Abstract:

The information available in digital form is increasing in an every day basis, the Internet is connecting world-wide digital contents and the WWW (World Wide Web) is providing an efficient platform consisting of access services, a gate to scientific and cultural resources, music, movies and video archives to everyone, including children.
The technologies which provide access to digital content are, at the same time, provoking important problems concerning the protection and management of IPR (Intellectual Property Rights) for this digital content. This happens mainly because technology is supporting efficient access and simultaneously ease of copying copyrighted information.
Internet is nowadays included to almost all National Curriculums of the elementary school. Therefore students have to conquest capabilities of collecting information through the Internet but also adopt principles towards a responsible use of it, especially regarding respect to IPR laws and regulations.
Proposed solutions to the problem of IPR protection in the internet tend to be aggressive and to lock valuable educational content. The only approach which deals with the issue in long term and sets the basis for future ethical use of the Internet is instructional actions which raise awareness and teach the Internet user the basics of IPR and the need to respect the copyright of information acquired by the Internet. The instructional approach starts from the early grades of the elementary school and through specific curriculum aim to “preserve honest internet users, honest”, supporting the ethical use of the Internet by children. The structure and rationale of these courses are mainly based on the experience of experts in the area and most of times do not take under consideration what are the conceptual representations of children about the Internet. This leads usually to complex teaching activities, often non effective. In a constructivistic knowledge framework instruction of these Internet characteristics has to take into account the conceptual representations of students.
The following paper presents the conceptual representation of students of eleven years old, attending the Sixth Grade of Greek Elementary School about WWW as a proposed basis of a course adjusted to students’ previous knowledge and misconceptions.

Keywords:

world wide web, internet, ethical use of resources and information, intellectual.