Teach kids to be safe on the net by getting them to think critically about censorware
Let's start by admitting that censorware doesn't work. It catches vast amounts of legitimate material, interfering with teachers' lesson planning and students' research alike.Beyond Censorware: Teaching Web LiteracyCensorware also allows enormous amounts of bad stuff through, from malware to porn. There simply aren't enough prudes in the vast censorware boiler-rooms to accurately classify every document on the Web.
Worst of all, censorware teaches kids that the normal course of online life involves being spied upon for every click, tweet, email, and IM.
These are the same kids who we're desperately trying to warn away from disclosing personal information and compromising photos on social networks. They understand that actions speak louder than words: If you wiretap every student in the school and punish those who try to get out from under the all-seeing eye, you're saying "Privacy is worthless."
After you've done that, there's no amount of admonishments to value your privacy that can make up for it.
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My school has some crappy censorware
Everyone in my class knows how to bypass it.
Thanks toughtiger.com!
Teach kids to be safe by getting them to think critically. (FTFY)
I once had to work with Netsweeper, the Peel board's censor software, designed to make sure that no one goes anywhere on the net that they shouldn't. While even I can see the problems that an irate parent might raise if they discovered little Johnny had been printing pictures of naked Danish jello eating contests, the board has gated off any website that contains fun or games, as I discovered when Carolyn, a fellow English teacher, tried to show me a site entitled “Games for Teachers” and we were blocked by a screen that sternly warned us that we couldn't go there because the site “may contain fun or games”. Not allowed. Panic set in; could I have been reprimanded if someone saw students having fun and games in my class? I fear the evidence suggests I could.
When I was in high School, (many many moons ago -- so my memory on this story is delegated to the basics) there was a teacher of mine that told us about one of his former jobs. He was working at a fast food resturant and training new hires. One of the things that he showed them was how to steal money from the business. While he was showing them how to steal, he was also showing them how easily they would get caught stealing. The program was a great success.
Sadly not very many people understand how this works. I once tried to explain to a former boss about teaching staff how to clean up after themselves after using the one computer in the building. Showing them how their "personal" folder on the hard drive worked and how to store things that were downloaded.
We had one person on our staff that was allegedly surfing child obsenity and storing it on the local hard drive of the computer. It's not like it was a secret to those of use that knew how to use the computer. So I was trying to explain to my boss the value of showing this person how easy it was to access this material even in his "personal" folder. My boss didn't make the connection (and wasn't going to fire this person anyway) so it never happened.
Long post short, this tactic works, but since it's counter intuitive, many people won't understand that, therefor it won't catch on. You've got to get people to realize that counter intuitive thought works. That there are some things that will only work if you don't do what is the straight forward thought.
In the US many schools receive federal funding that requires filtered internet, so for those schools, there's no choice to be made.
As an elementary school sys admin, I don't have a huge problem with this. Once a teacher told a 1st grader that he could do an image search on Google, as opposed to using Yahoo Kids (which is our AUP for students). The images that were returned for this student's search for "neopets" included one woman being mounted by a donkey, an Asian woman surrounded by penises and covered in semen, and lots of animated Asian porn.
The filters have gotten better, imho. Our filter now allows teachers and/or students to forward any blocked page notifications to me for review. I can unblock any pages or sites that meets our school's standards of acceptable content.
I like the thinking and intent, but I don't (yet) understand how this proposal produces an end result that includes "safer" access to the web for say, an extremely horny or hyper-curious middle-schooler.
By "safer" experience I'm assuming either the software has to be smart or at least accurate enough to block T and A, OR there's a paradigm shift for the student that empowers them to avoid tabooo material all on their own via some notion that tells them "if you go there, it's a potentially twisted distraction that could disrupt your progress".
Ya know Corey, we don't even get out of the article title before we hit a problem.
"by getting them to think critically about censorware".
s/about censorware//.
There, fixed that for you.
Seriously, if critical thinking were actually a skill taught in schools and valued by the populace, at least 75% of the stupid things that happen in this world (everything from the Patriot Act to "birthers" to anything supported by a legal opinion from John Woo to Young-Earth-Creationists, and more besides) would be a non-issue.
bob_calder (who is getting a dB error of some kind)
We talk about it in class all the time. The kids get it.
I teach Internet and Society at Dillard High School in Ft Lauderdale where our district uses 8e6. My only real beef with it is the way it blocks internet communities of the good sort. By the time I get something unblocked, a couple of months have gone by.
Vertical applicaiton vendors off all sorts seldom act in the interests of the actual business model they support. They might lose the bid if they did.
Sadly, school (at least until college/uni) has mostly been about producing mindless drones who will slot into low to middle ranked jobs and work tirelessly to further enrich their masters.
The intention sounds good, but is totally naive.
Middle school boys will use the first opportunity they have to go scouring the web for porn - some of them hating themselves all the time for looking at stuff they know they shouldn't be looking at, but are unable to pull themselves away.
As a parent who has a middle school aged boy that has been pulled into the insidious world of online porn (starting with innocent search queries) I have no problems with installing filters, even if it means having to manually approve sites that get pulled into the filters.
And my son is grateful that the temptation is removed - he is actually a happier kid with the filter in, than if he has to fight that battle with no help. Cause it's a battle that he is not equipped to win at that age.
Shouldn't be? There's few things more unhealthy than a kid who has never seen porn. The humiliation that will occur when his first boyfriend takes his shirt off will likely scar him for life, and leave him unable to form any meaningful relationships.
The real problem here is that we've got kids hating themselves for doing what comes naturally.
You've messed that kid up real bad. I hope you've started a fund to pay for his future therapist.
Huh, I just did a Google image search (SafeSearch OFF) for "neopets". After 30 or so pages all I found were some hyper-cute cartoon virtual pets. Maybe I'm doing it wrong.
I'm with Kirk, and Asuffield.
Oh, and by the way, I'm 13 presently, and I've had no problem with "temptation" really, if he can't handle it himself there's something a bit deeper that needs to be addressed with his decision making.
Oh, but funny sidenote, I heard from one of my friends that his teacher, while doing a project on Japan, looked up "Japanese girls" on google images
You can guess how well THAT worked out.
As an English teacher at a school that uses blocking software I ran into a problem when I was trying to find lists of large numbers since the word "sextillion" caused pages to be inaccessible.
As a seventeen year old in the UK:
When I left my secondary school, it was operating on a white-list-based system, the white-list consisting of around 1400 sites (Or sections of sites, "http://www.bbc.co.uk/schools/gcsebitesize/*" style), probably fewer than half of which still had content, and a few of which were being caught by content-based filters anyway.
This had been put in place because a single child had had bullying comments left, by a known person, on her profile on a social networking site which was already a blocked domain.
The sixth-form college I have just finished my first year at had a reasonable filter (Nothing noticeable but YouTube blocked), apart from for the last two months, when a new filtering product was bought and installed.
And then turned up to 11.
It can be interesting, seeing what the filters have decided a site contains that day. Boingboing is always "Games and timewasting", while almost anything, regardless of content, turns into "Dutch pornography". www.liberty-human-rights.org.uk? "Intolerance and violence". Anything at all to do with computer networks? "Proxies", "Hacking", or both. My favourite political blog was, for reasons unknown to us mortal users, the last time I checked, blocked under:
Mobile phone ringtones
Pornography
Intolerance and violence
Malay pornography
Dutch pornography
Racism
Weapons
Complaining about this, I found that I, as a student, wasn't supposed to speak to them about it. I was futher told that if I coulds get my lecturer to come to them, in person, with a writen statement about how it was essential for their course, they would consider unblocking it for the people in the class, but only for as long as they said we needed it.
Luckily, toward the end of the year, I found out that Tor traffic wasn't blocked, and students have always been allowed to bring their own laptops in.
@#14:
Be thankful you don't work in the English town of Scunthorpe.
I'd rather we teach kids to be safe by teaching critical thinking about the internet. We all agree that filters are not perfect, but in order to preserve a reasonably effective teaching environment and to comply with federal laws, schools use them. And teaching kids about privacy really does start with teaching them about the ability of fellow users to find their information online or on the computer they used. I'd rather my kids were self-limiting in what they post (there's the critical thinking skills) than relying in total on filters.
Given that kids access the internet in multiple locations beyond the school environment, we need them to acquire those critical thinking skills and online literacy to succeed in preserving their privacy.
That being said, a free family safety solution that emphasizes collaboration between parents and kids (no spying) is OnlineFamily.Norton.It works for both PC and Mac and is easy to use.
Marian Merritt
Symantec/Norton Internet Safety Advocate
But: what teaches kids about computers, what teaches kids about networks is getting past this censorware. #15 started using Tor because of the crappy censorware. Who'd do that if everything you could reasonably want to look at was blocked?