But when districts end up blocking sites like GoodReads or Ning or Skype or even Edublogs, one has to raise an eyebrow, and consider what we’re trying to accomplish here. We’re in the business of educating, and these services have undeniable educational value, so why aren’t we restructuring our policies to incorporate them into our students’ learning?

I think one main problem is the lack of parental involvement in how children experience learning at schools. Are parents (a) being kept in the loop on how we expect their children to behave according to the AUP, and (b) are they willing to give the teachers some freedom in teaching Internet responsibility, without teachers and administrators being fearful of lawsuits when students decide to abuse that freedom?

I hear of parents all the time who DON’T even think the Internet is a necessary tool in the classroom, when the old textbook-in-hand, teacher-writing-on-the-chalkboard worked well enough for them in school. Perhaps schools need to start holding regular “Internet Awareness” classes for parents. Could there be a way to make these classes mandatory, i.e. “if you enroll a child at our school, you have to be aware of how we teach in the 21st century?”

Before I started reading this thread I was more in favor of filters and censorship than I am now after reading all these comments. But, you can teach a person something and he is only going to really get it after that person experiences it. The two best examples are “don’t touch the wet paint” and “don’t play with electricity with your bare hands” Everyone has these explained to them but everyone tries them anyway.

So, if people are going to try it anyway, many of you argue they should learn it at school first. If you get rid of the filters, do you take the kids through the trenches so they can experience it at school first? I see the filters at school as a time saver for teachers. It saves them from endlessly controlling the kids every step onto the “filter zone.”

Do teachers want to teach time management? Is it better to let kids email at school and use up their time doing that instead of some research with a teachers help at their side (like in college). I agree that blocking email usage is useless and blocks a useful tool.

It seems though that the filters and blocking have a place at certain ages and levels of experience and as long as parents can sue schools for their child’s bad behavior we will never see an end to “censors and filters” in school.

After all, your school library, “filters in” the books the school has chosen to hold in its collections. There are no books on: bomb making, that contain vulgar images/language, porn, hate filled speech, advertisements, wide open comments, etc. Where has all the outrage been, over the course of the last 100 years in the education world, over this “filter”?

You may believe and want wide open, unfiltered, and unblocked access to the Internet for your students, but you also have to realize that because of the dynamic nature of the Internet and the immense amount of unfiltered content on there, it is just not possible in schools. Say you want to take the students to whitehouse.gov and one in your class mistakenly types in whitehouse.com – how are you going to handle that in the class? It is the equivalent to putting a bunch of magazines on a table and telling students to grab one and having a playboy mixed in with all of them. That would never be permitted in a non-technical school world. If all schools, nationwide, had totally unfiltered Internet access, you’d have absolute chaos ensue. Teachers I work with don’t even know how to send an email attachment, let alone be able to safely direct students through social networking sites, to Youtube videos, etc.

There is a major difference in a school environment blocking and restricting Internet access to minor, versus China as a nation restricting access to the same Internet to its citizens. As educators, you have to be able to see, and distinguish, the difference there.

As you’d suspect, I don’t agree with what much of Shelly states in the original blog post above. “Whatever happened to the notion that teachers are capable of educating their students? Whatever happened to the notion that it was better for a student to learn about the dangers of life among peers in the safety of a classroom led by a trained professional teacher rather than in the darkness of a bedroom alone in the glow of the computer screen?” What Shelly conveniently leaves out of the picture in the above quoted paragraph is – parents.

I am in a school district that last year, loosened its filtering dramatically, now the same teachers who last year were asking us why we had to have a filter, now want us to block the same sites that they wanted open a year ago!

On another thought, would you agree that the school library should contain magazines like Playboy and Penthouse? Because with no filtering you would be allowing these and much worse.

It is not the filter that blocks sites, only people who put the sites into the filter. Any site can be unblocked and any site can be blocked, I think most schools filtering process (how things get blocked or unblocked) needs to be looked at and figured out how to work better to serve everyone.

It all comes down to affordable bandwidth and legal liability, if you can figure out how to solve these, then unfiltered internet is just around the corner.

When it comes to cell phones and other personal internet enable devices, if the school or district allows the use of such items, then they may (and most likely will) be held liable for any potential lawsuits brought forth from the inappropriate use of these devices.

I think you raise an interesting question on the minds of many an admin. But the issue of privacy is only part of the equation; there is also the issue of digital transparency and the authentic (and useful) use of social media.

Here’s a repost to your response via the TeachPaperless blog to give you an idea of what I’m thinking is an even more heady dilemma:

A 21st Century Dilemma

We all know that an alias and an alt Gmail account pwn any Web 2.0 log-in without giving away any personal information. We also know how annoying it is to have to deal with anons on blogs or discussion boards.

So, the dilemma: Do you let kids alt their way around outmoded firewalls and proceed anonymously through Web 2.0, or do you teach them to approach social media in an open manner and risk whatever consequences?

reposted from: http://teachpaperless.blogspot.com/2009/06/21st-century-dilemma.html