, and intended behaviors. Furthermore, the site was evaluated using the American Library Association's recommendations on navigability, accuracy, authority, currency, and objectivity (Kapoun, 2000). Keller said this example demonstrates that educational content can be evaluated in a manner that is thorough, rigorous, and feasible and can grapple with the extent to which a site is developmentally appropriate, relevant to young people's needs and interests, and user-friendly.

Striving for better, thoroughly evaluated educational online content will take time. The creation of a “.kids” domain, for example, would take

Page 49

time and could be costly. Smaller-scale attempts to create a socially appropriate and educationally beneficial Internet landscape for children also have potential because they can be accomplished more quickly and on a local basis, though they will inevitably have significantly less material than a “.kids” domain could.

Mary Dempsey, commissioner of the Chicago Public Library, described the Chicago Public Library's effort to create a kids-safe portal to the web. The library's home page for kids and teens is designed to be a safe portal to that links to educational material online. The page, Chicago Public Library Sign of the Owl (< www.chipublib.org/008subject/003cya/sign/sign.html>), has an attractive graphic with a flashing button for an Internet safety quiz as well as a menu that includes the Teen Edition, Homework Help, Good Reads and Great Books, as well as resources for parents, teachers, and youth librarians. The Safety Quiz is an interactive quiz that poses one question at a time that can be answered with a yes or no button that calls up the correct response as well as feedback about the question. For example, the second question in the quiz is “If I see stuff on the Internet that makes me uncomfortable should I keep it a secret?” Depending on your answer you either get a bouncing star graphic (if you are correct) or a “Danger” sign if you answer incorrectly. Both answers are accompanied by the following text: “If you are at home, tell your parents right away if you come across any information that makes you feel uncomfortable. If you are at the public library, tell a librarian and then leave that page right away.” This short quiz is fun (even for adults) and provides very useful information about Internet safety to children, Dempsey said. In addition, the links provided on the Sign of the Owl home page are helpful and entertaining, and the Homework Help section is useful to students.

The Sign of the Owl, with a reasonably extensive number of links, is an example of a positive “kids area,” or what some have likened to the Public Broadcasting Service's (PBS) children's television programming, but created for an online venue. Creating a home page for a school or library that acts as a portal to the web is not difficult. In the simplest form, a teacher would preselect material relevant to a class by bookmarking a series of sites in a navigator or simply providing a list of sites that students should use for a unit or project. Creating an area dedicated to young people and filled with educational material could be a very ambitious project, such as creating an expansive “.kids” domain filled with enough interesting material that young people can get immersed in for hours, or it could be a relatively low-tech effort to satisfy busy students with bookmarked sites,

Page 50

thus providing readily available links to prescreened material. Such approaches can be used now to create home pages with preselected lists of relevant sites, and it can also stimulate future development of positive content. This approach would avoid some of the difficulties associated with filtering and free speech issues.

Workshop participants suggested several models for funding larger projects, such as creating a “.kids” domain. One suggestion was joint ventures between foundations and the government to set up a media lab that would generate this material. A second suggestion was to call for the industry to earmark a certain amount of money to creating and managing a PBS-like site. Laurie Lipper, director of The Children's Partnership, compared this suggestion to the process that cable networks went through to create and support CSPAN. Although these projects are never entirely without self-interest on the part of the industry, she stated, like CSPAN, it is possible to create a useful and valuable product through this type of industry commitment.

Social marketing has the potential to protect young people from many types of inappropriate material because it selects and produces carefully considered educational and entertaining material for them. Internet safety can also be incorporated into safe portals so that young people will be exposed to this information when they go online. Social marketing has the additional benefit of avoiding issues pertaining to free speech because it centers on producing and making available material, rather than censoring or restricting certain types of content. The limitations of this approach are the potential costs of creating a large-scale “.kids” domain, and, in the case of creating individual portals to the web, the need for individuals with technical proficiency to generate homepages. Young people also may not be willing to work within the “.kids” domain even if they like the content contained in it. Because of this, social marketing would need to be paired with other approaches that involve parents or other authority figures setting rules and limits on young people's Internet use. Examples of these approaches appear later in the chapter in the sections on mentoring and monitoring and creating acceptable use policies.

Page 51

inappropriate material online. Media literacy represents a set of skills required to critically analyze images and information represented in the media in order to evaluate the extent to which they are relevant and credible. For example, concept-oriented communication stresses the development of consumer competence and may be associated positively with adolescents' skepticism toward advertising and other harmful media content. In one study, mothers whose family communication patterns were based on concept orientation tended to mediate the media's influence on children by discussing and viewing ads with children (Carlson et al., 1992). A related study by Alemi et al. (1989) developed a computer program to allow teenage girls to practice making choices to prevent pregnancy. The feedback and information provided by the game to the teens allowed the girls to think critically about the contexts presented and practice decision making.

Information literacy describes the how-to skills of finding relevant and useful information on the Internet. For example, performing an effective search requires the selection of the right set of keywords, familiarity with Boolean logic, choosing the right search engine for the topic, and knowing how to navigate through a browser so that it is easy to enter and exit web sites, databases, and other online resource tools. Information literacy provides a set of strategies that could help to prevent young people from viewing inappropriate material in the first place (e.g., if a search returned a web site that the young person had learned to recognize was likely to contain sexually explicit material rather than information on reproduction, the user could simply choose not to click the questionable site).

The skills required to evaluate Internet content are a bit more challenging than those a young person would need to watch television critically. One of the primary differences is that many web sites provide what appears to be informational content but is in fact advocacy that may or may not be founded on research. Young people have a very difficult time telling the difference between compelling rhetoric and a compelling argument based on knowledge, and these are extremely important skills for today's children to acquire. Media literacy offers a set of cognitive skills that could protect against misleading information or a disturbing image by teaching young people how to recognize underlying messages, criticize them, and develop productive counternarratives (Mangleburg and Bristol, 1998). Finally, participants observed that media literacy could equip young people to deal with a wide variety of dangerous or inappropriate material online. Many viewed this as very important because they felt the attention to sexually explicit web sites comes at the cost of neglecting material that could be

Page 52

equally or more dangerous to young people because it encouraged them to make bad decisions about their behavior.

Joanne Cantor and Sarah Keller offered two studies of how media literacy can help counteract negative effects that young people may incur from their media consumption. Cantor conducted a study with elementary schoolchildren to determine if she could mitigate the aggression-promoting effect that research has shown often occurs with watching television violence. Investigators showed their young participants a violent cartoon but beforehand asked them to think about the feelings of the victim of violence throughout the episode. Viewers who received these instructions did not experience an increase in their acceptance of violent solutions to problems, nor did they find the cartoon to be as funny as those not instructed. This media literacy intervention reduced desensitization compared with the control group in the study (Nathanson and Cantor, 2000).

Keller conducted an online media intervention program with girls in their early teens designed to get them to think critically about the messages the media was providing about what women should think about romance, love, and sexuality (Keller, 2000). She asked the participants in the study to think critically about images they observed in the media and to identify how they thought the media was shaping their thoughts and attitudes about love, romance, and sexuality. The girls responded by criticizing the media because they felt the media encouraged them to focus too much on romance and trying to attract men. Their critical comments were used to help generate a web site with alternative images and messages that the teens thought reflected their own attitudes and experience with romance. The web site was pretested with 46 middle- and low-income girls of mixed ethnicities in New York City. Results indicate that recognizing the messages inherent in the media and being able to criticize those messages are important steps in being able to resist those messages, she said.

While such findings suggest that media literacy can help mitigate the impact of the media on young people's attitudes, the question remains of how to use media literacy in schools. Kathy Boguzewski, an instructional technology consultant with the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction, described how she used media literacy to teach students how to evaluate information on the Internet in two different contexts. The first took place earlier in her career as a library specialist. The only connection to the Internet was in the library, thus Boguzewski had a great deal of control over the way in which the Internet was being used, and it was relatively easy to ensure that students were not only avoiding inappropriate material, but

Page 53

were obtaining useful and effective online resources. Students used the Internet almost exclusively for research purposes, and their time was limited because access was available only in the library. Boguzewski would begin by talking to students about their topics and would then teach them search strategies to help them find relevant information online. Once they had found several web sites, Boguzewski would teach the students how to evaluate the information they found to determine if it came from a reliable source and if the information was accurate and reasonable. Some of the questions used to guide their evaluation included:

Boguzewski offered an example of how these questions can help teach young people how to be skeptical about information presented online and how to structure an analysis of it. Recalling a high school student who needed to write a persuasive paper and had chosen the legalization of marijuana as his topic, Boguzewski described the process she guided him through in order to differentiate valid information online from advocacy or misinformation. The student wanted to argue that marijuana should be legal and was generally an advantageous, if misunderstood, drug. Boguzewski did not judge him, but rather helped him to find web sites addressing this issue. After being disappointed by information on the American Medical Association (AMA) web site, which does not support legalization of this drug for a variety of medical and public health concerns, the student found a web site advocating for legalization. This particular

Page 54

teen was most pleased with his discovery until Boguzewski began to walk him through an analysis of the content offered on both sites. The teen recognized the AMA as an authority on scientific and medical knowledge and acknowledged that this information was pertinent to making evaluations of the benefits or negative consequences of using cannabis. In contrast, the web site advocating for legalization was published by a group that the student did not recognize and could not determine on what medical information the web site was basing its pro-cannabis position. Boguzewski suggested that the student email the contact person on the web site to ask why their position was in direct opposition to the AMA's regarding what the group identified as the benefits of cannabis. Unfortunately for the young pro-cannabis activist, the group did not reply to his email, so he had no other information through which to evaluate the credibility of the web site. Furthermore, the student agreed with Boguzewski that the questionable web site did not provide enough relevant or scientifically credible information to be preferred over that provided by the AMA, and therefore he could not use the web site as a basis for his argument.

In this example, Boguzewski taught both information literacy skills (e.g., using search engines effectively and selecting the most pertinent hits returned in the search) as well as media literacy (e.g., evaluating the extent to which information is relevant and credible). This was very effective in a one-on-one situation and allowed the opportunity for the adolescent to explore his views on a controversial topic in a controlled manner, forcing him to confront his assumptions while also learning the difference between web sites presenting research findings and compelling rhetoric. The limitation of this strategy is that it is time- and labor-consuming and in a one-on-one format would not be effective in a setting in which young people had extensive access to the Internet. However, one can imagine a computer classroom setting in which this experience could be translated into a lesson plan that walks a group of students through a web search and then as a group evaluates web sites that assume different positions on a particular topic.

As the availability of Internet access grew, one-on-one student lessons were not enough. Boguzewski began to train teachers in her school the strategies she had developed for evaluating information online so that they could use this process in their classrooms. The school institutionalized this process by including information literacy as an objective for student research papers—information drawn from online sources had to be thoroughly evaluated by the student, and this had to be demonstrated satisfac

Page 55

torily to the teacher. As access to the Internet has continued to grow in Wisconsin schools, a statewide policy about the use of technology was developed. This included an acceptable use policy to which all students must adhere as well as a series of developmental, educational objectives for the technology skills that must be mastered by a student by specific grades. For example, by 4th grade, students must be able to use web sites preselected and bookmarked by the teacher; by 8th grade, they must know effective search strategies; and by the end of 12th grade, they must be able to evaluate Internet content for validity and reliability as well as to assess the search engines for effectiveness and the way in which they returned information. Boguzewski stated that this plan is of great benefit to students because it teaches them a life skill through information and media literacy, which they will need in college and other settings that do not have filters or adults to provide critical evaluations.

As strategies to protect young people from inappropriate material, media and information literacy offer a number of benefits: they teach young people critical thinking, knowledge evaluation, and skillful use of the Internet (e.g., effective searching), which may make them resistant to a wide variety of media influences (e.g., messages that could encourage unsafe sexual practices or other risky behaviors as well as commercialism and direct marketing). Once taught, these critical thinking skills stay with the child and can be used in any other setting involving the Internet. In other words, children are always armed against inappropriate material, even if the particular computer terminal they are using is unfiltered or is in a situation without adult supervision. The limitations of media and information literacy are that it can be time- and labor-intensive, especially if one considers creating a school-based curriculum, and it does depend on young people's cognitive skills. For example, while a younger child could be taught effective search strategies, depending on his or her developmental maturity, advanced critical thinking skills may or may not be within his or her reach. An adolescent, however, can be more easily taught critical and evaluative skills, as his or her cognitive skills are likely to be much more advanced.

Page 56

reach is to raise parents' awareness about safety issues on the Internet that they need to discuss with their children. Many participants observed that the most effective way to accomplish this would be through a national public awareness campaign. Anne Thompson reminded the audience of the awareness campaign in the late 1980s, “It's eleven o'clock. Do you know where your kids are?” She suggested that a similar television campaign might be effective, offering the following slogan, “It's eleven o'clock. Do you know where your kids are online?”

This type of campaign would certainly reach a wide audience especially if television were the platform to reach people. It could pique parent interest, convey a few points of information, and refer parents to additional information. A drawback to this approach is that it would be an expensive endeavor and is likely to need support from a number of collaborating institutions. A less expensive means to accomplish this would be to create educational web sites, as The Children's Partnership has done (outlined below). However, only parents who are already online and perhaps seeking information would be reached.

In addition to raising parent awareness of this issue, workshop participants commented that there is also a great need for more in-depth training. Improving parents' efficacy with technology and “cyber parenting” are two extremely important areas of training and represent more difficult tasks, requiring a more hands-on intervention than a public awareness campaign. There are existing models, largely from nonprofit organizations, that have worked to both identify the specific concerns and needs of parents as well as to develop programs that would provide training to increase their efficacy with the Internet. Both Laurie Lipper, co-director of The Children's Partnership, and Eileen Faucette, founder and coodinator of PTA Live Online, discussed outreach programs that their organizations have developed to assist parents in guiding their children's online activities, as well as the concerns parents have about the Internet and technology in general.

Page 57

their children's online activities and media habits. They are also important players in leveraging schools and other institutions that serve kids both at the local and national levels.

That parents feel inadequate or incapable of providing guidance or setting boundaries about their children's online activities was identified by both Lipper and Faucette as a big impediment to children's safety on the Internet. From her research with parents, Lipper consistently heard concerns from them that their children know so much more about computers than they do, and that they did not feel like they could provide any relevant guidance for them. Yet researchers in this workshop noted that parents' involvement in their children's media activities are beneficial for their development.

In response to parents' desire for information to teach their children online safety, The Children's Partnership developed The Parent's Guide to the Information Superhighway, first published in 1996. The report focuses on how parents need to think about and approach technology, as well as how they can address Internet issues with their children. It is not a how-to manual on filters or web support, but rather offers guidelines and recommendations on age-appropriate strategies for setting limits and encouraging productive online activities for children. A summary of these guidelines is presented in Box 4-1. The guide includes practical tools available to help foster parent-child discussion about online safety and responsible online behavior. For example, the report contains a sample contract for the parent and child to sign that lists some dangerous activities the child agrees never to do (e.g., never give out one's full name, address, or telephone number or agree to a face-to-face meeting with another user). This is a useful pedagogical tool, especially for parenting younger children, because it provides a concrete set of rules and boundaries for safe and acceptable behavior that parents and children can review and commit themselves to. The guide also discusses how the Internet can be used to emphasize a family's own values through a relational and educational process between parent and child.

The Children's Partnership web site posts the guide along with several other resources for parents, including a step-by-step look at what parents can do to work with their children. The guide is also available as a Microsoft powerpoint presentation guide that can be downloaded and used in training. At the time of the workshop, the organization was in the process of posting the results of a national survey on best practices for parent involvement in technology programs and locally available parent training. The Children's Partnership also helped initiate several community technology centers in low-income areas with programs to teach parents and children how

Page 58

Page 59

to use the Internet and how to be safe online. The home page of The Children's Partnership links to many of these centers as a additional resource.

The Children's Partnership also conducted a series of focus groups with parents to find out what assistance they want with regard to the Internet. The information from these focus groups offers insight into programs that could prove effective in reaching a broader range of parents. In every focus group parents wanted to see a children-only zone with entertaining and educational material that was commercial free. Parents also requested information on important online issues that could accompany their monthly Internet bill or be emailed by their provider. Low-income parents expressed a great interest in more help from schools and teachers in offering education for both children and their parents. Parents also said they would like to see the industry set aside money to fund research on issues pertaining to children and the media.

Page 60

orientation to the Internet for parents. Live Online is a series of classes that include topics such as keeping kids safe and productive on the Internet, street smarts for the info highway, email ins and outs, search skills, and online literacy. The objectives of these classes are not to make parents more adept with the computer than their children, but rather to provide parents with enough exposure to the Internet that they feel confident talking with their children about their Internet activities and can set boundaries for activities. Creating effective cyberparents is the goal of the Live Online program, and Faucette tailors the classes to the interests and particular needs of the communities to which she travels. Sometimes Live Online is a series of topical classes, while at other times, Faucette will provide a single demonstration and presentation to raise awareness. Live Online is offered at a number of different locations depending on the needs of the community. A Barnes & Noble bookstore was the location of choice for the Fort Gordon community, while others have taken place at schools, community centers, and even at local businesses.

While Live Online serves to educate parents willing to attend a demonstration or class, Faucette had another strategy for conducting outreach with parents who were technophobes or who were unaware of the need to be involved in their children's Internet activities. Faucette's Sneak A-Tech programming involved taking computers to venues that had little to do with technology. For example, Faucette arranged to have computers and an Internet connection at a ladies gardening class and showed the group how to find information about planting, particular flower varieties, and seed availability. Faucette then used the opportunity to bring up issues related to young people, the Internet, and parenting to which the women were considerably more receptive after they had discovered that the Internet was not difficult to deal with and was even relevant to their own interests. She was able to sneak in a technology lesson in a nonthreatening way that the members of the gardening class enjoyed and were receptive to. With many adults, this is a very important first step toward becoming effective cyberparents.

Information, training, and hands-on activities such as those offered by The Children's Partnership and PTA Live Online can fill a knowledge gap and thereby assist parents in taking a more active role in their children's online activities. They may do a particularly good job of helping to address Internet safety with parents, although certainly programs could be tailored to facilitate approaches for parents to counteract other types of inappropriate material. The limitations of these projects reflect parents' willingness and ability to participate in such programs as well as their ability to make

Page 61

parents aware of the availability of such resources. Funding, of course, is always a challenge to such efforts.

Page 62

Parents can adapt this strategy at home by keeping the computer in a central location, such as the kitchen or family room, rather than in the privacy of the child's room. A classroom can be set up in a similar manner to the children's section of the library, in that computers can be situated to face the interior of the room so that the monitors are visible. In addition, sign-up sheets can be used to keep track of who is using the computer. In Chicago's libraries this is a necessity due to limited resources (i.e., the number of children wanting to get online exceeds the available computers so the sign-up sheet serves to regulate use). Dempsey observed that the sign-up sheet gives young users a sense of responsibility about how they spend their time online, because they cannot feel that they are anonymous users.

Such monitoring strategies as orienting a computer screen so that it is easily viewed by an adult in the room are easy to employ and come at no cost to teachers or parents. Volunteer programs, such as Dempsey's Cyber Navigators, also are virtually cost-free for institutions such as libraries if they have a volunteer pool from which to draw. In addition, Cyber Navigators or approaches like this program provide opportunities for mentoring relationships. Supervision does require the presence of an adult, but this can be turned into a time for adults and young people to interact and talk about numerous types of inappropriate material and safety issues.

Page 63

Page 64

Page 65

explicit pictures as well as harassing, defaming, and stalking other students. Material that disparages or harasses another student and is posted by a peer to a bulletin board can be particularly damaging and painful. For this reason, it is important for acceptable use policies to include rules making young people responsible for the content they create.

For an acceptable use policy to be effective, it must be communicated clearly to students and parents, it must come with consequences, and violations of the policies must be disciplined. It also needs to distinguish accidental viewing from deliberate seeking of inappropriate material. The former is best treated as an opportunity to educate the user about how to avoid such content in the future, how to remove it from their screen, and if necessary how to report it to the Internet service provider. A student who intentionally seeks inappropriate material would potentially be dealt with by some stated disciplinary action (e.g., loss of Internet privileges, call to parents, detention).

Linda Roberts noted that acceptable use policies are most effective when they are developed in conjunction with parents, community members, teachers, and students. Acceptable use policies developed jointly with the school and the community are more likely to incorporate the particular sensibilities of parents and can be designed to address specific concerns. One community, for example, may be more concerned about accidental exposure to sexually explicit material, while others worry about young people spending time in chat rooms. The process offers an opportunity for the community to consider the balance they want to try to strike between unregulated access to information or a more restricted use of the Internet. Such discourse can prevent future tensions between teachers and parents by allowing difficult and potentially contentious issues to be resolved.

Acceptable use policies can be effective in addressing not only sexually explicit material and content posted by students, but also other inappropriate material. These policies are low in cost for institutions, and although they require some effort initially to design, they are neither time- nor labor-intensive to maintain. The challenge in acceptable use policies lies in the extent to which they are clearly communicated to young people and then enforced.

Page 66

described this skill set as “responsible netizenship.” Willard emphasized the importance of providing young people with action- or response-oriented knowledge that would allow them to recognize and deal effectively with unsafe strangers, online predators, hate group recruiters, and sexual comeons. They must also learn to recognize when they might be vulnerable and what steps to take in problematic situations. For example, she described the typical process through which both sexual predators and hate group recruiters generally approach young people. They try to get as much personal information as possible and then start feeding them “candy” in the form of compliments. This may seem a simplistic and obvious strategy, but a young person—like many unsuspecting adults—may not be impervious to flattery. If the young user responds that they do not have many friends, the next comment might be “that is hard to believe,” or “your peers are really missing out, but you are probably too mature for them,” and so on. Young people need to understand explicitly how this process works, what to expect, how to recognize it, and how to deal with the situation. For example, an appropriate response would be for young people to contact their Internet service provider or to be encouraged to be assertive online in terms of ending contact with another user or declining instant messages from users who harass them.

Training in how to be a responsible netizen could come as a part of media and information literacy training, parent educational outreach on children's Internet safety, or as a part of acceptable use policies (e.g., a policy could state that in addition to expecting that young people will avoid sexually explicit material, they are encouraged and expected to take appropriate action if they have an unpleasant encounter with another user). Like other forms of training, feasibility depends on having time in school curricula, funding to offer training in other community settings, and a communication strategy that can bring this issue to the attention of parents, teachers, and other adults. Responsible netizenship is also primarily designed to address experiences in which young people are having problematic instances with other users rather than being exposed to inappropriate web sites.

Page 67

fied to teach as well as opportunities for professional development. Curriculum associated with certification should be reformed to include course work on various types of technologies, how to integrate them into the classroom effectively, and how to encourage a productive use of the Internet with a group of students. Roberts also wanted to see the number of professional development opportunities increased so that already-certified teachers have training opportunities to make them skillful users of technology and adept at incorporating technology into their curricula.

Mary Dempsey noted the importance of providing technology training to librarians and stated that ongoing training can be an opportunity not only to increase librarians skill with technology, but to also provide a venue for sharing strategies to keep young people on task with productive use of the Internet. Less formalized training in the form of regular meetings among librarians can offer the opportunity for individuals to share new information on technology (e.g., a newly discovered web site that is particularly good) as well as to discuss emerging issues and how to handle them. This less formalized training or knowledge sharing can help to disseminate new strategies individuals have found to be particularly effective in protecting young patrons from inappropriate material.