Protection of over 16 on t'internet

[Marcus]

http://www.bbc.co.uk/newsbeat/12020091

I can understand her viewpoint, but I honestly feel that she, like many other parents, has merely failed to educate her daughter on base truths about the internet and other media. Not all of it is true. Wrapping over 16s in cotton wool isn't going to help, you'll just end up with young women/men who are clueless and then get killed, rinse and repeat.

This appears to be part of a worrying trend of throwing gimmicks at the problem and hoping it goes away, like the absurd facebook panic button. If someone is being groomed, it is likely they won't know it, thus making such a button a useless waste of screen space.

Your opinions? Mine in a nutshell is that parents need to take more responsibility in educating their kids about the net and its wonders. Saying 'I wasn't in the internet generation' is no excuse.

[Jubal]

This is pretty true; education is more important. You can't wrap people in cotton wool forever; sadly certain members of the police force and health and safety services don't seem to have twigged yet.

[debux]

I think that informatics lessons (or however they're called) should be really implemented. For example, in my school, there is only informatics classes from 7th grade to 8th, which is ridiculous, considering as well that the teachers barely knows how to make columns in microsoft word. It was such an easy course that many of my classmates got out of the course, which wasn't even optional. Maybe kids should learn from early the benefits and dangers of having internet.

The older people, or that simply are ignorant of how important and massive internet is, should also get informed, although I'm wondering how they will.

EDIT: once I read the article, I think the person that made the mistake was the late girl. Why would she add someone she doesn't know? Why would she trust him? I know there must be an emotional or psychological problem (like of low self-esteem maybe) in between, but why didn't she mention it to someone?

[Jubal]

Absolutely. ICT teaching is genuinely a shambles over here, from 2008-10 I did THREE GCSEs in ICT to A* level and literally there was only one module where I learned anything major that was new to me (I mean, I learned how to do fancier things with excel etc, but it was only the one with CAD programs where I was confronted with anything more than a bit of tinkering and a lot of paperwork to get the grades).

It's fairly appalling (the trouble of course is that people who are good at computers go and make lots of money being good at computers, so school ICT teaching is usually done by failed science teachers or guys whose prior experience was a teaching course and managing a database somewhere they worked once).

[Andalus]

Before meeting someone from the internet, you need to be sure they are who they say they are, or arrange to meet them in a safe environment. It is the girl's mistake for not doing this, or the parent's fault for not explaining this to her daughter. The same would apply to, say, the dating ads in a newspaper. It's common sense.

[Jubal]

Indeed. Common sense should be a far more common teaching point in our schools though.

[comrade_general]

Common Sense 101

particularly 1:17  

[Son of the King]

Absolutely. ICT teaching is genuinely a shambles over here, from 2008-10 I did THREE GCSEs in ICT to A* level and literally there was only one module where I learned anything major that was new to me (I mean, I learned how to do fancier things with excel etc, but it was only the one with CAD programs where I was confronted with anything more than a bit of tinkering and a lot of paperwork to get the grades).

It's fairly appalling (the trouble of course is that people who are good at computers go and make lots of money being good at computers, so school ICT teaching is usually done by failed science teachers or guys whose prior experience was a teaching course and managing a database somewhere they worked once).

My GCSE ICT consisted of literally a 10/15 minute spreadsheet followed by a veritable mountain of paper, a PowerPoint Presentation (not presented to the class or anything remotely interesting like that) and another mountain of paper, and finally an Access database followed by the biggest mountain of paper I've ever written. Also 2 exams (I think each was 1hr long, maybe 1hr 30) of loads of really basic and dull stuff, a lot of which had nothing to do with anything we had learnt during the two years. To be fair, most of the two years was spent doing the coursework. All we ever explicitly were taught was the Data Protection Act (about 5 times) and the Computer Misuse Act (also about 5 times) which were on the exam for about 10 marks.

My A Level in Computing wasn't that much better to be honest (AS was particularly bad, since I had a better understanding of programming than my teacher from the look of things) and although there was more content the exams were very similar to my ICT exams (except mildly more technical in parts). The coursework was better (since it wasn't ICT coursework) but that was about it. Most of the marks lost in exams (at least from mocks) seemed to be from not answering the question using the correct structure of language they wanted.

[Marcus]

I went for an ICT BTEC at college, and for the most part it was good. I actually learnt stuff I didn't know.