UK online safety study

Ars Techica had a post about a recent British study that is "an independent review of how parents and children are being affected by the rise of new technology." I particularly like the following analogy. Byron, the author of the study, suggests that parents should treat technology as they do more traditional areas of childhood development, and makes two informative comparisons: crossing the street and learning to swim. Each of these is associated with risks, but parents manage them in stages, with education, followed by supervised exploration that ultimately leads to allowing children to explore largely unsupervised. Technology largely presents a problem because it lacks the intuitive and widely understood aspects of education and risk.

The full text of the article is available here.

[Image:Flickr: maveric2003:Eric Chan: "Kids on a rope"; http://www.flickr.com/photos/maveric2003/833326910/]