As a teacher and parent, I am most focused on teaching digital citizenship skills to my students and my children. But let’s face it: adults need help learning about how to effectively read and understand technology, too. I had a reminder about this when I saw that my state (Massachusetts) had put together a new website resource to teach residents about Internet business scams and how to protect yourself from them.
Hosted by the Massachusetts Consumer Affairs Division, the website (Top Massachusetts Deals) lets folks know that the links are all fake websites, but if you stumble on one of them (such as the one about weight loss, or medical billing, or great Internet deals) and click on any of the “pay links” or “free stuff” links, you get a nice, large alert that THIS IS A SCAM. The scam part of the site also provides very details explanations of why it is a scam, and what you need to be looking for before you pull out your credit card.
I love that our state is doing this, and I hope it becomes part of a larger campaign to educate people about the need to be literate in many ways, including the ability to “read” a website, determine its origin, think about the legitimacy of product and owner, and make an informed choice based not on the flash and graphics, but on the content of the material.
Peace (in the know),
Kevin
Comments
Erin Wilkey Oh
on Jun 14 2012
at 15:05
I totally agree
Thanks for sharing this, Kevin. It reminds me of my time teaching English to recent immigrants and refugees at a community college. The first semester I taught, I had a student bring in a stack of mail and ask me to tell him what was important and what wasn't. Every single piece of mail he brought was junk mail--advertisements and companies trying to get him to sign up for something. It stuck with me as a perfect example of how literacy involves so much more than just being able to read text.
And of course, it is the same for digital texts. My high school students often struggled to differentiate between the ads and the real content when searching online. Very cool that Massachusetts created this. And it's a great resource for lessons on evauating websites.
Thanks!