Picking a Side of Your Line

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About ten days ago, an unknown number rang through on my mobile phone (thankfully on silent at the time) during my houseroom. I ignored it and it rang again. My complete lack of desire to answer this call, from a local mobile number, wasn't seeming to sink in for whoever was on the other end of the phone as no matter how much I ignored it, they ignored my ignoring and persisted to call me. Eventually, with my students not in any dire need of my attention at the time, I apologized to the class, relented and answered the phone. There was a recorded message with the voice of an American sounding woman which, part way through the message, got spliced with an Australian sounding woman. The general gist of the message was that they wanted me to push '1' to pay 60baht (~$2) to hear something or press '2' to decline. I pressed the red button on my screen and hung up.

The calls stopped for a little while but later that day started back up. I ignored it again and again and by the time I had gotten home, I had about 17 missed calls from this unknown solicitor. It was astoundingly frustrating. I had even spent about a half an hour trying to call the mobile phone company's customer service to see if there was a way to block calls from that number. Every time I called, the line was busy. Right as I was going to sleep, the number started ringing again. The harassment was driving me crazy. I turned my phone off and went to sleep, hoping that it would cease. The next morning, I had gotten an email back from the mobile phone company with a way to block the number. Annoyingly, there was a nominal fee (30 baht per month) but I decided to try to subscribe to the number blocking service. All attempts to activate this failed. The calls continued for a few days but grew less frequent and it has been a few days now since they've tried calling. I'm hoping that this means it has ended but time will tell.

The reason I recount this story is because I grew up in a time before mobile phones or internet were available everywhere and anywhere. I'm on the cusp of Generation 'Y' and Generation 'X' so I'm old enough to remember times without technology but have still been around it enough to have a pretty reasonable understanding of it. One thing I thankfully never had to put up with when I as growing up was cyberbullying but this situation gave me a timely experience with how it might feel; unwanted solicitations from an unknown person or entity. My recent experience is admittedly pretty light in terms of seriousness but I was amazed how worked up I was getting over this unrelenting caller. If such a reasonably insignificant, non-personal act could wind a person up so much, it got me thinking about how traumatizing cyberbullying must be for a student when the attacks are more directed and vicious.

As part of my CoETaIL course, I've been keeping my eyes open for thoughts, opinions and news with regards to cyberbullying. I've spoken with teachers and counselors from my school and from other schools around South-East Asia and, from what I've found, cyberbullying seems to be something that many teachers have heard of happening in their schools but few have had personal experiences with. During an unconference discussion at the Learning 2.011, one of the consensuses we reached was that schools need to be proactive in defining what exactly entails cyberbullying and what role does the school play in cases of cyberbullying. If there is no policy in place, then it will be quite difficult to respond effectively when an incident inevitably occurs.

Some NIST faculty, not coincidentally also members of our COETAIL cohort, have been looking over our school's Acceptable Use Policy recently and we've found some interesting things. One glaringly obvious thing is that procedures with regards to cyberbullying are not very clearly addressed within the policy or in other school policies. I will take a closer look at our acceptable use policy and other technology oriented safety policies in another blog post later this week. For now, I will leave you with some very clever wordplay in this award winning spoken word performance about how to be safe and responsible online...

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