A few days ago I was ranting about our filter blocking Doug Johnson’s Blue Skunk Blog. In the immortal words of Emily Litella – “NEVER mind.” My brain must have been on vacation. Our lovable filter does NOT block The Blue Skunk after all. It was blocked back when it was hosted by EduBlogs. Now it is open. Or – in the words of one of our Tech directors – “At least it is open for now”. Hmmmm…. That sounds ominous.
However – I stand by the rest of my rant regarding the undue influence of filters.
Now – for more thoughts about filters….. Hopefully I will not have to retract this one.
There have been a number of postings on LM_NET recently regarding Myspace.com, Facebook et al. I used to be completely in favor of blocking those sites. I am beginning to modify that stance. (Oh My God – I really AM channeling Emily Litella!) Anyway – as usual, Doug has 2 excellent posts on filtering.
I think Doug (and others) definitely have a point. I love the quote/paraphrase from Carol Simpson “teaching kids Internet safety in an over-filtered environment is like teaching kids to cross the street by never letting them out of the basement.” Schools need to teach students about on-line safety. When sites such as Myspace are blocked, we think we are keeping the students safe. But – is it a false sense of security? The kids go home to unfiltered environments and often do what they please without regard for privacy or safety. Meanwhile – have we prepared them for an unfiltered environment? Again – I am rethinking my stance about all of this.
Taking a more conservative viewpoint ….. Perhaps these sites really are too dangerous to be freely available in schools. BUT – I am afraid that we are painting a lot of sites with the same brush and banning many “social” web technologies (such as blogs and wikis) that have great value for classroom learning. In our haste to filter the dangerous – we are tossing out access to valuable learning tools. Where does the blocking stop? Which site will be next? Freedom is a messy thing. So much to think about….So little time!….So few surviving brain cells…..