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Digital skills: succeeding in a digital world
Digital skills: succeeding in a digital world

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Week 4: Staying safe and legal

Introduction

How safe do you feel when you’re online?

Last week while exploring your digital footprint and identity, you identified techniques to help you create the ‘right’ image online. You are now aware of your presence and impact in a digital environment. In addition to this, you also need to know how to protect yourself online and stay within the law. This is all part of digital well-being.

Over the course of this week, you will be introduced to some key strategies to help you keep safe online. Being aware of possible threats and understanding how to deal with them will go a long way towards increasing your confidence when you’re online.

In this video, Wendy and Katharine talk about the importance of keeping safe online and identify some of the potential pitfalls.

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Video 1: Introduction to Week 4
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Protecting yourself is also about looking after your own digital property (content) and respecting content owned by others. It is useful to know how your content is protected legally and how that works for anything you create and share online. If you decide to reuse someone else’s content, you should only do this with permission from rightsholders (those who are in control of the rights you need) or by making use of your country’s legal defences – such as Fair Dealing in the UK.

In the first section you will be exploring passwords and finding out how to protect yourself online.

By the end of this week, you should be able to:

  • make sure that your online experience is safe and constructive
  • begin to consider and improve your digital well-being
  • use and create online information without breaking the law.

This relates to both ‘Manage and communicate’ and ‘Understand and engage’ in the Open University digital skills framework, and both ‘Digital identity and wellbeing’ and ‘Information, data and media literacies’ in the Jisc digital capabilities framework that you came across in Week 2.