Baby sitting at computer

I teach cybersecurity from kindergarten to Sikorsky. By the time we get to protecting the DIB we have lost decades of instilling practices of good cyber hygiene into students so I propose starting the Maturation Model not at Level one, but in grade one.

(This is my once a week ask to the CMMC community to support our free tech-4-teens) camp.

Maturation Model and the CMMC

The matuartion model in the CMMC derives from the CMMI developed by SEI.

The model focuses on, “process institutionalization, which measures how ingrained the CMMC practices are within an organization” ((Stewart and Hoover, 2020)

Five matutarity levels begin from basic cyber hygeine to state of the art real time monitoring and response for mission ready data. Organizations do need to grow but people make up organizations and we need to build in a culture of cybersecurity in our K12 school systems. It all begins with a Domain of One’s Own (DoOO).

If you do not own and shape your truth who will?

Domain of One’s Own

DoOO began as a way to put students in charge of learning spaces. You give them a domain, a bit of server space, and some basic tools like CPanel and see what happens. Trust me a WordPress admin learns the importance of cybersecurity real quick.

Gardner Campbell (2009) wrote about personal cyberinfastructure and said students:

would become, in myriad small but important ways, system administrators for their own digital lives.3 In short, students would build a personal cyberinfrastructure, one they would continue to modify and extend throughout their college career — and beyond. A Personal Cyberinfrastructure

The CMMC maturation model will work more efficiently when everyday people come ready with a fault tolerant culture while also knowing the importance of cybersecurity.

I need your help and ask you support these efforts by donating to Tech 4 Teens camp.

Tech-4-Teens

We established tech4teens during the COVID summer when students in New Haven had gotten little help in learning how to learn online. It grew out of a seven year old program I started called the Elm City Webmakers.

Students bring a passion and get a blog. Then they get a taste of web design, photography, video editing, podcasting, and coding. After trying out all the flavors students go back to the buffet line and design their own dish.

We go through a curriculum of tell your story, learn something, teach something, and then do something. During the do something module students develop a project to better themselves or the world while choosing one of the five tech pathways.

As a volunteer I run the camp with Concepts for Adaptive Learning . We need you to donate. If you believe in the mission of cybersecurity and the CMMC let’s begin by building the culture amongst our K12 students.

All of our proceeds go to providing free computers and digital literacies training to families in New Haven. The COVIOD crisis showed us the pain of the digital divide. Please give whatever you can. The local school districts have run out of computers to give families. We fill this void. Donate Now.

Image attribution“Hacker” by Micah Sittig is licensed under CC BY