It’s important to know what sites are being blocked in which schools. I’d be very curious to see what patterns might emerge from this and whether they follow types of schools, socio-economic status, etc.

I also think schools should have to provide a public list of the sites and/or types of sites they block along with their reasoning, and that these decisions should be open for public debate. When I was in the classroom, it would drive me crazy that I couldn’t pull up YouTube or Blogger blogs to share and discuss with students. And two years out, I don’t think those blocks have changed.

The most disturbing aspect for me is the lack of guidance, and this is an old problem. How else do we expect adolescents to act, particularly when given free reign in the technological playground of social networks, when they have no clear or firm guidance from school administrators or parents? This is by no means a pardon for the students, but the strongest rebuke should fall on the shoulders of the parents for trying to shelter their children from the thing most likely to help them succeed in the world: the trimming down of the ego (a societal problem, really). Second in line should be the administration for failing to issue that rebuke.

The new problems are the more difficult ones, and require more time, thought, and research than I can put in right now. Questions about privacy, online identity, safety, censorship, and the like all bear heavily on these events … events that are, to different degrees, happening in every school.

Nevertheless …

I found this “tract” this morning:¹

I’ve always found fear-mongering to be the approach taken by those with the most to fear, and book burning to be the act of intellectual cowardice and weak faith.² Here are a few Rowling quotes on this on-going controversy:

You have a perfect right, of course, as every parent does, and I’m a parent, to decide what your child is exposed to. You do not have the right to decide what everyone else’s children are exposed to. So that’s how I feel about it.

[The moral significance of the tales seems] blindingly obvious.

The key for her was the choice between what is right and what is easy,

because that, that is how tyranny is started, with people being apathetic and taking the easy route and suddenly finding themselves in deep trouble.

Read more about the Potter/Christian controversy on Wikipedia. ³

1. “Tracts” are those little pamphlets distributed by the fervently religious, often with cartoons, that apparently have the power, in a few tiny pages, to entirely change your views and beliefs; this one came to my attention through A Distant Soil
2. I understand that some people burn books in protest, as a symbolic act to try to bring attention to an issue. I still feel conflicted about it, though, even when the purpose is legit.
3. Wikipedia is another oft-demonized work, though in this case its accusers tend to be librarians, note-card-carrying English teachers, and stuffy members of the intelligentsia.

Because of the Image Wall, Miguel is requesting that other educators boycott Bloglines until that service is removed:

I hope you’re reading Bloglines. Image Wall is bad, bad, bad. I’m headed to something else. Ok, BOYCOTT BLOGLINES, FLICKR, BLOGSPOT, YOUTUBE, BLIP, etc.! Around the Corner v2 – MGuhlin.net – Around the Corner v2 – MGuhlin.net

There’s already some talk happening on the Bloglines forum about this (search “image wall”), and comments are growing on Miguel’s post.

My first comment on this thread was:

Seriously? I’ve written a bit on my blog about the balance between safety and access, between protection and education. I think schools are erring far to the side of caution and, through our fear and “head-in-the-sand” approach, are abdicating our responsibility to successfully prepare and educate students. We therefore fail them now and set them up for further failure in the future. (The New York Times was just reporting on the results of this failure, actually …)

I don’t advocate improper material in the classroom, but how can we teach students to safely but effectively use emerging technologies if we just run around blocking them all? We need to teach and model safe, effective use. We need to lead in knowledge, confidence, and hope … not hide in ignorance, fear, and despair.

I can guarantee a child’s safety by locking them up for 18 years, but I don’t recommend that approach … and what would they do when they were released?

On a tangent: this country’s hyper-sensitivity to nudity seems absurd to me, and ignorantly prudish to most of the rest of the world. Decapitations, pools of blood, serial killers, machine-guns and torture? All fine for primetime viewing. A bare breast!? God forbid! HaloScan.com – Comments

Since then, others have commented as well. I wanted to continue the conversation, but my latest batch of thoughts were too long for the comment section and contained too many links. Instead, I’m posting my comments here (and left a link in the comments thread). I recommend you read Miguel’s post and related comments first so that you can read this reply in context:

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First of all, Bloglines belongs to the owners of Bloglines, not us. They provide a service that consumers can choose to use or not use, and they are well within the legal requirements (along with Flickr, YouTube, Blogspot, and others). I don’t use Bloglines, but that was a decision that came long before this issue. I do stand by Bloglines’ right to do whatever it thinks is best, within legal limits. I also stand by the rights of others to choose not to use their service and to voice complaints to Bloglines as potential customers. However, I do not support anyone trying to make that choice for anyone else.

Secondly, the Internet does not belong to any one subgroup (just like the nation as a whole, in theory). The moment that one subgroup, regardless of size, attempts to silence other subgroups, we have a serious problem. This is an issue of rights, and it’s larger than the classroom.

Please understand me: I am concerned about safety in the classroom and am not suggesting we disregard this concern. However, if educators truly want total control, then educators should create or implement software and services that provide them with that control. I’ve argued in the past that we need a leveled approach to safety: younger students do need more protection than older students, but at some point, students need to be taught to deal effectively with the actual, uncontrollable world.

Knee-jerk reactions that attempt to silence others or ban their use outright seem counterproductive–it removes students even further from the “world and future” for which we claim to be preparing them. You’d be hard-pressed to name three more powerful, revolutionary, and popular online services than Flickr, YouTube, and Blogspot. And now we want to ban them because they allow individuals to use the services however they see fit, within legal confines? That just sounds too dangerously close to 1st Amendment violations to me.

The problem seems to me to lie more with how schools are dealing with “the outside world” (online or not), the rights of students, and the schools’ obligations in terms of both. Our policies and our understanding need to catch up (so that things like the Julie Amero case don’t have to happen).

Now, on the other hand, if Bloglines wants to position itself as a key educational tool, then this “image wall” is probably a bad idea (and, as others have said, also kinda pointless). Educators should indeed express their concern. And I agree that services like Bloglines, YouTube, Flickr, etc. should allow all customers to easily filter potentially objectionable material (as services like StumbleUpon does … and with the understanding that these filters will never be perfect). I think concerned users of these tools should let their requests be known to the services.

But we must remember that the law in these cases is designed to protect free speech because we realize, as a nation, how important that right is and how dangerous restricting that freedom can be. I want my students to understand that, and I want to educate them in that direction. There’s a line we need to watch carefully between carelessness and empowerment, but we also need to watch the lines between education and programming, between protection and control.

So, while I agree with the rallying cry to teacher vigilance and student safety, I also request that we take a more thoughtful, balanced approached. Of course, I could also be just plain wrong. If so, please talk me through why that’s the case.

At that point, a mini-explosion went off in my head. It seems the county had decided to add ELGGSpaces to the block list along with nearly every other useful/interesting “Web 2.0″ site, from the obvious ones like MySpace and Facebook, to sites like Flickr, Blogger, Google Video, and even Wordpress.org (which doesn’t host the blogs themselves, just the files and documentation on the Wordpress software).

I immediately sent an email to our school’s technology specialists and to one of the technology specialists at the central administration office. Thankfully, it took only two days for the county to unblock the site, and now my students are back to working online.

This is not an attack or complaint against my county in particular. In fact, I was pleasantly surprised to see the quick turn-around on this issue. The problem is that this seems to be happening nation wide. Schools are defaulting to “block access” rather than “open access.” I’ve heard the arguments from the various concerned parties, but frankly, I’m not convinced.

By cutting students off from accessing the world of the web in schools, we are failing our students in a number of ways:

• Abdicating responsibility for student safety – If we refuse to address the social web in schools (or are blocked from being able to do so), then we leave students to explore it on their own without guidance and without a forum in which to discuss the implications of its use. Additionally, by not training students how to effectively and safely use these tools, we leave students open to an even greater chance of being victimized online. (See Pete Reilly’s post about online safety: the majority of sexual abuse, online or off, happens at home.) And please, let’s not fool ourselves into thinking that by not addressing it in school we are keeping it out of our schools.

Whether or not YouTube is being blocked, it is ON your campus in the form of miniature devices tucked away in the pockets and backpacks of your students. Cool Cat Teacher Blog: Spies Like Us

• Preventing the “free and easy exchange of ideas” – A fundamental assumption of an open democracy (or democratic republic) is that all people should have free and easy access to information and should participate in a free and easy exchange of ideas so that each person will have an equal opportunity to participate. No tool has made this more possible than the internet, and social software has extended these possibilities. Don’t we want our students to become active participants in society?
• Failing to prepare students to be fully literate citizens – It should be clear by now that digital literacy is a component of general literacy that can no longer be ignored. This will only increase over time (see “Generation M’s Surprising Struggle With Tech Literacy“).
• Treating students like prisoners rather than learners – I don’t mean to be hyperbolic, and this is more of an emotional / affective appeal, but I still feel it’s valid. The more we regulate (and over-regulate) students, their schedules, their bodies, and their access to outside information and alternative points-of-view, the more we make them feel like prisoners of the very institution that claims to want their healthy development and their successful preparation to be independent members of society. To quote Bill Strickland:

“If you build world class facilities, you will get world class students. If you build prisons, you’ll get prisoners.” (view his slide show)

On the other hand, I’m not trying merely to complain or accuse. Schools do have a legal responsibility for the safety of students and staff. What I’m calling for is a more considered approach to these issues. How can we balance safety with openness? What revisions must happen to Acceptable Use Policies to help preserve that balance once it is attained?

We cannot answer these questions or accomplish these goals if we act from a position of fear and ignorance. Undeniably, there is a price to pay for freedom, and we can never guarantee complete safety in a free society, but this is already acknolwedged in the “offline world” and must now be acknowledge in the “online world” as well. Pete Reilly says it so well it’s worth quoting and repeating often:

We can never eliminate all risk; but there are ways to maximize our students’ safety while using these incredibly powerful tools. …As educational leaders we need to be safety conscious. We need to be prudent, reasonable; but we won’t live in fear and we won’t act from fear.It is by opening doors, not closing them that we create new possibilities for our children and new futures for ourselves.

Pete Reilly : THE FACTS ABOUT ONLINE SEX ABUSE AND SCHOOLS

This reform must come first to and then from the administrative level. While it’s exciting to work with teachers and show them some of the possibilities of tools like blogs, wikis, and podcasts, those teachers will be limited in their implementation of these tools as long as the administrators remain uninformed and unsupportive. [update: for more on this, see Gary Stager's excellent article "School Network Policies Threaten Our Democracy"]

One of my personal goals now is to reach out to administrators at all levels in my county and help them understand what these tools are and what potential benefits these tools bring to education. The benefits these tools can provide far outweigh the cost of finding ways to use them safely. I have hope that we can work to find safe solutions that truly honor student success.

Norwich, Conn seventh grade teacher, Julie Amero has been convicted of four counts of risk of injury to a minor after her classroom PC displayed pornographic pop-ups in class.

Slashdot | Teacher Found Guilty of Endangering Kids Due to Spyware

Amero faces up to 40 years in prison! Consider this: the computers were running Windows 98; she reported the incident as soon as it happened; the people involved in the trial, from what we can tell from the original story, seem technologically challenged as well.

This entire event is clearly a case of district negligence, yet a substitute teacher is going down for the district’s technological incompetence. Read the story and the comments in the Norwich Bulletin. Also see BoingBoing’s comments on this issue.

This is terrifying and beyond ridiculous. All educators using any form of online technology should be up-in-arms about this case. Unless some other information comes to light that will show Amero acted intentionally (which seems highly unlikely from what I’ve read so far), it seems clear there should never have been a charge, much less a trial and conviction.

Have you ever been subject to unwanted pop-ups, even on updated and protected computers? Have you ever tried to regulate the sometimes-mindless clicking of students with internet access? If this trial stands, how can we ever use technology without a constant fear plaguing us?

I’m deeply concerned about the trends I see in our government: NCLB has inspired mindless teaching and a culture of stress, the Patriot Act and other moves have seen the government violate more and more rights to privacy. And in the rest of the world: Australia deciding that links to copyright material are illegal, teachers in the UK calling for internet censorship, Canada questioning fair-use rights.

What’s next, firing teachers for their artistic expression, pursued in their off-hours?

I think I’m confused: what country am I in? what century is this?

From The New York Times:

Iran held a gathering that included Holocaust deniers, discredited scholars and white supremacists from around the world on Monday under the guise of a conference to “debate” the Nazi annihilation of six million Jews.

Iran Opens Conference on Holocaust

As expected, much of the Western world expressed outrage at this event. The irony of the timing of this event was highlighted in the White House’s statement:

While people around the world mark International Human Rights Week and renew the solemn pledges of the Universal Declaration on Human Rights, which was drafted in the wake of the atrocities of World War II, the Iranian regime perversely seeks to call the historical fact of those atrocities into question and provide a platform for hatred.

Holocaust Conference in Iran Provokes Outrage

I don’t have a problem with people thinking, asking questions, talking about, or even holding conferences about pretty much whatever they want. What I have a problem with is when fear is used to enforce a position or when other voices in contention with a position are silenced. Anyone have any doubt that a dissenter would be allowed to speak freely at this event, which is supposed to “celebrate” Iran’s political freedom?

Not to mention the stupidity of this position–the willful lunacy and hatred that has to drive this position.

Of course, I’m caught here by my own belief that voices must be heard–which means we must allow this voice, too, if we want to avoid slipping down into the same well.

Nevertheless, this reminds me of the agenda behind any act of genocide: the desire to silence another permanently and to refuse to acknowledge any “other” voice. But any position that relies on silence to maintain itself only reveals its own weakness, and a foolish will to persist in that weakness.

But such weakness and such foolishness can be powerfully terrible.

“To say it’s never been equal is obvious, but none of those services degrade other services on the internet. The problem arises when schemes are discussed that would prioritize some traffic over other traffic.” (emphasis added)

The controversy is over who gets to decide which traffic to prioritize. Ideally, this decision should be made by the users of the medium based on their needs and the demand of the majority. This is something free-market competition already helps to ensure, and regulations are already in place to prevent abuses of this system.The article raises an important issue, though, when it points out that–as the internet takes over more and more of the communication world, including telephone and cable television–the need for quality assurance will grow.

… if it’s true that the net is currently a hodgepodge of policies mostly worked out by parties seemingly at war with one another, it’s likely nothing compared to what’s in store once ISPs start to replicate cable TV and telephone service in earnest. In order to work, these applications require guaranteed quality of service, something that’s not usually available on the public internet today.

However, quality is exactly what is supposed to increase in a free-market system wherein providers are allowed to compete with one-another in providing the best service.Any regulations that are established should only ensure that competitors do not block access to one another and do not make exclusive deals with particular ISPs. Beyond that, in my opinion, the government should stay out and let the net continue to develop based on the needs (and preferences) of its users. In other words, a survival-of-the-fittest (coolest, most-efficient, etc.) model.Of course, I don’t claim to be an economist or a politician and could be missing an important piece of the puzzle here. If so, someone correct me. I’m just opposed to big government telling me what I can and cannot do on the net (within obvious moral/ethical boundaries), and don’t like the idea that one company can restrict my options simply because it has lots of money.

As educators also know, we are educators, not parents. Parents have always borne the responsibility to guide their children and help them navigate successfully through the world. Technology is another part of that world now, and another area through which parents must help their children navigate, not simply abdicate responsibility because they are “out of touch” with the technology.

Here, too, educators can help, but only if they are learning about and working with these tools, not ignoring them or hiding from them. Which brings me to the point of this post. A recent entry on the blog “The Road to Know Where” is just the sort of work that educators should be doing to help parents and students navigate this new world of technology.

So, I’d like to point you to the “Parent’s Guide to MySpace” as a resource to provide to parents and as a resource that teachers themselves should know.

Freedom is worth protecting, but freedom brings responsibility that we can’t ignore without putting oursevles and our children at risk. Handling technology responsibly doesn’t mean ignoring it or shutting it out, though. It means learning about the technology, understanding its dangers and its benefits, putting the technology to its best use, and helping others to do the same.

One reason I think YouTube and MySpace succeed so well is because they understand this simple concept and, for the most part, they let people do stuff (and have seen amazing growth as a result). The problem with the response of too many educational institutions is that they don’t understand this simple concept. Unfortunately, this is true not only in the online world (as the recent debate about blocking access to online sites demonstrates: see Harris and Richardson) but is often the case in how districts handle "real life" complications, too. At my own school, we often see school-wide or county-wide initiatives put in place that restrict everyone because a few people did some stupid things (or worse, out of the fear that a few people might do some stupid things).

By letting people do stuff, you do run the risk that a few of those people will be mean, or lazy, or maybe just stupid … a problem that must be addressed. The alternative, though, is that if you don’t let people do stuff, nothing much really happens. And stuff like inspiration, creativity, discovery?  Not much chance of those things happening either …