Three metaphors for eSafety teaching or training
modified Flickr CC-licensed image from Elephi Pelephi
I’ve been doing a lot of esafety sessions with students around Wolverhampton over the last two years with small student groups, whole year groups, teachers, parents, and LA officials. Here are three metaphors or ideas that I return to time and again (possibly, too often?) when highlighting some of the key issues.
1. The Internet is a tool. Like a spade.
I often set the scene for eSafety sessions by considering the question “Is the Internet Good or Bad?”. A few years ago, AOL used an advertising campaign that included two films. The first was entitled “The Internet is Good”. The second (surprisingly) was called “The Internet is Bad”. Here they are:
Students will happily debate whether the web is a “good” or “bad” thing, and many are savvy to some of the “techy” problems that can arise: popups, viruses, hacking and so on. Following this debate, I "steer" the debate to my my opinion that the web is neither “good” or “bad”. The web is a tool. Like a spade. A spade can be used to do good things: planting crops, or digging the garden. It can also be used for doing bad things: I could bash you over the head with it and bury your body in my garden. Yet we wouldn’t accuse the spade itself of being a “good” or “bad” tool. It’s the person using the spade that is good or bad. The internet is the same; simply a tool for people to use. They may choose to do good things with it, or bad things.
2. The Internet is like a swimming pool
This is lifted straight from the Byron Review. Here’s the narrative of the metaphor. If I want to keep people safe in a swimming pool, there’s two approaches I could take. Approach no. 1 is to only have water that comes up to your ankles, and to surround the pool with 50 lifeguards. You’d be very safe in that pool. But would it be a fun pool to use? Would you visit? The answer is no, of course. Instead, what can we do? We adopt the second approach: we teach you to swim. This helps you to look after yourself. We do have lifeguards in place in case you get cramp in the deep end (the equivalent, in our metaphor for esafety, of reporting a problem, should one occur), but, fundamentally, it is education and support that helps to keep you safe, not heavy-handed restrictions that limit the fun or usefulness of the web.
If I’m feeling a bit melodramatic: “The purpose of this session is to help you to swim safely in the waters of internet, taking care of yourself as far as possible, but with the knowledge of how to contact the lifeguards if something goes wrong”.
3. The Sandwich Board
The idea of the Sandwich Board came from the CEOP ThinkUKnow training. I typically ask for a volunteer to come up to front. I ask the rest of the class to imagine that their classmate has a sandwich board over their head. (I wish I’d actually taken the time at some point to buy or build a real one!). Often, I need to explain what a Sandwich Board is. (Explaining the concept has been helped recently by Dominos Pizzas dressing their staff in pizza boxes and making them stand beside main roads in Wolverhampton).
The script goes a bit like this
Now, imagine that onto the front of the sandwich board, I write your full name, school name, email address and mobile number. On the back, I put some photos of your friends, and a list of your movements (your status updates) over the last year. Then I send you down to the City Centre on a Saturday afternoon, wearing your sandwich board, to wander round for a couple of hours. Are you going to be happy about that? (“No”). How many people might see you and your information? Let’s say it’s 10,000. Now, how many people could see that same information if you published it onto Facebook, and didn’t protect it by changing your privacy settings? Many millions. The number of current users of Facebook is approximately 550 million. If Facebook was a country, it would be the third most populous in the world, after China and India.
I hope these metaphors are useful for you too. Do you have any others to share?
eSafety in Teaching and Learning 
Reader Comments (2)
Just a test comment by me to check the appearance of "Latest Comments" in the sidebar
A second comment to test the comment spacing!