ALA Launches Choose Privacy Week
RSSBy Lauren Barack -- School Library Journal, 05/03/2010
While students may have an innate ability to go online and navigate the Internet —understanding the ramifications of putting their personal details on the Web may not be as clear.
Enter Choose Privacy Week, an initiative of the American Library Association (ALA) that launches today to educate and raise awareness of how to protect information in a digital age.
“The point of Choose Privacy is to spark a nationwide dialogue of what privacy means to us, and what the privacy laws are today in the digital space,” says Angela Maycock, assistant director for ALA’s Office for Intellectual Freedom.
For children, protecting those rights is even more critical as young students often aren’t sophisticated enough to grasp what is appropriate behavior on the Web. School librarians can play a crucial role in helping to steer children towards tools they can use to protect themselves, say experts.
“Certainly we know young people are intuitively and naturally interested in social networking and other tools online,” says Maycock. “And so school librarians play a really important and critical part in this effort as they’re a starting gate in learning how to access information, and do it responsibly and safely.”
Yet how school librarians approach these lessons can vary, especially depending on a student’s age. A kindergartener may have a different understanding of cookies than a junior in high school and so teaching tools often need to start with very rudimentary examples and behavior models.
“We begin at a very young age teaching students that their library card is private, and what they check out is private, and we address it as an etiquette lesson,” says Linda Corey, chair of the Intellectual Freedom Committee for the American Association of School Librarians (AASL), and a coordinator of 36 school librarians in the Blue Valley Unified School District in Overland Park, KS. “They have a right to read what they want without people knowing, and we teach them that when someone is checking out books in front of you, you step back.”
The ALA is also offering online tips to educators and parents on different ways to approach privacy concerns with students at www.privacyrevolution.org.
While the Web site went live for Choose Privacy week, ALA’s Maycock says it will stay up indefinitely to continue to guide teachers, librarians, and students on how to protect information, and their privacy online.
“There’s a real gap in privacy knowledge,” says Maycock. “People are saying they’re very concerned about their privacy online. But they lack good information on how to deal with it.”
