Apparently I Work in a Filtered Environment

I was truly surprised last week to click on a link in twitter that had been posted by Alec Couros. It was a link to a copy of his Ph.D dissertation. I was absolutely shocked to find this come up:

I know this is a box that many people are familiar with and one that raises the ire and the blood pressure of many people. I've read for months people's rants about their battles with the filters in their systems and I have always taken great pride in the fact that in my building we had no system installed of any kind. It was great to be able to say to people that we believe in education and not censorship. The mode of operation in our building was always very simple. We first of all have students sign a relatively strict internet use policy. Second is that we go through it with students and outline the consequences to them, their grades, and their computer usage if they break this policy. Next, we enforce it. Kids who are places that are inappropriate or nasty are held to account. We check history files and keep an eye on our students expecting them to call us over if they accidentally run into something nasty. This has always worked fine and we have had extremely few cases of students who have needed us to call their parents in and meet with them, having the students explain why they have felt the need to surf porn sites in school.

And the fact is that I know that many nasty and inappropriate sites are not blocked at school. Just last week I inadvertently followed a link while I was checking out new twitter profiles and ended up someplace I should not have been. This is another reason why I was so absolutely floored to see this access denied notice show up on my screen.

I immediately took a screen shot of this notice using Jing, posted it to my flickr account and sent off a ranting email to my tech superintendent. Now this man is fairly new to his job but has embraced it with a sense of vision and interest. He quieted me down with a long explanation email talking about how light filters have been installed at the provincial level and offering to Skype with me about it further. He also told me that it had been in place for awhile and that it only says good things about our building and our students if we had never seen this notice before.

Now I understand all about due diligence and accountability. I understand all about online safety and keeping the focus on "educational" sites. But I have a terrible feeling that this is the end of Eden, the thin edge of a wedge.

And I am incredibly saddened to see it arrive.

Tags: internet, filtering, schools, yuck

Comments

[David Jakes]

We use that filter, Clarence. The end is near. It's very aggressive.

[Alec Couros]

Light filter? I assume all of Scribd is likely blocked. There's tons of great stuff there.

It sounds like you have done everything possible before this make students responsible. And it doesn't seem like there have been any incidents. When I see this in school districts I always ask the questions: Why do we filter? Was it an academic decision (or made by a technician)? Who does it serve? Who does it hurt? What are the implications for creating individuals/citizens who can self-regulate? Does filtering produce a false reality? What is lost by such a decision?

[Darren Kuropatwa]

Just yesterday I was talking to a student over the lunch hour. He came to see me about getting some help with something he wanted to do online and we got to talking.

He basically said that the filters are an annoyance and that if he really wants to access a website they don't really stop him, he uses a proxy; different one every day. I asked what he does when he stumbles across porn in this way. He said "that stuff just gets in the way. When I'm online at school I'm trying to get work done. I just click through the porn to get at what I need. What's really annoying though is that they block Google images and there are lots of times that really gets in the way."

The real crime for me is that our school filter also blocks creative commons image search (http://search.creativecommons.org/). I keep talking about ethical online use of materials and when I try to point them to a way they can legally practice that, it's blocked. Oy!

[Wesley Fryer]

I am, like Alex, wondering what the background is/was for the decision to start filtering. Canada doesn't have a law like we do in the US like CIPA, as far as I know. I'll be interested to hear what you find out as you visit more with this IT person, Clarence.

[Ric Murry]

I notice your filter is 8e6.com's product.

Just a forewarning. They have nothing to do with education, other than to frighten education tech directors and boards into believing their product is necessary. You will likely find, in the near-future, that a site which was not blocked will be blocked, with no warning, just based on a "spike in hits."

Remember, to "86 something" means to kill it. My opinion...8e6 kills the use of the Internet when it is used in a school setting. This is true in my situation, anyway.

I'm truly saddened that yet another system (or provincial level) has succumbed to the filtering fallacy.

[Saskboy]

The end is getting nearer, but at work or school I almost expect to see something like that. The end really will arrive when I'm surfing at home, and see crapola like that.

[Jim Dornberg]

I have run into the same thing. Scribd has been totally blocked, in spite of all the good things that have been posted. I used to recommend people upload a text file and Scribd would turn it into an mp3 that could be downloaded and used on an iPod. But that ship has sailed.