CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2009
| Author | Nikolova, Maya Fadeeva |
|---|---|
| Title | Safe Internet Use for Children: An Analysis of Awareness Aampaigns for Internet literacy under the European Commission Safer Internet Programme |
| Summary | Abstract The issue of protection of minors on the Internet poses a big challenge for policy-makers. For this reason, the policy tool of awareness campaign for media and Internet literacy has grown to become very important. The present research examines the policy by the European Commission to fund national level awareness campaigns for safe Internet use for children, by asking the question which input factors are more significant for the success of the awareness campaigns. For this purpose, compared are three case studies – the awareness campaigns in Bulgaria, Slovenia and the United Kingdom. The main conclusion was that higher level of support from national authorities is related to better dissemination of the awareness campaign in the formal educational system, which in theory ensures that the optimal number of children will be reached. Within the three cases, the institutional support seems to be a more significant input factor than the communication strategies and the educational content of the awareness campaigns. In the light of the findings, the paper offers three recommendations to the European Commission. The first is to demand more national-level institutional support of the projects by encouraging participation of national public agencies in the campaigns and public co-funding. The second is to require the campaign coordinators to track the percentage of schools where they distribute the campaign’s educational materials and potentially link this performance indicator to an increase of funding for a subsequent round. The third recommendation is to encourage more knowledge spill-over between the funded awareness campaigns of content formatting strategies in order to increase the average time visitors spend on the awareness websites and thus, increase the potential effectiveness of the educational content. |
| Supervisor | Hintz, Arne; Dimitrova-Grajzl, Valentina |
| Department | Public Policy MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2009/nikolova_maya.pdf |
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