L-plates for cyberspace
All kids want to do what their elder brothers and sisters do, says La Trobe educator Jenny Masters, and that includes roaming around cyberspace.
A new cyber club program launched in May gives children aged 6-12 years the skills. It teaches them how to set up their own web pages, complete educational tasks and chat with their friends, all within the safety of supervised space.
Dr Masters is one of ten real-time mediators whose job it is to interact with users to promote social networking and guard against bullying.
'We operate like teachers in the schoolyard,' Dr Masters says, 'sorting out problems as they arise.'
innovative on-line playground is a collaboration between International company Intuitive Media and La Trobe's Faculty of Education. The project has received $1.2 million from the Telstra Foundation.
In the UK 100,000 children are members of the site with up to 500 connecting each night.
The Australian program already has 1,300 members. It differs from other sites in that children have to be registered by their classroom teacher to ensure the correct identity of all those on-line.
'Children use their own first names and typically chat to their classmates,' Dr Masters says. 'We are interested in promoting real communication not fanciful cyberspace identities.'
If there is a problem, users can press an emergency bell. This goes off regularly, says Dr Masters, for all kinds of reasons. 'So and so said I had a funny name,' one child complained. She had to mediate.
'We recognise that children want to use on-line services yet we want to protect them from stranger danger and bullying.'
She describes it as a 'scaffolded environment' that helps children learn the skills before they have Facebook. 'For a long time we have been trying to get children to be active rather than passive users of the internet.'