Online safety - whose responsibility is it?

Interesting post on Linda's blog (nod to Vicki Davis for the link) about online safety. Linda takes issue with the ruling of judge who declared that it is the parents' responsibility to teach their children online safety. At this point, I think I agree more with the judge.

Linda lists five groups of stakeholders who she says need to take ownership of and be held accountable for Internet safety:

• Industry companies & organizations
  
• Governments & regulators
  
• Law enforcement & oversight boards
  
• Individuals & families
  
• Schools & other educational resources.
  

I agree that all these parties carry a responsibility. However, my view of the balance of responsibility is a little different. Linda likens the judge's ruling in this case as being on a par with holding parents responsible for the traffic deaths of their children, saying: "If someone hands a 14-year-old keys to a faulty car and says “go have fun” down a poorly maintained freeway that doesn’t warn of steep curves would society blame the parents for the ensuing crash?"

If the child had been properly educated by his parents and to a lesser extent, his community and his teachers, he would not take those keys, any more than he would have taken candy from a stranger as a pre-schooler. He would know it was both wrong and dangerous. He would have too much respect for his own safety, and for the safety of others to take such a risk.

While I support the concept of due care on the part of manufacturers, let's bear in mind that they are simply producing a product. The manufacturers of the car in the analogy above are not expected to shoulder responsibility when a child takes the wheel.

There is a worrying increase in reliance on regulations to protect our children and an abdication of parental responsibility. I have no desire to live in a society that is completely regulated "for my own good". Too Orwell, too Equilibrium.

One of the primary needs of every human being is safety/shelter. Sadly, we have lost much of the notion of community that existed in previous generations. However, a community of sorts still exists in the extended family and the school. Until I am convinced otherwise, I maintain that it is this community, most especially the parents, upon whom the onus rests to meet all a child's primary needs.

Linda makes the point that consumers have the right to be informed of the risks associated with any new product or feature. I agree. However, I would like to point out that many parents (and sadly many teachers) can't be bothered to make the effort to access the information that is available to them. For many of us, as long as the children are being quiet and aren't demanding our attention, we are content to let them get on with it. It is all too often only when the wheels fall off that parents sit up, take notice and look for someone to blame.

People like Vicki Davis expend an enormous amount of energy teaching children about netiquette and safety online. It is a tragedy that her efforts are so notable - they should be the norm.

Visiting? About this blog...

From time to time, posts appear that encourage us (bloggers, that is) to provide newcomers with an introduction to our blogs. I have tended not to do this, because my view was that the handful of readers already knew their way around.

Then recently, I received a message from someone via via via, to the effect that they were unsure how to go about subscribing to my blog. So I decided to rethink things.

First off, I have added a widget just below the blog title for easy subscription via a selection of aggregators. Since I have a Bloglines account, I have a "Sub with Bloglines" button on my browser toolbar, and this is the way I subscribe to any blog that sustains my interest. I recognise that not everyone (a) uses Bloglines as their aggregator and (b) knows how to do this! Apologies for a lack of inclusiveness in my approach.

I tend to be a bit of an end user blogger. I don't know how to add a widget to my blog that tells you how many readers I have had, nor would I know where to start to customise my template. I had to have help from Mark Berthelemy in adding that widget, for example. Mark is a total whizzkid, who fortunately belongs to the same team as I do for his day job. I wouldn't ever have believed that I would meet anyone more passionate about learning than me... and then I met Mark!

Another invaluable source of help has been Vicki Davis, who occasionally posts on "how to" do this, that or the other thing associated with blogging. I think that Vicki is slightly newer to blogging than I am (I started on 13 July 2005), but she has taken the bull by the horns and become a blogger of note in a very short space of time. She is also a very unselfish person and a born teacher who is willing to share what she knows with anyone who's interested.

My blog posts tend to centre around issues associated with learning: learning in general, my own learning experience and my reflections on the experiences of others (often my two sons). My field is the corporate environment, so my focus is on the workplace learner. This is my passion - post-compulsory learning under circumstance which are usually a long way from conducive.

Obviously there is some overlap with the fields of formal education, and my own current journey through a master's degree, coupled with my sons' adventures in a high school system that is alien to me (since I was educated in a different country), mean that I have an interest in this sector as well.

Since we are human and not very easily compartmentalised, I don't stick purely to my own fields of endeavour, but have been known to post about unrelated matters which have touched my life in some way.

Since blogging is in large part a conversation, I am a fairly prolific commenter, and you are likely to come across my name in the comments of many of the blogs listed in my Bloglines. I keep track of these conversation using CoComment, which has been proving increasingly unreliable of late - several conversations going completely unrecorded. I also welcome comments on my own posts, although I recognise that I seldom produce content that is of sufficiently stirring significance to attract a lot of traffic. This doesn't lose me any sleep. Like many other bloggers, my posts are a way of thinking out loud, of getting things of my chest, of committing my thoughts to a space where I can come back to them. If a post serves all these purposes and still strikes a chord for a reader, then that is a double bonus!

If you are new to this blog, I hope that this has been of help to you in some way.