Don't Trash Your Spam!: Reasoning on Spam as a Way to Train Critical Thinking

Context

The experience took place at the D’Oria - Pascoli lower secondary school at Genova, Italy, and involved a third year class composed by 25 students engaged in a course on Digital literacy devoted to synchronous and asynchronous communication. The course on Digital literacy aimed at:

• 1.

  Getting to know and use the major asynchronous communication tools (SMS, e-mail, forum, wiki, blog, etc.).

• 2.

  Becoming aware of the effects that such tools might have on communication modalities, (e.g., second orality effects, cfr. Ong, 1982).

• 3.

  Being able to detect danger signals sometimes conveyed by such tools (e.g., spam and phishing).

Specific objective of the latter aim was the reflection on the elements that should be taken into account to detect strange and dangerous e-mail postings.

Even though the experience can be reproduced with other technologies or on paper, in this case a wiki was chosen for at least two reasons: it was useful to gather and share in a common environment all the students’ impressions and it was useful to familiarize students with a communication tool supporting both synchronous and asynchronous communication. The wiki used for the activity was PbWorks, a piece of software from the US (http://www.pbworks.com/), which was used to immerse the students into an English language interface environment online. This tool is free (if used for teaching purposes), intuitive and easy to access and use. It was customized in order to allow access to authorized users only: each student was given a login and password and could work in a secure environment and monitor the contribution made by other authorized users. The choice of a wiki ensured a high degree of flexibility in the organization of the working time and guaranteed a unique repository accessible from anywhere by each participant.

The activity was run in the computer lab of the school. Each computer had a fast Internet connection to access the wiki environment that was previously set up by the teacher. In order to replicate an analogous experience, a collection of spam messages should be kept by the teacher or the adult in charge of the activity.

Background

Anti-phishing education is becoming an independent study sector together with the analysis of belief dynamics. It aims at investigating both the ways to protect oneself from phishing and to analyze the reasons why people fall into a trap, in order to design the key elements for sound and selected defensive strategies (Dhamija et al., 2006),