Keeping Unacceptable Content Out of Schools
By Paul McMahon on Mar 23, 2009 in Education in Hong Kong, Learning for a Flat World and tagged ABC, blocking, filters, issues, podcast, policies
I have just finished listening to a podcast of Australian Radio Current Affairs program, Background Briefing where it discussed the issue of the proposed country wide internet filter the government plans to put in place via ISPs. The ABC does not keep the podcasts online for more than a few weeks so I urge you to download this one soon if you have interest. The programme is called Conroy’s Clean Feed.
Having worked in schools where the network Nazis are out to block absolutely everything and anything that might have even the slightest hint of pornography, bad language, or any other form of anti-social content on it, in the name of bottom covering, let me tell you it makes for an unhappy and quite frustrated teaching community. By all means filter out the really bad and blatantly unacceptable sites. No one would argue with this. The issue is and will always remain, in an era where around 7.3 million websites are created each day (source Berkley), it is going to be one very busy “network guy” who diligently evaluates these sites for appropriateness to kids! Faced with this daunting task, most network techs do the simple thing and set filters to block words/domains etc. This inevitably leads to the common issue of all sites with “sex” in them being blocked, thus making the personal development teacher trying to do a sex-ed lesson quite angry. Not to mention the plight of the poor biology teacher trying to teach sexual verses asexual reproduction.
Speaking as someone who set up and ran a 1:1 Laptop programme for over 800 kids in 1998, I have to say that I did see my fair share of unacceptable content on kids laptops in over 7 years of setting up and running the programme. The thing that might surprise and give many of you food for thought was that 90% of it did not come in via our internet connection!
As an independent school with an international population of students, our kids seemed to have access to a host of content from friends that were only too ready to share it with them. You can imagine the kudos of a 16 year old boy showing his peer group some content to make their hair curl! Our Malaysian and Chinese kids seemed to feel that this was a good way of being cool in their peer group. These kids were clever too. A few were silly enough to bring it in on a USB thumb drive that would be shared around but the really clever ones would have it encrypted on their laptop. As we had a blanket rule of no encrypted files on their computers, this would be immediately suspicious. Sometimes we did have issues with parents supporting us in demanding that the files be unencrpted in front of an adult but by and large our kids did get the message and I think that the level of sharing was small. In fact the kids used to regularly tell me that the level at our 1:1 school was a lot less than at other schools that were less tech-aware and allowed kids to bring in USB drives, Optical media and mobile phones unchecked.
This is a problem that a few schools are dealing with now as you can see by this post on Disruptive Student Owned Technology by an Australian educator. In short, rather than kids being able to bring along “any” USB drive, they have to buy and bring the school-badged one that is purely for school and can be searched at any time by any teacher.
I am very interested to know if your school has a policy on the media that kids can bring to school and your right to search devices such as their mobiles, USBs, iPods etc.
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This appeared in yesterday’s Sydney Morning Herald (Timely I thought!)
Censorship run rampant? “In my school lunch break,” writes Susan Margan, of Epping, “I tried to open a website for an appointment to clip my dog Algie’s nails. Blocked. The local pooch parlour is wonderful but the www address includes the word ‘groomer’. Hilarious, or just watchdog-sinister?”