Tom’s been cranking at the Gray List of sites that he wants to test over at the Blog Banning wiki, and, in fact, he’s ready to give it a shot. It will be interesting to see what happens, and if you can take part, I’d really urge you to participate.
The whole blocking issue really hit home this morning. I was chatting with a superintendent and a principal about some upcoming, summer bloggy training we have scheduled and I asked about the level of blockage at their district. Blogger? Blocked. Edublogs.org? Blocked. PBWiki? Blocked. Wikipedia? Hahahahahaha.
Teacher and student Internet access at home in this district is nearly 100 percent. Does it really make sense to block literally hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of potentially worthwhile, safe, educational sites with the flip of a switch when those same sites are being accessed from home?
There’s more of a post brewing in all of this. For now, let’s see what Tom comes up with.
I agree with you completely regarding the blocking of potentially worthwhile sites. We, meaning education, need much better policies for the blocking and unblocking of Web sites. We simply can’t accept blindly what our filtering software dictates-it’s just not that simple. And I think that many of the school districts that I have worked with are missing an effective policy that enable teachers and/or administrators to request the evaluation of a blocked Web site, and the subsequent unblocking of the site. For the record, all four of the sites mentioned in your post are available to the students in my district (District 99, Downers Grove, IL).
If you can’t beat them … don’t try! Wouldn’t it be easier to just circumvent the school altogether, have students blogging from outside the school? And one has to wonder, who benefits from such a byzantine system that fosters blanket rules like these?