UNM students are taking kids’ Internet education into their own hands.
Information Security is a graduate level class at the Anderson School of Management. The course requires students to make presentations for kindergarten through 12th grade students in New Mexico schools, said Information Security Professor Alessandro Seazzu.
“The ultimate goal of the program is to raise students’ awareness of their own information and how to properly protect it,” he said. “The topics will usually gravitate towards social networks and how to put information that students will upload in social networks.”
Lecture topics differ between grades because children in elementary school use the Internet for different reasons than high school students, Seazzu said.
“There are now students in elementary school who already have e-mail accounts,” he said. “So we kind of tell them, ‘This is safe, this is not safe and this is the information that is appropriate to give and not to give.’”
He said Anderson students show kids Web sites that are safe to surf — like those of Disney or Cartoon Network.
High school students, on the other hand, are usually given information on the dangers of social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter, Seazzu said. Many high school students can share every detail of their lives on these sites, but they don’t understand the implications of doing so.
“What happens is that students in high school generally do not have a mindset that understands how relevant the information they place on the Internet can be,” he said. “They don’t realize that once it’s there, you can’t take it back. They also don’t know the extent that the information is accessible to others.”
Anderson students do Internet searches on students in the high school classes they present to beforehand, he said. They incorporate the information found into their presentations to show students how visible their personal profiles are.
“You can kind of show how, if you had the intention, you really could to piece their whole lives together based on the information that they freely uploaded and made available to everyone,” he said.
Anderson student Jenna Esparza said she chose to make her presentation on Internet safety to an English class at Eldorado High School yesterday.
Esparza said she encouraged students to make their Internet profiles private and taught them how to identify fake Web sites that cause viruses.
Get content from The Daily Lobo delivered to your inbox
“I gave them one article about how teachers have been fired over what they post on the Internet or on their Facebook sites,” she said. “Another article was about identity theft with Limewire.”
Esparza said many teens in high school aren’t picky when adding friends on social networking sites like Facebook and Myspace, and this is a dangerous habit when anyone with an e-mail address can make profiles on networking sites.
“They’ll friend anyone because they’re trying to get as many friends a possible and be more popular, and that’s not always safe,” she said.
Esparza said it’s also important for students to get educated about Internet safety at a young age because future employers can use Internet searches to decide on hiring employees.
“Do Google searches on yourself, as nerdy as that sounds, just so you can know what’s out there on you,” she said. “I just don’t think a lot of people understand what their actions can do. I don’t want to scare them, but I do at the same time.”
