Keeping Kids off the Internet – What’s With the Draconian Filtering Policies?

A couple years ago, I made a commitment to take my classes virtually paperless. Aside from the occasional in-class exam, my students and I rely on our class website and various online tools to move documents back and forth, to have asynchronous discussions, and to create and view presentations. Of course, the catch is that we need the internet, but my school has campus-wide Wi-Fi and I teach in a big city where hotspots and 3G are ubiquitous.

So it’s easy for me to forget that I’m lucky. On my campus the web is available in virtually all of it’s unfiltered glory. On top of the essential tools like our LMS, Dropbox, and Google Docs, we also have access to Web 2.0 sites like Blogger, Ning, VoiceThread, Wikipedia, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. Sure, we’re concerned about our students finding offensive content, but we’re also committed to helping our students and teachers make wise online choices. If we’re preparing kids to be in the world, why not educate them about it?

So I’m reminded today that many teachers and students aren’t as lucky. I’m at a Model U.N. conference at a large suburban school in a well to-do area. The school has Wi-Fi, but the filter is so aggressive I can’t access sites my students and I use daily (I’m writing this post on my iPad on 3G).

Others have made the argument against filtering, so I won’t go into that in detail (see excellent arguments here and here), but I’d love to get your opinions. Is filtering necessary? If so, why filter so aggressively? Is there a way to filter effectively that both protects students and allows them to use the Web to its potential? Aren’t we doing students a disservice by blocking the full internet? As my PLN colleague @WackJacq told me this morning: “I’ve students who instead of experiencing epiphanies & wonders, learn about bureaucratic gridlock, & stubborn fear!  When/Where shall our students begin to learn how to use the internet as a learning tool?”

Founder of “The Free Encyclopedia” Honored for Democratizing Knowledge

A Swiss organization has awarded Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales 100,000 Swiss francs ($104,000) for “democratizing the access to knowledge.” The founder of Wikipedia has created a tool that allows for access to humanity’s greatest resource – our collective knowledge – by making it available anywhere to anyone with internet access.  Moreover, Wikipedia makes it possible for anyone to contribute to that base of knowledge easily, and for new contributions to be quickly disseminated.

The Im Grueene Foundation said Friday the free online encyclopedia “revolutionized the access to knowledge as man’s most important resource” because it allows users to also be contributors. … Wales has said the site has more than 3 million entries in English, far more than a traditional encyclopedia, and is rapidly expanding into other languages, with almost a million entries in French and more in German.  (Google News)

There was a time when access to knowledge was limited, and routes to power were thus restricted to people with access. The internet promises to change this, and Wikipedia is just one example of a web tool tearing down the old social order.  Regardless of what you think of the veracity of Wikipedia’s information (studies show it’s very good, here and here), if you agree that opportunities for self-improvement and social mobility should be available to all, Jimmy Wales’s invention is a boon for the world.

Your comments are welcomed.