Community Site for our KASKids?

Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by Dawne Smith-Sliming on May 29, 2010 at 5:37am

Rona,
I have to say this is an idea that I think holds great potential equal to the risk. The reality of our society and the threats children face is overwhelming. By creating an online forum for kids we would be undertaking a huge responsibility morally speaking and perhaps even legally.

Should there be a safe place for kids to build an online KAS community? Yes. Do I think we have the resources to do that? Not really. A safe site would have to be passworded and have layers of other protections in place. I don't know how we would safeguard against predators. Facebook, MySpace and other social media giants haven't solved that problem and they have staff and $$$ behind them.

If we had our own tech genius, our own code monkey like Casey over at ravelry I might feel differently.

I know that yahoo groups has a feature of offering closed membership groups. An international (or at least English-speaking) Yahoo group might be the best way to test if people really want an online KAS community for the school kids. We can do it invite only. The teachers could give us the emails of students allowed/wanting to participate and the group owner could manually subscribe each email. We would also need to have VERY strict rules about not giving out private details.

When my kids went back to school in grade 6 they were given an email without consulting me first. Let me tell you, that pissed me off quite a bit. The fact that the email was to be used only inside a school intra-net does not change the fact that the school did not consult me in something I deem to be MY choice and not theirs. It was supposed to be about emailing homework to the teacher which my kids ended up doing quite well from home, from my email account. And, of course, the intra-net at the school ended up hacked into and the filters reset etc.., You can imagine what went wrong there. Lots of stuff.

I think it's probably true to say that the average kid emails and MSNs and maybe even Facebooks etc.., It's still a very grey area of what age they can/should have this privilege. We might be opening up a huge can of worms when resources are already low.

I think this topic is best visited in a few years.

Sorry to be the downer and rain on the parade but those are my honest thoughts. I've been thinking about this for some months now since Cress and I spoke about it, very informally, through email.

Permalink Reply by Rona Malewit on June 1, 2010 at 4:41am

Dawne, no worries being a downer, we want all opinions! Thanks, Rona