I believe that we need to exercise the same amount of caution and awareness in the digital world as we do in our daily world. I remember when my oldest son was in the 8th grade and earned the nickname "Beast" from his wrestling teammates. One day in the US Mail, he received an invitation to view beastie.com and he assumed that a classmate/teammate had created a site to pay his wrestling skills homage. Although I trusted that the sender's intentions were naive and innocent, I immediately thought that the site would surely involve bestiality and forbade my son to visit it. He was stubborn and decided one peek wouldn't hurt. The next thing we knew, plaintive mooing was broadcast from our speakers and pornographic images began to assault him. We were bombarded by all kinds of unsavory pop-ups after that and we had to scrub the computer.
Logic dictates that we set some boundaries and work to build awareness about personal safety, identity theft, and common sense about what we want to be publicly seen on the media. We also need to educate students about technological threats of viruses are spread. I'd like to ensure that we educate ourselves about verifying sources of information from the internet just as we would in the "real world." I'd like to see students (and my adult friends) checking Snopes.com before hitting the "forward" button for more fearful stories. In short as we explore the possibilities of virtual lessons, we must include a component that aims to develop respectful, responsible, ethical citizens in this realm.
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