Staying Safe Online: For the Older Generation

Week 1: Choosing and preparing your website topic

Task 1: Topic Brainstorming

The first step in this project is to choose my topic, here is a list of some I have come up with.

• A guide to staying safe online: providing a detailed narrative that conveys information on the best way to practice online safety and ensure that the reader knows the dangers of interacting with the online world.
• The importance of digital literacy - understanding how to educate those who perhaps don't know how to be online.
• The changing nature of privacy online; as a commodity from big corporations.
• The impact of virtual technologies on the cultural heritage sector.
• Learning techniques for digital cultural heritage; understanding how different technologies can be used to better educate users interacting with cultural heritage.
• Using technologies to tell a narrative story in the digital age, different ways of conveying information in an online environment.

Refining the list!

• Throughout the rise of the internet in the information era, online communities have begun to thrive. Through this malicious agents and those who seek to exploit the vulnerable in these communities have become an increasingly big issue.
• Therefore, understanding how to stay safe when interacting with online communities is paramount. This situation emphasizes the critical importance of gaining a solid understanding of online safety principles when engaging in these virtual communities.
• The vast expanse of the internet has revealed itself to be fraught with potential risks and vulnerabilities. Consequently, it's important to equip people with knowledge and adopt precautionary measures to navigate the digital landscape.
• In a world where personal information can be shared with a few clicks and where distinguishing between genuine and fake identities can be challenging, as well as the capacity to protect one's online identity, assumes paramount importance. Therefore, a comprehensive grasp of the online community interactions and the ability to identify signs of malicious intent have become essential components of digital literacy.

Task 2: Understanding the topic and narrowing down focus

What questions do I want my project to answer?

• I want my project to fill the gap of the lack of online education and safe practice for older, mature individuals. I want to provide a resource that those who did not receive an online education can use to help perform better online practice.

Topic in Summary

I want my future project to be an guide to internet saftey for older invidiuals, with less digital literacy skills.

Using search terms to find appropriate resources

• Now with a refined goal with my project, I need to gather a list of resources that I can call-to when looking for relevant, academic information.
• I broke down my topic's keywords 'online safety', 'adults', 'digital literacy'. I took care to research through various means, such as the University of Glasgow library and general queries through Google.
• This resulted in me gathering some academic resources that are useful in gathering a general picture of the topic but also contain enough detail for my project to contain well-informed resources.
• I did come across irrelevant resources; however, these were easy to identify and were mostly due to the queries producing results that did not match my general audience I was aiming for, as there are many resources for online safety for children, these were naturally going to spill into my searches.
• Luckily, further refinement of searches wasn't necessary. I felt like I gathered a good list of resources, at least ones that I could build from.

List of References

• Arlitsch, Kenning, and Adam Edelman, 'Staying Safe: Cyber Security for People and Organizations', Journal of Library Administration, 54.1 (2014), 46–56

  https://doi.org/10.1080/01930826.2014.893116

• Friedman, Ari B., Chris Pathmanabhan, Allen Glicksman, George Demiris, Anne R. Cappola, and Matthew S. McCoy, 'Addressing Online Health Privacy Risks for Older Adults: A Perspective on Ethical Considerations and Recommendations', Gerontology and Geriatric Medicine, 8 (2022), 23337214221095705

  https://doi.org/10.1177/23337214221095705

• Morrison, Benjamin, Lynne Coventry, and Pam Briggs, 'How Do Older Adults Feel about Engaging with Cyber-Security?', Human Behavior and Emerging Technologies, 3.5 (2021), 1033–49

  https://doi.org/10.1002/hbe2.291

• White, Claire M., Michaela Gummerum, Stacey Wood, and Yaniv Hanoch, 'Internet Safety and the Silver Surfer: The Relationship Between Gist Reasoning and Adults’ Risky Online Behavior', Journal of Behavioral Decision Making, 30.4 (2017), 819–27

  https://doi.org/10.1002/bdm.2003

Task 3: Resources and File Structure

I have created a seperate .html file which includes a copy of my moodboard and my resource spreadsheet. It is here and in the navigation bar.

Setting up my file structure

My experience with HTML is fairly limited, but I am confident in my abilities, I have therefore decided to mostly ignore the given template and use it sparingly; this will help me have more creative control over the website files, and add features as I please.