The wonderful folks over at eSchool News put together this great program summarizing one of the most powerful and informative panels at NECC, the Internet Safety Town Hall, featuring Don Knezek, ISTE and Jeanne Biddle, Anastasia Goodstein, Amanda Lenhart, Douglas Levin, Lauren Nelson, Lan Neugent and John Slivka.

Back in February, I blogged about recent developments in the area of research surrounding social networks, online predation, and internet safety, led by the Crimes Against Children Research Center. This panel featured, among others, Amanda Lenhart from the Pew Internet & American Life Project. She is just one of many talented speakers who presented passionately at this panel. Forget the misreported and misunderstood statistics and fear-based “safety” programs … we have DATA here to help us really understand at-risk online behavior by children and develop ways to reach these kids. The risks have been overblown. Worse, some internet safety programs that have been built around misunderstood data have been discovered to be rife with errors – errors that would be costly to ‘fix.’ So, we’ve got to fix things ourselves, to know what we should be saying to kids.

Great panel, great production, great cause!

-kj-