IN this Internet age, how techie and Web-savvy are Filipino children?
Angelo, a 15-year-old junior high school student from the Good Shepherd Christian School in Mandaluyong City, says his favorite subject is computer class. He is proud of his computer skills and uses the Web regularly to research term papers and book reports.
Twelve-year-old Claire, a grade six pupil at the Pasong Tamo Elementary School, finds that she has to limit the time spent playing computer games and surfing the Net to give way to her studies.
Angelo and Claire are among the schoolchildren aged 10-17 who can be considered computer literate. They join 9 out of 10 youngsters in Metro Manila and the Visayas who use the Net regularly. They are also active in social networking sites, with most of them being members of Friendster.
These findings are from the survey, ?Internet Access and Use by Filipino Schoolchildren,? conducted by the Asian Institute of Journalism and Communication (AIJC).
The study was commissioned by Unicef to find out the extent of Internet access and use among schoolchildren. This could be the basis for policy recommendations on how to create a child-friendly virtual community, said AIJC president Ramon Tuazon.
The field work was conducted from February to April 2009 in the cities of Manila, Mandaluyong, Pasay, and Quezon for Metro Manila, Baguio City and Benguet for Luzon, Iloilo City and Oton for the Visayas and Marawi City and Marantao, Lanao del Sur for Mindanao.
The respondents were grade school children aged 10-12, and 13- to 17-year-old high schoolers in public and private schools in Metro Manila, drawn using enrolment data from the Department of Education as basis.
Adventurous as Pinoy netizens may be in exploring the wide world of the Web, they are not as daring as others in crossing over from the virtual to the real world, the survey found out. This should bring some relief to anxious parents.
Of the schoolchildren surveyed who engaged in online chatting, only 7 percent reported meeting up (?eyeball?) with strangers they had befriended online. This finding indicates a high awareness of the dangers of cybercrimes.
Why do schoolchildren use the Internet? The most frequent purposes cited were e-mailing (89 percent), connecting with friends (88 percent), schoolwork (83 percent) and online gaming (77 percent).
These reasons are borne out by the websites the young respondents most frequently visited ? Friendster, YouTube, Google, Yahoo/Yahoo Mail, and Wikipedia.
Friendster is the most frequently visited website (76 percent). ?Perhaps because it is where one can do almost everything from socializing to sending e-mail, sharing photos, viewing/ uploading/ downloading images, and even gaming,? the AIJC study noted.
Other major findings of the study:
Internet access is lowest among schoolchildren from Luzon (58 percent) and Mindanao (47 percent), particularly in the Cordilleras and the Autonomous Region of Muslim Mindanao (ARMM), respectively, which are among the poorest regions in the country.
There are as many girls as there are boys who are Internet users in all areas surveyed, except for Mindanao where more girls than boys access the Internet.
Internet cafés provide the venues for 8 out of 10 schoolchildren to go online.
Computers are becoming a regular feature in homes, with 58 percent of Internet users having at least one computer unit at home.
Schoolchildren allot a significant amount of their baon (allowance) or savings to Internet use, with almost half (46 percent) spending more than P300 monthly for their Internet habit.
Uploading and downloading images and music are among the more popular activities. The incidence of uploading images and music is 71 percent and 69 percent, respectively, compared with downloading images and music at 77 percent and 70 percent, respectively.
There is heavy use among young netizens, with more schoolchildren doing Internet activities twice to thrice a week, such as e-mailing (40 percent), visiting one?s social network account (50 percent), and online gaming (41 percent). ?
