You know one thing that is a real problem in online learning, is porn. That is why school districts are so reluctant to open their minds to more open collaboration and social networks. Not only has the Internet made porn readily available to anyone and almost everyone who wants to find it, it has created a new generation of people willing and able to bare everything to anyone! Sexting on teenager’s phones seems like fun and totally harmless to them.
The moral disintegration that has seeped into our world has made a prolific problem of sexual addicts who go to porn for self-gratification. This not only harms them individually, it hurts and breaks up family relationships, causes some to be sexual predators, and can totally ruin people’s self-esteem and life.
I am all for great filters, and have a pretty good one at my house. Sure, it causes problems when I can’t pull up a picture of a rainbow for a project, but it is so totally worth it to me to have the blocks in place. So, I can understand schools’ hesitation to relax their blocking standards. Unfortunately there is always opposition in all things; the good always comes with the bad.
What do you think? Is it ever going to be possible to get social networking sites unblocked in our schools? What suggestions do you have to solve the problem?
Interesting post. Check out my blog, my first 2 posts discuss web filters (we have a new one on my school netowrk that is essentially blocking everything kids need to access my classes):http://laurasetcblog.blogspot.com/
ReplyDeleteAs for your header line: I once heard one of my drama professors say, "keep the drama ON the stage and OUT of your life!". My students love that line.
Great job, Karlene!
you make a good point but I wonder if school are not throwing the baby out with the bath water. I understand why the filters are in place for the students, but why would a district have equally restrictive filter for the staff. Teacher's go through massive back ground checks just to get their certs and then most district do additional checks. If they don't trust a teachers to use school resources correctly then how can they trust that teacher to teach children. For many teachers the message that districts send with these filters is not a good message. It is my experience that school filters are easy to get around for the students how want to get around them. So most of the time it only hurts the good student from getting to a site that for what ever reason is blocked but would be very useful for teaching. It is a little like gun restriction. The people who want guns to do bad thing will alway no how to get around the restrictions and the people who want to use the web for bad things will also alway know how to get around the filters. I believe the answer to this problem is in monitoring, not in restricting. There is a lot of software out there these days that makes monitoring website excess very easy and almost automative. I think district don't want to do this because they are not sure how to handle it when they catch a student on a bad site. This is the real problem. Just some things to think about.
ReplyDeleteGary
Funny-I just used the baby with the bath water analogy! I agree Gary.
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