By Cameron Weston
CYBERSPACE can be more dangerous than real life, so a new course is teaching high school students how to travel through its vast reaches empowered and aware.
Five western suburbs schools, including Mt St Joseph’s Girls College in Altona, are involved in the ‘R U Tech Savvy’ project, in which 50 students aged 14 and 15 spend three days together to explore internet safety.
Topics include internet addiction, new forms of internet communication, mobile phone use and responsible spending.
The online world is a constantly changing landscape and the advent of new web forms, like the recent worldwide explosion of personal web logs or ‘blogs’, has presented new possibilities for unscrupulous users to exploit others online.
Paula Teggelove, a school psychologist at Mt St Joseph’s Girls College and a member of the program planning committee, said the ubiquity and accessibility of the internet had also created a new set of pitfalls for unwary users.
Ms Teggelove said that while younger users had grown up with internet technology and tended to be more tech savvy than older users, their lack of wider world experience made them vulnerable.
She said that seemingly incidental information given out online, like where someone worked and details of their roster, could be used nefariously by the wrong people.
Ms Teggelove said other issues like ‘cyber bullying’, where other students created derogatory web pages, spread malicious rumours or posted doctored or personal photos online, was a serious emerging problem for school-age internet users and would be tackled in the program.
Mobile phone use was also on the agenda, as text messages are also used for bullying.
All five schools involved in the project had enthusiastically embraced the idea, and the students themselves had responded very positively, Ms Teggelove said.
The program will also result in the production of an information brochure and poster, spreading the message that internet safety is an issue that needs to be taken seriously.
