Digital literacy and skills towards economic and social development – WS 06 2011
31 May 2011 | 11:00-12:30
Programme overview 2011
Addressing the digital divide is currently a hot topic of discussion around the world. With increasing awareness of the economic and social benefits of being online, there is accordingly, a growing number of initiatives aiming to tackle the digital divide and get people online. This has lead to an influx of new and vulnerable users on the Internet.
People
Key Participants
- Ivan Stojilović, IAN/Telecentre-Europe
- Agnieszka Wrzesien, Nobody’s Children Foundation/eNASCO, European Youth Forum
Co-moderators
- Ana Cristina Neves, Knowledge Society Agency, Ministry of Science, Technology and Higher Education
- Laura Hutchison, Nominet
Session report
The digital gap still exists: first of all in the dimension of access (technical equipment, geographical differences); and, secondly, in the dimension of Internet use by the people (children, youth, parents, teachers). It is acknowledged that the new technology has the power to bring educational content and empowerment closer to the people and to reach them at their preferred online-places.
The messages will focus on what should be done to reduce the gap as well as an outlook of tomorrow’s challenges. The overall goal is to make everyone a literate person online, able to act independently and able to make an informed choice.
In the dimension of access, Telecentres all over Europe play a major role as service providers and in terms of capacity-building. Yet, the topic of access needs to be considered as highly important and linked to social inclusion.
In the dimension of Internet use, youth organizations need to receive incentives to encourage more offers for young people. Besides, peer-to-peer learning programmes need to be extended (e.g. parents-parents, teachers-teachers, young people). The school curriculum needs to be shaped in order to empower children and young people. A minimum standard for e-Literacy needs to be defined.
Tomorrow’s challenges lie within the increased use of Internet technology on mobile devices as well as how society is going to deal with the aspect of transparency.
Transcript
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>> Digital Literacy & Skills Towards Economic & Social Development.
>> Good morning.
>> So in the context of the discussion, there are lots of people coming online and that’s increased the interest. And that means we have got to – and the question of digital literacy is becoming increasingly important –
>> Good morning, everyone. I am an advisor at European school net. And, therefore, I will address this from the point of view of education. First of all, I think it’s a bit of a misnomer because digital literacy is the capacity to mediate the changes of our times, to get meaning from our social context, cultural contexts. Therefore, I think that now digital aspects of our lives is old hat and so we should be talking literacy and not in particular digital literacy. And for me, literacy – does have to cater for those that can’t use written text. They are young children because we know that 75% of children are online by the time they are seven years old. Yesterday someone spoke about a grandmother in Morocco who wants to use this new technology, but in fact can’t – a lot of different social interactions which are magnified by being in a digital world where we can’t see the person we are communicating with and we can’t see all of those textual clues which help us interpret communication.
Initiatives to increase digital literacy or literacy. – a centre in 30 countries across Europe and we have been named by the European Commission to be in charge of awareness raising. Awareness raising to help people understand problems they can encounter online and avoid problems to the greatest extent possible, but also have the literacy skills they need.
Three of our populations, the one that we think need extra help are the very young children and here we have developed a book about being online, but in fact it’s for 4-year-olds to 8-year-olds where we actually take them through the steps of and socialize them into the online world by putting it on paper and you can see some of that over there.
We create things for children and their parents because we see the parents are also the greatest in need of new forms of literacy so they can guide their children and also be very competent users online. So this material you can find through – which you can find in 30 different languages all of this material. So I think it’s the older generation, the grandparents who play a very, very important role in the life of their grandchildren. It’s parents, but it’s also teachers who need to know how to socialize young people into this online world.
Why? As long as we have vulnerable users, we will have people who are going to take advantage of them. Everyone needs to be independent, self-sufficient, and have enough self-esteem to be able to encounter all of the new situations that they are having online. I think that I have said enough and I will pass it along to my colleague from the safe network because mobile technology has raised an even greater challenge and I’m not going to deal with that challenge.
>> AGNIESZKA WRZESIEN: My name is Agnieszka Wrzesien. Here in this session I’m speaking on behalf of European NGO’s working for social Internets for children and different stakeholders. And it is as Janice mentioned, I would like to talk about mobile Internet, what new challenges does it bring. And do these challenges require a specific approach in digital literacy strategies? When it comes to mobile technologies in Europe a lot of people – the findings from the online study showed that over 41% of children in ages 9 to 16 use the Internet via mobile phone or some kind of handheld device. Teenagers, they consider mobile phones as a kind of barometer – I think we need to realise that for many adults Internet is still a place where we go to do a specific thing. So we go to book tickets, to book hotels. So it’s kind of – it’s a very instrumental approach, I would say.
Children see it as a computer integrated extension of their everyday life. In their lives they are engaged in this media not as technologists, but as kind of cultural people. As new social practices and I think this media actually cannot be understood – as software or software and hardware. And now the question what – what does this mobile access actually change in the case of children and people? Such a high percentage of children are going online via mobile. It’s a chance towards much more privatised Internet use. And Internet guide has been a great concern for parents. Now with the emergence with numerous mobile devices, this is simply not feasible anymore, and basically there are two issues around – one issue is many parents are not of our culture are very unfamiliar. Many parents will be unaware of the fact that their child’s mobile phone has restricted access to the Internet and they will be unaware of what kind of – they already sought on the child’s mobile phone and even if for the sake of argument, we assume parents are informed and all types of applications are installed on the mobile phone, there is no feasible way that parents can monitor online activities of the child on the mobile phone.
As parents would have less and less supervision of our children online, and I think there is a clear implication for how media literacy strategists – all ages to deal on their own to be digital citizens online behaving in a responsible and ethical way.
Many children simply lack appreciation of how relationships can go online and with mobile phones it’s not only contents or a handful of contents. There are more issues, like, for instance, sexting, which is usually involving female teens sending pictures to their boyfriends and to find out that the pictures end up online. There is another issue of education-based services in which applications capable of giving information about physical location of individuals. This is very sensitive data and those applications are capable of being linked to social networking sites.
The concern is children, without fully understanding, may be publishing location data about themselves, especially over 25% of children keep their profiles public. And with mobile technology, it’s also important to stress that those risks are present at all times and wherever you are. Mobile Internet also very much reshapes the way children learn in schools because with the advancement of smart phone technology, what appears to be gaining importance to the concept of mobile learning which would be one of the streams of learning in tomorrow’s formal and also informal education.
And I very much like to – but I think parental authority also and he said if you want to use television to teach somebody, you must first teach them how to use television. So I think this argument can very well be applied also to newer media. So if you want to use the Internet, if you want to use mobile phones, computer games to teach, then you must empower students to understand how to critique this media. So we should not – but education about this media should be seen as necessary prerequisite for education with media.
So how digital media constructed how mobile phones work. Children need to understand who is communicating to whom and why, and children need to be aware of different commercial uses that are invisible to users.
Children need to know when they are being – commercial companies and how information they are providing can be used by these companies. Of course, this should also be extended to non-commercial sources and interest groups because there are – often using the web as a means of persuasion and influence. And I think I will stop here and some other comments for the discussion. Thank you.
>> I think that we are going to show a movie. Now, we are going to talk about policy and I don’t know how many of you are getting this idea and idea of telecentres. So telecentres are places where – empowerment and so eventually focus on how telecentres and tools for digital – capacity building toward economic and social development. To make full use of this, use of telecentre is center around – hardware in municipalities where institutions have telecentre, cultural, recreational, so on, so far, meaning that we are talking about a network that goes much farther than the school itself.
>> Thank you very much. Ladies and gentlemen, my name is – but I also represent here Europe and I will start my presentation with a short movie about – and what is the use of this net book. We go now to the video.
(Video shown)
>> The more important issue is – raise the rights of Internet what social implications this leads – so it’s more social content we need to deliver in order to address this need for more literacy among – we don’t know quite how to do this. Traditionally education systems – approach certain content is establishment needs to be necessary to deliver this information, but also it is necessary to somewhat – and to understand this Internet is based upon initiative of individual people. So I think discussing how we should – digital literacy it’s to understand we need top down – digital literacy and we need to provide a foundation for people to take initiatives such as Internet society. It’s crucial to understand our understanding of – actually need for different approaches than – functioning elsewhere. So we are talking about – education. We are talking about different approaches on content, information and makes education necessary. Applications are somewhat interactively educating – you are talking collaboration, talking about open source, talking about knowledge base, talking about demographic – opportunities for people to – we are talking about media technology, we are talking about technology that are able to reach out to large amounts of people at the same time. So we need different approaches, and there is so much necessary to – young generation. What is interesting – discussions we are talking about threats, but in our understanding, our opinion is much more about talking about opportunities. It’s much more about promoting benefits while creating critical thinking, and this critical thinking – this will allow for very young generations, but – we propose three steps to improve this understanding. Second step is to educate young people on how they can participate at a certain level, and it’s something – so one thing is to use it and the other is to actually reshape how to utilize all of the benefits of Internet.
>> We have some participant questions – parents of children goes to a session of having control over kids and what young people are doing with the Internet. So question is how to address this sort of session of digital control. Thank you.
>> Yes, it’s true. There is a trend to push parental controls – all sorts of techniques and there is lots of talks. In the telecentre we have come to one conclusion, and this is for almost ten years of experience, only one thing works, and it’s conversation and dialogue between the children and the parent. So everything that we do is trying to push parents to have something like paper that makes them feel comfortable that they can begin to look at with their children that triggers a dialogue.
And I think that this has to carry on right through the child’s – as he becomes – child’s childhood. Parents have to become involved with what child is doing online and could form own ideas and try to do similar things. Facebook is a question that often comes up. Should a parent have a profile on Facebook because his child has a profile on Facebook, and is this the best way? Well, certainly, it is a good way to guide if the parent is comfortable with having a profile on Facebook. We must remember that young people learn from the models we give them and very rarely from the restrictions we put on them or from the monitoring that we do.
So I would say it can become – that if parents remember this fundamental that children learn by doing and by talking with parents, we can overcome this.
>> Does anybody have any comments on that question?
>> I would like to know what to do with children that are actually –
>> The question? Yes, it happens and we have a lot of calls from orphanages and boarding schools because it’s a big problem there. It’s difficult to have dialogue if you have a dozen children all wanting dialogue. We give the same instructions. They need to find some way around this. They need to find an older person that feels close to that child that can have the dialogue. This is one where we are educating teachers because many parents, unfortunately, the parents aren’t listening to what people like me are saying and they are too busy earning money. 1% of children under the age of four in higher income, higher education families actually have a mobile phone, whereas 4% of children in families of people – or without diploma have a mobile phone. It shows that this is exactly the type of families that we need to reach here. We are putting an enormous weight on the shoulders of educators.
>> I think that many families – actually I would like to comment on the previous part. I do agree that dialogue is very crucial. It’s very important, especially when you take into consideration in the first place where children go online is at home. It clearly shows that parents, guardians are primarily responsible for guiding children through the virtual world. And let’s talk about mobile access, probably mobile phones there needs to be much more elements – the question we can ask is actually where does this come from? It’s simply that parents do not receive enough support probably, and I would say that different strategies need to adopt the stakeholder approach for different educational programmes are one part of the solution which helps to insure that children benefit from new technologies and have positive experiences in the digital world.
We also need to invite other players who are also present here who have a huge role to play in supporting children and people and everyone who is online. Thank you.
Thank you.
>> I would like to come back to – a question from –
>> I comment on this subject as a parent and heavy user of Internet and a family that has four members and four computers all at different places. We use Skype to communicate between ourselves. It has not alienated us. It has helped facilitate scheduling and stuff. We talk a lot. We have maintained close relationships with our children, so we were blessed that the kids grew up before Internet became such a huge issue and they are now independent enough, 16 and 21, to be safe on the Internet, but I work in broadcasting, and broadcasting has solved the issue as much as the issue can be solved.
There is a consensus across very many countries that the ratings should exist, and countries have developed a system, age-based system. There are three things that will protect the children from broadcasting, that’s violence, sex and profane speech. And these three things are the only elements that you want them protected from at certain ages. By 10 they believe in Santa Claus and there is age steps that we can cross. So it’s technically possible, we have seen yesterday what the – locally has done with accessing to the e-administration portal, you can work with companies that basically have sorted out these issues on their own. You can technically programme the content as long as we agree which content is appropriate for which age.
We could ask the IP companies to literally label the content and programme the computers and the mobile phones to not access certain content over a certain age. That would be a really simple system that could work. It doesn’t work perfectly, so there is – there has been undergoing this process of rating the programme for years now and they cheat whenever they can. They will pretend this programme is for 14-year-olds when it’s actually for 18-year-olds, and there has been steps back and forth with that, but it’s a fairly good system when implemented properly and can be done and it can be done on the Internet as well.
>> Thank you so much. Can you introduce yourself, please?
>> Hello. My name is – Student Communication Council. I find this very interesting about the telecentre so we don’t – we have policies, we have infrastructures. The question is why these – are not affected, why we have no results. Personally I have – service in Portugal and I believe in education, so I was able to make – and the problem we had is that people there lack information and education –
>> You were working in the telecentre?
>> So our aim was to implement cultures and educate countries to promote these centers. So after our object was finished with family participation and youngsters were very interested in engaging in this. So maybe we need to – interpersonal conversation. We have schools approaching us. Some people aren’t educated enough. Some people are. So my question is maybe we should stop our – and more education of face-to-face communication to – this is my first question. And the second one, it’s the responsibility of the producer and the question of how ethical is, for example, to use – and I would like to ask you what kind of – you use in telecentre, is it open source software or is it – because software in school that we had to – and not all are able to afford this software. Maybe we should also use open source software. Thank you very much.
>> Thank you for the question. My answer is the country. In some countries – there are many initiatives in communities which are good from our – but there is no talk at all about the education of people, about people who – how to teach. So from my perspective, the main problem is how to include people to use technology to make them – unfortunately in Serbia there is no strategic foundation towards – of people we stick towards motivating and making more affordable computers and Internet for people, especially those who are – the second question includes how to tell something inside what kind of software it is. So in our telecentre we have one Microsoft and instead we use open source. But to be honest, in Serbia, using media software is a big issue here and it’s not such common to have Internet Microsoft because of policy.
>> May I ask you if your telecentre network is marked for youngsters, to adults or elderly as well?
>> It depends on who is – in Serbia. More than half the population does not use computer or Internet and especially persons with disabilities and poor people do not use Internet. To offer them access to computers with Internet and to teach them how to use Internet – more than 90% of jobs are using ICT. So if those people now were – in five years they will be even more excluded. So there is a huge gap between 20, 25% of population who are vulnerable and those who are not. And we are trying to somehow decrease this gap.
>> Two are – one is more focused on small areas, and there is about 50 telecentres and there is another second one focused more on – but the problem is that unfortunately in Serbia it is not vision, it is not – for those telecentre. And for all of these telecentre are – so we are applying for projects and –
>> Thank you very much. Interesting insight. Any other questions from the audience?
>> My name is – what seems to be missing, and I may be wrong here, but what seems to be missing is we have excluded sets of people – or whatever in Serbia or residents of inner city – which does happen. We offer them opportunities through good initiatives like yours, but it seems somehow that that is not going to work. Somehow you have got to actually bridge that gap rather than just offering these things. Perhaps this is being done, but it doesn’t seem to me that it is, and I just think that that gap which you so describe is going to get wider and wider because there is no way of actively reaching – reaching these people to get them to understand the benefit. You can’t force them to use it and if they choose not to, that’s a choice, but I’m not sure that choice is presented to people, not actively anyway. I wonder perhaps if you could comment on that?
>> Based upon information – there is also a huge demand for the type of services we are offering. We have some – on the economic, social and especially – offering our services. And we know that after – communication there is a general movement – people feel more secure, people have better motivation, greater motivation – 30% of unemployed are finding jobs after our courses. Some of those groups are – in our centre, we are trying to re-establish this network. So it is a matter of – there are some groups, for example, some of them network. It is also a matter of social inclusion and –
>> You increased my worry there because you said you had 400 people waiting. What you are doing is yourself selecting those people in those groups, or maybe, they are self-selecting the people who have that ambition to get on any way, but actually to avoid getting the second class system which is getting wider and wider as the government gets stronger. You have to – those people don’t put themselves through, that was my point.
>> We are offering more and more telecentres in Serbia. I think this is the best way. And, for example, my NGO – because we have more than one kind of people calling us for those kinds of services, so we are underfunded unfortunately.
>> Thank you. Comments. There is one comment which feeds into this debate – so in very – countries they first care about the usual – but in Internet is usually very bottom of the list. So the question is could top down incentives help from governments or what do we need to motivate governments to put an incentive that’s also Internet becomes higher on the agenda and, yes, this is – but governments are motivated to bring everyone online. So that’s it.
>> Hi, I wonder if anybody from the audience would like to react because we think that there is nothing to – there is no – and these kinds of things. They have already discussed – World Summit of Internet Society and – it is a forum of dialogue between developing and the least developed countries and developed countries. And it is a non-event. We have these kinds of discussions so what we need is regional IGF and we have this world IGF with all of these countries and we are focused on development. And if you – how ICT is so high on their agendas for now, and even when they have new governments, they always have a minister responsible for Internet society or ITT or something related to information society. And then we have also the partnership that was formed years ago in Africa, and the partnership is invented for science, information society, and space. And African countries, they are so keen on this partnership and they are working very hard.
And on the telecentre issue, there is also a telecentre network. And it includes developing countries and the least developed countries. And in fact, a lot of based in – and the reality of this structure of the telecentres is something that it exists to change the paradigm. For instance in Portugal, it exists in 200 telecentres and – because they are not in schools, they are in municipalities, institutions, various centers and parliament and Training Centers. It really depends on the dynamics of each municipality.
So in Africa, in Asia they are very active in this area. And mobile have really helped the use of the computers and to use the telecentres.
>> Once again, this is a very positive topic, but actually as we – education I would expect looking more into the – education to use education to progress our society – our generation are actually making use of Internet.
>> I think that it’s very important, yes, you are right, we need to look at these people who are being excluded.
>> I think the problem is that every generation – top down education to a certain degree. So quite often we try to use these kind of approaches and control the experiences, but actually the – it’s about incentives you need to provide in order to make the – generation, about enabling these people to take action to actually –
>> Nevertheless, I think that it’s important when we are talking about the excluded to see who is excluded and why. Because the child who goes to school normally should not be excluded. I know that – are very bad. In certain countries there are only one computer per 20 people. In the best it’s eight pupils per computer, however, if you look at it this way, you see that the younger generations are getting access if they are going to school even if they do have disabilities, they are getting access. I have recently been through the saga of my father-in-law, age 80, going online. I’m pretty horrified because there is no top town incentive to give cheaper computing, cheaper Internet access to the older generation. They pay exactly the same we do. And this is really heavy for someone who is on retirement. Secondly, no matter the instructions that you give when you go into a shop to buy his computer, he will come out with the most expensive object because there is no real understanding in these places that sell computers of what the needs are and how we should cater to these needs. There is also another top down incentive that would help, and it’s called positive content, because even kids online show that young children, well, children age 6 to 12, they consider that there is not enough really good content for them for their age and for what they want to do to be able to get the most out of Internet.
So top down incentives could really help here – and the commission has a positive content competition going on and what they have found is there is really not much positive content for this really young age group. So there are top down incentives that could be put into place. It wouldn’t solve the problems of everyone, but it would solve the problems of the majority of those who aren’t having adequate access to Internet at the moment.
>> I’m just asking you to look a little bit more into a better way to create Internet – shapes the future.
>> We are talking a lot about our – when there is no access to a computer or the Internet. First, introduced problems of – but there is access to computers and Internet, but there are some problems with using it, like risks for young people when using the Internet. And my question is about that. There is, I think, some problems with reaching these groups, these groups high risk in using Internet because of – young people and kids are reaching down with – because they are on the Internet. Peer to peer education where there is not a top down reaching group, but peer to peer projects.
>> Did you have a question?
>> I have a comment that has nothing to do with the question just asked. So I’m not sure if this is the right moment to make that comment. I think the problem here is we are talking about top down incentives is they come from governments and thus from people who are kind of stuck in these old school ways of thinking, because I don’t think it’s about good content or bad content. I don’t think it’s about having age barriers for content on the Internet.
It’s about understanding the Internet as something that is, it’s not a place. It’s a – it changes the whole way we work, the way we collaborate, the way we communicate, and I think in order to unleash the potential, this is where we have to start. And I don’t see this coming from a top down approach because it would have to come from people who haven’t understood that yet. So I am skeptic about top down approaches. We need more bottom up approaches because otherwise it won’t work.
>> Thank you. I would just like to come back on the first question – and we ask for people to people to centre who are dealing directly with the Internet and just off the top of my head – made changes for children on using the Internet. And youth organisations to adopted a – but to share the knowledge for intergeneration education on Internet. That’s just one example, but I wanted to flag that there are – that allow initiatives.
>> There is an initiative, European-wide initiative. Every centre in 50 countries consists of an awareness raising body, a help line and a youth panel. And the role of the youth panel is to understand what campaigns are going to be ruled out to criticize the adults who are going to put this out, and to criticize the material before it’s actually published. So that way, first of all, youths are really involved, but secondly, the role is peer to peer.
And in Romania, for example, there are now 2,500 youth panels working in the country, and there are even peer to peer initiative from the age of 4 upwards. So in every – in the 30 countries, the 27 – Iceland, Norway and Russia there are peer to peer actions and some of them extremely – and it is a great way of tackling the problem.
>> Yes, briefly on the peer to peer model, you are right, this model is becoming much more common and we are – in Poland we are just about to launch a project with students in every Polish school and I assume it’s the same in other countries. There is a student council which takes lead on the front issues in the school setting. So they are having us work with members of the student council that would actually take lead on different initiatives like Internet safety and work with colleagues in school setting. I also wanted to refer to one of the – that Thomas mentioned earlier which I find super important which was about social, the social consequences.
And one example I would like to give you is that it’s not only for all people, for all of us, probably, because in different educational settings nowadays, we are taught, for instance, how to seek, how to look for a job online, how to write a CV, how to write a nice resume, how to do online application, but what seems to me not to be enough emphasis is what kind of consequences our digital footprints may have on our professional life, even with delayed consequences.
It is obvious nowadays that employers are reviewing or using web search to review candidates. They are reading profiles on social networking sites. So I think we also need to think of maybe from a long term perspective, but this is an issue and it’s not about looking for a job, but it’s also for applying for university, applying for trainingships, so on.
>> I have three projects in regard to this examples of good practice, and one project in Thailand is – it’s kind of a project that is applying these kind of technologies available in order to incorporate young persons that want to – I think it’s crucial to understand that there is not either online and – and offline work. All work is online these days and in this regard I would like you to consider when it comes to digital literacy other stakeholders in this kind of basis, because, for example, in the – you can perfectly combine – on one side you educate people how to use it for people building, how to involve other people on other topics and issues, while at same time educating how the – educating – so I think it’s a multistakeholder approach that needs to be applied in this regard especially.
On the other hand, it’s crucial to understand this change we always perceive in the next couple of years and you cannot really control it. So it’s a little bit about what this awareness raising actually means. But the change is happening. It needs to happen in a transparent world and – it is necessary to understand that this world, the future, it’s the future of tomorrow. It’s been being available online. And companies who are running – are looking online and we don’t find any Facebook pictures. Is it just – come from other pictures. We don’t hire them anymore because we know that they are pretending something.
And it’s the future tomorrow is about being authentic and being for real. But children should be protected and there should be a safeguard.
>> I don’t believe that now everybody is online. And we need to have those people not online to be online. Secondly, Internet is a place for everybody, not only our children, young, and seniors. We need to have this different approach for each operation no matter the age, education level, income, whatever.
>> I’m glad you agree with it about transparency and about the dangers of Facebook, images of wildness and such because even if it is a problem with somebody, it’s a very transitional problem because eventually everybody will have their indiscretions on Facebook and you won’t be able to distinguish one from another. And I would like to just emphasize what you said as well. I’m totally with you on what you say about content for those people who are online and for the new ways of working. But as you said, what we are doing by saying the whole world is now online, there is no such thing as online, offline is included those –
>> There we go again, that’s infrastructure discussion. We need to take notice about it. I’m just talking – what I’m so motivated about is failing to generate – it’s education –
>> One is about how do we get people online who are not online which is an important topic and how do we protect children and groups who are vulnerable, and how do we actually use the tools and things that are available to improve society? Because I think it’s impossible to unite these very different subjects in one workshop that lasts for 90 minutes and expect it to have any tangible outcomes. So I hope next year we will have more space to discuss these issues and we will have workshops on all of them separately.
>> Just following on from that, we are – we do have five minutes.
>> A comment on my experience. I’m not – we began acclimating schools in ‘97 to Internet. I was involved in many schools and inside the daily life of schools. This is a difficult task because it is a generation gap, a very big generation gap between parents and kids. They don’t understand each other. The same with students and teachers. The students are very skilled in using Internet.
There are many teachers that aren’t. But we have a problem even if parents are very specialized in technology and were telling kids don’t do this, don’t do that, there is a big problem that usually what parents tell kids don’t help. I was going to use the example when my daughter, now she is 32, when she got her driving license, I said be careful, don’t overspeed, they overspeed. They don’t understand a lot of the dangers and luckily she never got in car accident.
But in Internet – I have some friends that are teachers in schools and I offer myself to go there and try to give my experience about the safe use of the Internet. So sometimes I go to schools and I try to bring parents to schools. So I offer to be the seminar in schools and they say the seminar is for parents and students. Some patients have curiosity, they go to seminars, and my feeling is that most of them don’t know what is Internet. They have a very, vague idea about what is Internet. They are afraid of talking to children.
When I encourage please talk to children, ask them what they are doing on Internet, which web sites they are visiting, parents are afraid. They are afraid of talking to children – the schools are very important role because I must confess I’m not very optimistic that parents can contribute to teach children about dangers of Internet. The school has to do that. We – teach students not to disclose personal information. Not very optimistic that you can change misuse because children – try to react to advice from parents. Okay. That’s all.
>> I’d like to come back on that and say that –
>> Well, I’m a dreamer. I think that we can make it, but we need mixed types of learning. We need informal, we need formal. We need the right terms, the right tools to do this. I dream of the day when we are going to find a social networking tool that teaches safety in school, for example, so that we can put the social and the cultural back into school. I also dream of the day where parents will be empowered enough not to think that their lack of knowledge of the computer prevents them from giving this very important help that they can to their young children.
So I will finish with let’s come up with some great ideas for empowering parents, empowering teachers, and making sure that literacy is a very broad range of skills including critical thinking, social, cultural so that young people can mediate all of these fabulous tools we have today to have a good life ahead.
>> Just in finishing that I can see how many persons we have – so just briefly – there remain a lot of questions open, and I’m wondering how to proceed with these questions and whether the – will be up to take the questions and give answers afterward.
>> I would like to ask you to think more about these opportunities and forget about – because there are so much unnecessary, but be open to use these kinds of – coming up, and – and this kind of – apply to education to the students.
>> Internet is a huge space for communication, getting information and making – everybody should have a chance to be a part of this space.
>> My final remark is that when we are speaking of digital, implementing of different digital initiatives, we need to integrate – and the stakeholder approach. Schools play a special role and governments that – within school curriculum, but I think we shouldn’t overlook the other players, for instance, NGO’s, the telecentres we have today, and also industry and – who also have the power to empower parents and to work with elderly people who we shouldn’t forget. Often in families our primary – and sometimes grandparents actually spend much more time with children than parents do, and this also creates a lot of potential, I think, for talking about the –
>> Thank you very much. I would like to thank all of you and the panel.
We are pretty much on time. Thank you.
(Applause).