Quick, Block Del.icio.us
I’m not a fan of internet filtering systems. At all!
Simply banning web sites doesn’t teach students anything about safely using the net and it excuses some educators from having to manage web access.
However, I do understand that filters are a political reality and that there is some material on the internet that needs to be blocked from student view.
But del.icio.us?
One high school in this area has added that seemingly benign utility to their blacklist because of how one student was using his account.
It seems he was posting recommended sites for his friends, some of which the school administration thought were instructionally inappropriate. Including new tools for bypassing the filtering system at the school.
So, we blame the technology and ban it instead of acknowledging that this student has a much better idea of just how useful del.icio.us is than his teachers do.
Be happy that it’s only one school. I know several entire school systems that block access to all bookmarking sites.
Argh!
Our district blocks wikipedia, of all things. Information Services considers it to be a blog—and we can’t have kids looking at those, can we?
We also have several elementary schools that block Google Images but not other image search sites. I’m not sure what they think is in one search engine that’s not in the others.