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Monday, August 04, 2008

P2P online-safety ed program

By "P2P," I mean by peers, for peers, and I'm referring to the logical idea of teen-communicated online safety ed, not the adult-taught kind - though it starts with young adult trainers. What's even more intelligent about the LEO Project in Syracuse, N.Y., is that it's really leadership training with online citizenship and safety folded in (safety in a holistic sense, involving critical thinking and behavior that protects reputation as well as well-being), the Syracuse Post-Standard reports. "LEO" loosely stands for "The Leadership, Education and Etiquette - On and Offline," and it's a project of Power Unit for Motivating Youth, a Syracuse after-school and mentoring program co-founded by a school district staff member, Akua Goodrich, who told the Post-Standard the program's about developing youth leadership in "the city and the state and the nation and the world" simply because the Internet's not just local. In one four-day class, 26 "ambassadors" who are high school students learn about "cyber safety and social networking issues as well as peer-to-peer marketing and career preparations. They are now developing a Web site [as well as individual blogs] to help educate their peers on the same issues and plan to visit elementary and middle school students this year to pass on Internet safety messages." It seems to me this is the kind of program that gets closer to reaching more at-risk youth (since research shows it's the young most at risk offline who are most at risk online - see "Profile of a teen online victim").

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