PLN 5

I read an outrageous article called, “Black Monday: Bloggers on Trial” written by Vicki A. Davis about a class whose blogger accounts and website were ordered to be taken down by the Department of Education and Children Services in Southern Australia. This was a class of young students; ages about 8 or 9 who were using a type of online blog for a project in class. Some parents and other authorities believed that this was a big risk to the children’s safety and wanted the site taken down. I think that this is ridiculous for these kids to have to just delete all of their hard work. The teacher says that he did send out a permission form for the parents to sign giving the “okay” to set up these accounts for their kids. The students never put out any personal information including their names and it was a well monitored project by the teacher.

This relates to me because I clearly have a blogger account I do not think that it is very dangerous at all. Like any information that is put on the internet you have to be careful, but these kids were so I see no problem. We use these accounts for school I find them very effective and efficient. My teacher and these students teacher is always keeping an eye out for any information too personal that is being put on these blogs. Those students obviously had put a lot of hard work into those projects online and they had to take them down which would be very upsetting to an eight year old.

All over the world they are trying to prepare the youth for the future. It is very apparent that computers will be a huge part of this future so why are now they trying to prevent young people from using the resources we have? I think it is a great idea for these children to be getting involved in these online accounts because they will be using computers in the future so why not prepare them now? This whole situation could have been handled better then just completely shutting down these students accounts. They should have set up a more private account, or something rather than just cutting them off from the valuable resource such as the internet.