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The Internet has increasingly become a common and essential element of teacher lessons. However, when asked about getting around the government-required filters, to conduct the deep research required to find the best resources,
..a frequent response is, “I have no idea.” The next most-common response: “I have no idea, but when I need to get to a blocked site, I ask a student for help.”
A recent Justin Reich op-ed piece (In Schools, A Firewall that Works Too Well) in the Washington Post (brought to my attention by Thomas Daccord) explores some of the issues of schooling in a world wide web that is fenced off. He starts the piece with…
Web site filters in schools have had tremendous success in keeping one group of people from freely searching online. Unfortunately, that group is teachers.
Reich describes a Facebook group, with 187,000 members, devoted to sharing strategies for getting around school and library filters. I won’t take any more from your reading of the article, except for one of his final statements.
The best strategy for protecting students online is educating them about Internet citizenship and safety. Young people need to learn about safeguarding their personal information, handling cyber-bullying, reporting and ignoring advances from strangers, avoiding online scams, and being courteous in online communication. They must understand the dangers and consequences of making details of their private lives available to the public. This education needs to happen at home as well as in homerooms, health classes, school assemblies, technology classes and guidance counseling.
School districts are spending more and more on technology stuff but then restricting the use of it. Like a parking lot full of Porsches with a locked fence. Looks good but not going anywhere. I blogged about this over a year ago ( http://blissthink.blogspot.com/2008/01/web-filteringcensoring.html )after a discussion with my schools guidance counselor. She was concerned about students and their access of sites she thought were inappropriate. She asked me about contacting our districts IT department and having the sites blocked. I think I convinced her that a better route might be to talk to the students, find out why they were accessing the sites and discuss with them her concerns. Turns out they had found the sites at home on the unmonitored computers in their bedrooms.
Unfortunately, as with so many other things, one of the main causes of “extreme” filtering is the desire of legislators to keep their positions. Parents and other citizens driven by fear often fomented by the media, make requests of their legislators to keep their children safe and the easy answer is legislation. Laws which insist that filters be in place are then proposed, discussed at length, and sometimes passed. While these citizens are desirous of keeping children safe, there is little regard for the harm that is being done to the education of children.
And, it’s not just filters. There is a fear of newer technology which keeps cell phones, ipods and numerous other technologies out of the hands of children. There are exceptions, but they are limited in scope. Instead of filtering and limiting technologies, we should be teaching children how to use these items to advance the learning process.
Unfortunately, many of us will take the easy road when faced with the issues of material on the web or new technologies. It is easier to block and prohibit than it is to face the issues and educate. I also think it has to do with the enormity of the issues and the time we have available in schools. However, as we proceed down the technology road, I feel it is becoming apparent to many that education, not prohibition, is the path we must follow.
I certainly agree that education rather than blanket prohibitive internet filtering policies is the right direction here. The question then becomes: Who do you educate? Clearly, students need to be taught good cyber-citizenship and still need to be monitored by the school in some ways. I would have to argue that parents need to be made aware of the realities and dangers of the internet and what they can do about it. They need to be given the resources needed to talk to their children about wonders and monstrosities of cyberspace and how to interact with it in a responsible and safe manner. I believe that schools are in the best position in society to provide those resources for parents. Although it is the job of schools to teach children and not parents, it is the responsibility of schools to keep students safe.
A while back, I visited a private school that had decided to use no filtering software at all. Instead, they established an authentication system for the network so that as students login, all of their Internet activities were recorded — and made available to their parents. I think that bringing parents into the conversation is key — and more than anything else, we must avoid scaring anyone. Scared parents and teachers over-react and that closes down the conversation.
It never fails that I find a great website with wonderful resources and the next time I go to it, it has become blocked. Then in order to get it unblocked we have to fill out this form and submit it electronically and then maybe they will think about unblocking it. We pay more to have some one moniter what we do and cause more problems. Our students are the ones being affected the most.
The procedure for unblocking is even worse for us — we have to fill out a form and then fax it in (there is no online submission process). There’s only one fax machine in the building (a high school with 1700 students), so that takes a significant amount of effort and time. After faxing two requests, having subsequent e-mail conversations to check up on the status of the requests and further arguing my case, both requests were rejected. I gave up for the year, though I plan on submitting a few more early next school year.
Since writing the op-ed, I realized that things are really worse then I thought in some places. I’ve traveled to quite a few schools, but I never encountered a filtering regime where unblocking decisions were made outside the district! Nick, your fax machine insult is a particularly menacing detail. Any district or school that is using filters needs to have local control to maximize the potential for teachers and IT staff to put gates in the knee-high fence. If we have to have them, let’s at least have humans at the helm.
And my hat’s off to all the teachers who are pushing against these fences. Keep pushing! We’ll come up with something more sensible eventually.
Ten years ago in a former life, I was the Chief Technology Officer for Education Networks of America (www.ena.com) when we launched the Tennessee statewide K-12 network and had to design a filtering system capable of handling an entire state.
ENA has now grown to serve multiple state networks but back then, we were faced with a choice about filtering. We had alot of flak beginning about online pornography and certain districts who refused to hook up until there was some solution.
The choice boiled down to this: we could either come up with a fair statewide filtering solution for our network or the legislature and 138 school districts would begin to debate what was appropriate for access on the Internet. We knew that this would be the end of the Internet for all practical purposes in K12 education in Tennessee.
We came up with a system that utilized a 3rd party listing program that categorized sites into 32 types e.g. hardcore pornography, lingerie, sports, news, chat, etc. We applied this list into a proprietary system that allowed teachers to “unblock” any site for educational purposes for x minutes. They could essentially have an entire class unlock a site and view it. We gave the principals of the schools the ability to issue these bypass codes to the teachers which pushed the issue to the local school where it belongs.
We then worked with the state DOE on the basic categories that we felt all parties would agree do not need to be in the K-12 system. There were some surprises. We originally allowed Sports as a category but we had to selectively block some Sports sites when live video feeds of NASCAR racing became the #1 traffic item on the K-12 network to the detriment of other educational uses of the network! (We literally had networks running near capacity during the racing season and educational sites were very slow.
The issue for network providers and schools is not just the content itself, but also the impact that specific sites have on the overall usability of the network. This filtering issue is about 5 layers deep, it’s not just about content restriction due to child safety issues, its about the usability of the network as a teaching tool as well. Until we all have gigabit connections at the schools we will have to effectively manage bandwidth as a resource. Even with giant pipes, my experience is that “K-12 Internet usage rises to fill the bandwidth available.” No matter what kind of pipe you lay in there, the kids and the teachers will find a way to use it all up.
To be actually integrated into the curriculum as an trusted, reliable and effective teaching tool, online resources for teachers must work consistently at 8am, 10am, 12pm, and 2pm. Otherwise, like the proverbial slide projector with the burned out bulb, it will go in the closet and we are back on the chalkboards…
Paul Van Hoesen
Director, cTechnology.org
This is the compromise, I believe. We have trusted teachers for decades (and more) to be the instructional leaders of their classrooms, and part of that job being to select content to be used for those instructional purposes.
But I can’t help but wonder if this is a temporary problem. It would make sense that when you unleash this kind of service on classrooms across the state, to instructional leaders who are un-accustomed to seemingly unlimited content, that there would not be immediate instructional application, causing a void that had to be filled. As we explore and invent ways of utilizing abundant content and communication capabilities, learners will start to prefer doing more interesting things on the networks than watching NASCAR.
But I’m not a NASCAR fan, so I don’t know for sure 😉
David, thanks for this great post about internet filtering, reference to Justin Reich’s article, and for inspiring and responding to the excellent comments that follow. I link to your post in my blog entry (http://cjpeterso.edublogs.org/2010/02/20/internet-filtering/).
A key point for me is the dishonesty and deceit we tacitly condone though arbitrary and unreasonable filtering practices. When teachers get students to bypass filters, and avoid-the-filter resources abound on Wikihow, Facebook, and YouTube, it is time for educators to collaborate and make change happen.