 |
| Sieber (2010) |
Mrs. Smith considers herself to
be a pretty savvy computer user. She has been working with computers for five
years and uses them regularly in class. Mrs. Smith gets an email from someone
she does not known but opens the email anyway. When she opens it, the message
has some advertisement for a free gift, so she deletes the email. Several days
later she is working on her computer and notices that her internet browser is working
very slowly. She decides to check the computer with an antivirus program and discovers
that she has a virus on her computer. She determines that the virus came from
the email she received several days previously. How do we protect ourselves
from online dangers?
Source: Ribble, M. (2015) Digital Citizenship in Schools (3rd
Edition) International Society for Technology in Education ISBN 9781564843647
This scenario that I chose has a situation which is very
common when it comes to inappropriate use of technology. In this scenario Mrs. Smith
opened an email from whom she wasn’t familiar with and that resulted in a
virus. People have been using email as a source of trying to hack people’s computers
and they are usually attached with a virus that will ruin your computer. I know
this because a few years ago it happened to me. I accidentally opened an email from
an unknown user and it gave me a virus on my computer. This is inappropriate use
of technology because I had to make sure my information was safe and that
resulted in a long process. In this case, that is exactly what happened to Mrs.
Smith. This is going against the rights and responsibility that one has towards
the digital world. Everyone has the right to their personal information and it
is your responsibility as a digital citizen to respect everyone’s space. This scenario
was a clear violation of that. The email that was sent from unknown citizen
makes the scenario inappropriate, but Mrs. Smith shouldn’t have opened the
email if she didn’t know who send it. So Mrs. Smith wasn’t using the technology
inappropriately but her opening an unknown email was not right. To avoid this
similar situation in the future Mrs. Smith should never open an email she doesn’t
know about or who sent it.
Do you think technology was used inappropriately in this scenario?
Nisha Nayyar
Hi Nisha,
ReplyDeleteEmail spams can be very scary, especially since they have the power to cause nasty and harmful viruses to technological devices. This scenario truly exemplifies the need for practicing digital responsibility online at all times. It is important to not trust strangers or unusual content that is sent through email since there is the possibility of getting an unwanted virus if they are opened. I agree with you that Mrs. Smith used technology inappropriately with regards to opening the email from the unknown user because it resulted in her dealing with negative consequences. Although, I think she used technology appropriately when she realized her computer was not working properly and ran a virus scan through the anti-virus program. This did not prevent the situation from happening, but it was a smart action that she performed to help address the problem. This was great post and thanks for sharing!
Taryn