Broaching the issue: older learners

Now let’s consider older learners. Listen to a teacher describing how she has raised awareness of internet safety issues with her university-aged learners, and consider the questions below the video. I’m Nora Tartsay, and I come from Budapest and I work at the Eotvos University in Budapest. So I teach university students. Have you ever had a problem with your students of cyberharassment or cyberbullying? Actually, they never talk about these things. They think they know everything about safety. And they think they’re very careful about that, too. So what they surprised me about was that, basically, when they were in secondary school they had problems.

So university students usually think that they are fine and they themselves don’t get harassed, or at least they don’t talk about that. Do you have a policy in your school regarding cyberharassment or cybersafety? Not really, unfortunately. There is a tendency to talk more about that, but universities are somehow neglecting this issue, I think, a little. So it would be more important to talk about that. And I feel that teachers don’t have the time, or they don’t think it’s their responsibility to talk to students about that. And what guidance do you give your students on cybersafety and e-safety? Actually, I don’t like to guide them myself.

So what I try to do with them is I ask them to work on projects. Right? So small-scale research projects. They do this in groups of three, for example. I asked them to go and talk to younger students. Secondary school students, primary, some talked to their families. And they asked questions about cybersafety issues. So one group, for example, interviewed 15, 20 students in a secondary school. And they themselves were amazed about the responses that they got. So instead of me telling them how important it is to talk about them, they could experience it themselves. Another group did interviews with online relationships that they had. So they asked their peers on Facebook, for example.

They looked at their profiles and they tried to describe the difference between the online personalities that their peers show of themselves compared to their real personalities and they tried to compare the two. And they were again amazed at the difference. Like the pictures they upload about themselves, the background information they give. How careless they are about safety issues on Facebook. So we talked a lot about that, and eventually they started to educate their peers, their the younger brothers, sisters, their parents, maybe. And they also told me how important it would be to talk about these issues in school.