Towards Online Safety 3.0

The South West Branch of the BCS Chartered Institute for IT has announced the first event of its 2009/2010 programme. The event, entitled Towards Online Safety 3.0, will be delivered by Ken Corish, the Education Advisor for Plymouth City Council, on Tuesday, 13th October 2009, at 7:30pm, in the Plymouth Lecture Theatre (Block C), Portland Square, University of Plymouth.

Ken Corish will review the opportunities that educators and parents have to build youth enrichment and empowerment to protect and enable young people online, through digital literacy and citizenship. He will draw on recent US research and current examples from work in the South West.

The official announcement for the event reports that: "The online-safety messages most people are getting are still pretty much one-size-fits-all and focused largely on adult-to-child crime, rather than on what the growing bodies of both Net-safety and social-media research have found. It very often fails to recognize youth agency: young people as participants, stakeholders, and leaders in an increasingly participatory environment online and offline. Though its aim is certainly positive, its message is still negative and lacks context. Much of it is largely irrelevant to young people."