Schools filtered like totalitarian police states
I recently shared a workshop in a public school, which like many others around the United States, blocks almost all websites which permit interaction and collaboration.
As you can see on the above images, the websites which were blocked included delicious social bookmarks, Flickr photo sharing, the Storycorps oral history project, Friendfeed, Google Mail, and Feedburner. Why were these sites blocked? According to the filter, these sites are:
- forums
- computers.filehosting
- forums.blogs
- forums.mail
- forums.blogs
How does the photo sharing website Flickr qualify as “filehosting?” The website is used to share photos and video clips that can be up to 90 seconds long, not ripped, commercial mp3 audio files and copyrighted DVD video files.
It is ridiculous and unacceptable that educational leaders as well as the communities they/we serve tolerate this level of censorship in the United States of America. We would almost certainly raise loud objections if the same draconian level of censorship was applied in the library to printed books. Why do we tolerate and accept this level of censorship on our educational networks? Censorship of sites like those above is not justified by the legal requirement for schools receiving E-Rate funds to block pornography. Of course schools should block porn as CIPA requires, but the above websites are not being blocked because they contain porn. The project “Unmasking the Digital Truth” seeks to uncover many of those reasons. CIPA, eDiscovery, FERPA, COPPA, bandwidth concerns, liability fears, and ignorance are all reasons for overcontrol and draconian censorship like I experienced at this school.
When are we going to see a well articulated and coordinated grassroots campaign to combat and stop this censorship madness?
3 Comments
Deven Black
Sunday, 14th June 2009 at 5:55 pm
I agree that this filtering is totalitarian, but at least this school’s filter seems to have a mechanism for overriding the denials. Many other schools, including mine, don’t trust anyone’s judgment about what might be useful in spite of the filter’s settings.
Wes Fryer
Monday, 15th June 2009 at 12:28 pm
I agree that this filtering system’s option to immediately override the block is great. Apparently there is some variance in how principals are willing to share the override code, however. On some campuses, all the teachers have and use the override code as necessary. On other campuses, the principal won’t give the override code out to teachers.
Amanda
Monday, 25th January 2010 at 3:24 pm
Man! That’s so my school! We’re not allowed to use blogs or we can get fired, no podcasting without a 10 hour course and hosting them ONLY on the school server. Don’t even THINK about creating a website anywhere but on their server (which, btw, requires another 10 hour course and each post/site must be cleared before uploading). Some of the greatest tools to use with students are blocked b/c we’re concerned for “Safety.” For goodness sake these kids are doing WAAAAAAY more than using Google Docs (which is also blocked) at home! Teach responsibility, not censorship!
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