Australia

Here are a couple stories from down under.

Australia, May 28th [|Cyber Bullying on the Rise]

Sergeant Barry Blundell, of the electronic crime unit said that over the past couple years police investigations had been launched into cyber bullying in South Australian schools. He also recognizes "We receive inquiries from members of the public on an almost daily basis," he said. The article goes on to mention that often calls are from parents that are worried about the children's blog and offensive chat room behavior. This shows parents are interested in learning about how they can be involved in their child's cyberlife.

In response to recent concerns Education Minister Jane Lomax-Smith, launched a pamphlet about the realities of cyber bullying which will be distributed to all parents with children in years eight to 10. "It is particularly important that parents and the community broadly understand the issue, recognise the signs and can take initiatives to reduce the scourge." I think that perhaps the minister should go further by working with the school boards to provide parent information nights. A pamphlet on cyberbullying is fairly basic start at defineing the problem, parents need to be shown how to get online and exposed to sites children may frequent.

Australia, [|March 2 2007 - Youtube banned in 1,600 Victoria State Schools]

Is this really an effective method to avoid improper use of a great resource? Banning this service is irresponsible of the school system, students can go home and surf the site themselves, post what they want and get into trouble. We need to teach how to use services such as [|Youtube.com] appropriately and ensure guidelines are in place for school usage. By sweeping it under the rug the problem does not go away.

Australia, Feb 2 2007 - [|Bullied Students afraid to go back to school]

It is interesting to note that the problem students have power and ability to remove items from the net quickly and often hard to prove material existed. Principal Aurthur Graves quoted "Weblogs they are impossible for the school to deal with." See the video story [|here]. My note, maybe they are not impossible to deal with, I think the solution should be that students are taught to be aware of consequences of an online world. As we have seen in previous readings and articles, this too suggests that parents need to be more involved in monitoring what the students are up to online.

Melbourne October 24th, 2006 - [|Internet safety program Launched] listen to the podcast by selecting the media type at the top of the page.